We Should Live - Ben Bateman

You may recall Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who fled to Belgium to escape the misogyny of Islam, only to find that the Muslims in Belgium were as oppressive as the Somalis. She became a Belgian politician famous for denouncing Islam in very specific terms. Members of the Religion of Peace naturally issued a death threat against her, and she had to live under tight government-funded security. But then the Belgians got tired of protecting her, and she recently moved to America to work for a think tank.

Watch this video in which she appears on the Bill Maher show. It’s a little dull at first, but wait until until about 40% of the way through, when the stuffed-suit liberal politician declares that Christians and Muslims have lived together in peace and tolerance for centuries. In her quiet, almost delicate voice, Ali casually bludgeons him into the dirt, effortlessly demonstrating how little he knows about Islam. It’s priceless.

In The Return of the King, there’s a scene where an unconscious Frodo has been captured by orcs in Mordor, and is being held in the top room of a tower. Sam must rescue Frodo, which would ordinarily be impossible. But a fight breaks out among the orcs holding him, and the ensuing chaos allows Sam to work his way to the top with relative ease.

I love that whole sequence, because it shows that evil overlord Sauron has problems, just as the good guys do. Our heroes struggle to awaken their allies to unite and fight against their common foe. The king of Rohan is lost in a magical stupor, while the steward of Gondor is lost to gloom and partial madness. At the beginning of The Two Towers, both nations are weak and directionless. They triumph by building up their strength and resolve.

Evil has a different set of problems. It always has plenty of strength, because the monsters are inherently destructive. But that destructive power is difficult to channel. The orcs and other monsters will just as happily fight each other as they will destroy Minas Tirith. The weakness of Gondor and Rohan is that its forces will go back to sleep if given the chance. The weakness of Mordor is that its army could at any moment degenerate into chaos.

Do you remember US representative Patty Murray? She was the politician from Washington State who suggested in December of 2002 that Osama bin Laden was popular all around the world because he built schools, roads, health-care facilities, and day-care facilities. Leave aside that her claims were false, and that she’s not a very smart woman. The point here is simply that she’s a very, very liberal politician.

But no matter how far you go to the left, there is always someone further left who hates you for not having gone far enough. Ms. Murray may have recently learned that principle while making a public appearance in her district with some police officers. She had planned to dish out some idle claptrap about the importance of law enforcement, but instead was rhetorically ambushed by the far left.

You can watch the video here. Three different moonbats took turns delivering prepared speeches in support of immediately impeaching the president and vice-president, de-funding the war, etc. One asks the police officers at the meeting to arrest Ms. Murray for not doing enough for the cause. My favorite line is when the second speaker, as she is being led out of the room, announces that Ms. Murray is more at fault than George Bush for the horrible crimes in Iraq, because she ought to know better, being a liberal.

I live in the northern tip of Texas, where the last presidential vote went about 80% for Bush. It’s refreshing to see the kinds of loons who inhabit our country’s more liberal areas.

I’m closing out week #2 of the flu, but this observation by Mark Steyn is too good to ignore.  He writes about British abolitionist William Wilberforce who is portrayed in the recent movie Amazing Grace:

Wilberforce’s life reminds us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising. For his pains, his countrymen are now raised in schools where they’re taught that the British Empire was the pre-eminent source of racism and oppression, and they never learn that the single greatest force in ending slavery around the globe were a few Englishmen and the ships of the Royal Navy. And in the end isn’t self-loathing just an excuse for lethargy? To insist you’re inherently wicked absolves one from having to do anything.

The same kind of lies we told ourselves about slavery we now tell ourselves about other parts of the world, and for the same reason – because big changes are tough and who needs the hassle?

The New York Sun reports:

The letter “X” soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.

The new development came with the issuing of another mind-bending fatwa, or religious edict, by the infamous Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — the group of senior Islamic clergy that reigns supreme on all legal, civil, and governance matters in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The commission’s damning of the letter “X” came in response to a Ministry of Trade query about whether it should grant trademark protection to a Saudi businessman for a new service carrying the English name “Explorer.”

I was skeptical of this at first.  With the MSM’s reputation in tatters among those in the know, it’s difficult to know whom to trust.  But the businessman who requested the trademark wrote publicly about the problem over three years ago.  So I think that there’s some reality here.

