Sunday is slower...

Sunday was slower, for which I am grateful. I must have wasted at least two hours dicking around on the Internet, being in interrupt mode, and a lot of extra time herding children. After a breakfast of egg, bacon, and cheese sandwiches (my heart! my heart!), we hit the library while Omaha went to the printers' to recover an 1100-page document for some political meeting she had that afternoon. I picked up Guy Kawasaki's Reality Check, which unfortunately hasn't taught me anything I don't already know.

I dropped the girls off back at home, leaving them with Lisakit (poor woman!) while I drove Omaha down to said event.

The big task of the day was the housecleaning. I now have a shower stall that doesn't gross me out, yay!

For dinner, I made pork chops with garlic & white wine gravy, purple fingerling mashed potatoes (which looked a lot like Play-Doh), and steamed "whatever veggies I could find in the fridge": cauliflower, broccoli, and zucchini. It ended up being delicious.

Some days, life is way too busy. This wasn't one of those days, but it felt like it.

Grief, Art Robinson worked with Gary North...

So, there was a lot of buzz about a terrible, terrible interview Rachel Maddow conducted with Art Robsinson, the candidate for the 8th district in Oregon. Maddow tried to get him to either embrace or repudiate opinions Robinson had espoused over the years, and Robinson spent the entire interview calling her questions "sarcastic lies," a tactic he seemed trained in, to the point where Maddow was banging her head on the desk.

Robinson seems to have had an interesting career. He's a PhD. chemist by profession, and had a remarkable opening act working with Linus Pauling, but over the years he's become more and more ideologically conservative, to the point where he's become a global-warming denier, and HIV-causes-AIDS denier, and "Darwin dissenter." (A classic case of crank magnetism, if ever there was one.)

But what caught my attention was that he authored a book with Gary North, the Christian Reconstructionist who believes that the day will come, "by the sword as well as the pen," when America will be a Christian nation, when non-Christian will be unable to avail themselves of the public square, and where witchcraft and homosexuality will be grounds for the death penalty.

North is really careful to never, ever say that he advocates for the overthrow of the US Government, but he's also frank that "politics involves establishing one view of the 'holy commonwealth,' and excluding all other rival views."

The right wing was all abunched last week over one imam's claim that "someday, the flag of Islam will fly over the White House." Both the left and right were inflamed by Markos Moulitsas entitling his last book American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Religious Right, in which he writes that the far right and the Taliban have many of the same aims and goals, and only the residue of the Founding Fathers' Enlightenment values prevents the religious right from really going all medieval on our asses.

But Art Robinson consorts with people who really are as close in attitude to the Taliban as one can be, and still claim to be Christian. Art Robinson wants to put a cross on the White House. Why isn't that outrageous?

[edit] Grief, Robinson's a total wackaloon. He runs a homeschooling publishing and distribution house, and has an essay on the site about how, if the evidence leads to an unbiblical conclusion, the evidence is wrong. "What are you going to believe, this many-thousands year-old book written by goatherders, or your own lying eyes?"

Java humor

I've been getting a lot of calls from recruiters recently. I'm not sure what prompted that, but still, it's nice to know that my skillset is wanted. They keep asking me if I have any Java programming experience, and I have to explain that I don't. (I'm no longer having to explain that Javascript and Java aren't the same thing, thankfully. They seem to have caught on to that, at least.)

A friend forwarded me this: Wikileaks to Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects. I love this part:

Java programmers around the globe are in a panic today over a Wikileaks press release issued at 8:15am GMT. Wikileaks announced that they will re-release the source code for thousands of Open Source Java projects, making all access modifiers 'public' and all classes and members non-'final'. Agile Java Developer Johnnie Garza of Irvine, CA condemns the move. "They have no right to do this. Open Source does not mean the source is somehow 'open'. That's my code, not theirs. If I make something private, it means that no matter how desperately you need to call it, I should be able to prevent you from doing so, even long after I've gone to the grave."

It reminds me, though, of Jacob Kaplan-Moss's observation that when someone says, "We don't have to provide good documentation or a decent API; it's open source, you can do what you want," what they really mean is, "We hate you."

Happiness and Religion are Incompatible

David Sosa, following Nozick's thought experiment on the Matrix, proposes:

Happiness is less like belief, and more like knowledge. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you're mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn't just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.

Michael Kingsley writes about Intellectual Honesty

Intellectual honesty is more demanding: It means being truthful about what's going on inside your own head. To start, you shouldn't say anything that you don't believe is true. But that's just to start. Intellectual honesty means that you have a basis for your belief, that you have tested your belief against other beliefs on the same subject, that you have no blinding bias or, at least, have put bias aside as best you can.

