Category Archives: My Philosophy

Why Christians should be Killing Babies

07 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in My Philosophy, Religion

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Every once in a while I exercise my right to post something that most people find utterly repulsive. This is one of those posts.

Most Christians believe in a God that judges people for their sins and sends them to eternal heaven or hell based on his judgment. Let me show you how it logically follows from those beliefs, that we should kill all newborns.

To the Christian I ask, do you believe that a newborn goes to heaven if he or she dies? If not, then you cannot claim your God to be a benevolent God. What did a newborn ever do to deserve eternal hellfire?

I’m going to assume that you believe newborns go to heaven if they die. Here is the problem with that belief: Since living life beyond the newborn stage increases the chance that a person sins, thereby reducing the chance that he or she will get into heaven, shouldn’t you take it upon yourself to kill all newborns to ensure their eternal happiness? Sure you would go to hell for your troubles but wouldn’t it be the right thing to do? Wouldn’t it be better for one person to go to hell for killing thousands of babies than for half of those babies to grow up as sinners and go to hell when they die?

The beliefs that; 1) God is benevolent, 2) God is more likely to send grown people to hell than babies, and 3) One shouldn’t kill babies, is not a coherent set of beliefs. At least one of these beliefs must be wrong. If you disagree, please tell me where my reasoning is faulty.

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Thoughts on the Semantics of Free Will

05 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Epistemology, Mind, My Philosophy

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Based on some of the comments left on my earlier post about free will ultimately being an illusion, I think I didn’t adequately explain myself. Hopefully this post will help convey my perspective and not just further muddy the waters.

In short… When it comes to human choices, if you can explain why one option was chosen over all the others, then you cannot believe it was a “free” choice. Like a computer, the human brain made the final selection based on the external circumstances and the internal state(s). In other words, given the circumstances and the internal state(s) of mind, the choice was inevitable. On the other hand, if you cannot explain why one option was chosen over the others but you still attribute it to free will; that is an argument from ignorance.

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There is more than one way of looking at free will–more than one way of explaining the process of making a decision or selecting an option. For example, let’s look at the process of selecting one shirt to wear from a whole row of options in your wardrobe.

If you are the average guy, your selection might be based on a few simple rules such as; Is it comfortable, or is it of appropriate quality for the job at hand? While the average guy might narrow his selection down to half a dozen shirts based on these rules, there is a good chance that he’ll choose at random from those remaining options (i.e. grab the closest one at hand).

If you are the average girl, your final choice will likely be the result of the application of a fairly complicated set of rules with no element of randomness at all. Your rules, for instance, might be based on questions like; Does it go well with my pants? Does it go well with my shoes? Does it make me appear slimmer? Is it appropriate for the function I’m wearing it to? Does it make me feel pretty?

There are two different ways of looking at this selection process. The most common way of looking at it is to claim that ‘they exercised their free will and each chose a shirt’. Another way of looking at it is that ‘selections were made based on the application of rules, randomness, or both’.

What if the situation was a little different? What if a man was holding a gun on these people and threatening them with death unless they wear shirts of his choosing. This time, both the guy and the girl will likely select the shirt that the maniac wants them to wear.

Again, there is more than one way of looking at this selection process. Instinctively you might think the couple had no free will–that they were forced by the maniac to wear specific shirts. That is not the case, however. They could have defied the gun-toting madman. The first way of looking at it is that they exercised their free will and made the choice to select the shirts they were ordered to select, rather than to risk death. The second way of looking at it is that they simply made their selection based on external circumstances and internal rules (i.e. man with gun + I don’t want to die = do as he says).

What I’m slowly but surely trying to get at is that one way of looking at the choices we make is to think of them as a selection process that utilizes a set of rules with perhaps an element of randomness involved. You could call this process “free will” and many people do, but it’s not truly free will–it’s a (perhaps unconsciously) calculated selection based on pre-existing internal rules and external circumstances.

