Greene and Pinker, and “Piggy”

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A conversation between Brian Greene and Steven Pinker, two of the current greatest scientists/writers;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how Trump “cares,” and his “piggy” comments;
  • Briefly noted items about how the GOP destroys, not builds; how the Trump administration uses bogus math; Christian nationalism and football games; and how conservatives discover new “rights” to take down Obergefell.
– – –

I have said before that in our modern age knowledge of the world is available to every person, in great detail, in books and in videos and on websites like Wikipedia, and how they comprise detailed understanding of the world far beyond anything captured in the ancient holy books. And there are podcasts, including those by many of the great nonfiction writers of our time. Here’s an example, which popped up on Fb today.

YouTube: What Happens When We All Know? | Brian Greene & Steven Pinker

An hour-long chat between two great scientists and writers. With an occasional ad. I listened to about 15 minutes; it’s largely about ideas from Pinker’s latest book, which I will write up here soon. I seldom listen to podcasts; I’d rather read books. But there are podcasts out there by Sean Carroll, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, and others, some with weekly posts. They’re ways of keeping up with the latest thoughts by the greatest contemporary thinkers, if you’re not inclined to read books. They’re better than listening to sermons.

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How Trump cares. And his “piggy” comment. How has the US sunk to this level? Or: given the excellence and expertise so readily available, as in the above item, why has the US government declined to moronic proportions?

Heather Cox Richardson: November 17, 2025 (Monday)

President Donald J. Trump spent the weekend flooding social media with posts claiming that his economic policies are working and that his 34 felony convictions and the investigations into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russian operatives were illegitimate, and posting angrily about those people calling out his association with Jeffrey Epstein. He even reposted a statement from one of his own lawyers saying, “If Jeffrey Epstein had any dirt on Donald Trump, he would have had great leverage in the criminal case against him at the time he died,” which perhaps conveys a different message than he intended.

Then, after fighting furiously against the upcoming House vote over releasing the Epstein files the FBI collected as part of its investigation into the convicted sex abuser, at 9:15 p.m. last night Trump abruptly reversed course, saying that House Republicans should vote in favor of releasing the files “because we have nothing to hide.” “I DON’T CARE!” he posted.”

But of course, he does care, as is evident from how deeply he fought the release of the files the FBI collected during its investigation of Epstein right up until the final signature on the House discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a measure to require the Justice Department to release the files. As Meredith Kile of People magazine reported, when a female Bloomberg reporter at a press gaggle aboard Air Force One November 14 asked him if there was anything “incriminating” in the Epstein files, he pointed a finger in her face and said: “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy.”

From other sources, apparently his “piggy” comment is a common rebuff to female reporters. Classy as always. Also here: JMG, via Newsweek: Donald Trump Tells Reporter ‘Quiet, Piggy’ When Asked About Epstein Files .

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Briefly noted.

  • Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 17 Nov 2025: The Next Phase In The Crusade To Overturn Obergefell — — Conservatives have now discovered a “right” of children to be raised by heterosexual parents. Would they also criminalize single parents? And their argument admits that gay couples can, and do, raise children. My take: children benefit from having as many adult influences in their lives as possible; it takes a village etc.; but young children have no sense of whether those adults are male or female.
Posted in conservatives, Science | Comments Off on Greene and Pinker, and “Piggy”

Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How Religion Poisons Everything”
(Twelve, May 2007, 307pp, including 24pp of acknowledgements, references, and index)

Here is the fourth, and last-published, of the four books by the so-called “new atheists” published in the mid-2000s. While Sam Harris was an academic, Daniel Dennett a philosopher, and Richard Dawkins an evolutionary biologist, Christopher Hitchens was a journalist and “public intellectual.” It’s worth glancing at the table of contents of his enormous essay collection Arguably to get an idea of his range of subjects. He had opinions about a great many things. He drank and smoked a lot and died at age 62. And he deliberately used lower-case “god” in the title of his book.

There are many videos of him speaking; he is erudite, has a cultured British accent, and can speak fluently on any topic at a moment’s notice, it seems. By the same token, this book reads more like a personal essay than an extended rational argument, chapters detailing historical events endlessly with occasional personal anecdotes thrown in. He’s the least polite of any of the four. Wikipedia has this summary, including the book’s critical reception. (With nits like how he confuses two of the Crusades, without addressing any of his core topics.)

Not surprisingly, many of his topics overlap those of the Dawkins book just revisited. (Imposing religion on children; arguments from design; how the NT is worse than the OT; how religions arise; how art and science reveal more than the scriptures; about Hitler and Stalin; and obviously, how the claims of religion are false.) Unlike the Dawkins, I have not reread this book recently; I’m just polishing up the notes I took back in 2007.

*

Ch1, Putting it Mildly

When author was a boy, it was Mrs Jean Watts who taught scripture lessons, and it was her saying things like “see how God made the grass green, since it’s the most pleasing color” that caused his thoughts to rebel—obviously, she had it exactly backwards. Eyes adjust to nature, not the other way around.

Other epiphanies—

  • If god created everything, why are we supposed to praise him for doing what he did anyway?
  • Why didn’t Jesus heal blindness, not just one blind man?
  • Why all this prayer with no result?
  • Why this anxiety about sex?
  • And a minister would say faith will become important when you start to lose loved ones. What does that have to do with it? How does the truth of religion depend on being comforted?

There are four irreducible objections to religious faith—

  1. It misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos;
  2. It combines the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsis;
  3. It results and causes sexual repression;
  4. It is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

Author says “I am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar conclusion…”

Our principles are not beliefs, based on faith; we are not dogmatic. We are not immune to wonder and mystery—that’s what art and literature explore….  the revelations of science are far more awesome; the Hubble photos. Marx was misquoted (about religion being “the opium of the people”).

Religion is mad-made, and the men who made it can’t agree on what their prophets et al actually said or did. Yet they claim to know *everything*…

Not that author would advertise these views; he’s happy to participate in religious rituals when circumstances require.

Religion is only the beginning of arguments about meaning, of justice; it will never die out, as long as we fear death, the unknown, and each other. It can’t be prohibited. But is the opposite true? In fact, people of faith are happy to plan the destruction of those who disagree with them—

And so the author concludes: Religion poisons everything.

Ch2, Religion Kills

Why is it that belief in a supreme being who dictates the rules of the universe not make people happy? Congregations are seldom happy to revel in their claims; they must interfere with nonbelievers, to have power in this world. Thus Mother Teresa flew across the world to influence the divorce laws of Ireland.

Dennis Prager asked author how he would feel about being in a strange city and seeing a group of men approach him from the down the street. Would he feel safer knowing they came from a prayer meeting? In fact, author has been in such positions, and would feel threatened… as he has in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, and so on.

There was the Ayatollah Klomeini, who issued a pronouncement of death against Salman Rushdie, for writing a work of fiction. At the time, perhaps, he needed an issue. In fact, attempts were made on Rushdie, or on his translators—some succeeded. And the Taliban, destroying ancient works of art. And the 9/11 hijackers were no doubt very sincere in their faith. And Robertson and Falwell, who blamed it on various sins. And so on…

Ch 3, A Short Digression on the Pig: or, Why Heaven Hates Ham

All religions seem to have dietary provisions; what is it about the pig? Author speculates it is perhaps because of their very similarity to humans… even the taste may be that of “long pig”, as roasted human is referred to in New Guinea…

Ch 4, A Note on Health, to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous

Religion is bad for your health. In Calcutta and other Muslim nations, a US/UN campaign to inoculate against smallpox was denounced by religious authorities as a western plot to sterilize the faithful… Meanwhile Catholics spread misinformation about condoms.

Isn’t it interesting that most ‘miracles’ are about healing. Arguments against condoms cite ‘natural’ justifications. Is it natural for a grown man to suck the penis of an infant boy? It is if it’s Jewish – performing a circumcision. No matter how weird or unhealthy, such practices are considered the free exercise of religion. So the Christian Scientists, the Adventists, etc.

Author says by all means allow adults to entertain various weird ideas… but to impose them on children is some kind of sin.

There is the ‘Jerusalem syndrome’, describing those psychiatric patients who wander around that city claiming to be the messiah. We are to take their claims at face value.

Religions claim a monopoly on sexual matters, and are oddly preoccupied with virginity. A category of literature focuses on adults recovering from religious education. And religions seem to focus, even welcome, the end of the world (hardly a healthy preoccupation), from various prophesiers to Left Behind and David Lindsay. Ironically, they would hijack the advances of science to carry out their ends.

Ch 5, The Metaphysical Claims of Religion are False

Obviously, the early faithful were ignorant about the world in which they lived. Any attempt to reconcile their writing with science is doomed to failure.

Deism was at one time a reasonable position, but now it is a childish thing, to put away with childhood. Laplace said his hypothesis about the movement of celestial bodies did not require the idea of god; neither do we; to have faith makes no difference.

We can wonder about how ‘they’ thought in ancient times, but it’s no excuse. Ockham’s razor implies that if a creator is necessary, so is an infinite regress of them. A ‘leap of faith’ has no end.

Ch 6, Arguments from Design

The paradox of religion is the insistence on submission, with the conceit that humans are at the center of things. Humans are solipsistic; superstition is understandable, they are innate.

Author recalls bus ride in Sri Lanka, when a pedestrian was run over, and author dissuaded local authorities, leading other passengers to regard him with some kind of reverence…

Fortunate events are heralded as miracles; unfortunate ones overlooked.

Design arguments range from macro to micro. They betray the same solipsism. Being inspired by the shape of a daughter’s ear. But ears look the same even when their owners are deaf. We like to think the world is suited for us, forgetting the other planets and infinite space.

At the micro end are all the unverifiable and unfalsifiable arguments. Quote Shermer on the eye; it’s not intelligent, there are variants – ospreys have *better* eyes than humans, and some fish have 4 eyes. But details show flaws. Evolution is smarter than you are. Intelligent Design is a tautology.

