Social networking

I am not an active member of FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn or any other social networking site. I do not play any MMORPGs. I do not have an active account on any message board, discussion board or any other conversational forum. I do not use Skype, AIM, ICQ or any other chat program. There may be some remnants of past activity in these areas, but I no longer check them.

I have this blog, an email account (that sufficiently clever readers of this blog can find), and a phone.

If you try to friend me, or buddy me, or whatever it is that's done at these sorts of places, I'm not ignoring you: I'm simply unable to respond. Either I don't have an account (as best I can tell, FaceBook does not require an invitee to have an account), or I've long forgotten the password and I'm disinclined to retrieve it.

I make no judgments: if you use these sorts of media, good for you. They don't work for me, however, so I don't use them.

Uber Cool Nerd King

I'd've scored higher on SF/comic if they'd included TV and movie questions that went beyond Star Trek/Wars, Dr. Who and Battlestar Galactica. (e.g. Red Dwarf, Firefly, Lexx, etc. I'm a postmodern SF fan.)

I'm logical

You Are Incredibly Logical

Move over Spock - you're the new master of logic You think rationally, clearly, and quickly. A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!

How Logical Are You?

(h/t to Scientia Natura)

More Random Facts

I've been tagged by jean kazaz; I've been tagged before, so I'll have to come up with 8 more facts.

1. I mentioned in my previous post that I dropped out of high school and college. Technically, I finished high school early, taking the California High School Proficiency exam, and I was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley; since I didn't fulfill my high school's criteria, however, I didn't actually graduate. I dropped out of UC Berkeley less than a year later.
2. I'm a pretty good poker player; I can hold my own in a casino, and I always win against my friends. I play with friends always for stakes less than the beer contribution.
3. I'm a strong amateur Go player, but I won't get any better until I can take professional lessons.
4. I taught myself to play a few pieces on the piano, including Bach's Two-Part Invention #14.
5. I learned computer programming when I was 14, auditing classes at Kansas University where my mother was a graduate student
6. I learned everything I know (academically) about English grammar in a six week intensive class in 6th grade
7. I learned philosophy arguing with Christians on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board
8. I learned carpentry, plumbing and electrical work when I owned and maintained my home in Colorado

Autodidact as I am, my wife is still irritated with me that I won't read the classics of English literature.

Since I've already tagged 8 people I'll just tag my readers. If you want to play and you have a blog of your own you can post there, or you can post 8 random facts about yourself in the comments. If you haven't been tagged before, please tag 8 other people explicitly.

Coming out week: The Alpha and the Omega

Before I "met" Larry in this digital forum, I never really referred to myself openly as an atheist. In some senses, I still don’t, in that my identity as an atheist isn’t a big part of who I am as a person. I consider metaphysical musings to be trivial. While I enjoy such musings, much as I enjoy the intellectual wankery of amateur-hour policy wonkery, both hobbies really aren’t much more than a cognitive form of ego masturbation. Et la, I try not to let such an identity define me. It’s not that I think poorly of people who do choose to fight that fight – and I’ll jump in if I feel it’s warranted or amusing – but I simply can’t get worked up about something I don’t particularly care that much about.

Interacting with the people here in the forum Larry provides, however, made me see that this very attitude made it important to be forthright about my atheism. There exists in this world a very wide swath of people for whom adherence to the right kind of faith, or at least some kind of faith, in a God is felt to be crucial to participating in the larger community. George H.W. Bush and Joe Lieberman both stated publicly that atheists cannot be good people and should not be allowed to be citizens of a participatory democracy. Frequently, theists of all stripes ask how one can be good without God. I not so humbly contend that I am living proof that God is not necessary: I work day in and day out to help individuals with developmental disabilities and their families, making sure they are not denied access to their rights, medical care, education, and work. I do this for a relatively modest salary compared to what my personal ability and education make possible. I have always done thus, for no better reason than I felt that it was important to give to the community by helping people in need. I feel good doing good. How do I know my work is good? Because it has observable positive effects, and the people on the receiving end say so: just like anyone else.

