Blog break starting early

I woke up yesterday with a bit of a winter chill or whatever. I've been so healthy since moving north that I can usually shake something like that off in one day, but I still don't feel great today so will take it very easy. I need to be in good shape for the AAP conference, which will be pretty intense if I do the right thing and go to as many papers as possible.

Tomorrow, Sunday, I drive down to Sydney for it. I'll be home on Friday evening. Basically, expect silence for the next week or so.

AAP conference coming up

With the AAP conference in Sydney occupying the whole of next week, I'll be on a blog break soon. Just some advance warning here. The program looks pretty interesting; I just need to get myself sufficiently on human-being time, rather than vampire time, to make sure I get to as many papers as I can. Having my own paper on at 9 am on Tuesday may help with that.

Incidentally, it seems that the metaethical position that I have argued for on this blog and hinted at in, for example, my piece on Singer in The Journal of Medical Ethics last year has been given a name. Or at least a position rather similar. A very recent (2010) paper by Caroline West labels a position much like mine "revisionary moral realism". Okaaaay ...

Getting a good government back on track

Julia Gillard's rhetoric has been that a good government had lost its way, and that she stepped up last week to get it back on track. It seems to me that she has a great opportunity to change bad policies - to show just where she thought the Rudd regime had gone off track. With a huge amount of good will out here in the electorate, she can do a great deal to reverse selected policy directions that were taken under Rudd. This is her honeymoon with the voters, and it shouldn't be wasted.

That doesn't mean she can just go crazy and introduce a whole lot of massive policy changes only a couple of months out from an election (surely it can't be much more than that). But it's going to be awfully disappointing if the main change that we see prior to the election turns out to be making concessions to the mining industry on tax policy. I'm not here to say that shouldn't be done. Pragmatically, Labor has no choice but to negotiate over this issue and get the best deal it can within a reasonable timeframe so it can clear the issue off the books before an election is announced. That's the political reality and Gillard knows it well. Fine. But if she wants to hang on to all those voters who've come back to Labor from minority parties, she's going to have to demonstrate that big business is not the only, or main, beneficiary of the sudden change of leader.

Over the past few days, there hasn't been much hint of that. From my viewpoint, she's still likeable and seems capable, and she still offers hope for the future if she can get past the looming election. But she's playing safe just a bit too much in my book. Yes, Prime Minister you don't want to be the female version of Mark Latham - that's understood out here in electorate land. But a teensy bit more of the vision thing would be nice right now.

Aussies, what would it take for Julia Gillard to clinch your vote?

Roll up here and tell us. Unfortunately, there are signs that she is going to be rather cautious about moving away from existing Labor positions. That's understandable, I suppose. In her shoes, I would be cautious too. With the election about two months away (I'd guess), this is not a time to start looking crazy-brave. She's a realistic politician, and I respect that. Still, it's disappointing to see her expressing conservative views on topics such as gay marriage.

In my case, the real vote clincher would be some suitably strong signal that she's going to back away from additional censorship of the Internet. The Conroy-Rudd approach is dangerous at so many levels, and this is a symbolic move that she could make with little backlash. Numerous people out here in the electorate would be applauding like crazy.

How about it, Prime Minister?

Copenhagen Declaration on Religion in Public Life

No one is being asked to sign this, which is just as well - I am reticent about signing things drafted by others. Still, I wouldn't have too many quibbles about this one, and it's a great document for discussion. (I can think of at least a couple of quibbles, off-hand, and maybe there'd be more if I really thought it through. But they're not huge, and and as with other such documents I'm not posting it for the sake of my quibbles but for info and discussion.)

H/T PZ Myers

=========================
The recent Gods and Politics conference in Copenhagen adopted the following Declaration on Religion in Public Life. The conference was the first European event of Atheist Alliance International, and was co-hosted by AAI and the Danish Atheist Society.