Let me use the analogy of computer software here. Suppose that I am writing a computer program and this program needs the ability to choose from several possible options. The outcome of the program depends on which option the program chooses. I can code the software to select from any given options in several different ways. I could code it to select randomly from the available options, I could code it to select an option based on the values of variables within the program as well as data from external sources, or I could code it to select based on a combination of both (rules and randomness). I could even call this section of code the “free will module”.

Now you might argue that the software doesn’t actually have free will–that it makes its selections according to randomness or a set of rules based on the external circumstances and the internal states, or a combination of both, and you would be completely right. That is after all; my argument. It is often useful to refer to the concept of free will but there’s no true freedom of will involved in our decision making process. We are just very complex computers that aren’t quite smart enough yet to understand all of the “rules” written into our “code”.

The first and most common way of looking at choices and the human decision making process, is the concept of free will. The second way of looking at it is that given the external circumstances and the internal state(s) of the decision-maker, the final decision was actually inevitable, and thus; not truly a free choice. At first glance, the second way of looking at it seems more complicated and harder to follow. However, I believe it is a better explanation of the human decision-making process because it removes the complex and under-defined concept of ‘free will’, thereby being overall; a more parsimonious explanation.

Just to be clear; I consider the “rules” (that our brains use when selecting from a number of possible options) as being part of our internal state(s). Our internal states are constantly changing as we experience new things and as a result, the choices we make are changing as well. We make different choices than we would have years ago, given similar external circumstances, because our internal states have changed.

Within the context of humanity–that is, when speaking about people and their choices in everyday language, “free will” is a useful concept. When in the wider context of all existence and trying to understand how it all works together, it becomes apparent that free will is an inaccurate oversimplification of the human decision-making process. It becomes apparent that no part of the human mind (e.g. the will), is truly free. All parts are constrained to act in accordance with the laws of nature. The human mind is just another part in the tightly interconnected machine that is the universe. There is no room in  the gears of nature for true freedom.

For the human will to truly be free it would require that the human mind (or a portion thereof) operate independent (i.e. outside) of nature. This does not seem to be the case. The human mind is a part of nature and I have not found any evidence that it somehow transcends it.

In a way, ‘free will’ is simply a semantic artifact that arises from the way we tend to oversimplify the human decision-making process. That being said, it is often useful to use this concept. It is easier to attribute a choice to someone’s free will than it is to analyze the choice, enumerate the external circumstances, and deduce the internal states of the person. “Free will” is useful in everyday language but it is an oversimplification–an example of a sort of lossy semantic compression.

The concept of free will is also helpful in assigning blame and determining intent in morality and law. Saying, “He committed the crime of his own free will,” is just a simple way of saying, “Given the same external circumstances and internal state(s), it is inevitable that he would do it again.” The justice system can then go on to estimate the probability of that person finding himself in the same circumstances and take the appropriate steps (e.g. prison, therapy, etc.), to either reduce the chance that he’ll find himself in the same circumstances, or change his internal state(s) so that he reacts more appropriately when he finds himself in those circumstances again.

That concludes this rambling collection of thoughts on the semantics of “free will”. I hope it has been helpful in conveying the ‘other way of looking at it’.

The Illusion of Free Will

03 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by in Mind, My Philosophy

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This morning I went to work. I don’t really like the job and often it doesn’t seem worth the money. That being said, I didn’t lie awake in bed faced with the difficult choice of whether or not to get out of bed–I just did.

I didn’t make my morning coffee because, being the just-in-time procrastinator that I am, I just plain didn’t have time. I didn’t even give coffee a moment’s thought. I haven’t made my morning coffee in a long time because I’m so used to not having enough time. I could have had coffee this morning and been a few minutes late at work but it wasn’t a choice that I engaged in. I just didn’t give it any thought.

About a mile from my house, where I usually make a right turn to continue on towards work, there is a traffic light. I can see the light for a while before I get there and if I see it turn red, I take a different, smaller street to bypass the light. It adds two more turns to my route but it saves a little time. If the light is red when I first see it, I continue on to the light because chances are, it will be turning green right around the time I get there and it’ll be faster in that case than taking the route with two additional turns. As I drove towards that traffic light this morning I could see that it was green. I hoped that it would remain green until I reached it but I kept a sharp eye on it and prepared to take the secondary route should it turn yellow. It did turn yellow and I turned on the secondary street without giving it a moment of thought. A long time ago, I reasoned through this plan and now the route that I take doesn’t feel like a choice anymore. It depends only on the state of the traffic light.

