Mitt Romney Destroys America!!!

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This is almost something I never do – I’m going to write about something that happened today. I know how you feel…I was surprised too.

Consider it an early Christmas present. Or consider it a pre-Triassic mammal that looks like a hamster but has a really impressive name like verymightyandvirilehampsteradon.

It’s really up to you.

Mitt “Mittens” Romney delivered a speech today in which he hoped to dispel the fears of non Mormon Christians by not talking about the fact that he is a Mormon. This is very much like what I do when my daughter asks me where I’m going as I sneak outside to smoke.

“Daddy, where are you going?”

“Hey Look! Dora is on!”

This works pretty well for now, but I obviously need to quit smoking.

In the same vein it is widely perceived (especially by Governor Romney’s pollsters) that many fundamentalist Christians have concerns about the specific differences of the Mormon Church. Can this speech allay their fears?”

So Mittens says, “Freedom requires religion.”

Wait…what?

Freedom requires religion? Freedom REQUIRES religion? Freedom frikkin’ requires frikkin’ religion!?!

Religion requires freedom in order to be practiced and this is a no-brainer that most people respect without much in the way of an argument. Not that there aren’t people who don’t agree, but instead of forming a carefully worded explanation, they explode. Or they turn into Christopher Hitchens. (Ha! Irony!)

I understand that is just pandering to religious conservatives and Baptist hair engineers. However, when a person states that religion is a necessity for a civil society, I’m inclined to gag.

Gagging requires inclination…no scratch that, gagging is a reflex.

The last time freedom required religion was back when the Catholic Church owned all the printing presses and wouldn’t let anyone learn to read Latin. Wait…that doesn’t sound right.

That must be because it’s wrong. Of course, so is Mittens.

On its face, what Mittens said is like stating that we must have diapers in order to have shit.

Personally, I only need diapers when I want to feel extra confident around the office, but that’s not the point.

Freedom comes first in the order of things, not religion. Humans have appetites: we want things. Be it personal safety, personal expression, chili fries or the completely denuded skull of Ben Affleck, we are creatures who seek out goals that we perceive to be good. This applies to very high minded things like universal human equality, but it also applies to having shiny, moistened gherkins slowly inserted into our nostrils by a prostitute. It also applies to religion and wanting to be President.

Freedom is nothing more or less than the ability to pursue these goals unimpeded. It’s basic, it’s primeval and it comes well before things like ladders, rain coats, tacos, accounting tables and anyone’s belief in any god. Religion is not a prerequisite for freedom; it is just an expression of freedom. Civil society and the application of freedom are the best things that ever happened to religion.

So, I would argue (and I would win) that religion is closer to the hooker with the glistening nose gherkin than it is to one of the basic engines of human nature such as the freedom of the individual.

I guess it probably doesn’t need to be pointed out that when Mittens says ‘religion or ‘faith’ what he likely means is ‘Christianity as practiced by those who can vote’. This is all about how Mittens is not a weirdo because he’s a Mormon, and that ‘regular’ Christians should just still vote for him. (As opposed to Democrat Mike Gravel, who is a weirdo because he eats urinal cakes…)

If he were really talking about no faith in particular then I think that he would also be a liar. Do we think that Mittens finds Islam, Wicca, Christianity and Norse polytheism to be equally vital to the continued existence of freedom?

If so, I’m assuming he’d appoint a Supreme Court Justice who wanted to swear his oath while holding a replica of Odin’s eye patch.

Does religion remain necessary to freedom if it promotes violence?

Does religion remain necessary to freedom when it discriminates?

Does a lame, church-pandering, politically calculated speech by Mitt and his Important Hair warrant this much bitching and moaning on my part?

Actually it does.

In the practice of moderate and reasonable people, religion is just dandy even if I disagree with the premise. Heck, in some hands, religion is genuinely noble. But if freedom requires religion then your government needs religion to keep you free. If your government has religion then the one freedom it can never give you is freedom from religion, and that pretty much rips the guts out of your freedoms entirely. So really, as far as government is concerned, the only thing that freedom needs is for someone like Mittens to leave you alone.

