A hard world to be ludicrous in

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Mother Night is the fictional memoirs of an American, Howard Campbell, who works as an Allied spy in Goebbel's propaganda ministry under the Third Reich. While working as a spy, he creates a good deal of propaganda for the Nazis, and a central question of the book is whether, in doing so, he did more harm than good.

At one point he writes the following, which refers to Nazism but which could just as easily apply to any religious or political system of dogmatic belief:

I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

- Mother Night, Ch. 29

Philosophy Quotations Explained: "I think, therefore I am"

"The proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind."
- Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, II.

"Ego cogito, ergo sum..."
- Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Part 1, Article 7

"I think, therefore I am," is perhaps the most famous quote from all of modern philosophy. When the quote is taken out of context, however, it may seem that Descartes is magically thinking himself into existence, or that he's making some snooty statement about the philosopher's raison d'etre - that the meaning of life is to think.

This latter misinterpretation is spread further by witty slogans on t-shirts and bumper stickers advertising all sorts of hobbies - e.g., "I ski, therefore I am."

But Descartes wasn't talking about how much he liked thinking. He was actually trying to establish the foundations of knowledge - what we can know with certainty.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes's project is to find some fundamental proposition that is beyond doubt, and then use it as a starting point from which to derive everything that we know. Descartes writes:

All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived. (Meditations, I.)

Descartes goes on to point out that everything we perceive is subject to doubt, because we could be dreaming, or our thoughts could even be subject to the manipulations of an evil demon (think a 17th-century version of the Matrix).

So given that our senses always can be deceiving us, can we know anything with certainty? Yes, Descartes says: we know, with certainty, that we are thinking. Even if we are dreaming - even if we're trapped in the Matrix and don't know it - we at least know that we are thinking. And because we know we are thinking, we know that we - in some manner or form - exist. I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum.

Philosophers since his day have split a lot of epistemological hairs over the Cogito and whether it actually proves what Descartes wants it to prove. But his radical project of doubting everything, and applying mathematical logic to problems of knowledge and reality, still makes Descartes the father of modern philosophy.

Philosophy Quotations Explained: "God is Dead"

After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.— And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too!
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III

God is dead. - Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead. - God
- Bumper Sticker

This is one of the best-known of Nietzsche's aphorisms, and is one of the strongest statements of atheism in history. Nietzsche's contempt for religion is infamous, and this is simply the most pithy among many atheistic statements he made in his writings.

But pronouncing the death of God seems like a contradictory way to assert atheism. After all, if God is dead, that means that he used to be alive, doesn't it? And therefore Nietzsche seems to be shooting himself in the foot - in declaring God's death, isn't he implicitly acknowledging God's existence?

It's this mistaken reading that's reflected in the bumper sticker above. (Although Nietzsche himself probably would have gotten a kick out of that joke, he probably would have retorted with something like, "How convenient to believe in someone who doesn't exist - you can put whatever words in his mouth you like!")

The problem with the popular interpretation of "God is dead" is that it takes Nietzsche's aggressive rhetoric literally. Nietzsche is as famous for his rhetorical flourishes as he is for his atheism, and although this makes him enormous fun to read, it also can lead to misunderstandings like this.

By "God is dead," Nietzsche means to call attention to a cultural fact: that like the gods of ancient Greece, the Judeo-Christian God has lost his ethical power and philosophical importance. Since the Enlightenment, science has replaced religion as the only responsible way to explain worldly phenomena, and ethical systems have become less and less dependent on religious imperatives. Although Nietzsche criticized the Enlightenment values too, he was firm in asserting that the vestigial worldviews of religion are an obstruction to personal, intellectual, and cultural growth.

In another section of the Gay Science, Nietzsche tells the story of a madman who proclaims that "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" We have killed God, because we have rejected - or perhaps outgrown - the worldview into which God and religion fit. Now that God is dead, our challenge is to replace him with a worldly, human ideal, and to supplant religion's conventional morality with a new, personal ethic that makes no claim to objectivity.

