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
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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

Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 2

Posted on Friday 14 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

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

(Post 1)

Here are the first four chapters (out of ten), which deal with the arguments for and against the existence of God, summarized in 3700 words. Note that Dawkins refers to many other authors and their books, and frequently quotes. I’ll only allude them in passing.

*

1, A Deeply Religious Non-Believer, p9

Einstein quote.

Deserved Respect – author describes a boy (later the author’s chaplain) laying in a field, feeling a mystical response to nature. Isn’t this religion? No; it’s on par with the end of Darwin’s book, or Sagan in Pale Blue Dot, both quoted. How ironic that religion never acknowledges the wonders of the universe as revealed by science—preferring their own, smaller but personal god. Also quotes Weinberg.

We need to distinguish between Einsteinian religion and supernatural religion; the former is what Hawking used when referring to the ‘mind of God’. Awe at nature is about being a naturalist, as most scientists are; they aren’t religious in a supernatural sense. (Mentions the short Baggini book p13b and Martin Rees p14)

In fact when Einstein wrote a paper explicitly denying his belief in a personal god, it caused an uproar; he was denounced from the pulpit, people wrote letters telling him to go back where he came from. Samples p16-17.

A ‘theist’ believes in an active personal god; a ‘deist’ in a god who created the universe but has since left it alone; a ‘pantheist’ uses the word God as a synonym for nature…

Einstein used ‘god’ as a metaphor, and author wishes physicists would stop doing so; it creates needless confusion. To deliberately confuse the two is an act of intellectual high treason.

 P20: Undeserved Respect — So the title of the book refers to supernatural gods only. As a second matter to clear up, the issue of giving offense and respect. Author is amazed at the extent to which religion is deferred to in society, especially America. Long quote from Douglas Adams, 20b.  Thus to attain objector status from the draft, one merely needs to state that one’s a Quaker. Conversely, religious conflicts avoid using religious terms—Catholics vs Protestants, etc. p21.

In the Supreme Court, a religious argument trumps others (e.g. whether a ‘religion’ may use a psychotropic drug). Author signed support for Salman Rushdie. Now religious parents claim ‘freedom of religion’ as the basis for wearing t-shirts with offensive statements in school—the ‘right’ to be Christian.

The most absurd recent case was the ‘offense’ Muslims took to cartoons published in a Danish paper, which were deliberately spread with false information around the world in February ’06, causing riots and violence (ironically). While no one calls out the Muslims on the offense they give to Jews…

So author will not go out of his way to offend—but will speak plainly where necessary.

2, The God Hypothesis, p29

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction:  “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Only someone first encountering him as an adult can appreciate the horror. Example of Churchill’s son reading the Bible for the first time.

But it’s an easy target. By the ‘God Hypothesis’ in this book we mean not specifically the OT God, but the generic supernatural intelligence who designed the universe and everything in it. The alternate view of this book is that intelligence comes into being only as the product of gradual evolution… The god of the former hypothesis is a delusion.

P32 Polytheism. It’s assumed that polytheism is more primitive than monotheism, without explaining why. Some writers dismiss polytheism and atheism on apparently equal grounds. In fact society exhibits monotheistic chauvinism, with tax breaks, and so on. Yet the Roman Catholic church is virtually polytheistic, what with the trinity, and Mary, and thousands of saints, angels, etc., all shamelessly invented. Jefferson dismissed it as sophistry.

And there are many varieties of religion other than the three great monotheistic religions; but life is too short, and this book will refer to ‘God’ as representing those three. (Refs to Frazer, Boyer, Atran 36.3)

P37. Monotheism. A Gore Vidal quote dismisses the ‘sky-god’ as patriarchal and bringing much misery. The three major religions all derive from Judaism, the cult of a desert tribe obsessed with sexual restrictions, charred flesh, etc. Then Paul of Tarsus founded Christianity.  Islam added violent conquest, and so did Christianity in its crusades, witch hunts, etc. The Abrahamic God is presumed to be a personal one—one who answers prayers—unlike the 18th century god of the enlightenment, an altogether grander being. Thus the fate of Thomas Paine.

