lpetrich
29 Oct 2009, 09:53 PM
I've found a nice interview (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Interview-with-Richard-Car-by-Ben-Dench-090803-799.html) with historian and philosopher Richard Carrier over at OpEdNews.com.
He starts out by noting the decline of religion in the U.S. of A, and he speculates that it may need our nation about a century to catch up with northern Europe. He may be pessimistic, or simply hedging his bets. If it becomes more socially acceptable to have no religion, then many
He speculates that it's in good part because of other social opportunities that are now available; he claims that " You can also listen in on their own chatter. They are freaking out over how badly they are hemorrhaging youth." One has to be careful there, because alarmism is a good way of rallying the troops. Fox News and other right-wing propagandists don't rally the teabaggers with "Barack Obama will be much like our previous President, our hero George W. Bush". Instead, they rally the teabaggers with "Barack Obama is an un-American extremist liberal socialist Communist terrorist who wants to take over the economy and kill your grandmother."
He turns to how the Internet makes it easier to get access to other sources, making it more difficult to create an insular intellectual world, as many fundies have tried to do with "Christian" everything. Sociologist Steve Bruce has noted in his book God is Dead that cities tend to have less religiosity than rural areas, despite it being easier to find a church that fits when in a city.
Susan Jacoby has made a similar point in her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. She noted that twentieth-century freethought had not had much of a voice as compared to nineteenth-century freethought, because of the rise of large-scale, centralized information media whose managers wanted to reach the largest possible audiences. However, the Internet has made possible what the late Clark Adams had called the "degraying of freethought".
This may partially be a reaction to the fundies' shamelessly breaking the long-time social convention of religion being purely private, that is, "don't ask, don't tell".
He speculates that technology can go even further, that in a century, we could have working telepathy machines, and that this will make counterevidence to mind-body dualism readily available. This will even include religious experiences. This will also be useful as a lie-detector test.
He proposes that within two centuries, it will be feasible to upload one's consciousness into a computer that runs a virtual world. One will then be able to choose one's own "god", those who are running whichever virtual world one decides to live in.
Turning to education, he proposes skills-based instead of memorization-based education, but one needs either a lot of good teachers or very good AI to achieve that.
Academic philosophy is next. He dismisses the "renaissance of Christian philosophy" as " a rise in fundamentalists trying to act like serious philosophers (e.g. Swinburne, Plantinga, even Craig himself), not any actual evangelization of traditional philosophy departments." He even notes that William Lane Craig is a Biblical literalist. He points out that "You can't do theology the old way, arguing from an exegesis of the Bible, claiming to have spirit communications from God, or appealing to worldly authorities like sectarian creeds or the Pope. Only science and academic philosophy are respectable, moving forward, dominating social opinion, and have any chance of surviving the long haul." That may be why many Xian apologists have been so desperate to claim vicarious credit for modern science, even with their embrace of pseudoscience like creationism, "Intelligent Design", and mind-body dualism.
He laments that "In academia, philosophy is almost dead. What passes for philosophy now is little more than a fancy system of games and puzzles." and asks about why its relevance has become so limited. He claims that he wanted to make philosophy more broadly relevant with his book Sense and Goodness without God, but professional philosophers were not interested.
He concedes that learning the history of philosophy can be useful, if only for noting what not to do. However, he also had the experience of getting a paper rejected from a philosophy journal for not discussing the work of various other philosophers; he complained that too many professional philosophers were doing history instead of philosophy proper. He even once asked an editor of a philosophy journal why he published an article with a glaringly obvious logical flaw. "You actually expect philosophy journals to prevent the publication of fallacious arguments?", he responded.
Turning to the Jesus Project, he was concerned that it might get shut down from lack of funding and administrative disagreements among its organizers. Its 2009 conference was postponed to 2010, which is not a good sign. But he notes that his paper on Bayesian inference will get published in the 2008 conference proceedings, which will come out next year.