Evolution is capricious and cruel—species have disappeared, so have human cultures, gone in floods or conquest. Genesis cites beasts but knows nothing of microorganisms.

The Burgess Shale, as written about by Gould, implies that ‘rerunning’ evolution would by no means result in the same outcome. Cites It’s a Wonderful Life; the Galapagos, Voltaire, Sam Harris.

Ch 7, Revelation: The Nightmare of the “Old” Testament

Religion betrays itself by citing revelation, which rather undermines its insistence on faith. Obvious objections: revelations are inconsistent, often come to illiterate people in remote places, etc.

The early books of the bible, called those written by Moses, include the Ten Commandments, which are easy proof that religion is man-made—were murder et al permissible before Moses? How can they demand the impossible—to not even *think* about wanting other people or things? Why didn’t god just invent a different species?

And what was left out—nothing about slavery or child abuse or rape or genocide. In fact, a few passages later, Moses *orders* a slaughter.

Fortunately, we can be reassured that none of these events ever actually took place; they’re fiction. Thomas Paine spelled out that Moses was obviously not the author.. He was referred to in third person, the books allude to events that occurred long after his death. Numbers describes Moses’ command to slaughter all civilians except virgin women. The books are preoccupied with the local—nothing beyond the desert, the nomadic existence.

Ch 8, The “New” Testament Exceeds the Evil of the “Old” One

The gospels are preoccupied with fulfilling the prophecies of the Old Testament, but are obviously hammered together and later tampered with. HL Mencken. The error, made by Mel Gibson and everyone else, is thinking the gospels are history, when they disagree on important matters, and *other* gospels give even other accounts, the gospel of Judas, for example, giving Jesus’ origin as the celestial realm of Barbelo. If that had become canonical, unbelief in Barbelo would have been grounds for torture…

The best argument for the questionable existence of Jesus is the lack of records by his contemporaries; the gospels were reverse-engineered and mistranslated (almah meant young woman, not virgin). Jesus never mentioned his virgin mother; was rude to her. And what about his brothers and sisters? Amazingly, the Catholic church invented the doctrine of Assumption as late as 1951. Thus man-made.

Like the Old Testament, the New is full of astrology and magic, and Jesus’ sayings are oddly absurd—unless coming from a person who actually believed his ‘kingdom’ would come in the lifetime of those who followed him. (thus, ‘take no thought in the morrow’).

CS Lewis’ preposterously argued that the absurdity of those teachings proved his divinity—otherwise he would have been a lunatic. In a sense there’s a brave argument here: either the gospels are literal truth, or the whole thing is a fraud. But the gospels can’t be literal truth…

Another scholar, Barton Ehrman [[ who now writes as Bart Ehrman ]], set out to examine the gospels and discovered sections that were obviously added later—e.g., the story of the woman adulterer who was brought before Jesus, who said let him who is without sin cast the first stone. It wasn’t part of the original gospel…

Only ‘faith’ is left.

Ch 9, The Koran is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths

The Koran grew out of the usual oral tradition among illiterates, and once written down could only be expressed in Arabic. Translation is resisted, and doubters sternly repressed, betraying a sort of insecurity. .. Author describes an incident at a dinner party in DC when someone took great offense over a remark he made about Jesus.

Islam began in the 7th century: Muhammed and the cave; the ‘hejira’. In some sense Arabs felt ‘left out’ of the tradition of revelation, so they welcomed their own prophet. But squabbles began almost immediately, since Muhammed left no succession plan.

There’s some question whether Islam is really a separate religion, since so much was plagiarized from earlier holy books. It demands complete surrender and submission, with no justification. The form of Arabic at the time permitted vastly different readings (i.e. the way vowels and consonants were recorded), and collections of anecdotes about who said what were sifted over the ages, at one point 237 years later an expert decided only 10,000 of the original 300,000 could be authenticated—and then many of those were from other sources, or contradicted each other. One set of sayings were known as the ‘Satanic verses’ because at some point Muhammed decided he didn’t mean what he said, and supposed he must have been possessed by the devil at the time.

Hume had the final word on revelations… (which is easier to believe, etc.). And Islam has never had a ‘reformation’ like the other major religions.

Ch 10, The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell

It’s odd that religions require miracles at all; doing so is to admit that faith by itself isn’t good enough, that something is required to impress the credulous. The things to observe about supposed miracles is how petty some of them seem—tears from a statue, etc.

Hume again expressed the issue: is it more likely the laws of the universe were suspended for one person, or perhaps that they were deluded?

Two examples: resurrection, and UFOs. The interesting thing about resurrections is how many there were in various biblical stories. And in any event, what do they prove? As for UFOs, despite the many accounts and their similarity, never has any physical evidence appeared.

Author had direct part in the church’s investigation into Mother Teresa, first concerning a TV documentary filmed in a dimly lit room, when a technician decided that when the footage came out better than expected, the holy light was the reason. Then the later story about a woman in Bengal who was supposedly cured by Mother Teresa, with all the shady circumstances therein.

Similarly the faithful are anxious about having to explain natural disasters, when no explanations are needed if you merely understand the basics of geology and weather and chance. Yet the faithful are eager to blame this or that sin—take your pick.

Better explanations, via science and art, exist now than anything in the holy books.

Author has some sense of what it’s like to lose one’s faith—his in Marxism eventually gave in to reality. You’ll feel better when you do.

Ch 11, “The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin”: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings

It’s still possible to see new religions arise—the cargo cults of pacific islanders. Later a child evangelist named Marjoe (for Mary + Joseph) Gortner grew up, quit the racket, and made a documentary film exposing the techniques they used—which won an Academy Award, and changed nothing.

Then there’s the Mormons, and Joseph Smith’s discovery of burial mounds and golden plates that no one could be allowed to see besides himself; he ‘dictated’ their contents to scribes, with of course much material lifted from the bible. Dennett wonders if the preachers really believe what they preach. In any case, Joseph Smith had the charisma to play the role, for people in a new territory open to the idea. Mormonism was explicitly racist, until a convenient ‘revelation’ changed church policy. And give it to them for the clever idea of retroactively converting everyone who ever lived, via their genealogy databases—a way to solve the problem of how people who lived before their prophet could be saved.

Ch 12, A Coda: How Religions End

The prime example being the case of Sabbatai Sevi, a 17th century ‘messiah’ who claimed many followers, but who managed to disappear without becoming a martyr; his followers vanished and he became a footnote in history.

Ch 13, Does Religion Make People Behave Better?

Author admires Martin Luther King, but he didn’t preach religion so much as nonviolence. Curiously, the Old Testament brought down all sorts of plagues and punishments on people, but only Jesus mentioned Hell and the concept of *eternal* punishment.

History shows that the morals of the great religions are questionable—both Christianity and Islam endorsed slavery…until it became economically prudent to abandon it. Both sides of wars always claim god to be on their sides.  Islam still condones slavery, for those they consider heathens.

Gandhi is not as admirable; he simply rejected modernity, would have had India reduced to villages and prayer wheels, and let others do the fighting for him rather than taking part in serious negotiations.

So do people need faith? The point is, behavior doesn’t prove anything one way or the other about the ‘truth’ of the faith. Examples.

Ch 14, There Is No “Eastern” Solution

Author once attended an ashram, where a sign said to leave your shoes, and your mind, at the door. Religions of the Orient may seem attractive, but they lead to the same kind of violence… as in Sri Lanka, where suicide murders were invented. Dalai Lama seems mild, but what he advocates amounts to one-man rule, by himself, and his statements are so full of vapid contradiction that they’re ‘not even wrong’.

Ch 15, Religion as an Original Sin

Some precepts of religion are simply immoral themselves. Creation myths, for example, that are simply wrong in light of recent knowledge about the universe.

Blood sacrifice—the idea that slaughtering animals, or humans, accomplishes anything. There are still cults trying to breed the ‘red heifer’, and people kill each other over a cave in Hebron where Abraham supposedly lived.

Atonement—the idea that one person dying 2000 years ago somehow forgives the sins of someone living today—who had no involvement or interest in that event, and is implicated in the ‘original’ sin simply by being alive.

Eternal punishment and impossible tasks—strictures that are mere wish-thinking, often revealing hypocrites who say one thing and do another. Laws that are impossible to obey—coveting goods, merely thinking about adultery is adultery. It makes religions into police states, where every thought and action is watched, or banana republics, where bargains are made to excuse or forgive.

You can’t compel altruism, or it isn’t altruism. You can’t overlook the plain fact that a humans hands reach to the genitals…

Ch 16, Is Religion Child Abuse?

A passage in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a prime example of a preacher describing the torments of hell in order to frighten children. Religion institutionalizes torture, including the traumatization of children.

Abortion is a difficult issue but every step of understanding the issue has been fought by the church. Genital mutilation—including circumcision of boys—is practiced to control sexual pleasure. And ridiculous misinformation about masturbation persists on Islam websites…

Ch 17, An Objection Anticipated: The Last-Ditch “Case” Against Secularism

But, people always ask, haven’t secular/atheistic regimes been just as bad—e.g. Hitler and Stalin? The answer is they were totalitarian societies, which are religious in a sense, with a supreme leader and thoughtcrimes defined to control the private sphere. (As bad as John Calvin’s defining who is and who isn’t saved or ‘elected’ being out of one’s control.)

There is also the point of how the established religions responded to those regimes. The Catholic Church endorsed Mussolini, made treaties with Hitler, and through inaction condoned their regimes; and after the war, the church helped Nazis escape to South America.

While in Asia, Hirohito was proclaimed to *be* god.

Einstein is quoted as praising the church, but the statement is phony; in fact he explicitly denied belief in a personal god, etc. The communists sought to replace religion. But the religious impulse is ineradicable… p247.6: “All that the totalitarians have demonstrated is that the religious impulse — the need to worship — can take even more monstrous forms if it repressed.”

More examples: North Korea, anti-Semitism, apartheid in South Africa.

