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Beta Culture: The Footprint of the Past

One of my many interests is the residual social / societal effects of historical events and social movements.

For instance, the fact that we still say “God bless you” when people sneeze, 14 centuries after the supposed origin of the practice …

One explanation holds that the custom originally began as an actual blessing. Gregory I became Pope in AD 590 as an outbreak of the bubonic plague was reaching Rome. In hopes of fighting off the disease, he ordered unending prayer and parades of chanters through the streets. At the time, sneezing was thought to be an early symptom of the plague. The blessing (“God bless you!”) became a common effort to halt the disease.

… means that when we get some idea in our little human heads, even crazy, useless shit, that crazy, useless shit PERSISTS.

WE KEEP ON DOING IT. Keep on teaching it, for decades, centuries, after it last meant anything real … if it ever did.

I know for a fact that the shadow of the slavery era, and the Civil War, still hangs over the Deep South where I grew up — in attitudes, government action, inter-racial relations, so much more — on both sides of the racial divide.

Living here in New York state, I’ve seen little hints here and there that the Prohibition era, the heyday of organized crime, still hangs over eastern cities. In police practices, in the attitudes and actions of elected officials.

It’s well known that Jews and Muslims still avoid pork, long after any evidentiary reason for it.

Speaking economically: considering the lengthy, ongoing failure of infrastructure in the U.S. – the desperate situation of roads and bridges, the school system, water and sewer systems – the beggaring debts of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., still hang over us.

I’ve considered that the ubiquity of religion worldwide has had massive and profound effects ranging from lingering social practices, government policy, language, understanding of history, even human psychology and our relation to the natural world.

But again on the subject of war, this catches my interest:

Historians have underestimated the death count of WWI by a huge margin

Look at these Austrian men murdering bound and blindfolded Serbian prisoners. Considering what we know about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, imagine what sort of psyche comes out of that. Imagine the millions of damaged young men coming home after this war, and that war, and all those other wars.

Few of us find it easy to kill others. The military takes mostly-peaceable nebbishes off the street and teaches them how to do it — to shoot, stab and blow up other human beings. It shoves them into the blowtorch of war where they experience the opportunity or necessity of killing and torturing others. After which, with full memories and attitudes intact, it releases them back into common society.

With that package of damage in their heads, essentially as functional sociopaths, they then attempt to reincorporate into society. Where they grapple with their attitudes about women, about freedom of speech, about foreigners, about religion. Voting those attitudes. Spreading them. Teaching them to their kids. Supporting new and more deadly wars, but also the conditions that cause those wars. Accepting without question or protest further government actions, or authoritarian proclamations, or even heinous lies propagated by such sources as FOX News.

Yes, we as an entire culture, an entire civilization, are damaged by the lasting cultural footprint of religion.

But now I’m considering this new idea, that war, just as deadly as religion to both individual human sanity and the sanity of entire cultures, may hang over us as an equally-dark social cloud.

One more reason to attempt to take a new path, develop a new culture, something more reasonable, more human and humane.

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Killing People, With Kindness

Watch this video of a 94-year-old man in an epic 65-meter footrace last year.

Would it sadden you to know the winner, European masters athletics champion Emiel Pauwels, is now dead? And that he deliberately ended his own life a week or so ago?

95-year-old ‘Belgian Bolt’ holds big party before ending life by euthanasia

In his hometown of Bruges he held a big party with friends and family two days before his death – and even downed two glasses of champagne for the occasion.

Pauwels looked like he was ready to run another race but wanted to end his life before the cancer really got a hold of him.

His son Eddy told Belgian television that he ‘agreed 110 per cent’ with his father’s decision to end his own life.

Pauwels had been bedridden the past couple of months with stomach cancer. His choice was based on the certain knowledge that he wasn’t going to be getting well, and that whatever discomfort he was experiencing was only going to get worse.

(I chuckled at one indelicate but somewhat humorous headline: Emiel Pauwels, 95-year-old sprinter, euthanized after winning gold medal. Sounds like he broke a leg in the race and had to be put down like a horse.)