Of course I could defy my earlier reasoning and the choice to take the secondary route based on the state of the traffic light and intentionally deviate from my normal morning travel plan but what would be the point? Would it be worth it just to prove that I actually have a choice in the matter? If I defied my normal travel plan would that have been a real choice or would it simply have been because my reflection on the nature of free will caused me to feel disconcerted causing some inner instinct to force me to prove something to myself? Would that really be a choice or would it just be my brain once again controlling my mind?

Before I reached the fourth traffic light on my route, the vehicle directly in front of me braked suddenly. Almost instantaneously I pushed on the brake pedal of my own vehicle. When I saw the vehicle brake in front of me, I wasn’t faced with the difficult dilemma of whether or not I should brake. I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I just braked… instinctively.

Later today I was asked if I could work a little later than normal. Finally I was faced with what seemed to be a real choice. I deliberated on the matter for a moment and made the decision to work two extra hours but not the full three that had been asked of me.

Of course once I looked a little deeper at my choice I realized that I didn’t actually have a choice in the matter. I don’t like working late at this job (because of other responsibilities) but I felt that I needed to. The last two times I was asked I had refused. It was time that I compromised and worked a little later to stay on the good side of my employer. Given my circumstances, and my state(s) of mind, I took the only possible action.

Free will is an illusion. True freedom of will does not seem to exist because if my choices have a reason, then obviously I can trace the causality of my actions to a point prior to my “choosing” to take that action. If I have no reason for an action that I took–if I just selected randomly from the available options, how is that free will?

It seems that I am just another cog in the grand machine. I am a special cog, though, because I have the ability to look inward and reflect upon myself.

When I feel happy, it is not because I decided to be happy. It is because the complex biological system that is my body, moved certain chemicals around in my brain which caused it to experience what I call “happiness”. That thing which I call “I” had no choice in the matter. Similarly, when the mind is faced with what seems to be a choice, it is chemical and electrical interactions within the brain that decide the outcome. There really is no room for or need of anything like free will.

When I am faced with the dilemma of choosing pizza or a sandwich for lunch, my brain runs algorithms which I have barely begun to understand. This algorithm may factor in my prior experiences with sandwiches and pizza, a financial comparison of the two, my current financial situation, whether or not I’ll be eating alone, the comparative ease with which these foods can be acquired, the amount of time since I have experienced either of these foods, and many other factors that I don’t even know. Within seconds, the algorithm has completed and pizza is the winner. It feels like I decided to get pizza instead of sandwiches but after thinking through all of the above, it no longer feels like it was really my choice. My brain makes all of my decisions. I really have no choice in the matter. Before I realize that I want pizza, my brain has already made up its mind (I’m not even sure what to call that. Is it a pun? It seems like so much more).

Science seeks natural explanations for questions. Naturally, since there is no other kind of explanation (‘supernatural explanation’ is an oxymoron). Our universe, at least at the macro level where we live and play, appears to be deterministic. In other words, every event within the universe appears to have a cause. Quantum mechanics seems like it could be a whole different story but there seems little indication that events at the quantum level are relevant to the question of free will.

We can take any event (e.g. Uncle Bob died) and find its cause, (e.g. car wreck), find the cause of that (e.g. brakes were bad), find the cause of that (e.g. Uncle Bob was a procrastinator and never got around to fixing his brakes), and so on and on. Theoretically, if we were smart enough, we could take any event and trace it back through causes until we reach the beginning of time. Even the actions of people can be traced to causes which were caused by prior causes, and so on. If Uncle Bob procrastinated because his father never taught him the benefits of getting things done right away, can we blame Uncle Bob’s father for the car wreck? No wait… Why did Uncle Bob’s father not teach Bob about the dangers of procrastination? Can we trace the ultimate cause back even further?

