Truth as Revolution

This Applies Only To Properly Formed Deductive Truth, Not To Personal, Subjective Faux Truth

Scriba Dei and Loving The Truth: "The Nigger Question"

And this:

Scriba Dei, at Vox Day's Place.

Oxford Dictionary Adds an Appropriate Word

Oxford Dictionaries names 'post-truth' word of the year

For much of the western nations, Truth has become irrelevant. The Nietzschean will-to-power under the Leftist narrative supplants any search for Aristotelian validation of arguments. And the First Principles of Non-contradiction and Excluded Middle are no longer even considered.

That leaves Tautology, or definition as Truth, as the sole source, where X is defined as True and therefore IS True. The assertion of tautology is the fundament of Narrative, and Narrative is the source of PC and the three class system. So the pseudo-Marxist Leftist utopian Narrative is definitely Post-Truth.

While the term, "post-truth" is apparently recent, the post-modern adaptation was popularized by Marx/Darwin, with each of those affecting the rise of anti-rationality in science, philosophy and culture.

If You're Interested In Intellectual Integrity, Rather Than...

...the propagation of dogma - especially in our "institutions of higher learning", then you probably will want to read this:

NAS Statement: The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom

Of considerable interest to me is the section near the end, "5. Pursuit of Truth". It's a sad sign of the times that this fundamental principle must be reasserted, especially in the elite halls of intellect which have become dogmatically corrupted by various intellectual religions.

A Series Of Essays, Which While Stating The Blatantly Obvious, Are Brilliantly Stated

These three (at a minimum) essays by John C. Wright should be taught to all literate children, over and over.

Leftists and truth (an excerpt):

"It is crucial to the worldview and self esteem of the Left that they regard themselves, despite all evidence to the contrary, as being morally and intellectually superior to their honorable opposition on the Right. A century long nightmare of the mass deaths, wars, broken lives, mass thefts, mass addiction to lying propaganda, and spiritual chaos spread by this political neurosis makes the act of total mental dishonesty needed to maintain this stance of presumptive intellectual superiority both difficult and comical to maintain, yet by heroic effort the Left manages to do so.

It is because they sacrifice everything else on this altar. Their self esteem, or, to call it by its right name, the Sin of Pride, absorbs all their attention and overthrows all other scruples, hesitations and sentiments. They are desperate to maintain their illusory and inflated self-image. Because they are desperate, they are shameless.

The prime evidence of their shamelessness is in the attitude, present in all writings of the Left that venture into philosophical areas, of disdain and dismissal toward the truth. I do not mean that they are untruthful. They are, but that is a side effect. I mean that on a fundamental and philosophical level, there is no place in their worldview for the concept that truth is objective.

In the bleary and psychedelic and flaccid mental world of the Left, truth is a matter of consensus, like the rules of grammar, or a matter of personal preference, like your taste in ice cream.

For them, truth is not true."

And this irresistable ccomparison:

"In the quest for intellectual superiority, there are two basic strategies: first, do something concrete to display your superior intellect to the world unambiguously, such as by reconciling Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity, or such as by proving that, for projective algebraic varieties, Hodge cycles are rational linear combinations of algebraic cycles.

The second is to claim superiority of the intellect, and to display to the world some form of incomprehensible paradox, or gibberish, or make noises like a hoopoe, so that when a skeptic questions your alleged superior thought process, you can grandly decree him to be too mentally retarded to comprehend your culminant transcendent ultra-superbrilliance, and too morally corrupt to deserve to do so."

And,
"For obvious reasons, the first strategy is unavailable to the Left. The second strategy has the obvious drawback that it makes objectivity the enemy. Truth is the enemy. So the second strategy fails unless confidence that truth exists is undermined.
[emphasis joyfully added]

Leftists and Virtue; (an excerpt):

"Because of their rejection of the idea of truth, even Leftists who might otherwise admire virtue must oppose it and promote vice. Allow me to explain.

A conservative will assume men are imperfect, or, to use the correct term, Fallen. He says that the guilt we feel when we sin is because we fall short of the standard virtue sets, and therefore we must try ever harder, with the help of good laws and good customs, to achieve virtue. Some conservatives say this is the point of civilization.

A progressive will assume men are always growing more perfect. He says the guilt we feel is a hindrance to happiness, if not a psychological disease. Therefore we must try ever harder to abolish taboos and guilt complexes and hang up, that is, to eliminate modesty, decency, shame, and lower the standards of virtue. The progressive dismisses traditional standards of virtues as being meaningless (hence the word “taboo”) or unhealthy (“guilt complexes”) or irrational (“hang up”). The elimination of virtue is to be done with the help of social engineering by ever more intrusive experts granted ever more intrusive powers over our lives, eliminating law and custom and replacing it with experts armed with arbitrary powers. Some progressives say this is the point of progress.

In sum, the conservative think we should avoid guilt by adhering to a standard of acting virtuously; the progressive thinks we should eliminate the guilt by eliminating the standards, and then acting in any way we damned well please, and the consequences are someone else’s worry.

Now, I have made an outrageous assertion: not that Leftists are indifferent to virtue, but are openly hostile to virtue."

The Left and the degradation of beauty (an excerpt):

"The strongest argument against the atheism so beloved of the Left is not an argument that can be put in words, for it is the argument of beauty. If you see a sunset clothed in scarlet like a king descending to his empurpled pyre, or wonder at the gleaming thunder of a waterfall, if you find yourself fascinated by the soft intricacy of a crimson rose or behold the cold virgin majesty of the morning star, much less see and enter a cathedral or a walled garden, or you hear Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” by Beethoven or see the David of Michelangelo, or become immersed into the song and splendor and Northern sorrow of Wagner’s “Ring” or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, if indeed you see real beauty and for a moment you forget yourself, then you are drawn out of yourself into something larger.

In that timeless moment of sublime rapture, the heart knows even if the head cannot put it into words that the dull and quotidian world of betrayal, pain, disappointment and sorrow is not the only world there is. Beauty points to a world beyond this world, a higher realm, a country of joy where there is no death. Beauty points to the divine.

The Left hates this argument, because – since it is not put into words – it cannot be refuted in words. It can only be refuted in images: a urinal, a several cow head, a can of shit, a messy bed. These images are ugly, aggressively ugly, meant to be demeaning, meant to be absurd, harsh, jarring, repugnant and gross. If the vision of a the morning star points to a world beyond this world, fair and filled with the music of the spheres, then visions of shit and blinking lights and severed heads and unmade beds point to a world of roaring despair, a desecrated graveyard, a dungheap.

The Left hates this argument, because if beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder, then beauty tells us what is a truth, a real truth, a truth from a world beyond the world of petty propaganda, a beauty beyond the world of pornography. The Left hates this argument, because if beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder, then beauty is meant to be served, not used for your selfish pleasures. Beauty humbles the proud, for it shows them something beyond themselves and their appetites. And the left hates that."

While he refers mostly to "Leftists", it is obvious that they cannot hold their principles or lack of principles and yet be theist. Leftism might contain a few theists, but their cognitive dissonance would be so great that it would indicate issues with their sanity. Leftism is a religion in its own right, a religion of destruction and hatred for all but the elite, the messiahs, the Ubermench. And even with with all that it is a mix of excessive self love and excessive self hatred resulting in a neediness only elitism can cure; that is a sanity issue, too.

Read these essays at their source.

ADDENDUM:
I just cannot resist these views on AtheoLeftist paradoxes:

"In this case, the idea of relativism is a mystery of the faith, and one never meant to be employed consistently. It is only used by hypocrites. No one ever applied the idea to his own ideas. No Leftist ever says, “I believe global warming is primarily man-caused and is certain to have disastrous rather than beneficial effects on human civilization — and my beliefs are a byproduct of the fact that I am Caucasian. My beliefs only apply to me and do not apply to you.”

It is only the beliefs of their opponents which are denounced: we are chided and lectured and dismissed as lunatics who suffer the strange delusion that matters of opinion are matters of fact.

The idea is rarely stated explicitly. It is the unstated assumption behind phrases like “that is true for you but not for me” or behind claims like “no one has the right to impose his views on another.” (It is never explained why it is that this view, the view that no one has the right to impose his views on another, can be imposed rightfully on all and sundry.)

If truth is true, then we are all accountable to it. We all have to answer to it.

If truth is true, there is one right answer and no one has an argument in favor of the wrong answers. If truth is true, the right answer has the right to speak and all the wrong answers shut up.

But if truth is not true, everyone has a right to an irresponsible opinion, and no one ever need answer for wrong answers. Only the right answer is commanded to shut up, whereas all the wrong answers need never stop their megalomaniacal chattering and caterwauling.

And now you know why the Left holds the dogma that no truth is true."
[From his essay on truth]

Go! read them at his place!

Doubt and Truth

Rhetoric and Dialectic: Persuasion With Falseness v.s. Demonstration of Validity

Vox Day gives a good explanation of rhetoric v.s. dialectic today. We have recently seen the use of rhetoric-only as arguments for defense of the killing abbatoirs of abortion in the comments here on this blog.

