A descriptor of "nothing?"

I was trying to reply to this post by Richard Carrier and got a "Nonce verification failed" message, so I'm reposting it here to save it. Did I get banned, or is there something not working on his site? I noticed this particular post doesn't have any comments on it yet, which is unusual for his audience.

Christians are prone to deciding what to believe based on groupthink, cult-think, and intuition (otherwise known as emotion in lieu of reason).

I bristle at this caricature of "intuition," however as a romantic I don't see "emotional" as a pejorative. It does seem, however, that you are using it as a pejorative here. Is this merely a rhetorical strategy, like the "mic-drop moment" you describe in the other post? My sense of "intuition" is described in the following example. Imagine you are someone who is very talented and familiar with the ins and outs of Euclidean geometry, and use it every day in your work (you might be an engineer or an architect, for example). You've never used any other form of geometry. Now, try to learn how to use elliptical and/or hyperbolic geometry. First, embrace the new "fact" of this geometry that there is not a single line parallel to a given line passing through a point not on that given line, but rather there are zero (elliptical) parallel lines and all lines drawn through that non-colinear point will eventually cross the given line, or there are an infinite (hyperbolic) number of lines parallel to the given line that pass through that point. Try to forget all of your training and visual intuitions (especially if you are an architect enmeshed in an x, y, z world) and embrace this new reality. Is the struggle I describe above inherently emotional in nature? I'm not sure "emotional" is an adequate descriptor, or if it is then in this case it seems the emotions aren't seen as pejorative and lack the rhetorical power of the pejorative I perceive in your description. When it comes to morality, however, I cannot bring my romantic self to engage in perfectly dispassionate assessments of things like "good" and "evil." There is a fundamental passion when it comes to morality, and in my opinion you can't have "good" and "evil" without simultaneously acknowledging "beautiful" and "ugly." Aesthetics is central to any sort of conversation that tries to describe a "moral reality." That all said, I can't for the life of me understand why people allegedly with faith in a god of "love," "mercy," "vengeance," "hardened hearts," and "hope" seem so squeamish about embracing the emotions that this particular god encourages them -- even commands them -- to embrace with "all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind." All of the apologists appeal to emotion in the end, and they appeal to aesthetics such as "eternal," "unchanging," "omni-omni-omni," and several others when they describe "nothing" as bad and undesirable and "something" as good, among other things.

So there is no coherent argument that God must exist “because atheism predicts nothing will exist.” It doesn’t. It predicts pretty much what we observe exists.

This might be a distraction, but there are theories in physics -- informed by intuitions (aesthetics) of symmetry that describe a universe with exactly equal parts matter (mass plus mc^2 mass-equivalent energy) and anti-matter. It you ascribe a positive value to the former and a negative value to the latter, this leads to a sum total of mass and energy in the entirety of the universe to be exactly (not approximately, not close-within-measurement-tolerances) zero. This was the case before the big bang (if it makes sense to describe a "before" to the big bang that gives time any meaning), it is the case now, and it is the case forever. Net-zero mass/energy is a somewhat counterintuitive notion of "nothing," however it does have some efficacy when countering some rhetorical claims of apologists such as "something cannot come from nothing." Of course, this idea of "nothing" is not the one the apologist is using. The apologist is appealing to something more akin to meaning, which is fundamentally emotional, and not all that helpful for this topic. Again, maybe a distraction but there may be something worth considering in there.

Emotionally satisfying persuasion: Is it the best choice for someone who values a morality founded in empathy?

In a recent post by Dr. Richard Carrier entitled A Simple Thought Experiment That Destroys Plantinga’s Free Will Defense of Evil, he spoke of a "Mic Drop" moment created by a persuasive technique used by Matt Dillahunty:

Imagine our world, and an alternative one identical in every way (every single way), but one: in that world, the Biblical God consistently condemns slavery (rather than consistently endorses and even occasionally commands it), complete with reasons why His People must never practice it and instead always morally condemn it. In which world is that God more moral? There is no honest way around the answer: the non-existent God is more moral. Which entails any existent God cannot be moral. Mic drop. You’re done.

Needless to say the cognitive dissonance that creates is literally painful.

When I read this, my immediate reaction was to nod my head in agreement. Indeed, it is emotionally satisfying, at least for the person dropping the mic and perhaps for the section of the audience who already agrees with you, the part who needs no persuading. 