P38 Secularism, the founding fathers and the religion of America.  Were the founders deists? They were secularists, as many statements indicate. Barry Goldwater (quote) railed against churches trying to tell him how to vote. The treaty at Tripoli in 1796 explicitly denies that America was founded as a Christian nation.

Ironically, American has become much more religious, in contrast to England, with its state-run church. Why? Possibly because American let religion became a matter of free enterprise. Jefferson, however, stressed reason; he would be called an atheist today. Madison and Adams made similar remarks, p43. Now we have Bush Sr. denying the citizenship of atheists.

Atheists are more numerous than generally realized, but they are discriminated against. Story of a man protesting a faith healer—the police threatened *him* with violence. It’s impossible to be elected for anything as an atheist. The founders would be horrified.

P46, The Poverty of Agnosticism. Isn’t that a reasonable position? It’s ok for topics when there really is no evidence, such as the existence of extra-terrestrial life. (Don’t rely on ‘gut’ feelings.)

But there’s a difference between TAP, temporary agnosticism in practice, as being one of waiting for the evidence, and PAP, permanent agnosticism in principle, which means believing a subject can never be decided, that evidence cannot apply.

Author claims the existence of God *is* a scientific question. TH Huxley invented the word (agnostic), and he meant not a creed but a method—that of following reason. (Quotes p49)

We can certainly discuss the *probability* of the god hypothesis, and we can describe a spectrum of probabilities from 100% certain there is a god to 100% certain there isn’t. Not knowing doesn’t equate to 50% likelihood either way. Consider the spectrum of probabilities, p50, from 1, strong theist, to 7, strong atheist. [[ I would be a 6 on this scale. ]]

Compare Bertrand Russell’s ‘teapot’ hypothesis (quote), one in orbit of the sun but undetectable. Similarly we are all tooth fairy agnostics. Other examples. The Flying Spaghetti Monster might exist. But we can pretty sure such things don’t exist.

As always, the burden is on the believer. We’re all atheists about Zeus and Baal. What matters is whether the existence of God is probable.

P54 NOMA. Still, theists stress the unprovability of God’s nonexistence, as if that implies the opposite, or at least makes it equally likely. Some scientists bend over backwards to be nonthreatening to theists—Gould’s ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ or NOMA (in ROCK OF AGES). Compare Martin Rees (OUR COSMIC HABITAT) who seems sympathetic to NOMA. Science and religion don’t intersect.

But why then should theologians (does the topic exist?) have any authority about anything? As opposed to the gardener or cook? E.g, why should religion be allowed to say what’s good and bad? Which religion? How to choose from them all? Why not leave out the middle man and make moral choices ourselves? Some scientists bend over backwards to not offend religion.

If such a god exists who can suspend natural laws (to make ‘miracles’) it would be a quite different universe than one without.

Contrarily, if DNA were discovered to support Christ’s virgin birth, you can bet believers would *not* shrug and say science doesn’t apply—they would trumpet the evidence. NOMA is popular only because there *isn’t* evidence for any of these things.

Anyway evidence for miracles is required for sainthood; most people do believe their prayers are answered. They don’t believe in NOMA. They believe God helped them win, or saved them a parking space.

P61, The Great Prayer Experiment. It was double-blind, with 1802 patients, and results in April 2006 detected no difference in whether patients were prayed to or not. (Author offers mocking example of Bob Newhart sketch about this.) Theologians opposed the project—after the results were in, and offered rationalizations—prayers must be for a good reason, say. Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne actually defends suffering (even of Hiroshima!) in typical such reasoning, and suggested that ‘too much evidence’ of god’s existence would be a bad thing. Other theologians dismissed the study too; you can be sure they would not have had the results been positive.

P66, The Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists. A broader issue concerns attacks on science in general from certain political groups. Defenders stress NOMA. A sort of Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists. One of these is Michael Ruse, who criticized Dawkins for playing to the creationist base; Jerry Coyne properly replied that the real war is between rationalism and superstition. Creationists fight dirty, by conflating evolution with atheism. Examples with comments by Dennett and Myers.