Self-identifying as an atheist is important because there are theists dedicated to tearing down atheism and atheists. Men like Peter Berkowitz and Michael Novak have penned what amount to, even if they are beautifully written and highly intelligent, little more than hit pieces that prey on fear. The charge that one cannot be good if one is an atheist is a terrible accusation of monstrosity, equating atheists with sociopaths (and frequently sociopaths, like Hitler and Stalin, are equated with atheists in order to distance theists from their ilk): Atheists should fear the community, and the community should fear atheists.

I was not raised religious, never attending church despite my parents’ nominally Protestant upbringing. My mother never talks about religion, and seems to have lost faith around the time of her mother’s early death. My father maintains a quiet, personal faith in something resembling Spinoza’s god. I have never found a need for faith, and that lack is far more telling to me than absence of evidence (though I see none of that, either). At age twelve, at the height of my parents’ contentious divorce, in the throes of suicidal ideation, no faith appeared out of my despair. At the loss of my beloved grandfather when I was fourteen, I did not want to believe my grandfather was gone for good, but again simply found no need for a belief in the afterlife to console me; I had his writings, his gifts, my memories, and the parts of me I recognized as his teachings and influence to shelter my grief. Facing a life-threatening open-heart surgery at sixteen, again I felt no need to resort to prayer or faith to comfort my anxiety: things would play out as they would play out, and I had to trust in the skill of my doctors or not at all. I chose to trust my fellow man and here I remain today, twelve years later.

The one thing that keeps me sympathetic to the theist is the one or two nights a month where I remain awake, breaths coming shallow and rapid, a tight constriction in my chest. These are the nights where I contemplate the possibility of oblivion. Nothing terrifies me so much as the thought of my mind ceasing to exist. I can live with that terror or find solace in comforting belief; ultimately, because I have experienced no need in my life and no revelatory experience, and absent a childhood of gentle indoctrination, I do not turn to belief. I spend some nights afraid, and go on with my life.

One thing I don’t think most theists understand is that I would love to be wrong. I constantly search for reasons why I am wrong in my politics, in my lack of faith, in my morals, in everything. If I am wrong, I want to know; and being insecure as I often am, I must always deal with the uncertain feeling that I could be wrong about any given thing. If I trust to anything, it is my openness to this possibility and my constant search for contradictory information. Sometimes that leads to a changing of opinion. In terms of atheism, despite actively seeking out writers like Messrs. Berkowitz and Novak, C.S. Lewis, the Bible, Sikh and Hindu and Buddhist teachers, and so on, I have yet to find anything that convinces me. To say, for example, that Christians (one sect, all sects, whatever) are correct and I will experience Hell is a gamble I can live with because the consequence if I am wrong still means that my mind continues to exist. And so, Hell holds far less terror for me.

Given so many scriptures to choose from, it seems to me that the only acceptable answer lies in either a Hindu conception (thousands of gods, or one God with many faces) or a Unitarian one (vague Spinoza-esque God thing out there somewhere). I have never been able to reconcile the idea of a loving God requiring worship and belief. Love is not unconditional among humans, but either God is greater than we are – and so should have unconditioned love for all life (or contempt, or indifference; who are we to say?) – or God is no greater than Man, only more terrible and powerful. Just as I do not bow to those I don't respect, whatever their authority, and would struggle against a human tyrant, I cannot worship at the feet of the contradictory conceptions of the Abrahamic God.