He claims that a big reason for the numerous "historical Jesus" concepts has been deficient methodology; in effect, that it is hard to test the various hypotheses with typical methods.
He speculates that the result of improved methodology will be to give less wiggle room in New Testament studies, and that the result will mean fewer Xians and more radicalization of remaining ones. Like what has happened with evolution and what is happening with the Old Testament. An alternative would be to redefine Xianity into forms that would be unaffected, but that has two main alternatives:
Enforcing a separation between verifiable knowledge and theology, between the "historical Jesus" (if any) and the "Christ of faith". That seems like a rather agonizing mental split, it must be said.
Becoming a "cultural Xian", or even a "Xian atheist", something like what some Jews and Hindus are.
Richard Carrier's interviewer then asked him which religions are most compatible with secular humanism and/or general human welfare. He claimed that Taoism was, followed by Buddhism. That's likely correct of their more philosophical forms; he had been a philosophical Taoist for a while.
As to secularism and general human happiness/prosperity/etc., he suggests that secularism is a byproduct of what's best for human happiness, and he noted that secularism ought to be "freethinking, critical, honest, and respectful of liberty." Marxist societies, he tells us, has violated all four conditions.
After addressing the question of whether atheists have a moral compass, he puts in a plug for atheist and secularist activism. "But above all, be reasonable, rational, kind, and honest, and cultivate a good life. The best advertisement for rational thought is for people to see that those who support it are good people, passionately devoted to their principles, and happy with their lives."
He then calls for more research into paranormal phenomena, then goes on to his political proposals.
He proposes selecting Congresspeople by randomly choosing 535 college graduates; they would then make the President their employee, in parliamentary fashion. The idea is to get a representative sample of the most expert part of the population.
A big question is what will qualify as a legitimate college for this purpose. It ought to be more than the Ivy League universities, and less than diploma mills like Patriot University: Kent Hovind's Alma Mater (http://homepage.mac.com/lpetrich/Creationism/PatriotUniversity.jpg) (link is to an old picture of it; it is now Patriot Bible University).
He starts out by noting the decline of religion in the U.S. of A, and he speculates that it may need our nation about a century to catch up with northern Europe. He may be pessimistic, or simply hedging his bets. If it becomes more socially acceptable to have no religion, then many
He speculates that it's in good part because of other social opportunities that are now available; he claims that " You can also listen in on their own chatter. They are freaking out over how badly they are hemorrhaging youth." One has to be careful there, because alarmism is a good way of rallying the troops. Fox News and other right-wing propagandists don't rally the teabaggers with "Barack Obama will be much like our previous President, our hero George W. Bush". Instead, they rally the teabaggers with "Barack Obama is an un-American extremist liberal socialist Communist terrorist who wants to take over the economy and kill your grandmother."
He turns to how the Internet makes it easier to get access to other sources, making it more difficult to create an insular intellectual world, as many fundies have tried to do with "Christian" everything. Sociologist Steve Bruce has noted in his book God is Dead that cities tend to have less religiosity than rural areas, despite it being easier to find a church that fits when in a city.
Susan Jacoby has made a similar point in her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. She noted that twentieth-century freethought had not had much of a voice as compared to nineteenth-century freethought, because of the rise of large-scale, centralized information media whose managers wanted to reach the largest possible audiences. However, the Internet has made possible what the late Clark Adams had called the "degraying of freethought".
This may partially be a reaction to the fundies' shamelessly breaking the long-time social convention of religion being purely private, that is, "don't ask, don't tell".
He speculates that technology can go even further, that in a century, we could have working telepathy machines, and that this will make counterevidence to mind-body dualism readily available. This will even include religious experiences. This will also be useful as a lie-detector test.
He proposes that within two centuries, it will be feasible to upload one's consciousness into a computer that runs a virtual world. One will then be able to choose one's own "god", those who are running whichever virtual world one decides to live in.