P69 Little Green Men. Move from the teapot example to the existence of ET life—that we can make estimates about the likelihood of. The Drake equation. We have more evidence now, and we can certainly imagine what kind of evidence it would take to convince us of their existence. (Mentions of Hoyle, Sagan, Clarke, Galouye, 72-73.) In fact, ETs might well be godlike—but they wouldn’t be gods. It’s a matter of provenance. Gods are skyhooks, not cranes.

3, Arguments for God’s Existence, p75

Thomas Aquinas offered five, easily exposed as vacuous. The first three (The Unmoved Mover; The Uncaused Cause; The Cosomological Argument) involve infinite regress, with ‘God’ presuming to be the end of it; of course there’s no reason to imagine such a terminator to regress to have all the other qualities we ascribe to God, 77b. But not all things infinitely regress—one can subdivide an amount of gold only until reaching a single atom. The fourth argument, from degree, is hardly an argument. The fifth, from design (the teleological argument), is the one still taken seriously by some (but of course can be explained by natural selection).

P80, The ontological argument and other a priori arguments. The most famous is the notion that since a perfect thing is conceivable, and to be perfect it must exist, then this perfect thing, god, must exist. Author considers this argument ‘infantile’. But it gave even Bertrand Russell pause. But similar logic can prove the opposite. They didn’t understand Zeno’s paradox. Hume and Kant provided the definitive refutations of this argument. One can similarly argue that God does *not* exist, p83. Other examples, p84-5.

P86, The argument from beauty. How do you account for Beethoven? But, the logic is? Improbability of a genius? Jealousy that such an artist could exist unless created by god?

P87, The argument from personal ‘experience’. The most common. A man converts after hearing the devil during a camping trip in Scotland… which others would recognize as a devil bird. Many people hear things or see things; some are called mad; enough of them make a religion. (Quote from Sam Harris p88.)

The brain runs simulation software of the world, rather than perceiving the world directly. Thus optical illusions; thus a bias toward perceiving faces and hearing voices. Author recalls hearing a voice that turned out to be wind through a keyhole.

Explaining mass visions is harder—e.g. the 70,000 pilgrims in Fatima who saw the sun tear across the sky. But explaining how this could happen and the rest of the world not notice—let alone if the earth had actually torn apart—is even less likely. Cf Hume. [[ anyway how could anyone verify that 70,000 saw the same thing? ]]

P92, The argument from scripture. Some people believe because scripture says so. CS Lewis: Jesus claimed to be son of god, so he was right, or insane or a liar. (Or was honestly mistaken.)

People aren’t used to wondering who wrote something down, when and why, what their biases were, etc. [[ of course simply claiming it was inspired by god is the answer here. ]] In the case of the gospels, the issue of whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem was handled differently (p93); two of them assumed he must have been, because it was prophesied. Similarly there are many contradictions in the Christmas stories (cf Tom Flynn in Free Inquiry), and many elements of the myth were lifted from other religions of the time. But many unsophisticated people do take the bible literally… presumably without having read it closely. Generations from David to Joseph. As explained by Bart Ehrman in recent books.

And there were other gospels, 95b. With stories even more implausible than those in the four canonical ones. Footnote about mistranslations, from ‘carpenter’ to ‘virgin.’ 96b. So too is The Da Vince Code entirely fiction.

P97, The argument from admired religious scientists. (Note Bertrand Russell quote.) Yes Newton said he believed, as did Faraday and Kelvin, but up to the 19th century virtually everyone *said* they believed. These days it’s hard to find prominent scientists who claim to be believers—though he names three Brits (99.4), and Francis Collins, etc. Very few Nobelists, or Royal Society members. Studies by Shermer (How We Believe) and others show a negative correlation between education or IQ and belief.

P103, Pascal’s wager— But this isn’t about belief, but about feigning belief. Wouldn’t God know? Anyway, why is it so important to God to believe, moreso than being kind, generous, etc.? And what if, per the wager, one died and discovered that Baal was the real god who existed?

P105, Bayesian Arguments. A writer named Stephen Unwin published a book recently trying to use Bayesian arguments, a series of set theory estimates combining various factors… Unwin provided his own estimates of six facts (evil things happen, etc), ran the calculation and got something above 50%–then added a fudge factor of ‘faith’ to bring the result to 95% (!).

