Günter Grass hat größtenteils recht und selbstverständlich er ist kein Antisemit. Und wenn er einer wäre, dann wäre es sicherlich nicht sein aktuelles literarisches Unterfangen, welches ihn als solchen entlarven würde. Vielmehr zeigt der bizarre Krampf der deutschen Presse wie erschreckend effektiv die israelische Maschinerie damit war, eine allgemeine Akzeptanz für die politisch perverse Verschmelzung von Judentum und Zionismus zu erzwingen. Aber nicht jeder, der etwas Jüdisches ablehnt, verachtet alles Jüdische und – normalerweise unnötig zu sagen, jedoch nicht zu dieser Stunde: Nicht jede Verachtung von etwas Jüdischem ist irrational, mörderisch, ungerechtfertigt  oder böse.

Das Gedicht von Grass mit selbstzufriedener Empörung zu einem Ausdruck von Antisemitismus zu erklären, bedeutet, eben diesen zu banalisieren. Und während solche Dinge eigentlich von der israelischen Maschinerie zu erwarten wären, welche sechzig Jahre lang versucht hat, die Welt davon zu überzeugen, dass jeder Kritiker der der Staatspolitik augenblicklich zu einem Nazi wird, ist dies von der deutschen Presse, die es besser wissen sollte, unverzeihlich. Hysterischer Philosemitismus ist ebenso gefährlich wie hysterischer Antisemitismus – beide richten sich an einem fiktionalen Judentum aus.

Ich möchte diesen Punkt etwas verdeutlichen. Judaismus ist nicht auf den Zionismus reduzierbar und Juden wie ich selber fühlen sich der langen Tradition des aufgeklärten Progressivismus verpflichtet, der sich zuerst in genau diesem Land durchgesetzt hat und den Prinzipien von Vernunft, Gerechtigkeit, und Gleichheit folgt. Dies steht der  Loyalität, die von einem Nationalstaat gefordert wird, gegebenenfalls antithetisch gegenüber –  so auch im Falle Israels. Kein Jude, der sich über das soziale und historische Erbe des alten Judentums bewusst ist, kann ruhig dasitzen angesichts von Deir Yessin, Sabra und Shatila, der Operation Gegossenes Blei oder Netanyahus drohendem Abenteuer im Iran. Der Tod von Kindern, die Zerstörung von Eigentum und die Entwicklung eines Apartheid-Staates sind unentschuldbar. Und angesichts derartiger Ungerechtigkeit im Schweigen zu verharren, ist nicht bloß eine beunruhigende Lüge – wie Grass meint – sondern eine Komplizenschaft mit Unterdrückung und Ungerechtigkeit.

Solche Äußerungen haben mir eigenartige Kritik eingebracht: Zionisten nennen mich – wer hätte es gedacht – einen Antisemiten. In dieser schönen neuen Welt waren die einzigen Menschen, gegenüber denen ich mich je politisch rechtfertigen und für mein Judentum entschuldigen musste, Zionisten. Ich habe inzwischen verstanden, dass das Schweigen, das Grass nun abverlangt wird, und das auch oft von Juden wie mir gefordert worden ist, im Grunde eine Aufforderung ist, mich von den Prinzipien von Vernunft, Gerechtigkeit und Gleichheit abzuwenden, was eine Abwendung vom Judentum bedeutet. Und diesem Aufruf werde ich nicht Folge leisten, so wie es niemand mit einem politischen Bewusstsein und einem Minimum an Anstand tun sollte.

