What is the most important issue in the world today?
posted by mike at 10:48 PM
Friday, March 10, 2006
Previous Posts
- Hiatus.
- My Nuggets of Wisdom...
- Stevie Franchise traded to New York.
- Good evening, friends.
- College Basketball is the trizz-uth.
- I've resigned to letting someone who "knows about ...
- Aussie Open...
- I can't believe I'm doing this, but I'll dive into...
- Reds baseball...
- Oh, this is rich.
15 Comments:
One thing makes me nervous...
WFP doesn't have clearly posted what percentage goes to the programme and what percentage goes to management-type expenses... Looking around, it says something like "around 9%" is their overhead cost, which, admittedly, is pretty good.
And, I just prefer World Vision. 87% goes to programs, directly (including the African food crisis), and it's not run by the UN, being an organization that I don't have a whole lot of faith in... Too bureaucratic for my taste. Plus, I'm just a big "private charity" fan, anyway.
But, yeah...
This is a problem which demands action. But, I imagine that most Americans care too much about being able to eat another meal out, so they aren't willing to give to, you know, keep people from starving to death.
Which is very sad.
World Vision is a Christian organization. That means they have an overhead of another sort.
"World Vision offered material, emotional, social and spiritual support to 100 million people in 96 countries."
If you want to proselytize, that's your business. However, you will not get any of my money. The same goes for the Salvation Army.
The WFP and Red Cross look like much better choices to me, respectively.
I will not have this discussion turn into some sort of proselytization diatribe.
Similarly, I will not have this discussion turned into some sort of "charities misappropriating funds" diatribe.
The issue is starvation in Africa. World Vision is a viable option; you cannot ignore their ability to allocate food and provide agricultural help in the region. That's a valid contribution to humanity, and it makes the world a better place. Similarly, the UN WFP is an excellent place to donate funds. Even if only 75% of your money makes it there, the money that is there will be well-spent, as food is much cheaper. The specificity of the donation process with the UN is particularly appealing to me, so I find it to be valid as well.
Also, there is nothing acadmeic in this exercise; careful consideration of the issue will lead to starvation. The time for thinking about how to deal with the issue was years ago; the time to act is now.
No offense, but I have every right to discuss what I want to discuss.
The WFP does look like an excellent charity to donate to, and I already mentioned that.
I was simply having an expanded conversation about charities; I will not donate to a religious charity because prostelytizing IS a deplorable waste of money. The WFP is not a religious charity, so I will gladly donate to it.
I completely agree that this is one of the most important issues today.
Wow, Grant...
You really hate Christians, it seems. I mean, you can't even admit that World Vision and the Salvation Army are, you know, helping people and such...
I'm willing to admit that the UN WFP is helping people. I just tend to believe that less bureaucratic organizations (like World Vision, for example) tend to provide more heart along with the help that they give. Also, as a Christian organization, they give hope, which is something we all need, and especially those in dire circumstances.
Ultimately, unlike the UN, World Vision understands that the problem isn't JUST hunger. Rather, there is a great deal of need beyond that.
And that's not just a Christian concept. That's a human concept.
People don't just need to survive. They need to live.
I do not hate Christians; I used to be one myself, so don't give me that crap.
I don't know which organizations have more bureaucratic ineffeciency than others, but I do know which organizations have motives other than feeding hungry people.
Of course people need hope; I'm sure that the people working on the ground for the UN care deeply about the people they are helping. I'm sure the people they are feeding have a deep appreciation for the work the UN does. I expect nothing less.
Christian organizations skew the concept of hope. I don't want my money to be used for proselytizing. People don't need false dogma -- they need food. Whether it be the Catholic Church helping the spread of AIDS by preaching against contraception or Protestant churches promoting intolerance towards homosexuality, I will stand against it.
"Used to be one" is a telling phrase.
