Disbelievers have probably been around for as long as the concept of God itself. It was not until the Scientific Revolution, however, that God was dealt the fatal blow. People realized that humans are capable of using reason to understand the world for themselves. This freed them from dependence on the claims of religious authorities.

Although severely wounded, God was not yet dead. After all, many influential scientists, such as Isaac Newton, continued to believe in Him. In fact, many people continue to believe in Him to this day! How can this be explained? Heidegger to the rescue:

It may be that this God will continue to be believed in, and that His world will be taken as “real,” “effectual,” and “determinative.” This history resembles the process in which the light of a star that has been extinguished for millennia still gleams, but in its gleaming nonetheless remains a mere “appearance.”

There may still be so-called Christians, but they are Christians in appearance and name only. In today’s world, even those who profess to believe in God are unable to suspend reason entirely. They live in a world that is made much more comfortable by the progress of science. They understand that those who take the Bible literally are considered by most to be religious nuts. Christianity no longer monopolizes Western thought. Exposure to diverse worldviews, intensified by the Internet, robs Christianity of its supposedly unquestionable validity.

Now that God is dead, almighty Science is free to step in and take His place as the sole source of truth and meaning – right? Well, not exactly. Actually, by “God,” Nietzsche was referring to more than the Christian God.

“Christian God” also stands for the transcendent in general in its various meanings – for “ideals” and “norms,” “principles” and “rules,” “ends” and “values,” which are set “above” the being, in order to give being as a whole a purpose, an order, and – as it is succinctly expressed – “meaning.” Nihilism is that historical process whereby the dominance of the “transcendent” becomes null and void, so that all being loses its worth and meaning.

When you rebel against a system, you have to be careful not to replace it with a virtually identical system. And it seems that many people are making a religion out of science. Richard Dawkins, one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, is a shining example. He considers the “God hypothesis” to be a scientifically testable – and therefore falsifiable – hypothesis and obviously believes that the evidence shows that God does not exist. You might think that Nietzsche, the champion of God’s death, would be sympathetic to this anti-religious sentiment. However, I am not so sure.

Remember: Nietzsche was not concerned with the question of God’s metaphysical existence. The death of God meant the death of metaphysics itself, and controversial as it may sound to the Darwin-worshipping atheist, the so-called “objective” world of science is a metaphysical fiction. The world that you experience directly with your physical senses is inherently subjective. In science, objectivity means intersubjectivity, which means agreement among multiple subjective accounts. In other words: I see it and you see it. We can agree on that much. But it is going too far to say that this means that the object we both subjectively perceive must be “real,” that it must exist even when one of us is not looking at it, that it must exist in the “real” world beyond subjective experience, that it must exist metaphysically.

Perhaps the best translation of “God is dead” for our age is “absolutism is dead.” But science itself does not have to be absolutist. In fact, when practiced by individuals who are not trying to capitalize from controversial metaphysical claims (e.g., “God does not exist”), science is not absolutist. Science never claims to have the absolute truth on any subject. New experimental data could change everything, as has occurred several times throughout the history of science. A scientist – an actual scientist – will never say with any sense of finality that God does not exist because that is a metaphysical claim and science has nothing to do with metaphysics.

Science is absolutist when it is practiced according to the correspondence theory of truth, which states that a proposition is true if it corresponds to reality. According to this view, “reality” is something altogether different from your subjective perception. An alternative to the correspondence theory is the pragmatic theory of truth, which is becoming more popular among philosophers of science. Pierce, the founder of pragmatism, was skeptical “of metaphysical ideas – such as the idea that there is a ‘real’ world beyond the world we experience.” Pragmatism does not assume the existence of some metaphysical reality. In keeping with the parsimonious nature of science, the pragmatic theory defines truth as that which works best. The focus is on practical effects, not the utterly meaningless question of whether propositions correspond to a reality that we can never experience.

So then, is science dead? I don’t think so. The year 2011 saw a staggering number of profound scientific breakthroughs, and there is no sign that this trend is slowing. It is absolutism in science that is dead. Science itself is alive and kicking.