Ultimately, I find that I am comfortable with a Mysterian position: there are some things that are simply too complex or ethereal for us to conceptualize or comprehend in our current form. As a student of history, if I have faith in any one thing, it is in man’s potential for further progression as a thinking, feeling creature, since that progress is amply demonstrated in the few millennia’s worth of information we have available to us. Maybe one day we will possess deeper insights into the nature of metaphysics. But it seems to me, as we grow more enmeshed with technology and our thought ascends past rudimentary tribalism into more complex forms, we have moved past the need for a God. Our growing technological interconnection moves us past the need for tribal cohesion. Teleology can be found in unity in leaving a better world for our children. Moral lessons and thought have progressed, allowing Scripture to pass into Literature (there is a reason why logos translates into both "god" and "word"), serving now the same educational function that mythology and folk lore does. Our incredible ability to learn and adapt leads to an expanding base of knowledge, allowing us to accept that there are things we don’t know but may one day, superseding the need for a supernatural explanation for events whose causes seem beyond our ken.

My atheism is, in the end, about confidence in the forward progression of our species and the positive effects we can choose to have. I am an atheist precisely because I am also a humanist. We are our own Alpha and Omega. I guess, in the end, my atheism informs who I am far more than I first thought when beginning this essay.

I'm mad as hell

... and I'm not going to take it anymore.[1]

I've received some feedback about my "vitriolic" tone, which has its most severe expression in my recent essay Sir Salman Rushdie, but has also been noted regarding my writing about religion in general, most recently my essay Rococo metaphysics. I'll not deny the charge, nor make excuses, but I would like to give my readers a little of the back-story.

I came to philosophy via religion: I started discussing both religion and philosophy at the Internet Infidels Discussion Board beginning in late 1999. Before that, I'd read a little philosophy and "spiritual" stuff, but I'd not thought or read deeply on the subject. I started off very abstract and dispassionate on Infidels, using my innate skepticism and skill at logical analysis developed as a computer programmer to discuss and criticize the canonical arguments for the existence of God. I worked out most of the rebuttals on my own; they're really not that difficult.

I noticed a curious thing... well, two curious things. The more logical flaws I found in religious people's philosophical and ethical reasoning, the worse their reasoning became and the more angry and contemptuous they became. I've lost count of the times I've been damned to hell or the had dust of my words shaken off someone's feet.

The other curious thing I noted was that the more I departed from the philosophy endorsed by the atheist philosophical gurus of Infidels—mostly regarding scientific epistemology and meta-ethical subjective relativism—the worse their reasoning became and the more angry and contemptuous they became. I was the subject of the most vicious personal attack I've ever witnessed merely because I left the board.

I came to the conclusion that no one, atheist or religious, enjoys having his or her own views criticized, and, absent a structure of enforcement, will often early abandon reasoned discourse for invective and personal attack.

As a case in point (on the religious side), look at Stephen's comment on the feedback post. I am called a "relentless prick", a "pain-in-the-ass", "obnoxious", "like a self-absorbed bully", "splenetic and insecure", "attention-hunger[ing], swaggering, and bullying", arrogant, mean-spirited, pissy, needy of attention, outrageous, egotistical, angry, and hateful. In an earlier comment, Stephen calls me "a take no prisoners troll". Kenneth has called me "a petulant man-child", "insulting", a "victim", "a classic bully", "a petulant, arrogant, bully", one who "a sound defeat as a stunning victory" [a lie; I never claimed "victory"]. He further calls me "snippy", an "ass", "closed-minded", "a playground bully", one who "crap[s] on my plate and call[s] it chocolate pudding," one who indulges in "playground name-calling", "rigid and so enslaved". (He correctly identifies where I was unclear to his detriment; had he simply pointed out the error, I would have apologized and corrected it.) And these are just a sample.

Now, I'm not in the least bit offended by Stephen's or Kenneth's comments; they have a right to whatever opinion of me they please and I'm happy to let them slide off my back. But compare and contrast their comments with my own in our conversation, especially the post which apparently drew his ire. Search as you will—I've linked to most of the posts on his blog on which I've commented—and you will not find a single unkind word only one unkind word (I called him an "insensitive creep" for suggesting I would be blasé about a loved one being raped) I've said about the man himself, only my honest opinion about his ideas. The worst (unprovoked) thing I said about him was that he couldn't handle criticism and having his ideas mocked, which is factually true: I mocked his ideas here and he banned me from his blog. (The only person I've banned from The Barefoot Bum, Perezoso, was banned for harassment, not for disagreeing with me or posting a personal attacks.)

