Though it’s Ceiling Cat’s Day of Rest, the Imagine No Religion meetings proceed, with talks today by Harriet Hall, me, Lawrence Krauss, and Carolyn Porco, and a speakers’ dinner tonight. There were some interesting talks yesterday, with three of them about how to address the growing problem of Islamic radicalism—two by ex-Muslims. All of the talks gave different suggestions, but Maryam Namazie’s was especially controversial for me, since she claimed that Islamic radicalism was not at all a problem of religion, but of “politics and control”—the desire of one group to control others, both Muslims of different sects and women. Yet she also asserted that bringing secularism to the Middle East would help the problem (why, if it’s not religious?), and at the end of her talk she quoted from Lennon’s “Imagine no religion” verse. But if religion isn’t at least a major part of the problem, why would its absence help anything? Her implication was that if there were no religion, things would still be as bad in the Middle East as they are now, for the desire to control others would still cause harm. I disagree strongly, for I see that as a Glenn Greenwald/Karen Armstrong approach based on avoidance of palpable motivations. I have great respect for Namazie’s work, but her words seem to contradict both her actions and even other words in her own talk.
Peter Boghossian had some interesting suggestions about how to intervene on both the macro and micro level to “de-brand” ISIS, including forming a PAC to develop an advertising campaign to take the “cool” out of ISIS, just as they took the “cool” out of cigarette smoking in the 80s. He suggested that we rebrand ISIS as “goofy” rather than cool, though I don’t know how one would do that. Both he and Faisal Saeed al Muttar, however, agreed that religion, not “power,” was the biggest problem behind Islamic radicalism, and that the key to solving that problem lies in first recognizing its religious nature.
Chris DiCarlo related the heartbreaking tale about how he had lost jobs and tenure by being an atheist—in Canada!—and proposed that we devise some kind of “fairness machine” that could make decisions without human bias. That, of course, presupposes some objective view of ethics, à la Sam Harris, and I’m dubious that such a machine could work without first being programmed by subjective human values. But it would at least have decided to give DiCarlo tenure, which he fully deserves as an articulate philosopher and excellent teacher who uses the Socratic method.
Finally, Robert Price, an atheist who works at a theological seminary, gave a nice talk about the question of the historicity of Jesus, which he doubts but can’t adduce convincing disproof, though he agrees that question has nothing to do with either the existence of God or the tenets of Christianity. His talk was full of erudite references, but was engrossing, as he showed convincingly that Christianity was just a myth resembling many that had gone before it. He also mentioned—and this is something I hadn’t thought about—that we have no proof that the Jesus person or myth didn’t begin forming long before the “zero A.D.” time we commonly think of.
Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss had an hourlong conversation at the end of the evening, covering diverse topics including the security blanket of religion, the nature of alien life (what might it be like? carbon based? would it have eyes, and DNA?), the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics, and so on. I have pictures, but no time to share them today, I suspect. Tomorrow I have the day off before I fly to Vancouver, and a kind reader, a research biologist at the facility, has promised to give me a “behind the scenes” tour of the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park, which I certainly intend to do. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is jarred by religion:
A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: Either my ears are ringing or it’s the church bells.
Ja: Nad czym myślisz?
Hili: Albo mi w uszach dzwoni, albo to dzwony kościoła.
Is the conference going to be put on DVD so we can purchase it?
The talks will be free on YouTube eventually.
I think the people who want to join ISIS will see right through Peter’s plan. Many are young, so they’re already at a place where they’re suspicious of familiar authority figures and looking to rebel. They’re naive and idealistic, so they’re looking to couple that sense of rebellion with a cause, and ISIS already has a strong “brand” in that respect. I think that particular battle is lost.
Actually…right there in the Old Testament, written at least a few centuries before “zero A.D.” and possibly tracing its origins to half a millennium or more before the time of Paul, is proof positive that Jesus was a long-standing Jewish demigod / archangel / whatever.
(Note that “Jesus” and “Joshua” are the exact same name, come to us through different intermediate languages — just like “Lysander” and “Alejandro” are both different forms of “Alexander.”)
