"Phone call from God"? I like it!

Via RichardDawkins.net comes an article about Bible campers who each received a "phone call from God" as part of their camp experience. The comments on the article have many atheists chiming in with the kind of outrage you might predict: "...lie to children in order to brainwash them...", "...despicable when adults are so deceitful and manipulate little children this way", "title of this article should be 'still lying for jesus'", etc. Oh, they're not wrong. But I had a different reaction, one that might surprise you:

Right on!

Why do I say that? Because this is putting Jeebus firmly in the same camp as Santa Claus. Which sounds great to me.

The only reason it's cute when we have kids sit on Santa's lap or pretend to mail their letters to the North Pole is because we assume that as they start to grow up, they'll start to realize the absurdity of the whole charade. Even young children can smell bullshit when you have to explain to them that, "Oh, yes you're right that Santa can't possibly be at every mall at the same time. See, that's just Santa's helper!" Ironically, the charade itself becomes the first frayed threads that start to unravel the entire mythology. If there were no Santa-at-the-mall, there would be no corresponding realization of the implausibility of Santa-at-the-mall, and the myth of Santa might last just a little bit longer in these young minds.

These kids getting the "phone calls from God" are seven, eight years old according to the article. It won't be more than another year or two on the outside that they realize it wasn't actually a phone call from God, I would think.... and maybe that will be their first inkling that something doesn't smell quite right.

It's probably beyond the average ten-year-old to identify the flaws in Pascal's Wager, or to recognize the arbitrariness of their own beliefs in relation to the beliefs of children in another part of the world, or to spot the problems with the Cosmological Argument (most ten-year-olds in fact are quite swayed by the much more simplistic Teleological Argument). But your average ten-year-old knows that "phone calls from God" are fake. Your average ten-year-old may even go on to think, "Hmmm, now why did the adults at the camp bother to fake that phone call from God, if they knew I could just pray about it? I wonder..."

So I say, go for it. This kind of absurd shenanigans demystifies and deromanticizes God, and potentially invites some rather "inconvenient" questions -- and in my book, that's a good thing.

(Side note: This reminds me of my vision of a distant post-Christian future where there are kiosks at the mall where once a year you can take your kids to get First Communion pictures, complete with a comically dressed Pope -- or Pope's Helper, as the case may be -- wafers shaped like Dinosaur Jeebus, a variety of optional photo packages, etc...)

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We're not adeists, okay?

Gary Gutting writes:

...Dawkins’ argument ignores the possibility that God is a necessary being (that is, a being that, by its very nature, must exist, no matter what). On this traditional view, God’s existence would be, so to speak, self-explanatory and so need no explanation... His ignoring this point also undermines his effort at a quick refutation of the cosmological argument for God as the cause of the existence of all contingent beings (that is, all beings that, given different conditions, would not have existed). Dawkins might, like some philosophers, argue that the idea of a necessary being is incoherent, but to make this case, he would have to engage with the formidable complexities of recent philosophical treatments of the question...

Here we go again...

Look, even if the "formidable complexities of recent philosophical treatments" manage to resurrect the dubious Ontological Argument, Argument from Contingency, or Cosmological Arguments -- and frankly, I have trouble imagining how they might, but I'll grant Mr. Gutting the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is merely a symptom of a lack of imagination and/or ignorance on my part -- those only get you as far as a deistic God. There's a great yawning chasm between deism and theism, and Dawkins' (and others') arguments are quite effective at demolishing any would-be bridges seeking to unite the two.

We are not a-deists. While many of us find deism to be unnecessary, irrelevant, and frankly somewhat silly, most of us don't categorically reject it as impossible. Moreover, you will rarely find an atheist mounting an attack on deism. The most we have to say about deism is when somebody tries to play the old switcheroo (as Gutting does here) and we are forced to point out that what that person is trying to pass off as a justification for theism is really just a justification for deism, and that the latter is a great big Whofuckingcares. That's about the worst you'll find an atheist saying about deism.