There are many logic books and there are many rhetoric books. One of my favorite summaries of rhetorical devices is "The Art Of Controversy", by Arthur Schopenhauer (This same book is ffound under other titles, but they are still translations of the same work by Schopenhauer).

An excellent use of dialectic and refutation of false rhetoric is found in one of my favorite works: "Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science" by Angus Menuge.

Rhetorical fallacies can also be found at fallacyfiles.org.

Taking Awhile

Is Evolution True or Fact or Managed Supposition?
What started as an answer to an Atheist regarding the debunking of “evolution as Truth”, has exploded into a full blown article on “What Qualifies As Knowledge?” (working title only). I currently have it only a quarter done, but I promised it out too soon and the massive expansion from a single point (wait; that was the Big Bang)… ok the increase in density (no wait that’s looking backward into the Big Bang)….

It’s just taking longer than I thought. Here’s a contingent outline that might not apply at all:

What Can Be Known
Introduction

A. The use and misuse of Logic in Pursuit of Ideology
B. The Rational Necessity of Supporting One’s Worldview
C. Inability to Support One’s Worldview
D. Evidential Theory, primary.

Part I Induction As Knowledge

A. Empiricism as disciplined induction (w/deductive subcomponents)
B. Hypotheses vs Knowledge
C. Limits
D. Dependencies
E. Application to Evolution Arguments (and Atheism/Materialism)

Part II Deduction As Knowledge

A. Logic, a summary
B. Mathematics, an overview
C. Necessary Precursors to Empiricism
D. Deduction

(1) Deductive Formatting
(2) Grounding
(3) Reductio Ad Absurdum
(4) Probability

E. Applicability to Evolution Arguments (and Atheism/Materialism)

Part III Evidentiary Theory

A Types and Quality of Evidence

(a) Physical
(b) Inductive
(c) Deductive
(d) Historical/

(B) Evidence As Truth
(a) Kinds of Truth
(b) Incorrigibility

Part IV What Qualifies As Knowledge?

A. Subjectivity As Defeater Of Objectivity.
B. Is Materialism Knowledge?
C. Is Skepticism Knowledge?
D. Probability And Bayes’ Theorem

Part V. Is Evolution Knowledge?

A. What is actually knowable from the fossils.
B. What is Actually Knowable from DNA
C. What is Actually Knowable from Empirical Observation
D. Power of Predicition; Utility for Biological Research.
E. What is Disallowed Under The Ideology of Exclusivity of Materialism.
F. What Can Be Rationally Concluded Regarding Evolution?

Addendum:
Also a section called:

How Atheists make non-rational demands of theists' evidence, which they cannot in any manner produce in defense of their own beliefs (i.e., completely irrational).

You Are Here: The State of State Control

A graphical representation of our position in history is given at Zero Hedge. The relative positioning is related to the books, "1984", by George Orwell, and "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. These books were not required reading in school back when they came out, yet everyone I knew read them and discussed them along with Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies amongst many others. I don't know if the subsequent generations of maleducated and low information Americans have read them, or have even heard of them. I doubt they are on youtube or are mentioned by the comics from which the Left gets their information to live by. These books are not about rainbows and tolerance of absolutely everything but criticism. Well, they sort of are, actually, except for rainbows.

On a semirelated note, Bill Mahr is threatening to bolt from California due to taxes... But Bill, taxes are the blood flow of the Left; you gotta love taxes! Wait, I get it. Taxes are for other people: for the masses.

New Rights And The Demands Of Homosexuals

[This is part 1]

When it comes to homosexuality, there are two opposing underlying worldviews in play. The views are diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. A person cannot choose both worldviews without logical fracture in the resulting worldview. And once a person chooses one of the worldviews, the other worldview becomes not only morally defective, it becomes onerous under the moral principles of the chosen viewpoint. However, only one worldview remains rational.

What I hope to do in this part is to lay out the origins of the underlying worldviews of both sides, and then to illuminate the issue as seen from the Right. This might surprise those on the Left who have characterized the Right in manners to suit their own prejudices.

Rights; Their Source and Moral Authority

The source of human Rights is a basic point of contention. How are Rights derived? What is the foundation which gives Rights a meaning which is absolute and inviolable, even “unalienable”? Or is there any such absolute and inviolable source in the first place?

The political Right is largely coincident with religious beliefs for a reason: the concept that humans have intrinsic value beyond that of an assemblage of quarks and leptons, and that this value is due to an external source which has provided humans with non-physical capacities such as intellect, will, and agency, these faculties being outside the abilities of subatomic particles to provide. The intrinsic value of each human, including the faculties each human possesses, leads to the basic human Rights, which include the Right to exist (life), the Right to pursue the necessities for existence, the Right to protect one’s existence, the Right to procreate, and the Right to freely use one’s faculties.

The existence of these special Rights leads to the further concept of the existence of absolute morality, a code of behavior which is not the product of human convention or manufacture, but which also is from an external source, as are the faculties which humans possess, as well as life itself. Within this concept is embedded the idea that discrimination is necessary in order to select behaviors for oneself which conform to the moral code, and that there exists such things as decency and good character, without which a person is not decent or good. Accomplishing decency and good character requires self-restraint and self-discipline in their pursuit. They are not awarded as a necessary trait of being human.

There is a difference between human Rights and permissions. Many of the “New Rights” which are currently being “discovered” are actually merely permissions. The spectrum of acceptable behaviors which is endorsed by the political Left does not exist, except as a non-valid concept, for the political Right. Rights are not negotiable according to the political Right. Permissions are negotiable, but they cannot refute the non-negotiable Rights, nor interfere with the absolute morality which is externally provided.


New Rights, New Morals: Rights Endowed By The Left, As Seen From the Right

The Left has a different concept of humans. Humans are animals, and are not special in any specific manner. All human attributes are physical including the intellect and agency. All Human Rights are permissions which are seized and maintained with the use of power. Power is the determinate factor in human relationships (Note 2): not only must Rights and permissions be seized with power, those humans who possess power can and likely will deny human Rights to other humans with less power. The brokering of power, then, is essential, and that is the focus of the progressive movement: to change the power structure to a top-down control of utopian objectives for the benefit of all mankind. This requires a very strong government which determines the Rights (actually permissions and faux entitlements) as it sees fit. In other words, the Left favors a “Positive Rights” system, where ordinary humans have only the permissions which are allocated to them by the government – a government which is benign and humanistic by definition if not fact, and is manned by humanist elitists who are guided only by their emotion of empathy, in order to install perfect Equality. Equality is a holy tenet (holy in the sense of absolute and untouchable). Nothing else is “fair” except Equality. (More on this in a bit).

Further, the permissions favored by the Left are based on a spectrum of acceptable behaviors, wherein no behavior is actually immoral unless it contradicts the UberMoral of Equality. The spectrum of acceptable behaviors goes back at least to the Kinsey report on sexuality, which promoted the idea that any and every sexual behavior is not just normal, but exists along a spectrum of sexual preferences, all of which are valid and normal. Within this concept, discrimination of certain behaviors as good vs. other behaviors as bad is a violation of the ideology: it is immoral in the Leftist world. This produces a basic conflict with traditional Rights which encourages discrimination against undesirable behaviors, a conflict which seems irresolvable.

The Logical Non-Coherence of Non-Discrimination

And yet, the behavior of discriminating against immorality is exactly that which the Left is engaged in, all the while claiming that discrimination against immorality is intolerant and thus immoral. They discriminate against the immorality of discrimination. This logical non-coherence of the Leftist moral position is either not perceived by its Leftist adherents, or else is studiously ignored. Thus the Leftist position is seen as dogmatic, self-endowed, and irrational by those on the Right. Intolerance of dissent while claiming tolerance as a necessary moral precept is irrational.

The ideal for the Left, then, is that human Rights are self-endowed by humanist elites who have (or wish to have) seized power over both the prior governing principles and the human masses, and who apportion permissions called Rights to the masses as their empathy dictates, along a spectrum of acceptable behaviors. Power is to be maintained by and for the elites in order to maintain Equality in the masses, regardless of their desires otherwise. It can’t be otherwise, or Equality will not occur. This ideal is not in place now, and the power currently wielded is not absolute (more on this below).

Leftist morality then, at least to the extent that they assert morality, is based on Equality of every human (under the elites) (regardless of behaviors). Equality is the moral standard. Inequality is immoral. (Except for the elites, who are morally and intellectually superior, hence, more deserving). (Note 1). Inequality amongst the masses is cause for great moral outrage amongst the Left. The solution is always force, inasmuch as is actually available. Judicial forcing has worked for the Left. Emotional and psychological forcing via the media has also been productive.

