Jesus Camp - we don't need to think

Tonight, I watched the movie "Jesus Camp" for the first time. I've seen pieces of it on YouTube. I've heard and read many others' opinions about it. I had no doubt that I would be opposed to the ideas presented. However, I expected to find something redeeming, too. Jesus's sermons are mostly lessons of peace and understanding. But there was nothing good to find.

I've now seen the face of the forces that are working to turn back the clock for the human race. They are, without doubt, committed to seeing the progress of the world, made mostly through reason and openness, undone so that the twisted view of the bible they have adopted can be made real. They see no sense in any ecological thinking because the world is given wholly to the people of the garden of eden. For them there is no question that united states was founded as a christian nation and that president GW Bush was the best chance we had for revival. War is sanctioned by Paul the apostle. Faith is most genuine in children and should be reinforced in them with no question. Public schools are godless and therefore evil. Most of all, without having their exact view on all thing to do with Jesus, you will surely burn in hellfire.

For me, the most shocking thing was near the start when the woman preacher, who is in much of the film, was talking about how "Muslim kids" are trained to use rifles and grenades from the age of 5. This absolutely does happen, just as militias in the mountains of the US do the same. But what shocked me was the obvious passion and zest she had saying that her kids for Christ should have the same kind of lust for giving their lives for god as do those kids. She wants warriors. She wants blood. She sees no conflict in loving kids and wanting them to die. Why should she? Clearly they don't go to 72 virgins, but they go to a better place for sure.

"We don't need to think about what we believe about homosexual activities, it's written in the bible." says Ted Haggard. Ironies of hindsight of that man saying it aside, the message is clear: "we don't need to think". I can't come up with a more insidious thing to tell a child.

What I'm left wondering is this: is it too late? What can one do against such willful ignorance?

The Rally for Sanity: Really?

Unless you've been willfully ignoring mass media, you've heard about Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity". I went. I never do such things. I've been to some political events before, but all when I was in college and all when I stumbled on things going on in NYC. Mostly they turned me off. Rallying never seemed to make much of a difference. So I'm going to attempt to explain a bit about why I did go to this, and give some impressions of what I saw.

When I told people I was going, I was asked a number of questions about the motives of the rally: "Isn't it just a concert and a show?" "Isn't it just the same old liberal media/MSM folks doing something to copy Glen Beck?" "Isn't this just to make Jon Stewart richer?" "Isn't this just a proxy rally for the Democrats?" "Isn't this just a big reaction to the tea party?" "Isn't this just an anti-fox news rally?" The answer to all of these is the same. Maybe so. There's no way for me to know what the real motivations are. But I didn't go for any of those reasons, though some of them are appealing and others are quite unappealing to me. I went for one simple reason. The political discourse in this country is broken. There is no real dialogue. There is a series of monologues. Even if it was only on the surface, the stated reason for this event was to try and counter that with some sanity, reason and thoughtfulness. And if it was going to be just a bit like that, it seemed worth supporting. Throw in that my wife really wanted to go, too, and that we have friends in the DC area we could hook up with, and we had enough motivation to make it.

There were some other questions I was commonly asked: "Isn't this rally every bit as extreme but on the other side [than the tea party]?" "You always complain about big money interfering in politics, and isn't this just that and not even trying to hide it?" "You say you're an independent, but you're going to a democratic rally - why?" "What good is it to gather around paid celebrities when it comes to politics?" How extreme, how democratic (versus independent) and how celebrity focused the rally was were things I didn't think I could judge without seeing it. And, even if it turned out to be all three, that idea of a calmer kind of discourse was appealing enough for me to get over it. And I liked that they were not trying to hide who was sponsoring the event, why and with what biases. I wish every political event was so obvious about where the money comes from. I'm for transparency above all things. Comedy Central simply must be shocked at how much success they've gotten from Jon Stewart. It's not like he had such a stellar track record previous to The Daily Show. It's my opinion that the content really does come from him and his crew if only because his success was his own formula and no executive would ever mess with a cash cow once it started delivering the milk.

The stuff on stage was OK. Not incredibly inspiring and not all that political - at least not directly. Having the Mythbuster guys was a nod to science, I'd guess. A bit of a lame one, but I'll take it. Stewart and Colbert were very funny, as they usually are. But if you've seen their act before it was nothing shocking. Stewart did his best to be heartfelt and did better than usual at it, but kept it brief and mercifully un-hokey. The one thing that really did it for me was Tony Bennett singing America the Beautiful. That was awesome. And I have to say that it was nice that it ended promptly as promised.