I was banned asked to part ways from Subversive Christianity because I accused Kerry of typical intellectual laziness... for a post in which was nothing but a thinly disguised accusation—without a shred of argumentation—that atheists were fascist jackbooted thugs. This is the same person who called Richard Dawkins a "halfwit" on the same intellectual level as Ravi Zacharias. Again, Kerry is entitled to his opinion. But there it is.

I had a falling out with a theist friend because I said that employing the fall of Man (i.e. original sin) as a component of theodicy was too risible to be worthy of discussion.

(Just to compare, the vicious personal attacks on Infidels stemmed from a particular personal attack ostensibly regarding my use of "evidential" instead of "evidentiary" (or was it the other way around?); I was contradicting the dominant anti-Popper philosophy of the Infidels philosophical gurus.)

There are, of course, two sides (at least!) to every story; I'm not trying to justify myself; I'm just trying to tell you where I'm coming from, from my own subjective perspective.

I've drawn two conclusions: First, the philosophical underpinnings of religion are not merely mistaken, they are ridiculous. They are nothing but post hoc rationalizations to support the objective truth of the speaker's moral self-righteousness. (I am, of course, just as self-righteous as any religious person, but I have what I see as the honesty and sincerity to own my self-righteousness as my opinion, however strongly held.)

The other conclusion is that once someone has become attached to any philosophical idea, they view any criticism of that idea as a personal attack and react defensively. Religious people tend to be more attached to more ideas which are more stupid and ridiculous, but the defensive reaction is not limited to theists.

I have an extremely passionate nature, and I'm becoming more passionate as I grow older. Were I not gifted with a degree of analytical skill and, perhaps more importantly, had I not received a pacifistic and liberal upbringing, I might well have become violent to some degree. But I do have analytical skill, and I was raised as a pacifist, and I'm not violent, not in the least. I'm not going to apologize or feel the slightest shred of guilt or shame for who I am; I'm ethically responsible only for the choices I make in how to express my nature.

I very passionately loathe stupidity, falsehood and error. I abhor human suffering and despise that which causes it. Half of all human suffering is caused just by people being mean and dumb, but a goodly portion is at least amplified, if not directly caused, by ideological stupidity. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on ideological stupidity—I oppose more-or-less secular American exceptionalism, and I would oppose Soviet-style Marxism were it still a live philosophy—but religion has been, in my opinion, the longest-established and biggest supplier of evil-causing bullshit.

I admit to rather more personal grievance against Islamic culture and religion. My wife is an apostate from Islam (and thus subject to the death penalty in any Islamic country), and the level of suffering she has endured at the hands of this culture and religion angers me to this day. Her experiences have prompted considerable research, and the more I read about Islam, the more I become angered by its medieval ethics, pervasive misogyny and violent response to the lightest criticism.

But other things really piss me off too. The millions of Iraqis killed—and tens of millions injured and made homeless—by our regime of sanctions and two wars. The destruction by the Republican party of what few Enlightenment gains made in my country over two hundred years, the enthusiastic Christianist support for this destruction, and the shameful complicity of the Democratic party in not opposing this destruction.

I don't believe that anything changes until people get really pissed off about it, until they stick their heads out the window and say, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore." The men in Islam are not going to treat their women better—and the women in Islam cannot fight for their ordinary human rights—until the weight of world's contempt exceeds the male privilege of that culture. As valuable as is dispassionate, abstract discourse, we're not going to stop wars of aggression, torture, and the destruction of our civil liberties with abstractions and bend-over-backwards politeness.

I do not attempt to disguise my contempt for stupidity, but I do my best to talk in detail about what I am contemptuous of and to justify and explain my contempt. I hope you will never see a simple pejorative without (excepting common knowledge) a detailed substantiation underneath it.