We, at the World Atheist Conference: “Gods and Politics”, held in Copenhagen from 18 to 20 June 2010, hereby declare as follows:

•We recognize the unlimited right to freedom of conscience, religion and belief, and that freedom to practice one’s religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights of others.
•We submit that public policy should be informed by evidence and reason, not by dogma.
•We assert the need for a society based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. History has shown that the most successful societies are the most secular.
•We assert that the only equitable system of government in a democratic society is based on secularism: state neutrality in matters of religion or belief, favoring none and discriminating against none.
•We assert that private conduct, which respects the rights of others should not be the subject of legal sanction or government concern.
•We affirm the right of believers and non-believers alike to participate in public life and their right to equality of treatment in the democratic process.
•We affirm the right to freedom of expression for all, subject to limitations only as prescribed in international law – laws which all governments should respect and enforce. We reject all blasphemy laws and restrictions on the right to criticize religion or nonreligious life stances.
•We assert the principle of one law for all, with no special treatment for minority communities, and no jurisdiction for religious courts for the settlement of civil matters or family disputes.
•We reject all discrimination in employment (other than for religious leaders) and the provision of social services on the grounds of race, religion or belief, gender, class, caste or sexual orientation.
•We reject any special consideration for religion in politics and public life, and oppose charitable, tax-free status and state grants for the promotion of any religion as inimical to the interests of non-believers and those of other faiths. We oppose state funding for faith schools.
•We support the right to secular education, and assert the need for education in critical thinking and the distinction between faith and reason as a guide to knowledge, and in the diversity of religious beliefs. We support the spirit of free inquiry and the teaching of science free from religious interference, and are opposed to indoctrination, religious or otherwise.
Adopted by the conference, Copenhagen, 20 June 2010.

Please circulate this as widely as you can among people and groups who advocate a secular society.

Pretending to be the victim

Here's the final post made at You're Not Helping. Here we see this dishonest little anonymous coward, this person who hid in the long grass and lied and lied about himself and everyone else, actually claiming to be the victim!

Of course we still don't know whether the information given even in the final post is true. That's the thing about fakes: once they are known to be fakes, you never know whether to believe anything they say.

Obviously there are more lessons here than just the one about dangers inherent in anonymity, but that one is a pretty good start.

Death of a blog

The You're Not Helping blog used to be here. The anonymous coward who ran it has evidently removed it, or at least stopped it and put it behind a wall, or something, after admitting that he is one person (not several as claimed), entirely male (not a mix of male and female as claimed), and based in a different place from where he claimed. He also admits that a number of the frequent commenters there, among his cheer squad, were sockpuppets. How embarrassing.

The blog I'm talking about started out looking like it might be, well, helping. It proposed to be a balanced, fair, civil, analytical commentary on the on-going accommodationism debates as they unfolded. It would, we were assured, criticise both sides where merited. At first, it looked as if it might operate like that. There was definitely a legitimate place for such a blog.

But over time it degenerated into vendettas against individuals, unmerited accusations of dishonesty, crazy theories about the wrongs committed by "New Atheists", misrepresentations of views and arguments, and a tone of near-hysterical hostility towards various individuals (most notably, but not solely, Ophelia Benson).

Well, it's gone.

One lesson to draw is about anonymous cowardice. Now, I totally understand that many people need to use pseudonyms so they can express or explore unpopular ideas, or frequent odd nooks and crannies of the internet, or engage in a certain amount of robust interaction with others - none of which might look good to straightlaced current or potential employers (or family members, potential lovers, or whatever). That's fine. Anonymity and pseudonymity have their place. In an oppressive society, they may be very needed - though not so much if you live in Australia or the US or some other Western liberal democracy.

Anyway, anonymity can have its legitimate uses. On balance, it's a reasonable precaution for most people in many situations on the net. But it can also be abused. If you use it to defame real, identifiable people who do not possess vast political power but do have real reputations, families, employers, etc., to worry about, then be careful you're not abusing the privilege of going invisible here on the interwebz. Even if you chose anonymity for a legitimate reason, you may be tempted to abuse it. That may not even be for your own good.

Some of us, like me, don't like using defamation law on principle (though there are limits .. since I think using defamation law is justified in some situations). But even if you're confident that you can exclude defamation law as a factor in what you say, there comes a point where you are simply abusing your anonymity to act like an arsehole. You don't get to use it to harm good, honest people in a way that you'd never do if you had to stand behind your words and take responsibility for them with your real identity.