Schlicht und ergreifend: Grass hat recht. Er hat in vielerlei Hinsicht recht, vor allem aber hinsichtlich der Tatsache, dass unsere Stimmen sich gegenseitig finden müssen, um zu äußern, was jeder längst weiß, was aber von Gerüchten und vorschnellen Beschuldigungen des Antisemitismus verhüllt wurde. Nicht im Gewand des Neuartigen oder plötzlicher politischer Erleuchtung,  sondern eher, um sich gegenseitig Mut zu machen, zu sprechen, wenn die israelische Maschinerie uns fest entschlossen als Kriminelle und Monster abtut, aus dem eigenen Land ausschließt uns beleidigt und beschimpft als die Erben Hitlers. Mit der Forderung an Israel, sich verantwortlich zu zeigen und Gerechtigkeit walten zu lassen, spricht Grass mit meiner Stimme, der Stimme eines Juden. Und falls die Worte von Grass tatsächlich etwas dazu beitragen, den vom Likud  angestrebten Kriegsmarsch in den Iran zu verhindern, wird Grass mehr als ein Leben gerettet haben, was dem Talmud zufolge bedeutet, die ganze Welt zu retten.

Übersetzung: Felicitas Zeeden

The Daily Mail has branded Tony Nicklinson, a British man who seeks the right to legally end his life after having suffered from ‘locked-in syndrome’ for twelve years, a ‘single minded, selfish obsessionist.’ A High Court judge has ruled that Mr. Nicklinson should be able to seek a ‘defence of necessity’ for cases such as his, thus establishing that ‘there are no alternative means by which his suffering may be relieved’ and absolving of murder the doctor who would assist Mr. Nicklinson’s death.

Whilst the Mail’s disgustingly frivolous treatment of a man who would think himself ‘lucky’ to develop cancer so that he could ‘say no to those who would keep (him) alive against (his) will’ does not stray onto the dangerous ground of quasi-religious ‘sanctity of life‘ claims, it does revert to scaremongering talk of dangerous precedents. Kathy Gyngell writes in her article that this is a case of ‘personal ambitions’ being put before considerations of the ‘consequences for society’ and that the judge should not have given his request ‘the time of day.’ Ms. Gyngell apparently belongs to the ‘hard cases make bad laws’ camp. However, what it seems people really mean when they cite this cliché is that hard cases make difficult laws. That may well be the case, but do we really think that it’s easy to draw the line between free speech and hate speech, or self-defence and murder? No. Do we draw such lines anyway? Of course. It seems clear to us that logistical considerations should not determine legal principles.

Besides, whilst there is reason for caution when discussing cases of non-voluntary euthanasia (not be confused with involuntary euthanasia), it is deceptive to overplay the possibility of misjudgment in cases of voluntary euthanasia, as the Mail does in drawing desperate parallels to the uncertainties of abortion. As with Tony Nicklinson, these are instances of people making a ‘voluntary, clear, settled and informed decision’ to end their lives, with such cases having been properly considered for years in Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland and three American states.

It soon becomes clear that it is exactly this ‘voluntary decision’ that the Daily Mail opposes. In a typical case of ‘political-correctness-gone-mad’ hype, the Mail dubs euthanasia a case of ‘rights too far,’ claiming that we are ‘obsessively rights oriented’ and that, in fact, ‘death is not a right.’ The National Right To Life News Today has reacted to this case in the same manner, saying

“We all accept that there are limits to choice. Even in a free democratic society there are boundaries to our autonomy. We are not entitled to exercise ‘freedoms’ that will endanger the reasonable freedoms of others…this is in order to maintain protection for others.”

Let’s first be clear that euthanasia, a ‘good death,’ does not endanger, or even interfere with, the rights of the general population. Secondly, death is a right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that we have a right to life, not an obligation to life. Thus, in the same way that the right to security of person does not deny us the right to put ourselves in danger or that the right to own property does not deny us the right to forgo that property, the right to life should not deny us the right to death. In fact, in exercising our right to death we are precisely forgoing the security of that which is our most fundamental piece of property. If we are to be self-determined, autonomous and empowered to take true ownership of our lives we must also be able to take ownership of our deaths. Furthermore, the Universal Declaration seems to lend support to Mr. Nicklinson’s case in particular, stating that ‘everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself’ and that ‘no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.’ It seems that for the courts to extrapolate Mr. Nicklinson’s right to die from these statements alone would be and act of inference rather than interpretation.