The following passage from Stephen LaBerge’s Lucid Dreaming made me think of the difference between absolutist and relativistic worldviews. The non-lucid dreamer sees the dream world much in the same way that the absolutist sees the waking world: as an external, objective reality that exists independently of individual perception. The lucid dreamer sees the dream world much in the same way that the relativist sees the waking world: as an internal, subjective reality that depends on individual perception.

Non-lucid dreamers perceive themselves as being contained within the experiential world of their dreams. Whether they play starring roles or are only pawns in the dream game, they are still contained in a dream that they take for external reality. As long as they perceive themselves contained in this world, they are sentenced to a virtual prison with walls no less impenetrable for the fact that they are made of delusion.

In contrast, lucid dreamers realize that they themselves contain, and thus transcend, the entire dream world and all of its contents, because they know that their imaginations have created the dream. So the transition to lucidity turns the dreamers’ worlds upside down. Rather than seeing themselves as a mere part of the whole, they see themselves as the container rather than the contents. Thus they freely pass through the dream prison walls that only seemed impenetrable, and venture forth into the larger world of the mind.

Now, when it comes to dreaming, virtually all of us would agree with the lucid dreamer’s view that the dream world exists within the mind. When the non-lucid dreamer wakes up, she realizes that what she had mistaken for external reality was in fact “just” a dream. But, according to absolutism, now that the dreamer has awakened, she really is in external reality. Now she is in the “real” world. Right?

Wrong. Tibetan Buddhists, who have been using lucid dreaming as a tool for self-development since the eighth century, teach that the most profound lesson from this paradoxical state is that the dream world and the waking world are identical in nature.

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a highly persistent one,” said Einstein. And it is precisely its persistence that makes the illusory waking world so convincing. No matter what kind of crazy dream, delusion, or hallucination we experience, we always seem to end up back in this world. Nonetheless, the world “in” which you find yourself is a product of your mind. Consciousness – subjective experience – is the foundation of “reality,” not the other way around.

The homeless do not deserve our sympathy. Their circumstances spring from their own poor decisions. If they would just get jobs, their problems would be solved.

Welfare recipients are a burden on society. They are too lazy to work so they stay home and do drugs all day. Meanwhile, honest, hard-working Americans are paying for it in taxes.

Occupy Wall Street protesters are a bunch of spoiled babies. They have more student loans than paychecks under their belts. They don’t know the first thing about the real world. They have the nerve to complain about economic inequality when they live in the greatest nation on Earth, a nation where anyone can be successful if they work hard enough.

Social problems like poverty are the result of individual choices. So get a job. Hard work solves everything.

This is the rhetoric of social conservatives. The worldview underlying it is one of staggering oversimplification – but perhaps this should not surprise us. A recent study links social conservatism to low IQ scores, lending support to the oft-repeated accusation that conservatives are anti-intellectual. Psychologist Brian Nosek commented on the study in an email to the Huffington Post. “Reality is complicated and messy. Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies.”[1]

When it comes to the poor, conservatives tend to blame the victim. They assume that poor people are poor due their own lack of grit, gumption, and genes. This is the kind of thinking that led to the American eugenics movement. Starting in 1907, we started sterilizing the poor in an effort to breed poverty right out of the American population.[2] Then came the Great Depression and masses of “genetically fit” individuals were suddenly poor.

It turns out that intelligence and ambition are not always enough to protect one from the abyss of poverty. These character traits may be important but there are also contributing factors that are beyond the control of any individual. Such factors include “uneven changes in technology, cyclical unemployment, a dual economy, uneven geographic spread of industrialization producing pockets of poverty, and concentrated ownership of property.”[3] Some people are born into social environments that do not give them much of a chance to succeed, regardless of how hard they work.

Welfare stereotypes are a permanent fixture of conservative dialog. The picture so often painted is that of a poor black female. She is addicted to drugs. She has as many children as possible to increase the amount of her monthly welfare check. This stereotype is inaccurate and misleading. There are more whites than blacks on welfare.[4] National surveys consistently show public overestimations of the number of blacks living in poverty. Unfortunately, whites who hold such distorted views are more likely to blame the victim and oppose welfare in general.[5]

Unquestioning faith in the promise of the American Dream also leads to oversimplification. The idea is that our nation is one of unlimited opportunity. The rags-to-riches stories of people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are often used as examples. The problem is that such drastic economic transformations are exceedingly rare. Social mobility (freedom to move up the socioeconomic ladder) is nowhere near as high in this country as Americans tend to believe; it is actually declining.[6] The average American dies a member of the class into which he or she was born.

