However dismal or bright the prospects of arriving at truths that correspond to external reality may be, I don’t happen to particularly care about such truths. It doesn’t matter to me whether the assumptions upon which I base my actions correspond to external reality.

You’re lying.

If you didn’t care about objective external reality, then you would make-believe construct a narrative that lets you walk through brick walls, to reach your physical destinations experiences sooner and to coincide with your understanding of the world as a fashionable lie set of ideas rather than a concrete reality.

Meters, elements, energy, wavelengths: all of these are linguistic constructions, collective fictions like the gods.

Hear that, everyone? Those of us seeking nuclear disarmament can just deploy Asa to the weapons facilities. One lecture on how plutonium is socially constructed, and those bombs will become duds by sheer force of imagination. It’ll be a triumph of the will.

The possibilities are endless. Houses bulldozed by Israeli settlers? No problem. Kinetic energy is a collective fiction; Hamas schools can teach pomo physics and the Palestinians will be safe from bullets, rockets, and second-hand American jets.

Get a bad sunburn at the beach? Wavelengths are imaginary! Ultraviolet light is a lie perpetrated by mean scientists on the payroll of the sunscreen-industrial complex. Forget skin cancer, I’m just going to stop encouraging myself to have the experience of radiation.

Proceeding from these assumptions, let us examine this notion of truth. Firstly, as far as I can tell, I have no direct access to “external reality.” I have access only to my experience, which may or may not reflect external reality in a consistent way, or at all, assuming such a reality even exists. Secondly, a proposition must be articulated in language, which, in my experience, does a pretty mediocre job of accurately reflecting my experience. It can be argued that it’s reasonably successful at adequately reflecting experience, but then, adequately for what?

Here’s where the crux of the issue is for me. However dismal or bright the prospects of arriving at truths that correspond to external reality may be, I don’t happen to particularly care about such truths. It doesn’t matter to me whether the assumptions upon which I base my actions correspond to external reality. What matters to me is what sort of experiences they allow/encourage/cause me to have.

Similarly, when it comes to group stories, it doesn’t matter to me whether they are “true” in the correspondence sense, but what sort of existence they cause the communities that hold them to lead.

The definition of belief from which I operate, and from which it seems that Ashley and Storm at Sea may be operating, is, to articulate it extemporaneously, “a narrative or set of ideas that constitute the world in which I live and upon which I base my actions.” In this sense, all beliefs are indeed equally valid.

However, I don’t believe that beliefs should not be criticized. I think that by intelligently critiquing one another’s narratives we produce an increasing number of increasingly complex and nuanced narratives from which to choose, and i like this.

Eric,

Another word for them is Unitarians. Everyone’s right! Now hug your neighbor and let’s all feel good about ourselves.

–the matthew show

This, on the other hand, is just being an asshole. Of course, I respect your right to be an asshole, but preferably somewhere where I’m not. Pity about the internet being everywhere.

But we can both go to a spectrometer (?)and see that the sky one of us terms blue and the other terms green has a wavelength of x length.. That’s an objective raality, even if our subjective perceptions or labels vary.

I see a tree, someone else sees a work of god(s) - objective reality says, it has chlorophyll, requries water and nutrients to grow, etc. An artist sees it’s aesthetic potential, a carpenter it’s furniture making, a bees it’s food potential. But in it’s brute facticity, it is a tree x meters high, reducible to x elements, x amount of stored energy - all measurable, all unchangeable outside the laws of physics.

–phylosopher

Meters, elements, energy, wavelengths: all of these are linguistic constructions, collective fictions like the gods. What’s real, if anything, is those immediate experiences that I communicate as “tree” or “sky.”

Or at least, from my perspective. It’s totally cool with me that you believe in truth and all, but I saw people talking past each other, and that always prompts me to jump in.

On the “real” topic, one of the worst things about this incident (besides the repeated institutionalized rape) is that it will be used as further evidence that relationships that are not monogamous and unigenerational are wrong, bad, unnatural, etc. In fact, it will be used as evidence that other kinds of nontraditional relationships and family structures are also wrong, even though we haven’t seen any homosexual rape cults (that I’m aware of.) And I’m sure the mainstream will ignore the fact that the hallowed institution of marriage itself was a real handy tool for this kind of exploitation. Not that that was what it was designed for or anything . . .

The crackers that do it here in PA pretty much relegate their offspring to dumb and dumber.

The PedoMormons have been doing this for years. It is more that the law enforcement now feels that with Bush soon gone and the next President being Democrat, the penalties will match the crimes. Sheriff Doofus won’t do jack so you to go around his cracker @ss. This means federal and state. In the last eight years, most of the appointees to the federal have been religio-crazies who might not want to put Gawd-fearin’ men in jail. So, when the rapists go to trial, they’ll face Obama or Clinton prosecutors and judges who dare not set the perps free.

