Republic or democracy?

Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)
(RCP Publications, Print, October 2010, $8 from Revolution Books)

Introduction
Republic or democracy?

Probably the biggest overall criticism I have of the draft Constitution is that at least at first glance it appears to set up a republic instead of a democracy. I used to think the distinction was right-wing bullshit, until I heard Aaron Sorkin put the line in the mouth of fictional President Jed Bartlett: "In a democracy, the people rule; in a republic the people choose their rulers." Regardless of the terminology, I think the ideas are sufficiently well-defined and distinct; I'll use these terms henceforth.

In general, I consider the republican form of government to be one of the quintessential bourgeois institutions. It seems difficult — if not impossible — to prevent those who have a lot of economic power to dominate any republican electoral process. Indeed the framers of the US Constitution more-or-less explicitly choose a republican form of government because it would allow the existing land-owning, slave-owning and capitalist classes to dominate the electoral process and the government. (Indeed Bob Avakian makes a very similar point in Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy.) Whether this was the right choice under the specific historical circumstances is a much larger question than I care to address now, but the historical circumstances in 1787 were very different than they are today or immediately after a successful revolution.

I would very much prefer a form of government modeled — at least in spirit — more closely and explicitly on the Paris Commune. The people must, I believe, be brought directly and intimately into the process of government right from the start. There will, perhaps, be some need of an interim "scaffolding" while the people develop the habits and attitudes necessary to govern a large, industrially, scientifically and economically complex nation, but I think at least the form of a true democracy needs to be present from day one. Lenin's slogan was, "All power to the soviets!" Again, whether this slogan was practical or feasible in 1917, I think it is at least more superficially plausible in 21st century North America.

Keep in mind: I have only just skimmed the draft proposal: You and I, gentle readers, are more-or-less working together on a more detailed and deep reading. It may well be that the Constitution, when read carefully, adequately addresses my objections, either by making the transition to a true democracy compelling or arguing more directly for the benefits of a republican government. And too, I invite commentary, at this point focused on a more philosophical analysis (I'll get to the substantive analysis of the Constitution itself chapter by chapter): If you think the republican form of government has compelling advantages over the democratic.

The most obvious objection to democracy is scale; whether or not it was their original intention, the republican government established in 1789* has scaled from a nation of a few million to a nation of a few hundred million with only one truly catastrophic political failure (which was probably unavoidable by any system of government). So I think it's incumbent on me to offer some ideas as to how a state of many tens of millions (probably the smallest revolutionary state) or possibly many hundreds of millions (especially if Canada and Mexico were to be included) could be governed democratically.

I describe my hypothetical system as "democratic syndicalism". Essentially, it consists of a pyramiding election of delegates (distinct from representatives) from the smallest local level of neighborhoods through cities, states, regions and finally the national government. A neighborhood consists of a couple thousand people in a compact geographical area; each neighborhood elects a delegate to the city (or borough, for very large cities such as New York or Los Angeles) government. If we arbitrarily set the maximum size of a city government at about 100 delegates, then we get the smallest operating local government representing about 200,000 people. Each local government would elect a delegate to a regional government (of at most about 10-20,000,000) and those to a national government of some hundreds of millions.

The members of government would be delegates rather than representatives: they would be immediately recallable, rather than serving for a fixed term. A delegate would have no official power of her own; she must at all times — if she wishes to keep her position — exercise her power on behalf of her constituency. I would add that delegates receive a fixed pay while they serve, at the local level of the median income of their constituency, and at the national level no more than the 1st quartile of income. We might also have to create asset restrictions (which I'll talk about in another post when we get to economic organization).

These local and regional governments would have legislative, executive and administrative power over government services (more on this later) provided exclusively or principally in their their defined geographic areas. These powers — especially executive and administrative — would have to be indivisible: the governments could delegate the work to specific members (e.g. an "executive council"), but they could not delegate official power; the body acts only as a whole. They would have to operate openly: no act could have official or legal standing unless published openly.

