Look what Roy Zimmerman had to say on this video:
This one goes out to PZ Myers and the phine pholks at Pharyngula ( http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula)
“Christmas On Mars” will be featured on my “Real American” CD, due out early in 2010. As always, it’ll be available on http://royzimmerman.com/ and at iTunes.
That’s what we need, Martian Christmas carols!
Enjoy. This is part of a whole series at Symphony of Science.
I’d never realized what a useful tool the Bible is in infallibly resolving difficult moral problems until I read this detailed dissection of a difficult situation on Answers in Genesis.
Here’s the hypothetical situation: you know the whereabouts of a family of Jews hiding from the Nazis. A Nazi patrol comes up to you and asks where they are; you, a good God-fearing Christian, can either lie and say you don’t know (which would be bad, because, like, lying is a sin), or you could tell the truth, and the Nazis would zip off and search for and presumably execute the family. What do you do?
As a non-Bible believing amoral godless atheist, my first thought was that this is trivial: you lie your pants off. The ‘crime’ of telling a lie pales into insignificance against the crime of enabling the death of fellow human beings.
According to Bodie Hodge of AiG, though, I’m wrong. The good Christian should reject lies, Satan’s tools, in all circumstances, and should immediately ‘fess up the location of the Jews. He backs it up with Bible quotes, too.
If we love God, we should obey Him (John 14:15). To love God first means to obey Him first–before looking at our neighbor. So, is the greater good trusting God when He says not to lie or trusting in our fallible, sinful minds about the uncertain future?
Consider this carefully. In the situation of a Nazi beating on the door, we have assumed a lie would save a life, but really we don’t know. So, one would be opting to lie and disobey God without the certainty of saving a life–keeping in mind that all are ultimately condemned to die physically. Besides, whether one lied or not may not have stopped the Nazi solders from searching the house anyway.
As Christians, we need to keep in mind that Jesus Christ reigns. All authority has been given to Him (Matthew 28:18), and He sits on the throne of God at the right hand of the Father (Acts 2:33; Hebrews 8:1). Nothing can happen without His say. Even Satan could not touch Peter without Christ’s approval (Luke 22:31). Regardless, if one were to lie or not, Jesus Christ is in control of timing every person’s life and able to discern our motives. It is not for us to worry over what might become, but rather to place our faith and obedience in Christ and to let Him do the reigning. For we do not know the future, whereas God has been telling the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10).
Gosh. I never thought of it that way. So…all those Christians who sheltered Jews during WWII are actually burning in hell right now for their sinful wickedness? That is so counterintuitive, it must be true!
Sometimes I find it hard to believe how callous these conservative politicians can be. The governor of Rhode Island has just vetoed a bill that would have allowed a same-sex partner to make funeral arrangements for a dead partner. So imagine this: someone wracked with grief at the loss of someone to whom they had committed a substantial part of their life now gets to also be told that they are locked out of the responsibility of taking care of anything to do with the funeral ceremony. How degrading and insensitive; how vile and intrusive.
Shame on Governor Carcieri. It takes a real man to kick the heart-broken and bereaved at the moment of their deepest hurt, and Carcieri has arranged to do it over and over again for years to come.
We’re learning a bit more about the fellow who was maced and arrested in Chicago, thanks to the efforts of the Chicago Ethical Humanist Society; members of that group are busily writing to me to let me know the Whole Truth of the incident, and why they were justified in siccing the police on Sunsara Taylor’s cameraman. It’s weird, though: they keep telling me how bad and awful and wicked this fellow is — his name is Gregory Koger, by the way — but they won’t say what he did that justified the police assault on him. And that is dismaying. The ethical society doesn’t seem to care much about ethics and logic and justice.
So I got this email:
PZ, this is the man – in his own words – whom Taylor recruited to be her cameraman.
What do you think she thought his reaction would be when told by the police to stop/leave?! She knew he would snap, fight, and would get pulverized in the process.
Are you still full of admiration for her?
I followed the link, and the answer to the question is more complicated than a yes or no.
Koger is an admitted jailbird. He committed some very serious crimes and served some very serious jail time. He probably is a little bit scary; maybe a bit frustrated, and definitely angry with the system.