Recently I wrote about Herouxville, the little Canadian town that officially proclaimed its social expectations as a warning and guide to Muslim immigrants.  The predictable liberal reaction was pure hatred.  But here, as on most topics, the liberals are simply ignorant.  Wahhabi Islam, which Saudi Arabia promotes worldwide with its unlimited petrodollars, is more bizarre than even most politically aware conservatives realize.  Their backwardness keeps us safe to some extent, but the only path to long-term safety from the Wahhabi fanatics is to stop projecting our fantasies onto them (e.g. “Islam is a religion of peace”), and see them as they are.

Video blogger Nick Gisburne has been deleted from YouTube. He tells his poignant story here, unless YouTube pulls that, too. (Non-YouTube backup available here.) Mr. Gisburne is an atheist who has produced and posted about 64 videos on YouTube, and developed quite a following. I assume that most if not all of his videos were critical of Christianity—until the most recent. That most recent one was what prompted YouTube to delete his account and pull all his videos.

And what sort of video would be so awful as to warrant this reaction from YouTube? It was a slide show of verses from the Quran. It had no commentary beyond the title, “Islamic Teachings: Cruelty from the Quran.”

I’ve written several times recently around the theme that atheist morality is deficient, not because it comes up with the wrong day-to-day answers, but because its lack of a comprehensive foundation means that it can’t hold together during the intense moral crises that hit us infrequently but predictably. These crises shatter the intellectual’s comfortable assumptions and thrust him onto an unfamiliar plane ruled by emotion and raw power.

On that plane, the intellectual is nearly powerless. And worse, he barely comprehends why or how he has become powerless. He recites his intellectual arguments like magic spells, and struggles to understand why they fail. YouTube is bigger than Nick Gisburne. It can do what it wants, at any time, without explanation. And there’s not really much that he can do about it.  Like most of us, myself included, he lives in a calm and rational world, where intelligence reigns and people generally do what they should.  But that intellectual world isn’t the real world.  It’s more like a city with a big wall around it.  Mr. Gisburne just got a tiny glimpse of the darkness beyond that wall.
I really feel sorry for this guy, even though I’m sure that his views on religion would infuriate me. I urge you to watch the video (here or here) and feel the emotion that he is going through. Because that mix of panic and bewilderment is precisely what I hope to help atheists avoid.  I’m not against atheism in principle; I just observe that it doesn’t work.

This post explored the lone genius fallacy, where a single highly intelligent person is tempted to believe that he can singlehandedly overcome any intellectual challenge. Today let’s consider a closely related problem: long blind alleys.

Wii Tennis

My son is five and a half, and I recently got him a Wii. This is a new gaming console distinguished by its motion-sensitive wireless controller. Where other game consoles focus on pushing buttons, the Wii’s emphasis is on pointing or swinging the controller, which opens up a whole new range of gaming possibilities. The game that comes with every Wii console is Wii Sports, and the best of the five sports in that game is the tennis. In that game, you play by holding and moving the Wii controller exactly as you would the handle of a real tennis racket.

My son doesn’t yet have enough finger dexterity to mash buttons, but waving the controller around is much more natural. Hence the Wii purchase. But of course he has never played tennis, so it wasn’t obvious to him how one would move the handle of a real tennis racket. So instead, he would wave his controller around wildly and with great boyish vigor, so that his controller was always in motion when the ball came near his player, and he would usually hit it. The game is forgiving enough that a solid majority of these random shots would land inside the other half of the court, so at first he was very pleased–and I was surprised–to see that he could actually play the game.

Frantic random swishing did fine for the first week or two, but I am proud to report that my son wanted to practice and improve. And so I had to tell him The Ugly Truth: He wasn’t going to get any better by randomly swishing his controller with even greater ferocity. While his approach had yielded impressive initial results, it had very little long-term potential. The only way for him to advance further in the game was to back up and learn to play it as its authors intended, with carefully timed single strokes. Only then could he control the angle of his shots, land them in the court reliably, and even eventually learn to control where in the court they would land.

This got me to thinking how common this type of problem is. Let’s call is the long blind alley. Faced with a problem, you take a path that yields good initial results but ultimately has limited growth potential.