The New Morality and the New Rights are in direct opposition to traditional morality and rights, which are now despised and derided by the Left. The moral inversion is a direct result of the Kinsey type of claim that behaviors exist along a continuum of acceptable behaviors, none of which should be discriminated against, certainly not by traditional morality which is immoral due to its non-congruence with the New Morality. The inversion has some readily identifiable characteristics:

Inversion of Moral Values By the Left

(a) Truth is not objective and does not actually exist. Truth becomes the servant of the ideology, and whatever premise supports the ideology is considered to be true. Thus any premise which does not support the ideology is false. This logical error of rationalization is one of the basic underlayments for the Leftist ideology. It is irrational. And ironically it is achieved by discriminating against actual facts which do not conform to the desired conclusion.

(b) Equality is the ultimate Moral Truth; however, it does not mean the traditional “equality of opportunity” coupled with responsibility for the consequences of actions and of potential failure. The New Morality is Equality of Outcome (everyone gets a blue ribbon and homosexuality is morally equal to any and all other behaviors). And it is coupled with the Equality of behaviors to the degree that no behavior must suffer the consequences which that behavior entails. This is based in the concept of Fairness which is determined emotionally, based on the emotion of empathy rather than on considerations such as prior ownership, individual contribution, market valuation of one pursuit vs another pursuit, or any other consideration outside of Equality of outcome. No outcome which is not equal to other outcomes can be considered Fair. Hence any Right held by straights must also be held by homosexuals: that is Fair and Equal and therefore Moral. Thus same-sex marriage automatically becomes a Right.

(c) Family is not valued, and traditional family values are denigrated (Note 2). Homosexuality is valued more highly than traditional family values which are said to be in place in order to persecute homosexuals. Further, casual sex is promoted in all possible venues from media and movies to schools where sexual adventurism is encouraged and condoms are supplied, and access to abortion without parental knowledge is pursued – all in the service of impersonal, consequence-free sexual encounters outside of marriage. Abstinence and personal responsibility such as chastity are not valued, and is ridiculed. Self-control is too hard for modern generations.

(d) All fixed values are rejected in favor of spot values which are Relativist and Consequentialist. All behaviors are valid, so there are no actual good/bad values to be had, except for dissent from the basic concept of the continuum and Relativism; dissent is counter to the accepted morality and is therefore evil, despite there being no objective or absolute evil.

(e) Moral source: the self; moral theories including Equality are thought up for personal use. It is moral because I say so. Still, not accepting the tenet of Moral Equality is difficult to do, when there is such forcing pressure to accept it.

Moral authority: the self; one can and must decide for himself what is right; there is no absolute or objective moral guidance, and anyone who claims otherwise is evil, and is attempting to use that for domination. Except that Equality, the Father Moral, is always valid.

(f) Accountability: Since all behaviors are equally valid along the spectral continuum of behaviors, there is no need for accountability.

(g) Moral consistency: Consistency of Equality is demanded of others; consistency of personal behavior is eschewed as a discriminatory requirement. Trust is to be demanded, not produced by consistent behaviors.

(h) Character (and decency): Character is not an existing human trait; this proceeds from behaviors being valid regardless of any consideration of character. And character, along with the demand for “decency” as a product of “good” character, are too difficult for some people and are therefore discriminatory. Assertion of character as a valid or desirable trait is evil.

(i) Humility is rejected, including humility in intellectual pursuit as well as dogmatic elitism. What is favored is the Will To Power, using whatever power is available, and disguised as empathy, a la Alinsky. However, humility of the masses would be convenient in the pursuit of Equality.

(j) Justice is definable as Equality in outcomes; this is claimed to be motivated by empathy for fairness, and fairness demands equality. This justice, however, is asserted from a position of Will To Power, an elitist, top-down allocation of fairness and equality from a position of obvious inequality (known as “more equal”).

(k) Fairness cannot exist if the parties are only partly equal. Hence, total equality rather than partial equality is the natural process to produce fairness. Since people cannot accomplish this on their own (after all they do not have equal starting positions or equal capabilities) they must be forced into equal outcomes in the pursuit of Fairness. This forcing is necessary due to the Left’s massive Love of Humanity.

Force

The forcing functions of the past half-century have been via the seizure of psychiatric and education associations, the media and Hollywood, and the government, especially the judiciary, followed by the Senate, the Justice Dept and the Education Dept.

Here is where permissions are forced undemocratically onto the social fabric by a tiny minority of activists. For example, male-female marriage is defended successfully in every instance where it is brought to a citizen’s vote, whereas it is defeated in venues where judges unconstitutionally legislate it as a new “Right”. Another example is the installation of abortion as a “Right”, by activist judiciaries following the spectrum theory. This contrasts to civil rights for blacks, which was legislated by a largely Republican majority, with much dissent from the party of slavery, Jim Crow, Separate But Equal and the welfare plantation which was originated as the War On Poverty.

Even more influential in the culture is the accusation of hate and intolerance whenever the Left is insulted by the existence of dissent to their moral creation. The creation of Leftist moral correctness, tolerated speech and proper thought alignment has intimidated and indoctrinated several generations into the ideology of Moral Equality, the Spectral Continuum of Totally Acceptable Behaviors and Unreckoning Tolerance, and the evilness of dissent along with the subhumanness of dissenters. One such tactic is the constant cry of “racism” whenever a black politician is confronted with uncomfortable questions from a white, or even a black who is not “black enough”. The comparable cry of “homophobic bigot” accompanies challenges to the homosexual community. The psychological forcing function has been quite successful amongst the semi-educated generations. Righteous intimidation is a staple of the Left.

Conflict

The political Right has no concept that all behaviors are acceptable and exist along a spectral continuum of totally acceptable behaviors. The continuum concept is in direct conflict with the concept of specific good and decent behaviors, vs. bad and indecent behaviors as determined by an absolute moral code.

Even the Left violates their own premise when it comes to behaviors such as pedophilia, even though Kinsey supported that behavior as part of the normal sexual behavior spectrum. This internal conflict is countered with denialism.

Further, the claim of the existence of a spectral continuum of totally acceptable behaviors leads to the destruction of all social restraints (what’s to restrain if all behaviors are OK?), and enables social chaos. This is empirically observable in the younger generations which have been brought up under the influence of the spectrum. And the spectral continuum is couched in terms of complete Tolerance of all behaviors as acceptable, and yet includes the demonization of “intolerance” of certain behaviors as unacceptable. The resulting confusion in the under-educated is highly visible to (probably) anyone who has actually taught high school in the past decade.

This confusion is beginning to be implemented into thought-crime laws, in the form of “hate” legislation, where crimes which are perceived to be based on “intolerance” are more severely punished. This adds discrimination to the list of Leftist institutions, and illuminates yet another non-coherence, that of anti-discrimination screamed at the Right while institutionalizing it from the Left.

The view from the Right is that the Left has seized control of the institutions which influence generations of humans, and has proceeded to eliminate the education of disciplined thought and historical knowledge, which are replaced with irrational Leftist ideology and barely literate job training. The culture is driven by faulty news coverage which is poisoned with embedded Leftist-elitist dogma; televised social corruption in prime time; and legal attacks on the Right from a self-empowered government with corrupt views of justice and a view merely to its own power and that of its financial cronies.

Homosexuality

Homosexuality is merely a single battle in the conflict between the Traditional Right and the intended hegemony of the amoral Left which is bent on implementing social amorality and top-down control (despite the lessons of those same experiments in the bloody 20th Century). Homosexuality was declared “normative” behavior not by scientific conclusion but by the attacks on the APA by homosexuals who succeeded in getting sanctioned permission for their behaviors by the removal of the homosexual disorder from the DSM. This was accomplished by just one individual, who ignored actual science and unilaterally removed homosexual disorder from the DSM due to his personal sympathy for homosexuals.( Note 3) They further secured their position by successfully implementing the banishment of any treatment for homosexuality reversal, and in some places any attempt at treating homosexuality is a crime punishable with imprisonment (Britain for example). The idea that homosexuality might be reversible is now virtually a thought crime, despite the numerous cases of actual reversals. Further still, homosexuals now must be portrayed in student’s textbooks as always positive role models with never a negative reference, at least in California.

Special Pleading For Limits To The Spectrum

Again, the case for normalizing homosexual behavior was made on the basis of the theory of the spectrum of totally acceptable behaviors and the Kinsey report, plus the power of the APA takeover. But the homosexuals now claim homosexuality not to be comparable to other behaviors such as pedophilia. In fact, they become agitated at the suggestion that if homosexuality is normalized using the theory of the Spectral Continuum of Totally Acceptable Behaviors, then other behaviors can and will use the same tactic, including pedophilia. But after all, Kinsey and now subsequent psychologists claim that pedophilia is normative behavior, even beneficial to the child/infant. So it is Special Pleading for homosexuals to claim the spectral continuum theory for themselves and then deny it to others. That places the denial of the moral equivalence of homosexuality with pedophilia into a position of irrationality. And that, of course, violates and negates their own raison d’etre If homosexuality is normative because all behaviors are normative along the continuum, then there can be no discrimination, even by homosexuals, even of pedophilia, under the system which they chose for their own justification. But they apparently don’t realize this non-coherence. If they did, or if they were forced to admit it, it would be extremely inconvenient to their cause.

