Bible autographing is a thing?

Everybody and their grandmother mentioned in the Biblical genealogy of Two Corinithians has by now heard of Trump autographing Bibles for Alabama tornado victims.

This:

President Trump is signing bibles for  volunteers and survivors at a Baptist church in Alabama. pic.twitter.com/9b8VfyZiKF

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) March 8, 2019

is yet another reason this leftist, contra Arlie Russell Hochschild and fellow librulz, doesn't do "listening tours."

And actually, Trump autographing bibles (did he sign the first page of "Two Corinthians"? did he get his "cracker" [of the many crackers there]?) is only half as vulgar and one quarter as irreligious as the people who asked him for the autographs.

And, it's not just "the left" calling Trump out, contra fellow travelers at Red State:

I don’t know who it is a worse commentary on: Trump actually signing Bibles in Alabama, or the people asking him to sign a Bible.  Lordy Moses.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) March 8, 2019

That said, if Obama also did it, even for MLK's family, it's still theologically grotesque in my corner of the world.

But, that's Merikan Xianity, especially Southern style, in my corner of the world.

And, having grown up Lutheran, not Baptist or Church of Christ, even before becoming a secularist, it's not really "my corner of the world"; I just live here.

And, if the "Mammon" of which Jesus warned includes fame as well as money, this secularist, looking from the outside, says it is un-christian. It's also halfway to being a success gospel.

I have little doubt that Episcopalians and Catholics, as well as Lutherans, north or south, would look askance.

Andrew Sullivan hits a new pseudointellectual low

In what I see as possibly his greatest feat of anti-intellectualism since denoting an entire issue of The New Republic to touting the pseudoscientific insights of The Bell Curve, Sully is now hoisting high the old canard that atheists are really religious, too.

I have myself said that Gnu Atheists, in some sociology-type ways, show a mindset similar to fundamentalist-type Christians, and have thus called them atheist fundamentalists. But, I've never claimed that they, let alone non-Gnus, are religious.

He then followed with teh stupidz of claiming religion is in our genes.

Neither one is close to true, in reality. The fact that Sully is arguably a very good representative of the Peter Principle in mainstream media, especially thought and opinion media, on the other hand, is almost ironclad as an argument now.

But, I couldn't let such arrogant, arrant nonsense go unchecked.

Here's a few thoughts I posted on Twitter, with interspersed comment:

Nope on both points
On A., Gnu Atheists are quasi-religious, sociologically, but not metaphysically religious
On B., no, certain genetic-driven tendencies toward imputing agency, or over-imputing agency, is FAR from being in our genes.

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

In short, per his Bell Curve love, on B, Sully seems to be doubling down on the pseudoscience of Ev Psych. A Scott Atran or Pascal Boyer will easily steer clear of this while offering much more plausible theories about the origins of what eventually became religious belief mindsets.

Of course, the second point, that religion is in our genes, is not far different from the "intelligence is in our racial heredity" that .@SullyDish claimed as part of fellating The Bell Curve.

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

From there, it's off to the land of false analogies, refuted by this:

But Andrew Sullivan, .@sullydish, has yet more teh stupidz.
Claiming that a denial of god is the same as belief in god? That's like claiming that evolutionary biologists who deny creationism are the same as creationists.

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

The real problem is Sully's willful ignorance on a fair amount of philosophy. I note that here

And, MORE Andrew Sullivan stupidity. .@SullyDish practices #scientism when he claims science can't replace religion because it's not abt "meaning." Hey, Sully? Way to prove you're willfully ignorant of #philosophy. It can indeed discuss meaning where science doesn't .@mpigliucci

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

and here:

Sullivan gets even worse, himself using the word "scientism" later on after having strawmanned science for not being scientism. And, on issues of "meaning" and philosophy, he misappropriates John Gray while ignoring likes of Hume and Camus from philosophical greats

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

Finally, Sullivan shows his misunderstanding of the political movement he claims to represent.