I am much in favor of every individual retaining the power to end his own life, and I like to know there are sane places in the world where such a choice is respected, even honored.

I don’t live in one of those sane places, and it saddens me to think of the people who might exercise this freedom, who might NEED it to escape intractable pain and progressive indignity, but who cannot. Over the final four days I sat with my Dad, a strong-willed, wonderful, much-loved man who refused all intervention beyond morphine, I watched him suffer at length and die slowly.  I asked the hospital staff at least twice if there was anything more that could be done, and the people I talked to slid away from answering, as I know they had to.

I wish I could say something more profound about it, but … lives end. They do. Where I live they end all too often with all dignity and individuality stripped away by a system that insists we do not have this choice, should not have this choice.

I see this as an avoidance of clear thinking on the subject, and I see that as the direct result of religion.

Once you get religion out of your head, once you step outside the religious paradigm and start looking back at what’s there, it’s obvious that the socio-cultural EFFECTS of god-belief persist, even in societies that don’t see themselves as powerfully religious.

Here in the U.S., one of our socio-cultural remnants is the idea that “suicide” is a sin, that “God’s will” must be respected to the bitter, painful end, even for those we already know — who they themselves already know — will die in medically-extended agony.

I’d like to see that change.

Belgium has a fairly sane view of the thing (story):

Euthanasia, for medical reasons, has been legal in Belgium since 2002 for people over the age of 18. More than 1400 people a year choose to be euthanized. Last year, the Belgium senate voted to allow euthanasia for terminally ill children as well. The vote passed overwhelmingly in the senate and is now being hotly debated in the lower house of parliament. If the bill passes, Belgium will become the first nation in the world that legally allows people of any age to be euthanized.

 

 

 

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Population Pessimism and Diminished Personal Freedom

Face it, if your Superbowl party includes a sofa that comfortably seats four people, and you have game snacks for four people, but two more people show up … Everybody has less room. Less popcorn. Less beer.

Those two extra people COST something to the others.

Further, if you lived on an island with sharply limited resources, in a situation where growing population had finally bumped up against those limits, you’d be forced by the situation to demand less for yourself, to work more closely with others to ensure everybody got their share of what remained (okay, unless you were content to be a bully and grab everything for yourself, with no thought to how many were going without). The situation would become less a matter of “my freedom” and more a matter of “What’s possible, or allowable, considering this limited environment?”

Increasing island population would cost something to everyone there.

We in the U.S. live in a rich society, and we tend to think — and talk — a LOT about our freedom and our rights as individuals.

But the thing is, we DO live on a island like that. It’s called Earth. And we are already in the thick of that population vs. resources event.

Doesn’t matter what we think or feel. What matters is the factual matter of the situation. The reality of what we face.

As we get farther into peak oil, peak water, soil depletion and agricultural limits, groundwater pollution (fracking, but also seepage from garbage dumps, etc.), global warming (rising sea levels, erratic weather and food insecurity), extinctions and invasive species, damage to the oceans, strategic mineral exhaustion, antibiotic resistance and the certainty of pandemics …

We’re going to be forced to realize that some large part of our concept of personal freedom may be something of a social luxury.

Hell, sometimes our own innovations place limits on us. The mass marketing of entertainment – movies, music, books – reduces individuality and discourages the broadest possible range of human thought. The surveillance society, ostensibly created to counter terrorist activity, but gleefully pursued for its own self, steals the right of privacy from all of us. Even our waste disposal (toxics, nuclear waste, etc.) degrades the safety of those living nearby.

So what happens to freedom in a world bumping up against real limits? What happens to individuality?

In our probably-diminished future, you will still be an individual, but you’ll be an individual with fewer innate rights – possibly even a LOT fewer – just by virtue of the situation: More people dividing up less stuff.

Happening already, isn’t it?

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Beta Culture: Sometimes It’s You

Outside my bedroom window, three floors down and about 50 yards away, a car alarm began going off. At about 10 p.m. Sunday night.

