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Swami
Eggshell Walker

Registered: 01/18/00
Posts: 15,413
Loc: In the hen house

Atheist Website responds to Christian Letter

#1645164 - 06/19/03 02:37 PM (20 years, 9 months ago)

In the exchange below, Cliff takes Swamism to a new level!

Doomed To Wallow In The Cesspool Of Despair by
Julie Hagerty

From: "Julie [surname removed (heh heh!)]"
To: "Positive Atheism"
Sent: May 24, 2002 5:09 PM

I have a comment or two to make on this website in a general mannor.

As much as I admire the ideas of creative thinking and logical reasoning, there does not appear to be any positive outcome in reality of not having a belief in a benevolent force in the universe. Even in Buddhist philosophy, there is the acceptance of failure through our own human devices. If there is not an acknowledgment of the fact that there are measures in our own power to reconcile with our own mistakes, humanity can not function as a constructive society, and is doomed to wallow in the cesspool of despair and unresolved conflict.

-- anonomous

From: "Positive Atheism"
To: "Julie [surname removed]"
Date: May 24, 2002 9:32 PM

Julie,

I strongly recommend using extreme caution when writing to a complete stranger with the intent of accusing that person of propagating a message inconsistent with truth (deceit), or propagating a self-inconsistent message (hypocrisy), or of propagating an otherwise destructive message. Having failed to make so much as a single point with this attempted attack upon that implacable authority known as Truth, you are well on the way to earning our Mute Annie Award for the month of May, 2002. This is a dubious distinction, indeed, as the month still far from over. Compounding all this, you have, in but a single short paragraph, prevailed against some abjectly stiff competition! Besides, the award itself remains but a figment of this author's quick and fruitful imagination, itself never ceasing to find a way with words.

To complete the ring of irony, you go so far as to refuse to even sign your letter!

Julie, Julie, Julie!

Not being one to make empty assertions, I will now grant you the dignity of justifying what I have said above.

You start by insisting that "there does not appear to be any positive outcome in reality of not having a belief in a benevolent force in the universe."

This might give your reader the impression that you have some stern criticism of the message about which you have chosen to comment -- if, in fact, you were saying anything at all! "Positive"? Just what do you mean by that? "Positive outcome"? What does that mean? "Positive outcome in reality"? Which "reality"? Whose "reality"? "Reality" as opposed to what?

In truth, this could mean literally anything! You could launch this criticism against anybody for having propagated any message whatsoever, and you would be able to make this criticism "fit"; that is, you could argue some interpretation of what you said to justify it and make it appear as valid. I reiterate: you could use the above sentence to criticize literally any message!

Ah, but you use the above device to argue against "not having a belief in a benevolent force in the universe" -- as if very many who lack such a belief do so deliberately rather than by default! Truth is, most who lack such a belief do so by default: this is not a condition that most of us choose, but one that we come to for lack of a reasonable alternative! The claims that such a "force" exists simply don't hold water for most of us. You might as well rail against the inability to wiggle one's ears or curl one's tongue or whistle or snap one's fingers!

I, for one, have as yet been unable to assemble for myself a comprehensible understanding of what "a benevolent force in the universe" even means but you want me to skip that part and go ahead and believe that claims for the existence of such a thing are true!

Worst of all, though, you argue that we should believe that claims for the existence of "a benevolent force in the universe" are true not because they are likely to be true but because there would not be "any positive outcome in reality" unless we did believe that those claims were true!

I'm sorry, but I'm just not that dishonest!

Then you turn around and appear to extol "the acceptance of failure through our own human devices" through Buddhism. But the question of whether or not you are, in fact, praising "the acceptance of failure through our own human devices" is left to the imagination of the poor clown who cowers at the "business end" of your reprimand.

First, I'm not sure I understand where Buddhism fits into the picture: our web site advocates the end of bigotry against atheists, we have not taken up the cause of Buddhists, except as some Buddhists are atheists. And having established their atheism, their Buddhism thus becomes incidental to us: it's their atheism that concerns us the most.

Ah, but alas! Precisely what it is that you're actually saying here turns out, upon even a cursory overview, to be most unclear. (What is your daytime job? do you write New Age pamphlets? do you contrive marketing stratagems for household products? are you a member of Congress?) Which is it that's supposedly done "through our own devices," the acceptance of failure, or the failure itself?

Then comes your whammy: Your premise is contingent on our alleged inability to acknowledge something. "If we cannot acknowledge" -- what -- might I ask? "If we cannot acknowledge" something that you presuppose to be fact. However, conspicuously absent is a demonstration as to the truthfulness of your claim. Unable to show its truthfulness (unwilling to even give it a crack), you forfeit your right to call this claim a "fact" or to even use the term acknowledge in connection with it (as one can only "acknowledge" what is demonstrably true!).