Unwin considers the existence of evil is a factor (against God, actually); but it’s not one that concerns author much. Religious people seldom distinguish between what they believe, and what they wish to be true. Another solution to the problem of evil might be that god is simply nasty—or he has better things to worry about, or that evil is a trial, etc. etc. All rationalizations that have been made.

The much more powerful argument, from improbability, is to simply wonder, who made God?

Ch 4, Why There Almost Certainly is No God, p111

P113, The Ultimate Boeing 747. This is a clincher for most people—that the world is so improbable, God must have done it – but author claims it’s a clincher in the opposite direction, but indicating why God almost certainly does not exist.

The reason is a variation of Fred Hoyle’s 747 argument—he said the probability of life originating on earth is as likely as finding a 747 blown together by a hurricane in a scrapyard. It’s the creationist’s favorite argument because they have no clue about how natural selection actually works, thinking it some theory of chance.

The reason is that God is the ultimate 747—if god created life and the universe, then God is himself even more unlikely, for what is to explain God? Actually, natural selection is the only answer.

P114, National selection is a consciousness raiser. Like maps with the south pole at the top. Just as feminists’ use of ‘herstory’ was for author. It makes one aware of possibilities one wouldn’t have considered. Douglas Adams read earlier Dawkins’ books and was converted to ‘radical atheism’. (See The Salmon of Doubt.) The principles of natural selection apply to other sciences; in a sense cosmology was born with Darwin and Wallace.

Theists who thinks evolution is god’s method of achieving creation—they don’t get it. With natural selection, there’s nothing for God to do.

P119, Irreducible Complexity. The favorite ploy of creationists is to cite ‘irreducible complexity’ – as in many examples of lifeforms in a Watchtower published booklet about how life got here – as the reason ‘chance’ can’t explain life, implying that therefore design (by God) is the only explanation. (They omit natural selection, because they don’t understand it or don’t want to, 120b.) But God just extends the problem. The real answer is a third alternative—natural selection, which has a cumulative power. Creationists take an all-or-nothing position, as if half an eye or wing is useless. In fact many intermediate forms exist in nature, and are useful. (Author cites own metaphor of ‘mount improbable’, with a cliff on one side, a gentle slope on the other.) Darwin anticipated these issues.

Creationists worship gaps—they seize upon them as evidence that their alternative explanation of design must be true. But it’s easy to imagine situation where part of an eye, or wing, is better than nothing. “The fact that so many people have been dead wrong over these obvious cases… “ 124.7.

P125, The Worship of Gaps. It is a faulty way of arguing—that if an apparent gap is found, God must be needed to fill it. Whereas scientists seize upon gaps as new opportunities for research. Example p126 about a frog’s elbow joint; ID is assumed as a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Gaps represent a failure of imagination; author has called this the argument from personal incredulity. But if you can’t figure out how Penn & Teller do a trick, that doesn’t mean the supernatural was involved.

An arch of stones and no mortar is irreducibly complex, but its construction can be easily imagined: by using a scaffolding subsequently removed.

Michael Behe is invented the term ‘irreducible complexity’ in 1996, using the flagellar motor of bacteria as a prime example. (Author cites Philip Pullman in a footnote here.) In the Pennsylvania 2005 court case Behe was presented with numerous cases to explain the immune system, and simply shrugged them off, as Judge Jones easily saw. (Note book by Kenneth Miller.) Examples. Another of Behe’s favorites, the immune system. Mention of Jerry Coyne. The explanation ‘God did it’ is simply giving up.

P134, The anthropic principle—planetary version. The origin of life itself is cited by theists as a ‘bigger’ gap, but it only had to happen once. The so-called anthropic principle explains why the origin itself can be extremely improbable—it only had to happen once. … Even if only one in a billion planets produced life, there are still billions in the universe that would have life. Theists assume that for Earth to be in a ‘Goldilocks orbit’, God must have done it. The anthropic principle says, since we’re here to ask the question, we must be one of the billion.

