"I would tell myself to ask questions, to read the text, to wonder, to explore the nuances, to take seriously my intuition and abilities to debate. I’d tell myself to listen to what is actually being said with critical and reasoning ears. I’d tell myself to substitute “Invisible Friend” for “God” every time I encountered the word and notice how ridiculous the rhetoric sounds from grown-ups. I would challenge myself to be more skeptical, to study science. I’d tell myself to find joy in life – it’s the only one you are going to get – don’t waste a second."
— Recently Sam Harris did a short interview with Tim Prowse, a pastor who lost his faith, and giving away his job and a whole life’s work, has now walked away from the church. The above quote is what Tim said when Sam asked him ‘If you could go back in time and reason with your former self, what could you say that might have broken the spell sooner?’
"Or let’s take another possibility. Suppose a new prophet arises who claims a revelation from God, and that revelation contravenes the revelations of all previous religions. How is the average person, someone not so fortunate as to have received this revelation personally, to decide whether this new revelation is valid or not? The only dependable way is through natural theology. You have to ask, “What is the evidence?” And it’s insufficient to say, “Well, there is this extremely charismatic person who said that he had a conversion experience.” Not enough. There are lots of charismatic people who have all sorts of mutually exclusive conversion experiences. They can’t all be right. Some of them have to be wrong. Many of them have to be wrong. It’s even possible that all of them are wrong. We cannot depend entirely on what people say. We have to look at what the evidence is."
— Carl Sagan discussing the implausibility of religious belief in The God Hypothesis. Belief without evidence is useless at best, and scary at it’s worst.
"The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.
That has secular forms with gurus and dictators, of course, but it’s essentially the same. There have been some thinkers - Orwell is pre-eminent - who understood that, unfortunately, there is innate in humans a strong tendency to worship, to become abject. So we’re not just fighting the dictators. We’re criticising our fellow humans for trying to short-cut, to make their lives simpler, by surrendering and saying, “[If] you offer me bliss, of course I’m going to give up some of my mental freedom for that.” We say it’s a false bargain: you’ll get nothing. You’re a fool."
— I recently finally received my order of the New Statesman Christmas issue from the UK. It was guest edited by Richard Dawkins and it’s centrepiece was an interview Richard Dawkins did with the now late Christoper Hitchens in Texas near the end of last year. It was either the last, or one of the last, public appearances that Hitchens made before his death. I think this is the pick of everything he says.
Fuck it. Fuck it. No more excuses.It’s time to once again put the metaphorical pen to the metaphorical paper. My mind is running at 140 miles per hour and I need to get it out somehow. World, I’m sorry for the absence, but as I always say: life has a habit of getting in the way. Expect bigger. Expect ruder. Probably expect the arrogance levels to be off the charts.
Talk soon, peace.
"
Not everyone was doing fine before 2003. After a failed Shiite uprising at the close of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Mr. Hussein executed tens of thousands of people, mostly Kurds and Shiites. International sanctions destroyed the economy, creating mass poverty and crime. The dictatorship inflicted deep wounds to the collective psyche, which partially explains why the American invasion unleashed so many unforeseen consequences, from sectarian violence to a winner-take-all political culture.
“If you go to Basra and go house to house, wives will say that their husband disappeared,” said Jana Hybaskova, the European Union’s ambassador to Iraq. “The level of destruction of society was a million times deeper than anyone expected.”
Experts estimate that the remains of 250,000 to one million Iraqis lie in mass graves around the country, victims of the Hussein government. Not a single victim has been identified by DNA analysis, partly because various government ministries and the two factions with the greatest claims of victimhood — the Kurds and Shiites — have been unable to agree on how to proceed. The lack of a painful but cathartic process of reckoning with its history — as South Africa and other countries have done — has stymied Iraqi society’s ability to vanquish the ghosts of its past.
"
— a quote from a NY times article about the US leaving Iraq this week. I figured this quote was a reminder to everyone that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, and while it’s tragic that after nine years of war the Iraqi people are still a while away from complete peace and stability, at least they don’t have Saddam. Here’s hoping they find the peace and stability they deserve.
"
Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of our most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many fields—including economics, medicine, and politics—but until now, he has never brought together his many years of research and thinking in one book.
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
"
— Just before, I was introduced to the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman from a short interview that Sam Harris did with Kahneman on his blog. Kaheman’s work sounds very intriguing, and his brand new book, Thinking Fast and Slow (whose blurb from Amazon I have quoted above) sounds very useful and important to anyone interested in how their mind - and the minds of those around them - shape the world around us. I’m very excited to track down a copy and read it. The university library say they have a copy on order, but if I get too impatient, I might need to go buy it. We’ll see how long I last…
"
Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)
By that measure, there is very little “good religion” out there. Put bluntly: God is not a lot of fun these days. Many of us don’t view religion so generously. All we see is an angry God. He is constantly judging and smiting, and so are his followers. No wonder so many Americans are enamored of the Dalai Lama. He laughs, often and well.
Precious few of our religious leaders laugh. They shout. God is not an exclamation point, though. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this.
"
— A quote from another NY times opinion piece, this time by author Eric Weiner, about how normal people without a strong religious affiliation (‘nones’ he calls them), feel about religion and God.