So "God is dead" should be understood as a powerful metaphor, not a literal claim about theological mortality. And although Nietzsche is physically dead, it's he who has the last laugh: in the world of ideas, he remains as relevant as ever.

Philosophy Quotations Explained: Introduction

Because most people do not read philosophy, a philosopher's popular reputation - if he or she has one at all - is usually based upon one or two famous aphorisms. Too often, those aphorisms are torn from context, and the original ideas behind them come to be distilled or distorted.

In this series of posts I will reexamine some well-known but frequently misunderstood philosophy quotations, using careful reading and consideration of context to explore what the philosopher really meant.

For starters, here's an incomplete list of quotations on which I plan to post.

Aristotle: "Man is by nature a political animal."
Descartes: "I think, therefore I am."
Rousseau: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains."
Hegel: "What is real is rational."
Hegel: "The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only with the falling of dusk."
Darwin: "To suppose that the eye... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the people."
Marx: "Workers of the world, unite!"
Nietzsche: "God is dead."
Nietzsche: "What does not kill me makes me stronger."
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Sartre: "Everyone gets the war that he deserves."

Recommendations for additional quotes are welcome!

Men are from Mars, Women are from... Stupid?

The Washington Post: We Scream, We Swoon, How Dumb Can We Get?

I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women "are only children of a larger growth," wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?

I swear no man watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club." No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either -- although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn't some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.


Charlotte Allen wonders - apparently, in all seriousness - whether women have some kind of a predisposition to be the stupider and weaker sex. At first glance it appears this is nothing more than a simple logical fallacy: she assumes that the glaring mental deficiency so manifestly displayed in herself must be present also in the rest of her sex. But she doesn't stop there - in one short article, she takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of hasty generalizations, half-baked arguments drawn from arbitrary examples, and conclusions that are laughably and patently wrong.

Her argument is so imbecilic that it's self-satirizing, largely because she backs it up with such absurdly trite and meaningless examples. Oprah? Sappy romance novels and soap operas? Swooning over cute polticians and rock stars? Bad driving? Yes, this really is the hard evidence she brings to prove women's intellecutal inferiority. Her argument is based on nothing more substantial than tired old jokes from a bad stand-up routine about differences between men and women.

In an attempt to be more convincing, though, she appeals to the authority of experts:

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal.

So, women get into 11% more accidents, but their accidents are 66% less fatal? Sounds to me like women are better drivers.

It gets worse:

The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy.

Apparently Ms Allen thinks that brain size determines intelligence. Male brains are bigger; therefore men are smarter. That argument appears sound - until you consider that the brains of Neanderthals were about 10% larger than those of homo sapiens. A bigger brain does not mean a better brain.

Ultimately, with regards to this and all of her examples, it's a simple case of selective evidence. It would be just as easy to write an article parading the apparent mental shortcomings of the male sex. Women are worse at navigation? Ok, but there are more women enrolled in higher education than men, and they tend to get better grades. Women watch sappy TV shows and cry about superficial nonsense? Ok, but men act functionally retarded when they attend sporting events, and they exhibit constant paranoia about the relative size of their genitals. Women swoon over sexy politicians and stars? Well, men are the reason that pornography makes up so much of the internet.

Self-oppressing idiots like Charlotte Allen take subversive glee in expressing a viewpoint that is against the grain of conventional wisdom and political correctness. In the end, though, her argument is nothing but a series of outrageously misogynistic opinions strung together by scattered and unconvincing examples. She's clearly not the brightest crayon in the box.

Fortunately, her breathtaking fatuity is the exception, and not the rule.

Du bist, was du isst

You may be familiar with the old adage 'you are what you eat', but you have to read it in the original German to really get the joke. It was originally coined by the nineteenth century German philosopher Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach. In his essay Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, Feuerbach wrote:

"Der Mensch ist, was er isst." (The man is what he eats.)

It's a clever pun: in German, 'ist' means 'is', and 'isst' means 'eats'. Feuerbach, a firm atheist, was not trying to give dietary advice, but rather was making a fiercely materialist point about the biological, non-divine status of man.