Ch 18, A Finer Tradition: The Resistance of the Rational

Unbelief has always existed, though until recently it’s been kept largely private. Socrates showed how conscience is innate, and how to mock believers by taking their beliefs at face value. Later: Lucretius, Spinoza in 17th century Holland, cursed for ‘pantheism’; Bayle and Voltaire and Kant, who undid the traditional arguments for god and faith. Writers like Paine and Franklin paid lip-service to religions of the time. Darwin used the words. Only Einstein needed no caution, being explicit about his denial…

Ch 19, In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenment

If we had the alternative to be handed the truth, or be able to search for the truth, we should take the latter. Now we have fundamentalist regime, Iran, about to possess nuclear technology, while creating hysteria over Danish cartoons.

Religion has run out of justifications; we need a new enlightenment, the study of mankind, of science and literature that enable us to know ourselves and our world.

Last paragraphs:

Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifts and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts tht have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first in our history, within the reach if not grasp of everyone.

However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of “progress,” in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. “Know yourself,” said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.

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A final comment of my own. I don’t think his humane civilization will ever development. For centuries, there’s already been a split between those who understand all these things, and those who don’t. The latter are those form whom life is made easier by ascribing to a particular religion, or say they do, without necessarily knowing the complete content of the religion. Many people don’t *care* about the world is about beyond their personal well-being. And if they do care, it’s so easy to say, all the answers are in this or another holy book, period. That explains a lot. That’s why (see Prothero) the more people in some countries know about religion, the fewer they actually believe. And to a large extent it’s an identity, the way being a member of a town or city or descendants from a particular country is… not a matter of an individual choice.

 

 

Posted in Book Notes, Religion | Comments Off on Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great

Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 6

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

(Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; Post 5)

*

Here are glosses on the Preface and 10 chapters of the book, followed by some general comments.

The Preface points out four consciousness-raising aspirations. First, you don’t have to live with the religion you grew up with. Second is the power of ‘cranes’ in understanding the cosmos. Third is the issue of childhood indoctrination, as in assuming a child belongs to the religion of their parents. And four is atheist pride; it’s not something to be apologetic about.

Chapter 1 explains how awe and wonder are available from the wonders of the universe, and how scientists who express such awe are not religious is the supernatural sense. This book concerns supernatural gods. Author is amazed by the deference religion is given, especially in America, and while he’s aware many will take offense by his arguments, he will not go out of his way to offend, yet will speak plainly.

Chapter 2 considers the ‘God hypothesis,’ the plausibility of a supernatural intelligence who designed the universe and everything in it. Polytheism is more common than strict monotheism, e.g. the Roman Catholic church with its trinity and saints and angels. The three major religions all derive from Judaism, the cult of a desert tribe obsessed with sexual restrictions and charred flesh. Paul of Tarsus founded Christianity. Islam added violent conquest. The American founders were deists and secularists. The existence of God is a scientific question, and can be considered as such on grounds of probability. If a god exists who can suspend natural laws it would be a quite different universe than one without. Studies of prayer show no effects.

Chapter 3 considers the standard arguments for God’s existence, and dismisses them as vacuous (Aquinas) or illogical or subjective. The gospels are inconsistent, and only four of them were retained; there were others. Pascal’s wager is about feigning belief. Bayesian arguments can be fudged. Religious people generally believe what they wish to be true. All sorts of rationalizations for the existence of evil. And anyway, who made God?

Chapter 4 takes the opposite perspective, explaining reasons why there is almost certainly no God. Creationists are impressed by the apparent design of the world, but natural selection is the consciousness raiser to explain that, and to explain so-called ‘irreducible complexity.’ Author calls such arguments failures of imagination, or ‘arguments from personal incredulity.’ Arguments from anthropic principles can be explained without resort to gods. And the Templeton Foundation is disingenuous, paying scientists to offer ideas that can be twisted in support of religion. Summary: the appearance of design in the universe is explained by natural selection, a crane, not a skyhook intelligent designer.

Chapter 5 expands the perspective to explore the roots of religion, why it would have evolved, what it’s ‘good’ for. Some ideas invoke group selection to explain why groups united by religion out-survive those that don’t. Or religion may be a by-product of something else, perhaps from the instinctive and necessary gullibility of children to believe everything their parents tell them. Religion appeals to the mind’s tendency to perceive purpose, even consciousness, in inanimate objects. These become ‘memes’ that spread across many minds, with occasional mutations. We can see how easily new religions appear and evolve, from Mormonism, Scientology, and cargo cults.

Chapter 6 considers the roots of morality, asking why we are good. The religious think religion is necessary to be moral, while in fact there are obvious Darwinian explanations for ideas of compassion and altruism. Most people claim they would be good anyway, even if there were no God watching over them. Criminals are more likely to be religious, more educated people less so. How do we decide what’s good and what isn’t? Through various applications of universalist principles and the practical consequences of various behaviors.

Chapter 7 concerns why morals do not derive from scriptures (given the many bizarre things that happen in the OT); how the NT is no better, or even worse; how Biblical rules apply only to the in-group; how the moral zeitgeist has moved on since Biblical days despite religion, not because of it; and how being an atheist is unrelated to people being evil.

Chapter 8 addresses why author is so hostile to religion; why not just dismiss it, like astrology? Because submission to a holy text subverts science, and an understanding of the real world. Examples of blasphemy laws, of attitudes toward homosexuality, of abortion and the conflation of embryos with fully grown adults, of the false Beethoven fallacy, and of how ‘moderation’ in faith fosters fanaticism.

Chapter 9 address childhood inculcation, how children are automatically assigned the religion of their parents, and how this is a kind of mental abuse. How it’s more important to teach children how to think [which is exactly what the parents don’t want them to do]. How the price of maintaining such cultural diversity is the lives of children. How teaching comparative religion, and teaching the Bible as literature, would be valuable.

Chapter 10 is about whether religion fills a “gap” in the brain, providing consolation and inspiration. But atheists are not more depressed than believers, and despite the promise of an afterlife, believers are just as afraid of dying as anyone. And how presuming that the only reason your life has meaning is because God exists is infantile. Science is much more inspiring; our brains evolved in a world of limited range, and science allows is to see a far greater reality.

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Here’s a comment I wrote down upon finishing a reread of this book in 2022:

Honestly, no one seems to spell this out, but the ‘traditional values’ of religious faith and ‘family values’ that place the highest priority on generating as many children as possible, are merely the protocols of the most basic tribal values for perpetuating the species—i.e. for winning the game of ‘natural selection’. The reason people (especially parents) fear homosexuality, is because it reduces potential grandchildren; the reason they fear atheism is because it threatens the social cohesion and common purpose of the tribe. To think that the only ‘purpose’ of sex is reproduction is to limit human experience to the most basic animal functions. To deny the discoveries of rationality and science in the face of religious faith is to limit human experience to the most basic tribal protocols. Is that all being human is? Ironically, in denying evolution and proscribing social roles outside narrow reproductive functions, fundamentalists are being as animalistic as they possibly can be—not transcending their animal heritage at all, but perpetuating it.

Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off on Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 6

Six Seven and Human Nature

Posted on Monday 17 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What does “six seven” say about human nature? Brain rot, or something else?
  • Morality: what should we wish upon people who despise us?
  • Short pieces about cattle, single mothers, Obergefell, Trump’s lying about the economy, Christian nationalism, and Trump’s itch to start a war with Venezuela
– – –

What does this say about human nature?

The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman, 14 Nov 2025: Is “Six Seven” Really Brain Rot?, subtitled “The viral phrase is easy to dismiss, but its ubiquity suggests something crucial about human nature.”

I’ve been hearing about this “six seven” phase for some weeks now. Popular, apparently, precisely because it’s meaningless. Using it means you’re one of the cool kids. But to the essay:

Recently, my wife was texting with a friend who lives in Singapore. The news from the other side of the world turned out to be that kids there had discovered “six seven.” On Halloween, our friend reported, a boy with a handmade “six seven” jersey had earned applause as he made his way through her neighborhood—a place that’s a long way from Sixty-seventh Street in Philadelphia, which the rapper Skrilla may have been referencing in his song “Doot Doot (6 7),” which came out last December. Since then, kids of all ages have been inexplicably entertaining themselves by saying “six seven” at every opportunity, ideally with a lilt on the “seven” and a little wiggly hand motion. My son Peter tells me that kids have been saying it so much in his second-grade classroom—not just during math instruction but throughout the day—that it’s been banned. (He’s under the impression, certainly erroneous, that “six seven” has been prohibited at every school on Long Island.)

“What is ‘six seven,’ anyway?” I asked him, not long ago.

“It’s brain rot,” he said, confidently.

I followed up: “What’s brain rot?”

“It’s random stuff from the internet that fills up your brain,” he said.

Then with some background about the origin of the phrase. And noting that it’s not used online, only used in person.

The senselessness of “six seven” contributes to the impression of brain rot. “It’s absurd and random,” the actress Elizabeth Olsen said recently, on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” This is certainly true—and yet linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists have long known that much of what we say is meaningless. In 1923, in a seminal essay titled “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski observed that, whenever people get together, they talk about a whole lot of nothing. “As much among savage tribes as in a European drawing-room,” he wrote, social life involves a lot of conversation in which meaning “is almost completely irrelevant”: “Inquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things—all such are exchanged, not in order to inform,” and “certainly not in order to express any thought,” but just to create “ties of union.”

I’ve noted this before. What is it people need to talk about so incessantly? “Ties of union”? Hmm…

Could meaninglessness itself be a message? In a recent exploration of “six seven” in the Times, the style reporter Callie Holtermann argues that the phrase might be seen as “a kind of gleeful obfuscation, an effort to be unknowable by a generation that has, virtually since birth, been relentlessly on display.” A writer tells Holtermann that “six seven” is meant “to frustrate the olds”—it’s a way of saying, “Let us exist in our own space.” These ideas sound plausible, but might be too centered on the concerns of adults. When a busload of elementary schoolers shouts “six seven!” between the sixth and seventh stops, are they really trying to say something to the bus driver? “There is in all human beings the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other’s company,” Malinowski writes. Childhood and adolescence are socially challenging. Maybe kids love “six seven” because it makes togetherness easy.

