Having just finished this fucking philosophy thesis that has been keeping me from loving the internet like I should, a friend recommended me a recent horror film called The Ruins. And it wasn’t bad. To start with, it had that guy from 100 Girls, which is favourite b-grade, pseudo-intellectual teen comedy of all time. I mean, that’s good, but it’s not very scary. And including people from the cast of Pulse was never, ever, ever going to help the success of the movie.

But how many times do we have to sift through the same story in a different setting? The past 20 years of horror movies haven’t seen too much innovation in the genre (disregarding, of course Scream and it’s partner in crime, Scary Movie 1). Apart from an intensification of gore, the storylines consist of ‘regular’ people (just like you and me!) that somehow end up in bizarre situations where their reasonable beliefs are devoured by some supernatural or currently-unexplainable-by-our-science creature that has somehow managed to evade not only scientists but batshit insane cryptozoologists for centuries. This supernatural mystification, that giant Other lurking in the background - and it has to be the background, for how else would it be unexplainable?? - is pretty much essential as a plot device. Otherwise, how can we get scared?? How many Saw-esque movies based entirely on gritty special effects and gore scenes are we gunna have to watch before we get bored? Looking at the imdb database of top rated horror movies, the most recent horror film that sits in the top 50 seems to be Evil Dead II, the other two notable exceptions being Grindhouse and Sean of the Dead, which are both parodies of the genre in a sense. This is surely saying something. But what????

The first answer that comes from the lips of many friends: aren’t you just fucked up? This shit is brutal, man. But you’ve spent so much time on the internet and researching strange social fetish groups (religion included, of course) that you’ve become desensitized to the brutality! But the words just make me think of Metalocalypse and how funny death by metal can be. Is parody all that’s left here? We all laugh at Nazi jokes, even if the methodological slaughtering of Jews was the worst tragedy of the reasonable and industrial modern world. If parody is all that’s left, this cynical, jaded apathist won’t be disappointed - it may even be worthwhile.

But a man like myself who so often falls into inconsistent banter cannot rest content at this though - why do I keep watching if every story has been told over and over in the back of my mind? It is not true that every supposed horror film I’ve witnessed in the past few years has been full of crap. Of course it’s not. But when I think to the ones I hold in esteem, what is the link? Audition was the most recent addition to my favourites collection, and among recent non-parodical horror Cannibal Holocaust and Devil’s Rejects sits up there too, despite my not liking it at all at first. Takashi Mike has given me a few good cringes and laughs, to be honest. But it’s hardly fair to group him with other western gore/horror directors.

There’s a decent theory spinning around my mind about this: we educated westerners have forgotten how to be scared. We’ve grown so accustoms to the clichés of genre that we can predict every movement that is made on the screen. Of course the critical girl is going to die. Of course there’s going to be a male who scarifies himself in hope that some weaker character can escape, and of course there’s going to be that shot that so obviously hints that this redemptive hope can never be realised. Either that, or like the fucking bastardization of I am Legend we are presented with some ridiculous eutpoian religious salvation. And this deluded hope is obviously enough to tide over most of the people who watch movies like this. The money makers are the films that play on many people’s greatest fear: that we will not be saved from death, that there is no salvation for any of us. A few may offer a happy conclusion in some redemptive state, but the horror has been looked into; the temporary status of life, the futility of redemption. But for us educated bunch, believing something in spite of evidence is more than a little silly. Hence, our horror films are parodies of the great alien invasions or supernatural travesties of decades past.

But does this mean that there is no redemption for horror?? Are we condemned to be the reclusive ironists of the film industry? I think not. And the reason I think this is that what we know is a hell of a lot scarier than what we do not know. The recent success of the prominent new-atheist movement attest to this: the fact that there are a billion people out there who would kill you for their gods is fucking scary. The Dionysian brutality of human nature will always be scarier than whatever bullshit ’supernatural’ theme that the modern monotheistic majority can throw at us. And if this is too ‘brutal’, too fucked up for your liking, than maybe you should stick to reading your bible than watching these shitty, repetitive and unconvincing horror films.

 Unfortunately, and rather obscurely, this movie has no men on fire (I don’t recall any, but I was rather drunk when we watched this). But like any movie in the action genre you have hyper-masculine, masochistic, wounded protagonists spinning off cheesy one-liners as they kill everyone and everything in their way – in an often convoluted manner.

Even more unfortunately, the plot for this movie was stolen directly from Rambo II. John Creasy, ex-CIA (Rambo, ex-army), depressed at the failings of his previous occupation, takes a new job in hope of redemption, fails new job, goes on redemptive killing spree. But whereas Rambo was inspired by post-Vietnam America, Man on Fire is inspired by Bush-administration family values.