False Analogy Failures

Homosexual defenders frequently compare LGBT’s to the blacks in the hopes of co-opting the black civil rights movement for themselves. Many if not most blacks find this comparison both onerous and invalid. (Note 4) Many blacks inhabit the political Left simultaneously with the religious Right, and where the political Left conflicts with the religious Right, the Left loses.

Straw Man Failures

And finally, homosexual defenders apparently cannot conceive of any rational reason to oppose their self-conceived moral position. So they suppose that any/all opposition is due to stupidity and/or hatred, and they promote that vision as their rallying cry. They thus create caricatures which they apply to a huge population which they then vilify, and they create the very environment of hate which they accuse the Other as having created. They then start to believe their own cartoons, and thus, being totally enmeshed in their own warped views and hate mongering they are intellectually unavailable for discussion of the actual root problem which their non-coherent position presents. The entire homosexual movement has thus descended into petulance and childish tantrums, couched in conceit and contemptuousness.

Conclusion: What This Is Really About

At bottom, the defense of man-woman marriage is not even about homosexuality, although that is where the battle line is drawn. It is really about the adoption of amoral spectral continuums of presupposed acceptable behaviors and false moralities such as mindless Equality which are dictated as social standards. It is about social engineering outside the auspices of democratic control. Further it is about resisting the Will To Power which is being exhibited by the Faux Moral Left, as they attempt to install top-down permissions for radical factions which then in return support the Leftist drive to hegemonic power. This includes not just homosexual permissions to defile matrimony; it also includes the continuing persecution of poor minorities by the implementation of Leftist plantation enslavement programs, even by Leftist blacks who profit by it. It also includes, contrary to Leftist propaganda, the elimination of crony government and the domination of the economy by banks and the Fed, as well as the world financial institutions. And like it or not, it includes male-female marriage as beneficial to children. It includes fighting the domination of culture by Leftist control of media, education and government, with irrational and false morals. It includes the defense of rational thought, disciplined logic and due diligence in the pursuit of actual facts concerning every situation.

I Predict…
…that despite the lack of caricaturization of the Left or homosexuals in this article, and the lack of any hate speech directed their way, and despite the attempt to merely describe the rational differentials between the positions and the perception of the destruction which will come from the concept of spectrums of acceptable behaviors, that this will result in charges of bigotry, hatred, subhuman stupidity and worse. Merely critiquing the moral precepts of the amoral Left is a moral attack on them: they do not tolerate any deviation from their position well (without retaliation). And the “not tolerate” translates to complete Intolerance. The objective of Holy Equality in all things seems to be an inviolable tenet of Leftism, and any violation is met with extremism in their response. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, “extremism in the pursuit of Holy Equality is not extremism, it is Holy behavior”. The self-endowed self-righteous are also self-justified for any behaviors; after all there are no non-valid behaviors under the continuum theory.

I predict that the Left will produce defenders who, rather than refute the above, will claim that they don’t know anyone who matches this description; that the claims above are bigoted and ignorant of actual Leftist positions – which they will fail to establish; and that this is bigoted hate speech of which they are quite self-righteously intolerant. And mostly they will create insults rather than create a dialog in their defense. I’ve been through this before.

Part 2 will appear in a few days.

Notes:

Note 1. The self-perception of moral eliteness is endemic to the Left, who condemn those who violate the Left’s morality of Equality as subhumans: mouth-breathers; knuckle-draggers; morons; death wishes are common. But when asked to elaborate on their moral system and its moral authority, few – very few - actually respond. The existence of an actual moral system violates the concept which protects the homosexual: there cannot be such a system on the Left because such systems are discriminatory, yet they have this self-endowed and self-righteous moral superiority anyway. This logical non-congruence also commonly eludes the Left.

Note 2. One homosexual Leftist characterized traditional family values thus: Family values are where a man goes home and beats his wife. Feminists have called marriage “legalized rape” and marriage has been described as the slavery of women, destroying their self-worth. Lesbianism has been offered as an antidote; Catharine MacKinnon, professor of law at U of Michigan claims that prostitution, marriage, and sexual harassment are “indistinguishable”. “We have to abolish and reform the institution of marriage”… Gloria Steinem. “Until all women are lesbians, there will be no true political revolution”…journalist Jill Johnson.

Note 3.The individual who unilaterally removed homosexuality from the APA DSMII is Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, a junior member who somehow got into control of the DSM after a turbulence which removed senior members. Barely 40 years old and with no discernible experience with homosexuality, Spitzer unilaterally removed homosexuality from the DSM, not for scientific reasons, but out of sympathy for homosexuals who wanted to be considered normal. In fact, a current report from the NY workgroup on homosexuality which reported that homosexuality was, indeed, a disorder was rejected. So actual science (now deemed heretical) was and is trumped by homosexual activism.

http://pfox.org/Removal_of_homosexuality.html

Note 4. Prop 8 was defeated in California by the contribution of the votes of both the black and Hispanic communities.

Honesty

Honesty is a Precious Thing.

Not only do I value honesty, I presuppose it in people. While I know that is an error, I still commit it. Honesty is a subset of truth, and truth is a subset of the absolutes. For Atheism there are no absolutes, so by the time we get back down the chain from absolutes to honesty, there is none in the MaterialWorld of Atheism.

Now honesty might necessarily be feigned as a pragmatic effort to convince others of trustworthiness. So it not only is not a characteristic that is valued under Atheism, it is a tool to be exploited, used as far as it will go to the Atheist’s advantage.

Atheism is largely pragmatic. The main Atheist claim regarding morality is just that: behaving in a certain way is pragmatic and that is morality for the Atheist. The term for this is Consequentialism, where any goal which one desires should be pursued with whatever tactics are required to achieve it. Atheists might protest that this is a distortion, yet that in itself is a tactic being used.

The issue of honesty vs. Consequentialist pragmatism is why Atheists are not seen as trustworthy. There is no such thing as honesty which is attached to the concept of Atheism. That includes intellectual honesty.

Intellectual honesty requires humbling oneself before logic first, and material factoids last. But there is a strain of Atheism that refuses humility as an abrogation of “free thought”, which is just thoughts without anchors in anything meaningful. Free Thought, Atheism, and Philosophical Materialism are the keys to total freedom, unencumbered by the need for humility in the face of anything which is undeniable, such as incorrigible truth.

Thus logic becomes not a disciplined refection of a path to rationality, it becomes a malleable weapon which is to be tuned to the needs of the wielder. The Atheist assertion of “logic” is thus tautological, not actual: they define whatever they say to be “logical”. There is no urge to study logic as a discipline, nor to follow actual logical procedures. Whenever a fallacy in their “logic” is pointed to, they pull out as many Red Herrings as necessary to divert the conversation. I say this as a general principle because inductively, that is the case; there might be exceptions, and I hope to come across them in order to find out how they justify the logical chasms in their worldviews. But so far, not much luck.

There is no feasible Atheist defense against this observation. “Good without God” is transparently a relativist matching of a temporary “ethics” statement to whatever behavior the Atheist is currently fond of. Any possible Atheist protest of “personal integrity” is transparently just another tactic in the pragmatist’s toolbox. In fact, no matter what an Atheist says, it can be seen as a “tactic”, toward some objective, some agenda, which only s/he sees and knows. There is no possible way to encounter Atheists without suspicion, unless one is naïve to this characteristic.

So I should not be caught off guard while in discussions with Atheists. There is no reason to suppose that their arguments are sincere, that their facts match any actuality, or that their approach to their fallacies will help them learn anything. Atheists in general do not intend to learn anything, especially logic, which they have already redefined to be whatever they say. On the contrary, Atheists seem to have another objective, which is to preserve their total freedom so as not to have to be humble in the face of truths which they are powerless to change. In other words, "free" thoughts without grounding in anything but agenda.

So, there are no truths in AtheistWorld, and there is no truthfulness. So there cannot be any honesty, or for that matter, dishonesty. And that characteristic makes every Atheist suspect.

I, personally, value honesty. But it cannot be presupposed in people.

I need to take more care.


ADDENDUM:
This issue extends to the concept of “absurdity” also. Logical absurdity is a specific thing; it refers to a proposition which is logically non-coherent, or cannot be shown to be coherent, and this is found using Reductio Ad Absurdum, which takes the converse and hopes to show that it is contradictory (absurd). If the converse of a proposition is absurd, then the proposition itself is not. Clearly, logically inconsistent premises or logically unsubstantiable claims fit this category of determination of logical validity, including those propositions or premises which fail Boolean categorization.

The convenient but ungrounded and transient nature of the logic of Atheism is subject to producing statements which are logically absurd, but which seem perfectly logical under the transient processes of non-absolutist Atheism. In fact, linear logical discipline fails the transient processes of non-absolutist Atheism, and appears – I am instructed – absurd to the Atheist.