So please. If you are going to make an argument to undermine atheism, do not make a case for deism. That's retarded. That would be like if I said I didn't like soccer, and you tried to convince me to watch a game by extolling the virtues of baseball. It's not even a coherent conversation. So just stop, please, thank you.

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There are no fucking As in "definitely"

I'm sure a bazillion people have made this same post, but I am fucking PISSED. There are NO FUCKING "A"s IN "DEFINITELY", FUCKING INTERNET!!! GAH!

Holy shit, I just realized my calling in life is to write a fucking browser plug-in that filters all incoming text, and if a string appears that matches "definitely" but with one of the fucking characters substituted for an A, then it will fucking fix it so you don't have to see humanity with its pants around its ankles tugging at its weiner and spewing "A"s all over a word with no fucking "A"s in it.

This is fucking rediculous.

The punchline may not be worth it. I am experiencing physical pain seeing that last word on my screen...

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SMBC rescues the Teleological Argument

The fatal flaw in the Teleological Argument, even before Darwin came along and gave us a better explanation, is that it leads to an infinite regress. If you think that the only acceptable answer to the question, "What created all this shit?" is "God", then you're going to have a doozy of a time with the question, "What created God?"

Until now.

Turns out that God was created by an insane space monkey who rules reality. Who knew???



Solves that pesky theodicy problem too...

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PZ and Ebert can criticize video games as much as I can criticize modern jazz

I don't get a lot of types of jazz. I'm not talking about the groovy sort of big band-ish stuff like "The A Train" and "Take 5" and whatnot -- that stuff is riffy and cool and I totally get it. It's the jazz where everything just seems totally chaotic and fast and, to an untrained ear like mine, random. You know, maybe it will be a jazz trio, and the drum is doing some sparse super-fast jazz beat, the piano is constantly soloing, and the bass is doing a walking bassline that is moving about 150 bpm and constantly changing, never repeating.

My problem with that kind of jazz is, if I asked you to say, "Oh, how does that song go?", I don't think you could do it. You'd have to play me the actual song. What's the theme? I just don't hear one, at all.

But you know what? That's probably my fault. I know a fair bit about music theory, but I have not "practiced" at listening to jazz, and in general I've found that the really out-there variations-on-a-theme-type stuff -- in any genre -- is a little beyond me.

I feel like I do have one legitimate semi-objective criticism of that type of music: In my opinion, the highest aspiration for a piece of art is for it to appeal simultaneously on both a deep level and an accessible level, i.e. there is enough substance there to please a connoisseur of that type of art, but it also functions on a level that is immediately understandable to the uninitiated.

But if I were to assert on that basis -- and admittedly not having any concept of the finer points of that type of music -- that it could never be art, well, I would come off like like a boorish ignoramus, don't you think?

I know I'm months out of date here, but so it is, I think, with Ebert's and PZ's respective slamming of video games as an art form. How you can you look at a form of entertainment whose advocates spend countless hours practicing in order to fully appreciate it, and then come in and announce that you are more qualified to judge it as an art form than they are? That's exactly the equivalent of someone who has spent almost no time practicing listening to jazz (like me) announcing that because he doesn't understand it, it must suck. That is a boorish and ignorant attitude.

What inspired me to write this was that I just recently finished playing through Limbo, an art-y puzzle platformer similar to the highly-acclaimed Braid in its aspirations (though completely different in both mechanics and tone, of course). It occurred to me that it would have been more difficult to appreciate some of the artistry of the game if I had less experience/skill with video games. If you get really stuck on a particular puzzle, for example, that can interrupt the flow of the narrative and disrupt the atmosphere. Proper pacing is only achievable if you have sufficient skill. Imagine if, for example, one of the ridiculously cool set pieces in The Matrix (the original one, please!) could either be compressed into a slick hyper-adrenal three and a half minutes -- or drawn out to a tedious 20 minutes of posturing and flailing about, depending upon how many action movies the viewer had seen previously? In that alternate reality, would you lend any credence to the verdict of someone for whom all the scenes were tedious and drawn out? Of course not!