You do know which organizations have motives other than feeding hungry people, you say... All I'll say is that at least World Vision, the Salvation Army, etc, are honest about their other motives. Do you really believe that the ONLY motivation for WFP is feeding hungry people? If so, you're far more optimistic about the UN than I am.
Of course, that's not saying that people don't have an appreciation for the work the UN does. Nor is it saying that that appreciation is misplaced. It's just that I think that the idea that the UN WFP's ONLY motive is feeding hungry people is a little bit far-fetched. It's a political organization, and political organizations serve political purposes, though they may do some good along the way.
Christian organizations skew the concept of hope... How, specifically?
Also, claiming that the Catholic church helped spread AIDS through Africa by preaching against contraception is inaccurate as well. The Catholic Church (last time I checked) ALSO preaches against sex outside of marriage... Which would do quite a bit to limit the spread of AIDS anywhere. You can't blame the Church that people only PARTIALLY followed their teachings.
As far as Protestant churches promoting intolerance of homosexuality (btw, Catholic churches do to, if you standards are what I'd guess they are), I'm not going to argue with you on that. There are some churches that have theologies here that are a bit "off" (on both sides of the spectrum). But, the fact that not every Christian gets everything right... No, the fact that NO Christian gets everything right... is not a reason to abandon Christianity.
Of course, you have every right to do with your money and your stance as you will. I suppose it's just odd to me that you feel a need to attack Christianity every time it comes up. This, I think, is what led to my apparently erroneous belief that you hate Christians.
So, out of pure curiosity (or nosiness, if you prefer), why that reaction? And why did you decide to abandon the Faith?
Not totally related, but I'm interested.
I suppose I am more optimistic about the UN than you are.
Christians skew the idea of hope through their priorities. If given the option of "saving" someone's soul or offering someone a meal, you'd choose to save their soul. Unfortunately, your belief system is bogus (from my viewpoint), and you'd just be giving them nothing at all.
According to the Bible, homosexuality IS an abomination before God. God supposedly destroyed numerous people in Sodom & Gomorrah partly because of homosexuality. There's no need to ignore or candy-coat Christian dogma. It is important to see whether it is true, and from my viewpoint, the answer is overwhelmingly NO.
I "abandoned" the faith because it isn't true. I can not make it any clearer than that. I react strongly because of how Christians act. They promote intolerance towards homosexuals and women. Many obstruct scientific research and reasonable thought. They waste time and money and promote falsehoods.
Why wouldn't I react strongly?
"Christians skew the idea of hope through their priorities."
Let me give you the choice, Grant. You can either save someone's soul or you can give them a meal. Which would you choose?
I would guess that you'd choose to save their soul, seeing as this is an infinite, eternal good as opposed to a finite, temporal one. Really, if you chose to feed someone a meal rather than save your soul, you'd be a particularly cruel person. ("Have a nice meal before you BURN IN HELL ETERNALLY, HAHAHA!")
Ultimately, you choose NOT to save people's souls because you either a) don't believe they have souls (at least in the Christian sense of the term... This is the most typical view among atheists, I'd guess.) or b) don't believe their souls need saved (this is more typical among universalists). It's not really a matter of priorities, see? It's more a matter of belief systems. Which is clear from your declaration of the bogosity (my own word which I haven't used for several years... Isn't it a hilarious word, though?) of Christian beliefs.
I'll have to actually read your piece on atheism before I can hit that issue more head on... Unfortunately, time is something that I'll probably start running a bit short on before too long. But, just glancing at it, I see that you're a Smithite, which at least gives me some idea. Though that's material for another venue (I may take up your e-mail offer if I get around to coming up with a decent response to your piece on atheism).
But, I think you're ignoring an important point... I'd argue (and I'd guess that WorldVision and the Salvation Army would agree with me) that the Christian response to "saving souls or giving meals" should be "both". And, actually, speaking as an evangelical Quaker, I can say that my sect has historically taken that stance (for the most part), and often has seen giving meals as the FIRST STEP in saving a starving person's soul. (Stuff about tangible demonstrations of God's love, etc. etc. You know where I'm coming from, I'm guessing.) So, it's not even an either/or kind of scenario.
