The most popular of the latest batch of competitive, degrading ‘reality’ television programs privileged enough to be gracing the exclusive and sought after halls of the Australian free-to-air channels is a show called Kid Nation. A bunch of American kids are chucked together with the intent of building and maintaining a model town. Luckily for anyone concerned about the ethics of all this, we could be assured that the network would have written permission from the parents to ridicule their kids as much as they wish. The only reason I put myself through the experience of watching this was to get some new material for a blog post (apart from the fact that I’m bored shitless in a country town). The ads told me there was a religious conflict so I was drawn in to see how they all inevitably decided that god was awesome. Oh, and also I’m bored shitless in a country town. Fucking holidays.

I don’t think that anyone seriously believes that ‘reality television’ depicts actual everyday life, but in case my often horribly misplaced faith in humanity fails me I should make a few generalizations about the genre. Shows like Big Brother and Survivor work through their narratives each season by presenting an end goal and a means for achieving it, such as individuals competing and conspiring against each other, gradually eliminating the others. Each episode is a fragment of the main narrative with brief conflicts inserted to be resolved before the next; kinda like a purposeful soap-opera. To make the story-telling ends meet contestants are reduced to fit fictional characters of the main narrative. In Kid Nation the competitive aspect is largely overlooked for the teleological end-goal, which is the completion of their town ‘Bonanza’. Still, the miniature conflict-towards-a-purpose model fits as the kids perform their given tasks with the notion of hopefully choosing what is best for the town.

The problem is supposed to arise when the kids are literally told to organize their religions. While it seems that about a third of the kids have no real strong religious conviction/indoctrination, the kid leaders try to organize a group ritual where everyone can pray and worship and learn about the other’s religions. While there doesn’t seem to be too much protest at first, somehow the idea gets to the kids heads that there should be conflict here and blonde fundamentalist declares that her faith is so strong that she wishes to remain ignorant of ‘them’. At the dinner table the ‘Jew Crew’ is formed, while the Christians declare that they are awesomer and much betterer. We are told a couple of times that putting together people of different religious persuasions is what starts wars - “even with guns”. Yep, it is surely the case that few of these kids have any idea of what is going on, let alone why there is supposed to be a conflict other than “Ma an’ Pa raised me this here way”.

The exception is little gap-toothed Asian kid, who compares the disagreements to the Tower of Babel problem, with kids talking around each other, making no progress, unaware of why they’re arguing. He does a census of the religious population of the town and the diversity makes it obvious that the script writers chose the contestants with this problem in mind for the meta-narrative.

Eventually one girl organizes a bunch of people to makes prayers around a fire (mind you, she eventually wins $20,000 for this kindness by the end of the episode). And after succeeding in their competitive church-building activity they get to choose between a bunch of bibles or a fucking MINIGOLF COURSE (I want one). Despite the kids being clearly torn between the two, they are eventually convinced that the minigolf is only a temporary gratification (much like the show itself) whereas the holy books are forever, like diamonds or some shit, there to be looked at and to be put on display to show how much better they are than others. “This is a chance to grow spiritually”, one boy states matter-of-factly, as if patience and virtue have nothing to do with golf. Upon reading the ‘Holy’ texts (out-loud to the cameras for some reason) the selected sample of kids conclude that “It’s all saying the same thing”. Tall black Christian kid cries at the fire-prayer service, touched by how prayers to gods sound the same in other religions. It isn’t just theism they talk up either. ANY religious teaching is claimed to be valid, as long as we all get along.

While the ‘many paths up the mountain’ idea may be good for stamping out fundamentalism and sure makes me laugh when it turns into vague crystal-worshiping spiritualism, the problem is that they have blatantly ignored all the kids who are indifferent in their beliefs or are merely unreligious. There is no voice in this conversation for dissent from religion. The show acts as if these people are just too different to be considered: their ideas are incommensurable with the ideal community. To drive the point home, the theistic religions (plus Hinduism) are looked at in the mock-census, while Atheists are grouped with ‘Other’, tacked on the end like a footnote not relevant to the discussion at-hand. One girl claims that she is having a “crisis” where she is not sure if she believes in god anymore, like being irreligious is something detrimental that needs curing. I can almost hear the voice of Bush Snr echoed in these kids.