Togetherness easy, hmm..

In “Interaction Ritual Chains” (don’t judge a book by its title!), Collins lays out a holistic theory of human nature, centered on rituals, into which “six seven” fits nicely. A ritual, Collins explains, “is a mechanism of mutually focussed emotion and attention producing a momentarily shared reality.” There are big-time rituals, like communion, and small-time ones, like shaking hands, or dapping up, or standing at the front of a conference room and clearing your throat. These acts—which often involve a physical component—help make gatherings of people cohere. Rituals are “everywhere,” Collins writes, because social life is ultimately “a string of situations” which must be inaugurated, conducted, and concluded.

Rituals! Now we’re getting somewhere.

Rituals do more than lend structure to our days, Collins argues; they also create “emotional energy,” which is something we crave. We want to feel alive, valued, connected, “charged up.” On Sundays, in church, we experience something special when we’re all together, praying; we have “feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action.” We can’t stay in church forever, but its rituals attach their emotion to “cognitive symbols,” which we might later use to extend the good vibes. Church ends; you go home; ordinary life resumes. But, later, you see the steeple above the treetops, and you feel a surge of energy flowing from your fellows and God. “What holds society together?” Collins asks. The answer is “groups of people assembled in particular places who feel solidarity with each other”—and who then find ways of sustaining that solidarity across space and time, using symbols and rituals that help them feel it even when they’re not together.

Religion! Not nonsensical “brain rot” exactly, neither “six seven” nor religion, but both ways of binding, if only superficially, with others.

\\\

A moral quandary. The solution, it seems to me, is to wish on others only what you would have them wish upon you.

OnlySky, Tom Krattenmaker, 17 Nov 2025: Should we want the best for MAGA voters?, subtitled “What are our moral obligations toward people who despise us?”

While chatting with a fellow attendee at a humanist meeting a few years ago, I said something that sparked quick disagreement. Some of my friends were serious Christians, I pointed out, and I had no wish to see them deconvert.

Their faith was important to them, I explained. They practiced it in ways that made them better and happier people. After investing so much in it, losing it would be devastating for them.

“I want the best for them,” I said.

My conversation partner wasn’t having it. Surely, he said, belief in a non-existent God could not be in their best interest. If I wanted the best for them, wouldn’t I want them to know the truth?

Then addressing Charlie Kirk, his wife’s forgiveness of the murderer, and Trump’s disagreement, that he hates his opponents and doesn’t want what best for them.

It’s a cold slap to hear the president speak of me and my ilk with such contempt. Yet can it be said that we want the best for him, and his supporters? And if so, what does it even mean to want the best for one’s adversaries?

Good answers will go a long way toward determining the future of democracy in this country.

The essay goes on. The problem is dealing with what different people think is “best” for them, and for other people. Believers want skeptics to accept Jesus; rationalists want believers to understand the world as it actually is, and how their beliefs are myths and repeated-retold stories.

The writer concludes by advising: stay in touch.

On a personal level, if we interact, stay in touch, and listen to the legitimate parts of our rivals’ stories and concerns, we might even influence them in the long run, as they influence us (gasp!) in our understanding of who they are and where they are coming from with political and cultural stances.

It doesn’t mean we excuse a Nazi tattoo or a Confederate flag, or nod in assent to incoherent conspiracy theories about climate change being a hoax and Democrats stealing the 2020 election. If we “want the best for them,” we want them to be free of toxic falsehoods.

And if we want democracy to have a chance in the decades ahead, we need to understand that no one can be scorned and abandoned. What do we think “deplorables” do when they’re forsaken and normal politics fail them? Quietly acquiesce and crawl under rocks?

A quarter-millennium of American history says they do not—and what they do instead might not be the best for any of us.

In my case, I’ve already been cut off by a relative who did not want me to challenge him about his MAGA-inspired conspiracy theories.

So what would I want for MAGA voters? Not what is “best” for them. But something like: I want for you the understanding that stories, no matter how old, are the products of generations of oral retelling and print translations and re-translations and so are almost certainly not literally true; but what is true is best derived from observing the world through systematic investigation and repeated corrections via evidence.

It’s a neutral strategy. Say that back to me, and I’m fine.

\\\

Today’s briefly noted items.

  • Boing Boing, Jennifer Sandlin, 17 Nov 2025: Arizona pastor says “single mother whores” aren’t worthy of church help

    Welp, Phoenix, Arizona-based far-right “Christian” pastor Steven Anderson is at it again, spreading the kind and generous word of the Lord. That’s pure sarcasm, in case you wondered, because, in fact, he’s been out here doing what he does best — spewing venom and hatred for anyone he deems unworthy of Christ’s love. His list of the damned is long, but this week he’s highlighting everyone’s favorite scapegoat, “‘single mother’ whores.”

    — — As with ICE, you have to wonder what kind of people are drawn to these kinds of jobs.

Posted in Human Nature, Religion | Comments Off on Six Seven and Human Nature

Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 5

Posted on Monday 17 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

(Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4)

*

Here are notes on the final four chapters. Glosses follow in the next post.

*

Ch 7, The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist, p235

So are scriptures the source of morals? They might be so directly, via rules like the Ten Commandments, or indirectly, by setting examples. Either way, the Bible is just weird, as would be expected of a “cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents…” (p237). That zealots hold it up as the source of morals indicates they haven’t read it, or don’t understand it.

P237, The Old Testament. Noah—God was so upset with humanity he drowned the lot of them, except for one family. Such stories aren’t taken literally anymore? But that’s the point [[ Pinker makes this point too, in ANGELS ]] —if we pick and choose which stories to take literally, then scripture isn’t the basis for what we believe is moral. Anyway many *do* take it literally, just as some believe the recent tsunami was the result of particular sins. They consider innocent victims of such disasters to be collateral damage. “You’d think an omnipotent god would have a more targeted approach…”

In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the men of Sodom demand access to male angels so they can sodomize them—and Lot turns over his daughters to them instead. What morality is that? Later Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt—for looking back. Then Lot’s daughters get him drunk to have sex with him. Similar odd and gruesome stories come in Judges. Abraham, founder of the three great religions, passed his wife off as his sister, who then became part of the pharaoh’s harem. Later he was perfectly prepared to sacrifice his son. If not literal, what metaphorical messages are these stories supposed to convey? What kind of God would require Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter?

God’s rage over rival gods resembles sexual jealousy of the worst kind. (And why were people of that era so ready to cheat?) A golden calf was sin enough for a slaughter and plague. Later God incited Moses into slaughtering the Midianites—except for the virgin women, to keep for his own tribe. For some reason, Baal was a favorite among rival gods.

Again, you can’t claim the Bible as the source of morality—there’s some extra unspoken criteria for deciding which parts are ‘symbolic’ and which are literal. Have biblical advocates actually read it? See Leviticus 20 for a gruesome list of what the Bible actually says merits the death penalty (p248). The 10 commandments apparently rank the gravest sins as worshipping the wrong gods and making graven images. The famous Weinberg quote 249.7

P250, Is the New Testament any better?. So what about the NT? Is it any better? Jesus was certainly an improvement—but that’s the point: he didn’t derive *his* morals from scripture. Plus, his family values were dodgy.

Some teachings are no better than in the OT: the doctrine of ‘atonement’ for original sin, which condemns everyone for the sins of remote ancestors. And it adds a gruesome sado-masochism: that God incarnated himself as a man in order to be tortured and killed, in this ‘atonement’, including for all future sins! Why couldn’t God simply forgive our sins, without all the torture? And condemning Jews to be forever known as ‘Jesus-killers’? It’s all barking mad, relying on a Jewish doctrine of blood for atonement. Who was god trying to impress?

Another unpalatable aspect of the NT is that teachings such as ‘love thy neighbor’ applied only to the in-group—i.e. other Jews. [[ Again, as long understood. ]]

P254, Love Thy Neighbour. As an example with Southern Baptists counting the number of Alabamans in Hell—including of course everyone not in a church congregation—people always assume that they themselves will be among the ‘saved’; rapture sites are further examples. John Hartung has shown that Biblical injunction not to kill etc applied only to other Jews; there’s no proscription against killing ‘heathen’. Hartung presented a story to Israeli schoolchildren, who remarkably supported a massacre on the grounds that Arabs were ‘unclean’ or that God had promised them the land. But change the story to some ‘General Lin’ in a remote Chinese kingdom, and the reaction reverses. I.e., religion justifies things we wouldn’t otherwise condone. Hartung shows that Jesus supported the same ‘in-group’ morality as in the OT. It’s no different than attitudes of other ancient works, except the Bible is still accepted as a guide to morality. (258m)

Similar attitudes appear in hymns or prayers thanking God for not making one a heathen, or a woman.

In practice religious conflicts aren’t over religion per se, but are defined by the labels used for each side—Protestants vs Catholics, etc.; the same in India (Salman Rushie quote). The in/out-grouping is similar to the way football fans separate themselves, except that religion 1) labels children, 2) segregates schools, and 3) has taboos against ‘marrying out’. ‘Mixed marriages’ are frequently regarded in shame. Studies show in-group marriage is common among Christians, but especially so among Jews, whose rabbis often refuse to officiate over ‘mixed’ marriages.

P262, The Moral Zeitgeist. Then where do we get our ideas of right and wrong? Except for groups like the Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people, religious or not, subscribe to the same set of vaguely liberal principles—don’t hurt others, freedom of speech, paying taxes, etc. Examples of ‘New Ten Commandments’ (p263, source in footnote 103) show various attempts to capture such values; author would include things about indoctrinating children and valuing a timescale longer than your own. (Author mentions many such examples can be found, just google ‘new ten commandments’.)