I can't respect the use of anonymity for that purpose, and I'm glad to see the end of this dishonest blog. Oh, and so much for the moral superiority of accommodationists.

Oh no, those dogmatic atheists

Over at Blag Hag, Jen McCreight blogs about a panel at the recent conference Evolution 2010. One panel, which was devoted to the subject of communicating science, apparently turned into a fest of accommodationism, with warnings to the audience not to offend the religious by suggesting any tension between religion and evolutionary theory.

Now, of course, there are religious positions - such as a strict deism, but also some liberal positions - that do not conflict with science, at least not in any direct way. While I would argue for more subtle forms of incompatibility even between some of these positions and science, it really depends on just what positions we're talking about.

But that's not the big problem in the US if you want to defend science. The big problem is that a very large proportion of the American population buys into fundamentalist positions that are plainly incompatible with science (i.e. the incompatibility does not go by way of any kind of contestable philosophical-scientific argument). E.g., these people believe in a literal creation about 6000 years ago, in the tower of Babel and Noah's flood as historical events, and so on. No matter how hard we try, we can't cover up that at least those positions are rendered untenable by science.

Anyway, Jerry Coyne and Ophelia Benson are already blogging about the issue, in response to Jen's post. Good for all of them. I just want to home in on one point, elaborating something I said in a comment at Ophelia's place. Even my Christian friends should be able to agree with this.

It arises from Jen's report that:

The reason why people feel compelled to do this [back away from critiques of religion] is because religion holds a special status in our society where it can't be criticized, even when it's blatantly wrong. This really came out in the second part of the symposium, which was by a woman from AAAS (I unfortunately missed her name). She said there's no use in including creationists or atheists in the discussion because we're extremists who won't change our minds.

This is sheer stupidity. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there is some kind of spectrum of belief that runs from atheism to Christian (given the context) fundamentalism by way of various moderate and liberal religious positions. This is slightly odd because it's not at all clear what parameter is increasing or decreasing along the spectrum in the way that wavelength decreases as we go from red to violet. But let that pass - maybe we could think of it as a spectrum of decreasing trust in holy books or some such.

Granting that, then, occupying a position at the end of a spectrum of beliefs is completely orthogonal to occupying a position of greatest dogmatism about one's beliefs. In principle, the person in the middle of such a spectrum may turn out to be the most resistant to revising her position. I.e., a person who believes in God but denies biblical inerrancy may be every bit as dogmatically committed to her position as the person who believes in both and the person who denies both. She might be more so. After all, how many people who occupy such a position are really likely to become atheists when they hear the arguments for atheism? How many of them are really likely to embrace a position that the Bible is inerrant when they hear the arguments for that position?

Furthermore, even if this person is not dogmatically committed to her position but the other two (the atheist and the fundamentalist) are … so what? If I am open to changing my mind on some position that I hold, why does that make it less a good idea for me to talk to people with different but more strongly-held views? If I'm open to changing my mind, then presumably I am open to the idea that these other people have strong arguments that I ought to listen to. So why not hear the arguments? Why avoid dialogue?

As it happens, fundies do tend to be dogmatic. It's hard to get them to change their minds on anything. They'll perform extraordinary mental gymnastics to preserve their basic position, even though it is so plainly opposed to the core findings of modern science. But that degree of dogmatism has little or nothing to do with where they fall on the supposed spectrum of views. The dogmatism comes about partly because they have an integrated system of thought, and they are very resistant to giving up one part of it – the rest may then collapse! They tend to see themselves taking part in a narrative of history with more-or-less determinate dates for key events in humanity's relationship with God: the special creation of each individual kind of plant and animal; the fall of humanity from grace; the establishment of God's covenant with Abraham; the presentation of the Law to Moses; the sacrificial atonement for our sins when Jesus was crucified and resurrected; and an end time still to come, when Jesus will return in glory, leading up to a final apocalyptic war between good (God) and evil (Satan) in which good will prevail. If you remove any element from this, the whole structure is threatened.