Thirty blasts of the horn, then silence. For about 30 seconds. Then another 30 blasts. Silence. Again. And again. And again. For more than two hours.

I was reading in bed, as I always do, and I’m able to ignore a lot when I’m caught up in a book, so it wasn’t a big problem. But it was annoying. And it went on. And on. And on.

I finally looked out the window, and saw the flashing taillights of the car doing the thing. It was in a little open-ended garage behind the apartment building next door. And it belonged to someone I knew.

I didn’t know how to reach her, but my downstairs neighbor-lady did. We called her at about midnight, and of course she too was being kept awake by the incessant noise. After hearing whose car it was, she called the owner and told her about it, and a few minutes later, there was a bleep-twip! in the middle of a honk, and the alarm went silent.

Ah, blessed relief. For about 10 minutes. Then it started up again. Calls were made, and the lady was again notified, and a few minutes later, bleep-twip!, it stopped again. For about 5 minutes this time.

Rinse and repeat a couple more times.

Finally I got up and put on my pants and shirt. I dragged my toolbox out of the closet and my roommate made one more call to the lady. We trooped out in the freezing, icy weather, and the vehicle owner popped the hood on her car so I could disconnect the battery cable. Ah, blessed silence!

I showed her exactly what to do, how to put the cable back on, so she could drive the car to the shop when she was ready to have them fix it.

I’d wager a good 35 of my neighbors were being kept awake by the thing. They probably all thought the same thing I did: “Someone’s going to do something about that pretty soon. Any minute now.” I’d bet the police were called by more than one of them.

Someone had to go down and fix it. Eventually I realized it was me.

Talking to my local freethinker Meetup group earlier that same day, I said “There are all these problems in the world. One of the problems, though, is that we generally assume someone else is going to fix them. The government will fix things, or corporations will fix things, or ‘scientists’ will fix things. But sometimes … sometimes it’s you.”

This is pretty much the cornerstone of my motivation for working on Beta Culture.

Most of us automatically think someone else – smarter, bigger, better people, way off somewhere, people more capable or concerned – is going to fix things. But that’s really a sort of faith, isn’t it? A sort of pocket religion, the idea that Someone Else is going to make it all better.

Here’s the thing about all those Someone Elses: They can’t – and I mean it literally, they CAN’T – care about you and your personal interests. They don’t know you, maybe they don’t even want to know you, and they may well find it impossible to take an interest in the things you care about, the things you think are important, the things that are hurting you.

If your street is filled with blowing litter, or the nearby park is filled with dog poop, maybe it’s you who has to pick it up. If the vacant lot next door is a neighborhood eyesore, maybe it’s you who will have to do something about it. If a car alarm is going off at midnight, maybe you have to go out into the cold and fix it.

Even if it’s a problem the size of the world, Someone Else, busy with his/her own personal life, or possessed of a whole array of interests different from yours, may never even notice.

Here’s the other thing about all those Someone Elses: They’re just people. Sometimes they are people working together in large numbers – calling themselves government, or First National Bank, or General Electric, or Monsanto, or the Catholic Church – but they’re still just people.

And you, every bit as people-y, can do the things they do. If you only DECIDE to get them done.

Sometimes it’s you.  Sometimes it’s US.

And maybe it’s now.

 

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Beta Culture: More About the Nexus

One of my central ideas about Beta Culture, about creating it, is that every culture on Earth, past and present, is potential source material for designing our own unique cultural environment. We can borrow, copy, or just outright steal ideas and ways of doing from any and every culture.

Borrow cultural goodies from the Mormons. Steal from the Catholics. Copy good stuff from the Romans, the Shakers, the Japanese, the Italians, the Navajo. Borrow, copy, steal … and make it ours.

If you’ve been reading these posts on Beta Culture, you’ve probably come across me making the point that culture is basically “This is how my people do things” — the real-world customs and traditions, actions and attitudes of a self-identified People.

