Quizzes Feb 4, 6

Neuroexistentialism (MP) 1-2 (Catch up on Baggini first)
LISTEN

Add your quiz & discussion questions, comments, links, et al...

1. What distinguishes neuroexistentialism from previous varieties of existentialism? (1)

2. Neuroexistentialism is defined here as ...? (2)

3. Neuroscience adds what to Darwin's message? (8)

4. What's problematic about the hypothesis that altruism is not a naturally evolved trait in humans? (26)

5. What serious drawback initially faces the view that religion is the watershed of moral values? (27)

6. Just like prairie voles, humans have many ...? (32)

Add your quiz questions, please.

Discussion Questions

• Is there an inherent clash or incompatibility between the scientific and humanistic images of humanity, or is the perception that there is due to contingent assumptions about science or humanity (or both) that we need to reconsider? 
• If you're familiar with Wilfred Sellars' "manifest image," how would you characterize its relation to what Caruso and Flanagan call the "humanistic image"?
• Is a geist necessarily the same as a ghost?
• Are we really "100% animal"? Or does the evolution of human culture distinguish the human animal in ways that challenge that characterization?
• Would Darwinian evolution still be controversial, if there had been no history of religious  devotion preceding its articulation?
• If you consider yourself a humanist, do you accept the list of humanistic "commitments" on p.6?
• If you embrace a scientific worldview, do you accept the assertions attributed to the scientific image on p.6?
• If altruism is a naturally evolved trait in humans, why are there so many selfish people? 
• If you are not religious, have you concealed that from acquaintances so as not to arouse their suspicion that you might be amoral, or worse?
• "Group living often involves norms that keep selfish behavior in check." (34) How would you characterize the present status of such norms in our society? How resilient is the normative structure of civilized behavior at this moment? Are we about to find out?
• COMMENT: "There is not JUSTICE, there is just us."
• Add your DQs please

01:04 What is neuroexistentialism? 04:12 Neuroscience, free will, and existentialism 10:43 The "compatibilist" claim that free will and determinism can co-exist 22:21 To define “free will,” first redefine “agency” 30:22 Why the importance of luck should make us doubt intuitions about free will 39:00 Moral responsibility and the Nazi war criminal thought experiment 50:30 Does Gregg’s personality predispose him to reject retribution? Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and Gregg Caruso (SUNY Corning, greggcaruso.com)

"...I am optimistic about the prospects of life without free will. I call myself an optimistic skeptic.As an optimistic skeptic, I maintain that life without free will is not only possible but that it's preferable. Prospects of finding meaning in life and sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for example, would not be threatened..."

And I am an optimistic free will skeptic skeptic...


Feb 6, MP 3-4
LISTEN

1. Love and what seem to be similar phenomena? (39)

2. Early relationships determine adult relationships, according to what theory? (42)

3. Lewis says we can be attracted to others with whom we do not share  what? (47)

4. Some worry that even if neuroscience doesn't really undermine morality, people might be incited to behave immorally if what? (55)

5. The study involving people who'd been hypnotized to report feelings of disgust shows what? (61)

6. Philosophers and psychologists might make more progress if they focused on what? (65)

Add yours please

Discussion Questions

• Are charity and kindness natural? (41)
• Is love rational? Friendship? (43) 
• Is Lewis right about the affect of Eros on happiness? (46)
• Do you agree that our capacity for love is in some important way foundational or a prerequisite for our moral nature? Is there any particular reason why a godless person should favor or disfavor this view?
• Should we in any sense immunize our moral beliefs from alteration in the light of the current state of neuroscientific understanding? Is the attribution of personal responsibility just so crucial to social stability and the public interest that we ought to erect a wall between neuroscientific facts (where consensus can be identified) and moral values?
• COMMENT: “While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.” C.S. Lewis
• COMMENT: “Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.” ― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
• Add your DQs please

I'm not a C.S. Lewis fan (surprise!), but Shadowlands is a lovely film and a moving love story. If I were Lewis, though, the events it depicts would have sorely tested my faith.

==
The subject of Love came up in discussion the other day, it often being alleged that materialists (physicalists) can't account for it in their ontology... and since atheists are most often physicalists, that's relevant. Also, Valentine's Day is coming.