Conservative faith in the value of hard work is built on the presumption that the occupational structure works as envisioned in the American Dream. Given present unemployment rates and the decline in social mobility, this presumption is hardly tenable. And even if the occupational structure was such that there was no unemployment, it is questionable whether that structure is really desirable. Interestingly, a substantial proportion of the unemployed are not looking for jobs. They are unemployed by choice.

For those of us who have been thoroughly institutionalized by the workplace, it is difficult to imagine why anyone would choose to be unemployed. It is actually a fairly simple matter when we consider the similarities between wage labor and slavery. Such comparisons have been made since the time of ancient Rome. Cicero said that “vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labor, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.”[7]

Before the American Civil War, Southern slaveholders compared the conditions of their slaves to those of wage earners in the North. Their goal was to downplay the inhumane nature of slavery by relating it to labor that is supposedly more voluntary.[8] The wage slave, however, is only superficially freer than the slave. She has been given an illusory freedom of choice. She has some choice regarding the labors that she performs – McDonald’s or Burger King – but, like the slave, she has no real choice about whether to actually perform these labors. The threat of physical punishment has been replaced by the dual threats of ostrasization and starvation. Tangible chains of steel have been replaced by the psychosocial chains of economic inequality.

What if you get a job doing something you love? Social psychological research indicates that the promise of an external reward like money would decrease your intrinsic motivation to do that job. Getting paid to do something that you love seems to cheapen the activity, making it just a job.

As we get farther from the Industrial Revolution, the Protestant work ethic is clearly becoming less convincing to the young. We are coming of age in a society with a broken economy. Our parents are the ones who broke it. We are the ones who have to fix it. To do so, we must work smarter – not harder.

Last night I had an interesting dream. I was at AUM. There were horses on campus for some reason. They didn’t have saddles or bits or reins, but they were still obedient, docile creatures. Then, suddenly, they went wild and started running around like crazy. I was scared at first because they kept running directly at me, but they never trampled or bit me. They were just being playful. It’s as if they woke up and realized that they were free. Free, after a lifetime of bondage. And all they had to do was open their eyes and realize that the humans never really had the power to control them in the first place. Can you blame them for being so excited?

Then the military came in: soldiers in full combat gear, including fully automatic assault rifles. Everyone gathered outside the Taylor Center. I was standing with the rest of the students on top of a hill. Before us and to the left, all the horses were lined up. There was also a giraffe and a couple of other animals. Some soldiers guarded them, preventing their escape. Before us and to the right was a group of soldiers in firing squad formation.

Suddenly there was the sound of gunfire and female students screaming in fear. I looked at the animals and saw that one of the horses had just been shot in the head. Its head was blown off completely. Its body remained standing for what seemed like an unnaturally long time, and blood gushed out of its open neck, a veritable fountain of death. The soldiers systematically killed each of the animals. The word “disgust” does not even begin to capture the horrid feeling that completely overtook me. There was no need for this.

That’s about the time I woke up. But I wish that it wouldn’t have ended that way. I wish that I would have become lucid so that I could have done something about it. Like Neo, I would have flown up to those soldiers and neutralized them with blinding speed. Unfortunately, the events did not strike me as a departure from waking life, so I was not shocked into the realization that I was dreaming. After all, the American military really is responsible for much – if not most – of the unnecessary slaughter of innocents that plagues our world today. The only unrealistic thing about my dream is that the soldiers limited themselves to “neutralizing” (i.e., murdering) nonhuman animals.

I believe in the goodness of mankind. I do not think that people in the armed forces are inherently evil; they’re just inherently misguided. Most of them are probably lured into the “service” by financial incentives. These selfish folks are misguided because they think that a paycheck makes it worth it to align oneself with the global police force of the one percent. Others actually believe in the American military; they support the “wars” being waged around the world and feel that they are performing their patriotic duty by fighting in these conflicts. These ignorant folks are the seriously misguided ones. They actually believe the lies of the corporate mainstream media.