Religion — the formalized way of relating to the supernatural — is a subset of culture, I think you’d agree, and most cultures throughout human history have had religion at or near their hearts. The most basic argument for the creation of Beta Culture is that we haven’t yet had a culture that has NOTHING of religion or faith, the supernatural or mystical, about it … and that this is worth doing.

The Nexus, a church-like meeting place which is nothing like a church, is one of the central ideas to creating this new culture.

Speaking of which, there are several repurposed former churches here in Schenectady. One, a beautiful modern church near downtown, now houses a graphic design firm. Another, also downtown, is home to an acting company. Within just a few blocks of my house, there’s a VACANT church, with another vacant-looking one about a mile away.

Given my choice, I would steal the hell out of the “church” idea, and create — in some of these old churches — a Nexus in every major town in the United States. Of course Nexus would have nothing at all to do with religion or unsupported belief, everything to do with enhancing the culture and interactions and freedoms of Beta community members.

I wrote briefly about repurposing a former government office compound here: Beta Culture: A Community Nexus.

The [facility] features interconnected buildings with 10-foot-wide hallways, including a full-sized gymnasium with locker rooms, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and even its own bowling alley. Plus cafes, lounges and common areas scattered throughout. Not to mention 600-space parking, and this sweet, sweet, feature: a full-sized commercial kitchen with industrial-sized ovens, which just screams on-site restaurant and bakery!

Tell me that doesn’t sound like the ultimate headquarters of an evil genius bent on world domination. Or, you know, the central nexus of a growing, worldwide social organization aimed at making the world a better place for everybody living on it.

So say there was this community center owned by Betas — atheists — with all sorts of interior goodies for unbelievers. What might some of those things be?

1) A meeting place where members can get together for planning, for discussion, for socializing.

2) A public freethinker library and reading room, for community outreach and proselytizing.

3) A media center and digital lab for creating online and printed support media.

4) A coffee house for networking among local college students.

5) A child care facility and preschool for working Beta parents.

6) Classroom(s) for teaching Beta ideas and values, among other things.

7) At least one small apartment for visiting atheist/freethinker speakers.

This all probably seems a bit utopian, but I see it as desirable, and even do-able. Every organization, no matter how large, starts somewhere small, with an idealized plan that one day — given the investment of enough time and effort and good ideas by the people who want to see it happen —  becomes the reality.

Or, you know, it fails and vanishes.

But the truth is, a certain amount of blue-sky optimism at the outset is the only way anything EVER happens.

 

 

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Beta Culture: The Necessity of Change

This is a bit more heated than I’d say the thing …

Burn the Fucking System to the Ground

… but there’s one quote I view as absolutely accurate:

The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to give the insiders their royal prerogatives, and to shove the regulations, the laws, and the debt up the asses of everyone else.

I don’t see “burn it to the ground” as a workable solution. This is more a cry of impotent rage — the same thing we did in the 60s that changed pretty much nothing. But I can see this other approach as a real solution:

Step away from the system and do your own thing. Do it so well other people, more and more of them, join in. Do it so well and so long that it becomes the new system — more reasonable, more humane, more fair, more livable.

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Beta Culture: Self Defense in the Medical Arena

So you go into a hospital and it looks like every other, right? Doctors, nurses, beeping monitors, an overall air of concern for patient well-being. And for most of us, it’s probably even true.

But for one targeted class, women in need of emergency, or sometimes even routine, reproductive care, one in ten hospitals in the U.S. take a radically different approach to medicine.

Read this paragraph from Miscarriage of Medicine – The Growth of Catholic Hospitals and the Threat to Reproductive Health Care:

With the rise of Catholic hospitals has come the increasing danger that women’s reproductive health care will be compromised by religious restrictions. The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (the Directives), issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), govern care at these facilities. The Directives prohibit a range of reproductive health services, including contraception, sterilization, many infertility treatments, and abortion care, even when a woman’s health or life is in danger. Moreover, they often restrict even the ability of hospital staff to provide patients with full information and referrals for care that conflict with religious teachings.

That highlighted bit means that not only will they not provide certain “sinful” medical services, or even give you correct medical information on which your health may depend, they also won’t tell you where you can go to GET that information and those services.