Yet when you go to that link, what you also discover is that he’s ambitious and is trying to improve himself through education. He thinks, he writes, he studies. He’s active in the Communist Party, which, while I don’t care much for the revolutionary agenda, is definitely motivated by a strong sense of social justice, and I can understand why someone who is being judged by the comfortable bourgeoisie as a thug who deserves to be beat up by the police would find it appealing.
What I can’t understand is how someone who identifies themselves as an ethical humanist would decide this fellow human being was nothing but a mad dog brought to the event to provoke a violent incident. What they don’t understand is that I’m not speaking out because I idolize Bob Avakian (I don’t) or think Maoism is the answer (I don’t) or that I think Sunsara Taylor should not be criticized (not at all) — it’s because the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago is betraying what ought to be the basic principles of such a society: tolerance, engagement, argument, discussion.
One of the things I do admire about the Communists is that they do reach out to the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned, and they try to address the injustices our society commits. It’s a shame that ethical humanists can’t do the same, but instead treat a former criminal as a pariah who has to be put down.
The members of the EHSC should really stop writing me. Every time they do, I’m a little more appalled at their attitude.
This is fast becoming the theme of news stories about atheists this year: that there are differences in tactics in the atheist community, with some people being more in-your-face about it (yours truly takes a bow), and others wanting to be more conciliatory towards religion. Well, how surprising that a movement of diverse freethinkers who value critical thinking, skepticism, and open argument, and which lacks either a charismatic central leader or a hierarchy of control, might have members with diverse views…
Here’s another example of journalists jumping on the bandwagon: a story about the Freedom From Religion Foundation meeting in Seattle, in which different people have different tactics.
Ho hum. Let me know when the atheists appoint a pope and start erecting monuments listing dogma and doctrine. That will be news-worthy. The revelation that atheists are a fractious bunch? Not so much.
It’s for college students only, and first prize is $2000. Come on, students, you’re used to churning out term papers, and that prize is substantial.
The topic of the essay is free expression.
The Campaign for Free Expression is a CFI initiative to focus efforts and attention on one of the most crucial components of freethought: the right of individuals to express their viewpoints, opinions, and beliefs about all subjects—especially religion. To encourage free expression and to emphasize the importance of this fundamental right, CFI and its sister organization, The Council for Secular Humanism, are sponsoring this contest.
Given recent events in Chicago, that topic is ironic and rich in potential for discussion.
Tonight! On PBS’ Nova! It’s a promising new documentary on human evolution, Becoming Human.
I’m going to try to watch it, but unfortunately, my glasses are broken, and I just got back from an eye exam, so my pupils are dilated and the world is a far too bright blur. I’ll try to see the glowing blobs moving on my TV screen anyway.
The Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago has done an incredibly stupid thing. They invited Sunsara Taylor to give a talk on “Morality Without God”…and then disinvited her. The reasons weren’t clear, other than that some people in the society disliked her politics — she’s a communist — and the group caved and cancelled her speaking engagement a short two weeks before it was to happen.
Basically, the ethical society was unethical. You just don’t do that. But then they made it worse.
They’ve been stonewalling. No explanations, no apologies, nothing — they might as well admit that they’re feeling a bit guilty. This is inexcusable: one thing humanists ought to be committed to is the resolution of disputes by dialog and discussion.
Next step: they seem to be spiraling into self-destruction here. Sunsara Taylor showed up at the venue for the meeting and gave a speech to ask that the organization stand up for their principles and give her planned talk; if they didn’t, she’d be giving it at the home of another, sympathetic member of the ethical society. It’s all very civil.
Except for this: near the end of the speech, the president of the “ethical” society dispatched police officers to handcuff and arrest the videographer. WTF?
This is insane. Again, the society is silent. All we know is what we see, and it doesn’t look good.
Is this some kind of return to the McCarthy era? Taylor is openly communist, but there is nothing illegal about that, and it certainly isn’t a reason to discriminate against her. If the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago is going to start throwing people out and arresting them for their ideological affiliation, I’m more concerned about a few other criminal organizations, like the Republican party and the Catholic church, and think there are better grounds for slamming the door shut on members of those groups than the American communists. But I’d rather see free discussion of ideas by all of those people, and think that a humanist organization ought to be particularly sensitive to the virtues of free speech.