Anyway, with love in the air I thought I'd share this recent essay from Garrison Keillor. Being a lower-midwesterner by birth I still appreciate his upper-midwestern drollery... and still regret his having been indiscriminately swept up in the #MeToo moment and unfairly lumped with the creepy, criminally- reprehensible Harvey Weinstein. Mr. Keillor is one of the funniest storytelling poet-promoters of his generation. I miss Prairie Home Companion.

The art of love in the far North

Winter is a thoughtful time. Snow falls in the trees and my natural meanness dissipates and the urge to bash my enemies’ mailboxes with a baseball bat. I put fresh strawberries on the cornflakes and taste the sweetness of life. I speak gently to the lady across the table. Marriage is the truest test — to make a good life with your best-informed critic, and thanks to her excellent comedic timing, we have a good life. My third marriage and this year we ding the silver bell of twenty-five years.

America is the land of second and third chances, not like Europe. We have remedial colleges for kids who slept through high school. In Europe, the system is geared toward efficiency: it separates kids by age 12 into Advanced, Mediocre, and Food Service Workers, and once they assign you to a lane, it’s hard to get out of it. In this country, if our children are lazy and undisciplined, we try to see signs of artistic ability. We put them in a fine arts  program. They spend three years writing weird stuff and get an MFA and you drive through McDonald’s and the young people fixing the Egg McMuffins are poets and songwriters.

It’s a land of high hopes, thanks to the Atlantic and Pacific that serve to isolate us from reality. Our ancestors were happy to escape the zeal of revolutionaries and the madness of despots and come to America and work like draft horses, hoping their children and grandchildren would have an easier time of it. And we do. Fifty years ago, when we referred to “homosexuals,” it sounded like people suffering from a condition that required treatment, but when “gay” became common usage, it changed everything. How can you be opposed to happiness?

For an old man, there aren’t many second chances, but we still hope for them. I miss my youth, the buzzin’ of the bees in the cigarette trees near the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings, and now the bee population is down, the smokes are gone, lemonade contains dangerous additives, and when did you last see a bluebird? In my youth, men worked on their cars, changed the oil and the spark plugs, replaced the fan belt, and other men gathered, squatted around the car, and talked about manly things. The driveway was their territory. This is all gone now. Cars can’t be repaired by ordinary people with ordinary tools. Men have been forced into the living room, which belongs to women. They say, “Take your shoes off” and you have to do it.

The country is falling apart. There are new food allergies every week so we can’t have dinner parties anymore unless we limit the menu to locally sourced artisanal lentils. And people who come for dinner spend the first half hour talking about how long it took to get here — rush hour is horrendous, three and four hours, so people email and text behind the wheel, even shave, and do makeup, change a shirt, put on a tie, nobody dares tailgate because they’re steering with their knees so traffic moves even more slowly. Online medical education means someday we’ll go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung. The Boeing debacle means we can only ride Airbuses now, planes designed by engineers who eat mussels and wear silk scarves. And Washington — Mr. Drumpf wouldn’t have been a capable water commissioner in a midsize city but here he is, running foreign policy based on phone conversations with Tucker Carlson. Republican politics is based on the imminence of the Second Coming: if Jesus doesn’t descend within three years and take the Republicans to heaven, they are going to be in very deep waste materials.

But hope remains. People still fall in love. I know millennials who are crazy about each other and don’t try to hide it. The country is on the skids but still I see people going to the trouble of seducing each other. In Minnesota, this is done by owning a snowblower and going to the home of the person you adore and blowing the snow, and if he or she (or they or we or those) is receptive, they will invite you in for a bowl of homemade chili. I don’t know what Californians do but in the north, it’s very simple. Snowblowing followed by chili. Chili with ground beef or chicken in it. What the heck — take the risk. Veganism can wait until after marriage.

The Good Place, Goofus and Gallant

Okay, I'll just get over my Ted Danson phobia and watch. Maybe not binge, though.

Michael Schur swears he didn’t name Michael, the avuncular architect played by Ted Danson on Schur’s metaphysical sitcom, “The Good Place,” after himself. The character was actually based on St. Michael the Archangel, who according to Christian tradition is involved in the final judgment of souls.

But the parallels are undeniable. Over four seasons on the NBC comedy, both Michaels spent their time devising elaborate, twisty fictions and trying to settle on a suitably just plan for the afterlife.