If you believe in God and you believe that God is omniscient, then you run into the same problem with free will. If God knows everything, including whether or not you will end up in hell, then what could you possibly do now to change that destination? If God knows everything, then the future must be predetermined which means that free will is only an illusion.

It seems that no matter how you look at it, whether it’s from an introspective, a scientific, or a religious perspective, free will is ultimately an illusion.

Note: I believe that free will is ultimately an illusion. I also believe that free will is an important and useful concept. This apparent contradiction seems to be caused by mere semantic confusion which I’ll try to address in a future post.

The Semantics of my Atheism

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in My Philosophy, Religion

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What really is my position on the existence of God? Am I really an atheist or am I more of an agnostic? The question isn’t as simple as it seems.

I personally dislike the atheist/agnostic labels because I feel that my position isn’t clearly defined by either. I don’t consider myself agnostic because in most cases, I think those who believe in God are making a mistake. I don’t consider myself a pure atheist because in most cases my position would not include the unequivocal statement that ‘God does not exist’. My references to “most cases” I hope will become clear soon–once I discuss the definitions of “God”. If we drill deeper, my beliefs are probably closer to agnostic atheism or atheistic agnosticism than to either atheism or agnosticism. It just didn’t sound right to call my blog, “X Amish Agnostic Atheist”.

My position is quite simply that; the available evidence for the existence of God, as most people would define God, does not warrant the belief in such a being. Note that the above position applies to anybody that doesn’t ascribe to the common definition of God; be they atheists, agnostics, pantheists, Buddhists, or what have you. For a period of time, I actually considered myself a pantheist and there may still be pantheistic ideas out there that I would consider.

My position is also; if you believe in God, as most people would define God, then A) you must have evidence that I do not, or B) your belief in such a God is unjustified. I am of course assuming that my determination of what makes a belief justified or not, is valid, and that I have not made a mistake in the reasoning with which I concluded that the available evidence does not justify the belief in such a God.

Now, on to definitions… With all the different religions and belief systems, God and gods are ascribed many different characteristics. Some of these Gods, I am more inclined to discard as foolish given the ready natural explanations for the things that are ascribed to them. Many cultures have believed in thunder gods and almost all of us consider the notion foolish now that we have a natural explanation for thunder. I am as atheistic about such Gods as most people are willing to unequivocally state that, “Santa Claus does not exist.”

On the other hand, if we consider a pantheistic God, such as; the universe itself is God, then I tend to be more agnostic than atheistic. However, I would consider such a God to be so ill-defined as to be almost meaningless. Is God; mathematics and the all-pervasive mathematics only? If that’s how you want to define God, then sure, I have no problem believing in mathematics.

Now, on to the semantics of the supernatural… According to many definitions of God, he is supernatural, existing outside of time and space, outside of our universe as we know it. We will never be able to detect such a God with our natural instruments and while they will never be able to prove that such a God exists, we will never be able to prove that such a God does not exist (I’m not even going to go into the whole burden of proof issue). I consider such a God; meaningless. If something is in principle undetectable, then it is by definition; nonexistent. Otherwise, the concept of existence is meaningless. Check out my older post about the Nonexistence of Undetectable Things for a more in-depth explanation of what I’m referring to.

Let’s take a break from God and talk about aliens for a moment. Do they exist? Are they out there? I don’t know. On the subject of aliens I am agnostic, but not at all atheistic (I know the word technically doesn’t apply to aliens) because they are detectable in principle. I hope they exist.

What if you were to define God only as our creator? Would I believe in the possibility of that? Sure, if you’re willing to think of abiogenesis + evolution as your God. Oh, it has to be an intelligent creator? Hmm, what about those aliens? Could aliens have created us? Well, not really… it doesn’t make sense that animals are so genetically similar to us if we humans were created by aliens (unless they created the animals from the same stockpile of DNA). Well, maybe the aliens just brought the first cellular lifeforms and allowed evolution to take its course–creating us in that sense. Could I believe in such alien Gods? While I would consider such a God not out of the realm of possibility, I do think abiogenesis is a more likely explanation. While, I believe such alien Gods are far more likely than the Christian God, I’ll remain fairly atheistic about both.