Hitchens does represent one part of me, and I’m sitting on it right now. Or is that “resemble”?

I don’t know if biology can answer this, but how do you know that my blue and your blue are the same color? The sky has been labeled blue, so whatever color we see there we will call blue (again, ignoring pedantic exceptions). Yet, my blue could be your green. We could be experiencing different colors, but calling them the same thing and we’d never know.

But we can both go to a spectrometer (?)and see that the sky one of us terms blue and the other terms green has a wavelength of x length.. That’s an objective raality, even if our subjective perceptions or labels vary.

I see a tree, someone else sees a work of god(s) - objective reality says, it has chlorophyll, requries water and nutrients to grow, etc. An artist sees it’s aesthetic potential, a carpenter it’s furniture making, a bees it’s food potential. But in it’s brute facticity, it is a tree x meters high, reducible to x elements, x amount of stored energy - all measurable, all unchangeable outside the laws of physics.

From his essay praising blowjobs–a praiseworthy thing IMO–yet Hitch evinces a nasty attitude towards the women who have (allegedly) blown him:

As one who was stretched on the grim rack of British “National Health” practice, with its gray-and-yellow fangs, its steely-wire “braces,” its dark and crumbly fillings, and its shriveled and bleeding gums, I can remember barely daring to smile when I first set foot in the New World. Whereas when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue. Good grief! What else was there to think about? In order to stay respectable here, I shall just say that it’s not always so enticing when the young ladies of Albania (say) shoot you a cheeky grin that puts you in mind of Deliverance. [Vanity Fair]

Vanity Fair has, wisely, removed the original essay off their website. See also, Hitch’s essay about how women are naturally unfunny.

On a related note… Practicing evolutionary psychologists have an undeserved reputation for being sexist. I did my undergraduate degree in biological psych in a department that was teaching ev psych before it was a household word. The people I knew who gravitated towards ev psych, including my closest academic mentor in college, tended to be more liberal and enlightened in their personal and political philosophies than your average academic/grad student.

Whatever the implications/sociopolitical context of their ev psych work, I got the sense that the practitioners were drawn to the field because they questioned the received wisdom about sex and gender. It’s probably an unfortunate historical accident that ev psych was one of the few “scientific” disciplines that allowed “serious” inquiry into these subjects at a time when the humanities were burgeoning with opportunities for researchers to explore every facet of human sexuality as a legitimate academic pursuit. In the nineties, eager students who went into psychology to better understand human behavior were being told that human sexuality was a soft, touchy feely discipline that wasn’t a worthy avenue for their scientific aspirations. (This gets into factional and generational arguments within psychology that aren’t really relevant here.)

I’m using the scare quotes because I’m not sure that ev psych was that much more, or less, scientific than a lot of other avenues of research in psychology, I’m just saying ev psych had a cachet that gave some people permission to investigate stuff they were interested in that would otherwise have been dismissed. (Chalk that disciplinary norm up to whatever -ism you like.)

My point is that it’s almost always the crude popularizers of ev psych who inject the nastiness and overt sexism. The worst offenders usually have the weakest backgrounds in the field. The real practitioners, whatever you think of their research, are well versed in the idea that is doesn’t imply ought.

How do you know with dead certainly that nothing exists other than matter and energy? And how can you possibly be intellectually satisfied to answer the question, “what accounts for matter and energy in the first place?”, with the seeming non-answer, “they just exist, that’s all.”

First of all, the only one who has been making definite pronouncements either way is Ashley, who somehow knows that there is more to her than matter and energy. And yet it’s her critics who get accused of “dead certainty”. Funny.

Did you know that the emergence of matter (’virtual particles’) in a vacuum is an observable effect? OK, where did the vacuum come from? We don’t know, but people are working on that! How is this curiosity “dead certainty” and the empty pronouncements about “something more” and “some things are unknowable” aren’t?

And how could anyone possibly be intellectually satisfied with the non-answer “God* accounts for matter and energy. But nothing accounts for God; he just exists.”

(*or substitute a spiritual force of your choice)

I have read both of Sam Harris’s books. The first and most controversial is an embarrassment. He does get in a few moderately skillful digs at the belief in god, but, in general, his ignorance of the specifics of religion is quite woeful.

For example, in criticizing Catholicism, which is a large target, he makes the common mistake (many Catholics make it) of confusing the virgin birth and the immaculate conception. Both are essentially sexist, but then, of course, Harris isn’t interested in gender issues.

Harris also has nothing much to say about Judaism but he does expatiate on Islam. In fact it is his prime target, because the inspiration for his book was the attacks of 9/11. However, he knows so little about it that his primary evidence is a couple of pages from a book by somebody else, which are blood-thirsty quotations, completely out of context, from the Koran. He ignores the similar portions of the bible.