Turning to education, he proposes skills-based instead of memorization-based education, but one needs either a lot of good teachers or very good AI to achieve that.
Academic philosophy is next. He dismisses the "renaissance of Christian philosophy" as " a rise in fundamentalists trying to act like serious philosophers (e.g. Swinburne, Plantinga, even Craig himself), not any actual evangelization of traditional philosophy departments." He even notes that William Lane Craig is a Biblical literalist. He points out that "You can't do theology the old way, arguing from an exegesis of the Bible, claiming to have spirit communications from God, or appealing to worldly authorities like sectarian creeds or the Pope. Only science and academic philosophy are respectable, moving forward, dominating social opinion, and have any chance of surviving the long haul." That may be why many Xian apologists have been so desperate to claim vicarious credit for modern science, even with their embrace of pseudoscience like creationism, "Intelligent Design", and mind-body dualism.
He laments that "In academia, philosophy is almost dead. What passes for philosophy now is little more than a fancy system of games and puzzles." and asks about why its relevance has become so limited. He claims that he wanted to make philosophy more broadly relevant with his book Sense and Goodness without God, but professional philosophers were not interested.
He concedes that learning the history of philosophy can be useful, if only for noting what not to do. However, he also had the experience of getting a paper rejected from a philosophy journal for not discussing the work of various other philosophers; he complained that too many professional philosophers were doing history instead of philosophy proper. He even once asked an editor of a philosophy journal why he published an article with a glaringly obvious logical flaw. "You actually expect philosophy journals to prevent the publication of fallacious arguments?", he responded.
Turning to the Jesus Project, he was concerned that it might get shut down from lack of funding and administrative disagreements among its organizers. Its 2009 conference was postponed to 2010, which is not a good sign. But he notes that his paper on Bayesian inference will get published in the 2008 conference proceedings, which will come out next year.
He claims that a big reason for the numerous "historical Jesus" concepts has been deficient methodology; in effect, that it is hard to test the various hypotheses with typical methods.
He speculates that the result of improved methodology will be to give less wiggle room in New Testament studies, and that the result will mean fewer Xians and more radicalization of remaining ones. Like what has happened with evolution and what is happening with the Old Testament. An alternative would be to redefine Xianity into forms that would be unaffected, but that has two main alternatives:
Enforcing a separation between verifiable knowledge and theology, between the "historical Jesus" (if any) and the "Christ of faith". That seems like a rather agonizing mental split, it must be said.
Becoming a "cultural Xian", or even a "Xian atheist", something like what some Jews and Hindus are.
Richard Carrier's interviewer then asked him which religions are most compatible with secular humanism and/or general human welfare. He claimed that Taoism was, followed by Buddhism. That's likely correct of their more philosophical forms; he had been a philosophical Taoist for a while.
As to secularism and general human happiness/prosperity/etc., he suggests that secularism is a byproduct of what's best for human happiness, and he noted that secularism ought to be "freethinking, critical, honest, and respectful of liberty." Marxist societies, he tells us, has violated all four conditions.
After addressing the question of whether atheists have a moral compass, he puts in a plug for atheist and secularist activism. "But above all, be reasonable, rational, kind, and honest, and cultivate a good life. The best advertisement for rational thought is for people to see that those who support it are good people, passionately devoted to their principles, and happy with their lives."
He then calls for more research into paranormal phenomena, then goes on to his political proposals.
He proposes selecting Congresspeople by randomly choosing 535 college graduates; they would then make the President their employee, in parliamentary fashion. The idea is to get a representative sample of the most expert part of the population.
A big question is what will qualify as a legitimate college for this purpose. It ought to be more than the Ivy League universities, and less than diploma mills like Patriot University: Kent Hovind's Alma Mater (http://homepage.mac.com/lpetrich/Creationism/PatriotUniversity.jpg) (link is to an old picture of it; it is now Patriot Bible University).