What you read here is me, good and bad. I write for myself only, and to an audience of one (my wife, with whom I do not always agree). Keep reading my blog, gentle reader, and I will contradict some dearly held idea of yours. If you defend your idea poorly, I will mock your defense; if your idea supports human suffering I will express my contempt. You have been warned.


[1] "Howard Beale", Network, 1976, Paddy Chayefsky. Happy, Jimi?

Random Facts

The Archcrone has tagged me with the Random Facts Meme. The meme is:

1. All right, here are the rules.
2. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
3. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
4. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
5. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Here be the facts:

1. I dropped out of both high-school and college
2. I don't own a television
3. I rarely listen to music, except incidentally.
4. I used to brew my own beer (but I then realized I could buy it for $1.25 a bottle).
5. I hate mayonnaise
6. I worked as a computer programmer for almost ten years before I had a computer at home
7. I have extremely wide and short hands and feet (EEEE-width) and stubby fingers and toes
8. I wear mostly Hawaiian shirts

I'll tag:

My lovely wife
James
Janice
Chicken Girl
Plognark
Himself
Jonah
Norm
anticant
DBB
Kenneth

(Yes, I know I can't count.)

And anyone else who wants to participate.

Why I’m glad I’m not in academia

Bloggers Need Not Apply

I have been, in the recent past, a corporate executive, having the more-or-less final say over who does and does not get hired in the engineering department. As a matter of policy, I never checked blogs or did any other kind of non-work-related background check. I would consider doing so a gross invasion of the candidate's privacy.

Might such a check reveal important information? Perhaps, as the pseudonomous coward "Ivan Tribble" reveals. But everyone has to work, they have a right to work, and they have a right to be judged only on the basis of what they do at work.

For many years, as an non-executive engineer, I categorically refused to take drug tests—it's none of my employer's business what I do outside of the office. I'll never trade my liberty for a paycheck, and I'll never make someone else do so.

It's not up to me to criticize how academia works—and I'm sure academia cares not a rat's ass for my opinion—but I'm proud to freely discuss my ideas and opinions under my real name, and I will never ever be a part of academia, nor ever want to be a part of it.

Bible Quiz

You know the Bible 88%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

Not bad for an atheist. (h/t to Thoughts on Antiquity where Chris Weimer kicks my ass on the test.)

AIDS Marathon Training Program

The National AIDS Marathon Training Program, training two or three hundred runners to participate in the San Francisco Marathon, started this morning bright and early at 7:00 AM.

I work for the organization as a Site Assistant managing the logistics of the weekly training. The participants raise money for various AIDS service organizations and receive a comprehensive weekly training program as well as airfare and accommodations for marathons outside their local area.

My wife trained with AIDS Marathon for the Honolulu Marathon last December. I started as a volunteer, mostly pouring water for the longer training runs, and, when one of the Site Assistants was called to Iraq (from the National Guard), I got a "promotion".

The pay isn't large (it barely covers my gas running around the course) but the people are great and the cause is deserving. I have a lot of fun with it, and I'm proud to be on the team.

Sorry about the delay...

I know I promised you updates on Sunday, but I'm dealing with a serious personal issue. I'll be back blogging as soon as possible.

About Me

When I first started this blog, lo, these many moons ago, I had the idea that--for a lot of reasons--I would write completely anonymously. That idea didn't pan out: I found that I wanted to criticize other people's (*cough* Andrew Sullivan *cough*) work, and it seemed unfair and unseemly to do so anonymously.

I'm Larry Hamelin. I was born in the 1960s (as of this writing putting me in my 40s), I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife and our cat. I work as a computer programmer and sometimes Chief Technology Officer for a startup software company. I raised two children as a (more or less) single parent; they're now grown and making their own way in the world.