“That character is some sort of a showrunner — he’s writing scenarios and putting people in different positions,” Schur said recently. “I gave up trying to argue and have just accepted the fact that my subconscious will live on the show.”

“The Good Place” is ending this week, wrapping up Thursday night on NBC with the series finale followed by a live panel discussion, hosted by Seth Meyers, with Schur and the cast — Danson, Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto and D’Arcy Carden.... (continues)

==
Help is other people
Through a series of metaphysical twists (this is a rare sitcom with the momentum and galaxy-brain surprises of a drama like “Lost”), we discover that eternity is broken: No humans have qualified for heaven in centuries, less because we’re so bad than because the point-based system is out of whack.




The series was largely about the obligation to help others be good.

So Eleanor sets out to fix it, with the expertise of Chidi (William Jackson Harper), a student of moral philosophy; Tahani (Jameela Jamil), a self-absorbed socialite; and Jason, (Manny Jacinto) a small-time Florida criminal and Molotov cocktail enthusiast. Each alone is a Goofus. Put together — and abetted by a renegade demon (Ted Danson) and a hypercompetent A.I. assistant (D’Arcy Carden) — they may make enough of a Gallant to fix the universe.

It’s that “together” that connects “The Good Place” to Schur’s other communitarian comedies. A lot of TV series are about what it means to be good — even “Breaking Bad” was, albeit using a negative example. What distinguishes this one is that it’s ultimately about our obligation to help other people to be good, to tutor and challenge one another, to learn and to pass lessons along.
As its trial-and-comedy-of-errors shows, you can push yourself, work the program and accrue the points, but it’s nigh impossible to do it alone. An entirely individual morality, in its vision, is a kind of solipsism doomed to fail. Making a better world — or even one better person — has to be a team effort. (One Season 4 episode had the sunny-Sartre title, “Help Is Other People.”)

“The Good Place,” charitably, blames our circumstances, not ourselves, for this situation. Modern life, it argues, has become so complicated, the effects of our actions so far-reaching and unpredictable, that it’s impossible to live a good life on the first blundering try. (One small but resonant example is Chidi’s love of almond milk, the virtuous-seeming beverage with the giant water-usage footprint.)
nyt
==
A big part of my early moral education. Seriously.


g&g
==
Postscript. I watched the finale and I liked it. Turns out the denizens of paradise find eternity a drag, and only perk up when they're shown where to find the exit. Nice concluding secular message. And Hypatia of Alexandria too! Thanks again, Ed.


https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a30653064/hypatia-of-alexandria-lisa-kudrow-the-good-place-season-4-explained/


Lisa Kudrow's The Good Place Hypatia of Alexandria Cameo Explained - Why Chidi Met Hypatia in Season 4 - esquire.com
In introducing Chidi to Lisa Kudrow's Hypatia of Alexandria—a cutting-edge feminist scholar from ancient Egypt—The Good Place makes a sly comment about what kind of person gets into heaven.
www.esquire.com

How to post Google Book excerpts etc.

FYI-

1. Go to Google Books. If the selection you want to excerpt has a Preview, click on it.
2. Click on the link icon above the book.
3. Copy ("Ctrl-C") the Embed code that just popped up.
4. Paste ("Ctrl-V") that code into your post.

For instance,

How to post a snippet of text and link to the rest of it:

1. Copy the selection you want to excerpt.
2. Paste that into your post.
3. If it doesn't display correctly, highlight it and click on the "Remove formatting" (Tx) icon 
4. Type ("continues") at the end of the text ...
5. Highlight ("continues") ...
6. Paste the URL address onto ("continues")

For instance,

In a New Dystopian Novel, the Country is AutoAmerica, but Baseball Is Still Its Pastime

by Dwight Garner

The best thing about being God, Iris Murdoch wrote, would be making the heads. The best thing about writing speculative or dystopian fiction, surely, is updating human language, pushing strange new words into a reader’s mind.

Gish Jen’s densely imagined if static new novel, “The Resisters,” is set in a future surveillance state known as AutoAmerica. The ice caps have melted, and much of the land is underwater. A racial and class divide has cleaved the population... (continues)

Descartes's BS on the Necessity of God for Morality

This comment goes back to our discussion of the idea that God is required for morality, or meaning in life, or human goodness.