The world has moved on since biblical times—slavery was abolished in the 19th century, women have the right to vote almost universally, though it was widely denied as late as 1920. Racism was common until the early 20th century, blacks and other ‘unwashed’ assumed to be inferior to whites. Even Thomas Huxley and Abraham Lincoln did not believe in ‘equality’ of the races. The Zeitgeist moves on. Our attitudes about animals have changed—at one time dodos were killed merely for sport, as was ‘game’ in Africa. The way attitudes about racy books—not to mention that women or servants might read them too. Attitudes about the Iraq war show diminishing approval for warlike actions. Even the evil of Hitler is modest by the standards of the ancients. Derogatory terms for racial groups are no longer commonly used, nor would scholars typify entire groups. Even H.G. Wells wondered what to do with the ‘inferior’ races.

So why has this change occurred? Not because of religion; in spite of it. [[ I would suggest it’s simply the greater interconnectivity of the world, both physically and virtually—no one grows up experiencing only their own little tribe. We grow up more knowledgeable and enlightened. This trend is ultimately what ‘liberal’ means, and why ‘conservatives’ tend to be 50 years behind the times – even though they’d seem shockingly progressive by the times of 100 years ago. ]] It happens gradually, through personal connections and editorials and new laws. It’s not steady but jagged (note jibe at US government in early 2000s, p271). Charismatic leaders play a role. Education—especially biological science, to overcome the idea that women and other races weren’t ‘fully human’. Beyond that author will not speculate—but the zeitgeist does move, and not because of religion. [[ At the same time—taking a page from sf stories of post-apocalypse—I suspect that a global catastrophe would certainly destroy this progressive zeitgeist and restore the biases and prejudices of human nature, back on the tribal level. There’s no entirely escaping the legacy of our evolutionary past. ]]

P272, What about Hitler and Stalin? Weren’t They Atheists?. Both clearly were evil men, but people who ask this presume that they were evil *because* they were atheists (which is dubious in Hitler’s case), which doesn’t follow at all. What matters is, does atheism systematically influence people to do bad things? There’s no evidence of this.

Stalin was atheist, and derided religion; Hitler never renounced his upbringing in the Catholic church, and statements later in life indicate a nominal belief. He alluded to the Jewish blame for death on the cross; he gave speeches about his duty as a Christian. OTOH he made virulently anti-Christian statements in his Table Talk. Or maybe Hitler was just opportunistic and cynical. In any event all the evil carried out in his name was done by soldiers, et al, who presumably were Christian. Hitler never stopped speaking of ‘providence’ (and the ‘will of God’ p277).

In any event, no one ever fought a war over atheism. Sam Harris quote.

Ch 8, What’s Wrong with Religion? Why Be So Hostile? p279

(Opens with George Carlin quote)

Author doesn’t engage in confrontation; formal debates are not a way to get at the truth (as example description suggests). Still, author has gained a reputation for pugnacity; even friends who agree with him wonder why be so hostile, just dismiss it like astrology and crystal energy.

Well, such ‘hostility’ is limited to words, not wars (the author isn’t about to bomb anybody). And it doesn’t mean author is a ‘fundamentalist’ atheist, analogous to being a Bible Belt fundamentalist.

P282, Fundamentalism and the Subversion of Science. The difference is that the religious fundamentalist believes in the truth of a holy book, and evidence to the contrary must be thrown out. A scientist believes a book because of the evidence it presents, and when evidence changes, the books change.

But isn’t belief in evidence a kind of fundamentalist faith? No more so in science than anything else. We don’t dismiss evidence in a murder trial by philosophical evasion or relativistic pleas. Nor is author’s passion for evolution a kind of fundamentalism—it’s an enthusiasm, and a frustration that others don’t see it or won’t because of their holy books. Scientists do change their beliefs when evidence changes—example of belief about Golgi apparatus.

And author is hostile to religion because it subverts science—it says not to change your minds. A sad example is geologist Kurt Wise (at Bryan College in TN), who agonized over the conflict between science and his religious upbringing until he abruptly decided to give up the former. He explicitly rejects evidence because the Bible requires a young earth. It is like 1984, 2+2=5.

P286, The Dark Side of Absolutism. Despite the optimistic idea that the zeitgeist is changing (see previous chapter) there are many who don’t accept it, who are still absolutist, e.g. as in Pakistan and Afghanistan where people can be sentenced to death for insulting the prophet or converting away from Islam. The constitution of the ‘liberal’ Afghanistan still contains that penalty. Examples p287.

Blasphemy laws still exist in Britain. And in the US websites depict the ‘American Taliban’ with extremist quotes from Ann Coulter et al, p288.

P289, Faith and Homosexuality. The Taliban executes homosexuals, and even Britain had laws against homosexuality as late as 1967. Alan Turing committed suicide…

Similarly the ‘American Taliban’ includes Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps, et al, who denounce homosexuals and forbid their rights once the Christian majority ‘takes control’… as always faith-based moralizers care passionately about what other people do or think even in private.

P291, Faith and the Sanctity of Human Life. Typically the religious faithful consider embryos fully human and therefore abortion is murder. Oddly, many are less concerned about taking adult life—i.e. the death penalty, highest since 1976 in Texas, home state of GW Bush, who once (according to a report by Tucker Carlson) mocked a death row inmate pleading for her life. Mother Teresa said the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion(!). And Randall Terry pledges to execute abortion providers, and to conquer the country for the 10 commandments. This is Christian fascism.

A utilitarian view might focus on relative suffering, but slippery-slope arguments can be applied to abortion, and to euthanasia—if you allow certain cases, you invite erosion of standards until absurd cases are allowed—and justify absolutist stands that way. But religious foes of abortion don’t bother; an embryo is a person, that’s that. Despite inconsistency with standards for in vitro fertilization…

Fanatics can’t distinguish between killing a handful of cells and killing a full-grown abortion doctor, and proudly target the latter with high-minded moral purpose. In an interview one such defended his actions by dismissing laws as simply ‘made-up’ by men; like Muslim militants, who claim allegiance only to holy law. Another, Paul Hill, was executed in 2003 for one such crime, predicting he would become a martyr. Some called him a psychopath; author doesn’t think so, just poisoned by religious faith. By non-absolutist standards, great suffering was brought about by the killing of the doctor, whereas suffering of an embryo is nonexistent or disputable (e.g. no more than an embryonic cow or lamb). Non-absolutists would be more concerned about relative suffering, or what constitutes a human, or whether an embryo can suffer.

P298, The Great Beethoven Fallacy. But isn’t the point the *potential* of the embryo? A frequent anecdote is about a pregnant mother with four (or nine) previous children, many of whom were blind or deaf, whose father had syphilis, etc.—if her child were aborted, it would have murdered Beethoven.

The anecdote isn’t even true—it’s an inflated urban legend—but is fallacious anyway. One might as well have murdered Beethoven by refusing to have intercourse in the first place. What about the abortion that could have murdered Hitler? But 43 religious sites quote the anecdote, none noticing the fallacy. Every sperm is sacred, as Monty Python sang. Anyway the presumption is that only *human* life counts, when, given evolution, it’s impossible to draw any firm line between ourselves and other animals.

P301, How ‘Moderation’ in Faith Fosters Fanaticism. Other absolutists include the theocracies of Saudi Arabia, which oppress women, or the American ‘rapture’ Christians who seem to *want* a nuclear holocaust in order to bring on the Second Coming. (The changing moral zeitgeist of the previous chapter has left them by.) But even ‘moderates’ promote the climate in which such extremists flourish. The 2005 London bombings are explained only by religious faith; they and Osama bin Laden *actually believe* what they say (quoting Sam Harris again). But reports and governments sidestep this point, blaming politics or ‘terror’ or ‘evil’. But the ‘terrorists’ aren’t psychotic; they perceive themselves righteous. A NYr article quotes a Palestinian terrorist about his eagerness to become a martyr (long quote). They have no doubts; they really believe it.

Bertrand Russell quote 306: “Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”

If religious faith is to be respected per se, why not respect Osama bin Laden’s? This is why author warns against faith of any kind, not just extremist faith. Religious leaders apologize for extremist ‘perversion’ of faith, but what is the standard for faith in the first place?

Moderate Islam is a myth; some pick and choose from the Koran to justify what they want, or use the latest verses, but the peaceful verses are near the beginning.

What’s especially pernicious in any religion is teaching children that faith is a virtue….

Ch 9, Childhood, Abuse, and the Escape from Religion,

In 1858 a Jewish child was seized from his parents by officials in Bologna, Italy, and put into custody of the state to be raised as a Catholic—all because a Catholic nursemaid had once ‘baptized’ the child, who thus was considered by religious standards to *be* Catholic. The church allows anyone to baptize anyone (p312)—it just takes water and a few words.

To the religious mind, such a ritual takes precedence over any ordinary considerations, e.g. parental concern. Further, church officials in such cases sincerely believe they’re doing the right thing. (It’s obvious to them their religion is superior to any other.) And third, religious people just know, without evidence, that the religion of their birth is the one true religion, and all others are in error. Martyrs would rather die than convert (even the Jewish child’s parents declined to be baptized if only to retrieve their son). Fourth, it’s presumptuous to think that a child can have any religious belief at all, at that age; yet this presumption is unquestioned even today.

P315, Physical and Mental Abuse. This isn’t about sexual abuse, though we do live in a time of hysteria over pedophilia… despite evident cases of manufactured memories, etc., cases such as the Christian Brothers and the nuns in Irish girls’ schools. Author would suggest that bad as those are, it’s not as bad as the psychological damage caused by being raised in the church. Being molested can be icky, believing in hell can be traumatizing.