PZ Myers, meanwhile, launched a broadside against dishonesty, starting with the accomodation of science and religion as non-overlapping magisteria:

All the evidence is crystal clear right now: the earth is far older than 6,000 years. Evolution is real, and it is a process built on raw chance driven by the brutal engines of selection, and there is no sign of a loving, personal god, but only billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction. It's not pretty, it's not consoling, it doesn't sanctify virginity, or tell you that god really loves your foreskin, but it's got one soaring virtue that trumps all the others: it's true. ... The word for people who are neutral about truth is "liars". It shouldn't be "scientists". It shouldn't be "humanists".

All of this reminded me of Harry G. Frankfurt's absolutely wonderful book On Bullshit:

The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. ... For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

What's really going on here is simple, though: the vast majority of people put up with bullshit because it pleases them to do so. The very same mental machinery that leads them to the pleasures of religion makes them vulnerable to bullshit. And people put up with it because it's not lying: the person isn't trying to get away with actually portraying a version of reality, he's just trying to make the current situation beneficial for himself.

Which is what religion does. It's a persistent, self-replicating meme with which we have a relationship, the symbiotic value of which is very much in question. It's as persistent as Lactobacillus. The human mind has been built over the centuries to detect deception, but the detectors are weak when it comes to bullshit, because strong bullshit detectors would empty out the churches, mosques, and synagogues in a heartbeat. The human tolerance for bullshit, as opposed to outright lying, thrives because religion needs it to thrive. The human mind shies away from standing out and calling "bullshit!" because to do so threatens one's place in the tribe.

The question remains, just how necessary is religion, how much do we need to thrive as a species? Can we survive with just the cultural stuff, or do we need ritual? Must we keep that ultimate form of bullshit, supernaturalism?

What's most interesting to me is that the premise of Sosa's article (and Kinsley's) is that knowledge "requires the cooperation of the world beyond you," and that happiness is a form of knowledge, not a form of belief.

In Sosa's formulation, happiness requires authenticity, a consensus of the worthiness of what makes you happy. Pleasure does not. If Sosa's right, then religion is a potential source of pleasure, but not of happiness.

Overly long answer to a stupid question...

Dan Gainor (who?) at Faux News writes:

Imagine the furor if a televangelist went on a major TV network and told viewers Christianity would conquer the world and that the flag of Christianity would fly over the White House. Network reporters, Hollywood celebrities and the pundit class likely would seize the moment as an example of the evils of America’s supposed Christian theocracy.

...

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. What did happen is far scarier.

He then goes on to tell his fear-filled audience that Anjem Choudry, an imam from a radical Islamicist group, was interviewed on ABC This Week where he said: "We do believe as Muslims the East and the West will be governed by the Sharia. Indeed we believe that one day the flag of Islam will fly over the White House."

Gainor asks: "Why Did Media Ignore Threat of 'Flag of Islam' Flying Over the White House?"

First, one doesn't have to imagine the furor. It's already happened:

• Beverly Lahaye, of Concerned Women for America: "America is a nation based on biblical principles. Christian values dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office."
• Gary North, Instute for Christian Economics: "The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship."
• Gary Potter, Catholics for Political Action: "When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil."
• Joseph Morecraft, Televangelist: "Nobody has the right to worship on this planet any other God than Jehovah. And therefore the state does not have the responsibility to defend anybody's pseudo-right to worship an idol."
• Randall Terry, Operation Rescue: "Our goal must be simple. We must have a Christian nation built on God's law, on the ten Commandments. No apologies."

Christians have said that, on major TV networks, many times over the past twenty years. The press, not to mention Muslims in far off countries, have hardly gone berzerk.

Second, Choudry is not a US Citizen. He's not even in this country! ABC, to find its One Crazy Muslim, had to reach across the Atlantic to find someone obviously spittle-flecked enough to give such a bizarre rant. It would be nice if we had to go to Europe or South America to find the nearest crazy Christian advocating the overthrow of our current government. Instead, we find them on our own soil, and often given respectful space to air their opinions on Gainor's network.

Third, 88% of this country is Christian. If every Christian thought as one, then yeah, Christians could overturn any facet of the Constitution they wanted, including the First Amendment, and turn this into a country where non-Christian thought is outlawed.

Only 1.2% of this country is Muslim. Even if every Muslim in this country thought as one, a highly doubtful premise, their political clout comes to exactly nothing. The idea that Muslims could effectively, in this or the next dozen generations, affect our policies to the detriment of Christianity's stranglehold on our culture is absurd.

The threat that "someday the flag of Islam will fly over the White House" has about as much resonance with reality as "someday the Elders of Zion will rule America" or "someday, the Gay Manifesto will replace the Constitution." The fact that there are crazy people in America who believe both of these documents to be real (some of them Dan Gainor's readers, given the comments), and fear them, doesn't make them any more possible that Choudry's mad outburst.

[Apparently, I'm in a Usenet state of mind...]