René Descartes, as explained in his Meditations on the First Philosophy (1641), using his method of doubt, knew that he existed as a thinking thing, because he concluded that he must exist to doubt that he exists. He knew that God exists and is real because, as Anslem argued in 1078, he could conceive of God in his mind. From these two bits of knowledge, he knew that substances were real.

In his dedicatory letter of the Meditations to the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne, he went further. He said that the God’s existence is necessary.

“[I]n the case of unbelivers, it seems there is no religion, and practically no moral virtue, that they can be persuaded to adopt until these two truths (the existence of God and the immortality of the soul) are proved to them by natural reason. And since in this life the rewards offered to vice are often greater than the rewards of virtue, few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an after-life.”

This just bothered me. I was all set up to read the rational argument of why God is necessary for morality, and right up front he asserts a premise which is just, forgive me, bullshit*.

To say that humans prefer vice to virtue not an argument, it’s just an assertion, with no support. In fact, it may be just flat out wrong. The ancient Greet philosophers taught that humanity’s ultimate good was happiness. Aristotle taught that man achieved Eudaimonia (happiness) through the exercise of virtues. He gave us virtue ethics, moral philosophy based on character. Epicurus found happiness in pleasure, but in intellectual pleasure, not vice.

It has been suggested to me that Descartes's assertions may have been colored by to whom he was writing; i.e., the faculty of the theology department. If that is the case, calling bullshit on his premise is just being descriptive of his intent to persuade.

*Bullshit involves language intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence; statements produced without particular concern of truth, as distinguished from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth. It is this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that is the essence of bullshit. Quiz question: give an example of a prominent American president who is a bullshit artist. 

Spring 2020 Honors Lecture Series - Climate Change

MIDTERM REPORT PRESENTATIONS

Declare your topic by Feb. 6, in a comment below this post. Indicate whether you're interested in collaborating with a classmate or prefer to do a solo report.

You can do a solo report or team up with a classmate. I suggest anchoring your report to a specific text, something we're not already reading as a class. 

Talk to us for about 10 minutes and lead discussion. Give us a short (3 or 4 questions) quiz over your report and a couple of discussion questions. Your quiz should cover the presentation and anything you'd care to post and have us look at in advance. Your quiz questions are eligible for inclusion on the first exam.

Feb 11 - Ed, "The Blackstone Sermon"

Feb 13 - Jamil - The End of God-Talk: An African American Humanist Theology

Feb 18 - Heather, Death & secular meaning/Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

Feb 20 - Crystal, Nietzsche

Feb 25 - Cooper, On Humanism. 
           -  Ben, Identifying parallels between social oppression and control by religious institutions with "Woke Culture".

[We're not meeting on Feb 27, I'll be at a conference]

Mar 3 - Jessica, Camus: Myth of Sisyphus/Sartre: Existentialism Is a Humanism.

Mar 5 - Makayla Barrett : Thoughts on Sadhguru 

Spring Break

Mar 17 - How An Atheist Finds Meaning, Sheala Carpenter

Mar 19 - Patricia Hummel: The Reason Revolution by Dan Dana

Mar 24 - Debria Tyler Can Creationism and science coexist? 

Dr. Flicker's antidote to cosmic despair

One of the things some godless folk find unsettling, and subversive of the quest for meaning and purpose in an indifferent universe, is the prospect of ultimate cosmic nullity. I know at least one other of us is old enough to have been a Woody Allen fan before he became a pariah...

Dr. Flicker's antidote to cosmic despair: enjoy your life. Turn your attention to other things including a better future, but not to The End. (Isn't that basically Camus's message too?) And, do your homework.



"Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things." Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian

Sisyphus

The video Jamil shared. Let's all become authors so everyone can post cool stuff like this directly.

Secular spirituality in the classroom

Data shows adolescents with a strong spirituality are far more protected against depression, substance abuse and risk-taking, author and professor Lisa Miller says. https://t.co/qVgy2X9InJ

— Here & Now (@hereandnow) January 27, 2020

CHRISTIANITY ALMOST FREED THE SLAVES

Our discussion Friday regarding African-Americans and Christianity brought to mind this little tidbit about slavery and Christianity. The Declaration of Independence reflects Enlightenment ideas of a universal human nature and social equality. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” How could slavery be justified if all men are created equal, and endowed with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Also present at this time were the ideas of capitalism and property rights, and slave ownership was a property right.  The justification for denying these universal human rights to slaves became the idea, supported by race theories, that some were naturally inferior to others. This provided a basis for class distinctions, and a way to reconcile unequal treatment of some with the idea of universal rights. But that was not the first justification for unequal treatment; it was Christianity.