They will lie by omission, even when your life and health hangs in the balance.

Why is this important? Because the number of Catholic-owned hospitals is rapidly increasing.

While the number of secular non-profit and public hospitals fell by 12 percent and 31 percent, respectively, in the ten years of 2001-2011, the number of Catholic hospitals grew by 16 percent. In that same period the total number of hospitals in the U.S. declined.

The real scare quote for women needing emergency reproductive care is this:

  • In 2011, one in ten acute-care hospitals were Catholic-sponsored or -affiliated.
  • That same year, 10 of the 25 largest hospital systems in the country were Catholic-sponsored.

This is understandable, of course. Hey, souls hang in the balance, right? And what are your annoying little rights, your petty little health and safety, compared with that?

Doesn’t matter that you’re not Catholic. Doesn’t matter that it might cost you your life, or the life of your wife. What matters is THEIR set of moral rules, enforced on US.

Considering that the Catholic Church appears to be actively acquiring more hospitals and hospital systems, it’s hard to say any of this — the enforcing of their moral rules, at times when patients are most defenseless and frightened — is unintentional.

Yet another reason why a new social engine — Beta Culture — is needed. If there are people in positions of influence over you who fail to consider one of the most basic social promises — that in a time of desperate need, your medical care will not be compromised or sold short — it’s time to get out from under and go your own way.

—————

Lest we forget one who died from this this kind of “care”: Savita Halappanavar

 

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Clarification of an Argument for Atheism

What follows is an excerpt from my book (Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods & Faith), specifically a section from Chapter 20: Uneven Ground, about a double standard in arguments about atheism. The double standard is that one side gets exacting scrutiny, while the other side too often gets a pass.

I made reference to the argument — “As I explained in my book …” —  in my most recent post, Beta Culture: Proposing A New Definition of Atheism, but so briefly I wasn’t sure it was clear. Hopefully this will help:

Millions of people who would otherwise be full-blown atheists self-identify as “agnostics” because, even though they’re pretty darned sure there are no such things as 3-part gods and holy virgins who amuse themselves by appearing on freeway overpasses, they feel ouchy about making what they consider to be a logically-insupportable statement to that effect. “Well, if I don’t search the entire universe and determine for myself that it contains no Parrot-Headed Jimmy Buffet Goddess, I can’t logically support the assertion that there is no such thing. So I guess I’ll have to keep quiet and allow for the reasonable doubt that She Of The Green Feathers might really exist somewhere.”

My point is this: in the loosely-argued domain of personal faith – which is where all statements of religion are made – the assertion of atheism is equally justified.

If you’re not going to apply the strict standards of logic and proof to the first one, you can’t single out the second one for harsh scrutiny. That would be like waving a white job applicant through while forcing the black applicant to undergo a battery of strict tests.

In this loose domain of personal faith, the two are equally supportable – there is a god, there is no god – and you can “believe” either one with perfect justification. Yet our civilization is seriously slanted to favor one, reject the other. So much so that if you attempt to equate the two, or assert the no-god position, you seem to be radically slanted the other way.

Atheism – in the domain of personal faith – is as justified as any other “belief.”

But there’s this other domain, isn’t there? The one where both assertions – god/no-god – have to pass the stricter real-world test?

I need to go off on a slight tangent here, to talk about the couple of different flavors of atheism.

What I’ll call “hard atheism” is the definitive statement “There are no such things as gods.” This is active disbelief, the certainty that these mystical superbeings don’t exist.

“Soft atheism” is the slightly less definitive statement “No specific god or gods have been proven to exist, and it’s a mistake to actively believe in them until there’s some proof.” This is more like “I’d be willing to consider that they might exist, but only if some supporting evidence shows up.”