The interesting bits for me were in the crowd. First of all, everyone was so polite. There were a LOT of people there. And I saw nor heard any squabbling or mean words. Maybe every rally of like minded people is like that. But I've been to other big events (concerts, etc.) and never seen a crowd behave so well. Of course there were signs. Most were about issues, and most of those simply urged people to participate in politics and remain civil. The second highest concentration went for comedy. Some were more directly political. Of the political ones, most were anti tea party pundit. I say tea party pundit and not tea party because most were concerned with Palin, O'Donnell and other tea party celebrities. I saw only one sign that mentioned the tea party without pointing directly at those personalities. The only other political signs were supporting Obama and most of those were the ones with the Obama campaign image and the byline "probably not trying to destroy America". Overall, I thought the crowd was living up to the billing. Everyone was being engaged, topical yet civil. There was no one I saw that seemed to be "extreme" in any way save perhaps their willingness to go the extra mile for a cool Halloween costume - there were quite a few very realistic zombies roaming the crowd.

I was disappointed not to see any right leaning or conservative voices being overtly represented. There were some signs pointing out overspending and one saying that "to reduce spending one ought to look at the biggest parts of the budgets". That was about as conservative as it got. I knew it would be a socially liberal crowd, which is fine with me. And I was handed and subsequently wore a Panned Parenthood sticker supporting better access to birth control. And there were other represenatives of various social causes roaming the crowds to hand out materials. But I had hoped there would be more at least overtly centerist participation. But maybe that's a symptom of people like myself with a libertarian streak also not being the type to carry signs. Judging by the number of folks who were my age and older, which while not the majority were absolutely 40% of the people I saw by my reckoning, there may have been a lot of people thinking the same things. But there's no way to tell.

If I had to give the rally a grade based on it's stated purposes, it would be a B+. The crowd may get an A. But the content gets a B-. I give the crowd a bit more weight because a rally really ought to be about what happens in the crowd as near as I can tell. I would have liked to see more intellectual meat on the stage, and less clips from news media. I was happy I went. Partially because it was a good time all in, including seeing friends, getting time with the wife away from home and taking advantage of rewards programs I fatten through so much travel for work. But it was also good to have gone to see that there are many people who seem to want to take the volume level in politics down a few notches. And it was very heartening that so many seemed to support a scientific worldview - I wore a tee shirt with Einstein on it in a faux Che silhouette and the byline "viva la relativity" and it got a huge number of positive comments and thumbs up from the crowd. So while I didn't get anything but good entertainment from what was on stage, I did feel I got something worthwhile from the other people there.

three little words

Perhaps the simplest and most profound statement of my understanding of Nietzsche's contribution to human thought is expressed in a letter to his sister in 1865. Nietzsche writes "Every true faith accomplishes what the person who has the faith hopes to find in it; but faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth." In this quote, there is the nature of faith, its relation to truth and the relationship of humanity, faith and truth; all three cast in Nietzsche's unique viewpoint. Faith finds its origins in humanity's desires. The truth, something external to humanity, is unaffected by the faiths of people. And though it is in the individual and collective minds of thinkers that these things reside, they are affected by the concepts as much as the concepts are affected by them.

The first notion, that faith is a purely human thing, may be the most revolutionary idea of the three. That truth was out of human hands may have been easily accepted by many in Nietzsche's day, just as many think truth is out of human hands today. That is what the rising tide of religious fervor would have you believe - all liberal and conservative, extremist and moderate forms of it. Truth is divine only, the swallow would fall from the sky were it not for the will of god. Or in the more moderate form: only god knows for sure. But faith is always portrayed as a gift. We are granted faith from above. This gift is one of a benevolent abundance of gifts in the religious view. It is faith that allows us to know god; it is requirement to know god. Faith is also seen as a gift bestowed from father to son, mother to daughter, generation to generation. The faith and ways of our forebears being part of the pantheon of tradition that we are all to revere without question. So for Nietzsche to say that faith is something wholly of the mind, something that is sourced from the individual, is very revolutionary. Of course, here in this quote, he only speaks of "true faith". That is a real living idea which animates people's actions; it is not the stories and ideas of a culture as "a faith" is sometimes used to name. We can take this "true faith" to mean something like the opposite of Sartre's "bad faith". For Nietzsche, a "true faith", faith that would motivate people to believe and act in some specific way, is always personal - even if it is appropriated from one's father. It takes a great act of personal will to have this kind of faith. People would be presented opportunities to break their faith daily, and so there is immense effort required to preserve faith. Even stranger, many do break their faith regularly and then twist their minds, even their memories, to somehow bring the world, their memory of the world and their faith into alignment again. So much energy is spent defending this faith, faith battered on by the world like cliffs of salt battered by ocean waves.