Oddly, religious apologists love the anthropic principle, thinking it an alternative to chance. It isn’t; it’s an alternative to design. Matt Ridley has suggested there may be other unlikely ‘gaps’—the origin of eukaryotic cells, consciousness—but the same principle applies.

P141, The Anthropic Principle: Cosmological Version. That we live in a friendly universe is perhaps a more difficult problem; Martin Rees cites six specific physical constants that if slightly different would result in a universe without life. What does this mean? Perhaps that God set all six numbers. That still doesn’t explain God. Yet many theists are satisfied by this answer, perhaps subject to the psychological bias of perceiving inanimate objects as agents, 143b. Another answer is for some reason the settings are necessary, or dependent on each other on some deep level.

Further ideas suggest cycles of big bangs, or many universes in a ‘multiverse’. Each universe might have slightly different physical laws. Smolin’s idea (in The Life of the Cosmos) of daughter universes, where each daughter might have different laws, in a sort of Darwinian inheritance.

Theists have odd responses to these ideas—Richard Swinburne admirably claims to prefer simple explanations, but then finds it amazing that every electron has the same properties, or that each particle retains its properties over time. Surely God is maintaining things? But then he says God by definition is a single, simple substance. Author is boggled—anything capable of maintaining such complexity (not to mention answering prayers etc) must be very complex. Others, Ward and Peacocke, have similar ideas.

P 151, An Interlude at Cambridge. Author was invited to conference sponsored by Templeton Foundation (which should have been a warning; they’d paid for the journalists who covered it) and found himself the token atheist, and dismayed by Freeman Dyson’s vague conciliatory responses in support of having won the Templeton Prize. In the discussions that followed, theologians response to Dawkins was to simply declare the subject to be outside science; to talk about ‘other ways of knowing’; to cite personal experience; to ask why there is something rather than nothing; or to dismiss Dawkins’ world-view as so 19th-century (i.e. discussing issues so bluntly is simply impolite). Which was the last time anyone could claim to believe in miracles and virgin births without sounding embarrassed.

Author summarizes the central argument of the book, pp157-8.

  1. Explaining the appearance of design in the universe has been a great challenge
  2. The temptation, as with man-made objects, is to attribute appearance of design to design
  3. That doesn’t work because it doesn’t explain the designer
  4. Only a ‘crane’ can explain how complexity arose out of simplicity; natural selection is the most powerful crane.
  5. The equivalent for physics isn’t as apparent, but may involve a multiverse theory of some sort
  6. A better crane in physics may arise, but what we have is better than the skyhook intelligent designer

This is the main conclusion of this book so far—that God does not exist. If we accept this, what good is religion? Why is it ubiquitous? Where does it comes from…?

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My general comment, derived from the “consciousness-raising aspiration” of science fiction, is that human religions are deeply parochial. They project human relationships and attitudes onto the entire universe. It’s just as likely that something entirely beyond the comprehension of human beings is responsible for the universe; or, even more likely, the universe just is, in some necessary way, without having been created.

 

Posted in Book Notes, Morality, Religion | Comments Off on Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 2

Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 1

Posted on Friday 14 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

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

Of the four books published in the mid-2000s by the so-called “new atheists,” this one by Richard Dawkins was the most blunt and least conciliatory; it was frank, straightforward, and matter of fact. It covers all the basics, such as the arguments for God’s existence and why they are weak or implausible, and the reasons why it’s very unlikely that any god exists; then looks at the history of religion, the source of morality, how the moral zeitgeist has changed over the millennia, and the problems with religion and religious belief.

Dawkins was already a highly renowned evolutionary biologist at Oxford, famous for books including THE SELFISH GENE (which introduced the concept of “meme”), THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE, and UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW.

I reread the book a couple years ago and took detailed notes. As with the Haidt book just summarized, I’ll reproduce those notes with some comments along the way, and at the end boil everything down to a one-page summary.

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Preface

Dawkins tells how his wife didn’t realize that, as a child, she could have complained about her unhappy school experience. Her parents learned later; why didn’t she tell them? She didn’t know she could.

