Sign this petition

From the petition:

Children have the right to their own thoughts, including their thoughts on religion. Because of religious hegemony around the world, children are herded into temples, churches, and synagogues without their consent and forced to endure dogma and superstition. The decision to take up a religion or remain free of religion belongs to an adult mind fully aware of the consequences such a decision will have. Usurping the right of a child to remain free of religion until they are adults is unethical, no matter the motivation of a parent.

Here’s the link: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stop_forcing_faith/?e

Philosophy as Science and Art

Philosophy as a discipline is often criticized for being purely speculative, totally abstract and without practical application. The philosopher is one who simply thinks, while contributing nothing of any practical value to society.

This is obviously a misconception, and herein, I wish to explore why, by looking at philosophy both as science and art.

Philosophy as Art

Art is a broad subject. It spans eons, cultures, and formats and has few defined boundaries. Admittedly, I know very little about art. I would argue, however, that one of the central tenants of the discipline is meaning.

It is hard to picture an object of art being considered art if it were not endowed with some meaning or significance. Le Penseur, or “The Thinker,” for instance, can be seen as depicting man’s mental struggle in the search for truth; it has the capacity to produce certain ideas to which the observer can relate. This is both the artist’s skill in crafting a work with this capacity, as well as the observer’s ability to find meaning in what would otherwise be a chiseled slab.

What makes art great, perhaps, is its level of significance to observers. If I take a snapshot of my front yard, it has a small amount of significance for me: it is my yard, after all. To anyone else, though, it’s merely a picture of an unkempt lawn, which carries little meaning. The observer also finds it difficult to find his own meaning in such a snapshot. What gives rise to this capacity for significance, I’m not sure, but it’s clear that it relates in some way to what makes art important.

Philosophy, in the broadest sense, is the search for truth. While philosophical works lack the capacity for interpretation that is inherent in works of art, the discipline is the epitome of the search for meaning. Philosophy is the organized search for meaning and truth, and the expression and distillation of that meaning in the purest form possible. Perhaps philosophy then stands at the pinnacle of artistic pursuits; philosophy is the crystallization of artistic expression.

Philosophy as Science

Science, on the other hand, is concerned with the material world, and with the systematic discovery of certainty within that world. This might seem to be the complete opposite of philosophy, which tends towards the abstract, reasoned evaluation of things, rather than empirical data.

However, philosophy seems to me to be science taken to new levels. All branches of science take it as self-evident that our senses don’t deceive us in their representation of an outside world. Given this premise, science seeks to explain phenomena that the senses present. We see, for example, that things fall to the ground when we drop them. Science asks, why? Philosophy, then, is the next level of inquiry; it asks, for instance, how do we know that things fall to the ground when dropped? Can we be sure of the existence of objects, or of the ground? What sort of thing is a physical object?

The same rigor that’s present in science, of testing and retesting hypotheses, is also present in philosophy. Various theories are debated. The unsatisfactory ones are discarded, and the more secure ones are retained. Over time, we can indeed see that progress has been made.

Philosophy’s not simply abstract theoretical speculation. It’s just as rigorous as science, just as meaningful as art, and a decidedly important discipline.

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Incoherencies in the book, “How Do You Spell God?”

I do not like this book very much at all, for the following reasons.

A religion is a bunch of big answers to the really big questions.

Okay, that’s fine.

[...] religions have real good answers to real big questions.

…That’s not fine. At all.

I would have less of a problem with this if the authors substantiated this claim, but they don’t. They just state it. And it’s patently false.

The way we see it, there are four big questions all the religions in the world try to answer:

1. “What’s our place in the world?”
2. “How can we live the right way?”
3. “How do we pray?”
4. “What happens to us after we die?”

If something answers these questions, it’s a religion; if it doesn’t, it isn’t!

WHAT?! With the exception of #3, this is a patent falsehood. We can amend the last sentence, however, to “If something answers these questions [and such answers are arbitrary and require faith-based belief], it’s a religion; if it [answers these questions (with the exception of #3, which is inherently religious) using sound reasoning to arrive at logical conclusions], it isn’t.”