So what is it that you here assume to be factual? Here goes: "there are measures in our own power to reconcile with our own mistakes."

Say, wha --?

"Measures"? This could mean a number of things.

Does the qualifier, or what it qualifies, help us to narrow it down to a few possibilities? or even one?

"Measures in our own power"? Now I'm even more confused!

Just what is it that you are accusing me of having done that you'd go to the lengths of writing me a stern letter? In putting me through such radical changes, I would hope you'd give me at least an inkling, if not a clue as to what it is that I've done!

But the rest of this sentence, your main point, your rhetorical coup d'?tat, your "given-A-and-B-thus-C -- all of it -- cannot be rendered into something upon which three different readers would agree as to what it means!

Well, it says something about the fact that we make mistakes. So? What if we do make mistakes? So what? We make mistakes -- er, I guess.

In the most basic form, you might say that So-and-So was foraging through the Savannah a hundred thousand years ago and made a mistake, thereby allowing herself to become lunch for a tiger and her cubs. Yes, we might agree to call whatever she did "a mistake."

But this is a mistake in only one specific context: given that So-and-So wanted to remain alive, she made a mistake in doing something that cost her her life. On any larger or smaller scheme of things, there is no mistake, here. A mistake, in this context as with any context, is a human value, that is, the opinion of one or more human beings. Separate the aspect of human opinion and there remains no such thing as "a mistake."

Ah, but let us jump ahead to your "therefore":

Therefore, you tell us, "humanity can not function as a constructive society." I disagree: any society, being the construct of the humans involved, is de facto constructive, is by definition constructive! Any other terms that you might wish to apply to "constructive" would necessarily be contingent upon the desires of those involved, and is not necessarily limited to (whatever it is you said about) acknowledging some so-called fact about reconcile mistakes. I don't even need to know what it is you're saying back there, because any assessment of the "constructive-ness" of a society -- any society -- is de facto dependent upon the collective desires and goals and values of that society.

Then you say, "humanity can not function as a constructive society, and is doomed to wallow in the cesspool of despair and unresolved conflict"? To this I respond that humanity cannot (not "can not" but cannot) function as "a society" period! Anthropologists report that humans ("humanity"), once having grown in number beyond a single family or clan of about 150 members (see note) will divide into two families or clans and will diverge, becoming more than one (or "a") society.

Note:

In modern, civilized society, such unlikely "personages" as the President and First Family, the weather announcer, and even fictional television characters, when counted as "members of a person's clan," fulfil this prediction with the same precision that would be the case if the clans in question were literal tribes, struggling to survive in the jungles of the Amazon. The one notable exception is that two "virtual clans" in modern society are not competing for the same resources; thus conflict does not have the same real urgency (although it may seem that way to those involved, thus explaining PAM correspondent Chuck Shepherd's not infrequent reports of people killing one another over which television program to watch!).

This observation of fact is documented in Stephen Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, my copy of which is still packed away, but you can verify this fact in Pinker's widely available work.

Finally (whew!), you insist that "humanity ... is doomed to wallow in the cesspool of despair and unresolved conflict"! Every word of this phrase, with the possible exception of the term "unresolved conflict," is fit for nothing other than poetic expression. "Doomed" and "wallow" and "cesspool" and "despair" are each emotionally charged buzz words fit only for the Letters to the Editor section of a daily newspaper, and is not language that actually says anything.

Meanwhile, "unresolved conflict" is a redundancy, given that all conflict is, by nature and by definition, unresolved. And will "humanity" as a whole, being genetically predisposed to divide into smaller groups once any particular clan exceeds about 150 members, is destined to be engaged in conflict (destined, not "doomed" -- unless you're an abject pessimist, in which case we in the Northern Hemisphere are "doomed" to have numerous sunny days this summer!). There is no way around this conflict, nor would very many of us like living in conditions that might prevent such conflict -- if any at all! Human conflict is here to stay, and if we approach it as though we were "doomed" to endure it, then we open ourselves to the risk of overreacting to any conflict which might come our way. Such overreaction, in many cases, would serve only to aggravate the conflict, introducing elements of disagreement that would not ordinarily exist.

In short, what little I can make of your criticism of me is unjustified in that you don't even try to prove your premises, much less your point. Furthermore, what little I can make of your conclusions are the exact opposite of what I can easily demonstrate to be the case!

This, therefore, is a classic example of what can happen if one does not exercise extreme caution when writing to a complete stranger with the intent of criticizing that individual's message.

Cliff Walker
Positive Atheism Magazine
Six-and-a-half years of service
to people with no reason to believe

--------------------

The proof is in the pudding.

Edited by Swami (06/20/03 01:45 AM)

Extras:

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