This is a serious fork in the ability to communicate, a dichotomy between those who choose logical dictates to rule their processes, vs. those who eschew any absolutist control over their free thought. For this reason, I have in the past taken the conversation to a point where an obvious fallacy is in play, and then stopped the conversation from progressing beyond that fallacy, and insisting on its recognition. This has produced considerable tension and sometimes behavior which resulted in banishment. But it is the right thing to do. No conversation should proceed when it is based on a fallacy or is logically absurd. Kindly remind me of that next time.

Two Questions: Iintellectual Process and Ethics

I have been asked two questions recently, questions that have brought me to reconsider my approach to the issues addressed on this blog. Previously I have maintained the position that every individual should honestly and thoroughly examine all and every premise that constitutes his worldview. I said that because that ( based on the Descartes method of total rejection and reconstruction) is what enabled me to discover and reject the false principles in my own worldview. Now I wonder if it is possible for every individual to actually reject everything he thinks he knows and to rebuild from scratch. And if that is not possible, should I lay out in numbered form the exact path of worldview reconstruction that I went through?

Of even more concern is the issue of Ethics and how one makes ethical decisions: I have no moral authority to make such determinations and proclamations. Therefore any criticism of my views on the issue are subject to criticism which could only be valid. Yet because ethical proclamations are really merely human opinions, how could mine be any worse than any other? Especially if mine is offered as merely an opinion?

Still, despite a culture which no longer believes in or values truth, at least truth of the objective, incorrigible kind, there are certain things that are true, really true, even in the incorrigible sense.

One of the problems in relating my particular reconstruction process is that it was long ago, now, taking a long time which was consumed with study. For over a year, circa 2003, I was totally consumed with acquiring the “rest of my education”. I obsessively read four or five books a week, at first without any direction other than the issues which were being raised in my mind, and finally in a more linear path as I developed bottom up structure to my new worldview. I manufactured huge mounds of notes which devoured my desk, and those notes ultimately resolved into a coherent order as my worldview developed.

But the details in the finest granularity are lost to me now. What is important though, remains: Ask, “is there Truth?”, and “how can I know?”. And if there really is Truth, then what things are True?

And then, is logic really valid? How can I know? And the process and principles of logic: what are they? What makes logic True, if it even is true? Can logic even be used to think about Truth? How does logic relate to rational thought? Can rational thought exist without a basis in Truth?

For me it became important to know what the various philosophers contributed to the knowledge of truth. That took some time to sort out.

The process is ill-defined because it is personal. And for that reason I have recommended that each individual accept the responsibility to process his own concepts without bias from me and my process. And what would be gained from outlining my own experience? Would it shorten the process for others? Or would it negate the validity of their conclusions, which are not then their own but are borrowed?

But in actuality the quandary is moot, because the information exists on the website which accompanies this blog. That site contains the results of my queries, if not the messy process which had to be tamed in order to reach those results. I still recommend that every individual go through a process of total rejection of current principles held followed by a considered reconstruction of a true and valid worldview.

And by the way, this is a more honest form of skepticism than the current "Skeptic" fad of sitting outside the intellectual process and taking pot shots at it. The process of denial and reconstruction is a more complete intellectual process than denial followed by pure cynicism.

…

The second question involves how I, personally, make ethical decisions. Do I have a group of objective ethical principles, rules which I use to screen responses? To that question I can provide a somewhat better answer, even without the moral authority to make moral proclamations. That is because I don’t see this as an issue requiring moral authority; it is actually a pragmatic issue.

If one has a valid worldview, and accepts that there is Truth and has based the principles of his life upon that, then there is a direct approach to moral decisions. If a decision is to be made, and any of the options fall outside of the boundaries of my worldview, then those options are off the table. Acceptable options must cohere with my worldview, which must cohere with Truth.

This might be less than clear at first. That would be because I need to explain that my worldview contains subsets of Truth: honesty, integrity, reliability / dependability, truthfulness, personal responsibility, self reliance rather than parasitism, perseverance, and many other personal traits that derive from Truth.

If I am confused about a moral decision I can always go back to the concept of Truth and its subsidiaries, Integrity for example, and ask whether an option is coherent with my worldview.

This is not the same as running an option through a list of rules, and looking for a rule-based answer. Rather it is based on maintaining the integrity of a coherent worldview based on Truth.

This is the opposite of ethical opinions such as pragmatism, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and other rule-based decision processes – all of which have no basis in Truth, but are based on opinions of correct outcomes. Correct outcomes can come with the most onerous of means which are required to accomplish the “ethical” ends.

To the contrary, a Truth based approach questions both the means and the end and asks for the compatibility of those with the Truth based worldview. Integrity and honesty are both considered values in a Truth based worldview, while outcomes are the primary (only?) real consideration in the opinion-based worldviews.

There is another very real distinguishing difference between the opinion-based ethics and the Truth-based. That is this: a Truth-based ethic is for oneself, for keeping one honestly within the boundaries of his own worldview. Opinion-based ethics are for other people. The philosopher’s ethical opinion is that other people should behave in such and such a manner, in order to fulfill the demands of the philosopher’s opinion. It should not require much rumination to determine that opinion-based ethics tend strongly toward totalitarianism, with the philosopher’s elite opinion being enforced amongst the masses.

This is in diametric opposition to an ethic which one uses to control one’s own actions and opinions under the aegis of true and valid principles.

Here are some posts from the past that might be of interest on the subject of ethics:

http://atheism-analyzed.blogspot.com/2010/08/universal-objective-morality.html

http://atheism-analyzed.blogspot.com/2010/03/pz-watch-030310.html

http://atheism-analyzed.blogspot.com/2009/09/source-of-moral-authority.html

http://atheism-analyzed.blogspot.com/2008/11/ethics-and-saul-d-alinsky.html

http://atheism-analyzed.blogspot.com/2009/09/intellectual-link-between-atheism-and.html

http://atheism-analyzed.blogspot.com/2009/09/source-of-humility.html

Atheist Revolution and the "Atheist Manifesto"

This review of “The Atheist Manifesto” by Joseph Lewis is presented by blogger Atheist Revolution [otherwise nameless] who thinks that the quotes he has chosen are inspiring:

Atheist Revolution:

”Remember, this was written in 1954 long before anybody was talking about "new atheism." And yet, Lewis was not afraid to call the abolition of religion. I cannot remember the last time I actually caught myself exclaiming "hell yeah" while reading a book, but Lewis' manifesto did indeed have that effect.

”I'll end with my favorite sentence in the book, one with which I wholeheartedly agree” (see the last quote from Lewis, below).

Joseph Lewis:

”Do you know that the religionists opposed the use of anesthesia on the ground that God sent pain as a punishment for sin, and it was considered the greatest of sacrileges to use it—just think of it, a sin to relieve man of his misery! What a monstrous perversion!”

A charge made against “religionists” as if it were a belief of all religions. A charge without specificity, made as a blanket condemnation.

Lewis:

”It is because of the Biblical curse on man's search for knowledge, which has so paralyzed his mind during the past ages, and its detrimental effect upon progress, that makes the Bible the most wicked, the most detestable, the most pernicious, and the most obnoxious book ever published. It has been a curse to the human race.”

The Bible enjoins Christians to seek only the Truth, and to question all premises that are made, in order not to be fooled by human lies and “philosophy” over the facts of what happened. (If philosophy were “fact”, it would be science, not philosophy).

Lewis:

”As long as man loves a phantom in the sky more than he loves his fellow man, there will never be peace upon this earth; so long as man worships a Tyrant as the "Fatherhood of God," there will never be a "Brotherhood of Man."”

Exactly so, except that the qualifier is not necessary. It should read, “There will never be a ‘Brotherhood of Man’”. Brotherhood of Man is capitalized properly because it is a godless religion, based on irrational and unprovable tenets as well as distortions which are demonstrated in the hate rant presented here. The abolition of all religion in order to establish this universal godless religion is the objective. As Atheist Revolution says, “hell yeah”. Tolerance? None visible here.

Coyne: the Good Atheist

It seems that the institutional philosophers either are stuck in institutional thinking with its attendant fallacies or they maybe have time to write books but not think things through. For whatever reason some of them just can’t rid themselves of fallacies which they use over and over for proofs. A favorite is the False Dichotomy Fallacy. A true dichotomy has one option available; either choose it or don’t – two choices are all that are available.

The False Dichotomy offers two options which are diametrically opposed and which seem to be all the choices that are available, both of which are uncomfortable. But with two options, say P and Q, there are actually four ways to choose: P and Q; P and not Q; Q and not P; not P and not Q.

The deception which philosophers and other manipulators use is to present only two of the four possible choices. For P and Q, then, only the choices P and not Q, and Q and not P are presented as the available choices.

This then is the deception in Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma, which Jerry Coyne takes as the "logical" basis for dismissing a deity, disregarding the False Dichotomy Fallacy that his logic is based upon. Coyne is trying to make the case that Atheists are Good while God is Bad, which is the new argument being made by Atheists who are attacking the modern civilization in which they live.