What are these waves? They are the ever present pressures of the senses telling us what the world around has to offer. And this stream of data, this font of potential in-formation, is the only source, the only possible root from which one can grow, objective truth. I think in this day anyone who utters "objective truth" gets a chill. It seems like a shadow or a myth. Postmodernism has banished it. "You can't know anything, knowledge is merely opinion" quips Tim Minchin via his characiture of our silly age, who labels herself Storm. And there is this feeling among people that all perspectives are of equal weight. That one idea is just as good as another. Worst of all, there is this notion that science and philosophy support this multi-truthed view. The notion is this: truth is dead. Its death contributes to the resurrection of god, the latest religious revivals. After all, if there is no truth to be had in science, if the efforts of math and physics have ended with a thud, if no answers are coming; why not turn to god and religion where all answers are right there for you on the page? But there are those nagging waves. The senses and their evidence. The data of what happens around us. There is the ever present reality we all share and the rules we know to govern it. The persistence of the light lit from electricity generated kilometers away, made to work by applying principles that work every time. And as long as religious fanatics broadcast themselves on youtube, they will reveal the deep irony of living in a world where our knowledge of our shared reality, our access to objective truth, will always mock their faiths in things we cannot see and cannot burn for fuel and cannot use to make light to read by or videos in which to opine.

Finally, there is the notion of how interconnected are truth, faith and humanity. Humanity needs truth. Humanity needs faith. It may be found that these things, our symbolic representations of our world and our fidelity to them, are our defining traits. It is already known that we are distinguished from other primates by our ability to learn what we are shown as we are shown. Even if something odd or off is completely evident in the things we are shown, we will take them in as given. And it is thought this is an adaptation to allow us to receive wisdom without having to fully grasp it. How can you tell the 3 year old that stepping on the green rocks is bad because the moss is slippery and you will fall? Instead the three year olds that have survived have been those who simply do not step on the rocks that grandma does not step on - simply because grandma did not do it and for no other reason. And that unquestioning acceptance is amazingly efficient at transmitting crucial information about how to traverse rivers. It is shockingly bad at allowing us to learn truth in a world that changes so fast that the generation born today will hardly have any experience in common with the generation born just 10 years before them - and so on into the future unless we commit some horrible act of war that resets the pace of change. If we cannot learn to reject the faith of our upbringing as new data demands it, if we cannot learn to change our thoughts about the world as it's presented to us as we find ever more clever ways to see, then we are advancing without hope and developing skills no one will wield. So where can we place faith, faith we so desperately need to have, such that it does not destroy our ability to see? From what kind of source can we extract truth that would not be corrupted by the instrument we use to learn it? How can we live, in faith, and with truth, as humanity? Of course, Nietzsche would say we must overcome our humanity. For now, I am too timid to guess what that may mean.

the USA a christian nation? quote questions

i was reading about some quotes from obama about the relationship of christianity to the USA's founding. this is always a topic that irks me. the idea that the USA was founded on christian principles is a new revisionist one. it suits the agendas of people today more than anything else. but the reaction of the far left and secularists is also troublesome. to state that christianity, the single most influential force in western culture, had no hand in the ideas that founded the US, even in a negative light if you wish, is absurd.

i was reading the comments on the article when i came across one that pulled out many of the alleged quotes from founding fathers (and Lincoln of course) that dispute the US christian connection. so i decided to look them up, something i had not done before.

first there was the quote: "The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion", which was attributed to George Washington & John Adams. this one appears legit and is sourced from article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli. but it's not that black and white. first, the treaty was specifically aimed at appeasing muslims in tripoli. so one could immediately wonder if this wasn't political styling versus the whole truth. but then, there is also dispute over whether the quote even made it to the arabic version. and really this is only a restatement of the establishment clause of the first amendment of the US constitution. so there is nothing radical or new here.