That last paragraph, especially, is the heart and soul of the Jesus story: Jesus the true high priest (in contrast with the false ones in the temple of Jerusalem) built the celestial temple, the “true tabernacle” of YHWH; he sits at the right hand of the throne of YHWH; he is the prince of peace. And the word the KJV translates as, “The Branch,” is elsewhere translated as, “The Rising.” And to set crowns upon his head is to anoint him; anointing is also called, “christening.” Ergo, the Rising Anointed Joshua, or the Risen Jesus Christ. (And Christianity also has lots of references to Jesus as “the branch (and the vine),” even in more modern English poetic verses.)
Lest I be accused of “Bible Code” nonsense, Philo of Alexandria, far and away the most important Jewish philosopher of the Roman era and the man who invented the concept of the Logos in Judaism and whose philosophy the Christians adopted wholesale…Philo himself explicitly equated the Rising Jesus of Zecharaia 6 with the Logos and wrote a fair amount on the wordplay of “The Rising” in the then-already-ancient text. So, even if it is some sort of “Bible Code,” it’s a “Bible Code” that the originator of what would become Christian philosophy considered significant.
It’s also worth noting that Paul’s Jesus is indistinguishable from Philo’s Logos and bears damned little in common with Mark’s Euhemerized biography of Jesus.
Cheers,
b&
Also note that Philo was alive during the supposed NT events, too – and didn’t notice a thing.
Not just alive; brother-in-law (by marriage) to the King Herod Agrippa whom the Gospels identify as the reigning king during Jesus’s ministry. And an ambassador to Rome to petition Caligula about the horrific mistreatment of Jews (including crucifixions) at the hands of the Romans — that embassy in the ’40s, after the end of Pilate’s reign and well after the latest possible date for Jesus’s Crucifixion. And a prolific author who mentioned all sorts of contemporaries, especially with theological connections…and almost all of his works survive.
It is no more conceivable that Philo could have failed to mention the human incarnation of his life’s theological work, the Logos, whether real or by an impostor, than it is that the New York Times could have failed to report the results of this weekend’s horse race.
b&
Bob Price has a great podcast called The Human Bible:
http://www.thehumanbible.net/
I’ve been listening to his Human Bible, which became The Bible Geek, for probably a decade now.
Robert Price is such an engaging speaker. “erudite” certainly describes any of his talks.
On the subject of explaining the “appeal” of ISIS, Price wrote a very nice piece on his blog.
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/zblog/
A quote from the piece:
“I believe Islamic young people in the West (some of them) find themselves in the same position as the disappointed evangelical youth Schaeffer described. What they heard in their mosques about Muhammad and the past glories of Islam sounded antithetical to the pluralism and secularism of the society around them. Pluralism inevitably dissolves any master narrative that may once have given a more monolithic society its identity and sense of direction. For Muslims, their very existence as one more plant in a larger garden seems to contradict the ostensible raison d’être of Islam. The blandishments of radical Islam offer what a secular, pluralistic society cannot give: a jihad to conquer anomie.”
Perhaps what M. Namazie has in mind is that Islamic regimes like Iran and the Taliban held territories and now ISIS cynically use the religious zealotry of their enforcers to hold onto power. But to me if both the leaders and their enforcers and the run-of-the-mill supporters in their populations say that their rule is granted from religion, by religion, and for religion, then we should take their word for it.
Considering that industry got started in lands rich with a wide variety of natural resources, only one of which is oil, and that the Middle East is poor in natural resources in general but richer than all others in oil, that they should be underdeveloped and subjected to imperial colonialism was perhaps inevitable.
But, whatever the ultimate origins of the conflict, there is no escaping the fact that both Saudi Arabia and DAESH as well as basically all of the other Muslim-majority nation-states in the region are diligently aligning their laws with those set forth in the Q’ran, explicitly stated as such and for the purpose of submitting to the will of Allah and his Messenger Muhammad. And basically every last horror to come out of that part of the world these days is done because those committing the horror believe it to be the will of Allah as revealed to Muhammad and recorded in the Q’ran.
We may still have all sorts of problems of colonialism and distribution of resources to deal with without religion…but we can’t even begin to get to the fundamental causes, whatever they may be, so long as people are committing the most brutal of atrocities at the command of Allah and Muhammad.
b&
Just got to the Hili part as the church bell down the street tolled. A little spooky – have to get Dark Side of the Moon playing in the car in a minute…
far away, across the field
the tolling on the iron bell
calls the faithful to their knees
to hear the softly spoken magic spell
If anyone wants to follow up on Robert Price’s idea of the resemblances of Christianity to the many prior myths, I would recommend Joseph Campbell’s work, The Hero with a Thousand faces. Although published in 1949, it is not outdated since it deals mainly with comparative mythology, with no distinction between myth and religion. His style can be a bit difficult at times but he documents the idea that we have been there before very well.