Though misguided, most people are decent enough human beings when they decide to join the military. But basic training changes them for the worse. They are broken down psychologically into a raw primal putty and then molded into soldiers. And let there be no romanticizing about what it means to be a “soldier.” Unlike a warrior, who fights for what is right, a soldier simply follows orders, regardless of the ethical implications. If a soldier is ordered to kill innocent civilians, he follows the order. If a soldier is ordered to torture prisoners of war, he follows the order. Even if some part of his true self survives the remolding of basic training, and deep down he feels a tinge of disagreement with the order, he feels that he has no choice but to follow it. He is now the property of the United States government. He has given up his basic human rights to become a killing machine. Failing to follow orders could result in indefinite imprisonment or even execution (probably preceded by torture, of course). So he pulls the trigger.

There are exceptions. Consider Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence officer. He grew weary of American foreign policy and decided to do something about it. He leaked an enormous amount of classified documents, including the infamous “Collateral Murder” helicopter video, to Wikileaks. And thus he became a true hero. He had to have known what the consequences would be. But that did not stop him from doing the right thing. At the time of this writing, he has been detained without trial for 617 days. Although not to be downplayed, his sacrifice was well worth it. Now the truth about the American military is out in the open. Most of the world was already well aware, but many American citizens were still in denial. And, despite the leak, many still are.

What the world needs now is for more American soldiers to awaken from the nightmare of the brainwashing they received during basic training. More soldiers need to follow the example of Bradley Manning. They need to have the courage to think for themselves, to question orders and refuse to follow them if ethically necessary.

What if the one percent declared a war and the ninety-nine percent refused to fight?

There would be no war.

I had been looking forward to God and Morality, the philosophy class that I’m taking, ever since I signed up for it last semester. At the first class meeting, however, the professor revealed some information about himself that instantly annihilated my enthusiasm: he is a Christian.

In my eyes, philosophy and Christianity are fairly incompatible. These two “fields” (I use the term loosely, for Christianity is obviously not an academic discipline) were once united in what is referred to as the medieval synthesis. But then the Renaissance came along, and people started to use reason to think for themselves rather than having faith in the empty promises of religious authorities. In comparison to philosophy, Christianity is a joke. Rather than teaching people how to think critically, it tells them what to believe and how to live.

During the lecture, the professor briefly mentioned relativism. Despite having said previously that he always makes an effort to be “fair and balanced,” he defined relativism from an absolutist’s point of view, and then hastily moved on. This elicited a silent rage within me that has now been boiling for about three days.

This is what the professor had to say about relativism (this is a paraphrase, not an exact quote):

At first, relativism might sound kinda cool, and it seems like we could all call ourselves relativists. It makes it seem like we can all just get along. Maybe, as a Christian, I can hang out with my Muslim friends and we won’t argue about whose religion is right. But then, when you take relativism a little farther, most people realize that they’re not really relativists, and relativism is actually pretty hard to defend.

Here’s what I mean: According to relativism, truth is relative. So it is true for a theist that God exists and it is true for an atheist that God does not exist. But these two beliefs contradict each other. So how could they both be true at the same time?

This question is not fair and balanced due to its heavy reliance on:

1. Aristotelian logic.
2. An absolutist definition of truth.

Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction states that it is impossible for two contradictory things to be true at the same time. Aristotelian logic is the dominant form of logic in the West, so it’s easy to take it for granted. In fact, Aristotle’s laws seem to be stating some pretty common sense things that you don’t have to be a philosopher to figure out. But the only reason these things are so “common sense” to us is that Aristotle had a profound and lasting impact on the development of Western culture.

Of course, there is no single system of logic that is agreed by all to be correct. In order to make fair and balanced statements, therefore, one cannot assume the validity of a particular form of logic and use it as a criterion for determining the worth of various philosophical orientations. Another prevalent form of logic, used primarily in Eastern culture, is called paradoxical logic. As its name implies, it holds that it is possible for two contradictory things to be true at the same time.