Then there’s the idea that we live in a simulation. Could an advanced species have created computers powerful enough to simulate a universe and could we be living therein? Probably! While such a God is interesting to consider, it is once again, one of those undetectable Gods that just isn’t very meaningful in our natural universe.

So what really is my position on the existence of God? It all depends on what your definition of “God” is.

Why do I call myself an “atheist” then? I don’t believe the evidence for the existence of God, as he is commonly defined, justifies a belief in God. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I think the likelihood of such a God existing, based on our current evidence, is so low that my beliefs are much more like the pure atheist than the pure agnostic. That is why I call myself an “atheist” even though in some cases I am not an atheist.

Despising God

12 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in My Philosophy, The Conversion, The Questioning

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As atheists, we are sometimes posed the question; If the positive existence of God was proven to your satisfaction, would you worship him? My answer to that question is; No.

Now, before you assume that my reason for rejecting God is personal, rather than epistemological, let me assure you that I believe wholeheartedly that the God of the Bible does not exist. My reason for believing so is quite simply that I do not find that the evidence warrants a belief in the existence of such a God.

When I first began questioning the existence of God, I was racked with guilt. I believed that my questions were blasphemous and that blasphemy was an unforgivable sin but I could not quell them.

As time went on and the questions became more pronounced, I began to wonder how a being intelligent enough to create this universe, could torture someone like me for all eternity. According to the Bible, I was headed straight for hell. I didn’t feel evil.  All I ever wanted was to know the truth. How could an all-powerful being, torture me for following the truth? Was it really my fault if circumstances conspired to make me question his existence? How could he hide from me and then punish me for not believing in him? If he was God, could he not easily convince me beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he exists?

At the time, I still wanted God to exist. I feared an existence devoid of such a protector. I concluded that if God really did exist, then he must be nothing like he is portrayed in the Bible. I could not believe in a benevolent God and in hell at the same time. I could not believe that an omniscient being would resort to eternal torture.

As time went on, my definition of God shrinked until it vanished into nothingness. I no longer believe in the existence of God, benevolent or otherwise. I do not believe that the God of the Bible exists. I do not even believe that anything remotely god-like exists. If something god-like actually does exist, I would find it hard to believe that it would be like the God of the Bible. However, I can look at the hypothetical, ‘What if the God of the Bible really exists’ and develop an opinion of such a God.

The God of the Bible can be blamed for the mass murders of hundreds of thousands of people. He can be blamed for rapes, pillage, plunder, slavery, child abuse, and rampant destruction. He tells us that happiness can be achieved by smashing children against rocks, and he tells us that homosexuality is evil. Since he takes credit for it, we might as well blame God for all the natural disasters, evil, and suffering that humanity and the animal kingdom have ever endured. It doesn’t stop there. God claims that he’s really a nice guy and we have to worship him or else he will torture us for eternity.

After I stopped believing in God and my case of Stockholm Syndrome faded away, I stopped seeing the God of the Bible as a benevolent being, and started seeing the things that are really written therein. Any person or being that engages in the things that are attributed to God, is unimaginably evil in my opinion. As a matter of moral principle, I would never worship such a being. At this point, I believe I would rather be a martyr and be tortured for eternity, than to worship a narcissistic terrorist like God. Oh, and by the way… if I was God, I would be way nicer!

Our Responsibility to the Truth

05 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in Ethics, My Philosophy

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We tend to think that our responsibility to the truth is satisfied if we refrain from uttering hurtful lies. Even the most ethical among us seem to think that we’re fine as long as we don’t intentionally deceive others. Is our responsibility really limited to that?

Many people tell white lies to their spouses, lie on their tax returns, commit warranty fraud, propagate rumors, emphatically state things which they have no evidence for, and allow people and organizations to get away with saying things that aren’t truthful. The same people feel hurt when someone lies to them.

Lying can be intentional or unintentional. When done intentionally, it is often because some advantage is to be gained by the deceit. When unintentional, it can usually be blamed on carelessness or intellectual laziness. Just as we are culpable for intentional lies, I believe we are also blameworthy for our unintentional lies.