My own feeling is that, after 20,000 years or so, and among the 8 billion or so humans ever to live on Planet Earth, if nobody has yet provided any concrete evidence for the existence of one or more of these gods, then for every practical human purpose the second statement is indistinguishable from the first. If you’re the least bit non-belief-prone, there’s no use wasting your personal time on the question of God’s existence until the sky opens up and an angry 70-foot-tall Zeus steps down with lightning in his fists. (Well, of course it’s going to be Zeus. What, you thought it would be that Jesus character?)

But back to this matter of logic and evidence: There’s an interesting little side-issue that few religious people consider when the question of God comes up, something that lives at the heart of proof itself.

Let me explain something about the mechanics of proof. If you believe a thing, say that All Men Are Dogs, you can’t prove the truth of that statement by getting a bunch of your sorority sisters together specifically for the purpose of talking about what dogs men are.  You can’t do it that way because none of you, come to tell your own horror stories of Life Among the Dogs, are able to view the question objectively. Objective conclusions can’t happen when everybody weighing in has an axe to grind.

To really determine the truth of the matter, you have to turn the question over to someone objective. Get it? Someone who does not already believe that all men are dogs.

The judge of the statement might decide, after hearing your evidence, that all men are dogs. She might decide that all men are not dogs. She might decide that no men are dogs, or that some men are.

But she has to start by not believing your assertion that all men are dogs. Only from that position can she objectively consider the weight of the evidence … which you then have to deliver. If you don’t trot out the evidence, and a good, solid lot of it, your assertion can’t be considered true.

That’s the way reasoned argument works. Every question has to be weighed from the viewpoint of someone who has no axe to grind. Someone who doesn’t already believe in the conclusion the proponent hopes to advance with her arguments and evidence.

Perhaps without knowing it, you already agree with the point: No matter how devoutly religious you are and how much you might insist that everybody should automatically accept the existence of your god, if you come into court accused of a crime, you want the jury to start by not believing the charges made against you. All of us know full well that a juror who already believes the truth of the charges filed against the accused is not a fair juror, and a great deal of effort is made to see that those people don’t get into the jury box.

The only way to be sure each claim or assertion gets a fair hearing is to have a judge who starts with a mind clear of belief in any particular conclusion. A skeptical judge. A judge who says “I don’t believe you right now, but I’m open to convincing. Prove it.”

Whether you’re proving that all men are dogs, or that a Subaru Outback is the best car ever made, or that your specific God exists, that’s how proof works. You start with someone who doesn’t believe it.

Or, given the lack of an objective outside judge, you yourself have to start by assuming the assertion under scrutiny isn’t automatically true.

You can’t logically, rationally prove the existence of your god in a court that consists of nobody but other believers. You can only prove it, really Prove It in some sort of objective, rational terms, in a court not already convinced.

Which means, as I said: If there’s evidence, you have to trot it out. You can’t just say “Prove that he doesn’t exist.” You have to prove that he does.  Otherwise, it’s no proof at all, it’s just you and your friends doing a triumphant circle-jerk.

In the arena of reason and evidence, every statement has to survive on its own merits. Religion can’t get a free pass. Every religious belief has to pass through the court of skepticism, held to the same exacting standards of logic and reason, as any other assertion of truth.

In other words, religion has to be looked at from a viewpoint free of religious belief, and in that viewpoint religion has to prove itself.

Putting it still another way, the default state of a rational mind considering the truth of religion is one of unbelief. You start with the lack of belief, and then the believers have to prove their case.

Which means: Every time you have a conflict of one person who says “I don’t see any evidence that a supernatural superbeing exists,” and another guy who says “God is real,” it’s the second guy who has to trot out the evidence. The god-believer is the one who has to do the proving.

Which also means: In the real world of reason and logic, the default viewpoint in any argument about the existence of supernatural superbeings is unbelief. Which is to say, soft atheism.

Which also-also means: Atheism is always logically justified.

So …

People who hold atheism to what they think are strict standards of logic are already demonstrating a very high degree of illogic, first when they fail to use that exact same standard in judging – on that same field of argument – each and every claim of religion, and second, when they fail to realize that atheism – unbelief – is the starting point for any proof of the existence of gods.