Unfortunately what’s mainstream in the US often seems extreme to the rest of the world—never mind those who really want to turn America into a Christian theocracy. (As in the Left Behind computer game.) One church leader creates ‘Hell Houses’ to scare kids about what might happen to them after they die, the optimum age for attendance being 12. Of course, church leaders always believe they will be among the saved. Note that Dawkins did a TV documentary in Britain, The Root of All Evil, after which some viewers contacted him about pursuing counseling. Some tell of the trauma of what they believed, and the difficulty in giving up a community and family along with a belief system, or relationships that break up. Example Jill Mytton, p322, and what she was told to believe about hellfire and damnation. Julia Sweeney ends her play “Letting Go of God” with that realization, and the reactions of her parents. Even some priests (e.g. Dan Barker) give up belief but are unable to tell anyone, caught up in social and professional obligations…

P325, In Defence of Children. Nicholas Humphrey argued an exception to freedom of speech—children have a right not to have their minds addled with nonsense. Yet, who decides what’s nonsense? Author thinks it’s more important to teach how to think, than what to think. Example of Inca girl sent as a sacrifice; should we revel in her experience because her culture believed in her sacrifice? Shouldn’t we defer to standards of the time? Author thinks we *can* blame the elders for foisting such beliefs on an innocent girl. What about female circumcision? An allowable cultural practice? Yet no adult woman who missed it volunteers later in life…

How about allowing the Amish to raise children their own way? Cf Humphrey on cultural diversity, 329m. The price of maintaining such cultural diversity and practices is…the lives of children. Shouldn’t children have something to say in the matter? A Supreme Court decision in 1972 favored parents who wanted to remove their children from school—in the name of preserving the Amish community and religion (and avoiding modernity). In contrast, adults don’t volunteer to become Amish, and the children had no practical choice. It’s condescending to allow it… see 331t

P331, An Educational Scandal. In Britain the funding of a school that taught biblical creationism was justified (by Tony Blair) on the grounds of ‘diversity’. The head of that church, like others, made various scientifically illiterate remarks. A lecture on a UK website about teaching biblical science—removed but cached and later refound—proudly endorses the Bible as the source of scientific knowledge—and it’s by a science teacher. Protests, endorsed by scientists and theologians, were dismissed by the government. In a later radio interview, the school seemed unaware of what that science teacher had actually endorsed…

P337, Consciousness-Raising Again. Author cites newspaper photo in which children of various faiths portrayed the nativity scene as grotesque. The ‘brights’ explicitly insist that children must make their own decision to join or not. Shouldn’t all faiths do the same? Author would like to ‘consciousness-raise’ by not calling children after their parents’ religions—anymore than children are called liberal or conservative.

A case could be made to teach comparative religion—children would become aware they are mutually incompatible. Of course the faithful are uncomfortable with pointing this out, because it undermines their position about their own religion’s superiority.

P340, Religious Education as Part of Literary Culture. It’s remarkable as far back as 1954 how ignorant many Christians and Catholics are about their own Bible. The English Bible *should* be taught as literature, just like the Greek and Roman myths. P341 a list of phrases from the Bible (two pages worth!). PG Wodehouse, Shakespeare, presumably literature of other languages, rely on allusions to holy books. They can still be appreciated without believing in supernatural beliefs.

Ch 10, A Much Needed Gap?, p345

Title refers to jest “this book fills a much needed gap” – a solecism, but at times repeated seriously. So, does religion fill such a gap? Is there a god-shaped gap in the brain?

Religion has been thought to fill four roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation, and inspiration. This chapter deals with the latter two.

P347, Binker. Binker is the imaginary friend of Christopher Robin – long quote from AA Milne. Author didn’t have one, but apparently many children do have ‘imaginary friends’ they really do believe exist. Perhaps this is a basis for understanding theistic belief in adults? Another story about a girl’s ‘little purple man’ who gave her advice on her career…. Has religion evolved as a gradual postponement of the age when children give up their Binkers?

Or the reverse? Julian Jayne’s bicameral mind. Evelyn Waugh. The ‘second voice’ was really inside their heads. Are gods the result of Binkers, or vice versa? Perhaps both result from the same psychological predisposition.

P352, Consolation. Must acknowledge the role of consolation; if you remove God, what’s in its place? Of course, religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true, even if it were demonstrably necessary to human psychological well-being. Yet some resent attacks on faith anyway. Maybe truth is less important than human feelings. Dennett distinguishes between ‘belief’ and ‘belief in belief’.

Still, author does not concede premise—i.e., there’s no evidence atheists are more depressed than the faithful. What are claims of religion to offer consolation? There is consolation through direct physical contact, and also consolation through new information or perspectives, e.g. the idea that by the time an old man is ready to die, the child he once was already died long ago, by growing up, 354.2. (Thus, reasons not to fear death.) Many people do claim consolation after physical disasters, or in the face of terminal illness. But of course, false beliefs (e.g. in a cure) can be just as consoling.

If 95% of people really believe they’ll survive after death, shouldn’t they be looking forward to it? Why do friends weep? Why opposition to assisted suicide, etc.? Perhaps religious people don’t *really* believe in life after death. Or perhaps they fear merely the process of dying—since unlike animals, humans are not allowed to be anesthetized to death. And it’s the religious who oppose assisted suicide, etc., while atheists support it…

Oddly, according to one nurse’s report, it’s the religious who most fear dying—which sort of contradicts the premise of consolation. The Catholic church has its ‘purgatory’, a sort of Ellis Island waiting room, for which ‘indulgences’ were once sold by the church in a scam rivaling any; later various schemes of prayer served the equivalent, as at the New College of Oxford…

(359b) Author fascinated by the ‘evidence’ of purgatory—simply that since we pray for the dead, it must exist, or the praying would make no sense.

This mirrors the common claim for consolation—if there were no God, life would be pointless, etc. Therefore. Well, maybe life *is* pointless. Circular reasoning. And presumptuous to believe that something, e.g. God, must exist merely to provide *you* with meaning. An infantile attitude, like looking for someone to blame every time one gets hurt. (“There is something infantile…” 360.6)

The adult view is that life is as meaningful as we make it.

P360, Inspiration. This is a matter of personal taste, perhaps, so the argument is rhetorical rather than logical. We should feel lucky to be alive at this moment in time, considering all the possible people who could be alive; that we are makes life precious; it’s an insult to think it dull or boring. (Q 361m) How to fill the gap? Science is one way—the ability of our minds, shaped by evolution for basic survival, to create a much greater model of the world, results including art and science. One final picture…

The Mother of All Burkas. A burka is the sack-like garment enclosing a woman except for a slit to see through. A sad sight. The light we see with our eyes ranges over a spectrum that, on the scale of an inch-wide slit, leaves out miles and miles of wavelengths that we can’t perceive. Science widens that window. Telescopes and cameras reveal more of the spectrum. Our imaginations fail trying to understand things outside a range of sizes—thus quantum ranges are a mystery to us, as are speeds approaching light. Common sense lets us down. Thus Haldane’s remark about the universe being queerer than we *can* imagine. Douglas Adams and others played up this strangeness for laughs. Quantum theory seems as ‘true’ as anything we know, but it’s really weird. Both the ‘many worlds’ interpretation and the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation (the cat isn’t alive *or* dead until you look) seem contrary to human intuition. (cf Deutsch 365m) Science in general violates common sense—e.g. elementary probabilities…  Science *can* be explained; nevertheless, our existence is somehow surprising. What would the world look like if it were revolving? (367m)

Our brains evolved in this ‘Middle World’, which is why only experiences in this range seem intuitive. ‘Solid’ in this range isn’t really solid at the molecular scale. Why can’t General Stumblebine walk through the wall? We even find Galileo’s simple experiments non-intuitive—because we don’t live in a vacuum. We tend to think matter is more ‘real’ than electromagnetic waves. A person is more like a wave—the child you remember had none of the atoms that make you up now. ‘Reality’ depends on what the brain needs to survive. What we experience is just a model of the world, appropriate to the way we live in it. Monkeys experience a 3-d world of tree branches; a water boatman, a 2-d world of the water surface. Bats and swallows would have similar models, despite variations in senses used (echoes vs light). Dogs sense different fatty acids that are different molecular lengths. Colours are perceptions independent of wavelengths. Science opens the window. There may be no limits to understanding.

*

 

Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off on Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 5

Status on a Gloomy Day; Why Anyone Should Care

Posted on Sunday 16 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

It’s a gloomy day in the Bay Area, with one rainy storm moving through last night, another due tonight, with clouds and patches of sunlight today. We visited the Farmers Market in Montclair Village today, bought some produce, and a falafel.

Remarkably, I found no political news items or political commentaries today worth capturing for comment on this blog. Just as well; I spend too much time posting here about things that virtually no one will ever read, with no expectations about why anyone should care about my views about politics and religion.

I think I said a decade ago that posts here were in part items noted as research for my book — and that’s still true. But over the years many of my points have been made, about human nature, about conservatives and progress, about the apparent limits of human nature and cognition. I need to swing back to focusing on science fiction, and science, and noting current events only to the extent that they illustrate the broader picture I’m trying to assemble, and knit them all into a final product. Yet even so, that might produce a book… that perhaps a few hundred people would read.

A comment has been going around on Facebook that struck a nerve, since that book with my essay was just published and I don’t know how anyone will notice. I had a link to one version of the comment, but that link has disappeared. I’ll just quote the comment:

The real tragedy of being a writer isn’t rejection. It’s finally getting published and realizing nobody cares.

Of course these days *so much* is being published, no one can keep up. Anyone can write a blog, or self-publish a book, and why should anyone care, outside a few friends and family? Or taking the opposite POV, how much content by other people should one be expected to keep up with? No one comments on my blog; but then I don’t comment on anyone else’s blogs, not even the ones I read regularly. But let me not dwell on this.

Except to imagine that maybe I have some deep, original insight, in that essay, and in my book, that others might notice.

\\\

So, what’s happening now? It’s mid-November. 2025. I turned 70 this year. I’m still pretty healthy, I think, compared to some of the comments from Facebook friends my age and their health problems. I’m slowing down a bit. A walk that took 30 minutes 5 years ago now takes 33 minutes. But I can still walk. I can still exercise, biceps and triceps and so-on, with 10-pount dumbbells. I see all my doctors regularly, as advised.

My life is framed by the goal of writing a book that combines the understanding of modern science, as opposed to ancient, intuitive thinking, and how science fiction has or has not anticipated that understanding. It’s an ambitious, open-ended project: no matter how many books I read toward it, there will always be more to read. Perhaps I’m stuck in a Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good cycle.