As far as homosexuality, I'm not going to claim that it isn't a sin (though there are some more liberal Christians that would, I think erroneously). But, I will say that much of the conservative side of the church has reacted terribly to it. Ultimately, the central message of Christianity is about redemption from sin, not condemnation of sin. So, many right-leaning churches miss the point when all they can do is harp on and on about how we need gay marriage bans. Which was more my point.
"They promote intolerance towards homosexuals and women."
I've never heard of a church that promoted intolerance of women... One would think it would be rather short lived... "No more women!" doesn't seem like a palatable religious system.
But, I suppose it depends on what you mean by "intolerance".
Ultimately, I would claim that the best churches out there are redeeming homosexuals and women (and straight men, for that matter) from the sins that they are walking in, and are teaching them to follow the way of Jesus. A way of righteousness, forgiveness, faith, hope, and love.
"Many obstruct scientific research and reasonable thought."
PETA also obstructs scientific research... I don't hear you railing against them... Alcohol diminishes the capacity for reasonable thought, but I doubt that you're a tee-totaller (though I could be wrong, of course).
"They waste time and money and promote falsehoods."
We all waste time... For example, I spent several hours today playing SPQR. A waste of time? Most definitely. I could have been doing something productive, like working to produce more goods for a world where need is so great, or like dispensing goods to the poor at soup kitchens. But, nope, I wasted time playing video games.
We all also waste money. $8 to spend two and a half hours of a huge gorilla running around NYC?
We all also promote falsehoods, if we promote anything at all.
That's a "what are you saying?" statement, so I'll expand on it.
Each of us is human.
Humans have an imperfect capability to grasp the Truth.
Therefore, no human has perfectly true beliefs.
Therefore, any human promoting his own beliefs is promoting a set of beliefs that is not entirely true. This can be called "promoting falsehood". QED.
Perhaps you disagree with my premises though. I assume that you'll agree that we are all human. So, perhaps you believe that humans have a perfect capability to grasp the truth?
But, if that's true, then why are so few people atheists, if that is in fact true? Really, for perfectly rational beings, we have to be pretty easily duped. And that belief just doesn't seem reasonable... So, I'm guessing you reject it.
So, I guess you must agree with me that no one has perfectly true beliefs.
Let me go into some explanation of why this is the case.
There are 3 types of believed truths.
1) Believed truths that are true by logical necessity.
2) Believed truths that are false by logical necessity.
3) Believed truths that have some probability of being true that lies between 0 and 1.
I would argue that the grand majority of believed truths (by which I mean "things that are believed to be true") fall into category #3. Included in this is belief in a particular religion (including atheism). Now, some (I think Smith is among them) would claim that belief in theism falls under category 2, and therefore, by process of elimination, belief in atheism falls into category 1. Generally speaking, I find the his arguments (at least as I've heard them presented, I've not actually read him myself) are more or less as unsatisfactory as the proofs FOR God's existence. (Both casually ignore the difficulty in proving or disproving the existence of a being whose definition falls outside the capabilities of human understanding, and therefore the boundaries of human language.) Though, to me, the proofs for God's existence generally feel more contrived while Smith's feel more trite. *shrugs* Not really anything to do with "truth" there... Just my observation.
Anyway, given that religious beliefs are in category 3 (at least from my viewpoint), then the question is not so much one of "are they true?" as it is one of "how likely are they to be true?"
And, ultimately, this is where faith comes in. Faith provides that step between "likely to be true" and "believed to be true".
But, anyway...
That's a lot of rambling, haha, just to answer...
"Why wouldn't I react strongly?"
Primarily, because you could be wrong.