So the next time someone says anything at all about their god, we should all chime in with “When you can offer objective evidence that your god exists, then we might be willing to talk about it. Until then, you can’t logically make such a statement.”

It’s only fair.

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Beta Culture: Proposing a New Definition of Atheism

One thing I’m adamant about in my thoughts on Beta Culture: That the people within it must be atheists. As I’ve said before here, if you haven’t taken the mental journey of freeing yourself from religion, Beta is not for you.

And again, if that sounds harsh, the foundational distinction OF Beta Culture is the idea of a culture – a community, a virtual nation – of people who are free of religion. Free in every aspect of their lives, including all that we’ve inherited socially. The goal is to build such a thing for the first time ever on Planet Earth, and see what happens.

Anything short of that, say a culture that had a friendly “Oh what the hell, why not?” relationship with religion and religionists, would be a simple extension of what we already have. What we have had, for countless thousands of years, and what has given us this society and world. Might as well start up a new church fellowship.

Thought Experiment: Beta Culture

Beta itself is a thought experiment, the thought experiment of “What happens when humans build a totally secular, absolutely non-religious culture? What happens when humans examine and reimagine every aspect of human society – family, personal relationships, business, government, every human endeavor – free of mysticism?”

When I say “re-imagine,” I mean the exact opposite of this: To accept everything that’s gone before, both the social structures and their philosophical/conceptual/historical underpinnings, and to simply branch out or build upward from there.

No, I mean: Go back and pick apart EVERYTHING for its mystico-religious elements, and re-imagine things, re-create them, without those influences. Tear civilization down to the bones and rebuild it from the ground up.

I’m aware that might sound threatening. But when I say Beta is not for everybody, I mean it both ways. It’s not something that everybody would fit into, but it’s also not something intended to be enforced upon those outside it.

Oh, I expect it to be a potent social force eventually, if it becomes what it could be. But I see that force as a protective measure more than a transgressive one. In the same way that gays demand equal rights, Betas will demand equal rights – FULL social access and equality. If some Catholic Bishop gets his nose bent out of shape by our existence, just as he does by the existence of gays, that would be HIS problem.

The array of rights heretofore allotted to the religious has been overly broad, in my opinion, but there’s very little I’d want to take away from them. At the same time, I would absolutely demand that same array of rights for Betas. If, for instance, Bishop Christian Blatherbot gets an engraved invitation to the Presidential Inauguration, I want someone in Beta to get that same invitation, to show up and make a visible statement that Betas belong there too.

Thought Experiment: Science

Speaking of thought experiments, here’s one we’re already doing – the thought experiment of Science: What would the physical world look like if there were no supernatural beings or mystical forces – at all – to have any effect upon it?

What would astronomy look like? What would chemistry look like? How would geology work? What are the mechanisms behind the emergence and development of life? How do human brains function? What can we discover about physics? How does weather work? How good can we get in inventing reliable electronic gadgetry?

Again, the preface of all those questions is basically “If there were no such things as gods and ghosts, supernatural superbeings or mystical forces of any sort …”

This is in the shared endeavor of science, mind you, but it’s possible to carry out that same thought experiment in your own mind.

Before we get to that, though, note this very important result of the thought experiment of science: Pretty much everything in modern civilization. Hell, if we hadn’t performed that experiment, we’d still be riding horses and driving carriages. Maybe we could have derived steam power from a belief in spitting, hissing demons, but I doubt we’d have gotten much beyond it.

Note that science didn’t have to PROVE the non-existence of gods and demons, chariots pulling the sun across the sky, or angels dancing on pins. It just had to perform the thought experiment of assuming that such things didn’t exist to affect daily reality – incidentally flying in the face of thousands of years of tradition – and absolutely incredible results began to flow out of it.

Finally, though …

Thought Experiment: Atheism

From my earliest days as a public atheist, I’ve been encountering people who say “Well, I’m an agnostic because you can’t PROVE there’s no such thing as God.” Not to mention those on the other side of the fence who chirp “It takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to be a Christian!”