This explicitly democratic organization is highly unstable by design. Thus we need to create a countervailing institution to promote stability. I recommend a semi-privileged civil service, which would be constitutionally mandated to carry out the policies of the democratic governments. This civil service would have objective criteria for entry, internal control over promotion, and — absent criminal malfeasance or insubordination to the actual government — a guarantee of lifetime employment. Thus by "executive and administrative" authority above, the local, regional and national governments would in effect constitute the head of the civil service for their respective areas. Rather than trying to fine-tune a single institution with the right balance of stability and change, this separation creates an explicit dialectic between institutions of stability and change, which will (with all good luck) evolve to meet changing circumstances and conditions.

One additional advantage of this model is that it gives an obvious role for the revolutionary party that does not have the kind of pressure to evolve into a permanent and privileged ruling class: The revolutionary party can form the core of the civil service. At first, as the people are unused to self-governance, the civil service can exercise considerable de facto power. But by having at least in name a subordinate position to the people, the people can grow to exercise their own power more directly in a natural, unforced way.

The Stupid! It Burns! (worldview edition)

Supposed Atheistic Neutrality...

When my atheist friends ask me to step out of my worldview what is happening is simply atheistic evangelism. Let me explain. My worldview consists of having God as Creator of the universe and all that is within it, this God is a personal God and not one like the deist view holds, this God exists eternally in 3 distinct persons but yet are One in nature, one of them became a man named Jesus, was born, lived, died, and rose again for the salvation of His people, and the third person is who compels His people toward Jesus by the power of His grace and love, that the record of the life of Jesus and the life of the people of God has been recorded in the Bible and that the Bible is the word of God, therefore the Bible should be held to as truth and the source of truth since all truth come from God. This is my world view, and for me to step out from it it is to say::

* There is no God (therefore He cannot exist in 3 persons)
* The Bible is not the word of God, since God does not exist

You see how this is getting the Christian away from their worldview and already into the realm of atheism? Tricky, isn't it?

The shopkeeper and the navvy

Once again, here am I, with my middle-class origins and my income of about three pounds a week from all sources. For what I am worth it would be better to get me in on the Socialist side than to turn me into a Fascist. But if you are constantly bullying me about my 'bourgeois ideology', if you give me to understand that in some subtle way I. am an inferior person because I have never worked with my hands, you will only succeed in antagonizing me. For you are telling me either that I am inherently useless or that I ought to alter myself in some way that is beyond my power. I cannot proletarianize my accent or certain of my tastes and beliefs, and I would not if I could. Why should I? I don't ask anybody else to speak my dialect; why should anybody else ask me to speak his? It would be far better to take those miserable class-stigmata for granted and emphasize them as little as possible. They are comparable to a race-difference, and experience shows that one can cooperate with foreigners, even with foreigners whom one dislikes, when it is really necessary. Economically, I am in the same boat with the miner, the navvy, and the farm-hand; remind me of that and I will fight at their side. But culturally I am different from the miner, the navvy, and the farm-hand: lay the emphasis on that and you may arm me against them. If I were a solitary anomaly I should not matter, but what is true of myself is true of countless others. Every bank clerk dreaming of the sack, every shop-keeper teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, is in essentially the same position. These are the sinking middle class, and most of them are clinging to their gentility under the impression that it keeps them afloat. It is not good policy to start by telling them to throw away the life-belt. There is a quite obvious danger that in the next few years large sections of the middle class will make a sudden and violent swing to the Right. In doing so they may become formidable. The weakness of the middle class hitherto has lain in the fact that they have never learned to combine; but if you frighten them into combining against you, you may find that you have raised up a devil.

— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, chapter 13

Enemies

If you want to make an enemy of a man, tell him that his ills are incurable.

— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, chapter 10

Injustice?

I'm kind of bored, and I can only read and comment on so much of the RCP Constitution in one day (it's pretty heavy going), so I'll take a break and talk about the idiot du jour, Only the Sangfroid. I know, thin pickin's, but what the heck. And there's at least one little tidbit of interesting philosophy that comes up, although Sangy gives the point less attention than it deserves.