Now get those pickles out of your nose, you pervert.

Oh yeah, Mittens? Please shut the hell up.

 

 

 

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Do You Know Something?

“There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” – Aristotle

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

I like Aristotle’s work and I expect that I always will - the idea that the starting point for knowledge is invariably the real world always seemed so sensible. Conversely that filthy Hellenic ingrate continues to ignore me – would it kill him to return my calls or answer the letters so lovingly burned in my backyard goat-shrine? Same goes for Katie Couric – she has become very distant since realizing she sucks at being a news anchor.

When I first started studying philosophy (yes, I accept your barely hidden mockery…) the amount of rhetorical nonsense that flew around me was staggering. Everyone spoke in coded analogies about how you could never really know something for sure:

“Knowledge is like driving a car through the desert and then getting out of that car to understand how the hitch-hiker sees the cactus differently than you see the steering wheel of your car…you can’t know his cactus and he can’t know your steering wheel – that’s what I’m saying“

I wish I could say that I had built that paragraph from scratch.

Relativism and subjectivism ultimately teach us that unless we know virtually everything, we can’t really know much of anything. Also, if you can never ‘know his cactus’, you can hardly say that it’s a bad cactus, can you? The unknowable cacti of the world could be committing genocide or encouraging people to watch professional hockey and you can’t say anything because you have never known, and can never know another man’s cactus (I’m tempted to get that put on a tee shirt).

I didn’t need to spend any time or money on higher education in order to not know things. I came up with much better excuses as to why I didn’t know something than I ever heard from the great mass of ‘whatever’ relativists who were inhaling my tuition and my oxygen. Many of these excuses involved Jack Daniels or accidentally burning off my mandatory (grad student uniform code) university beard with a cigar, but they were convincing works of misdirection all the same and did not require the accreditation of a major university.

David Hume, by comparison weakly claimed that just because something appeared to cause an event ninety-nine times we could never be entirely sure that it would cause the same event on the one-hundredth time. Hume said that we invented an ironclad relationship when all we really did was learn to anticipate something that felt like a relationship. In other words, you can never directly witness cause and effect but you can predict it.

If I ever get to meet David Hume, I will swing an axe into his groin. If he fears the bifurcation of his pubic arrangement, he will attempt to dodge me (-3 modifier on d20 since he is dead and a Scot). This is because your anticipation of my axe splitting your kindling does not need to be one hundred percent. Ninety or ninety-five percent will be plenty for you to form the habit of not getting jabbed in the biscuit if you can avoid it.

To be fair, I’d get the hell out of the way for about one-in-a hundred.

We are what we do and we decide what to do because we accept that “it might be possible” is not enough for us to risk getting our naughty bits twinned. We dodge because we know, and we know because we perceive and then think about it — amazing, eh?
Now, I know what you’re thinking; “Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?”

No, I am not. But every day, I drive to work in my car – yes, yes now you get it!

You don’t? Oh…

Every morning I rise as late as I possibly can and only after a lot of bitching and moaning (Pardon me — link war…) I drag my big, Sinister butt to work. My commute lasts almost exactly twenty-five minutes and covers precisely the same forty-five kilometers of highway every day. Every day I smoke two cigarettes on this drive and drink about half of my giant, palpitation-inducing travel mug of coffee. Taking into account the accidental variations of the seasons, and the occasional moose, I see basically the same thing every day, and perform essentially the same actions.

…and so would you…

Where I see a small church with a badly degraded parking lot, you would not see guitar demigod Mark Knopfler breaking into that really great solo from the end of Telegraph Road. Nor would you see something more regular like a gas station or a coffee shop in place of that little, white church.

Or if you did, you’d be wrong – and we could prove it.

You could claim that it really is Mark Knopfler and that it’s just possible that we are both viewing the same thing and coming up with different results because of pure subjectivity. We could ask passers-by, nearby residents and as each replied “church, dumb ass” we could make your option of seeing Mr. Knopfler ever more remote.