Moving to Evil God, Coyne maintains that the Old Testament God did all sorts of things that he, Coyne, and the Atheists think are bad. Now God did order some things done that only a deity could justify, no argument there. But if a deity is justified in doing what ever a deity does, then Coyne has no case other than his own pique. Says Coyne:

” Now, few of us see genocide or stoning as moral, so Christians and Jews pass over those parts of the Bible with judicious silence. But that's just the point. There is something else — some other source of morality — that supersedes biblical commands. When religious people pick and choose their morality from Scripture, they clearly do so based on extrareligious notions of what's moral.”

What the Bible displays is a continuous cycling of obedience, betrayal, and correction. The correction is purposely visited upon a disobedient society by the use of an invading force which brings humility where hubris and contempt had reigned. And this after explicit warnings of what was to come. If one assumes these to be literally true, which Atheists always do, it is clearly the deity’s prerogative to handle his creation as he wishes. But this action, being that of the diety, is neither moral nor immoral in terms of human behavior. By taking on the Bible, Coyne should be obligated to at least understand its meanings and to use a meaningful model to criticize rather than his own fake model. Morality in human terms, according to the Bible, means obedience to the directives given by the deity. Now Coyne might not like the directives, and he might be tempted to compare the specific directives for action to the general directives for daily behavior and then declare his False Dichotomy. But as a declared intellectual he should act in dispassionate fairness when he passes judgment, rather than present False Dichotomies and Straw Man arguments. He does not, however, do that.

This is total blindness to the concept of a deity which is actually more powerful than Coyne is himself. Morality doesn’t come from the daily maunderings of institutional intellectuals; if it even exists it comes from an extrahuman source. The morals of intellectuals have never been consistent, and much less when put into practice have they been humane. Coyne’s argument against God and for Atheist Goodness cannot withstand the most cursory historical glance at the 20th century. Ah, say Atheists, that was coincidentally Atheists slaughtering hundreds of millions of their own countrymen, purely coincidence. In other words, excusing their own belief system for its slaughters.

But as fatally feeble as those arguments are, Coyne’s weakest argument is yet to come:

” Further, the idea that morality is divinely inspired doesn't jibe with the fact that religiously based ethics have changed profoundly over time. Slavery was once defended by churches on scriptural grounds; now it's seen as grossly immoral. Mormons barred blacks from the priesthood, also on religious grounds, until church leaders had a convenient "revelation" to the contrary in 1978. Catholics once had a list of books considered immoral to read; they did away with that in 1966. Did these adjustments occur because God changed His mind? No, they came from secular improvements in morality that forced religion to clean up its act.”

Religious people continue to improve or at least change their understanding of the deity and its wishes for them. Coyne conveniently ignores that it was the religious efforts of uberChristian William Wilberforce in Great Britain, and the Republicans in the USA that put slavery away – not the force of “secular improvements”. Taking credit for what one did not accomplish is intellectually dishonest, and none of the events he listed was forced by any secular superhero.

Coyne predictably defaults to the Atheist’s religious source, evolution:

” So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness. This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is built partly on the genes of our ancestors.”

First the absurdity of asserting that “secular reasoning” and Chimpanzee behavior are in the same category as morality is absolutely glaring. But let’s take evolution first: making up evolutionary Just So Stories just doesn’t cut it any more, but Coyne hasn’t gotten the memo. I’m sure he will some day.

But “secular reasoning” as a source of anything meaningful at all is the most absurd premise that can be made. Secular reasoning eschews any absolutes, so it has to base its premise support either on infinite regressions of subpremises, or on circular regression back to itself. Either way it cannot provide any firm grounding for… well, for any valid thought whatsoever, much less a guide for moral human behavior. This is the world in which the secular philosopher moralists live, a world which they make up and then want us to believe is real. For them maybe it is real, but I doubt it, because they do not actually live in the world they pretend is real.

And that is a true dichotomy: to make up rules and reality and then either (a) to live in it, or (b) not to live in it. If one asserts rules and reality, but chooses (b), then he might be hypocritical or maybe insane.

An example is the idea that “compassion” must become a human trait if one is to be a secular moralist. But then the real idea comes to the fore: it is not compassion but confiscation of other people’s wealth to be spread around. The compassion comes not from personal sacrifice but from sacrificing the Other on the altar of secularism. Sacrificing the Other is a large part of secular thought, so it must be moral according to the seculars.

Anyone who values “secular thought” as a way toward morality is suspect. In fact, as Massimo Pigliucci recently demonstrated quite adequately, secular thought is compartmentalized into sects, each of which condemns the other secular thought sects as dealing in “mental masturbation”. They are partly right; it’s just that ALL secular thought is mental masturbation. And Coyne is right in the middle of all that. Why is Coyne “Good”? Because he says so. What is "Good"? It's whatever he says it is... today. That’s the process of secular thought.

In fact Coyne wrote a book with a title that automatically places the entire book into the mental masturbation category: Coyne wrote: “Why Evolution Is True”. Assuming that evolution is a science complete with verifiability and falsifiability and is proven to be valid, it still is not capable of providing Truth. Science provides only contingent inductive factoids, from which deductive tests can be made, which show merely that no falsification has yet occurred. No matter how many tests are done, science never ever provides Truth. Scientists might presume a factoid to be valid for purposes of subsequent tests, but they do not declare Truth if they understand the basis for science. As both a philosopher and a scientist, Coyne flunks even the basics.

But for some reason, Atheists still respect him. Maybe it’s because he says what they want to hear.

[author's note: semantic correction, 08.07.11]

Loaded Language: Who Owns Words?

The Moral Outrage over anything Palin says continues with her use of a pair of words: blood libel. Apparently these words, when used together, are considered to be the property of an aggrieved group of people, a group not associated in any way with the context of Palin’s statement. A large and loud contingent of saviors for the aggrieved group is condemning Palin, largely and loudly, and analyzing her intent and even her education for anti-Semitism. (A rare opportunity for the consistently anti-Semitic Left to pose righteously in this regard).

While I myself was aware that certain words are considered possessions of certain groups of people, "holocaust" for example, and are not to be violated by their use in contexts unacceptable to the moral guardians of such things, I had not heard the term “blood libel” was in such a category. And I doubt that most people who lead their own lives outside the bastions of perpetual indignation which guard and protect such proprietary phrases had heard the phrase and knew of its protected and sacred status.

Nonetheless, Palin’s infraction by using the protected words has presented the Left with a field day of accusational opportunity.

How do words become sacred, especially in a culture that recoils at the concept of sacredness? Lenny Bruce fought for the right to use any word, the idea being that words do no harm; people do harm. The Left fought hard for that concept, back when the fight was against morality. Now the Left invokes censorship and censure and perpetual moral indignation.

Who owns words? Who owns moral indignation at the use of words? The moral indignation of the Left 4 decades ago had no more absolute, objective basis than does the moral indignation of the Left today, and the reversed position shows it. Their moral indignation is as spurious as the events that trigger it; indignant that Israel defends itself from a hate-deranged neighbor one day; indignant that a hated political opponent uses terms that are sacrosanct and “anti-Semitic” the next day. The flopping indignation registers as focused not on real transgressions, but on enemies of the Leftist Cause.

Moral indignation looks a little silly when it is being screamed by those who eschew moral absolutes and insist on moral situationalism. If the enemies of the Left were to claim ownership of sacred words and phrases, one can only imagine the level of indignation that the Left could achieve from that. (Think, “Constitution”).

I think also of the moral indignation of the Left at the moral indignation of the Right. Which one has proprietership of morality?

Transitions

The difference between an ideology defender and a truth seeker is immense: they are polar opposites. The chasm between them is something that I will now attempt to define. To start, I will elaborate some on my own experience, which was one of going from closed to open, from a perception of dominance to a voluntary position of subservience.

As an Atheist, I had confidence in my own superiority because I had consciously chosen the path of the elites. It works like this: To become an intellectual elite, all one has to do is to utter three little words: “ain’t no God”. By having had the intellect to make this choice, one is elevated to eliteness. But even better, one gets to choose an ethic, a morality, and to choose one that is convenient, one that fits what you do, who you are.

Having chosen a compatible morality, one becomes instantaneously righteous, perfectly moral, perfectly superior to, say, Christians, who cannot ever consistently meet the demands of their morality. The ease with which the self-anointed morality is achieved reflects directly on the character of the self-anointers: only a superior character could be so completely moral, so easily.

A perfectly righteous and intellectual elite then cannot be blamed for exuding self-righteousness; self-righteousness is almost certain for these individuals. This personal elevation has a meaning attached to it: this personal elevation was due to Atheism and to the self-selected morality – so they must be correct, because they work. This means that Atheism is morally correct, and that the morality is intellectually correct. What is not to love about that?