This is even more true of Limbo than of other similar games, because it goes out of its way to avoid acknowledging that you are playing a game. There is no status display to speak of. There are no subtitles or exposition. It doesn't even tell you how to play, except for a very simple screen that you can access via the pause menu, that simply tells you that one button is "Jump" and another is "Action". (And you are not at any time shunted to this screen -- you could play through the whole game without seeing it)

For Limbo -- at least for an experienced gamer -- this is no problem, because it makes creative use of various video game tropes to quickly build up a repertoire of environmental interactions, without having to coach the (skilled) player. I mean, dude, if there is a ledge I can't jump to, and there is something vaguely crate-shaped nearby... Yeah, I'm pushing the crate. Other more beginner-friendly games might tell you to push the crate the first time you see one, but Limbo assumes the player already knows this. Which I do, of course.

By doing this, the game accomplishes two things. First, it keeps the atmosphere intact. I'm not taken out of the sense of being a lost boy wandering through a shadowy nightmare-like forest by the incongruity of a pop-up screen telling me what buttons to press. Second, by assuming the player is already familiar with these tropes and then immediately building upon them, complex and original gameplay mechanics are achieved almost immediately. You don't spend 20 minutes collecting twenty trinkets scattered about some beginner's sandbox. You spend more like 60 seconds doing some jumping and pushing to get a feel for the physics and BAM! you're into real gameplay.

Now, how the fuck are Ebert or PZ supposed to understand that? That experience is as foreign to them as is to me the experience of hearing a fast-walking jazz baseline outlining an augmented 7 chord. We both have no clue what is actually happening. Oh, we may have some abstract concept of it if explained to us (you could use an augmented chord in a different, more stable, type of music and I'd probably get it) but at the moment we can have no real appreciation of it, because we have little to no practice at it.

I did mention that I felt my criticism of that type of jazz as inaccessible was at least somewhat legitimate. And if Ebert and PZ want to criticize video games for asking too much of the audience in order to appreciate them... yes, for the most part I agree! Listen, I've been playing video games since I was probably six years old, and with these modern consoles, I still say, "Oh shit, wrong button!" way more often than I ought. The Wii was a big step in addressing this but... I would agree that a lot of the more accessible games don't necessarily qualify as "art" (nor are they necessarily intended to).

It's one thing to criticize a genre of art that you have difficulty grasping as being too "inaccessible", yet it's another thing altogether to decree that it can never be art. I am big fans of Ebert and PZ, but that is a boorish and ignorant opinion, and they could do with a big heaping dose of humility when it comes to video games.

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Ideal kids programming

I'm working from home today, and sort of half-watching my son while my wife sleeps in. Just got past my least favorite song in Elmo in Grouchland. Oy...

My son actually likes cool music, it seems like. He was totally grooving to Gnarls Barkley the other day, for example. And I know nobody will believe me, but he seems to find Mastodon rather relaxing.

But he also likes furry creatures with big eyes that talk in squeaky voices. Can't there be a show with both? When will somebody make Elmo in Indie Rockland?

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The Ladder of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

So much for religion as "another way of knowing".

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is co-owned by "no less then six denominations. The primary custodians are the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Roman Catholic church, with lesser duties shared by Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac Orthodox churches." But these guys are all Christians, right? So if there is any epistemological value to Christianity whatsoever, they should be able to come to some agreements, even if it takes a while... right?

Enter The Immovable Ladder of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Over 150 years ago, somebody placed a ladder up against the wall of the church, presumably doing some basic maintenance. Now nobody will touch it because there is concern that the other five denominations with joint control of the church will flip out or something.

Yeah that's uh, messed up.

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