With this in mind, one shouldn’t be surprised at all the random cross-and-crucifixion shots dished out. The problem is that appealing to family values and Jesus is more difficult when you’re trying to make a gory, sadistic action film.

Firstly, the ‘bad guys’ are in an organised religion. Institutionalised enemies are good bad-guys, because even if their motivation is the same as the good-guys, their deeds can be rationalised within a hierarchy. The bad guys are pointed out always saying “we’re professionals – we’re just doing our jobs”, implying some Nazi–bureaucracy where no single person thinks that they are to be held responsible. In this film, it is the individual that is responsible – for his own salvation, for the family (that he represents) and for justice itself. Welcome, protestant audience.

There are obvious verbal pushes to indicate how personal justice (ie. Vengeance) is more efficient than organised justice. The police point out that Creary is doing more to remove corruption in the force than they could hope to achieve in years of organised work.

The problem, as it normally is in these types of movies, is where does the justification for this overkill arise? This is especially problematic when there is also a Christian theme. The injustice of the seedy Mexican underworld is made out to be the construction of a chain of corruption: man-made evil. The free-will defence is being applied here. There is no injustice in the natural scheme of things, but the actions of free men imposed it regardless. So technically, it’s up to men to fix it, right?

Here is the scary crux of the free-will argument. The divine punisher, the imposer of God’s will, is no longer God. Men must take up God’s will, whatever religious creed they have been indoctrinated into. The bible says to forgive, and only God can pass judgement. So says an old man to Creary. But, Creary says, they have an appointment up there – and he’s just pushing them to the front of the line.

And this line of reasoning is what made this movie so fucking scary to me. The way that these action films are meant to work is that we, the audience, are supposed to empathise with the protagonist and his struggle, and cheer his overkill, revel in his Dionysian bloodlust. But this is the deus-ex-machina of religious fanaticism. This is the hundreds of martyrs and saints killing the heathens in hope of apocalypse.

This is a reminder of the dangers of religious justification and its implication to everyone in a free society.

This post is opening up, becoming lost in terminology and trendy language, in an attempt to show where my concerns lie. Why I bother opening my mind each day and the meaning of my life. Questions that give me meaning in my asking them and yet ultimately make me concede defeat.

The second question that I posed in my last blog was discarded rather gratuitously. To say that atheism does not entail any position on morality prevents progress on the important question: (even if and especially if we find our own lives meaningful - ) How do we bring meaning to the lives of those who feel as if they have no meaning? This can in turn be taken in two ways: How can we qua individuals bring meaning to another’s life? - Or the question which I feel is more important: How can we make others realise that their lives are meaningful?

Whether or not you are inclined towards an objective morality the problem is clearly a social one. The breaking down of spatial and temporal relations due to the rapid increase in technological advances leads to not only the pluralisation of culture but the pluralisation of meanings. To say that the meaning of Greek philosophy was to examine the self and discover the nature of the world (Platonic or non-Platonic) is uncontroversial. To say that the meaning of the Renaissance was to rebel against dogmatic religious and philosophic doctrines is equally so. But the western person of today is plagued by multiple systems of meaning, each offering its own potential truths and potential falsities, forever offering improvements on potential certainties and forever recognizing their impossibility: the world of the every-day exists as a site of constant realignment. The tag ‘information society’ is understood by the sheer scope of what we can and cannot believe. Assume that bringing meaning to our lives is like writing an essay. We are given the potential sources for our essays but not the knowledge as to which to reference and and which to ignore, with no time to include a comprehensive comparison of them all. Never before have so many arguments existed in the same place; to survey them all would be futile, to judge them all would be arrogant and naive.

The question then becomes one of how to make another person’s life meaningful (or one’s own, something I have never had to deal with) when the available options for the subject to choose from are almost endless within the period of any given lifetime. If someone only sees the end, how can we make them see the inevitable beginning? And if one is to see only beginnings, how can we show them the temporal nature of their aims? How can people live and give meaning to their lives, but at the same time find collective meaning in subjective analysis?

In my brief existence I have had to learn just how temporary these brief connections with each other are. People who I love more than anything have tried to destroy themselves with blades, nails and ropes. My world has been moved by these people despite my will to keep them around. People who I once worked closely with are dead due such actions. Others are merely changed, forever scarred physically and emotionally.