School

I loved school. In my younger days I wanted to find some way to stay there forever, safe from the cold, cruel, real world. Now that I’m out, I can look back at it with some perspective. School is obviously very important, and much better than the alternatives for most people. But it has some downsides, too. If you mistake school for the real world, then you get a very skewed impression of the real world. And one component of that skew is the relative scarcity of long blind alleys. (more…)

This story about the small Canadian town of Herouxville (pop. 1338) prompted my thoughts below about socialism. This tiny town is apparently alarmed at the extent to which its neighbors are willing to bend over backward (or forward) to accommodate the demands of religious minorities. So the town council has adopted a Publication of Standards setting out some social guidelines to help immigrants understand what to expect in Herouxville. A sample:

• Women are allowed to drive cars, vote, dance, own property, and walk alone in public places.
• Women are not to be beaten publicly or burned alive. (more…)

Some words drift so far from their roots that their meanings nearly invert. ‘Socialism’ is one of the more spectacular examples.

‘Socialism’ is obviously related to ‘social’ and ‘society’, with the Latin root going toward friendly, genial, allied, associated, united, and living together. And you probably could have guessed that on your own, without looking it up. ‘Social’ and ‘society’ still hold meanings very close to their roots, with ‘social’ having a much warmer connotation than ‘society’. But ‘socialism’ is nearly the opposite.

Let’s not bog down in the multitude of meanings that ‘socialism’ can have. Most of the modern definitions come from Marx and especially Engels, who wrote about it at some length. But they didn’t invent the term; it dates back to the early 19^th century, from Claude Henri de Rouvroy or Robert Owen. I often think of modern liberalism as if it started with Marx and Engels, but reading about those two men shows that those two were only intensifying the ideas left in the wreckage of the French Revolution.

And that point of history helps us see that the historical essence of socialism was not about property transfers, but rather about transforming society itself, that is, changing the way that people relate to each other. That’s where ‘socialism’ originally came from, and it made sense in that context. As this page http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0843146.html summarizes it, “Saint-Simon called for the reorganization of society by scientists and industrialists on the basis of a scientific division of labor that would result in automatic and spontaneous social harmony.” (more…)

This post discussed why it is so difficult for atheists to have robust moral systems. Commenter Bernardo disagrees with me on some specific points, and concludes:

[A]re you proposing that I am incapable of compassion, and incapable of thinking about who deserves what, just because I think the universe doesn’t necessarily has a purpose, probably has always existed, and has probably developed naturally into the world as we know it? How exactly does my skepticism of an unprovable creator hinder my ability to predict the consequences of my actions and to ponder about whether those reactions cause the least amount of undeserved suffering in the world?

And I think that’s a fair statement of the core of the atheist’s argument. Bernardo is obviously a smart guy, and I’m sure that he takes morality seriously. Why, then, would it matter whether he believes in God? Why can’t he pick and choose among the parts of Christian morality that he likes, and leave the rest?

This sort of error is common among the highly intelligent. They frequently believe that they’re infinitely smart, that they can conquer any intellectual challenge. And they generally hold that belief until faced with an actual real-world intellectual challenge. Then they discard the belief, but usually only in that specific area. With all the others, they retain their belief in their infinite intelligence.

I say this from long experience. It took me many years of smacking into a series of immense obstacles to see the pattern: The world is full of immense challenges, each of which is far too large for even the most brilliant person to fully grasp.

Law

My mind immediately jumps to law, which doesn’t clarify things much for anybody who hasn’t been to law school. Law is similar to morality in many ways. On the surface, they’re similar because they deal with similar types of situations. Many immoral acts are also criminal acts, or acts that would subject the actor to civil liability.

Beyond that, studying the law helps one understand the immense range of difficult moral situations that can arise, and the complex ways in which they interact. Law isn’t as simple as saying that it’s bad to kill people. Law is about determining what amount of what type of evidence is sufficient to convict someone of murder. And it’s about what types of killings count as murders, with situations such as self-defense or accidental killings. And it’s about distinguishing between different types of murders, from negligent to premeditated, and punishing them accordingly. (more…)

In a sane country, a large proportion of the news would be filled with segments like this one from NBC, in which the reporter explains that some of our soldiers are unhappy about domestic opposition to their mission. It’s done with a light touch. The interviewed soldiers aren’t ranting, and don’t appear to be particularly interested in politics. They’re just presenting their perspective, in which they are unhappy about being portrayed as fools, dupes, or mindless drones.

But even such a mild dose of reality was too much for William Arkin of the Washington Post. The NBC segment threw him into a rage, and this screed resulted:

I’m all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn’t for them to disapprove of the American people. (more…)