Shame on the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago.
Whoa. This was a data-rich talk, and my ability to transcribe it was over-whelmed by all the stuff Hauser was tossing out. Unfortunately, I think the talk also suffered from excess and a lack of a good overview of the material. But it was thought-provoking anyway.
One of the themes was how people resolve moral dilemmas. He began with a real world example, the story of an overweight woman in South Africa who insisted on joining a tour exploring a cave, and got stuck in the exit tunnel, trapping 22 people behind her. Do you sacrifice one to save many? One of the trapped people was a diabetic who needed to get out—should they have blown up the woman so the others could escape? This was presented as a kind of philosophical trolley problem, and the audience was asked what was best to do…but I don’t think it works, because unlike those philosophical dilemmas, in the real world we pursue different strategies, and it’s rarely a black and white situation where one has to choose between precisely two possibilities — as in this case, which was resolved by greasing her up with paraffin and pulling her out.
Hauser gave an overview of the philosophical explanations for making moral decisions.
Hume: morality intuitive, unconscious, emotional
Kant: rational, conscious, justified principles
Theist: divine inspiration, explicit within scripture
Rawls: intuitive, unconscious, grammar of action: not emotional, built on principles
He’s going to side with Rawls. The key difference between a Rawlsian morality and the others is that a moral decision is made unconsciously, and THEN emotional and rational justifications are made for it. This is testable if you have a way to remove the emotional component of decision; a Rawlsian moral agent will still make the same moral judgments. Studies of brain damaged patients with loss of emotional affect support the idea so far.
He analogized this to linguistics, in which we make abstract, content-free computations to determine, for instance, whether a particular sentence is grammatical. This computation is obligatory and impenetrable; we can’t explain the process of making the decision as we’re doing it, although we can construct rules after the fact.
For instance, he summarized three principles that seem to be general rules in moral judgments.
Harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm seen as a side-effect.
Harm caused by action is morally worse than harm caused by omission.
Harm caused by contact is morally worse than equivalent harm caused by non-contact
We don’t judge morality purely on the basis of reasonable outcomes, but also on intent. He suggested that judging only on the basis of whether an outcome is bad or good is a primitive and simplistic strategy, that as people mature they add nuance by considering intentionality — someone who poisons a person accidentally is less morally culpable than someone who does it intentionally.
One example he gave that I found a bit dubious is the use of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to shut down regions of brain, in particular the right temporal/parietal junction (which seems to be a locus of intent judgment). In subjects that have that region zapped (a temporary effect!) all that matters is outcome. These studies bother me a bit; I don’t know if I really trust the methodology of TMS, since it may be affecting much more in complex and undefined ways.
Does knowledge ofthe law affect moral judgments? Holland no longer makes a legal distinction betwwen active and passive euthanasia, and many Dutch people are able to articulate a belief that passive euthanasia is less human than active euthanasia. Do the Dutch no longer percieve the action/omission distinction in Hauser’s 3 rules? In a dilemma test, they still make the same distinctions on active and passive stories as others do — actively killing someone to save others is morally worse than simply allowing someone to die by inaction to have the same effect — which again suggests that the underlying mechanisms of making moral decisions are unchanged.
In these same dilemma tests, they’ve correlated outcomes with demographic data. The effects of religion, sex, etc. are negligible on how people make moral decisions.
He makes an important distinction: These are effects on judgment, not behavior. How does behavior connect with judgment?
Hauser describe Mischel’s longitudinal studies of kids given a simple test: they were given a cookie, and told they’d get more if they could hold off on eating it for some unspecified length of time. Kids varied; some had to have that cookie right away, others held off for longer periods of time. The interesting thing about this experiment is that the investigator looked at these same kids as adults 40 years later, and found that restraint in a 3 year old was correlated with greater marital stability, for instance, later in life. The idea is that these kinds of personal/moral capacities are fixed fairly early in people and don’t seem to be affected much by experience or education.
There were some interesting ideas here, and I would have liked to have seen more depth of discussion of individual points. The end of the talk, in particular, was a flurry of data and completely different experiments that weren’t tied in well with the thesis of the talk, and there weren’t opportunities for questions in these evening talks, so it was a bit difficult to sort everything out.