In our latest episode, Sangy inexplicably thinks I think he's done me some "injustice" by quoting and criticizing my original post about the infantilism of religion. This charge is incomprehensible; nowhere do I argue that I've been wronged, I just argue that Sangy is not merely wrong, but also egregiously stupid. But no, I'm definitely not asserting any injustice. (Although I will remark that in his followup comment, Sangy attributes to me words in quotation marks that I never wrote, except when quoting him. That is an injustice. But we should have enough information to not get our knickers in too much of a knot over Sangy's failures of intellectual integrity.)

I'll gloss over Sangy's perseveration on my own "infantilism" (Sangy himself does not shy away from insults in general, and I think my "reading comprehension" insult is quite sophisticated), and I'll let the incomprehensible... well, I guess it's supposed to be a barb... asserting that atheist bloggers aren't that smart, pointing to the title page of an almost fifteen year old article in a minor philosophy journal. (I might read it for giggles when I'm in school on Tuesday and can access it from the library. Anyone want to give me odds that it has any relevance whatsoever to the present discussion? Anyone want to bet that Sangy has read and comprehended the article? I could use some extra cash.) Instead I'll move on the philosophy. Sangy first quotes me:

The fundamental principle of atheism is the rejection of ethical and epistemic authority: even if there were some form of objective values, meaning or purpose, they must be knowable to each and every person capable of rational thought.

and responds

This is groundbreaking stuff. Since when do we link ‘knowability’ with ‘existence’?

Imagine that there exists an object which is causally inert. ["Since we're just saying, can I be taller?"*] It would be weird to say that the object doesn’t exist by virtue of our being unable to know of its existence. Indeed, that would be ignoring reality as it is and ignoring that ‘our preferences [...] and wishes have no effect on reality except through our actions’. This isn’t a revolution in thought, by the way. Positivism has been dead in the water for decades.

*Source: Mad About You, Television, who knows what episode.

Again, one must wonder if English is Sangy's first (or fifteenth) language: In the quoted passage I do not at all* link knowability with existence. (And why does he put knowability and existence in quotation marks? He's not actually quoting me; he's not talking about the words themselves, but the concepts they represent; and I don't see any way to plausibly interpret the quotation marks as scare quotes. Oh right: Sangy is a barely-literate pseudo-intellectual.) I just don't make the argument (at least not in the original post) is not that what we cannot know does not exist. I'm arguing against authority, that no individual can reasonably assert private knowledge of any objective truth. If Sangy hadn't actually quoted me, we could reasonably assume mendacity; since he does include the quotation that directly contradicts his interpretation ("even if there were some form of objective values"), we are forced to conclude gross stupidity and a complete failure of reading comprehension.

*Update: If you squint real hard, I you could read a linkage there, but you have to be deliberately obtuse, ignore the context (as I explicitly mention "epistemic authority"), and completely reverse the point I'm making.

But it is an interesting point: Can we imagine an causally inert object? Is such a concept even coherent? What is an object but a collection of causally relevant properties? Ordinary people don't ever talk about causally inert properties of ordinary objects: such as the happiness of a rock, or the consciousness of piece of cheese. Indeed, does a causally inert object differ at all from no object at all? If so, how? And even if the universe were as thick with causally inert objects as morons at the Creation Museum, who — besides philosophers, theologians, pseudo-intellectuals such as Sangy, and other professional bullshit artists — would ever care? Does Sangy assert that his "objective moral landscape" is itself causally inert? If so, how can he know anything specific about it, even by "reason"? If it is causally inert, it cannot cause any effect in his mind... even on a dualistic account of the mind. I suppose Sangy might assert that we can know things by reason that are not causally effective, but he does not separate existence from causal effect, but more generally from "knowability".

Sangy does, of course, claim to know about this "objective moral landscape" by reason, but I think that word does not mean what Sangy thinks it means: generally speaking, "reason" usually consists of more than loudly asserting one's opinion and insulting the misinterpretation and misreading of objections.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Larry versus the Moron!

A Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America

The Revolutionary Communist Party has recently published a draft proposal for a Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (available from Revolution Books for $8). Regardless of the substantive merits of the proposed Constitution, this publication raises in my mind the intellectual credibility of the RCP as an organization sincerely dedicated to forming a working post-capitalist government and society. More importantly, they specifically request "serious and substantial engagement" with the work. I will take them at their word.

The work is long (91 pages plus an introduction) and rather dense, so I'll be covering it chapter by chapter. All page numbers will refer to the October 2010 print edition from RCP Publications.

The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and no one else's; I speak only for myself and no other individual, group or organization, and no one but myself exercises any power or influence to restrict, censor or alter anything I say here. More to the point, nothing here represents the official position of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

The introduction to the Constitution gives a realistic assessment of what the Constitution is and is not, and can and cannot be. It is first, explicitly a draft proposal, intended to "stimulate, as broadly as possible... serious and substantive engagement" about what a new socialist society would look like. The introduction explicitly predicates the adoption of the Constitution on the elimination of the existing capitalist-imperialist state and a broad popular mandate for the Revolutionary Communist Party. This is not a Constitution to be imposed from above, but serves rather to attract a popular mandate; it is to be established not by the party, but by the "millions and millions" of people who must act to bring about a revolutionary change to our society. Whether such events will actually come to pass is beside the point: this document lays out in print what the RCP would do if they were to win.

The authors also realize that the actual course of events were they to win would substantively affect any final Constitution; the draft proposal can at best be a starting point for — given the appropriate circumstances — a real Constitution for a new republic.

I would prefer a somewhat different style and organization. The RCP has a distinctive rhetorical style; it is not to everyone's taste, usually florid and often repetitive, but they can express their ideas unambiguously. The existing proposal also mixes the necessary legalese with commentary and philosophical background; I would prefer a more rigorously separated organization, such as found in the United States Constitution, distinct from the Federalist Papers. The document also seems at times to include the RCP's political platform; unless they were to intend an explicit one-party state (which they do not), this material would seem more appropriately separated out. But I offer these criticisms only to dismiss them as trivial, and get on with a more substantive analysis.

Is religion reasonable?

Ken comments on my recent post, The infantilism of religion. He is at least articulate and seems sincere, so I'll address his points here. It is, of course, a comment on a blog post, so I don't expect him to fully substantiate all his assertions, but his errors are so egregious that we have little reason to take him at all seriously.

His comment contains what appears to be a curious and subtle contradiction. On the one hand, he is emphatic that taking into account "verifiable historical facts, reason points to the truth of Christianity." On the other hand, he equates reason with "unreasonable" religious faith:

Science is based not just on reason but also faith. We call them assumptions and “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Ken immediately undermines his argument by adding,

You can object to this statement by observing that this type of faith is verifiable (it is). However, the Christian faith is also verifiable (being also based on fact), both historically (as much as any other historical facts are verifiable) and experientially,.

Ken appears to be conflating two different concepts: belief and disbelief that any God, especially the Christian god, actually exists, and the methodology by which people actually come to various beliefs, religious and scientific.

It is — or should be — common knowledge that there is an enormous tendency in religious believers to differentiate faith from skeptical, scientific reasoning. This is true whether or not it is possible to come to the Christian faith by skeptical scientific reasoning. Theologians of every religion sometimes attempt to obfuscate this difference, as Ken does, but there are substantive methodological differences between faith and reason. Ken does not delve deeply into these differences (noting only that scientific reasoning depends in some sense on verifiable facts, possibly implying that there is some "faith" methodology that does depends on something other than verifiable facts), so I'll leave this point for another day.

