You are a Social Liberal (76% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (78% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

If you take the quiz, leave a comment with your results.

I don’t usually give much away about myself. Want to know more about me? Here are some other quiz results…

Your Personality Is

Rational (NT) You are both logical and creative. You are full of ideas. You are so rational that you analyze everything. This drives people a little crazy! Intelligence is important to you. You always like to be around smart people. In fact, you’re often a little short with people who don’t impress you mentally. You seem distant to some – but it’s usually because you’re deep in thought. Those who understand you best are fellow Rationals. In love, you tend to approach things with logic. You seek a compatible mate – who is also very intelligent. At work, you tend to gravitate toward idea building careers – like programming, medicine, or academia. With others, you are very honest and direct. People often can’t take your criticism well. As far as your looks go, you’re coasting on what you were born with. You think fashion is silly. On weekends, you spend most of your time thinking, experimenting with new ideas, or learning new things.

You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements. Materialist 100% Modernist 94% Existentialist 88% Postmodernist 56% Cultural Creative 31% Romanticist 13% Idealist 6% Fundamentalist 6%

What is Your World View? (updated)
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You are an Atheist

When it comes to religion, you’re a non-believer (simple as that). You prefer to think about what’s known and proven. You don’t need religion to solve life’s problems. Instead, you tend to work things out with logic and philosophy.

18.75 %

You are sitting at home one night, quietly watching television or knitting or whatever it is you do quietly. There is a sharp knock at the door. “Police!” Somewhat nervous, you make your way to the door and open it. Two uniformed officers stand outside. “Mind if we come in? We need to ask you a few questions.” You agree, because you have nothing to hide. After about 15 minutes of questioning, you are led away from your home in handcuffs, charged with stealing $100.

I called the police.

You know very well that you didn’t steal $100 from me. Maybe I think you did. Maybe I just don’t like you. Either way, you’re now sitting in a jail cell. You had over $100 in cash in your pocket when the police arrived, and that was enough evidence for them to arrest you.

At the trial, my entire argument is “S/he can’t prove that s/he didn’t steal the money.”

You claim that you took that money out of an ATM. You even have a receipt for the transaction, but you can’t prove that those are the same bills. You say that you were home alone the entire day on which I claim that the money was stolen, but you have no alibi. You tell the jury that I may never have been robbed at all, but you can’t say for sure how much money I had that morning or whether I spent any of it. You suggest that I might have lost it, but you can’t find it, so that doesn’t help your case.

You are convicted.

Your trial was not held in the United States as you know it. It was held in a parallel universe in which an accused person is considered guilty until proven innocent. In other words, the burden of proof is placed on the defendant. Despite the fact that I am the one making the claim (that you stole my money), you have to disprove it. Does that sound fair to you? Does that sound logical? When a theist claims that the burden of proof about god is on the atheist, he is using the same flawed logic.

I’ve seen this topic in a couple of places around the blogosphere in the last few days, and I realized that I had never really discussed it in depth here. It’s such a fundamental truth, that I sometimes forget that some people just don’t get it.

In my example, I am claiming something which is not readily apparent, and I should have to prove it. In the debate over the existence of god, the theist is claiming something which is not readily apparent (god) and HE should have to prove it.

It is impossible to disprove the existence of god. (That’s right; you can quote me on that.) To do so, one would need to look EVERYWHERE. Actually, that’s not even good enough. One would have to look everywhere at once. Otherwise god might move around while you’re trying to find him. Even if one could do this, it wouldn’t be sufficient. The theist would still claim that god is just undetectable, and you looked right past him.

For the theist to prove god, he simply has to produce him. Proof isn’t even necessary. To show that it is more likely that god exists than that he does not (which would be enough for me to go back to church), the theist must simply produce some incontrovertible evidence that firmly points to god. None has been forthcoming.

Note the word incontrovertible. This eliminates the Bible as a source of evidence. I can write anything I want down on a piece of paper, and it doesn’t make it so, even if someone still has the paper 5,000 years from now. Saying that the Bible proves the existence of god is like saying that Santa Claus exists because you saw him in a Coke ad. As many theists are quick to point out, some people are bad, and they lie. The authors of the Bible may well have been those types of people. Of course some other people are good, but they like to tell stories. Some of the Biblical authors may fall into this category, as well.

Furthermore, the life of Jesus is not proof of god’s existence. While there is still some doubt as to whether Jesus even existed, there is enough evidence of his life to satisfy me unless new information comes to light. (For some reason, whenever I say this, theists attack me for saying Jesus didn’t really exist. Before submitting a comment along those lines, please reread the second sentence of this paragraph.) However, that being said, there is NO reliable evidence that Christ rose from the dead. Maybe he was not really dead at the time of his burial. Maybe the body was stolen so that his followers could stage the resurrection. Maybe the entire passion story is a fictional account tacked on to the end of the life story of a prophet. I don’t know, and neither do you.

That’s it. The burden of proof is on the theist. If you can read this post and still not see it, maybe this drivel is more your speed. It’s of the same caliber as Descartes’ proof of god.

~I AM~

Morality without god telling you what to do is a sticky business. Those whose lives come with an owner’s manual (Bible, Quran, etc.) can just look up the answer when facing a moral question. I know that if there were really a god with the properties ascribed to him by the major monotheistic religions, I would certainly do what he told me to whenever possible. I’d be scared silly. However, in the absence of such an authority, we’re on our own to figure out good and evil.