By contrast, atheists, qua atheists, don’t commit to any integrated system of thought. Some atheists might, of course. Some may be committed to, say, a version of Marxism, and they may cling to this as dogmatically as any Christian fundamentalist clings to the Bible and the form of theology that I just sketched. But most atheists involved in the current religion/science debates are not like that: they have views that allow a lot of room for disagreements about the specifics. If they change their mind on one aspect, there's not likely to be a whole structure of thought that starts to totter. Thus, these sorts of atheists may be open to changing their minds on many things - including on just how pernicious or otherwise they think religion (or a certain kind of religion) is. They are most unlikely to resist well-established conclusions from the physical and biological sciences.

What about religious moderates and liberals? Some may not have closely-integrated thought systems, and so they may not feel that they must hang on to every point or else see their whole worldview come crashing down. But some may have such integrated systems of thought. There might well be some whose reason for maintaining religious belief at all depends on certain key ideas, and they might therefore be reluctant to give these up or even examine them critically.

Whether someone is locked in to an integrated system of thought that has little flexibility in its joints really does depend on what she actually thinks, rather than where she is on some spectrum of bible acceptance or scepticism. Yes, some atheists could have an emotional commitment to some total system of thought, and this might make them dogmatic, but that is not because they are (for example) less inclined than moderate or liberal Christians to take the Bible as authoritative.

I’m not suggesting that it’s only a matter of how integrated your system of thought might be. There may be other issues, such as just how emotionally invested you are in your system of thought and how much seems to be at stake. If you think that changing anything will put your spiritual salvation at risk, you may be more resistant to changing your thinking than if you merely fear discovering that you're wrong. Again, some atheists may be very heavily invested, emotionally, but so may some moderate and liberal believers. There's no reason to think that the latter are going to find it more easy to give up cherished ideas than anyone else. (Conversely, some atheists may not cherish atheism at all, but merely feel driven to it by logic and experience.)

There are many possibilities, but the idea that the people at the ends of the assumed spectrum must be more dogmatic than those in the middle is just wrong. If Christian fundamentalists are especially dogmatic it may be evidenced by their maintenance of a position in flagrant contradiction to science, and it may be caused by commitment to an integrated system of thought with little give, by their sense that the stakes are very high, and maybe by other factors (e.g. if they reached their position through childhood indoctrination). These factors may not apply so much to liberal and moderate Christians, but nor need they apply to atheists. Again, there is just no reason to think that the degree of someone's dogmatism will correlate directly with her distance from the centre of some alleged spectrum of viewpoints.

I feel that I'm labouring a point here. I'm spelling out something that should be obvious. But it looks like the above has to be said, coz someone has been around the corridors of the AAAS bopping people with the stupidity stick.

Jenny Blackford poem in Midnight Echo

"Mirror" appears in the current issue of Australian horror magazine Midnight Echo. As Jenny explains:

"This issue, edited by the formidable Lee Battersby, includes my first published poem since Dolly magazine published a poem of mine that had (quite separately) won the Hunter Valley Research Foundation Poetry Prize (for schoolkids). In both cases, I was 15 or 16. I rush to assure you all that the Midnight Echo poem was written much more recently. I'm glad that Lee apparently decided that I hadn't lost my poetry mojo."

Richard Carrier on defining naturalism

An interesting essay by Richard Carrier in Free Inquiry. The opening para reads:

What is naturalism? As a worldview distinct from any form of "supernaturalism," "naturalism" is the belief that nature is (probably) all there is, and nothing supernatural exists. Of course, the word naturalism can be used in other ways. In the art world, it means one thing; as a special term in epistemology, it means something else; and so on. But as a worldview, as a comprehensive picture of the nature and content of existence, naturalism is the converse of supernaturalism. What does that mean? Attempts to distinguish the "natural" from the "supernatural" often fail on basic requirements of coherence and utility. I predict that all successful attempts will reduce to this: naturalism is the view that everything mental is fundamentally nonmental. That sounds bizarre and unexpected, but it appears to be correct.