For the person who just got the mic dropped on them, however, it is painful. This pain is not merely an unfortunate byproduct of this rhetorical strategy Part of the goal of this strategy itself is to induce suffering in the person against whom you are arguing, and perhaps that part of the audience who agrees with the person with whom you are arguing.

The primary target of this strategy is neither the people who already agree with you, nor the people who disagree with you in a way that this approach causes them suffering. It is the people on the fence, the people who are basically ready to walk away from the religion they grew up with but are looking for a reason to leave, and the people who already left the religion but are considering coming back because they are -- while not yet convinced -- are intrigued by the arguments of the person against whom you are arguing (Plantinga in this specific case) and are open to what they are saying about how free will is an acceptable excuse for the existence of evil in a world with an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God.

Deliberately inducing suffering, however, strikes me as something that people like myself who value an empathy-based morality should generally try to avoid and only do so if you've diligently ruled out all other potential methods of persuasion that don't cause pain, or cause less pain, than this particular technique.

I commented on his blog in this vein:

Needless to say the cognitive dissonance that creates is literally painful.

Something came to my mind when listening to Bart Ehrman talk with Alex O’Connor about the Dark Side of Christmas. They were reflecting on the story in Matthew (2:13-23) of Herod butchering hundreds (thousands?) of babies to get rid of the up-and-coming “King of the Jews” and how that led to them escaping to Egypt. That section cites two “prophecies” from Jeremiah (Rachel weeping) and Hosea (“out of Egypt I called my son”) — arguably as an excuse — a need — for the suffering. That is, the suffering was not needless, it was needed for a purpose: that prophecy may be fulfilled.

The three most common approaches are to defend slavery as somehow actually moral (at which point the Christian has lost all moral ground and thereby advertised their religion to everyone as morally repugnant) or to change the subject with a tu quoque fallacy (which advertises to everyone that the Christian has no response to the point) or to ironically resort to moral relativism and claim God “couldn’t” preach any true morality to the ancient Israelites because they were too primitive then or the culture was different then—or whatever illogical excuse.

Have you come across any of them using a fourth technique, where they attempt to show the necessity of the suffering associated with slavery, thus negating the “needless” part of the “needless suffering” charge? I can imagine them trying, and failing, for the same reasons that “so that prophecy may be fulfilled” falls flat on a modern audience as a “need” for babies being slaughtered and their mothers crying like Rachel.

We modern audiences are, however, open to hearing arguments from necessity. They were (and still are) effectively used to justify the second world war, for example. (Note I’m focusing on persuasion here and not the next step of diligent truth-seeking, so hopefully I’m back on track to engage your main topic.)

Needless to say the cognitive dissonance that creates is literally painful.

The irony of the first word in that quote from you is not lost on me, but have you given any thought to the suffering you are intentionally causing with this emotionally satisfying (for you, and Dillahunty, and I’ll admit myself as well) “mic drop” technique? Can you defend the necessity of this pain? Your opening paragraph seems to try, however I’m not sure you’ve exhausted all of the alternatives to this technique and analyzed them with the intent of finding the best possible technique available to us.

When I found myself nodding my head in agreement with the efficacy of this technique, I caught myself reveling in the emotional satisfaction on the part of the mic-dropper and tried to consider what it felt like to have this kind of mic dropped on me. The people who suffer from this, admittedly, are not the target of the technique. Rather, it is the people who the suffering-from-mic-dropping-evangelists wish to convert that are able to see better the moral bankruptcy of the sales pitch combined with the shift in strategies of the suffering from conversion of others and adding to their flock to not losing even more people (including themselves) to this strategy. Do these evangelists “deserve” the suffering we just inflicted on them? Are we now using suffering as retribution for their “sins” of being “irrational and often delusional?”

What might “mercy” look like to the mic-dropper?

People who have left a religion like Christianity, especially one of the conservative evangelical flavors of Christianity, often face a variety of personal loss:

• A loss of community. Once your mind shifts away from the faith, you no longer fit in. Even before you let it be known that you've changed and people start rejecting you, the very ideas that used to give you such joy and hope for the future now turn your stomach and grate at your ears. You've lost the foundations of almost all of your friendships. You suffer loneliness even while surrounded by all of your friends, and they can even be completely unaware of your internal struggles.
• A loss of your sense of aesthetics, what you used to find beautiful is now "meh," or even outright ugly to you. You might find yourself enjoying the melody of a song only to get distracted by the lyrics.
• A loss of meaning and purpose. WTF do I do now? Why should I bother? These can be replaced by cynicism, boredom, and nihilism.