Instead, I'll focus on Ken's assertion that "the Christian faith is also verifiable (being also based on fact), both historically (as much as any other historical facts are verifiable) and experientially,." He first asserts that "atheists like Civil War general Lew Wallace and, more recently, journalist Lee Strobel, who both tried to once-and-for-all prove that Christianity was a myth or a fraud, were led to the same unexpected conclusion." I don't know anything at all about Lew Wallace except what I read on Wikipedia. The General Lew Wallace Study and Museum mentions only that Wallace's novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (later made into the iconic 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston) was prompted by a conversation with noted atheist/agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll. In the article on the novel, Wikipedia cites the introduction to Ben-Hur, 2009, by Russell W. Dalton, reporting,

Wallace often told the story of meeting the well-known agnostic Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll on a train in 1875. For many hours, Ingersoll questioned Wallace about God, heaven and the story of Christ. Wallace said he came away realizing how little he knew about his own religion: “I was ashamed of myself, and make haste now to declare that the mortification of pride I then endured . . . ended in a resolution to study the whole matter.” In writing the story, he was able to sort out his own beliefs about God and Christ.

Furthermore, a superficial Google search reveals that reports of Wallace's "atheis" show primarily on Christian-themed sites. I'm not an historian, and I don't care to investigate the matter personally, but it appears at first glance that Ken is deeply mistaken on this point.

I know a little bit more about Lee Strobel, which further substantiates my conclusion that Ken is not relying on a scientific study of the facts to substantiate his Christian beliefs. There is a huge body of work at The Secular Web Library concerning Strobel, which finds him tendentious, one-sided, and skeptically incompetent. For example, Jeffery J. Lowder reports that:

Strobel did not interview any critics of Christian apologetics, even though he attacks such individuals in his book [The Case for Christ]. For example, Strobel devotes an entire chapter to his interview of Greg Boyd (an outspoken faultfinder of the Jesus Seminar), yet Strobel never interviewed a single member of the Jesus Seminar itself! Likewise, he repeatedly criticizes Michael Martin, author of [The] Case Against Christianity, but he never bothered to get Martin's responses to those attacks. This hardly constitutes balanced reporting on Strobel's part; indeed, on this basis, one is tempted to dismiss the entire book.

Paul Doland notes that Strobel corrects this deficiency (at least somewhat) in The Case for Faith, saying, "Strobel's first interview is with Charles Templeton, a former minister who is now an agnostic and has left the ministry." But Doland goes on to note that

Strobel interviews one skeptic, in the beginning of the book, and interviews eight believers to answer Templeton's questions. Essentially, eight believers are given the opportunity to rebut Templeton's questions, but no skeptic is allowed to rebut the believers." These are not in the least bit the actions of someone trying "to once-and-for-all prove that Christianity was a myth or a fraud.

Again, Ken seems very deeply mistaken about matters of verifiable fact.

Ken goes on to mention that,

I applied Occam's Razor: start with the simplest and most reasonable of assumptions. Starting with the assumption that the writers of the Bible were sincere (not even necessarily right), and they must have been sincere to have been willing to die for what they believed, and combining this with verifiable historical facts, reason points to the truth of Christianity.

First, Ken does not understand Occam's Razor, which has nothing to do with what assumptions you start with, and everything to do with how you evaluate competing hypotheses that fit the facts: "The Razor generally recommends selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions (also known as postulates, entities) when the hypotheses be equal in other respects." Why should we assume authors of the Bible were sincere? That's certainly one hypothesis, perhaps the most plausible prima facie, but Occam's Razor explicitly does not entail that we accept one hypothesis or another a priori. And what does "sincere" mean in this context? For example, the authors of the Bible (especially the Gospels) might have been explicitly intending to write some form of fiction; but we do not typically accuse writers of fiction of insincerity. They also might have "sincerely" believed that revelation was just as much a source of accurate fact as direct, physical observation.

More importantly, as Dagood has researched, the conclusion that the disciples died for their beliefs is not supported by the historical or biblical record. As he notes in this comment,

In order for “Die for a Lie” to work, one must show:

1) The witness saw a physical Jesus post-resurrection (not a vision);
2) The witness had an opportunity to recant to avoid death.

He goes on to claim:

Not sure how Paul helps you (regardless), since he never claimed (nor does Acts) to have seen a physical Jesus, but rather relies upon a vision. Even if he did die for belief—it was belief in a vision, not necessarily a physically resurrected person, thus the first objection remains robust as to Paul.

