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Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.3

Why you should never say "Bite me!" to Bear Grylls

So: Most of you is not even you. It’s something else, something beastly. Beastly in physical nature, but also beastly in mind. Run by hormones, urges, biologically programmed mandates … just as every other animal is.

Where does that leave us in a quest for Free Will?

Well, it leaves us still looking, doesn’t it? And not a lot of hope in the search. If we’re 99 percent animals — fucking and fighting, eating and shitting, birthing our befurred primate infants and suckling them on beastly milk-faucets little different from those of cows (ladies and gentlemen, I’m exaggerating for effect here), living a little while and then dying dead — that doesn’t give much hope of finding within us this otherworldly and evolutionarily-sudden desirable trait, does it? Continue reading “Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.3”

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Unbelief As A Thought Experiment

Just something that popped into my head a few days ago:

To be an atheist, you don’t have to grapple with questions of the Bible or the provability of the nonexistence of God. You just have to perform a simple thought experiment: What if there were no God?

In larger society, that thought experiment has been done. In fact, there’s an entire culture, a incredibly powerful shared human endeavor, based on it. It’s called Science.

Someone asked “What would things look like if there were no God? How would things work? How would they fit together?” Out of that came biology, geology, physics, real medical science, so much more. The experiment was fantastically, astonishingly fruitful in providing answers that you could not just think about, but use. Continue reading “Unbelief As A Thought Experiment”

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Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.2

It’s the same with most every creature you know. Make up a different life-pyramid for each one and you’d find that the few unique things that make them their own specific type of creature are essentially add-ons, extremely minor alterations on top of the ponderous weight of older traits.

Evolutionary “refinement” also sometimes involves a certain amount of letting-go. The horse’s mammalian ancestors, for instance, jettisoned reptilian scales, and all mammalian lineages since then demonstrate this loss. Horses and other equines even gave up toes – plural – for the single toe represented by each hoof.

But those ancestors kept a great number of the core physiological traits of reptiles, amphibians and even fish – hearts, brains, lungs, tails, and so much more – that are evident today. Continue reading “Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.2”

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Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.1

In making the point of how much free will we don’t have, I wanted to write about a concept I came up with a few years back, something to help us understand the, well, “automaticness” of much of what goes on in our heads.

Searching for something on it, I came across this chapter of yet another of my might-be books, a half-written volume titled Earthman’s Notebook.

It’s fairly long, but it illustrates the ideas pretty well.

I’m dividing it up, so it’s going to accordion three extra sections into the middle of my intended-to-be-three-part Free Will piece. Continue reading “Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.1”

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Free Will … Maybe – Part 1

Despite the fact that Daniel Fincke and I once, a long time back, mutually challenged each other to debate it, I’ve been putting off this post, or any post on the subject, for some time. And I’ll tell you why:

Mainly, I’ve just realized, it’s because I’m afraid of it.

For someone like Sam Harris to say explicitly that free will is an illusion, or for Daniel Fincke, whom I respect, to assert the same thing, disturbs me greatly.

Because … no free will? That’s like saying “You’re not real, you’re not there, you’re not YOU.” Continue reading “Free Will … Maybe – Part 1”

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Camels With Hammers, Booyah!

Stop reading this.

Go read this:

Is It Just A Mystery Whether God Exists?

Daniel Fincke details an argument between a godder and a skeptic.

Robin: Okay, first of all—I don’t claim to know there is a god, I admit I have faith. I am honest about that, unlike you making knowledge claims where you really only have faith too.

Jaime: Hold it—you cannot have this both ways. You worship this god, you live your life around your beliefs about this god and what you think it wants you to do, and you try to get me to believe in and obey this god. You claim all the time to know this god intimately, to have a personal relationship with it, and to know its will. To claim that you don’t act like a person who thinks they know is disingenuous. You’re not living in a humble middle ground like the kind of agnostic who refrains from believing, consistent with their belief they cannot know enough either way to commit to belief or disbelief. You constantly talk and act just as someone would only if they truly thought that they knew there was a god. I mean, how can you say you have a deep and intimate personal relationship with someone one minute and then turn around and the next minute say you’re not claiming to know that person even exists! What kind of an intimate personal relationship is that?

Dang it, I have to meet this guy someday. I’ve never even met an actual philosopher before, but now I want to be one. I want to be him.

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Flash vs. Substance

[If you liked my piece on Transition and Turbulence, maybe you’ll like this too. It might also work as an entry in the Book of Good Living.]

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We live our lives on a human stage.

Which means: A great deal of the stuff we do, we do for the benefit of the people around us.

And by “benefit,” I don’t necessarily mean “to help them,” although that can be a part of it. I mean this: “Human stage” implies an audience of some sort, and that audience is the people around us. They see us, they watch us, they applaud or boo or simply stand by indifferently as we go through each day. Continue reading “Flash vs. Substance”

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Short Stack #10

Wise Old Saying I Just Made Up:

We get a first life, which is Life. And we get this second life, which is the memory of us that remains in the minds of those who knew us. There is no other.

So do everything you can to really LIVE in your lifetime, and to leave behind the memory of intelligence and optimism, of strength and persistence, and especially of warmth and caring. Continue reading “Short Stack #10”

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Are You Doing Your Part to Kill God?

Had a thought last night:

Those of us who are atheists, we all came from somewhere. And it’s not such a reach to think that somewhere in our back trails, there are others who might appreciate a hand, in order to get where we got.

I grew up in Houston, Texas, went to a high school with shitkickers and country people. Good enough people, but also people mired in religion. I keep in touch with a few of them, and unfortunately, they’ve gotten MORE goddy rather than less, over the years.

I think one of the reasons might be Continue reading “Are You Doing Your Part to Kill God?”

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Short Stack #9

The next atheist book I write, I’m having it printed on the tanned skins of raptured Christians.

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Chinese New Year tomorrow! We enter the Year of the Dragon, the year of my birth! Yes, I am a Dragon!

And no, I’m not breathing fire just to prove it. Continue reading “Short Stack #9”