This sense of loss and suffering is not at all trivial. It can lead to profound depression and anxiety -- an unmooring and an ungrounding. It can lead to much, much worse things as well.

The kind of cognitive dissonance and suffering in the person who gets the mic dropped on them when subjected to this kind of rhetorical strategy is generally not that bad, but it resembles it and can be a relatively minor form of the suffering of the newly de-converted. This is because this strategy is targeted at these believers' core values of community, aesthetics, and meaning, and the fact that these believers have been indoctrinated into a mindset that is poorly prepared for this kind of loss. So, while it is perhaps only a "minor" form of this suffering, it is nonetheless still not trivial. Not at all.

Moreover, me taking emotional pleasure in their post-mic-drop struggles turns me into a "minor" form of a sociopathic monster.

Is there perhaps a way to use a form of this technique that makes it less cruel? Realizing ahead of time what kinds of pain this mic-drop technique are likely to cause, should I resist the urge and pull my punch, or should I just say that this evil I'm perpetrating is somehow necessary, or that the probable ends justify the probably evil means?

 

First Post: Running Man

Actually my first post here is an old post from 2006, from an old LiveJournal account I have long ago lost the password to.  The name of this blog, "Catharsissy," came from the mood I attached to this blog entry.  The name came from a desire for a catharsis, a purging of bad things through expressing them in writing, and also the desire for some self-deprecating humor to take the edge off of the pretentiousness of the project of catharsis, which tends to be undertaken by privileged people like myself who want people to read their shit (the relationship between creative expression and pooping has long been a useful metaphor for me, my handle in LiveJournal was "pooperman") but don't want to admit they are vain enough to think their shit is worth reading in the first place.

In any case, a repost is a much quicker start to a new blog than to craft one from scratch and to place too much emphasis on it being the first, lest I futz over every single word and never publish anything.  While I don't intend on throwing stuff up on this blog in unedited-stream-of-consciousness format, neither do I intend to wait until final-draft quality stuff is ready before I publish here.  I hope to find that happy medium between diarrhea and constipation...

Running Man

So, I just finished reading War and the Soul: Healing our Nation's Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder by Edward Tick, Ph.D. I bought the book from Tick directly after a discussion on PTSD at the local library. Both himself and Jimmy Massey, who is one of the founders of Iraq Veterans Against the War, gave an incredible talk about the true costs of war. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone--whether or not you are interested in politics, and even if you are one of those damn Canadians who are better than us Americans because you are a much more peaceful sort of folk up there.

This book has had a profound effect on me. It has opened up something I didn't know was there. This post will be an attempt at a limited catharsis of what I found.

Our country--nay, our world--needs to understand and deal with a plain and simple fact of war: the worst thing that can happen to a soldier in a war is not necessarily his death (although, of course it is true that his death is a bad thing).

What we must remember about war is not only that we ask our soldiers to risk death or dismemberment or physical trauma. We must remember that, in the case of the soldier who marches off to war and does not get physically injured and returns home in relatively-good health, physically-speaking, what we ask that soldier to do, and what that soldier does in fact do, when he is over there, is to murder in our name.

(Notice also that I'm talking about "over there", because that is where it takes place for the American soldier--at least historically-speaking since 1865.)

Now, it doesn't matter if you agree with "the government" that sent the soldier or not, because in this country "the government" is all of us--no matter how much we might like to distance ourselves from that fact of democracy. That you and I have little efficacy in directing the decisions of "the government" is our failure, and not the soldier's failure. He does what he does because we have told him to do so.

This brings me to the thrust of my post--I wish to confront, and I hope to help the people who may read this to confront, the mass-murder in which I played a non-trivial role.

I was a junior officer in the US Navy (when I resigned in early 2000, I was a Lieutenant, equivalent to a Captain in the army). I was assigned to the USS Carl Vinson, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. I served as a division officer in several reactor-department divisions, and also supported the watchbill both on the bridge (where I "drove" the ship) and in the propulsion plant (where I operated the nuclear reactors, provided steam for the catapults that launched the planes, and steam to turn the ship's screws--"propellers" as they are often misnamed by those not in the know).