Christianity as antiquity

"When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! this, for a Jew, crucified over two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son. The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A got who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and the ignominy of the cross - how ghoulishly this all touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?"

-Friederich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human

Critiquing the 'New New Atheism'

Writing in this past Sunday's Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz constructs an interesting critique of the recent atheist publishing boom. Referring to the views espoused by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris as 'the New New Atheism', Berkowitz has this to say:

Profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today's fashionable disbelief from the varieties of atheism that have arisen over the millennia. Unlike the classical atheism of Epicurus and Lucretius, which rejected belief in the gods in the name of pleasure and tranquility, the new new atheism rejects God in the name of natural science, individual freedom and human equality. Unlike the Enlightenment atheism of the 18th century, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which frequently went to some effort to disguise or mute its disbelief, the new new atheism proclaims its hatred of God and organized religion loudly and proudly from the rooftops. And unlike the anti-modern atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which regarded the death of God as a catastrophe for the human spirit, the new new atheism sees the loss of religious faith in the modern world as an unqualified good, lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a divine presence in history.

Essentially, Mr. Berkowitz seems to think that the caustic, mean-spirited, uncompromising nature of the atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al is unprecedented in western intellectual history, and he strongly implies that past generations had better sense than to be so dismissive of religious ideas.

This is patently false. Mordant, no-holds-barred criticism of religion is far from being a new development. Friederich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ambrose Bierce, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley - all of these thinkers and more have expressed atheistic arguments in even more uncompromising and mean-spirited terms than the 'new new atheists' who Mr Berkowitz pretends to be unique.

Consider Nietzsche, who wrote that "prayer has been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own", and that "in Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." (I have no idea where Mr Berkowitz gets the lunatic notion that Nietzsche thought the death of god to be a "catastrophe"; Nietzsche despised religion and thought the death of god to be a prerequisite for the rebirth of the human spirit. But I digress.)

Or consider Robert Ingersoll, who is little remembered today but who toured the US in the mid-nineteenth century giving lectures on atheism. He was one of the most popular speakers of his day, drawing record crowds in a country which had only recently gone through a second great awakening. He once said that "religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery."

These thinkers of the past made no such efforts to "disguise or mute their disbelief"; indeed, they proclaimed their hatred of religion "loudly and proudly from the rooftops" every bit as stridently as the new atheists. But I think Mr Berkowitz errs in saying that any atheists, new or old, possess a "hatred of God". You can't hate a being in whom you don't believe. All of these thinkers hate the idea of god - the notion itself that there exists a supernatural being in whom one is supposed to have faith. That's a big difference from hating the being itself - which makes it sound like atheists simply resent god, instead of thinking the belief in him irrational.

All this being said, Mr Berkowitz does make a couple of good points. First of all, he points out that nitpicking at religions - finding sundry contradictory or false statements in the Bible, for instance, or interpreting religious stories like the binding of Isaac in a strictly modern framework - is to miss the point of the religious experience. Although I personally think that these criticisms are not without merit, since so many people do interpret their religions in the same "slavishly literal sense" that Mr Berkowitz says atheistic critics should avoid, I see his point: it's not the big picture.

Berkowitz also makes a sound point in arguing that it is beyond the scope of the new atheists to prove that there is no god. No one will ever be able to prove that beyond doubt, just as no one will ever be able to prove that there is a god.

But I'm not so sure that that is what Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris are saying. I think that their argument is not so much that "we are certain that there is no god", but rather that "we are certain that there exists no good reason to believe in a god". As I have not read all of the books in question, I will not say for sure; but I suspect Mr Berkowitz may be conflating these two approaches to atheism.

The final thrust of Berkowitz's criticism seems to be this:

Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction.

With this I disagree. If anything, the new new atheism confirms America's commitment to freedom, because it is emblematic of the free exchange of ideas that make freedom worthwhile. The mere fact that these criticisms are harsh does not mean that they are undemocratic, and the mere fact that these thinkers consider religions to be false does not mean that they think people should be prevented from practicing them.