On the contrary, Ms. Gyngell believes it is ‘not for the courts but for Parliament to make a decision’ regarding euthanasia policy. Crucially, though, this should not be a matter of policy. This is a decision regarding rights, not politics, and it is therefore only appropriate that it be made in the domain of justice – the High Court – and not in the domain of party-centric Members of Parliament and unelected Lords.

To oppose the legalization of voluntary euthanasia based on an unfounded fear of complicated precedents and a confusion of a fundamental human right for a matter of political opinion is to make a mockery of Mr. Nicklinson’s ‘intolerable’ suffering, his privacy, his dignity and his right to a self-determined life and death. So yes, Ms. Gyngell and The Daily Mail, we are proud to be ‘obsessively rights oriented’ and to recognise Tony Nicklinson’s right to die.

–ZB

On Tuesday, the same day that Uganda revived its infamous ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill,’ the state of California announced its ban on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional. The very next day, Washington legalized gay marriage.

Many Americans will view these as two more instances of Western Democracy setting an example of progressivism to the rest of the world. However, let’s not forget that gay marriage is still not recognized under American federal law nor that it was only a little over three years ago that Proposition 8 was passed. This bill claims that ‘only marriage between a man and woman is valid or recognised in California.’ Meanwhile, Obama finds Uganda’s homophobia ‘odious.’

The point, however, is not that America is guilty of complete hypocrisy. Indeed, as of Wednesday seven states have recognized same-sex marriage. Moreover, Proposition 8’s referendum originally resulted in a very indecisive ‘yes,’ winning by only 4%. Rather, the problem seems to be that America and the West in general seem confused. Despite the coincidence of these diametrically opposed developments in America and Uganda, it seems that the issue of equality for homosexual couples is not a simple case of conflicting cultural inclinations in which some of the world’s nations take progressive positions and others do not.

In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a coherent or consistent trend, progression or movement in either direction. California’s ruling will undoubtedly be taken to the Supreme Court and the result remains unpredictable. The fact that it will be ‘California families, community leaders…and individuals’ under the banner of local groups such as ‘Protect Marriage’ attempting to undermine the equality that America professes to hold ‘self-evident’ is representative of the ambivalence with which certain people presume they can treat this essential principle.

Equality for homosexual couples is a notion as fundamental as racial or social equality, and should be treated as such. In the same way that history has condemned those communities that responded to Civil Rights movements with complacency, it will castigate our current tendency to subject such intrinsic human rights to the whims of the hoi polloi. As in California and Washington, governing bodies everywhere have the responsibility to legally entrench a commitment to equality. Only then can we sincerely claim to be an example of progressivism in the face of Uganda’s odious homophobia.

–ZB

Related articles

• According to the Pope Gay Marriage Limits Catholic Religious Freedom. (theradicalsecularist.com)

As secularists we tend not to confide in imaginary friends. As thinkers we should avoid engaging in combat with imaginary enemies. This is precisely what Evgeny Morozov should be encouraged to avoid. During a lecture given at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin, Morozov spent a good three hours defending with religious zeal and prophetic tone a balanced understanding of the internet from two imaginary interlocutors.

Ostensively convinced by the echoes of his own voice in the distant walls of the lecture hall, Morozov presented a sagacious strategy for combating the intellectual spectres assailing him. Claiming undisputed superiority over those who claim that the internet is simply a tool of the good and those who claim that internet is a tool for the bad, he cleverly positioned himself between the two and shedding the light of his intellect on us, his audience, he let us in on a remarkable secret. The internet may be more complex than either. The man’s intermittent intellect mounted on a rather rotund ego won the battle almost as a candidate running uncontested. (Against all odds, however, his elusive competitors managed to score a few points, though presumably just for effect) Yet, the victory seemed entirely ineffectual.

The argument ran like this: Those who take the internet to be an emancipatory tool tend to forget that they are participating and tacitly endorsing, if not submitting to, a structure of censorship enforced by corporative “business plan” designers with little or no oversight by the governments under which they operate. Those who take the internet to be a tool of censorship, intellectual homogenisation and intellectual collapse miss the fact that its creative uses and expressive possibilities have been in many ways beneficial.