In December of 1998 my ship was a part of Operation Desert Fox, which was a "military action" in response to Saddam Hussein's not following the rules of the UN inspection program, set up after the first gulf war.

Wikipedia estimates between 600 and 2,000 dead Iraqis and an American force about the size of 30,500. Wiki has this happening over just 3 days, December 16-18, 1998, but we kept bombing continuously (1-2 times per week minimum) until September 11, 2001--interrupted temporarily by an actual threat to our country, one of course that had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq. I remember a speech Captain (now an Admiral) David Crocker (CO of the Vinson) gave to us in January of 1999 telling us we, already, had been involved in "the longest continuous bombing campaign since Vietnam". Yes, those were really his words!

It was well after the flurry of those 3 days in December, during the early months of 1999, when I was standing watch up on the bridge on a quiet, late night with little going on since most of the people on the ship were asleep. The captain was at his chair, looking at a TV screen, when suddenly he said, "oof! Bruce, come over here--you gotta see this." He motioned for me and the other junior officers to come over and look, addressing me specifically because I happened to be closest to him on the bridge at the time.

When we looked at his screen we saw the familiar green/black images of that footage we've all seen on CNN showing a camera focused on some target that suddenly explodes with an explosion right at the center, as if the camera knew exactly where the explosion was going to be. It was one of those sequences that the military loves to roll out to show how "smart" our weaponry is--how accurate our bombs are and how humane we are for using these weapons because we strike only what we intend to strike with a minimum of "collateral damage". These images are strikingly rhetorically-effective in this regard, because they tell a story about an evil building that gets destroyed while the children in the playground right next to it keep playing because, while the noise is loud, the deadly force is contained to precisely destroy only evil and never stray to injure the innocent.

This was one of those images that wouldn't make it to CNN because it was not nearly as rhetorically-effective as those you do see on CNN.

On the characteristically-green screen was some kind of building moving slowly away but staying perfectly-centered. Suddenly someone--I think it was a man--runs out of a side door and is sprinting away. Details are sketchy, but one can generally make out that it was a male, probably fairly young but not a child, and either athletic or benefiting from an adrenaline-induced enhancement to his running skills. Suddenly the screen goes greenish-white followed by what appeared to be smoke and debris. The running man is nowhere to be seen, but it is fairly safe to assume that he is no longer with us, given the size of the explosion and his proximity to it the moment before detonation.

I notice the date/time stamp on the footage, and see that it correlates with the middle of the watch I had stood on the bridge the day before. Knowing that all planes had landed from their sorties by the end of that same watch, I know that the plane who dropped this bomb was one of those that landed, and that there was a better-than-average-chance that it took off during that same watch. I had stood the propulsion plant watch just before that particular bridge watch, so if it didn't take off when I was driving the ship, it took off using steam I helped to deliver to the catapults. (Note that the bridge team plays a critical role in launching and landing planes off the deck of an aircraft carrier, because it is imperative that the winds across the deck be "just right", especially for landing.)

This 20-second grainy-greenish video was as close as I would ever come to the evil I helped to perpetrate.

Layers of technology--the plane, the pilot, the button that the pilot pushed, the guidance system that "drove" the bomb, the GPS satellite (this operation was the first to usher in the GPS guidance system), or more likely the special-forces grunt painting the building with a laser--all served very well to insulate me, morally, from the death I was a part of. This video was a fluke--the Captain probably shouldn't have shown it to me, but he did, and because he did he disrupted the nice layer of moral insulation. My imagination rended the rest of that insulation asunder...

Why was this guy running? How did he know that he was a target? Did he think he had a chance to outrun the bomb, or was it pure instinctual fear that drove him to run in spite of his knowledge that it was hopeless? Was he ready to die? Did he take comfort in the knowledge that he was going to die in the service of his country? Who did he leave behind? This happened a little over 30 hours ago--is his mother crying right now? His wife? His son?

There was a nervousness among the people sharing this video experience. In an attempt to distance us from it, somebody (one of the other JO's, I think) said something to the effect of "fucking towelheads", even though (in spite of the graininess of the footage) it was perfectly clear that this guy was not wearing a turban. If I had to guess at his clothing, it was some sort of military uniform--one much like the one I was wearing at the time. In spite of the inaccuracy and the inappropriateness of the comment, we all gave a nervous and appreciative laugh--a "thank you for placing a little more distance between us and that fucking towelhead" kind of appreciation.