I have long considered myself a moral relativist (like LD), but I’ve never examined it all that rigorously. I’ve also never much liked the idea. I wanted very badly for there to be an objective set of moral rules, but I just didn’t see them no matter where I looked. Then Aaron comes along with his objectivist morality, and I have to think about it seriously. Based on his blog and the limited interactions I’ve had with him, I’d say he’s a pretty smart guy.

On The Atheist Hour, Aaron was asked an interesting question. “Why should you want to live?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the basic idea. Not “Why DO you want to live?” The SHOULD makes a huge difference. I want to live because of natural selection. Creatures that want to survive are more likely to reproduce than those that want to die. Duh. That doesn’t deal with the SHOULD part, though. My knee-jerk reaction as a moral relativist is that “shoulds” (or at least non-conditional shoulds) are meaningless, but I decided to take a shot at answering the question, anyway. I decided to discuss the issue with my wife (who’s no intellectual slouch). Suffice it to say that my wife is now pretty sick of the conversation because we’ve been going around and around the same points. As an unintended side effect of our talk, I think I may have convinced her that cannibalism isn’t so bad, which makes me very nervous about going to sleep tonight. I’ll have to make sure she has a snack later.

I won’t go into all the details of the arguments I’ve tried out, but after running through this a hundred times, I keep getting hung up at the same place. Life is the problem. It seems to me that objective morality is only possible if one takes as an axiom that life is superior to death. Everything else must follow from that. However, that is a value judgment, and I can’t find anything empirical on which to base it. Without this piece of the puzzle, I have to believe that morality, if the concept has any meaning at all, can only be determined by an individual or a culture, and there is no rational way to compare two actions on a scale of morality.

Usually, I post to make a point. Not this time. I’m looking for help and discussion. Can anyone show me how objective morality is possible without this dubious axiom? I’m going to argue for moral relativity here, but that doesn’t mean I’m saying any objectivists are wrong. I just need to put the argument through its paces.

If you want to brush up on objectivism, check out What Is Objectivism? (Thanks for the link, AK). For more on moral relativism, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

As a side question, how much of the trouble in this arena stems from language? All of the words I’m using were made up by people. Morality is just a word. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe it doesn’t describe anything in the real world, and all of the philosophical arguments we can muster won’t reify it. I’ve had a pet theory that I’ve been developing for the last few years. It’s a bit hard to follow unless you’re familiar with the concept of digitization. Basically, language is digital. The more words we generate, the higher the sample rate. However, the universe is analog. Doesn’t that mean it’s impossible to describe the world 100% accurately? If math is more your thing, think about calculus. If the world is a curve, language is the process by which we artificially straighten out a small piece of it to take a derivative. That’s not as good an analogy as the first, but it’s close. This last paragraph may be total gibberish, so feel free to ignore it and just jump into the main question about morality.

~I AM~

1. There are no gods, demigods, angels, devils, fairies, ghosts, gnomes, imps, elves, demons, sprites, goblins, leprechauns, trolls, incubi, succubi, genies, mermaids, banshees or the like.

2. The concept of “supernatural” is absurd and meaningless. Anything that exists is completely and totally natural.

3. There is nothing that cannot be fully understood given enough study, sufficient brainpower and a firm grasp of logic.

4. Omnipotence is impossible. Don’t make me get into the heavy rock paradox. It’s old and tired.

5. If you say something exists, and I say it doesn’t, the burden of proof is on you. For you to prove that it does exist, you just have to demonstrate it to me. For me to prove that it doesn’t exist, I have to demonstrate to you every single thing that exists, and then you’ll just say that it’s invisible or that I must have missed it.

6. When something is proven, I believe it. When something is unproven, I don’t. I’m funny that way.

7. Just because you call something proof, doesn’t mean it’s proof. Proof is at my discretion. My criteria rely heavily on the scientific method and my senses. That’s all I have. My heart does nothing but move blood around my body.

8. Religion, while not always destructive, has a long history of starting wars, inciting persecution and hindering the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Even a seemingly harmless faith will, given enough time, mutate into something obstructionist, dangerous or both.

9. While religion played an instrumental role in helping civilization past its infancy, it has done more harm than good for the last several thousand years. It is in the best interest of mankind that religion be completely eliminated.

10. The two most dangerous religious movements in the world today are Muslim Fundamentalism and Christian Reconstructionism. The destruction of these philosophies is the highest priority.

~I AM~

In the introduction, there is a passage that I thought would make for some interesting discussion.

The statement “I do not believe in God” has meant something slightly different at each period of history. The people who have been dubbed “atheists” over the years have always denied a particular conception of the divine. Is the “God” who is rejected by atheists today, the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics or the God of the eighteenth-century deists? All these deities have been venerated as the God of the Bible and the Koran by Jews, Christians and Muslims at various points of their history… Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called “atheists” by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a “God” which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?”

While I suppose no one will know for sure without the 20/20 hindsight of future generations, I think modern, western atheism (only 100 or 200 years old) is something brand new. I think it’s the first widespread movement to completely negate the concept of the divine without hedging its bets. Still, the passage certainly makes one stop and think. How do you all feel about this?

~I AM~