[[ Here I’ll interject a comment right away, to note that most people grow up automatically assuming the characteristics of their family and community. They acquire a last name without question; similarly they acquire a religion without question, even though a religion presumes many things about the world that are not verifiably true. But as Dawkins implies, you don’t have to. ]]

RD hopes this book will raise the consciousness of those unhappy with religion who just don’t realize that they can aspire to be an atheist… This is the first of his consciousness-raising aspirations.

[[ “Aspire to be an atheist”? OK, I’ll note this Dawkins blind spot. He doesn’t realize that very few people aspire to be an atheist, at least not publicly — because most other people take that to mean that you reject the constraints of the local religion and therefore can’t be trusted. It’s a matter of spin: people should aspire to be free of the irrational constraints of the local religion, along with the unsupportable supernatural claims, and learn to understand the world as it actually is. ]]

Dawkins comments how he hosted a British TV show in January 2006 titled “Root of All Evil?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzZh2wstj88) Aside: John Lennon’s song “Imagine” has been altered by deleting the line about religion, or replacing it by “one religion too”.

Then he outlines the topics to be covered in the book, mentioning three other ‘consciousness-raising aspiration.’ The second is the power of cranes, such as natural selection, that aid in our understanding of the cosmos. The third is the issue of childhood indoctrination; RD objects to phrases such as ‘Catholic child’ and wants everyone to speak of ‘child of Catholic parents’ instead. The fourth is atheist pride; it’s not something to be apologetic about.

The religiosity of America is truly remarkable. The status of atheists is that of homosexuals 50 years ago. RD hopes this book will help them come out. Alas atheists are hard to organize, though they outnumber Jews…

RD defends the term ‘delusion’ and discusses how his quotes are often taken out of context.

It’s presumptuous, but RD hopes religious readers who pick up this book will be atheists when they put it down. And he comments:

Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). Among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan. But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people out there: people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn’t ‘take’, or who native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether. At very least, I hope that nobody who reads this book will be able to say, ‘I didn’t know I could.’

Posted in Book Notes, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off on Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 1

Intentional Ignorance

Posted on Thursday 13 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on Republican lies and misrepresentations about health care;
  • Short items about a drop in US religiosity; Trump lying about falling gas prices; David French on how Trump keeps pardoning criminals as long as they’re loyal to him.
– – –

Paul Krugman, 13 Nov 2025: The Republican Brain Doesn’t Want To Understand Health Care, subtitled “For 15 years we have heard the same lies and misrepresentations”

There are almost 150 million dwelling units in America. Most homes are covered by insurance, and most home insurance covers losses due to fire. Yet in a normal year there are fewer than 400,000 home fires. Even if we allow for the fact that some homeowners don’t have insurance and some policies don’t cover fire damage, the vast majority of homeowners are paying for fire coverage that they will never use.

Clearly, this is a massive waste of money, a huge giveaway to the insurance industry.

OK, presumably almost no one believes that. While it’s unlikely that your house will burn down, losing your house to fire would be a crushing financial blow if you are uninsured. So we all pay premiums to protect ourselves against disaster. All Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans require home insurance.

Health insurance operates on the same principle. Without health insurance, you are at risk of a catastrophic financial blow if you get sick and require hospitalization. Moreover, even if you don’t require hospitalization, you are more likely to avoid getting regular check-ups and preventative care, thereby making it more likely that you will indeed suffer a health crisis and, possibly, death.

Yet the shutdown drama made it clear, once again, that Republicans, from Donald Trump on down, refuse to understand this basic point.

…

But the fact that Republicans have been misrepresenting how health insurance works since Obamacare was first proposed in 2009 is a testament to their cruelty and intentional ignorance.

And he patiently goes on to explain how insurance works, and how Obamacare was meant to work, and how Republicans after 15 years have never come up with a better scheme. And a line that echoes my repeated observation:

Republicans have lost the ability to think about policies that solve actual problems. Now it’s all a display of fealty to Dear Leader.

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Short Items.

  • NY Times, David French, 13 Nov 2025: One of the Founders’ Worst Fears Has Been Realized [gift link] — — How Trump keeps issuing pardons, commutations, or clemency, to criminals who are “either allies of Trump and his associates or used connections to Trump or his family (or helped enrich Trump) to get relief from justice.”
Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, Religion | Comments Off on Intentional Ignorance