Africans were first brought to America in the early 1600’s, but as indentured servants, not slaves.  They were freed when their debts were paid.  The use of slavery grew as the need for agricultural labor grew.  Initially the justification for slavery in spite of Christian theology and the principle of universal rights was that the Africans were not Christian, and therefore it was permissible to deny them a natural right to social equality.  Slavery was a means for conversion.  But as Africans began to become Christians, this undermined the justification for slavery, and the institution of slavery itself, because the Christian slaves would be freed. We couldn’t have that, could we? So the justification shifted to the (asserted) natural inferiority of Africans, and studies by biologists and anthropologists were developed to show this. Even though science has debunked this idea, it still haunts us today in some quarters of society.

How William James encourages us to believe in the possible

by Temma Ehrenfeld (Thanks for the link, Ed!) (WJ on secular faith)

‘He was joyful, an eccentric dresser, great conversationalist, 

and a spontaneous teacher.’ William James in Brazil in 1865.

In college, I developed a mysterious illness. I experienced myself as happy, yet in the afternoons I would cry for two hours. Although the obvious interpretation was depression, to me it was all about lunch. Food exhausted me and made me sad. I tried skipping breakfast and lunch, and snacking on cottage cheese and milk chocolate bars. Then carrots.

After many afternoons like this, what philosophical 18-year-old would believe in free will? I was a digestive system, molecules. The next thought was that I would die, dissolve into molecules… while young.

Around this time, I discovered William James (1842-1910), the father of American psychology as a formal discipline. Was my problem ‘psychological’ or ‘physical’? James let me understand that it could be both. Mental phenomena, he explained, had physical roots. He created the first biology-based psychology lab at Harvard University, yet he trusted subjective experience and honoured our capacity for clear thought. I was my digestion and I had choices, too... (Aeon, continues)

Funny as hell

More A&P funnies (And btw, Why do people believe in hell?)

#atheist #secular #gods

8:00 PM - 30 Jan 2018

Too small

“We have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.”

“Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.”

“A new concept of god: “something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature…that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow…Mars…the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us.”

“The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions and perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy... And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion... 

― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

Quiz Jan 30

JB 5-7

1. "Anaxagoras is the earliest historical figure to have been indicted for atheism" (Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History... & see Tim Whitmarsh's Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World - "Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills"), but the first "avowedly atheist work" was by whom? Who does Baggini name as some of his ancient precursors? (78)

2. Did original Marxist communism advocate religious oppression? (87)

3. Which of the traditional god arguments does Baggini find "philosophically interesting" but even weaker than the others? (97)

4. How do most believers justify their faith, according to Baggini? (98)

5. What methodological principle does Baggini invoke, to reject the imposition of stringent standards of evidence and truth? (104)

6. What's a humanist? (109)

Please post your alternate quiz questions.

Discussion

• Comment: "In the case of ghosts, we not only lack a rational explanation of how ghosts can exist, we also lack any rational reasons to suppose that they do." 77 Does this apply equally to souls, spirits, and dualistic minds? Is there a way of conceiving naturalism broadly enough to admit their possibility?
• Do you agree that Enlightenment values (liberty, equality, tolerance etc.) remain triumphant, dominant foundations of the western world? Thinking of the European refugee crisis, the American election, are they at risk?
• "The main danger we need to guard against is not religion but fundamentalism" - agree? Are atheist fundamentalists equally dangerous?
• Are you hostile to (ir-)religion? Should "Friendly" Atheists confront militant atheism or ignore it? Should moderate theists confront or ignore religious extremists?
• If a "god of the gaps" is objectionable, what should we say about gaps in our natural understanding? Is it an article of scientific faith, to believe that the gaps will eventually be filled?
• If "evolution accounts for the appearance of design," and evolved minds are capable of discerning this, doesn't evolution (after all) contribute significantly to what it means to be human?
• Does Baggini give short shrift to the role of "inner conviction" in establishing personal belief? Isn't subjectivity or temperament an inevitable factor in philosophy (as James said), even though the official view is that it should not be? Or is inner conviction just a mirror of external, local contingencies of birth?
• Do you agree with Baggini's rejection of the the Nietzschean critique of religion as inherently life-denying? 105
• "Atheism is the throwing off of childish illusions and acceptance that we have to make our own way in the world. We have no divine parents who always protect us... [this is] the precondition for meaningful adult lives." Fair?
• (Suggest your DQs...)