To some this might be a never-ending defeat (like Camus), but for myself in this moment, like many other moments in the last three years, this is an area that drastically needs my systematic and analytic deconstruction - even if all I can manage at the moment is a brief intoxicated summary of what’s been said before.

Next year, in my honours year, I believe I should be directing philosophy towards areas applicable to real-life. Making sense of the shit that I just dribbled.

Internet prices were raised at my uni this year, and as a result I’ve been avoiding (much to my dismay) any forums, blogs and porn sites. As a result I’ve had more time to study and drink myself into paralysis, hoping that maybe I’ll induce one of those mystical subjective experiences that convert thousands each year. I’ve decided alcohol doesn’t work, so perhaps I’ll give up for now. With the extra time and money I will save from drinking I think I can afford to post once a week or so. Yay.

A few posts ago I teared a new one in an episode of medical comedy Scrubs about how it dealt with the problem of evil. In the latest episode screened on American TV it picks up the issue again, this time putting a different spin on things. Nurse Roberts is the generic large black gospel women; probably one that fell out of Sister Act when they decided there were enough sequels to leave a lasting meme floating about the realm of popular culture. Dr Cox is the generic cynical, angry atheist with Daddy issues; probably an inversion of that much more plausible Freudian understanding of worshipers and fathers. Memetic lineage aside, Cox wants to show Roberts that bad things do happen for no good reason. Thankfully the show doesn’t resort to miracles again. Instead, Roberts argues that without her faith (in this instance, trust in her purely subjective communication with the J-dog) she wouldn’t be able to keep going with all the seemingly bad things that happen for no good reason.

There are two important questions a disbeliever should take into consideration. Firstly: Should people be allowed to trust their mystical experiences if it is the only thing keeping them going? And secondly, how is an atheist or agnostic to deal with evil?

Answering the first question is probably most controversial. Most people I have met who define themselves as atheists would argue no. They would argue that if it is not reasonable to believe then they should disregard the belief. But most of these people I know would not hesitate to give an addict drugs if it meant he could live to potentially kick the habit, or even, to just live slightly longer. There is inconsistency here if one objects to thousands of people dying.

The problem with enforcing beliefs is that people can’t always be reasonable, or that what is reasonable for one person may be unreasonable for another with different experiences. If ex-Korn guitarist dude believes that Jesus exists because he has conversations with him about everyday activity, then it would be hard for him to disbelieve that this character doesn’t exist. Sure, he’s crazy. But to him this character really exists beyond reasonable doubt. He’s probably too stupid to ever understand enough of the history of science to know that science does make progress on theories and technology, so probably to stupid to trust medical authorities when they tell him that all those drugs that he’s taken in the past have probably screwed with his head a bit and now he’s talking to himself, not to mention that there are hundreds of others that have their own different imaginary friends that don’t correspond with each other.

What it comes down to is something like Plato’s ‘noble lie’: how let the masses give meaning to their suffering without infringing on philosophical and scientific inquiry. What religious tolerance does is allows room for people like Nurse Roberts to hold her belief without forcefully pushing her beliefs onto others. As long as she doesn’t mind if Doctor Cox can get by without it, she can keep her faith. The best environment for freedom of meaning is secularism and religious pluralism. On this view fundamentalism is the enemy of religion, as is extreme rationalism, ala Descartes, or perhaps the crazy cult of objectivism, ala Ayn Rand. Expecting everyone to be reasonable is unreasonable in itself as reason is not tied down; what’s reasonable is relative to a subjective experience of life. Pluaralism gives religious meaning (which some people actually need to continue existing) some moving space while letting scientific inquiry continue. People should be able to have private freedom and private beliefs, as long as they don’t spill over to infringe other people’s freedom of belief .

The second question is easier to answer and much less controversial. Unbelievers can deal with evil any way they want. Disbelief in god does not logically entail any view on morality. Both Nurse Roberts and Dr Cox understand medicine in the same way as Camus does: as a never-ending defeat. Eventually people die and suffering wins. All that we can do is rebel against the state we find ourselves in and temporarily hold it back for ourselves and others.

Some people need more than that though. And they can believe more as long as their beliefs don’t restrict the fact that we don’t.

Camus on Suffering

I would name Albert Camus as being one of the most under-rated atheists of last century. Unfortunately, The Simpsons got it wrong with the whole ‘Sartre is smartre’ thing. Also, Sartre was an inconsiderate twat who practiced personal hygiene less than even the most devout arts-school drop-out. Camus’ arguments are equally applicable to realists as they are to phenomenologists, which is quite nice considering the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo of Heidegger and similar metaphysicians. Who would have thought using common language could be so effective. Sigh.