Not to mention, of course, our first indication of Paul’s death is 1 Clement, which does not mention how he died, and also indicates Paul continued to Spain, giving us a difficult chronology to coordinate with the New Testament. (And we should note the question regarding the dating of 1 Clement.) The beheading of Paul is not recounted until the Acts of Paul, written 150-200 CE—a work Tertullian claims was a forgery, yet [Tertullian] curiously lifts the story regarding Paul’s martyrdom from it.

He also mentions James, noting that

As for James’ death in Josephus, he is recorded as being a pious Jew, and killed for political reasons. There is absolutely nothing in there about his being killed for any belief whatsoever, let alone a belief in the resurrection.

Dagood writes more extensively on Peter's death, noting that there are only "three documents, dated around 100 C.E.," the Gospel of John, the (noncanonical) Gospel of Peter, and 1 Clement, which are "all in agreement Peter is dead, [but] none telling any details beyond that brute fact." Dagood concludes (from other evidence) that all we know is that "Peter died because he was convincing wives not to have sex with their husbands which made the husbands mad, so he ran away; but then he ran into Jesus who was on His way to be crucified again in Rome, so Peter offered to take His place, insisting on being crucified upside down because that is how Cain was born."

From Ken's numerous errors and obviously superficial investigation, we can conclude that he is not relying on "verifiable historical fact." More importantly he does not appear to understand Feynman's fundamental premise of skepticism, that we should bend over backward to not fool ourselves. Indeed, Ken is making the same mistake that so-called "rational" believers make: cherry-pick some evidence that supports their belief, ignore everything else, cast a little doubt on rationality and skepticism itself, and declare victory. This is not skepticism, nor is it even honest faith: It is dishonest to the core.

On punishment

IOZ makes a profound point about punishment:

I propose to you that the desire to see another human being punished, even a person who has done wrong, a category to which Bradley Manning emphatically doesn't belong anyway, is the most despicable of all human desires. Even if one admits to the necessity of punishment, a necessity that I find categorically problematic to begin with, then the only decent attitude is regret. To see punishment as an affirmative good is to be on the side of the barbarians. To turn your attention to a man who is not only decent and good, but who is innocent of wrongdoing, and to conclude that because he may have violated some bureaucratic doctrine in place for the sole purpose of obscuring and obfuscating the state's criminality, venality, and violence, he must therefore be tortured until he is insane, is psychopathic.

I have to say I agree completely. All I can add is that I don't believe the necessity of punishment is "categorically problematic"; I believe that punishment per se is never necessary nor desirable at any level. It is categorically unethical to ever intend for any reason to inflict nonconsensual pain, suffering or harm to even a sentient (much less sapient, self-aware) being for its own sake.

And, by the way, you should all be reading Who is IOZ?. He's the only self-described anarchist I've ever read who is not only not completely stupid, but considerably intelligent and nuanced. And he can really fucking cook.

How not to argue

onlythesangfroid (hereinafter OTSF) doesn't appear to like my recent post on the infantilism of religion. Really, the post is a veritable bonanza of a moronic attempts at argumentation.

The stupidity starts with the title: "If there really was [sic] a God here, He would have raised a hand by now… the infantilism of atheist moaning." Infantilism has a fairly straightforward meaning: "the persistence in an adult of markedly childish anatomical, physiological, or psychological characteristics." In my original post, I'm using the term precisely: the practice of "wishing makes it so", which is specifically and markedly childish. Commentary and criticism, even if it's mistaken, is not "infantile". (OTSF, as he's commenting on and criticizing my own article, would have to admit his own "infantilism"; indeed he should accuse everyone who engages in criticism of "infantilism".)

He goes on to mischaracterize my position, saying that I believe religion "means ignoring reality and concentrating more on our ‘preferences, hopes, fears, dreams, and wishes’ than on ‘reality’." What I actually said was, "Comforting yourself by wishing reality were some definite way is the essence of "wishing makes it so" infantilism... our preferences, hopes, fears, dreams, and wishes have no effect on reality except through our actions." One wonders if OTSF successfully completed elementary school, where students typically learn how to read and comprehend simple declarative sentences in the English language.