Quiz Feb 1 AA Intro, 1

1. "A lot of women are turned off by" what perceived demographic imbalance in contemporary atheism?

2. What important link with "potentially damaging implications" has begun to be explored by "only a handful of studies"?

3. What 'ism are New Atheists commonly accused of committing?

4. How does Anthony Grayling define humanism?

5. What prominent 19th century African-American said he would "welcome atheism..."

6-10. [Post your alternate quiz questions] 

• Is atheism misrepresented by a minority of aggressive, militant men? What can or should be done to address this concern?
• Do you think people who believe in something transcendently supernatural have a health or happiness advantage?
• Is it possible to advocate a scientific and evidence-based approach to belief without courting scientism?
• Is Grayling's definition of humanism better than Baggini's?
• Post your DQs

Atheism’s shocking woman problem: What’s behind the misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris? - As a movement, New Atheism seems like it would be so compatible with feminism — and yet that hasn’t been the case... Salon

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Getting Beyond "New Atheism" - The atheist public intellectuals are all intolerable, but secularism can be saved… Current Affairs

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Another plaint about sexism-ridden New Atheism
Suppose you start with the assumption that the atheist community is riddled with misogyny and sexism, that this is the explanation for the paucity of women atheist “leaders” and participants, then ignore the prevalence of gender imbalance and misogyny in other areas, and mix in some postmodern jargon, some “research” that consists of anecdotes and citations of other people’s data that simply show that women are less atheistic than men—what do you get? You get a new paper in the book Sociology of Atheism... Jerry Coyne

Also of interest:

Book Review: The Illusion of God’s Presence

Summary: Not a new theory, but a new and strong case for an old theory, supplemented with up-to-date neurological evidence.

Jack Wathey is a neuroscientist and computational biologist and the founder of Wathey Research, a scientific firm that focusesafter on problems like protein folding. His new book, The Illusion of God’s Presence, presents an answer to a puzzling problem: Why do human beings believe so strongly in a supernatural deity, even in the face of ample contradictory evidence? (Full disclosure: Jack and I have been correspondents for several years, and I sent him feedback on an earlier draft of the manuscript. It also cites my writing as reference material in a few places.)

The book begins with a gutsy personal anecdote in which the author, with painful honesty, describes the worst mistake he ever made – a family hiking trip in the Sonoran desert of southern California, which almost turned deadly when midday temperatures soared and they hadn’t brought enough water. Although no one died, he was tormented by guilt and thoughts of what he should have done differently. It was while grappling with his guilt that night that he was unexpectedly visited by the overwhelming sensation of a loving, forgiving presence in the room with him – despite the fact that he was and still is an atheist. It was “a religious experience devoid of religious belief”, as he puts it.

Wathey reflected on this experience after the emergence of the New Atheist movement. He writes that he found the books of prominent atheist authors “rousing and delightful”, but that they neglected “the real reason that most believers believe: their personal experience of the presence of God” [p.16]. It’s this subjective and highly emotional sensation, the same one he experienced for himself, that he believes lies at the root of most religious belief, and that this book seeks to explain in scientific terms...

His theory – the illusion of the title – is that belief in God is a misfire of the brain systems that evolved to promote parent-child bonding in infancy. A baby instinctively believes, without needing any prior experience, that its crying will summon a powerful, loving parental figure. Wathey calls this instinct “short-circuit certainty” and says:

“Even if she cannot be immediately seen, heard, tasted, or felt, the mother still exists. Even if she takes what seems an eternity to respond to the infant’s cries, she still exists. This knowledge would give an infant separated from its mother the persistence to keep crying for her, even if hunger and exhaustion would otherwise compel silence and rest to conserve energy. This hardwired, innate sense of certainty of the mother’s existence is, by definition, certainty in the absence of evidence. The infant is certain because certainty confers a survival advantage.” [p.63]

Wathey’s proposal is that in times of great despair, anguish or helplessness, this deeply buried neural network sometimes reactivates, giving a person the unshakable sense of a powerful and benevolent presence that’s willing to give aid or comfort. Effectively, belief in God is a supernormal stimulus for the innate parental image which all humans inherit.