Anyhoo… Camus makes an interesting attack on theism.

In Camus’ The Plague there is a character by the name of Father Paneloux. His first real mention in the novel sees him delivering a sermon preaching the god-given nature of the plague that has infected, exiled and alienated the town of Oran in which the novel is set. He offers the same belittling opinion of humanity as is necessary in Christian thought - necessary because we must all be lowly sinners if Christ’s sacrifice is to be meaningful. It is the rational stance to be taken by someone assuming the truth of Christianity. In a theoretical perspective it makes sense to him that god should be punishing these wicked creatures. But upon seeing first-hand the enduring torment that the plague inflicts upon a small boy he falls to his knees and is horribly shaken.

Paneloux knows that this intense suffering (followed by the child’s slow death) must be for the greater good if God is to exist. Let me go back to my earlier Scrubs post in which I laid out the general argument from evil. Those who already feel that they know the existence of god can simply deny this argument by denying P5 on faith. Considering how unsuccessful most theodicies are, it is no surprise that this is the most general position taken. Theists, Paneloux included, assume on faith that all seemingly gratuitous suffering is actually for the greater good and they just don’t understand how. God does work in mysterious ways, after all. While the argument from evil is not objective, it is objective that from what follows from the argument is either god does not exist or there is no gratuitous suffering. Thus, when Paneloux is presented with the intense suffering of the boy he is given two choices; he can abandon his faith or convince himself that these horrors are necessary. Logically following his predictable choice he has to admit that the cause of this boy’s suffering is not an unnecessary evil; that the plague bacillus, killing hundreds a day in the same manner, is there for the greater good. Paneloux does not encourage going out and deliberately infecting himself with the plague, but insists by analogy:

For the true Christian, one who has a logically consistent faith in god, it is unreasonable to not welcome suffering that has made others in the same circumstances suffer.

No one is sure if Paneloux dies of the plague or some other disease and is ironically marked as ‘a doubtful case’. Truth being, if he had have doubted his Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ he may not have died.

This is about as far as the text goes in the way of argument. But I have a couple of criticisms of this argument that I’ll put in my next post. I have a feeling that I can strengthen it afterwards.

    In the compulsory Christmas episode of the medical comedy Scrubs, ardent Christian surgeon Turk (denomination unspecified, but probably Catholic) begins to question his faith after countless people die and turn up injured on Christmas Eve. “How can I believe in a God,” he asks, “who lets innocent people suffer?” When confronted with the problem, his girlfriend Carla is also unable to give an answer. To understand this statement a major point needs to be clarified. If there is a deity or a god worthy of worship it must be omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent. That’s the traditional theistic definition of god (the rejection of this argument being atheism). If your ‘god’ has a different set of characteristics then the atheist / theist positions are irrelevant to you, and no, you are not a theist. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s extend on Turk’s worries and chuck it into standard form, eh?

P1. A god is by definition omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good.

P2. A perfectly good being would do everything in its power to increase good and decrease evil (unless an evil necessary for the greater good or to avoid a greater evil)

P3. An omniscient being knows all evils.

P4. An omnipotent being can eliminate all evils.

P5. There is a gratuitous amount of evil in the world, i.e. unnecessary evils that do not add to the greater good.

C. It is unreasonable to believe in a god.

    The show sends Turk on a mission to save his faith; after all, it feels so good for him to have faith in his god. We can’t have one of the show’s lead characters being content without some type of religious belief, can we? How can Turk account for all the seemingly unnecessary pain and suffering that he just witnessed? What we need here is a miracle; not an overtly religious message, but enough coincidence and luck to suggest that ‘higher forces’ are at work. So without any rational reason for his behaviour, assumedly just urged on by divine forces, Turk runs down the road to find a girl giving birth and saves the life of a baby or something like that.

    What is meant by ‘miracle’? Perhaps a miracle is a logically impossible event that does occur. But Turk’s ‘miracle’ is not logically impossible; similar unlikely things happen by chance all the time. Perhaps they mean a miracle is something that is unexplainable. As a sceptical philosophy student, I experience things daily that are unexplainable; to me, anyway. But they aren’t miracles. We often just lack a decent explanation for phenomena. It would have been silly for early 16C biologists to just assume that babies were miracles because they where unable to account for how foetuses develop. Perhaps they mean that a miracle is just a low-probability event that occurs, perhaps without a good explanation. When patients unexpectedly die without reason on the show they do not run around calling it a miracle, so it should probably be added that Scrubs defines miracles as being morally good events as well.