Yeah, sure. Please pass the butter. Brutal weather, uh?

And then I must wonder. Does anyone actually know anyone who claims the internet to be simply “good” or simply “bad”? Simply a system of repression or a tool of emancipation?  According to Morozov, that is everybody except the techo-educated elites. Arguing against Morozov is a bit like attacking a straw man but I have seen him and despite the dismal claims we can attest to the fact that he is made of flesh and blood. SO let’s just say: anyone who has posted a picture of a wild night in Tijuana on Facebook and has lived to regret it knows that the Internet and all its modalities, methods, channels and nooks have many edges and as such, need to be handled with care.

Facebook and Twitter as platforms of communication have been integral in the implementation and development of political systems. In many ways, they have permitted the development of socio-political spaces for deliberation by expanding the public domain in visible and sustained ways. However, the use and development of political and social activity under these structures have also had a cost—the suspension of privacy, for instance—which in some cases have been moderately to very high.  Not two weeks ago, Twitter activity was used as the excuse to prevent a British citizen from entering the United States. We can only imagine what a repressive system could do with the type of data available on Facebook.

Yet, the internet does something that is visibly revolutionary and which Morozov seems to find just quaint. That is to cement an intermediate space in which neither national governments nor economic interests have free reign on individuals. While this fact promptly shows its limits, it also often–as in the landscape of Arab politics–shows its power. The internet can be the space in which political pressure is exercised. It can force democratic demands upon authoritarian administrations, it can force ethical demands upon corporations and it can, importantly, extend the space of the public domain beyond the confine of the space of the national institutions.

But by the same token, it can be the object of pressure from states, corporations and power groups. The internet is a space where the public domain carves itself in contraposition to all these interests and forces. In and of itself, this emergent public space is not capable of defending itself efficiently from all these forces. Yet, as it has been shown once and again, it is slowly gaining and asserting its power and it is certainly capable of mobilizing each of the other players against each other to protect its growth.

As a good example, we can look at the practices of Facebook. Facebook essentially owns not only the platform’s identity of its users but to a great and ever-growing degree—and this was timidly pointed out by Morozov himself today—their online identity. Your image and semblance, your texts and your thoughts posted on the platform are administered by the company. But more interestingly, your identity as the user of the panoply of sites that now demand or allow access through Facebook is owned and administered by the company.

As a user, the terms of use are changed on the spot and with no consultation. In a few occasions, user pressure has forced the company to revert policies and licensing access. Yet, as the main mode of inhabiting the internet, Facebook users are possessions.

This practice, which has so far been uncontroversial on the internet, would be simply inadmissible in the real world where only authoritarian states by determining one’s identity are also possessors of right to one’s semblance, one’s ideas or one’s production. This should put obvious pressure on the political space in which this corporation lives. The US government should demand that Facebook determines the policies of use by the regulations that determine the freedoms and rights within the state. But besides the fact that this is unlikely to happen, it would surely not be enough.

If Facebook is understood as the space in which the determining rights and duties of their members define their identities across the space of information which they inhabit—albeit, virtually—then users have both the right and the responsibility to demand proper representation and input in the policies of the company. And if this is not attainable, then these should be sufficient grounds for an international body to expropriate Facebook as a ciber-enslaving operation so as to preserve the integrity of rights and responsibilities of its members.

As for Morozov, he would be well advised to use the internet to further his philosophical education. It may help him better understand the way in which the internet is both used and conceived by its users.

–MG

Related articles

• Evgeny Morozov: note to a grumpy pundit (macleans.ca)
• Should Google take the crazy out of the Internet? (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• The New Crisis of European Identity (theradicalsecularist.com)

This is part of an article by George Monbiot originally published in the Guardian UK.  You can find it in its original form in here.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly “different” others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the “critical pathway” from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to “rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order” and “emphasise the maintenance of the status quo”. Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence, this feels hard to write.

It has been reported that a family of three has been charged with the honor killing of three teenage members of the family and their mother.