He goes on to complain that I'm simply assuming I'm correct: "Concentrate more on his assumption that he knows what reality is and religious people do not." 'Tis true, I must admit, that in that particular post I do not make the specific case that skeptical atheists do in fact know more about reality than theists. But OTSF appears to miss two rather obvious items of context. First, I'm commenting on a specific post where Eden Ellis explicitly asserts that it is unreasonable to change her beliefs only because they provide meaning and purpose. If Ms. Ellis were to be correct (which she is not), she would be correct only by accident.

Second, OTSF fails to apprehend the nature of blog posts; perhaps he did not notice the ".blogger.com" hostname in the URL. Blog posts typically refer implicitly to the body of work on the blog, as well as positions that are common knowledge. I have written extensively about meta-ethical subjective relativism (which applies mutatis mutandis to other forms of subjectivism, including meaning and purpose), and it is common knowledge that skeptical atheists have argued extensively that we do indeed understand reality better than theists. If OTSF wishes to engage either body of argumentation, he's free to do so, but to complain it's not been explicitly included in an isolated blog post goes beyond disingenuity to willful obtusity and intellectual dishonesty.

OTSF goes on in that vein for a few paragraphs; it's noteworthy that he presents himself as a counter-example: "What’s weird is that I’m an atheist and I don’t think meaning and value are self legislated in this way." Again, OTSF seems ignorant of the prosaic principle of charity. When one is speaking of groups of people, especially a group as broadly defined as atheists, one should be read as making generalizations, not absolute universals. That some random atheist happens to disagree — especially one with the moral and intellectual failings OTSF displays — is not particularly relevant.

To be fair, I could have been more explicit: The fundamental principle of atheism is the rejection of ethical and epistemic authority: even if there were some form of objective values, meaning or purpose, they must be knowable to each and every person capable of rational thought. Pushing meaning, value, purpose and suchlike specifically to God means sacrificing at least epistemic autonomy: knowledge about God is available only by revelation, and the specific character — even the presence or absence — of divine revelation seems... er... enormously differential.

Also, OTSF again misrepresents my position: "The position assumes that there is not an objective value landscape because, in the mind of the Barefoot Bum, only God could create an objective value landscape." (I'm assuming that the odd construction "objective value landscape" means what it appears to mean.) However, this is nowhere near my position, and in fact it's rather insulting characterization of my reasoning:

P1: Only God could create an objective value landscape
P2: I believe there is no God
C: There is no objective value landscape

But OTSF ignores that I've written extensively on precisely what I believe about value objectivity and subjectivity, and it does not derive in any way from my atheism; my beliefs about value subjectivity as well as my atheism stem from my skepticism. Furthermore, I should note that God — at least not the personal God most theists seem to believe — cannot create an objective value landscape; properties of a personal being are subjective by definition.

(OTSF also makes the incomprehensible "argument" — at considerable length — that one could assert the contrary to my position.)

Finally, OTSF seems to reveal his own lack of skepticism.

Theists charge atheists with ignoring reality (that God exists). Atheists charge theists with ignoring reality (that God does not exist). The difference is that theists have an intellectually credible argument (bald naturalism is untenable) while atheists are correct (God doesn’t exist).

OTSF appears to be saying here that theists have a good argument, while the atheists are correct. At best, if theists really do have an intellectually credible argument, one should be an undecided agnostic. I have to bend over backwards here to charitably assume that OTSF would admit that atheists have some sort of intellectually credible argument, even if "bald naturalism" (as opposed to what, hairy naturalism?) really were untenable (which it's not). If OTSF does not admit any intellectually credible arguments for atheism (which we might infer from the fact that he claims that theists' intellectually credible argument is a difference), then he himself is just as deluded as any theist; he holds the correct position only by pure accident.)

It really is true that sometimes an atheist is a person with one fewer stupid ideas than a theist. In this case, onlythesangfroid seems to hold one fewer stupid idea than the bottom quartile of theists.

George Orwell on neutrality

Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, [the working class] easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.

— George Orwell, Looking Back On The Spanish War