A Catholic friend of mine is a fan of Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. As he sees it, mythical predecessors to Jesus supports the idea that God was slowly preparing us for the real thing. Faith successfully maintained and strengthened!
Yeah, I know.
You might wish to introduce your friend to the writings of Justin Martyr, one of the oldest of the Catholic Saints and the first known apologist. His First Apology is devoted to exactly that thesis, save that he attributes the “foreshadowing” not to divine preparation but diabolical imitation with the intent of leading honest men astray.
A typical example to whet the appetite:
b&
First time I ever heard of that interpretation. God does work in mysterious ways! Wow.
“As he sees it, mythical predecessors to Jesus supports the idea that God was slowly preparing us for the real thing. Faith successfully maintained and strengthened!”
Yes!
Sort of like how dowsers, or homeopaths, or physics are just shams and delusions NOW, but these fake versions are “preparing us” for the truth of those powers, which will arrive when we are ready for it.
That is consistent with the many similar “messianic” myths, and even historical persons, that has been claimed permeate the area long before and well after the christianist version. Which is in turn consistent with how religions evolve.
Does religion gives religionists warm and fuzzy feelings? That is because religion is fuzzy.
And re our PoPe Hili [Princess of Poland, emeritus], spits out hairy stuff.
I remember a ~100BC and a ~60BC christ in addition to the “zero A.D.” christ. That’s not to mention that Jesus was not an uncommon name in that region for that time.
Although I can’t recall the name, Bart Ehrman in his How Jesus Became God there was a figure in Roman mythology from around the same time that was more or less the same as christ. He was the incarnation of some god of the Egyptian pantheon.
Oh yeah, Mithras and Zoroaster. The modern Abrahamic religions ripped off a whole ton of stuff from Zoroastrianism.
It’s not so much that Christianity ripped things off from other religions as that that’s simply how religious thought worked in those days. Paul’s Jesus is indistinguishable from Philo’s Logos, and Philo’s claim to fame was the incorporation of the Pagan Logos into Judaism. But Judaism had already long ago turned the Egyptian god, Set, into the Adversary, Satan. The language of the Bible clearly reflects the amalgamation of the cults of YHWH and El, and the Jewish nickname for YHWH, “Adonai,” is just the Jewish pronunciation of the name of Adonis. The Flood is the Epic of Gilgamesh.
…and this sort of thing happened in all directions. Ancient scholars, before Christianity, had identified Osiris and Dionysus as being two cultural impressions / manifestations of the same divinity. The god, Serapis, was explicitly created as a politically-motivated reconciliation of the merger of the cults of Osiris and Apis, as reflected in the name itself.
And we all know that pretty much every single Greek god has a nearly-identical Roman counterpart, even though there were often some pretty stark differences before the merger. Zeus = Jupiter, Ares = Mars, Dionysus = Bacchus, and so on.
Today, we tend to think of the ancient religions as each being its own self-contained world, with strict boundaries between the pantheons. In reality, it was much closer to modern comic book lore, where you might see Batman and Superman team up to fight Loki.
b&
In addition, when populations merged, they usually just added the gods of the incoming population to the local pantheon. When the region was polytheistic it was far more religiously tolerant, though we are taught that the move to monotheism is a sign of society advancing. Imo, that’s clearly a point of view enforced by what became, by violence, to dominate.
On the other hand, if the reduction of numbers in the pantheon continued its downward trajectory after reaching a solitary number, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Then again, Christianity is far from a monotheistic religion. Never mind the Trinity and the wars fought over its nature; if Hades is a god — and he most certainly is — then Satan most emphatically also is a god. And if Prometheus and Pandora are gods, even if lesser gods, then so too Adam and Eve. Romulus and Remus? Abraham and Isaac. The Olympians and the Heavenly host; Roman ancestor worship and the dead joining the choir celestial on the other side of the Pearly Gates.
Plus ça change….
b&
Not necessarily, Satan doesn’t have to be a god. You seem to be mixing Christian and non-christian concepts of what is a god. Which are quite different things.