This is both a cultural and religious problem and it has to be addressed by the political structures where the communities who have seen these crimes take place–muslim by and large–live. The political institutions, from nation to community, are responsible for the protection of their members and the prevention of crimes against women especially when done in the name of political and moral principles.

But more importantly,  religious authorities need to loudly condemn these practices because wittingly and unwittingly their religious programs have been their sources.  The only difference between honor killings in Canada or Jordan and the stoning of adulterers in Teheran, Kabul or Jeddah is the relation between the executioner and its victim.  Surely enohugh, no individual Muslim is responsible for this, those who speak with the voice of religious authority, however, have the full responsibility to stop what their religions started. And there should be no doubt that, what we are seeing is, in fact, the product of religious morality.

As in Judaism and Christianity, it is centuries of the vilification of women in Islam, the vilification of sexuality and the violent enforcement of rules of sexual morality in the political schemes of these religions that produce the atrocity we see in Canada but also in Israel’s progressive public suppression and discrimination of women and the type of verbal diarrhea that falls off of the mouth of the pope every time he discusses gay rights. To suggest, as has been done, that these are the acts of ‘mentally ill’ people is to conveniently disregard the fact that these actions and words are well-articulated, well-calculated and programmed in the very fibers of these religious traditions and practices, independently of denomination.

Related articles

• According to the Pope Gay Marriage Limits Catholic Religious Freedom. (theradicalsecularist.com)
• The sophistry test: A response to Adam Jacobs (theradicalsecularist.com)

Yahoo news reports:

Benedict did not explicitly mention it, but the bishops have complained their religious freedom is eroding in the face of growing acceptance of gay marriage and attempts to marginalize faith.
The pope said many bishops believe that new laws make it difficult for them to object to what they consider ”intrinsically evil practices.”

So it seems that a clear conflict of principles has been asserted. This was something that the more perspicuous members of the Catholic Church had tried to above but here is Ratzinger making it explicit. The rights of those considered deviant inflict on religious freedom. These means that the freedom entailed in rights of sexual minorities cannot be achieved simultaneously than religious freedom. This should help to draw the line in the sand more clearly. We would like to suggest that if the equality of rights in the face of the law, in this case, the acceptance gay marriage, amounts to the reduction of religious freedom, then religious freedom–at least certain forms of it–will clearly have to go.

Related articles

• The New Crisis of European Identity (theradicalsecularist.com)
• The sophistry test: A response to Adam Jacobs (theradicalsecularist.com)

Just the other day, a colleague was telling me that she got a call from a friend in Kifissia, north of Athens, who was telling her of the tribulations of the Greek people in the face of the current crisis. Yet, it is hard to know exactly what may be the shape of the Greek crisis as you walk around Athens or Thessaloniki, especially if you happen to spend a mild winter afternoon around Kifissia. By late December, the Luis Vouiton store in the nieghbourhood is fully operational and other high-end shops in Glyfada—the posh-esque suburb in the south of Athens—are full to the brim with people ready to spend Euros on Prada. While the upper crust of the conspicuous-consumption class in the well-to-do enclaves of capital cities are never the best indicators of the economic health of a country, they are often capable of showing the socio-economic fractures in the fibres of a nation. Neighbourhoods like Kifissia or suburbs like Glyfada are the places where one can go looking for signs of political schizophrenia in any one society. If one is to believe the reports concerning the imminence of the Greek cataclysm, what one sees in the busy streets of Athenian winter are clear signs of a psycho-political meltdown.  The world may be collapsing but wouldn’t it be nice to get one more pair of Pradas before it does?

One would think that the approaching disaster with its presumably accompanying market collapse would make Greece one of the cheapest places in Europe. Not so. Finding a cup of coffee for less than three Euros is a challenge as it is to get a decent meal for less than 10 Euros or so. Sure cheap meals must exist in Hellas, but the sheer number of crowded 4-Euro-coffee houses shows that in the middle of winter with its anaemic tourist scene, Greeks are still willing and able to pay top Euros for their morning drinks and evening Ouzo.