Now, for a moment let's say that people follow me, and I'm dead wrong. But, I'm at least successful. I win many people over to the evangelical Quaker banner, and we all become good pacifists living simple lives and giving our plenty away to starving peoples.
But, I've unknowingly, and with good intentions led people into a bunch of falsehoods. You're right... God doesn't exist. Nor does an afterlife. Nor even do the souls I was trying desperately to save.
What is the result?
We have a lot of people not killing people, and voluntarily giving up luxuries so that other people can eat, and then dying only to be disappointed... Except they AREN'T disappointed because their consciousnesses no longer exist. So, they die believing they were doing the right thing and then fall into the sleep of death never to know that they were dead wrong.
Now, let's say that you're successful, but wrong. You convert many people over to your beliefs. They reject the silly notion that God exists, the churches all close, people use ECs to their hearts content (just to throw that in. :-) ), and people give to WFP.
So, what do we end up with?
Several pretty much happy people. Having sex only worrying about the spread of STDs, which can be pretty well controlled by other forms of birth control. No one is wasting money on big fancy church buildings and paying people to preach lies on Sunday mornings. And, many starving people are saved as that money now goes to WFP.
But, then these happy people die. And they find out that they were all deceived. Sure, it was with good intentions and unknowingly. But, in reality, I was right. There was a God that was offering an eternity in His presence if they would only believe on Him and seek to follow Him. But, this God will not force people into His presence if they reject Him. And, all these people did. So, they have an eternity where their souls are separated from the source of all goodness, beauty, love, and hope.
You're probably aware of this kind of argument. It's really just a modification of Pascal's wager, but made less selfish. (That's the big problem I have with Pascal's wager... it feels very selfish to me.)
Now, what's the point of this whole exercise? Well, part of it is that it's 11:30PM, and I'm not very good at being concise normally... let alone this close to midnight. But, the other part of it is to convince you that you may want to be more careful in your statements. Because, ultimately, you could be wrong. And, if you are, and you convince people because you don't believe you CAN be wrong, then you could cause grave consequences for them down the road.
Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't proselytize. Of course you have a right to try to convince people that you are correct. I just think it's wise to do so with a measure of caution.
But, of course, I could be wrong.
Quick commments:
Just because PETA obstructs scienitific research, that doesn't make it okay for a church.
People are easily duped. That's why psychis, penis enlargement, astrology, etc are viable businesses.
In my website, I think I DO address the difficulty in proving or disproving the existence of a being whose definition falls outside the capabilities of human understanding. In fact, that's part of my argument.
The problem with Pascal's wager is that mutually excluisve religions can make the exact same argument. I might as well become a Muslim or a Rastafarian by your argument. Since Pascal's wager applies to all, it applies to none.
I have no reason to think that I'm wrong. I hold the default (vacuous) position; you are the one making positive statements. Explain to me how your religious beliefs are "likely" true, and then explain to me how your faith is more valid than a Muslim's faith. If you can do that, you could be able to convince me. If something appears to be true, I'll believe it.
I found this quote by Sam Harris, and I think it is relevant to our discussion:
"The kind of intolerance of faith that I am advocating in my book is not the intolerance that gave us the gulag. It is conversational intolerance. When people make outlandish claims, without evidence, we stop listening to them--except on matters of faith. I am arguing that we can no longer afford to give faith a pass in this way. Bad beliefs should be criticized wherever they appear in our discourse--in physics, in medicine, and on matters of ethics and spirituality as well. The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. Now, if he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive."
Just a short comment, as I'm delaying future discussion until I can actually sit down and read the argument on your website in more detail and craft a response to the points you make.
My argument has run along more or less similar lines from the beginning.
We all make baseless assumptions.
Ultimately, the question is whether or not these assumptions create logical inconsistencies. Only then can we actually declare something as "false" with certainty.
Otherwise, we can only argue along probabilistic lines, and the idea that "God existing is unlikely" is logically different from saying that "The statement that God exists is false."