Was his death quick, or was it painful? If I had to guess, it was very quick, but I could be wrong. He very well could have been thrown away from the explosion by the pressure wave, like you see on all of those "A-Team" shows where they make a point of showing them stumble away covering their heads with their hands to indicate that they need an aspirin or something--somebody fetch this fucking towelhead an aspirin, for God's sake! (Feel free to nervously-laugh with me here.) This video clip, however, gave us no indication of whether he made it to the aspirin stand nearby, the aspirin stand that is no-doubt completely unharmed because of how smart our bombs are.

One might say this is killing, but not murder, hearkening to that loophole-type language from Exodus. One might get away with that if we can show that this particular death was justified somehow. You know, if this specific guy can be compared to the rhetorical-device crackhead that breaks into your hypothetical house brandishing a hypothetical gun and you must kill him or be killed--or worse yet kill him or he kills somebody you love. Can I make that case, specifically with our running-man-in-desperate-need-of-an-aspirin? No, I cannot. In fact, in this story, I more resemble that crackhead with a gun than does the running-man in this video.

Well, we might say that running-man is an extension of Hussein, and his death was necessary to get Hussein to stop making WMD's and to be more cooperative with UNSCOM inspectors. On top of not helping soothe me much on the whole killer/murderer distinction, this obviously falls flat because it is obvious that running-man's death (or headache) had no efficacy in this regard. Saddam may have been a bit peeved to lose that building, whatever it was and whatever evil things it helped that evildoer to do, but I do not think that Saddam shed a tear for running-man, and reconsidered his actions and strategy upon hearing news of his death. In fact, I think running-man's death, plus the deaths of the 600-2,000+ others, merely reinforced Saddam's hatred and his resolve.

So, running-man died for nothing. I murdered for nothing. That I could divide the 600-2,000 dead by the total force of 30,500 and come up with the figure that I killed only between 1.97% and 6.56% of a single person does not console me. As a single force, we perpetrated murder on a scale that far exceeds any single criminal mass-murderer story I can ever remember hearing about here in the US.

Technology insulated this from me before. My imagination really didn't accuse me of murder directly until now, after reading Tick's book. The greenness and graininess of the video served fairly well to numb me to the reality--as if it was a Hollywood movie, or a video game.

Now I'm starting to consciously feel guilt from my participation in this murder--not so much for the 599 to 1,999 others that died, but for this running-man. He's special. Somehow his spirit jumped through all of that technology separating us and left a mark on my conscience. Somehow the details of his life, his crying family, his fruitless search for aspirin... it all hurdled over these layers of moral insulation and was helped over the last wall by my imagination and I see him--or at least I want to. I want you to as well.

I'm sorry, running-man, for murdering you. Please forgive me. I'm sorry, running-man junior, for killing your father. Please forgive me.

Fuck this technology that tears us apart. Fuck this feeling that I should stop my sorrow for this man because I cannot possibly ever know him to weep for him. Fuck this world's justice that rewards me for mastering that technology and using it for murder, and placing that mastery of murderous-technology on my resume to land a well-paying job and a comfortable life with my wife and son. Fuck it all.

Fuck you, technology, especially for trying to keep this truth of running-man away from my understanding.

Sometimes I wonder what happens when Germans who participated in some aspect of the nazi concentration camps, no matter how far from the actual mechanisms they may have been, wake up to the realization of what they did and what they were a part of. I can imagine it feels a little like my affair with running-man here, although perhaps more acute. I refuse to judge those who tortured at Abu Ghraib because I'm not so sure I would have done a much better job, as an officer, keeping them in line, or even as a grunt--would I have had the moral perspicuity to identify the evil, and the moral courage to refuse? I really don't know. I probably would have, given my track record with running-man, found a way to distance myself from it and participated like a good soldier--just like those who were there did.

Some may say I'm making something out of nothing, and to compare my running-man story to Abu Ghraib or even nazi concentration camps is going too far. But how do these things start? Do you really think somebody wakes up in the morning to commit an atrocity and pull off a conspiracy? No--it's not like that at all. Conspiracies take place slowly, and they build up little-piece by little-piece, and like a frog who sits in a pot that is slowly heated to a boil, we don't notice until it is too late what is happening, if we notice at all.

Running-man is not insignificant. That we "only" killed 600-2,000 people in that conflict does not make it "less" evil than killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.

A million people are killed one running-man at a time.


Peace.