If I was a betting man (which I’m not) I would say that the producers of Kid Nation did not realize what they did. They solved their episode conflict in the same manner that religious conflict is generally pushed under the carpet: by completely ignoring the Other (which in this case is unbelief) and by selling minor difference as novelty not to be taken seriously. Rest assured that there is no conflict when pushing ideology.

    It has probably come to everyone’s attention that December has arrived and Christmas, whatever that means to us, is around the corner. Although I hear that Americans atheists have to suffer the torments of a hegemonic Christian reading, down here in Australia a rather secular tone is wafting out streets. Still, everyone in the West, regardless of nation, must put up with the horrible TV schedule dished out to us. Dodgy re-runs and cherished “Christmas Classics” permeate our poor television sets and for someone who in normal, non-holiday circumstances has the privilege of downloading whatever they want to watch it can be quite a traumatic experience.

With the largely secular atmosphere down here there is not too much for an atheist to say. Theism is sometimes tacked onto the end of a news broadcast, but most of the attention goes north to visit Santa. All those Christmas-Santa-ish movies are being screened at the moment. Last night it was The Santa Clause. Tonight it is Elf or something. They all follow the same plot: disenchanted parent (most likely a business autocrat of some type) realizes that the world can be an exciting, enchanted place due to some magical happening and despite being regarded as delusional by those around them continue in their sugary existence. THE END. The (more often than not) bitter skeptical characters such as the step-father in The Santa Clause are shown to be the irrational ones, having committed to their mechanistic beginnings at an early age (the step-father stopped believing in Santa after being disappointed at age three). They invested so much of their personality in being heartless that they cannot accept any enchantment when it is presented to them.

Sure, if an elf from the North Pole started talking to me I would not be in a position to doubt its existence. But if no one else could see it I would most likely check myself in to some sort of Institution and stop drinking so much. And so skepticism is treated in these films as being one of the more disgusting traits of humanity. Oh, us bitter, joy-killing, godless heathens!

But if you really want to milk the stereotypical Mr. Gruff, you will find that it is not the religious zealots who are benefiting from the caricature. Kmart started stocking tinsel about a month ago (I know this because I have a tinsel fetish). The famous Myer ‘Christmas Window’ in Melbourne opened a few weeks ago too. Shopping centers are the source of enchantment for everyone at this time of year, including the religious. If anyone hears of a religious family not buying each other presents they will be accused of being cold and bitter; disenchanted from the spirit of giving at Christmas. The joyful Christmas displays generally exist solely around the sites of consumerism that we worship to a larger extent around this time of year, with ‘Meet Santa’ booths opening everywhere. The festivity is here to intoxicate us, with those 50% of my street competing to see who can muster up the most extravagant lights display on their front lawns.

The problem is that this is such a religious event - it seems scarily all-encompassing. If I do not buy a gift for my girlfriend I will most likely be dumped and if I neglect my family members I will be shafted as the greedy and selfish black sheep. I enjoy the fact that this time of year makes everyone happy, but I never asked for gifts! I don’t want gifts, for fucks sake, I’m a philosophy major who has his bass and his computer and is content!

But anyway; while it is hard for the disenchanted to get out of participating, we should at least try to keep a cynical, condescending eye open to mock the spirituality of the other, right? And now I need my morning coffee.

Yes, lame post title. It’s how I roll baby. But holidays mean mindless TV, mindless TV means being annoyed at stupid religious propaganda, and stupid religious propaganda means venting in blogs. Oh, and blogs mean puns. To me anyway.

The Futurama episode titled ‘Godfellas’ has bending unit Bender shot out into space accidentally, apparently leaving him alone for the rest of eternity. During his voyage he runs through an asteroid belt and a small asteroid gets lodged in his casing. The asteroid is home to little living thingies who happen to think that Bender is god, and well, he orders them around and tries to help and ends up making things worse before they eventually blow each other up. Fair enough.

After all of this happens, a mourning Bender manages to crash into the actual theistic god who has somehow taken material form (I’m sure the dualists will make up some unconvincing argument as to how this is possible) and learned binary along the way. Bender shares his experience as ‘being god’; how it was so damn demanding and how it was so difficult to manage their society. Those who had faith in Bender the god believed that he would smite the unbelievers after listening to their prayers, leading them to victory, while the unbelievers for some reason were immoral bastards trying to bomb the religious, apparently because they’d ‘lost hope’ and were jealous or something. God tells Bender that it’s a balancing act and for some reason thinks this gem is relevant:

“When you do things right, people won’t be sure that you’ve done anything at all.”