That said, now...
Sam Harris claims that "When people make outlandish claims, without evidence, we stop listening to them..." He runs into problems.
1) Criteria for outlandishness. Ultimately, a claim is only "outlandish" if it blatantly violates the assumptions (or conclusions of those assumptions) that we hold to ourselves. For example, I find Marxist claims about economics to be "outlandish". But, that is because they violate my basic assumptions about reality and human nature. Now, someone with different such assumptions may find that my claims that "the free market produces wealth" are outlandish.
At least in the quote you provide, Sam Harris fails to provide a standard for "outlandishness" which seems to be a requirement for his conclusion to follow logically. Similarly, what makes a belief "bad"?
2) The idea of evidence. Ultimately, many would argue that there IS evidence for God's existence (you give many examples of these arguments on your site). D. Elton Trueblood wrote a great book about the empirical validity of religious experience, if you'd like to read it some time. If nothing else, it gives you something to think about. (The title is "The Trustworthiness of Religious Experience".)
Now, many of the arguments I have heard against these evidences are that they fail to be "proofs". I agree, they aren't "proofs", they are "evidence". Ultimately, proving meaningful things is, from a logical standpoint, extremely difficult. Especially when we're talking about something as complex as God. Ultimately, saying that "proofs of God's existence aren't actually proofs" doesn't really validate a hard-line atheistic position. All it does is say that it has a positive probability of being correct, but that's far from saying that it is more likely than not, or that it is the ONLY valid position. But, as I said, I need to read more of your website to find out what your actual argument is. I can tear down strawmen all day, but that doesn't really do anything as far as "constructive discussion" is concerned.
Ultimately, though I think that a great deal of our debate isn't necessarily about Christianity (or, more generally, theism) vs. atheism. Rather, I think much of it lies more on epistemological grounds, where I tend to be more (though not entirely) post-modern (heavy emphasis on uncertainty being high on the list here, and also the acceptance of it), and you seem to be more modern (empiricism and supremacy of reason being evidences). Ultimately, I'm of the opinion that both of these philosophies leave much to be desired. But, we're human. Getting things perfect isn't our forte.
Anyway, I hope to find time to come up with a more complete answer to you, though I may change tactics.
Up to now, I've been primarily focusing on undermining atheism. I may want to get more specific in giving positive evidences for Christianity in particular... This change in tactic may be necessitated by your claim that atheism is a "vacuous" position. Which, I presume means that it is the position you end up with due to the lack of evidence. (Which, as we are taught in logic classes, "the lack of evidence is not evidence", so shame on you... :-) )
Anyway, just to give you an idea of what I may end up doing. But, we'll see what happens.
I have no desire to disprove the existence of god(s). In fact, I do not think the existence of god(s) is a falsifiable claim. This means that I find probabilistic discussions of the existence of god(s) nonsensical. The supernatural can be wholly dismissed, from my viewpoint, save divine revelation and miracles.
Divine revelation flows through the schism of mutually exclusive religions. It has to lead to a universalist religious view or a complete dismissal of divine revelation (unless you simply wish to ignore other people's revelations).
I do not see convincing evidence for miracles.
I don't mind discussing Christianity; I just like to start with the broadest possible argument. I really see the evidence pointing against the truth of Christianity. We must be seeing or interpreting the evidence differently.
When I say that atheism is a vacuous stance, I mean that it is the default stance. The existence of god(s) must be asserted, and that's where the postive statement comes from. In other words, I think people should assume an atheistic viewpoint unless a reasonable argument is made for the postive claim of the existence of god(s).
If you have criticisms of the arguments on my website, I would love to hear them. I've changed things before based on discussions.
One quick question:
Why is atheism the "default" stance?
If you answer this on your website, feel free to refer me to that. Like I said, I just haven't found time to read it in detail as of yet.
Look under the section "Why Believe in god?" on my site.
Post a Comment
<< Home