The second response doesn’t bother me all that much. I mean, they have to say SOMETHING, right? But the first one … I always see it as a failure to think about the thing in deeper ways.

As I explained in my book, there are actually two arguments at work in most discussions of whether or not gods exist, with a hidden unfairness insisted upon by traditional believers.

The first argument is strictly a faith-y one. On the basis of faith, you can believe in a god, or believe in the non-existence of a god, with perfect justification. A god-believer who says “I have faith this is true” can’t turn around and deny the disbeliever the same rationale. Neither can we. If we accept theism based on faith, atheism is perfectly justified by the same argument.

The fact that no atheist would WANT to claim “faith” as his justification – it would feel sort of self-defeating – is irrelevant.

The second argument is the rational one. In this case, both sides need some sort of reasonable evidence. NOT faith, but hard facts that support ones’ assertion.

The problem comes in when the goddy side, armed with nothing but faith in existence, then demands the non-goddy side trot out four-decimal-place evidence for non-existence. It’s not a level playing field; I’ve always suspected this is exactly the intent.

Besides, as we all know, you don’t have to prove something doesn’t exist. It’s the ones making the claim of existence who have to provide the proof.

But … perfectionistic non-believers fall for the argument every bit as much as believers, large numbers of us going through life carefully avoiding the label of atheist for the safer, apparently-more-defensible one of agnostic.

But suppose we as individuals, we as a society, perform this same thought experiment: WHAT IF no such things as gods exist … in our lives?

What does morality look like? How do we bid farewell to those who have died? How do we celebrate births? How do we accomplish charity? What does every other aspect of personal life and mind look like? How do we live, how do we THINK?

In the vein of science, the distance from Ben Franklin’s kite to computers is a staggering leap of progress, brought on by that one thought experiment.

I suggest that leaps of equal magnitude would become possible – would be unavoidable, I suspect – if we performed this same thought experiment in our personal lives.

I’m proposing that atheism can be defined as this slightly different thing than we’ve always thought it was. Not the seemingly indefensible statement “God doesn’t exist,” but this other, wholly rational, logically defensible, thing:

Atheism is the THOUGHT EXPERIMENT of “What if there are no such things as gods?”

We don’t have to prove gods don’t exist. We don’t have to do anything really, other than hold the idea in mind. We also don’t have to waffle and worry about whether we must call ourselves agnostics — “I don’t knows.” We can proudly and confidently call ourselves atheists – the people who perform in their daily lives the thought experiment of non-belief in gods – and feel perfectly justified in so doing.

And see what happens.

 

 

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Beta Culture: Morning Thoughts

Toothpaste or teethpaste?

The fact is, if it had initially been called teethpaste, we’d be perfectly comfortable with that. If someone then suggested it should be called toothpaste, every one of us would come down on that fool. “You dumbass, it’s for TEETH – teeth, plural – not just one tooth. TOOTHpaste would be silly.”

The things you’re used to, that’s the way you think things should be.

It’s why we live the way we do, despite some bits of it being so obviously crazy. Not toothpaste, of course, but …

Overpopulation. Hunting elephants. Forcing pregnant 12-year-olds to have babies. War as a spectator sport. Fox News. Circumcision. The War on Drugs. The super-rich, world-spanning Catholic Church.

The problem with changing things like this – and I’ve missed about 12 million of them – is that most of the time there is NO RECOGNIZABLE PROBLEM. Meaning, most people can’t even see that there’s something crazy about the situation.

But if something’s really crazy-wrong, it produces REAL harmful effects, both to the people within it and the wider world beyond it. Whether you see them or not. Whether you’re comfortable with them or not.

How do you deal with a problem so big, so pervasive, so hidden, so averse to change?

You start small. Get a few people working together. Straightening the bent stuff, fixing the broke stuff, injecting sanity into the crazy stuff. Fix what you can, the things within your reach. And go on from there.

And 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 200 years from now, there are still elephants. War doesn’t exist. Fox News is out of business. Children everywhere get to be children. And the human race is still alive on Planet Earth.

That’s what I want.