Although, everyone should know that when asked if one is a god, you should say yes.
I’m using the term in an anthropological context. And if we’re going to call Hades a god, then there is absolutely no way to not also call Satan a god.
b&
Satan, Lucifer, the Morningstar, from what I’ve read is more based upon the Zoroastrianism anti-god than anything else. That’s not to say that Set isn’t a dick for killing his brother. Ancient Judaism needed a cause for evil other than their creator god and Lucifer fulfilled it.
The “Great Flood” myth dates back to Sumerians, not just Babylonians. I’m reminded of an office-mate in graduate school who blamed everything that went wrong on Hittites. Fucking Hittites.
I do agree that ancient myths are more or less equivalent to comic books. Depending on the writer zeus and jupiter are the same, or not.
This is one of the reasons I enjoy reading ancient myth, you never know what you’re going to get.
Satan and Lucifer are two entirely different entities; the one is the adversary and the other is the light-bearer. And Jesus even gets explicitly identified as the Morningstar at one point.
b&
Lucifer the Morningstar is what Satan is called prior to his fall. The adversary is the fallen light-bearer.
That’s all post-Biblical exegesis. The Satan who makes bets with YHWH about Job isn’t at all identified with Lucifer; that bit of syncretism came loooooooong afterwards.
Similarly, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden is again yet another character altogether, and only made to be one more face of the anti-YHWH evil super-god “The Devil” about the same time all the pro-YHWH gods (El, Adonis, etc.) were themselves amalgamated into the same confusingly-eponymous “God” god.
b&
Excellent new Jeffrey Tayler
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/07/no_one_exposes_western_liberals_faulty_thinking_on_islam_better_than_self_professed_%e2%80%9cheretic%e2%80%9d_ayaan_hirsi_ali/
And he’s taking a beating in the comments!
That’s just skirting around the issue. Yes, it is about control but religion not only gives them the bigotry to dislike one another but also the means to control their own in group. Sure, things may not be perfect in the Middle East without religion but I bet it would a hell of a lot better. Just look at old pictures of girls in Iran for example – in mini skirts!!
Also, jealous of your behind the scenes tour of The Aquarium. I loved it there. It is a small aquarium but lovely and right in the middle of Stanley Park.
If we had to use a phrase to sum up the main theme of the Abrahamic God concept, “politics and control” is not a bad one. God rules over us and we were created to praise and obey.
So I don’t see this “it’s not religion” argument. Politics will become more controlling the more it tries to resemble the Perfect form of government, the one where the ideal of perfect harmony has been achieved.
The aquarium is wonderful!
DiCarlo should look into the literature on the so-called “control problem” in AI (or maybe just watch a few recent episodes of “Person of Interest”).
The short version is that we might be able to build a machine to make ethical decisions for us — better decisions than we could make ourselves — but there’s no guarantee we’d like the result. Suppose the machine decides that the best way to maximize human well-being is to fit everyone with an IV endorphin drip? If the machine is smarter than we are, it will come up with even more creative ways to defy our intuitions about what’s best.
Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence covers this ground pretty thoroughly but I hesitate to recommend it because his prose is dreadful and needlessly opaque with specialized jargon.
My enthusiasm for a “fairness machine” is notably damp. I keep imagining something like this.
That’s why the zeroeth rule — for intelligences biological or mechanical — should always be, “Do not do unto others that which they do not wish done unto them, save for the minimal amount necessary to prevent violations of this rule.” In the medical profession, this principle might be called, “informed consent.”
If the super AI wishes to offer endorphin IVs to everybody, fantastic. But it steps way over the line when it either forces or tricks people into taking them.
b&
It turns out to be remarkably hard to express such considerations in formal logic executable by a machine. How, for instance, should we encode the difference between trickery and legitimate persuasion? We have no qualms about tricking, say, chimps into doing things we know are good for them. On what coherent basis should a benevolent superintelligence decide that tricking chimps is OK, but tricking humans is not? If there’s a line to be drawn, how do you quantify that?
The point is that we should be extremely skeptical about claims of a bulletproof ethical rule, since any such rule may turn out to have serious loopholes and gray areas invisible to us but exploitable by an entity much smarter than us.