You could still claim that ‘it’s always possible’ and technically, you’d be right. However, the possibility you’re banking on is so unlikely as to make it effectively useless. The church would be a church, Mark Knopfler would be nowhere in the area and you would just be wrong – there would be no mystery of epistemology or ontology, you would just be wrong.

But well before we got this far, I’d be forced to get my axe…and you *would* try to avoid it.

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I Don’t Believe in Your Beanie.

…Metaphor torture for beginners…

There’s an entire mash of concepts and proposals that I don’t believe. People are always saying things without the benefit of proof or substantiation of any kind. Sadly, this does not include the local constabulary when they remind me that the restraining order is still in effect.

This cannot be news to any of you (not the restraining order, certainly…), since at some point everyone is exposed to some kind of premise that is either not proven or something that is unprovable. For example;

Unproven; “I think I’m sexually attracted to the planet Jupiter.”

Unprovable; “The ghost of Bill Bixby keeps shouting at me.”

Now you may very well have a deep, groin-oriented passion for The King of the Planets and I suppose that you could even measure it empirically but under no circumstances will I help you in any way, pervert. Regardless, as ludicrous as it appears on its face, it is possible that you want to nuzzle that big, red dot.

On the other hand, there is no system of measure or calculation in existence that can determine if Bill Bixby even has a ghost, much less that the ghost is shouting at you in humorous exasperation (My Favorite Martian) or in anticipation of radioactive, wall-smashing fury (The Courtship of Eddie’s Father).

Either way…well, let’s just say I’m not going to get you to help my daughter do her homework.

It may not come as a big surprise that I kind of feel the same way about gods, angels, psychics and what the Amazing Grumpy poetically calls “woo-woo”. Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not going to pull a Richard Dawkins and claim that if you’re religious that you have the evolutionary equivalent of scurvy, but I will remain politely skeptical of your beliefs.
At the end of the day though, what I cannot get around in my own clouded mind is that any god (say, your god) is not only no more likely than any other god (say, Hermes) but is in fact no more likely than the shouting ghost of Bill Bixby. Neither is testable, and neither can be either proved or disproved. No real evidence supports the belief that gods of any kind are real (same for Bill’s ghost), nor that any god or divine influence has ever actually done anything that can be proven (again,ditto for the spirit of Bixby). Even if we just stick to the realm of abstract logic, there’s no real imperative to show that your god, or the shrieking Bixby poltergeist, are real.

As a result, in addition to being Sinister, I am also (by definition) a skeptic. That’s me, The Sinister Skeptic (I even wear a cape and tights to fight crime…well, I wear a cape and tights). I feel the need to reiterate that I am not against religion, even though I don’t happen to be a member of the gang myself.

In that regard, I guess my feelings on religion are very much like my feelings on funny hats. I think you should be free to wear the product of the strangest haberdashery that fills your prescription.

I may not be inclined to wear a jester’s cap or a gorilla head with integrated antennae, but I sincerely hope that you will grab whatever headgear moves you and cram it into your eschatological situation.

For the sake of full disclosure, I did once own a funny hat and wear it on a regular basis – I really liked that hat too, it was comfortable and I had nicely broken it in. Alas, the funny hat eventually seemed too ostentatious, and I could no longer justify its enormous ornamentation so I downgraded to something a little more sublime. Eventually, I started questioning the need for funny hats altogether (even those small, Asian hats that only look funny when you get really close) and finally I just took the damn thing off.

While I am not asking you to take your hat off, I am asking you not to use it as a reason to make other people do things. My daughters should not have to wade through your pseudo science on how the Great Haberdasher created English muffins. I understand that some people think that the verdict is out on baking and that the entire school of making farinaceous foods is full of holes - don’t take my word for it, just look at bagels (ha!).