There is yet another curious thing. For a country with a sinking economy, Greece seems to have a remarkable amount of economic refugees. Most of the people spending New Year’s eve at Syntagma seem to have been the foreigners from third world-countries of which just about every taxi driver I came across complained. Egyptians, Africans from Anglophone countries and Bangladeshis and Pakistanis who enter Greece from Turkey can be seen everywhere where low-paying jobs can be found but also selling trinkets in streets and washing car windows for a few coins in the streets.

To the untrained eye, Greece shows no evident sign of collapse. As opposed to, say, Argentina, where the economic crisis was received in the streets and both liquidity and credit disappeared overnight leaving tens of thousands stranded in their own homes without any means to fulfil the most basic necessities, Greece seems to be moving more or less unimpeded but not completely. In some sense, the financial misbehaviour of the Greek system over the past ten years is a good expression of the fact that in essence the country is a third world nation with all the problems—administrative, juridical and practical—germane to one. In many ways, this is somewhat typical of southern Europe. If one has any taste for the exotic incompetence, lack of administrative responsibility and public collusion that sustain bureaucracies and bad administrations one can take a trip to Spain or to Italy. But Greek may be a case of its own.

Yet, the insolvency of the Greek state is not necessarily the insolvency of the Greek people. As the good people of Kifissia, the people in Syntagma seem to also suffer from a compulsion to conspicuous consumption. Not only has the Greek Governments been spending money like drunk sailors but they have sustained and crystallized rampant corruption and with it the growth of a massive state apparatus which now needs to be fed. It turns out that, though hard to calculate, the agreement seems to be that upwards of 40% of the country’s economic output–GDP–depends on the public sector. Yet, it is not social programs what seem to be running dry the state troves and have provoked this massive debt crisis. So the question is, who of these 11 million people has the 340 billion Euros? The sheer size and fact that the Greek public sector has one of the highest corruption problems in Europe–only second to Bulgaria–should start to give us a clue.

Greece’s financial tribulations look a lot like one of those infamous heroin problem which send people into robbery, prostitution and petty crimes to support the habit. The system needs a fix and the dealer has cut Greece off. So if it is not going to be Europe, it will then have to be the Greek people who provide the means.

As in other parts of Southern Europe, many are prone to blame either Brussels or Berlin for the all these months of financial tough love but here is what by most lights ought to be taken as a legitimate question: would Greek tax payers be willing to pay for the endemic corruption and hypertrophic and incompetent apparatus? In some sense, the measures of austerity should be simply read as a shift in the assumption of political responsibilities. Europe should not be willing to enable or sustain the political and financial addictions of the Greek public apparatus. However, neither should be the Greek population. But while blaming Merkel is easy enough and possibly politically expedient, it is also dishonest.

An economic shock capable of pushing the Greek tax-payer into action may be useful and ultimately may be politically critical to fostering a shift towards transparency in the public sector. But this is clearly not something that the Greek tax-payer will be able to achieve by himself. The Greek govt has not only defrauded its international creditors, the Greek government has also defrauded its national stakeholders but its these stakeholders that sit defenceless as the Athenian junkie looks for some cash to score some financial and political assets.

In response to Adam Jacobs’ God Test for Atheist, who makes all sorts of rather crude logical assumptions to impute a hidden commitment of faith to self-proclaimed atheists we would like to offer the following response:

Jacobs writes:

1. Would you be willing to sell your parent’s remains for dog food?

If you answered no, why? As there are finite resources available to us as we plod through our limited number of revolutions on this planet, wouldn’t it be in your interest to maximize them — especially considering that a non-functional carcass provides little to no personal or societal benefit (and is a little unpleasant)? If you suggest that it represents something that was important to you and therefore you are inclined to treat it with more respect I would ask, “so what?” Your notions of respect and importance are subjective, non-intellectual whims that in any case (as we’ve said) are in reality nothing more than tiny electrical blips in your skull and worth far less than cash.