And although the new new atheists may indeed blur the distinctions between different forms of faith, that is no flaw, because the focus of their criticism is what all religions share. They are attacking what religions have in common, from militant Islam to Mormonism to Orthodox Judaism: faith. It is faith - believing things without reason - which draws the fires of their abuse.

Mr Berkowitz concludes his piece by suggesting that "the variety of religions" deserve "a fair hearing." Have they not had a fair hearing for the past several thousand years? If there is indeed "nothing new under the sun" in the criticism of religion, certainly religion can offer nothing new in its own defence.

Some clarifications on my views concerning religion

A reader of my blog recently wrote me with this objection:

Dear Mr. West,
I find your Blog to be a mystery. It mentions tolerance towards religions yet shows none, if tolerance has anything to do with respect. To modify a concept from Heidegger, I would recommend an attitude of Gelassenheit towards spirituality. I expect future posts to be either more sensitive about religion or at least more honest about your own biases. Thank you sir.

First of all, I would like to thank this reader for taking the time to read my blog and construct a respectful criticism. I shared a couple of classes with this person in college, and I continue to hold his thoughts in high esteem. I hope that this response can do justice to his objection.

I do not believe that I, on this blog, have ever made any pretension of objectivity. The opinions advanced herein are my own. I thought that the very nature of the forum would have made that clear. This blog is nothing more than an editorial outlet for my own thoughts and views, and that is meant to be implicitly understood without my having to write “I think” before every statement I make here.

But although this blog is inherently subjective, I take issue with the contention that it is biased. ‘Bias’ carries the connotation of an unreasoned prejudice or a deceptively subtle favoring of one side of an issue. I do not think that my views on religion are biased. I do not reject religion because of some visceral distaste or underlying prejudice; I reject religion because I find it to be a fundamentally unsound set of ideas.

As I see it, the foundation of religion is faith. To have faith means to believe something without having any reason to believe it – to believe something merely because you want to believe it, regardless of any supporting or contradictory evidence. I can imagine no greater stupidity than that, and I reserve no respect for any system of beliefs founded on such an intellectual farce.

Faith is the most dangerous intellectual precedent imaginable, and it has given rise to much violence and misery over the course of human history. It is primarily because of faith that religion retards scientific and social progress, and engenders the holding of unreason in equal or higher esteem than reason itself.

Moreover, it seems to me that the sociological, anthropological, psychological, and historical records make it clear that religions are social conventions created to satisfy the base needs of human beings to comfort themselves and to explain the mysteries of the world around them. Simply put, religion is born out of ignorance and fear, and as such, in the words of James Madison, it "shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."

Clearly I make no secret of my opposition to religious ideas. But let us not conflate intellectual opposition with intolerance. The position I take is that of Voltaire, who once wrote to the Jesuits (a people with whom he had fierce conflicts of opinion): “I disagree with what you say, but would defend to the death your right to say it.” I believe in intellectual freedom. I do not believe in banning books, or persecuting people, or forcibly stamping out beliefs (all things that religions have done at one time or another, and not by mistake). I believe in the free marketplace of ideas: you are entitled to your own opinion, and I to mine. But watch out: this also means that I am entitled to my own opinion OF your opinion, and you to your own opinion OF mine! Thus, you have right to believe in God, and I have the right not to. I have the right to point out why I think your belief in God is irrational and cowardly, and you have the right to think that I’m morally and spiritually bankrupt for saying so. And I have the right to think that that’s absurd. And so on. The free marketplace of ideas thus renders intolerance unnecessary, because at the end of the day, reason and logic should prevail of their own accord.

Of course, I’m not always so highbrowed in my criticisms. I often express my opposition to religion with disparaging mockery or sarcasm. But the apparent immaturity of such derision belies the purpose it serves. Religion, after all, rejects reason as an epistemic standard, and one cannot reason with the unreasonable; thus condescension and mockery are sometimes all one can employ against such bankrupt ideas.