second there is: "This would be the best of all possible worlds,
if there were no religion in it.", which is attributed to John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. again, this is legitimate, but is taken far out of context. the whole quote is:

"Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!" But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell."

so clearly this is not any indication of atheism or even rejection of chritianity on Adams' part. it's a man struggling with religion on a personal level.

third we have a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." i could not even find a satisfactory source for this one, but there are many instances of it being attributed in many places. and it is consistent with things Lincoln is known to have said about religion and christianity. again, though, all this does is portray a man struggling with religion. well that he should in the face of a horrible war, a mentally ill wife, the death of his children and dealing with slavery.

lastly there is the lion of the secular quotes in US history, Thomas Jefferson: "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." what's funny is that the one they pick here seems to be disputed. again, though, Jefferson proves a man of his times that struggled with religion and faith:

"Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a god, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. ... In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision."

this is from a letter to a friend. Jefferson's work provides much evidence that he was likely a deist and rejected all organized religion in his own life, but he also saw value to religion in the fabric of a society. perhaps the most revealing quote from Jefferson is this simple wisdom: "He who steadily observes the moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ." this is taken from another letter.

in the end, the silliness of chasing quotes from men long dead who themselves saw many sides to these issues should be plain. the US is not explicitly a christian nation, and it says as much in the constitution. the US was founded by men who, for the most part, believed in some form of a god and were profoundly influenced by christianity, one way or another. and, in a move more profound than they could have known, those men left room for future generations to define things for themselves. and this should be the real arena of concern. what we say today, what we do today, what we allow people to define this nation as today is the real issue. let's be sure we leave room for everything we are.

happy new year all.

moral revolution

When is the last time the west had a moral revolution? Civil rights in
the US? Suffragettes in England? No. Both were just the logical
extension the west's prevailing moral attitudes. They were changes in
social, civil attitudes. As was said "men, their rights and no more;
women, their rights and no less." Those rights, their moral
entitlements, were long established. Similar with the civil rights
movement. There was no question what MLK jr meant when he said he had a
dream. That dream was well lodged in the collective consciousness.

To find the last moral revolution, you need to go very far back,
indeed. Though it pains me to credit him for anything, you need to
look to Descartes' era of thought. The idea that was so morally
revolutionary was the sovereignty of the individual. The idea that
each person had in them a universe to be reckoned with and that such a
reckoning had consequence for all. It was the codifying of the
assumption of our whole US culture and the force in the "me" of the
"me generation". That the world could not ignore any one person for
fear of violating a vast realm of ideas, this was a revolutionary
moral notion. And the apparent fact that this only applied to
european, caucasian males was only a vestigial, social, political
notion - one being shaken off over time.

In the last 10 years in the US, especially with the rise of the new
left, there seems to be a backlash forming against this "me" focus.
People at least pay lip service to living with others in mind, others
around us and those in far corners of the world. But it hardly seems
to dent the way any of us live. Are we too far wedged into the gears
of the machine? Is this not the harbinger of a new moral view and just
a slight pang of guilt - soon to be cleared up when "the next big
thing" hits? It seems all the discussions in politics have become
decidedly moral in tone. Not the usual sanctimonious politician
feigning righteousness for efficacy, but a real, gut reaction to right
and wrong in the eye of these beholders. If anything, the simplicity
demanded from politicians today, in word, deed and mind, seems to
smell of the return of the US mind to moral thoughts. Moral thoughts
always must seem simple.

having faith like a professional

The word faith is much abused. Faith makes many think of something very specific. It is a word the conjures religion. "You must have Faith, my son." "Faith is your only weapon in the fight to save the world!" But faith has a much less grandiose meaning here. Faith is a belief without proof. A belief is an idea we would attest to being true (True in some way. Gödel spoils truth with a big "t", but truth will serve as a word still, for now.). An idea is a thought we can express to some satisfaction in communication. And a thought is just a species of meme. What a meme is is best explained by others. I have understood a meme to be data capable of causing in-formation, where in-formation is a verb that is a process leading to information the noun. I struggle with whether the capability to inform is required for a meme, but the informing meme, even if there are other types, is the only type of meme that is interesting here. It is from this simple origin in a meme that an idea forms we feel is true so strongly that even in the absence of any evidence we will attest its truth. That attestation is the act of faith.