.@mpigliucci Sullivan gets worse from there. (And, you need to pass this part on to Dan Kaufman.) He goes into "classical liberal" mode and claims that politics without religion is illiberal. https://t.co/vcclblD88m

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

Tosh. Both here and in Europe (and the Anglosphere across the world), many politicians and political thinkers are both classical liberals and irreligious.

The embodied version of the self is real

Is it really true, as people such as Gnu Atheist Alex Rosenberg and a person on Twitter claim, that there is no such thing as an I?

I think not.

I've long believed that Dan Dennett was on the right track, if not necessarily fully right, on subserves and consciousness "bubbling up." I have believed with Daniel Wegner that this means (without supporting determinism) that free will as classically defined by a Cartesian free willer doesn't exist any more than a Cartesian self-meaner. I've accepted any selfhood we have is changing, as well as fleeting to grasp. And, I've long held fast to the validity of David Hume's "whenever I try to grasp myself" idea.

But, the degree to which nailing down an "I" is a hard problem doesn't mean that an I is nonexistent, and contra Rosenberg, it sure as hell doesn't mean that Kandal and other neuroscientists have proven it doesn't exist.

Reality?

It's more subtle than that. No surprise.

It starts with consciousness as embodied cognition. Contra Rosenberg, consciousness doesn't exist in brains but in bodies. Per Dennett's heterophenomenology, I grasp the "I" that is you by seeing you in action. I impute agency by seeing you in action, even if I also accept that the creator of that agency is fluid. The existence of agency is different from the staticness of it. 

Ditto, you grasp the "I" that is me in just the same way. And, we accept the reality of these heterophenomenological determinations through social interactions.

For people who claim no "I" exists, like this guy?

If you knew me yesterday, you no longer know me anymore. I grow daily.#Change https://t.co/X7WWBqjwyC

— Psychology ۞ Pнιℓσѕσρнυѕ ۩ (@PsychologyDoc) November 28, 2018

 

Wrong.

If this were literally true, the following corrolaries: 

1. There would be no "I." (Arguably, there isn't a unitary I, but ... )

2. "You" couldn't know "yourself"

3. We'd arguably be living in a world of mass solipsism

4. None of this is new. See Heraclitus, Hume & Nelson Goodman.

Ultimately, this, like some things, may not be provable by science, but even before this point, Rosenberg is into the waters of scientism. 

And, we don't live in a world of mass solipsism, because we are social animals.

This is another thing that modern neuroscience also misses. After all, you can’t put a family, a Friday night poker game, a Tuesday morning kaffeeklatch or other social groups all in one ginormous MRI machine.

In turn, this is why philosophy of science, or even more, philosophies of individual sciences are needed. That’s why good (better than Dennett) cognitive philosophy or philosophy of mind is needed for cognitive science and neuroscience.

But, Alex Roseberg is like a self-discipline hating philosopher. (He’s not the only one; they do exist.)

The reality, as I see it, is what I was hinting at above. Selves do exist. They exist as individual, embodied-cognition consciousnesses interact with and define each other, and as subselves within those consciousnesses interact with each other.

Not a glitzy definition, but it’s as simple and as straightforward as I can make it.

Attempt to normalize Marxism and Sartre's bromance fails

Retired Wayne State professor of the history of ideas Ronald Aronson, an expert philosophical commenter on Jean-Paul Sartre, including on his friendship with Albert Camus, attempts to rehabilitate both Marxism and Sartre's attempt to rehabilitate it in a new Boston  Review essay.

And fails.

In a nutshell, here's why.


-->

First, Sartre did find a weak point — rather, the weakest point — of Marxism 101, with all of its permutations through Lenin, Stalin, Mao and even revisers like the Frankfurt School.

It’s Hegelian dialectic.

Congrats to Sartre for seeing the main issue that makes Marxism even more a pseudoscience than most theories of economics, since Hegelian dialectic and its thesis-synthesis-antithesis is purely a philosophical idea, and totally unscientific.