This isn’t a new idea, of course. Sigmund Freud proposed something similar, that religious belief grows from an unconscious longing for a childhood father figure. But where Freud was groping in the dark, Wathey backs his argument up with modern neuroscientific evidence, identifying the specific brain regions and networks that he believes give rise to this phenomenon. If you, like me, have a geeky fascination with how the brain gives rise to the mind, there’s a lot of material here to mull over: the role of nucleus accumbens in mediating reward-seeking behavior, cholinergic signaling in the basal forebrain, the top-down role of the visual cortex in sensory perception, and more. He surveys comparably complex neural programming in other species, like newly-hatched sea turtles which have sophisticated instincts that govern when to emerge from their nest, how to seek out the ocean, and how to tell which direction they should swim. He also devotes considerable time to infant cognition and what patient, careful experimentation has shown us about the way babies perceive the world.

There are probably a few questions that come to mind when you consider this hypothesis. I had them myself on my first reading of the book: Given that the parental caregiver is usually the mother, why isn’t God more widely believed to be female? Isn’t it maladaptive for this brain network to confer the sense that the supplicant’s prayers have been answered, whereas an infant is only soothed by the actual presence of its parent and not merely the wish? Why do so many religions believe in a God who’s a cruel, punishing lawgiver rather than a comforting maternal figure?

Wathey addresses those objections and others in the book, and I’m not going to go into detail about his answers in this review. Instead, I want to touch on what I thought was a very clever and unexpectedly persuasive argument: in addition to the neurological evidence, he describes “infantile imagery” in a wide variety of religions and cults: texts and rituals that, implicitly or explicitly, tell believers to picture themselves in an infantile role and God as a loving parent.

Sometimes, this infantile imagery merely consists of stressing the believer’s total helplessness and dependence and God’s omniscient willingness to aid. But sometimes the connection is unambiguous, as in prayer manuals which compare believers in prayer to a helpless baby nursing at a breast, or doctrine which instructs believers that they must be “born again”. (One tidbit I learned is that Jim Jones demanded his followers address him as “Dad”.) He also points out that prayer often involves rhythmic rocking or swaying, which parents know has a calming effect on small children. The first time I read this, I thought of devout Jews rocking back and forth in fervent prayer at the Wailing Wall.

The other thing I liked about the book is that Wathey demonstrates the explanatory fruitfulness of his theory. He argues that it can explain a diversity of questions under the same banner: why nearly all religions are obsessed with sexual proscription and taboos, or why denial of God consistently attracts such anger, or why prayer so often involves kneeling and prostration, or even why churches and temples have common architectural motifs. He does venture into speculation that the greater religiosity of women is partly biological, which I suspect will attract some opposition. But overall, when it comes to secular works on the origins of religious belief, this is a thoughtful and worthwhile contribution and a persuasive case for atheism.

The Illusion of God’s Presence is published by Prometheus Books and available online through major retailers. You can also listen to an interview with the author on Point of Inquiry.

- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2016/01/book-review-the-illusion-of-gods-presence/#sthash.KHlyHB8c.dpuf

==

...Birth and death are the bookends of our lives. Living towards death in time gives one's life a direction and framework within which to understand the changes that life brings. The world looks very differently to the young and the old. The young look forward. The old look back. What matters to us changes as we get older. The prospect of death informs these changes. The young have an intellectual understanding that death comes to us all, but their mortality has not become real to them. For the old, mortality starts to sink in.

For a long time, I have been puzzled by two famous philosophical ideas about death, one from Plato and one from Spinoza. The first is that a philosopher has a vital concern with death and constantly meditates upon it. The second is that the wise person thinks of nothing so little as death. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle. Ignoring death leaves us with a false sense of life's permanence and perhaps encourages us to lose ourselves in the minutiae of daily of life. Obsessive rumination on death, on the other hand, can lead us away from life. Honestly coming to terms with one's death involves reflection on its significance in one's life, and thinking about the larger values that give life its meaning. In the end, it is useful to think about death only to the point that it frees us to live fully immersed in the life we have yet to live.

JEFF MASON WAS A LECTURER IN PHILOSOPHY AT MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY. HE WROTE THIS PIECE IN 2011 SIX MONTHS BEFORE A DIAGNOSIS OF TERMINAL LUNG CANCER.