The Atheist has created a personal moral and intellectual superiority that is precious, it is cherished. The self is now highly satisfactory; it must be defended. In order to defend the Atheist self, the Atheist is free to use any position he finds necessary, because the defense of correct things must be correct no matter what it is. So any logic that supports the correct things must be correct. Any logic that does not support correct things must not be correct. The correct things are determined first; the axioms are created in their support.

Thus the logic that Atheists use bears no resemblance to traditional logic or rationality. This is an important feature to remember.

The chasm between ideologists and seekers of truth is binary: it is the difference between closed and open.

My own transition from ideologist to seeker began when I started to listen to other Atheists. Very frequently their positions went against common sense and common decency. I discovered that their self-endowed reputation for logic and rationality was highly disputable. As a logic designer I had some experience with logic. But I didn’t know how to define rationality, how to determine its coverage or its limits, what the actual functional limits of science were or why that was the case. So I had to learn how to think from the ground up. What is rationality? What is logic? How do we know that they are valid? How do we know that anything is valid? Most importantly, how do I construct a valid worldview?

Leaving an ideology can be painful, especially if one’s self-value is heavily invested in an ideology which supports that self-value. Leaving a supportive ideology means losing all the psychological benefits which that ideology bestowed, and it is a fearful loss of one’s internal, core, perceived personal value and self-image. In the case of Atheism, it is a loss of self-perceived superiority in both intellectual and moral eliteness. And what is gained? Only subservience. And not subservience to truth, because for the Atheist there are no absolutes, and that tenet is an Absolute Truth, a moral concept. So losing an ideology can also mean losing a morality, and even if the morality was self-derived, it can be a serious loss, an impediment to any transition. It is not a trade made lightly or without some source of coercion.

In fact, Atheists sometimes rail against subservience and humility: these are declared to be an abomination, a denigration of the human independence and integrity. (These same arguers will, of course, argue that there is no free will and that humans just happened and have no special value). Accepting the humility necessary to acquiesce to truth, when it is found, is not easy to choke down when a person has been basking as an intellectual elite and personally 100% moral in his past existence.

So if we are to use logic to define ourselves, the question becomes, which logic are we to use? Atheist rationalization or traditional rational logic? A seeker of truth has to consider how each logic is supported by its fundamental axioms and how it compares to observed reality both in life and across the universe. Traditional logic doesn’t work for Atheism and Atheist logic doesn’t work for seekers of truth.

The entire purpose of traditional logic is to discriminate against absurdity and falseness. It builds on a fundamental structure of universal validity, and provides methods of detecting fallacy. Logic is exclusive: it excludes falseness in favor of demanding validity. This is diametrically different from the increasingly popular use of inclusive thought and Atheist logic.

Two of the most powerfully deceptive of the inclusive theories are those of evolution and infinite universes. For example, evolution provides for any and all eventualities without exclusion (including no change at all) to have evolved from a single cell, and specifically denies anything to do with the advent of that original single cell. And the infinite universe theory means that anything that is conceivable not only could, but will exist in some parallel universe somewhere… including an orbiting teapot, a Flying Spaghetti Monster, and pink unicorns. This is declared inevitable: the equations defining it are “robust”. This is the new look of science.

But what does it mean to have a “theory of everything” that is, in reality, a theory of anything no matter how absurd? If theories and equations discriminate against nothing whatsoever, then what do they actually prove? Isn’t science supposed to be logic based, and designed, even required, to filter out the absurd? No longer, it appears. Much of science has quietly aligned itself with Philosophical Materialism over the past century, thereby becoming aligned with ideology, an eventuality that was not supposed to happen. When observations now include characteristics of the observer, the objectivity which science prided itself on in its heyday has become subjective. When a legitimate science such as biology becomes subservient to a non-empirical offshoot like evolution, science becomes beholden not to experiment and verification so much as to extrapolated inferences, and predictions retrofit into experimental results. Validity must be taken on the word of experts, who are never reticent to give it (especially biologists). The scientists become authoritarian in their ideology-of-absurdity, as Hawking demonstrates (“Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist”, Hawking says, with the definitude of a religious prophet). Something from nothing is now science, not absurdity. Even Feynman’s “many histories” model of quantum electrodynamics, which Hawking fearlessly applied to the emergent universe, means that histories of our existence are not really known – or knowable – knocking out all prior knowledge, scientific and otherwise. Absurdity is now endemic; a functional ignorance is “scientifically” enforced as an ideology.

So the thinking of the semi-educated is no longer held to the exclusivity of traditional logic; it is watered down with theories-of-anything-no-matter-how-absurd, and their acceptance without observational verification, and merely on the word handed down by the authority of the elites. It is indistinguishable from ideology because it is ideology.

Traditional logic is fighting uphill in today’s culture as well. Tolerance is valued over discrimination, to the point that discriminatory thinking is culturally and legally derogated. So how can discriminatory logic survive in a blatantly anti-discriminatory culture?

I don’t have an answer to this, short of personally defending the discrimination against fallacy as vehemently as I possibly can. And that is the purpose of this blog, which invites rational discussion based on, and held within, traditional principles of logic, and which has those principles explicit in the right hand column.

I’m not certain how to evaluate the difference in moral weight between temperance and truth; I certainly have the capacity to sacrifice the first in intemperate defense of the second. But I will hope for and try to maintain both temperance, and the pursuit of truth through traditional logic. There has to be something that is valid and true in the universe (even Atheists agree functionally as I showed above). Whatever is really, actually valid and true is worth defending, as is the process to find it.

Richard Carrier: Advice to Everyone on Becoming a Philosopher.

Richard Carrier, PhD., is a philosopher, lecturer, blogger and contributor to several naturalist websites.

On a recent blog post, he gives instructions on being a philosopher, and rightly suggests that everyone should perform self-examination. And one can’t help but agree with Carrier’s conclusion:

”Everything that's important follows from this process: what's right and wrong, what's important and unimportant, beautiful and ugly, true and false, better and worse, worthwhile or a waste of time. You will thus be able to make yourself a better person, and enjoy a better life, a life of less error and ignorance and greater wisdom and contentment--all at least within the limits set upon you that you can't escape.”

Carrier gives what he calls his four pillars of philosophy, written as tasks:

”Task Number 1. Spend an hour every day asking yourself questions and researching the answers.

Task Number 2. Read one good philosophy book a month.

Task Number 3. Politely argue with lots of different kinds of people who disagree with you on any of the answers you come to above.

Task Number 4. Learn how to think.”

But he immediately goes awry by insisting on three fundamental questions of philosophy, or at least to be answered first by the philosophically inclined, followed by three analytical examination questions:

"Who am I?"
"What do I really want in life? "
"How do I safely obtain it?"

…and to every answer to any of these questions then ask …

"Why is that the case?" and
"How do I know that's true?" and
"Are there other, better ways to answer that question?"

And to any of those answers, ask those same three questions, and so on, all the way down the line.”

First I suggest that his tasks are not in a proper order. “Learn how to think” should be first, and the task should be well established before any other philosophical tasks are attempted. While this seems obvious, apparently it is not. So here is the rather obvious reason why: If you still don’t know the proper process for analytical thinking, then you shouldn’t be doing analytical projects. Certainly not projects of enough import to direct the formation of your worldview. Learn the proper process first and thoroughly, and only then proceed into analytical philosophical projects.

Next I suggest that the original questions posited by Carrier are not the fundamental questions of philosophy. The questions posed by him are not basic to anything but narcissism in the seeker. Those question should be answered only after a solid grounding in deeper questions, such as these in the two lists below. The first list is mine, and is based on Russell’s list, below, and on “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, by John Locke, and “the Laws of Thought”, by George Boole”, and ”An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” by David Hume.

1. What is universal, and underlies valid thinking? (ontology)
2. What is truth? (epistemology)
3. What is knowledge? (epistemology)
4. What is life? (idealism vs. metaphysics)
5. What is a mind? (idealism vs. metaphysics)
6. What are origins and purpose? (teleology)

Bertrand Russell discusses the remaining philosophical questions to be answered by modern philosophers in his book, ”The Problems of Philosophy”. These can roughly be listed as,

a) Perception, reality, matter and idealism;
b) Knowledge, induction, general principles, universals and intuitive knowledge;
c) Truth, Falsehood and error;
d) The limits of philosophical knowledge.

Russell outlines and critiques the three basic first principles [1]:

”For no very good reason, three of these principles have been singled out by tradition under the name of ‘Laws of Thought’. They are as follows:

(1) The law of identity: ‘whatever is, is’.
(2) The law of contradiction: ‘nothing can both be and not be.’
(3) The law of excluded middle: ‘Everything must either be or not be’.