I started this blog as a forum dedicated to reason and observation as the only responsible sources of knowledge and the only reliable guides against error. I think that the harsh tone that I take against religion is in better harmony with that ideal than anything else I write here.

So to conclude, dear reader, I will not alter the nature of the position I take against religion. To be, as you suggest, “more sensitive toward religion” would be, I think, to compromise intellectual honesty, which demands that criticism not be afraid of its own conclusions. Intellectual honesty also demands considering arguments opposed to your own positions, and I frequently do this; I welcome any sound rebuttal to my positions, but I have yet to hear a pro-faith or pro-religion argument that was not fatally flawed in its logic. Thus I will continue to give religious faith only the intellectual credit it deserves, which as far as I can tell, is none.

The Use and Abuse of Philosophy

I'm always interested - and not infrequently disappointed - in how people react when I tell them I majored in philosophy. A college acquaintance of mine, for instance, once told me that she didn't like philosophy, because she found it to be too abstract. This puzzled me, especially because she herself was majoring in government. She seemed not to understand that all fundamental questions in her field - and, for that matter, in all of the humanities - go back to philosophy.

Philosophy is to the humanities what mathematics is to the sciences: it is the foundation upon which everything rests. Philosophy, like mathematics, appears at first to be abstract, even detached from reality. And for this reason, many people dismiss it as being too difficult, or of too little use in daily life to warrant serious study.

But philosophy is not at all abstract - it is eminently pragmatic and practical, and your mind can't live a day without it, any more than your body can survive without water or food. Philosophy is not some head-in-the-clouds pastime involving ridiculous questions about what sound a tree makes when falling in the forest. It is simply the practice of rational, critical thought.

My friend majoring in government, for instance, would have done well to consider that the core questions in her field are all philosophical considerations: what is the most just form of government? Is the death penalty just, or is it cruel and unusual? Is it fair to tax the rich and redistribute wealth to the indigent, or is true justice characterized by letting people keep what they earn? Does bigger government expand the borders of liberty, or does it limit them?

The other fields in the humanities also grow out of philosophy. One cannot study history, for instance, without considering why we should even care about the past in the first place. One cannot study art without aesthetics, anthropology without a theory of human nature, or sociology without an examination of social norms.

Even the sciences require an implicit study of philosophy. The scientific method is nothing more than an organized approach to dealing with the central challenges of epistemology: how do we know what we know, and what is the most responsible and reliable way of acquiring knowledge? And of course, all of the sciences rely on mathematics, which in turn rely on logical reasoning. One could thus go so far as to explain the project of science as the use of one branch of philosophy - logic - to pursue another branch - epistemology.

Simply put, philosophy is thinking - nothing more, nothing less. And the last time I checked, thinking is a fairly pragmatic and important activity in daily life (though ironically, one too often taken for granted by the very people who pride themselves on being pragmatic).

Memory

"Das habe ich gethan" sagt mein Gedächtnis. "Das kann ich nicht gethan haben" sagt mein Stoltz und bleibt unerbittlich. Endlich - giebt das Gedächtnis nach.

-Friederich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse


"I have done that," says my memory. "I cannot have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually - memory yields.

-Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Blind

"Haven't you noticed that all opinions without knowledge are ugly? The best of them are blind. Or does one who has a true opinion without knowledge seem any different than a blind man who just happens to be traveling on the right road?"

-Plato, The Republic, Book VI

Step 23

Dear Learned Pig,

I came across the following passage in the book 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People by David Niven. It is listed as "Step 23." What do you make of it?

- A Curious Reader

Don't Let Your Religious Beliefs Fade
Religion can show us the way in a world in which bad things happen. It can teach us that much of what we see is so complex we cannot understand why and how it occurred. (p. 42)


Dear Curious Reader,
Thank you for bringing this piece of mindless trash to my attention. Let's take it apart piece by piece.

"Religion can show us the way..."
Ok, wrong from the very start. Religion does NOT "show us the way"; it makes up a way. It encourages you to believe what you want to believe instead of believing what is rational. It values faith over reason and comfort over knowledge.
Any 'way' that religion 'shows you' is a path to ignorance. Religion insulates you from the truth, because the truth can be discomforting. Religion is a childish attempt by weak-minded people to project some sort of socially constructed meaning onto their contingent existences. But the fact that an idea is comforting doesn't make it true.

