Itchy Okie trigger finger

http://www.newson6.com/Global/story.asp?s=12320402&clienttype=printable

 

Please read the original interview transcript, linked above, before reading this post.  Without the full context, we run the risk of misinterpreting the words of a man who hopes to be elected to the highest office in Oklahoma.  There have been more than a few bits of disinformation circulating about this particular interview, and so I’d like to try to clear up a few things for the record. 

 

“Keep and bear arms” originally meant, at a minimum, the idea of owning personal firearms and using them in warfare or training.   Assuming, then, that our elected officials are generally familiar with the political terms of art they employ, this means that when Brogdon says “I have the right to keep and bear arms and to provide and protect our families from an overreaching federal government” he means to convey the idea that he perceives a need to arm and train in preparation to slay federal employees.

 

Now, I’m no longer directly on the federal payroll, but I spend the bulk of my working hours directly supporting federal civil servants, as well as Air Force officers and airmen, and I’ve got to say that they are all fairly decent folks.  I’ve also met Mr. Brogdon on occasion, and he seemed like a pretty nice guy.  As a result of these experiences, I’ve a good deal of difficulty imagining him shooting to kill my co-workers on account of their overreaching efforts.  Who, then, are the “out of control” feds against whom Brogdon hopes to prepare a well-trained militia?  Here, one is left to speculate because Mr. Brogdon was not so incautious as to precisely whom his proposed Oklahoma militiamen ought to be targeting.  Nevertheless, it is ominous that the anti-government rhetoric advocating training in preparation for insurrection (once the exclusive domain of marginal radicals) has become so mainstream that even gubernatorial candidates of major parties have no problem going on the record with such talk.

 

There are those who will say that it is premature to link Brogdon’s assertion of the need for an explicitly anti-federal militia to the far-right wing militia movement, but to them I must point out that the rhetoric used is too strikingly similar to be merely coincidental.  Consider, for example, the following quotation from Thom Robb:

 

“You should be in the movement out of a sense of duty toward our children.  Our duty in life is to assure a peaceful life for our children.  There is a war in America today.  In one camp is the federal government…[t]heir goal is to destroy us.  Our goal is to destroy them.  There is no middle ground.  There is only right and wrong.”

 

Notice several elements in common between Robb’s and Brogdon’s worldviews here: Both men divide the world into patriots and their beloved families on the one side and evil faceless agents of federal government on the other; both of them anticipate an armed conflict between these two groups; and both assert the duty of patriots to arm themselves and train for to fight in this conflict.   The notable dissimilarities between these men are that Brogdon has not (yet) claimed that armed conflict is inevitable, and that Brogdon tends to frame the opposing groups in terms of spiritual and ideological purity, whereas Robb focuses on spiritual and racial purity.  These distinctions do not make enough of a difference to comfort me.  How about you?

 

 

 

Steven Pinker at USAO

Last week, the campus of USAO in Chickasha was graced by one of the greatest minds of our time, and for once I can say that (by the grace of one of the greatest wives of our time) I was in attendance and paying attention.  The lecture was rooted in the concepts of Dr. Pinker’s most recent book but he managed to make it significantly more accessible and even more entertaining than the book itself. 

 

One of the highlights was a breakdown of English dysphemisms, their appropriate uses, and the strong emotional reactions that each category conjures up (e.g. revulsion, shock and awe).   Also, a reading of the Congressional attempt to ban naughty words by enumerating all of them. 

Haskell County Monument now officially unconstitutional

The story broke today (via Tulsa World) that the Haskell County monument to theocracy has been denied review by the Supreme Court, effectively making this decision the law of the land. Congrats to the Greens and the ACLU for triumphing over this attempt by theocrats to resurrect archaic religious dicta.

Force-feeding faith to tiny tots

Despite the steaming hot editorial imprecations flowing forth from the BM, it is emphatically not the case that we unbelievers are indoctrinating our children.  This is not a case of pot and kettle, this is a case of the purest tu quoque.  We freethinkers want our children to learn to think for themselves.  We don't just tell them what to believe but rather we try to teach them how to think, how to separate the wheat of rationality and evidence from the chaff of fallacy and myth.  We do this, in part, by exposing them to all sorts of various worldviews and letting them discern for themselves which ones to believe. 

