So, here’s the thing. Many of you who know me even a little bit, which is to say, everyone who reads this blog, knows I’m an atheist, and to some extent a socialist - although I have stopped using that label in favor of one less loaded with negative connotations and misunderstandings (I think this week we’re calling ourselves “post-capitalists,” but the title doesn’t really matter; the point is the same, that we believe the capitalist exploitative system must be replaced with a society based on societal cooperation, human possibility, and an end to class-based (or any) exploitation, as well as the end of heirarchy and authoritarianism.) And until now, I’ve been relatively content to let what political discourse I do engage in be mostly of either the satiric or irreverent forms; I feel that it’s both a more effective and less authoritarian position from which to attack things that I find wrong, or in need of fixing.

But enough is enough. These two stories have been building up in the periphery of my news-gathering sources, and today I heard a number of them again, all in a row, and it made something in me snap. (In the interest of credit where credit is due, many of these stories came from the recently-discovered-by-me podcasts run by the Atheist Community of Austin, particularly The Non-Prophets.) So I’m going to be perfectly sincere, straightforward, and open about how I feel about them.

This is going to be a bit disorganized, and I apologize for that. See, the other thing I like about satire is that it’s relatively easy to construct a tight, working criticism of something by ridiculing it; by pointing out how funny a stupid or even dangerous idea can be if taken to the extreme, if exposed for what it really is. But I can’t do that right now, because I’m in something of a rage, and the furthest thing from my mind is laughter. I want to spit on some of the people involved in some of these stories; really, I want to do far, far worse things to them, but I’ll do my best to keep restraint.

I’ll start out with a tame story, and one I heard first, although I don’t believe it comes first chronologically. The story is of Representative Monique Davis, from the Illinois senate. This may be old news to some of you, particularly because Keith Olbermann discussed it on his “Worst Person” segment, and I’ve heard it before, but I’d like now to make a comment. Here is a quick summary for those of you not familiar with her story. Now for the response. FUCK YOU. Even leaving aside the questions of church/state separation, arguably one of the absolute best parts of the United States constitution, a document that while I have some qualms with also has some excellent content, her response betrays ignorance, bigotry, and stupidity. As Olbermann pointed out, Lincoln was a Deist who put absolutely no stock in religion for political matters, but I also honestly don’t care what his religious views were; they’re irrelevant, because the point that matters is that no religious qualification can be held for matters of public discourse, particularly views that have no basis in reality. What is infinitely more important is one of the final comments that Representative Davis made: that it is “dangerous for our children to even know that [atheism] exists.” This position is both reprehensible and an admission of failure. First of all, if the position of religion is so weak that even knowing that an alternative exists is a danger to it, then there is no justifiable reason for believing in it (This in particular is a point that Matt Dillahunty, or as I like to call him, ”God,” made rather well on one of the ACA podcasts). But infinitely more importantly is this, and this is a position that applies to a considerably wider debate: the answer is never less information, or the controlling, shaping, and deleting of information, even when that information is deemed “dangerous” by a group, person, or worldview. Information is never dangerous in a negative way; it is only dangerous to repression, to authority, to thought police and conformity (not to sound too much like a cookie-cutter lefty). Furthermore, the only appropriate response to information that has some destructive potential, or even some negative potential, is proper contextualization. It is through understanding, discussion, examination, and evaluation of information that truth, consensus, progress, and knowledge become reality; it is through information that situations, conditions, freedoms, and rights can be asserted and improved. To say, ever, that it is harmful for someone to know of something, that someone would be better off not knowing something, is wrong, disgusting, vile, reprehensible in every way. It is paternalism, it is oppression, it is thought-policing, and it is horrific. Yes, content should always be contextualized, and yes, content that is not properly understood and examined can lead to false beliefs about what is and is not acceptable (Religion, I’m talking to you here, although certainly not just you) - explaining that video game violence is pretend, explaining why the Grand Theft Auto games are heavy-handed satirical works of art aimed at a mature audience and not murder simulators for teens, explaining why exploitation is wrong - all of these things are vital to any kind of gaining of knowledge, and the gaining of knowledge is essential to any kind of progress in human society.

Next, and considerably more tragic, is the story of a girl who died because her parents refused medical treatment. This is nothing short of murder. I don’t have the lengthy response prepared the way I did with the above, because my mental response is more along the lines of a string of capitalized, italicized, bolded profanities. I will, at the very least, censor myself. YOU MURDERED YOUR DAUGHTER YOU SICK, IDIOTIC, DELUDED, DANGEROUS MONSTERS. MAKING AN IDIOTIC CHOICE THAT RESULTS IN YOUR OWN DEATH IS ONE THING, SADLY ENTIRELY WITHIN YOUR RIGHTS. KILLING SOMEONE WITH THOSE BELIEFS IS NOT.

That’s the end of my specific stories that relate to points I’d like to make. I now want to talk more generally about how I feel about the world, about epistemology, about societal interaction in general. I am an atheist. By that, I mean that I do not believe any claim that I have thus far been presented with about any God, or anything that is not based in the demonstrable, testable realm of reality that we occupy. To an extent, this is a wholly personal matter. It doesn’t need to imply anything other than my personal disbelief, which I have reasons for. Those reasons are simply that there is no evidence, testability, or demonstrability of any supernatural phenomenon that has thus far been raised; furthermore, scientific explanations are in every way simpler than any supernatural theory and are also demonstrable to as near the line of proof as is possible within science. There is no reason to believe in anything but what has been demonstrated and tested; while we cannot and likely will never be able to claim universal knowledge of the universe, its workings, or its causes, there is no reason to believe anything for which we have no evidence, nor any reason to believe that supernatural phenomena of any kind exist.