BUT! Marxism is not Marxism without Hegelian dialectic. Pull that out, and you're engaging with non-Marxist Socialist theorizing of some sort.

Second, while comparing and contrasting Sartre to Camus, and intertwining them, and saying that Sartre tried to find a third way, Aronson ignores how late Sartre was to the table on criticizing both Stalin in particular and Soviet Communism in general.

Third, Marx ignored, or never thought through, larger economic consumptive problems of capitalism — resource exploitation problems that aren’t part of Marxism.

Peak Oil — temporarily offset by fracking — is one.

Climate change is a much bigger one, as this Boston Review essay notes in passing.

As far as Aronson's book on Sartre and Camus? Without staking absolutist positions on either side, Camus was in general right to reject the use of violence in social movements. And, per some critical reviews of his book (at that second link in the first paragraph), Aronson reportedly butters his bread clearly for Sartre, and for postmodernism that follows to some degree from him. You lost me there.

So Sharon Hill is no longer a skeptic

Sharon Hill of I Doubt It has finally seen the light and is leaving movement skepticism or Skeptics™. She mostly gets the reasons right, though in calling out scientism she doesn't get into larger anti-philosophy attitudes among many Skeptics™ folks who aren't necessarily scientism types. That's you, Barb Drescher. Still haven't forgotten you and your UCSB ev psych-leaning friend.

Too bad Hill herself likely isn't apologizing for fostering the cult of Brian Dunning. Nor does she take note of the likes of me or former top notch Skeptics™paralleler Massimo Pigliucci calling out all the things she has, and more, more than the five years ago that she says was the bottom of the movement.

Beyond her personal role in the sullying of the movement skepticism brand, she's apparently not aware of Jeff Wagg and Naomi Baker's even bigger black eye.

Nor does she look beyond tribalism at other issues involved — money and power. When one makes more than $100,000 a year for running a fairly small nonprofit, oh, like some California libertarian-neoliberal guy and the James Randi Educational Foundation, but not to name names, one has a vested interest in promoting both the brand and the tribalism used to keep it propped up.

Her own part in rebranding I guess includes dumping the old I Doubt It blog for her new website.

That said, there's other funniness in her "I'm not a Skeptic" schtick. She says that movement skepticism isn't hip enough on technology. Really? So, skepticsm is about marketing as much as anything, then? Does she now have a YouTube channel? A "brand"?

It's also funny to see her lack of skepticism toward attention whore Bill Nye and the allegedly "hands on" Neil DeGrasse Tyson, of whom the first allegations against him were already floating around at this time.

If funerals are for the living, I shall not attend: Thoughts, poetry, Schnittke

If funerals are for the living, what then when the living, or one of the living, doesn't want to do to the funeral of a dead relative?

My uncle died a couple of days ago. My dad had the one sister and no brothers, and my mom was an only, so I have just his sister and her husband, the dead uncle as aunts and uncles. The funeral is Tuesday. I could surely get off work, but I am not interested.

I semi-swore to myself after my mom's death, at her funeral, that I would never need to see my oldest brother again, for various reasons. I put the issues of deaths of siblings out of mind as being decades in the future, barring accidents or early cancer or similar.

But, I forgot about aunt and uncle, and now he is dead.

And I don't want to go, and not just because he's is surely going to be there.

I also semi-swore to myself that, other than for possible courtesy visits to church when visiting my sister and her minister husband, that I never would set foot in a church again except to attend a concert or other artistic event.

I have no desire to go there, and, at a minimum, to be a hypocrite, and, at a maximum, be proselytized by my aunt, or her daughter (both former parochial school teachers), or my oldest or second-oldest brothers, with the likelihood from greatest to least being in that order. Years ago, my aunt sent me an Easter card that, in not so few of words, said "You know it's true," about fundamentalist Easter beliefs. A religious funeral among conservative Lutheran Christians is only likely to bring that all to the surface, not to mention that, pre-deconversion, I had been to her church umpteen times and some oldsters there may still know me.