At the same time, I’m enjoying a vicarious (not sure this is the right word) family life via my partner and his two kids, boys, one who lives in the Bay Area, the other in LA, and at each end they have kids and extended families of cousins and in-laws. As I posted about on Monday, about last weekend’s trip to LA. We have traditions of visits back and forth at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but given their growing families, we don’t depend on them working out again. We’ll see.

\\\

Posted in Music, Personal history, The Book | Comments Off on Status on a Gloomy Day; Why Anyone Should Care

Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 4

Posted on Sunday 16 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

(Post 1; Post 2; post 3)

Our chapter today is about morality, and where it comes from if not religion. We could begin with my standard arguments. If you think morality is derived from religion, does that mean you wouldn’t know right from wrong without consulting a list of rules in your holy book? Do you people who don’t follow your religion are immoral, or amoral? Most, given a moment’s thought, would say no to both. There is something about morality that seems innate, intuitive. In fact, from current understanding, morality is in fact part of evolved human nature, and is reflected, second-hand, in the various religious texts. Dawkins alludes to a number of other writers who’ve explored this theme; I’ve gathered a few others over the years since Dawkins published.

*

Ch 6, The Roots of Morality: Why Are We Good?

It’s often thought religion must be the basis for morality, and some of the rage over non-moral issues, e.g. evolution, comes from the implication that undermining religion would lead to immorality.

The nastiest reader letters author gets are motivated by religion—examples pp211-213 that consign him to hell, etc., usually ungrammatical and misspelled. Why does God need such defenders? Even some intelligent people, e.g. a medical doctor, is greatly troubled by the supposed nihilism of Darwinism.

P214, Does our moral sense have a Darwinian origin? Several recent books (e.g. Shermer, Hauser) have explored how our moral sense—including compassion for strangers, etc.—can have a Darwinian origin; this section is author’s version. The idea of a ‘selfish gene’ doesn’t contradict this—it means the unit of selection is the gene, not the individual. Genes can ensure their own survival by making individual organisms selfish—or other ways, via kin-selection and reciprocal altruism, both well understood. The latter includes the detection of inevitable cheats. Game theory describes variations. Secondary phenomena include reputation (cf. Ridley Origins of Virtue), and altruism as a demonstration of dominance or superiority. All four kinds of altruism (p219b) would have been favored in the environment of early humans—small villages or roving bands, where most others *were* extended kin to some degree. That these same motives work in modern society among strangers may be a type of ‘misfire’, in the sense that they work despite the absence of their origin rationale. Thus kindness to strangers, or adopting a child. But we can understand natural selection’s ‘purpose’ for sexual desire and still enjoy it. Nor does it diminish romantic love.

P222, A case study in the roots of morality. Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds describes experiments in moral philosophy—describing hypothetical situations to people, typically involving a runaway truck, and asking whether it’s morally justifiable or not to take certain actions. E.g, the truck will run down 5 people, or can be diverted to a sideroad and run down 1 person. Justifiable? What if you can push a fat man off the bridge to stop the truck? Most say yes to the first, no to the second. And so on. To the point, there’s no difference in responses between those who are religious and those who aren’t. [[ This is the now famous trolley problem. I have Hauser’s book but have not yet read it. ]]

P226, If there is no god, why be good? Author’s response is, are you only good because you believe God is watching over your shoulder and peering into your mind? Because you fear punishment? Otherwise you would rape and steal and lie? (cf. the Shermer book) If people claim they would be good anyway, they undermine their claim that God is necessary to be good. Dostoevsky, in Brothers Karamazov, apparently believed people would *not* be good—and Steven Pinker’s experience (cf. Blank Slate) with mayhem during a police strike supports that belief (though apparently fear of God didn’t keep them in order). Author suspects criminals are more likely to be religious; that more educated people are less likely. Sam Harris (in Letters) cites statistics about which states and cities are the safest—those in the religious south are least so. And if there were correlation between religious faith and moral behavior, surely religious advocates would have discovered it by now (cf Dennett).

Still, how does one decide what is good and what isn’t, without religion? Kant tried to derive morals from non-religious sources—e.g. his categorical imperative: act only on such principles that would work as universal rules. This works for some rules, e.g. lying, not so well for other issues. Moral philosophers can be categorized as ‘derontologists’—belief in absolute rules—and ‘consequentialists’—where morality of an action depends on its consequences. The only rival for absolutism to religion might be patriotism.

In any event, people who claim morals derive from holy books don’t usually follow those books… and a good thing, too.

\\

My comments: People are good because it’s advantageous for them to be good… One gets along better in the world when does not lie or cheat or murder, when one is rather cooperative and altruistic. In the sense that success in life is all about passing your genes on to the next generation, these traits against being ‘bad’ and for being ‘good’ enable the bearer to pass their genes on more successfully than someone who is ‘bad’ and is constrained by others from doing so.

Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Human Nature, Religion | Comments Off on Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 4

MAGA Doesn’t Understand What Makes America Great

Posted on Saturday 15 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Nicholas Kristof on the three fundamental ingredients of America’s greatness that Trump and MAGA are undoing.
  • Short items about Elon Musk, D&D, and racism; Christian presumption about church and state; how easily Nick Fuentes has been endorsed by many Republicans; Trump’s bribes; and how Trump is wrong about fentanyl.
– – –

It’s been studied — what makes some societies great, and others failures. Which is why the slogan MAGA is so ironic.

NY Times, Nicholas Kristof, 15 Nov 2025: America’s Formula for Greatness Is Under Threat [gift link]

What’s the secret formula that has made the United States the dominant superpower in the world today?

I’d point to three fundamental ingredients, each of which is now being weakened. When I think of the historical legacies of our generation and of President Trump, I wonder if they will be less about the political battles in the headlines and more about the slow shriveling of America’s global standing.

I’ll excerpt. Here’s the first.

A commitment to education at every level, resulting in global leadership in science and technology.

I believe the answer to almost every question is education — the highest-return long-term investments are often in human capital. Yet throughout the ages there have always been those eager to execute Socrates, to subject Galileo to the Inquisition, to ban books.

Second:

An inclination toward free markets and free trade, supported by the rule of law.

This is the pillar that Trump is most respectful of. He mostly believes in capitalism and free markets — probably more than many Democrats — but has led a rapid retreat from free trade. His tariffs are the highest since the 1930s. Trump has also systematically chipped away at some of the underpinnings of a market economy. …

Third:

Immigration and the absorption of some of the brightest minds from around the world.

My dad, an Armenian refugee from Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States in 1952. Soon after, his landlady returned his rent, saying, “I can’t take money from a refugee.”

Such a welcoming spirit, while far from consistently applied, has enormously enriched the United States. Four of the Magnificent Seven tech companies are led by immigrants, and 46 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, according to the American Immigration Council.

These three things are among those that Trump and the MAGAites are undoing. Kristof concludes:

I see these three factors as central to America’s rise as the world’s leading power today. And these strengths are now being systematically undermined, especially universities, trade, the rule of law and recruitment of the world’s best minds.

… Throughout history, we’ve repeatedly seen how great nations sometimes lost their energy and drive, slipping because of what Jawaharlal Nehru described in the context of India as a “gradual oozing out of hope and vitality.” In the year 1000, the greatest city in the world was Kaifeng in China, then the most important country in the world — but China and Kaifeng then lost ground for most of the next millennium before reviving in recent decades.

The United States may or may not experience such decrepitude, but decline seems to me more likely if America chokes trade and immigration while stifling universities. Without its secret sauce, America would be just one more tired old nation watching other, more youthful countries race past it. Those are the stakes.

\\\

Briefly noted.

  • The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 11 Nov 2025: Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist, subtitled “The fantastical roots of ‘scientific racism'” — —  It seems that conservatives are attracted to racist tropes, and they also resent the game being changed to remove such tropes. (I have never played D&D.)
  • NY Times, guest essay by David Herzberg, 15 Nov 2025: I Am a Drug Historian. Trump Is Wrong About Fentanyl in Almost Every Way.

    The fentanyl story is based on an argument about history: The United States went from greatness to crisis because open-border Democrats betrayed the honest, hardworking people of America by exporting jobs and allowing in foreign drugs. Stopping the drugs, Mr. Trump wants us to believe, will let the wholesome, traditional American culture that he idealizes to flourish again. As a historian of drugs, I can tell you that this argument is wrong in almost every way.

  • Beginning with “There is no wholesome, traditional drug-free America that we can return to.”
Posted in Conservative Resistance, History, Politics | Comments Off on MAGA Doesn’t Understand What Makes America Great

Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 3

Posted on Saturday 15 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

(Post 1; Post 2)

One chapter for today. This is about where religion came from and what use it is.

*

Ch 5, The Roots of Religion, p161

There are various ideas about the usefulness of religion, but this chapter focuses on the Darwinian imperative—if something exists, it must be ‘good for something’. What is religion ‘good for’? It might be good directly; it might involve group selection; it might involve the ‘extended phenotype’ (e.g. a parasite directing an organism to do something); it might involve memes.

Australian aboriginals are presumably typical of our distant ancestors; their minds are full of specific useful knowledge about their environment, but also nonsense about witchcraft and female menstruation. And all cultures have had some version of time-consuming apparently ‘useless’ rituals and fantasies… Even when people give it up, religion is a default; like heterosexuality; that everyone recognizes.

P166, Direct advantages of Religion. Some evidence suggests that religious belief protects people against stress. Not that this has anything to do with the truth of religion’s claims. Still, like other placebos, it might have an effect. Yet if so, why would the mind evolve to benefit from false ideas? Note difference between proximate and ultimate explanations. (Ref Shermer How We Believe.) Some claims for religion are the former; we’re concerned with the latter.