According to the absolutist definition, to say that theism is true is to say that God really exists out there in objective reality. Truth is seen as an absolute. It is true for all people everywhere, regardless of their subjective point of view. Like Aristotelian logic, the absolutist definition of truth is also an essential aspect of the Western worldview.

Absolutism is not the only way of viewing truth. According to the relativistic definition, when an individual proclaims, in speech or writing, that theism is true, what this means is that this individual has the subjective experience of being entirely convinced that God exists. The same is true for the atheist, who has the subjective experience of being entirely convinced that God does not exist. In this view, truth is seen as a subjective experience, so it is entirely possible for two contradictory beliefs to be true at the same time.

If we reread the professor’s question with the absolutist definition of truth in mind, we will see how strange the structure of that argument is. By assuming that it’s impossible for both theism and atheism to be true, it assumes not only the validity of Aristotelian logic but also the absolutist definition of truth:

“If truth is relative, then both theism and atheism are true. But how can they both be true, if truth is absolute?”

Absolutism is considered the opposite of relativism. It is not fair and balanced, then, to define and judge relativism in terms of absolutism!

My last semester of undergraduate school begins tomorrow. I am taking a philosophy class called God and Morality. The professor emailed all students enrolled in the course a couple of days ago, instructing us to start reading one of the five required texts: Fact, Value, and God. He wants us read the first seven chapters by the first day of class. This means that I have until 6:20 PM on Tuesday night.

In reading the first three chapters, already I have been disturbed. Actually, my postmodern sensibilities were offended by the end of the second paragraph of the preface. In the first paragraph, Holmes writes:

…Richard Rorty declared this a post-metaphysical culture; the claim that truth is somehow objective, “out there,” is the unusable legacy of an age that saw the world as created by God. Historicism, Rorty claimed, frees us from theology and metaphysics and unchanging truth.

These words really caught my attention. I first learned of Richard Rorty last semester while reading Psychological Concepts and Biological Psychiatry by Dr. Peter Zachar (who also teaches the Physiological Psychology class that I’m taking this semester). After reading that book I began to study postmodernism intensively. I agree with Rorty that there is no such thing as objective truth, or rather that there is no truth “out there.” But the word objective actually means nothing more than inter-subjective. Objectivity occurs when different people have a similar enough subjective experience. But people are social animals with a need to conform, and they are pressured by their respective societies to view the world in a certain way. The sheer number of people who hold an idea to be objectively true, therefore, is far from enough to prove its truth to more skeptical minds.

Holmes, however, does not agree with Rorty. In the second paragraph, he reveals:

This book began as an attempt to explore historical ways of grounding moral values objectively in the nature of reality . . . Rorty is in measure right. But the claim that values are somehow objective, “out there,” is the legacy on which we still need to draw.

The idea of moral values being grounded “objectively” in reality is ridiculous, even if one assumes that there is some objective truth in the universe. If morals are objective, then why is ethics a branch of philosophy, and not a branch of physical science? If morals are ever studied in such a context, then it will be in the realm of psychology, where scientists may look for correlations between morality and other variables. For example, they might attempt to explain, in terms of neurochemistry, why Bob considers abortion to be amoral while Bill does not.

Different people have different ideas about what constitutes morality. Any attempt to objectify morals is a vain and selfish attempt to prove the correctness of one’s own system of morality. This technique is used primarily by religious authorities to maintain their power over a population. But also it is common for the very people who are thus subjugated to attempt to justify the moral systems that have been imposed upon them. Christians make a good example. They have been taught to believe that they will be subjected to eternal damnation if they do not believe in the Bible. Those who are unable to transcend this psychospiritual feedback loop are therefore extremely motivated to defend the Christian worldview (its system of morality included) at all costs.

Of course, Holmes offers no support for his assertion that we must continue to draw on “the claim that values are somehow objective.” That’s probably because the only reasons that he could offer are purely subjective. It is clear from his work that he is a Christian. He has a personal interest in defending the notion of objective values: he wants to believe that Christian morals were formulated not by human beings but rather by an omniscient God. Only then will he be able to rest assured that Christianity is not just an arbitrary system of beliefs like every other organized religion.