"... in a world in which bad things happen."
Aww, bad things happen? You poor little thing. Want a lolipop?
Actually, most people turn to religion as a metaphysical lolipop. It comforts them, because without the deluded belief that "all things happen for a reason," they wouldn't be able to deal with suffering.
Nobody likes the fact that bad things happen. That's why such things are called bad. But the mere fact that they happen means nothing in itself. The realization that the universe is indifferent to you is the first step towards living life for yourself.

"It can teach us that much of what we see is so complex we cannot understand why and how it occurred."
You know what's so complex that I cannot understand why and how it occurred? That fucking sentence. This man is as bad at writing as he is at thinking.
I suppose he's trying to say that religion teaches us that we cannot understand the world around us. He should try reading some books. Everything is rational - whether or not one is smart or brave enough to understand it.

So, dear reader, the idea that religion somehow makes life more meaningful is completely and utterly wrong. The advice I would give for a good life would read:

Don't Let Yourself Believe In Bullshit
Religion is a bunch of archaic, puerile nonsense designed to comfort the ignorant and the weak. Try learning about the world around you instead of explaining everything away with a bunch of ridiculous myths and outdated laws.

Thomas Paine: Rational American

I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
Your affectionate friend and fellow citizen,
THOMAS PAINE.

-From the preface to The Age of Reason (1794)

Why I'm a Feminist

I was watching TV the other day, and saw a Direct TV commercial that hurt my brain. In an outrageous assault on the intelligence of the viewer (and women everywhere), Jessica Simpson walks into a bar in a revealing outfit (redundant, I know, to say 'revealing outfit' and 'Jessica Simpson' in the same sentence). She is supposed to be in character as the waitress she portrayed in the cinematic miscarriage Dukes of Hazzard, but I fail to see the difference. Anyway, she starts blathering to the camera, in a coquettish southern accent, about how she's spent all these days working out at the gym, and she's insulted that her salacious male fans won't do her the justice of buying Direct TV to enjoy her fake plastic body in as much detail as possible. Yes, that's right - she's basically saying "I've worked so hard to become a vapid sex object, and now I'm offended you aren't going to objectify me to the fullest extent possible!"

But the climax of this idiocy is when she rattles off some detailed technical specifications about what she's selling, pauses, turns to the camera, and says with a smile:

"I totally don't know what that means - but I want it!"

In this sentence, dear readers, we have the three pillars of modern society's feminine Ideal. She is 1: Hot, 2: Brainless, and 3: Materialistic. Think of not only Jessica Simpson, but Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, Nicole Richie, Miss America, and so on.

Hotness may be an obvious characteristic, but it's a certain kind of hotness: the kind created by plastic surgeons that makes you look like a six-foot Barbie doll. Brainlessness - when's the last time you saw a sex icon wearing glasses? And Materialism - Paris Hilton failed to identify who Tony Blair was in a recent interview (see Brainlessness), but I'm sure she can tell you all about the differences between Coach and Gucci handbags, or about how many square miles of closet space she has.

I long for the day that a beautiful, smart, and independent feminine Ideal replaces the current hot, brainless, materialistic one. The fact that this places me in the minority among American men is the reason I am a feminist.

Moral Certainty

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the person, the surer they are that they know precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure.'"
- H.L. Mencken

Conventional

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

-John Kenneth Galbraith

Enemies of Truth

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

This is one of my favorite Nietzschean aphorisms. Having a conviction means feeling, instead of thinking, that something is true. A lie can be proven wrong; a conviction, on the other hand, can be maintained no matter what evidence or facts exist to impugn it. This is why convictions play such a vital role in religion; they allow the complete epistemic insulation that one needs in order to believe things without any reason at all.

With an upcoming election, we would do well to remember Nietzsche's words whenever a politician is praised for "the strength of his convictions".