Lying damages society in a number of ways. That is true whether the lie is intentional or unintentional but we tend blame only those that lie intentionally because we assume that unintentional lies can’t be avoided. That assumption is wrong.

Most unintentional lies can be avoided by doing some simple fact-checking. A lot of the rest can be avoided by doing more in-depth research. The rest can be avoided by rephrasing our statements to note our level of uncertainty. All unintentional lies can be avoided by being aware of our own ignorance. We are all ignorant, to an extent, in different areas of knowledge. That is fine as long as we are aware of what we are ignorant about and refrain from speaking with an air of knowledge on those subjects.

Take for example, the person who hears that homeopathy works wonders and recommends it to a friend with cancer–as an alternative to a hospital visit. Later that friend dies, partially because he wasted time with an ineffectual treatment instead of getting chemotherapy. The person who recommended the ineffectual treatment is at least partially to blame for the death.

It is not enough to believe that what we are saying is the truth. To ensure that our statement doesn’t bring harm to society, we must investigate the truth of the statement before stating it. We must ask ourselves in what ways the statement could be false. Even when we have gathered evidence to support our assertion, we should caveat it with a reference to the evidence or to our level of uncertainty. There is nothing wrong with prefacing some statements with “I think” and concluding them with “but I could be wrong about that.” Too many people are too quick to assert something. If they would only add a reference to the evidence they are basing that assertion on, we could more easily determine its validity for ourselves.

If a scientist tells us that we are safe from an earthquake and then a deadly earthquake occurs, we are rightfully angry. How could that scientist not look at all the evidence? How could that scientist not end the statement with a comment about the uncertainty involved with such a statement? We are angry about this and yet we continue to propagate rumors about people we don’t like particularly well.

Perhaps the amount of blame we assign to the unintentional liar should be based on the intellectual ease with which the lie could have been avoided. If someone makes a false statement that couldn’t have been avoided without considerable research then perhaps that person is not as blameworthy as the one whose lie could have been avoided by doing some simple fact-checking.

We must become critical thinkers (I believe this skill should be formally taught in elementary school). After my parents and most of society deceived me, albeit unintentionally, for more than ten years, is it any wonder that I hate deception? It is our responsibility to learn how people deceive each other both intentionally and unintentionally. By studying the art of truth we also learn about cognitive biases–how our brains deceive us and how we go on to deceive others because of that.

Before I conclude this post, I want to talk briefly about something that really irritates me; rumors. I was once accused of committing a crime (I was never charged and the real perps admitted to it several weeks later), so I know the power of slander/rumors and the damage that they can cause to their subjects. By being responsible for the things that we say, we become one less person that starts a rumor–one less person that hurts another. When I hear what sounds like a rumor, rather than spreading it further, I find it more productive to offer alternative explanations to the rumored one. It often takes the gossiper aback and causes him or her to reconsider their evidence.

I encourage you not to blindly believe the things I’ve said here but to reason through it yourself. By learning the skills of critical thought, we become filters for the information that flows through society. Not only can we stop ourselves from uttering unintentional lies, we can offer commentary on the ones that others utter. And always remember… we are to blame for our lies, the intentional ones and the unintentional ones.

The Fears of Death

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in Metaphysics, My Philosophy

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The fear of death is a primal and natural fear. Intellectually, I understand this as being the natural inclination of self-aware agents in a survival-of-the-fittest environment. This primal fear is not necessarily a conscious one. I’m talking about the reflexive behavior that we engage in when faced with danger. Reflexive behavior such as fight or flight.

Even religious people, those who believe in an afterlife for their personal essence, have this primal fear. Animals also have this primal tendency to avoid death. Without this inclination, life wouldn’t have survived in this hostile universe.

There is, however, a second fear of death that afflicts certain animals with high-functioning self-awareness. I’m talking about the existential angst that follows the realization that that which is I will at some point cease to exist. Many religions suppress this fear with the idea of an afterlife in which the essence of a person will never cease to exist. For the agnostic or atheist who has just left religion, this fear of death may have something to do with why life suddenly seems more pointless.