Related Article: Close Encounters of the Cancer Kind (written by Jeff Mason two months before his death in August 2012).http://www.philosophersmag.com/index.php/reflections/17-death-and-its-concept

Quiz Jan 28

jesusandmo.net... spiritual not religious...

Let's not forget also to go over last time's posted comments, and finish discussing ch's 1-2 before moving on to 3-4.

1. The Euthyphro Dilemma implies what about the properties of goodness? (39)

2. What is Kierkegaard's (and Woody Allen's) existentialist point about Abraham and morality? (42)

3. Morality is about acting in whose best interests? (44)

4. What's the "first step in moral thinking"? (49)

5. Does Baggini think it matters whether judgments like "pain is bad" are factual? (52)

6. Did Sartre deny that human life lacks purpose or meaning? (58)

7. What's problematic about seeking meaning in life by serving somebody else's purposes? (59) [And see Rick & Morty on passing the butter, below]

8. What "vital point" do we miss, if we focus too much on goals? (65)

9. What dilemma arises from reflections on eternal bliss or nirvana? (70)

Discussion Questions

• Can you admit the truth of cultural relativism without admitting the ultimate arbitrariness of moral judgments? If you insist on objectivity in morals, must you reject cultural relativism? 
• Which is the more important choice, Abraham's (to follow what he perceives as a divine command) or his peers' (to follow the rule of law and humane ethics)?
• What do you think David Hume meant when he said reason is and should be the slave of the passions? Do you agree? Must reason and feeling be antagonistic or hierarchical?
• Do you agree with Aristotle's characterization of a good person? 48
• Do you agree that the mere fact of consequences is enough to "get morality going"? 49 If you were stranded on an island alone, would you still (in principle at least) be subject to ethical evaluation and accountability?
• What do you think of the "nihilistic mantra"? 57 What's your answer to the question "why do you bother to get up in the mornings"? (See RD's reply...)
• Do you believe your life has an externally-imposed and objective purpose? If not, do you regret that?
• Is it possible to live meaningfully without goals?
• Does evolution confer meaning?
• Do you think most people lead meaningful-enough lives? Could they, if they appreciated life's simple goods?
• Do you know any stereotypically-shallow atheists? (68) Or theists?
• Do you want to live longer, or forever? Would your life mean more to you, if you did?
• Who's your favorite celeb atheist?
• Have you traveled in a place like the Czech Republic? Was it unpleasantly devoid of meaning? 
• Post your DQs, comments, etc.

U@d 1.26.16:
In Atheism & Philosophy, we look (with Julian Baggini) at godless ethics and meaning. The main takeaway: being good is a challenge for us all, with or without a heavenly host and role-model; and so is the quest for significance. You can't simply assign goodness or meaning to an external law-and-purpose-Giver and be done with it, we must each appropriate and perpetually re-appropriate the point and integrity of our lives. That goes for gods and humans alike, who must (Euthyphro should have learned from Socrates) all acknowledge the reasonableness of independent standards.

William James: "The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,— the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man's or woman 's pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place."

Also of note:

Way More Americans May Be Atheists Than We Thought ...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/.../way-more-americans-may-be-atheists-than-we-thought/

May 18, 2017 - The number of atheists in the U.S. is still a matter of considerable debate. Recent surveys have found that only about one in 10 Americans report that they do not believe in God, and only about 3 percent identify as atheist. But a new study suggests that the true number of atheists could be much larger, ...

10 facts about atheists | Pew Research Center

www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/01/10-facts-about-atheists/

Jun 1, 2016 - But one thing is for sure: Along with the rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans (many of whom believe in God), there has been a corresponding increase in the number of atheists. As nonbelievers and others gather in Washington, D.C., for the “Reason Rally,” here are key facts aboutatheists and their ...

Atheism in America: Why won't the U.S. accept its atheists?

www.slate.com/.../atheism_in_america_why_won_t_the_u_s_accept_its_atheists_.html

Feb 5, 2012 - But neither her sexuality nor her unwed parenthood are enough to make Renee Johnson anAmerican conservative's worst nightmare. As she explained to me when I met her at Rains County Library, “I'd rather have a big 'L' or 'lesbian' written across my shirt than a big 'A' or 'atheist', because people are ...