According to this supposed god, people shouldn’t be able to know for certain if he exists or not because they will assume that he will always come to their rescue and do the good for them. Subjects are supposed to gain their own moral awareness, shown in the fact that by the end of the episode Bender is unknowingly led to do the good by something that this supposed god has told him. This also seems to involve knowing which prayers to answer and which not; leaving this balance so faith can work is supposed to justify leaving some prayers unanswered.

Picking on this is too easy. Perhaps I should have found something different to write about. But it was there, so what the hell.

It’s pretty obvious for starters that there are people out there who claim that they “know” that god exists. A majority of the world, in fact, despite them all meaning different things when they say it. Most notably we have the dramatic rise in fundamentalism world-wide. The funny (or perhaps scary) thing is that this conviction does not lead to passivity one bit; it leads to passionate action. Instead of (logically) assuming that an all powerful being can sort out his own problems, people feel the need to do things for him. Hence we have Osamas, Bushes and Robertsons.

Secondly, there are people who firmly deny the existence of god (even if only probabilistically like myself in a weak atheism) that haven’t ‘lost hope’, so to speak, of living a meaningful life; these people seem to be the majority of the unbelieving population (from personal experiences, being involved in atheistic communities). Not only this, but finitude is arguably more desirable than infinite consciousness - and the episode even offers similar arguments!! Bender’s drifting through space for all eternity is seen as meaningless because he will eventually become infinitely bored as less things come to entertain him. Imagine existing for all eternity, doing all the things that you have always wanted to do. Assuming that one has conscious thought capable of change, one will eventually do everything there is to do, know everything there is to know, perfected every attribute of ones being to the extent that one is capable of. While one may dream of living forever as a child (when the religious dogma is seeded), growing old leads to different attitudes towards death. Finitude is not necessarily an evil.

So the justification for faith (reasonless belief) is misleading. Which leads us back to the question: why should one believe that all events are working towards the greater good when it is not very probable at all that they are?

While Futurama and the Simpsons may be commended for their light-hearted stabs at organised religion, their depiction of the universal acceptance of a god is downright disgusting and incorrect.

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.

        The sitcom has been one of the most popular genres in televisions history. Australia has only produced a handful of lasting sitcoms (Acropolis Now, Kath and Kim), so all the sitcoms that make it down here are either American or British. Europe has a Catholic majority, so it’s no surprise to see shows like Father Ted gaining popularity and Catholicism populating a majority of BBC sitcoms. But what I found odd is that I cannot think of one instance of a Protestant church appearing in an American sitcom. Everyone is Catholic. From Malcolm in the Middle to The Nanny, alters and priests abound. Scrubs, New Adventures of Old Christine, Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond – why is it that a largely (fundamentalist) Protestant audience has sitcoms set in a Catholic environment?

         My first thought was to the nature of the genre. A sitcom sets out to ridicule and is often very camp and exaggerated. Physical characteristics such as age, race, gender and deformities are prominent in sketches. Protestantism sought to break with the perceived out-dated traditions and rituals of Catholicism to focus more on the individual’s relationship with their deity. But these traditions make for excellent ridicule: think of all the things that happen to the holy water! Making fun of Catholic rituals has long been a Protestant tradition in itself. And in my personal experience, Catholics are very fond of making fun of Catholic rituals as well.

        My second reason was based more on personal experience. Protestantism seems to take itself and its deity very seriously. Jokes about Jesus getting nailed don’t go down very well with a Protestant audience. Which can make it even funnier to others around - but that’s irrelevant. In the Catholic sitcom setting there is room to mock organised religion without offending any serious Protestants. There is even room to throw in a theistic moral to the story, like the one in the Scrubs episode I looked at last. “Churches are made up of bumbling fallible people, but if we trust in God we’ll be fine!” You get the idea.

 

         I’m waiting out for a sitcom that can poke fun at all religions. If you can think of one don’t hesitate to tell me.

    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