What exactly causes this existential angst, this second fear of death, and how might we suppress it as individuals without deluding ourselves with religion?

The Bible is Ambiguous – No Informative Value

09 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Epistemology, My Philosophy, Religion

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The Bible is ambiguous and most Christians, I believe, can accept that. Given almost any passage, different people give different interpretations of the passage. Even a person who interprets a passage one way may interpret it another way years later. The Bible is an ambiguous text.

My argument is that the Bible, at least all the parts that are ambiguous, does not have informative value. If the authors wanted to convey information, to provide a text with informative value, they would have written clearly, and not in metaphors and parables. Like poetry, most of the Bible is of no informative value. Like poetry, I would argue that religious texts don’t serve to convey information as much as they serve to tease out our own feelings and beliefs. That is how different people interpret the Bible and poetry differently and how a person might interpret a passage one way and then interpret it differently a year later.

One argument that I’ve had to defend against is that the writers of the Bible didn’t intend for their text to be ambiguous. That’s just how they wrote things back then and if we find it ambiguous it’s a failure on our part. I disagree. We can point to any number of earlier writers, Aristotle for instance, who wrote unambiguous text that clearly conveys what the writer meant.

All religious texts that I have encountered are ambiguous, and they must be so to survive. An unambiguous text has informative value that can be compared with reality and tested. A religion based on an unambiguous text that made specific predictions (including dates and times) would either become a part of the body of scientific knowledge or it would be discredited.

There is definitely an allure to ambiguous texts. We don’t completely understand them and so we tend to assume that what they’re trying to say must be wise indeed. Ambiguity is not so much a technique for accurately conveying information as it is a technique for teasing out what you already believe. For that reason, there is some kind of value there–just not informative value.

Natural Law: The Foundation of Morality?

08 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in Ethics, My Philosophy

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The other day I asked an Amish friend of mine whether he thinks abortion is morally acceptable. His adamant answer was an unequivocal; No. When asked why, he says it’s unnatural; it doesn’t conform to natural law.

My friend is not the typical close-minded Amish person and his idea is that natural law is based on the physical laws; the laws of nature. He agrees with me that evolution is a natural outcome of biological agents living in a universe with our physical laws. He goes on to assert that the characteristics of evolution, such as the tendency to survive as an individual and to reproduce as a species; is natural law. Abortion, he says, is morally wrong because it does not conform to this natural law. It opposes the natural law of reproduction. He claims that morality is objective and it can be derived from the physical laws in the aforementioned way.

My first response to his argument was that abortion isn’t found in the animal world (and is unnatural in that regard) because it requires advanced technology which non-human animals don’t have. My second criticism was that we engage in a lot of activities which aren’t “natural” but he considers to be moral. Marriage and monogamy, for instance, do not conform to his idea of natural law.

My friend admitted that he would have to rethink his position but he refuses to accept my position; that there is no inherent or objective morality, there is only behavior that we don’t put up with.

What do you think? Is morality a set of objective, non-changing, ultimate-truth, ideals or does it evolve with society?

Suicide: Exploring the Afterlife

01 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in Metaphysics, My Philosophy, The Conversion

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There was a short period of time in my life when I was somewhere between pantheism and agnosticism. This was when I no longer held the dogmatic belief that suicide is inherently morally wrong but I had yet to release all hope for an afterlife. It was during this period that I toyed with the idea that suicide would be the ultimate adventure (I never actually seriously considered doing it myself).

Suicide: The Game of Life

Suicide: The Game of Life

I no longer believe in an afterlife but I still hold a small secret admiration for those that take their own lives. Many people call them cowards. I call them courageous. I would never commit suicide while I was physically healthy, but that’s partially because I’m a coward but mostly because evolution selected strongly against such tendencies–in other words, I don’t want to. Also, I’m a bit of a nihilistic fellow so I think suicide would be just as pointless as living. Why bother killing yourself? Even that is ultimately pointless.

If you believe in an afterlife, wouldn’t suicide be the ultimate adventure?