The more common forms of faith - faith in gods and supernatural occurrences - are indeed forms of the faith considered here. But faith in the supernatural is not the only form of faith. One may have faith in almost anything, though many things do not compel faith. Some would say it requires faith to believe that the sun will rise each day. The deep skepticism and cynicism required to doubt the inferential arguments of eons of daily sunrises coupled with science's demonstrations of the mechanics of the solar system is not common though. To rule out a lifetime of seeing the sun rise each day as evidence is, to me, excessive. That is not to say it cannot be done. One may have faith that the earth will not be hit by an earth destroying object from space today. The inferential evidence here is, of course, weaker. It is only negative evidence one can offer - so far this has failed to happen every day we have recorded history. There is also less evidence from science about what is out in space potentially ready to hit the earth. Again, it comes down to a question of the line drawn for evidence. How one considers evidence is core to how one draws up articles of faith and belief. What is considered good evidence for a belief? That is the question. For that which we feel is true but cannot rely on evidence, we have only faith as an option. Failing to have faith in the absence of evidence means giving up a belief and resigning the idea to being untrue.

Clearly, this is all very formal. The abuse of faith is abuse in the public square. The arguments offered in the informal world of everyday communication do not have such strict definitions of concepts like faith, belief, evidence, ideas, etc. And thus the abuse is in the eye of the beholder - the eye of the stricter practitioner of reason. Much in the same way a professional driver must shiver every trip through the streets of his home town watching how other people drive, much like a celebrated chef must get chills each time they stand in the kitchen at a friend's home watching them prepare a meal, the philosopher will be disturbed by how people argue their points in the public square. The lack of formality, the gross abuse of terms, the misuse of evidence, the offering of eons old fallacies as good bits of argument, all these things are like the grating sounds of fingernails on chalkboards. But, without any doubt, the reason someone pays the professional driver to drive is because they are so much better than average. Is it a good thing to wish everyone to be an expert? The world would benefit little if everyone was as adept at driving as professionals. But wouldn't the world benefit greatly if everyone could reason as well as the philosophers? Wouldn't it be good if simple words like faith were understood and not abused?

Faith is the bridge to all knowledge

Faith is the bridge to all knowledge. Any person who would make a case, who would prove their point, who would plea for truth in their notions will come to rely on faith in some form. It is the necessity of every syllogism. It is the animus of every argument - even the argument that there is no "faith" to be had. It is here that we find the dark specter of the Aristotelian error. Strip away the world, peel back each action and they say you find some thing a priori. But the matter which comes first is stripping and peeling the ideas of the world. And at the base of every idea you will find that thing one will not be denied. That thing one may not even be aware of - or able to express. This is the idea prima facie. This is the axiom to which all other ideas are like dew clinging in the morning. Under the light of the mind the dew will be gone, but the faith in one's axiom remains.

Whence come these axioms? How are they formed? Where do they find ground to grow and nourishment to thrive in one's mind? Does all that beg the question of mind? What is mind that it should bring forth axioms and the dewy notions that cling to them? The philosopher can not hope to hold sway over these answers any more. Science is the source from which all ontology must flow or be considered nonsense. We question the dew in the morning, but we can only do so by acknowledging the sun, the grass, the day, the earth and all that which common sense codified in process and method shows us. We live on a planet named Earth. The stars are distant beyond imagining and burn like a fire larger and hotter than anything we will ever truly know. The moon circles round the Earth, but the Sun stays fixed relatively at the center of our little part of the universe. Any first world child can tell you all these things, yet they were beyond the reach of all but the greatest minds for most of humanity's existence. All this science has laid bare. What we take from this - and all the other sundry input the world offers us - that is where the axioms we have come from.

We put a stake in the ground and take the moisture clinging to it in the morning light as nourishment. We ponder, or not, and we reach a place where we feel we understand what is going on - how ill fated a thought to have, but we all succumb to it. And it all starts with the morning of our minds, stirred by the rising of a fixed sun and aware of the fading, changing moon; when we look around at all that is plain to see and choose to think something of it. Our will binds us to an idea so real that the dew finds it solid enough to cling to. From there, we make the world's image.