    Let us just assume that miracles in this broad sense do happen, that such low-probability events occur and are indeed unexplainable. In this reading, Turk would be using the god hypotheses to explain away the improbable and unexplained good deed that just occurred. Let us even assume that this act would be logically impossible to occur: rather, that the event entails a logical contradiction of natural laws and supernatural forces logically must be at work (assume that this is possible for a moment, fellow sceptics). Even with all these assumptions, it does not follow that Turk should retain his belief in a god. For Turk’s concern was with the gratuitous amount of evil and suffering that he witnesses working in the hospital. The fact that unexplained good occurs fails to account for the unexplained evils that make up P5, and all the premises of the argument from evil remain intact.

    So in the end it seems as though Turk has mastered self-deception. But watching this episode reminded me of reading David Hume’s Dialogues… although Cleanthes is said to come out on top of the debate, the points the Philo makes are left unscathed. I hope the wishy-washy miracle conclusion didn’t stop viewers of this show from considering its earlier reasoning.

bUCKET__

Tec’ma’te, RAs.

I find it a strange coincidence that the less of a life that I have, the more of a nerd I become. Within half a year, I managed to watch every single season of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis and now own a few seasons of SG-1 on dvd (which, I might add, is impressive on a student budget). Originally, I hated the show. But my ex was into it, so I got the original movie to watch. I loved it.

The main premise of the Stargate franchise is exploring the universe using alien technology. The secondary premise of the Stargate Movie and SG-1 is killing off gods.

Of course, these gods are technically dead anyway. Chronos will never be thought to come back to create time again, and people will never again believe that Apophis will battle Ra to take the sun from the sky. But it would seem rather pointless to offend the religious majority. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to step on the toes of your audience. There are no real direct attacks on Christianity, or Islam, or Buddhism (excluding arguments made by idiots like this). It is the reasoning that the show uses to justify this killing that intrigues me.

For those unfamiliar with the show (and I do hope there are few of you), the original enemy are the Goa’uld, a parasitic race of beings who enslave the galaxy under the moniker of waring gods. The societies that they enslave are not polytheistic though; they all believe that their one, theistic god is the true god, and in most cases they will die for their belief. They are arrogant and temperamental, much like OT god. I am sure that most secular Christians would not care seeing those attributes removed from their proposed deity. But apart from disposing of the personified deities, early SG-1 is rather religion-friendly. The religion (or spirituality) that they follow is the rational, scientific process of ascension. So really, the show is attacking ‘faith-based’ religions, or non-verifiable, subjective religious experiences.

But it gets better, and worse. After the Goa’uld are adequately disposed of (there will always be a few OT-style deities being worshiped somewhere in the world, right?), a new enemy is introduced. The Ori are ascended beings who have been kind enough to show the world their ‘book of origin’. Their followers constantly quote their good book when their faith is attacked. They send off missionaries to convert or destroy. Many theists will argue that this does not resemble their beliefs, and, long-gone witch hunts and crusades aside, this is probably true. But the Ori are certainly fundamentalism incarnate.

But what most conservative theists probably don’t realise is that part of all this Origin bullshit is exactly what they believe. The Ori will destroy those for disbelief. We know the Ori are the bad guys because they are willing to punish those who can’t find enough evidence for belief in Origin. But isn’t this exactly the same as a deity who punishes those who fail to believe in him solely because they lack the evidence for that belief? Isn’t the notion of a perfectly benevolent deity incompatible with the notion of hell anyway? People must see some similarity here, as the show has been canceled and ratings have slightly fallen since the introduction of the new missionary-style baddies.

SG-1 points out a reason why I do not believe; what evidence is there for a perfectly benevolent deity? If hell awaits those who hold rationally acceptable beliefs, even if they’re wrong, then something is terribly wrong. Take an example from the history of science. Ptolemaic astronomy was way off the mark, and geocentricism seems ridiculous now. But people like Tycho Brahe were completely justified in their observations and measurements, even though their theories were off. The scientific community had observations that could be checked, repeated and verified, and just because their theories could not be expanded upon without observations made with powerful telescopes does not mean that they weren’t justified in believing what they did. Why does this analogy not get carried over in religious conversation? Why, when an atheist has no direct or inferred experience of a god (or any good metaphysical proof for his existence), do many theists still insist that their caring god will punish them for being reasonable? Even if there is a god, I doubt that he would punish us for being reasonable. This is even assuming that the notion of hell is even logically compatible with a benevolent god.

Save SG-1!

Lek tol,

James