These three laws are samples of self-evident logical principles, but are not really more fundamental or more self-evident than various other similar principles: for instance, the one we considered just now, which states that what follows from a true premiss is true. The name ‘laws of thought’ is also misleading, for what is important is not the fact that we think in accordance with these laws, but the fact that things behave in accordance with them; in other words the fact that when we think in accordance with them we think truly”

Russell also attacks issues of the metaphysics of the self and mind as uncaused causers and non-empirical “substances” in his ”Fifteen Lectures on the Mind”. Ultimately he declares that mind must be of some non-material substance, as elemental and fundamental as matter, but not the same as matter, because the mind, as an uncaused causer, does not behave according to the laws of matter and is not therefore material. Russell was not a materialist.

Carrier offers no guidance toward the objective of validity in thinking. This is, in my opinion, a severe flaw in any recommendation to beginning seekers of validity and truth. Moreover, he has an a priori bias toward idealism, which is a generally discredited thought process, even amongst modern public intellectuals.

[1] Russell, "The Problems of Philosophy"; Oxford Univ Press; 1912 / 1997; pg. 72.

Science and Underdetermination: The Uncertainty of Objective and Subjective Knowledge.

Massimo Pigliucci takes a swipe at Atheist Jerry Coyne concerning Coyne’s lack of understanding of the separation of Philosophical Materialism and functional materialism (science). Massimo is correct here, but he takes the idea in wrong direction, being under the influence of Philosophical Materialism himself. As expected, he declares religion to have no value, epistemologically, since it is not falsifiable, materially:

” In the cases we are discussing there is no science-like connection between theoretical constructs and empirically verifiable facts, so to “falsify” the latter is equivalent to shooting into a cloud of gas. It unnecessarily flatters and elevates religious belief to treat it as science.”

For Massimo, there is no knowledge that is not science, even though he disputes it in the text. He cannot relinquish it in his worldview. He continues,

”That is because they seem to equate science with reason, yet another position that is abysmally simplistic from a philosophical perspective. Science is conducted through the application of reason to a particular type of problems and in particular ways. But reason can be applied to other problems in other ways. Philosophy, of course, is an example, as it makes progress through the analysis and dissection of concepts, not via empirical discoveries. Logic and mathematics are additional obvious examples: mathematical theorems are neither discovered nor proved by using scientific methods at all. Unless one wishes to conclude that math is not a rational enterprise, then one is forced to admit that science = reason is a bad equation.”

Massimo goes on to claim that scientists are not educated in the history and philosophy of science, and they shouldn’t be commenting outside their areas of expertise (never mind that Massimo has been doing that all along as a prophet of evolution). Only philosophers should be telling the world what science consists of – not scientists, who don’t understand it:

” But when it comes to writing for the general public, I suggest that scientists stick to what they know best, unless they are willing to engage the literature of the field(s) that they wish to comment upon…”,

and,

” He has of course no obligation to study philosophy, but then he should refrain from writing about it as a matter of intellectual honesty toward his readers.”

In the course of his discussion, Massimo refers to the Duhem-Quine Thesis, which he thinks supports his idea that “the philosophers of science have moved well beyond Falsificationism”. The idea, refined by W.V.O. Quine, does not refute Falsificationism, it refines it in order to determine its value as a source of valid knowledge. But here Massimo takes off in the old Philosophical Materialist mode again, creating a strawman to shoot down:

” Conceptions of gods are infinitely more flexible (or vacuous, if you prefer) than either Marxist or Freudian theories, and they are thus simply not falsifiable. This is often (naively) mistaken to imply that no specific claim made by these theories can be rejected on empirical grounds. That’s as manifestly not true as it is besides the point: of course modern science can firmly reject the empirical claim that the earth is a few thousand years old; but since “the god hypothesis” doesn’t behave as a hypothesis at all from the epistemological standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”

Of course the “god hypothesis” is not that the earth is a few thousand years old (the strawman); the god hypothesis asserts that there exists a first cause for the universe. Here empiricism is emasculated. And it is hopelessly intellectually helpless to claim that,

“It unnecessarily flatters and elevates religious belief to treat it as science.”

Let’s examine the idea of underdetermination, and then examine first how it applies to objective knowledge, and then how it applies to subjective knowledge.


Holistic Underdetermination

“Duhem’s original case for holist underdetermination is, perhaps unsurprisingly, intimately bound up with his arguments for confirmational holism: the claim that theories or hypotheses can only be subjected to empirical testing in groups or collections, never in isolation. The idea here is that a single scientific hypothesis does not by itself carry any implications about what we should expect to observe in nature; rather, we can derive empirical consequences from an hypothesis only when it is conjoined with many other beliefs and hypotheses, including background assumptions about the world, beliefs about how measuring instruments operate, further hypotheses about the interactions between objects in the original hypothesis’ field of study and the surrounding environment, etc. For this reason, Duhem argues, when an empirical prediction turns out to be falsified, we do not know whether the fault lies with the hypothesis we originally sought to test or with one of the many other beliefs and hypotheses that were also needed and used to generate the failed prediction:”

“A physicist decides to demonstrate the inaccuracy of a proposition, in order to deduce from this proposition the prediction of a phenomenon and institute the experiment which is to show whether this phenomenon is not produced, he does not confine himself to making use of the proposition in question; he makes use also of a whole group of theories accepted by him as beyond dispute. The prediction of the phenomenon, whose nonproduction is to cut off debate, does not derive from the proposition challenged if taken by itself, but from the proposition at issue joined to that whole group of theories; if the predicted phenomenon is not produced, the only thing the experiment teaches us is that among the propositions used to predict the phenomenon and to establish whether it would be produced, there is at least one error; but where this error lies is just what it does not tell us.”

“In sum, the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses; when the experiment is in disagreement with his predictions, what he learns is that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group is unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not designate which one should be changed.”
Pierre Duhem; “The Aim And Structure of Physical Theory”;

via plato.Stanford.edu.

From W.V.O. Quine:
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.”

Or as I have frequently put it, an hypothesis verification - or falsification - depends first on the deductive fallacy as a prediction made from a law, then on the inductive fallacy as a generation of the law; next, the hypothesis contains premises which must be reconfirmed, axioms upon which the premise reconfirmation depends, and First Principles which are observed characteristics of the universe which are thought to be universal, but without a universal proof.

Or as Feynman put it, every experiment should be accompanied by re-verifications of all the supporting principles to make sure they are still valid.

Quine argued further,

“…because this leaves any and all beliefs in that web at least potentially subject to revision on the basis of our ongoing sense experience or empirical evidence, there simply are no beliefs that are analytic in the originally supposed sense of immune to revision in light of experience or true no matter what the world is like.”via plato.Stanford.edu.

This argument against absolute truth is valid only for objective “scientific truth”, or sense and empirical truth. The argument for subjective truth cannot be allowed to suffer by any implications of this argument. To do so would be under a Category Error.

Contrastive Underdetermination is another name for the Dichotomy Fallacy, where a dichotomy is presented which ignores the possibility of other choices or hypothetical pathways. It is an example of the inability to prove a negative, the negative being that there are NO other possible choices to be considered, so that one of the choices offered must necessarily be correct.

Underdetermination and Subjective Knowledge
If objective scientific knowledge is subject to definable and measurable uncertainties, then what of the uncertainty of Subjective Scientific knowledge? Specifically historical knowledge and variable laden knowledge such as social science produces? Falsification in these areas is relegated to exceptions, not falsification. If falsification is the sole arbiter of validity, then the only possible source of knowledge is objective empiricism. But even Massimo argues that that is not the case. But if non-objective knowledge is subjected to falsification, it is jeopardized with refutation on scientific grounds. This is the basis for Massimo's refutation (and denigration) of religion (that generic belief).

But in even more jeopardy is evolution, which as a theory is allowed to produce any outcome, all outcomes, or no outcome at all. This is not falsifiable, certainly not in the empirical sense since it is not empirical. And it is not falsifiable in the inferential sense (a non-valid concept at best) because any finding is used to adjust the theory slightly in order to accommodate the “all outcome” conclusion.

Are inferential conclusions always false? Of course not. But they also are never objectively True; as shown above, even decent objective findings are never True in any absolute sense. Evolution is somewhat less than not objectively true. It is subjectively speaking, a series of extrapolations, stories made up in order to fill knowledge gaps that are otherwise unfillable.

These stories extrapolated to fill gaps in knowledge are now protected by law. They are being instituted as first principles. There are battalions of lawyers poised to defend these stories and their exclusive use in government education.

Scientifically speaking, evolutionary stories are not underdetermined, they are explicitly non-determined as empirical science; they are non-experimental and non-empirical, and thus have no real standing in objective knowledge at all, save as dogma for Atheist agendas.

But as Massimo continually demonstrates, the axiom of Philosophical Materialism in his swarm of supporting principles colors all conclusions that he tries to make, even when he starts out on the right track. It appears that the residual dogma from his years as an evolutionary scientist have stymied intellectual openness in his few months as a philosopher.

As it happens, many of the supporting swarm of underlying axioms and first principles of logic and rational thought are inferential and subjective. These paths to knowledge, it turns out, have more truth value than any objective science knowledge or subjective science knowledge. Massimo needs to look there, and adjust his worldview accordingly.