Sigh. These people need an editor.

Here’s the next gem:

We don’t want all the religions to melt down into one big religion. This would be boring and would make the world very dull. It would be like having [...] just one flavor of ice cream.

No, no, no. This is a category mistake. There’s lots of flavors of ice cream because there’s no right flavor. You’ll notice, though, that there aren’t lots of answers to things like, “What color is the sky?” or “What is 4 times 9?” because with questions like that, there are right and wrong answers. Similarly, the “real big questions” that religion attempts (and usually fails) to answer also have concrete answers. There is no, “What’s your favorite flavor of what happens when you die?” We don’t know for sure what the answers are. We may never know, but that shouldn’t stop us from looking for them.

So, in a sense, the religions should melt together, if they knew what they were doing. At that point, though, it would cease to be called a religion, and would just be a collection of universally agreed-upon facts.

If you live long enough, you will meet somebody who hates religions.

I guess that would be me. Congratulations, reader, you’ve lived long enough!

One of the things people who hate religions say a lot is, “Religions divide people and teach them to hate each other.”

We say a lot of other stuff, too, but we’ll stick with that for now, I suppose.

This is ridiculous, and here’s what we say to people who don’t like religions: “Look around this world! Look at the people who are doing good stuff, the people who are giving out soup to hungry folks, [etc.] Can’t you see that lots of these people doing good stuff have a religion that taught them to do it?”

Not as many as the authors suggest, no. Furthermore, as charity organizations, religious institutions are miserably ineffective, as they have so many irrelevant overhead costs. How many more bowls of soup could we have given out had we not bothered to construct megachurches, marble alters, gold cross necklaces?

Then we say, “Look around this world at the people who are doing bad stuff. [...] Can’t you see that none of these people learned how to do that bad stuff from a religion?”

I’m looking. I’m seeing suicide bombers. I’m seeing holy wars. I’m seeing ruthless manslaughter in the name of religion splattering blood all over the timeline of history. The authors completely failed here.

We know that y ou can be a good person even if you have no religion.

Well, that’s certainly good to know!

[...] The teachings of religion are behind all the good things people do.

Whoa, there. Do I even need to address this?

People can come up with moral values on their own, without the help of religious doctrine. If we have any doubt, we can simply check out, for instance, the Richard Dawkins foundation, or any other charity that is not founded in a faith tradition. The teachings of religion are simply not behind every good thing anyone has ever done, and the claim that they are is quite frankly completely, wholly, and utterly wrong.

[...] when somebody says that religions divide people and teach them to hate each other, you should stand up and tell them that they are full of baloney.

Wait. So we’re saying religion doesn’t divide people… and then we’re calling for religious people to tell nonreligious people that they’re filled with baloney?

“Religion teaches people to love each other! If anyone tells you otherwise, tell ‘em to go **** themselves!!!”

The sad part is, one of the authors has a Ph.D… in philosophy.

The sadder part is, we’ve only made it to page four.

Four Reasons Why Our Political System Sucks

Democracy sucks. Why?

1. Because we elect politicians rather than people who actually know what they’re doing. Our political process is designed for the smooth talker, the pretty face who can convince us that if we vote for them, our wildest dreams will come true. The leaders of our country are invariably more concerned about the next election than they are about the country.

2. Because people who are wrong can still vote. Result: W. Need I say more? I think not.

3. Because one president isn’t enough. In this age of mind-blowingly complicated economic problems, energy crises, and intricate geopolitical interactions, Obama isn’t enough. We need at the very least councils of experts (not politicians) to run different aspects of the country, with perhaps an additional executive council to coordinate them.

4. Because the Electoral College makes no sense. Why do we not have direct elections? Imagine where we would be had the Electoral College not been used to catapault W. into the White House in 2000. Again – need I say more? Nope.

What’s the solution?

I have no idea.