P169, Group selection. (Ref Colin Renfrew and DS Wilson.) This idea suggests that a tribe with a militant god would defeat tribes with a peaceful god, for example. Author does not support group selection, though admits it can happen in principle. It has too many problems, e.g. subversion from within—even in a militant tribe, an *individual* who held back might survive to reproduce, letting others sacrifice for him. Even Darwin allowed that some form of tribal competition might have consequences, 171. [[ I’ll have comments about this at the end of the post. ]]

P172, Religion as a By-product of something else. This is the author’s own view. An example is why moths fly into candle flames. The instinct to navigate by light serves when the moon or sun is the only light; with artificial lighting, the same instinct results in a death-spiral. Asking why moths commit suicide is the wrong question.

What is religion’s something else? Author hypothesizes the misfiring of the how parents pass along experience to their children—how children reflexively believe what they’re told by their parents, as a mean of culturally transmitting information. Preachers tell stories; example from author’s childhood about soldiers marching on into an oncoming train. Such transmission carries everything, valid or not, like computers who execute valid programs and also viruses. The flip-side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. Religious leaders know the value of indoctrinating a child early, cf the Jesuit boast, and James Dobson. 177m. [[ It seems to me author doesn’t explain why the adult wouldn’t abandon obviously baseless beliefs—the same way adults no longer believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus ]]

Where *other* beliefs seem weird to us who didn’t grow up with them. Example of a Cambridge theologian wonders how primitive tribes can believe such nonsense, contrasted with the beliefs of a mainstream Christian, p178-9.

P179, Psychologically primed for religion. Evolutionary psychology suggests reasons why human nature would be susceptible. Children have a natural tendency toward a dualistic theory of mind—they attribute minds to everything, just as some people and stories assume minds and bodies are distinct (e.g. fantasies about minds exchanging bodies, example of an 1882 novel.).

People are also predisposed to be creationists—i.e., children assign purpose for everything. The purpose of clouds is to make rain. This is teleology.

Why would this be?

Dennett offers his idea of the ‘intentional stance’—the way we understand objects and animals and other entities. The physical stance, the design stance, the intentional stance. The last is a shortcut to presuming things about an animal that might eat you. Part of this is the assumption of ‘mind’ and purpose.

We do this when we attribute events to inanimate things.

A similar pattern might be seen in romantic love, in which love of a spouse is exclusive, unlike other kinds of love. It makes sense for the purpose of ensuring loyalty to a spouse, at least for as long as it takes to rear a child. There are even similarities between religious devotion and such love.

Lewis Wolpert (p186) suggests that strong conviction is a type of irrationality to guard against fickleness of mind. Robert Trivers offers a theory of self-deception—the better to deceive others.

Frazer’s Golden Bough showed the diversity, but also the similarities, of religious belief. Something like ‘genetic drift’ may apply, as it does to languages (p189). Yet at times religions exhibit intelligent design; leaders, like Martin Luther, who warn against reason as the enemy of religion (p190).

P191, Tread Softly, Because You Tread on My Memes. A meme can be any replicator that works analogous to a gene—something that makes copies of itself, along with occasional ‘mutations’. Objections to memes are exaggerated; e.g. an idea or practice doesn’t have to be passed along in literal detail, just through general principle, and the latter can be sufficiently binary for replication to operate according to natural selection. (e.g. the concepts of driving a nail into wood, or doing origami to make a particular form.) The game of ‘telephone’ would also demonstrate this—a short message might well be passed along without error, while a drawing couldn’t be replicated even from one step to the next. Digital vs analog.

Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine developed these ideas more extensively than anyone. Like genes, which work in ‘cartels’ of interrelated effects, memes operate in synch with one another—a ‘memeplex’. Thus some individual ideas survive because of compatibility with others, not on their own merits. E.g. a religion memeplex—life after death, martyrs, killing heretics, belief as a virtue, etc. (p199-200). Different ‘sets’ might work equally well; Islam as a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism as a herbivorous one. People guide religions but don’t design them—with the rare exception of Scientology, and to an extent, Mormonism.

P202 Cargo Cults. As in The Life of Brian, they exhibit the extreme rapidity with which religions can evolve. (Ref. David Attenborough Quest in Paradise.) Natives of south sea islands saw white men bring supplies, do mysterious things like shuffle papers and talk through boxes with glowing lights, and concluded the cargo was of supernatural origin. Similar cults arose in dozens of places. One on the island now known as Vanuatu includes a messianic figure named John Frum—cited only since 1940, but whose confirmed existence is still uncertain. Doctrines concerned his second coming, his kingship in America, etc., and when later visitors came the doctrines were shifted to fit available evidence. They demonstrate certain common features of religions—four lessons: the speed with which they spring up; the speed with which it covers its tracks; their similarity to each other; and fourth, to older religions.

\\\

My comments: The skepticism about group selection seems to have faded. The problem of the free-loader has been solved, it seems, by the realization that morality itself evolved: ideas of shame and honor, emotions like embarrassment. It’s precisely the development of such reactions that have allowed group selection, and thus the cooperation of larger and larger groups in competition with each other. Thus, even if not everyone within each group marches in lockstep with all the others, we can still observe differences in the outcomes between groups with different forms of government, or different religions.

Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Human Nature, Religion | Comments Off on Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 3

Conservative Principles vs. Reality

Posted on Friday 14 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on the decline and fall of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and how it’s always been a fraud;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how the ideology of MAGA is smashing against reality;
  • Short items about Republicans destroying the safety net, Trump dropping tariffs on countries who give him gifts, how religious groups are safe havens for sexual predators, and conservative predictions that Mamdani will starve NYC;
  • James Greenberg on Facebook expresses salient truths about how modern civilization knows about the ways it’s being undone, but denies them, i.e. about climate change denial.
– – –

How principled conservatism has morphed into “conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry.”

Paul Krugman, 14 Nov 2025: The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation, subtitled “Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable”

There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.

This is about the recent Tucker Carlson podcast interview with Nick Fuentes, “a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.

So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?

(I’ve not realized until now that the idea of globalism, an inevitability not just because the population keeps expanding but because it’s necessary to solve global existential threats, is equated by conservatives with a Jewish conspiracy!)

Krugman thinks this isn’t a new development, but that Heritage has always been a fraud.

It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.

The priorities of the Republican party have been obvious for decades. Krugman reviews more history of Heritage, including its accusation that he, Krugman, was a pedophile (“As they say, every accusation by the modern right is really a confession.”). And concludes,

Again, it’s important to get the story of Heritage correct, because it is also the story of the modern right as a whole. Heritage was never a respectable institution doing honest research. It was always in the business of telling lies on behalf of its wealthy supporters. But now it’s trying to turn itself into a MAGA/Groyper institution, less focused on telling economic lies and more focused on bigotry and conspiracy theories.

And if this shocks and surprises you, well, you just weren’t paying attention.

\\\

How often have I said that conservatives are not reality-based?


Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American: November 13, 2025

We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.

The economy, tariffs, price statistics from DoorDash, violence against purported immigrants, war with Venezuela, and on and on.

\\\

Briefly noted.

  • Slate, Shirin Ali, 14 Nov 2025: Republicans Are Ripping a New Giant Hole in the Social Safety Net, subtitled “After punishing hungry people during the government shutdown, the GOP has a new plan to make life harder for the most vulnerable.” — — The cruelty is the point. Or: conservatives somehow believe that the poor deserve their fate.
  • Friendly Atheist, 14 Nov 2025: How the Assemblies of God became a safe haven for sexual predators, subtitled “A sweeping NBC investigation exposed decades of abuse, cover-ups, and indifference inside the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination” — — But hasn’t this kind of thing been obvious for decades, especially in the Catholic Church?
  • JMG, 14 Nov 2025, from Family Research Council: FRC: NYC Will Starve Under Mamdani’s “Police State” — — No, it won’t. More conservative paranoia and cynicism. They predict things like this over and over, and they never come to pass. Also, our rights *do* come, explicitly, from the government. What rights come from God, exactly, in the Bible? Free speech?

\\\

I have no idea who this guy, James Greenberg, on Facebook is, except that he’s from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has 58K followers.

But his post from a couple days ago captures some salient truths.

Never before has a civilization known so much about the forces undoing it—or worked so hard to deny them. How is it that, despite all the scientific data and even the evidence of our own experience, so many people continue to believe that climate change is a hoax?

The simple answer is that fossil-fuel money turned denial into an industry. For decades, public-relations firms have flooded the media with carefully crafted doubt, transforming an empirical question into a cultural battle. Climate change has become less about carbon molecules than about identity, loyalty, and belonging.

And,

Yet the roots of denial run deeper than propaganda. They lie in how human beings construct meaning. We do not perceive the world as it is, but through the lenses of culture and language. Our understanding of reality—and even what we count as evidence—is shaped by cultural logics that organize experience, emotion, and belief. These logics give coherence to our lives, but they can also make us blind to facts that threaten them.

This isn’t quite how I would put it, but, yes. Then he describes an anthropological story. Then:

Every society faces uncertainty and risk. Cultures manage these by imposing order—by creating systems of knowledge, ritual, and morality that render the world predictable. Science and religion both perform this work, but through different logics. Science grounds knowledge in evidence and predictive power; religion anchors meaning in faith, ritual, and revelation.

Scientific knowledge is always provisional, open to revision. Religious belief, by contrast, rests on premises that cannot be proven or disproven: that God or the gods exist, that creation has purpose, that human rituals, prayers, and offerings are efficacious. Those premises give life moral coherence, but they also sanctify other ideas: that authority is divinely ordained, that power signifies virtue, that prosperity is a sign of favor. When belief fuses with identity, it becomes impermeable to evidence.

Climate change denial arises not from ignorance but from refusal—the insistence on preserving meaning against a truth that demands moral reckoning. Science challenges the old cosmology of human dominion over nature as a divine exemption from consequence. It reveals that nature operates under immutable laws, that our pretense of mastery has limits, that extraction carries costs, and that the planet itself can rebel. For those whose sense of order depends on human exceptionalism, that is not merely threatening—it is heresy.

And more. Very good.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics, Social Progress | Comments Off on Conservative Principles vs. Reality