I'm liberal/progressive politically and an atheist. These terms are very broad, so don't infer too much. I have an amateur interest in mathematics and science, especially statistics and quantum mechanics. I read a lot of science fiction. I play Go and poker at a strong amateur level. I don't have a television; Netflix hates me because I watch four or more movies a week. I don't read the newspaper; I get all my news from various blogs and Fark.

I'm pretty much self-taught at everything. I'm of the opinion that all true education is self-education; a formal setting just gives the student a (more-or-less) organized menu.

I had a terrific primary education at Brooklyn Friends School. I had a pretty good secondary education as well. After my junior year of high school, I took the California High School Proficiency test, and enrolled in UC Berkeley. I got bored after a couple of quarters and dropped flunked out to work as a computer programmer. Other than auditing some programming classes at Kansas University when I was in junior high, that's all there is of my "formal" education. At my more hyperbolic, I occasionally describe myself as a "high school dropout".

I became interested in philosophy in 1999/2000 when I stumbled upon the Straight Dope Message Board and then, more significantly, the Internet Infidels Discussion Board. (If you were around the Straight Dope in 1999, or Infidels in 2000 or 2005, email me and we can reminisce.) Although I learned a lot at both places, I ultimately found the discussion board medium too limiting. It's easy to build an audience on a discussion board, but difficult to present sophisticated material, especially controversial material. A blog has the opposite characteristics. I'd rather offer better content and build my audience more slowly. In any event, I'm mostly writing to my wife.

I think that my background in computer programming (and to a lesser extent my lifelong amateur interest in science) brings an interesting perspective to philosophy. You simply cannot bullshit a computer in any way, shape or form. The computer neither knows nor cares what you want or what you mean; it cares only what you say.

While I flatter myself as having skill and talent at thinking logically and rationally, I'm a very poor scholar. I have a great memory for ideas and concepts, but I rarely remember sources. I tend to read anything--computer programming, philosophy, politics, science--less to thoroughly understand what the other person has to say in any deep way, but to mine material for ideas and concepts I can use in my own life and work. So if you're looking any sort of comprehensive or authoritative explanation of what Kant or Hume (or Knuth or Booch) really meant, you'll have to look elsewhere.

One reason I enjoy philosophy is that, much like a computer program, any philosophical work (unlike scholarly "philosophology"[1]) has to stand on its own. Either the logic works, or it doesn't. A good argument is a good argument (and a bad argument is a bad argument) regardless of its provenance.

Another characteristic I bring from my background in programming is a ruthless pragmatism[2]. I'm interested in Getting Things Done, rather than finding some ideal of perfection or certainty. While I think truth is important and valuable, I'm not so much interested in Truth-with-a-capital-T. I'm more interested in thinking logically and precisely about some concept to help myself understand and make use of it; I'm less interested in exploring whether some particular way of thinking is Exactly The Right Way.[3] I think I have some real talent at finding the baby in even the dirtiest bathwater.

So... that's me. I hope you like what I have to say. If you don't, so it goes; my wife still likes my work.


[1] "Philosophology" is a term coined by Robert M. Pirsig in Lila, an Inquiry into Values to distinguish writing philosophy from writing about philosophy. I think the distinction between philosophy and philosophology is substantive and useful. Unlike Pirsig, I have no contempt or dissatisfaction at all with philosophology or even academic philosophy. I'm swayed to some extent by Matthew P. Kundert's 2004 essay, Philosophologology: An Inquiry into the Study of the Love of Wisdom, but unlike Kundert, I think that the distinction between philosophy and philosophology is still useful even though the categories overlap to some extent, and even though I disagree with the value judgment Pirsig originally attaches to the distinction. Maybe I'll write more on this topic.

[2] Every writer must, at some level, be in love with his or her own voice; I'm definitely no exception. As hard as I try to resist, sometimes I do bloviate; it's an occupational hazard.

[3] Just as I don't want to disparage philosophology, I don't want to disparage those who approach philosophy in a different way than I do; I could hardly assert that my way of thinking about philosophy is Exactly The Right Way.