At the end of the first chapter, Holmes writes disapprovingly of the Sophists:

. . . Thrasymachus is reported to have said that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger, making it relative to whoever wields the power. No cosmology, no knowledge of divine beings, and no cosmic justice. The dissolution of that vision of reality is complete. It fell to Socrates to recall Athens to the quest for knowledge, rather than settling for appearances and convention.

Neither I nor anyone alive today can claim to know exactly what Thrasymachus meant in regard to his definition of justice. But I know what the statement means to me. “Justice is the advantage of the stronger” means that the stronger get to decide what is just and what is unjust. If the species that are regularly slaughtered and devoured by humans were somehow able to speak out against the injustices that they suffer, it would make no difference. Humans are in control. Humans want to eat animals. So humans eat animals. Some higher, objective, cosmic justice is nowhere to be found. Justice is an intellectual abstraction created by human beings, and as such it exists within the minds of human beings.

Let’s briefly explore the idea that Socrates saved the day from the relativism of those pesky Sophists. This is laughable when you consider that one of the most famous Socratic quotes is, “All I know is that I know nothing.” One begins to wonder whether Holmes, a distinguished professor of philosophy, ever had the chance to read Plato’s Apology. Or perhaps it is just that, given the subjective nature of human beings, we see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe. The Socrates that I read about got into trouble by telling powerful men who thought they knew everything that they knew nothing. This sounds strikingly similar to the doubts raised by the Sophists as to whether humans are capable of knowing the ultimate nature of reality. And yet, Holmes somehow sees it fit to turn Socrates into a champion of absolutism who saves Athens from the agnosticism of the Sophists.

I’ll never forget the first time that I saw a Mortal Kombat “fatality” (finishing move). I was only about ten years old. When I, at that tender young age, witnessed Scorpion uppercut his opponent’s head (spinal cord still attached) right off of his body, I was profoundly disturbed.

But since then, the Mortal Kombat games seem to have lost some of their shock value. Up until now, that is. The latest game in the series, Mortal Kombat 9, is pretty disturbing in a lot of ways.

To begin with, there are a lot of messed up things going on in the background. In one level, you see a man suspended by chains being lowered into a pool of acid. A few moments later, his mostly decomposed corpse is brought back up into view.

In another level, you are in Hell. There are these strange structures in the background that are basically composed of a bunch of damned souls. You can see some of their heads and arms sticking out.

And while all of these messed up things are going on in the background, the kombat in the foreground is equally intense. There are now “X-ray attacks,” special moves that do massive amounts of damage in very painful looking ways. They are called X-ray attacks because, when Jax is breaking your back over his knee for example, the camera goes into X-ray mode so that you can actually witness your spine snapping.

When you fight in Shao Kahn’s stage, you witness what I consider to be most disturbing (and sexy) of all. On either side of his throne, you see that he has slaves. These two slaves are Skarlet and Katana, both of whom are playable characters in the game.

When Shao Kahn himself defeats you, you are forced to watch him stand there in a victory pose while another, unidentified slave girl crawls up to him in worship.

In searching for the above pictures, I discovered that there is a Facebook page called “I want to be one of Shao Kahn’s slave girls.” For some reason, only 3 people have liked it so far.

I want to be a polymath (an expert in many fields). For example, Leonardo da Vinci was a(n):

• anatomist,
• architect,
• botanist,
• cartographer (mapmaker),
• engineer,
• geologist,
• inventor,
• mathematician,
• musician,
• painter,
• scientist,
• sculptor,
• writer.

It seems quite impressive that da Vinci was able to accomplish so much, considering the time during which he lived. He did not have the aid of advanced technology. But he didn’t have the distractions of advanced technology either. Today, it is much easier than ever to be a polymath, if you can steer clear of the distractions. For example, check out Wikiversity. Virtually all of the information in the world is at your fingertips! The only reason people go to college is to earn a degree from an accredited university so that they can get a job. If, on the other hand, you are learning for the sake of learning, then there is no need to pay a university. If you are an autodidact (self-directed learner), then you all you need is an Internet connection.

I was thinking about experimenting with the following schedule of study:

I am also going to:

• learn new languages, starting with Mandarin Chinese, using technology such as Rosetta Stone and Shared Talk,
• make music,
• make art.