Could it be that subconsciously you suspect that it’s just wrong to do it — wrong in a way that transcends your temporality? If not, and if you would sell your mother’s corpse so that it can be made into pet grub, congratulations: You are an authentic non-believer.

Rather we would like to ask: are your questions reductive to the degree that they create a false dichotomy for the sake of proving a misconstrued point? Would you suggest that giving place of honor to the mortal remains of family members necessarily entails a commitment to the idea of the divine overlooking the fact that honoring the remains of kin fulfills a social function including fostering social structures and emphasizing social–family, community, national–identity? If you answer yes, you are a sophist. If you did not realize it, you are just not very smart.

Then Jacobs asks:

2. You and someone you dislike are stranded on a desert island with a functioning ham radio. One day you hear that there has been a terrible earthquake that has sent a massive tsunami hurtling directly for your island and you both have only one hour to live. Does it make any difference whether you spend your last hour alive comforting and making amends with your (formerly) hated companion or smashing his head in with fallen, unripe coconuts? 

If yes, why? As no one will ever know what transpired and it will soon all be over in any event, what difference could it possibly make what you do in your final moments? I again see only two possibilities for the non-believer — either you suspect that there is an inexplicable but real import to fateful decisions such as these or you have been conditioned to act a certain way — one that is more in sync with the logical conclusions of a believer’s worldview and not your own. As physicist HP Yockey suggested of the materialist’s viewpoint, “if humans are only matter, it is no worse to burn a ton of humans than to burn a ton of coal.” If you answer that it makes no difference whatsoever, then you are two for two (and I am impressed with your consistency).

Rather we would like to ask: do you conflate moral commitments into a necessary belief in a god overlooking the fact that cooperation may have neurological benefits–release of oxytocin, etc–and even a sense of fulfilling the duty of an idea of virtue, even if false? If you answer yes, congratulations, you are a sophist. If ‘ I did not realize’, you are just not very smart.

And finally Jacobs inquires:

3. Is love, art, beauty or morality intrinsically significant?

For those (almost all of us) who are inclined to say yes, the question once again is why? What precisely is the root of their significance? What difference does a painting make? You can’t eat it and it will not help your genes to reproduce (for whatever unclear reason it is that they “want” to do that in the first place). Does it truly matter whether or not you love your children as long as you provide for their basic needs? And if you suggest that love is a basic need that was cleverly “designed” by evolution to help parents to provide for their offspring, then does it matter if you only pretend to love them? Or do you believe that love has an intrinsic meaning of its own — one that transcends chemical reactions and meaningless groping towards cell mitosis? If you do, ask yourself why, as it would not seem to effectively square with the non-believer’s weltanschauung.

If you are willing to define the human experience as nothing more than an arbitrary series of chemicals, atoms and other blind and indifferent forces acting in concert, then at the end of the day, you necessarily concede that human emotion and experience are intrinsically meaningless. What difference, then, does it make if you (or others) choose to completely disregard concepts like kindness, decency and love? The non-believer is duty bound to say that it makes no difference whatsoever, as meaning — in all of its varied splendor — resides exclusively with those who acknowledge its basis. One that is neither blind nor random nor physical.

But int’s it that you reduce axiomatically all experience of pleasure to experiences of the spirit overlooking the fact that they have a socio-political function, a neuropsychological underpinning and a relation to evolution and reproductive fitness even if the agent is not aware of it? If you answer yes, congratulations, you are a sophist. If ‘I did not realize’ you are just not very smart.

Because he was evidently not quite sure if we got the point Jacobs explains:

If you chose the non-materialistic answer to any of these questions (no, yes, yes) you may be more of a believer than you think.

 

Yet we would like to suggest that if generally speaking you tend to think that there are ‘only two possibilities’ for explaining systems of valuation–an invisible friend or a commitment to the greatness of humans as worm-food–then you are just not very smart and we can forgive you. Though we would ask you to stop writing.

Related articles

• The Rabbi Adam Jacobs is a shining example of what happens when your mind gets infected with religion (furiouspurpose.me)
• Atheism is Never Fundamental http://theradicalsecularist.com/?p=206