No desire.

If funerals are for the living, I'm not going.

I then, with this adapted from handwritten journaling, thought about a poem. I had been thinking about writing one this afternoon. Hadn't sat down to do that.

Then, just after finishing up these notes, this extended haiku started to work its way out.

Death is for the dead
And life is for the living.
So don't fence me in.

Better yet, I won't
Fence myself by attending;
We're all better off.

Namaste for all —
A word that might well offend
Some others itself.

I touched dad's cold skin,
Satisfied that dead is dead
And shall remain so.

Schnittke's Requiem
Challenges old conventions;
Death is chaotic.

Emotional wounds
I shall not give, nor receive.
They will still result.

We will drift further.
I accept that is the price
Of preservation.

Not the first poem in this general vein. I wrote in the summer of 2017 about a dying secularist friend, and what to say to him, or not.

Does Texas really have that many atheists?

Near the end of its latest poll on the Beto O'Rourke-Ted Cruz Senate Race in Texas, Lyceum reports on the background of respondents, as most in-depth polls do.

There's this, on page 11: NINE percent claim to be atheist or agnostic. That's more than twice as many as who reported as Muslim. Throw out the 13 percent who were either "didn't know" (really?) or "refused," and you're at a little over 10 percent.

Really?

That said, counting 22 percent as either unaligned or third party, Lyceum claimed respondents were otherwise split, 39 percent each on Doinks and Rethugs.

Really?

But, let's get back to those atheists and agnostics.

I'm quite familiar with people misusing these terms to really mean "spiritual but not religious," or "irreligious vis-a-vis organized religion." (I experienced that very personally on Match.com. That particular conversation ended abruptly when the woman at the other end found out what atheism actually means.)

Let's say half our 10 percent falls there.

That's still 5 percent atheist or agnostic.

Let's say that 8 percentage points of the 13 percent refusniks are "nones," as are all 9 percent, in the original number, of alleged atheists or agnostics. Then, one-sixth of Texans are "nones."

That leads me to a piece by Psy Post. Until Friday, it seemed to me to be a pretty good psychology popularization blog and website. John Horgan is among its Twitter followers.

But then it blared: You live longer if you're religious.

Without saying that all we have on that is statistical correlation, not causal correlation, and without, in the western tradition, comparing today's US to today's Europe on that. (Well, it did kind of say that, but after the "blaring.")

Given that the power of intercessory prayer has been disproven by double blinded studies, in fact, we can say that almost certainly, it is NOT a causal correlation.

Add to that the fact that, especially in small towns, "church" and non-church general religious affiliation adds a degree of "community" to life for many people, especially in a place like red-state Texas. Also note that, especially in smaller communities, for those in need, many food banks and other forms of charitable outreach are church-based, or if not so explicit, at least religiously themed.

The only way to do a halfway scientific version of such a survey would be to look at churched vs unchurched people who are both also members of other organizations, like Rotary, Kiwanis, etc. And, you'd have to use more than obits. You'd have to use longitudinal time management research to confirm how often said people actually attended both churches and their social clubs.

And, there's been plenty of empirical research on the reality of a god already.

Speaking of empirical matters, we do also know that, by percentage of respective ethnic groups, more of those atheists are white than black or hispanic, but we also know that young blacks are consciously starting to catch up on leaving church, in part because African-Americans are finding more "secular" leaders willing to speak on "spiritual" issues. Like LeBron. Or Kaepernick. This is even as Congressional Black Caucus leader Jim Clyburn will suck up to Trump as much as those black ministers, to avoid churches paying new taxes.

Anyway, back to the original.

I highly doubt 10 percent of Texans are atheists or agnostics. I think there's probably a mix of bad polling methodology and "nones" using either "atheist" or "agnostic" as a synonym for "irreligious."

Well, stop it!