Again, there is a substantial literature on this topic, and the consensus seems to be that this is a very subtle problem with no easy solutions.
Ethics and morality, by their very nature, are about the relationships of social individuals…and anything resembling a “society” can only make sense if there’s something at least vaguely resembling equality amongst its members. And many of the horrors of history, such as American slavery, can be trivially identified as instances where those whom we today consider equals were, at the time, considered inconsequential animals no more deserving of consideration for equal treatment than the worms in the soil.
If a super-AI is as much more advanced than us as we are the worms in the soil, the least worst we can realistically hope for is the status of a loved pet, or maybe wildlife in a protected nature preserve. Anything more than that will be a conceit, no matter what perspective you consider it from.
Of course, as a practical problem, it’s another demonstration of the problem of the very notion of the divine. Let’s say that any given religion really is true and their gods really are real…what on Earth should make us think that the holy books are really in our best interests, and that they’re not actually cookbooks?
No formal logic can “solve” that problem, no matter how sophisticated nor well-intentioned.
b&
Last weekend I watched Ex Machina. It was interesting but there still seems to be an awful fear of females and female sexuality that I thought would have trickled away from shows.
Well, girls do have cooties, you know. I knew a kid whose best friend’s cousin died from cooties….
b&
ISIS says that they are about religion and I do not have any evidence to not believe them. They believe in the extreme ranges of Islam and they appear to have almost no morals and total disregard for all other forms of human life. It is like a large and well organized gang. The real problem they will have is the ability to actually run a “state” or country that would amount to anything.
Everything they do involves stealing or taking other people’s property and goods. They make money by selling stolen oil. Where else could you do this except other corrupt nations that allow it. Where do they get all the weapons of war except by stealing them and buying them from corrupt sources. They do not really create anything unless recruiting additional idiots to fight and die for them is creating.
I don’t know the answer but it must revolve around the idea of locating and eliminating the leadership of this gang. Why this has not been done is the question?
I hope you’ll have time and the interest to tour the Japanese garden (and other gardens) at UBC, Dr. C. It’s a world-class garden.
http://www.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/nitobe
The museum at UBC is pretty cool too!
“He suggested that we rebrand ISIS as ‘goofy’ rather than cool, though I don’t know how one would do that.”
Chris Morris succeeded in doing something similar in his movie “Four Lions,” the only good comedy I’ve ever seen about Islamic terrorism (the story covers four British Muslims plotting to bomb a marathon). Morris was inspired by the fact that a majority of planned terrorist attacks fail due to plain old human incompetence or vanity, and his film succeeds in making the terrorists laughable, petty, and deadly–one’s laughter is often uneasy, just as in great satires like Dr. Strangelove. Morris was the mind behind some of the greatest modern satirical TV programs ever made, including The Day Today and Brass Eye, and Four Lions is a worthwhile successor– though it failed to make much of an impression in America, it’s one of the best and most important films made during the last decade.
The funniest comedy take I’ve seen on terrorists is Key & Peele’s.
Google the video (youtube):
Key & Peele – Al Qaeda Meeting
b&
http://www.fourlionsthemovie.com/
Also available from less-sanctioned sources, for those who know about that sort of thing….
b&
“Her implication was that if there were no religion, things would still be as bad in the Middle East as they are now, for the desire to control others would still cause harm.”
Except that without the Book written by God to justify their behaviour, they would have to admit that they just want to be overlords of as much of humanity as possible, which would hardly have the cachet of “doing God’s work” would it?
The full text of Maryam Namazie’s talk at INR5 is available on her blog.
I liked it. I don’t think she is suggesting that Islamism has nothing to do with religion. I think she is suggesting that Islamists use Islam as a means to seek power and control people.:
I agree with this. I see parallels to it in India where the Hindu religion in reality is quite diverse, consisting of several different traditions and diverse practices but the Hindu right wing wants to homogenize the identity into their version of “Hindu” nation. Many Hindus in fact don’t agree with this homogenization but identify themselves as Hindu nevertheless. E.g. there are Hindus who have been eating beef for centuries but the Hindu right wing party in power has imposed beef bans in many states. So “Hinduism” (as interpreted by the right wing Hindu parties) is being used as a means of gaining power and control.
Off subject, but I have it on very poor authority Samantha Cristoforetti has chained herself to her coffee maker and refuses to leave the space station.