These are my personal feelings, and I don’t believe that they should be lifted from this page and universally accepted. The closest I can get to an ideal is that everyone who reads them and disagrees with them has a valid reason for doing so, understands that reason, and can and will defend it. If they fail defending it, I’d request a re-examining of their beliefs, just as my own beliefs are constantly subject to evaluation and redefinition.

I do not seek to inject my beliefs into others; I believe that beliefs should not come from anywhere until they have been thoroughly questioned, and indeed that everything should be thoroughly questioned, and whatever survives should be held up as, if not true, then the best working model, always subject to revision. This is key. Nothing should not be subject to revision; there is no truth so firm, no concept so immutable, nothing so perfect that there is no conceivable better form of it; the project of study, of human progress, and of personal belief should be to consistently criticize the current in order to form a better next. This is my fundamental position; everything I hold true can be reduced to the preceding statement: that the best course of action is determined by criticizing the current in order to form a better next.

If beliefs are personal, and must be attained through personal examination, reflection, and study, then why try to change people’s beliefs at all? Why am I writing this, since I will make no claims that my intent here is not to change some people’s beliefs, or more accurately get them to change their own? Because the world you live in, as well as the way you live in it, are shaped by your beliefs. Thus, if you hold indefensible, uncriticized, and for lack of a better term incorrect beliefs, your actions may well be indefensible, in need of critique, and indeed incorrect insofar as they lead to the betterment of anyone or anything. For example, if one believes that there is an immutable, infallible, Divine justice, one might be more lax in assuring that correct justice is meted out by society - in vulgar terms, “kill them all and let God sort it out.” If one believes that one is picked to be special, by God or some other higher power, then one might have disregard for others, in extreme cases leading to racism, bigotry, and even pogroms or genocide (dependent, of course, on other factors as well). If one believes that an afterlife is more important than this life, they might simply waste their life on guilt for crimes or sins they haven’t committed and be stuck with no life to live at all. I am in no position to say these are absolutely correct ideals, but if my analysis of the world I live in is correct (and I have more reason to believe it is correct than incorrect, since everything from demonstrable observation to constant re-evaluation suggest it to be so), then they are.

Furthermore, existence is not and fundamentally cannot be autonomous. I cannot choose which of my actions have impacts beyond my own life and which do not; some of my actions will, necessarily, impact others; indeed, virtually all of them will, essentially the only even imaginable exceptions being basic bodily functions like breathing, sleeping, or masturbating; even eating is suspect, insofar as food may be considered scarce in the global sense. No decision I make about my life as soon as I leave my room, and in some cases still within my room, is free of impacting someone else’s life, and as argued above my beliefs about the way the world works and the rules of the world I live in determine a number of those actions. It follows, then, that the beliefs of everyone else in the world inform their actions, and some of their actions will necessarily impact me. While a simplistic version of this argument could be presented as “I want everyone to agree with me, because that will make my life easier,” its intent is more complicated than that: I want everyone to hold correct beliefs, because if they do they will be more likely to carry out beneficial actions. If they are more correct than me, all the better, because then their actions have a higher chance of being beneficial; but believing that one’s beliefs are correct is meaningless unless it can be in some way demonstrated.

This is where we get into territory about why I live my life the way I do. Not in the sense described in the above paragraph, but in the sense that I feel that the most essential activities a person can be involved in are those of relations with and conversation with and an understanding of human societal relations. The rules of science and the natural world are more or less fixed; we don’t know all of them yet, but we know enough to know that the universe operates according to observable rules, combined with a certain degree of random chance and probability; understanding the world we live in, in the naturalistic sense, is a process of understanding those rules, and it is absolutely essential to the project of making existence better, alleviating suffering, and living better lives, not to mention the intrinsic value of such knowledge.

Human society, on the other hand, does not operate firmly by a set of logics or demonstrable, testable rules. It does not check a formula (speaking metaphorically - of course “nature” does not check a formula either, the formula is an abstraction used to understand the most probable occurrence of how a thing happens), and its experiments should by no means be expected to be repeatable under laboratory conditions. Human societal relations are complex, involved, and in many ways confusing things that rely on incorrect logics just as often as correct logics, are wholly determined by circumstance, and follow no concrete observable pattern. The work of a rhetorician, or political scientist, or sociologist, or soft scientist or humanities student, by whatever name, is to attempt to analyze, understand, and improve these relations, in order that life might be better. To determine what rules are in effect, to embrace the uncertainty and impossibility of codifying human social interaction and to shape and understand it such that a higher percentage of correct beliefs are held and thus a higher percentage of beneficial actions are performed. Much of this project is, of course, determining what beliefs are correct, and this is the work of the harder sciences that study the natural world, as well as the more broad-brush work of softer sciences like economics and political science. The rhetorician (and to a lesser extent the philosopher, who is perhaps to concerned with universals and objective truth) makes it his or her project to understand, spread, and argue for not only correct beliefs, but for a working and workable process by which to come across correct beliefs.

Believe it or not, this is all related. Both of the above stories could have been prevented if time was taken to spread information, to understand information, to critically evaluate both that information and the beliefs of the people involved (as well as, in the case of the murdering parents, human decency). So my atheism is one of those beliefs that I believe is correct, and which I feel I have good reason for believing, but the point of all of this goes further: don’t hold a belief which you cannot justify, and if you must, don’t let it inform your actions, particularly in cases in which it could harm another.

That’s all I have for now.