You and your hat-wearing pals should not get a tax break when those of us with nude heads do not. Your hat should not tell you how to vote and your hat should certainly never tell me how to vote. Your hat should not sell magnets and tell me that they cure migraines. Your hat should not lie to me and claim that it can bend spoons or predict the future with the power of The Hat.

Your hat has no place near the altar or the bedroom unless they are your own. Should your hat ever make you hurt anyone, take it off and burn it.

If you insist on doing these things in the name of your hat, I’ll have no choice but to get Bixby’s ghost to yell at you.

And remember, you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

The Value of Your Breath.

A person I hardly know walks up to me with a distinct look of urgency about them. With a concerned, sincere and almost parental level of credibility they want to warn me of something very dire.

“The first Pope of the third millennium has died, and the Holy land is still divided. This is a sure sign of the end of days. The Apocalypse is upon us.”

A few things will happen at this point, I will attempt to remove myself from the conversation as quickly as I can. It’s not urgent, I’m not compelled to get away from the Armageddonist with the same need that would motivate me to get away from an amorous professional wrestler named Lumpy, but I’m still going to leave. I will be civil, and I may even thank him.

What I will not do is sprint home (as this would make the thick, rich fat in my veins boil causing me to burst) and consult my copy of the King James Bible. I will not double check the contents of the Book of Revelations. I will not worry and I will not fret. I could turn this into a poem, I bet.

Sorry.

The reason that I will not become anxious over this warning is not because I am not religious. As a “soft” atheist I am not inclined to believe in any god right now, but I also don’t think that I’m smart enough to rule the whole thing out. So my disinclination toward godliness will not be what tips the scale. Upon final consideration, what will throw this piece of eschatological prudentia into the garbage heap is that I can honestly say that while the Days End scenario was presented with a chain of evidence and a process of cause and effect, it is one with which I am sufficiently familiar and can therefore comfortably ignore. If I am relatively secure in my belief that such assertions are flawed from within, I’m not going to bother with it.

But say what I want about his evidence, his premise and his conclusion, I must at least concede this; at least he had these things in his message. Most people do not.

The very sad fact is that people who speak about far more mundane, but more verifiable things do so with little or no evidence at all. As for linkage between their premise and their conclusion, most aren’t even aware of the meaning of those terms. Given that I am a snooze-inducing centrist (Ignore La Revolution!) my next point will not come as a surprise. This is not a lefty problem; this is not a righty problem. This is a stupid problem.

It is a problem of stupid people, by stupid people and for stupid people.

There are people (my best guess is that there are two of them) who might read this and say, “Hey, this is about me.” My reply is that, if you think so, it probably is.

People I know will discuss religion, sports, politics, philosophy and a million other things. Some will have well-constructed arguments, some will be making crap up as they go along and still others will be belching out oily clouds of partisan hackery that they memorized from some horrid fecal engine like Michael Moore or Sean Hannity.

But even these people have linkage and something resembling a logical chain of cause and effect. It may be a weak and evil chain like the one that Moore has about those villains who stand between him and cheeseburgers, or the cheese-and-meat-head claims of Hannity as he seeks to prove that he almost certainly drinks from unflushed toilets.

They are vile and horrid Sophists and propagandists, but at least they have a point. While they conclude to awful things, at least they conclude.

What I am referring to is the intellectual bankruptcy of relativism; the pimply faced, shrill ugly child of the philosophical family. Fact does not matter because, well they just don’t. Facts are stupid and mean and don’t allow me to make unsupported claims at random about varying subjects such as how Chef Boyardee is out to get me and why the government stole my copy of Johnny Get Your Gun or whatever piece of indulgent crap you were reading.

If the only thing you showed up to say is that none of these assertions matter because they are all just opinion, well that’s just your opinion. As such, rather than bother me with your hollow and vacuous statements of intellectual surrender, go to your dermatologist buy some degreaser and be quiet. I have no use for you.

If you are a radical or a fool, I can argue with you. If you are a relativist, you are the intellectual equivalent of dandruff. You are the detritus of real discourse, a foul byproduct.

Go away