 

A confident worldview, firmly rooted in reality, need not isolate and indoctrinate its children, forcing them to repeatedly intone the creeds that they must needs believe, cocooning them in an echo-chamber of Sunday Schools and  private Christian Academies or home-schools.  We freethinkers allow our children to interact with people of any faith or none, having confidence in their ability to learn to reason for themselves.  We feel free to take them to Christian services, Baha'I services, Jewish synagogues, Wiccan rituals, Humanist/Unitarian services, and anything else we can find to broaden their horizons.  Having seen all these for myself, I can say that few congregations are so pathetic as those which feel the need to constantly reassure themselves (and their children) that the object of their devotion is really real.  Here are some lyrics on point:

 

I believe I believe that God is here
I believe I believe that God is here
I believe I believe that God is here

(Moen, Overstreet; © 1997 Integrity's Hosanna! Music)

 

Offhand, I cannot think of anything more indicative of a deep-seated need to compensate for a total dearth of evidence ("We have ancient books!") than standing and swaying and repeating lines such as these over and over (and over).  I also cannot think of anything more personally stultifying, but I sit through it, gritting my teeth and humming vaguely along, because it is important to me that my children learn to understand the cultural milieu into which they were born, without which they cannot hope to understand why their neighbors behave as they do.  Now, have you Baptists ever showed your children a Dawkins film, in an attempt to expose them to other worldviews than your own?  Ever take them to an Orthodox or Catholic church to witness a liturgical service?  Ever take them to meet the friendly Unitarians or the Soka Gakkai Buddhists at the Gay Pride Festival?  Given them a book by Philip Pullman?  I didn't think so.  You are too threatened by the mere possibility of heresy and apostasy to even contemplate allowing your kids to sort such things out for themselves. 

 

Why is that, exactly?  I suspect it is because you fear you might face the unimaginable "wrath stored up for a man who would obstruct children from coming to Jesus" with which Mr. Prentice so unsubtly threatens his readers.  This should give us all pause.  What sort of Heavenly Father gives his children such an ultimatum?  Love Me or Burn!  This is an abusive father figure if ever there was one.  Somebody call the metaphysical DHS! 

 

Seriously, though, if you Baptists want to teach your children to tremble in fear of a cosmic ruler who fully intends to torture most of his subjects forever for the victimless crime of improper belief, so be it, that is your right as an American.  All we ask is that you respect our right to raise our children to think for themselves, instead of teaching them rely upon ancient documents of questionable provenance to provide all the important answers about life, the universe, and everything.

Contra Plantinga #6 - Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN)

A bit of background reading may be necessary here, because Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) is fairly technical and most people do not intuitively understand probability theory, especially Bayesian maths. Suffice to say that in order for Plantinga’s argument to go through he must show that humans most always form true beliefs about the world [ P(R)≈1 ] and that probability of this happening on the joint hypotheses of metaphysical naturalism and evolutionism is low [P(R|E&N)≈0]. Alas, Plantinga fails to substantiate either of these claims in anything like a rigorous logical fashion. He more or less assumes the truth of the former premise and merely hand-waves his way to the latter. Whenever you see a brilliant logician such as Plantinga eliding the steps to his conclusion instead of outlining a tightly reasoned deductive argument, well, caveat emptor.

A couple points must be made here. Metaphysical materialists cannot assume P(R)≈1 since we believe that all of the (oddly pervasive) talk of gods, spirits, ghosts, magic, chakras, witches, faeries, etc. is all so much bunk. People all around the world make up all sorts of wacky beliefs about disembodied minds and the imaginary forces emanating therefrom, and thus P(R) is evidently nowhere near unity. Moreover, since most religions (with a few interesting exceptions) assert that all other religions make up all sorts of untruths about the world, which are integrated into their devotees worldviews, it seems odd for any religious person to argue that humans almost always form true beliefs about the world. Finally, it should be evident from the overabundance of material at websites such as http://snopes.com/ and http://nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ that we humans are indeed quite prone to all manner of irrational thinking, not least of which an inborn tendency to attribute agency where none exists. Daniel Dennett and Pascal Boyer (among others) have written extensively and convincingly on this latter point, and I commend them to anyone interested in mapping out the bounds of human rationality.

Secondly, while the probability P(R|E&N) is nowhere near unity, it is neither nearly so low as to allow Plantinga's argument to go through. The crucial question here is whether we would expect naturalistic evolutionary mechanisms to select for true beliefs over false ones. This question is not nearly so simple as it sounds (or as Plantinga's treatment suggests) but it should be fairly obvious that it is generally far easier to program a neural network to solve problems of circumstantial adaptation by providing them with adaptive goals and good data than by providing them with maladaptive goals and bad data, as Plantinga suggests. Indeed, if E&N are both true we must expect that adaptive goals (e.g. craving food, avoiding pain) came first and the neurological wiring which allows for holding propositional truths (and hence the possibility of R) came along some time later.

Solidarity with Kurt Westergaard

May the forces of religious fanaticism and censorship drown in the blood they spill. Amen.