How 'Rational Atheists' spread anti Islam pro US military propaganda

[Guest Atom Dowry Firth]

"I can imagine being in a totally desperate situation where, OK – I have a young son, I love him, some evil guy says, 'Ha ha! your son is being raped, tortured, I know where he is…' I can well imagine, out of pure despair, torturing this guy. But it shouldn't be rendered something normal, which you do reasonably. You should at least be aware that out of pure despair, you did something inadmissible. I'm becoming, my God, the old kind liberal at my age! I would like to live in a society where, when someone starts to reason these vulgarities, you don't even have to argue – you consider him as a jerk, an idiot, an eccentric bad-taste guy."

 

Yep, pretty much

[hoggy]

ah! thanks nick!

he explains it similarly in one or two egs lectures as well, but yes that's it

[coax]

The problem I have with Greenwald / Snowden / Assange etc is that it feels like they have no idea what they're talking about sometimes. It doesn't mean they are wrong or that what they say doesn't matter, but to me it just means the world is a complex place, and /characterization/ of something is almost just as important as the actual facts. They tend to create a pessimistic deliberately deceitful image, so I have a hard time trusting their word. But god knows, government officials and the media also use characterization to the full extent they can as well, so it's a big clusterfuck in the end. A factual event or piece of information can be characterized to mean 2 opposite things I feel, if skillfully executed

[caze]

 

What Hoggy said is that sometimes you can break the rule, but it can't be justified.

 

Justified means that it was right and reasonable given the situation.

 

If you can't justify something, then it was not right or reasonable given the situation.

 

So why would you ever do something (break a rule) that was not right or reasonable given the situation?

 

Edit: I'm not trying to nitpick on the language used. I'm just saying that logic is circular and I don't understand it.

 

 

It's not a failure of logic, just two different ways of looking at the situation. On the one side you have people who are more concerned with the acts themselves (they're being a deontologist in the lingo of moral philosophy), on the other side there are people more concerned with the outcomes of those actions (the consequentialists). Moral absolutists, most religious people for example, tend to be deontologists, morality is something universal and set in stone (10 commands, the koran, etc); but if you don't think morality is universal, but rather a consequence of biological and social evolution, then it's hard to justify an absolutist stance.

 

Consequentialists are usually only so in the abstract though, in practical terms they realise that we need rules to live by (and generally we should overcompensate to be on the safe side). Which is why in this situation Harris thinks torture should be illegal, even if he can think of a few extreme situations when, on consequentialist grounds, torturing a person may be morally justified.

[caze]

Here's a good antidote for anyone who had the misfortune of watching that Greenwald interview (which was more of the same misrepresentative bulshit I was expecting - it's not that everything he said was wrong per se, more that it had little relevance to anything Sam Harris believes or has actually said, the interviewer actually called him out on this on several occasions, but he just ignored him):

 

[awepittance]

The problem I have with Greenwald / Snowden / Assange etc is that it feels like they have no idea what they're talking about sometimes. It doesn't mean they are wrong or that what they say doesn't matter, but to me it just means the world is a complex place, and /characterization/ of something is almost just as important as the actual facts. They tend to create a pessimistic deliberately deceitful image, so I have a hard time trusting their word. But god knows, government officials and the media also use characterization to the full extent they can as well, so it's a big clusterfuck in the end. A factual event or piece of information can be characterized to mean 2 opposite things I feel, if skillfully executed

i think this is not too uncommon of a problem. Intelligent people in general like to think of themselves (and some actually do practice this) as being resistant to propaganda, even if that propaganda is actually something positive (like Choimsky bringing awareness to American hegemony and empire). To a certain extent all these people are running a PR campaign of some kind using language in a skillful or clever manner to spread specific ideas. I think the only problem comes in is when the intelligent skeptic type takes this resistance so far in the other direction that they actually ignore undisputed facts or present things in a false equivalency paradigm based on the messenger (snowden, assange, greenwald). So for instance with Wikileaks, I don't like Assange. I think he's an arrogant mostly boring human being with not much to say when given the opportunity (his 'when google meets wikileaks' book was pretty awful, especially considering he was stuck in an embassy for years and that was the best he could come up with) however that doesn't ultimately matter since the leaks Wikileaks publishes are real and important. Im much more concerned about the content of the Wikileaks leaks or the Snowden documents than the personality/reasoning behind/beliefs of these people but instead we tend to get caught up in the personalities Vs the information.

[Brisbot]

People focus too much on the death associated with Islam, and don't take a look at the cultural effects of it.

So when this subject comes up I always think of this.

and IF you have a little more time:

To give this a wider context. He details what happened in the muslim world 1000 years ago to today, and then compares this to the US and says that it's slipping (which it is) and falling prey to the anti-intellectualism of Christianity. But is Christianity worse than Islam in this regard? Not yet, not even close. Islam is improving honestly, and Christiantity is slipping, but Islam DID give birth to the anti-scientific culture we see today, and the US is becoming more anti-scientific thanks to things like Faux News.

[awepittance]

seems really arrogant of him to take that kind of perspective, but for some reason I've always really disliked Tyson even before I learned his half-baked political ideology.

[caze]

he's wrong about arabic numerals, the Indians actually invented them before Islam existed, the arabs persians only brought knowledge of them to the europe later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81_al-Khw%C4%81rizm%C4%AB).

[Brisbot]

seems really arrogant of him to take that kind of perspective, but for some reason I've always really disliked Tyson even before I learned his half-baked political ideology.

...

 

Sorry I even tried.

he's wrong about arabic numerals, the Indians actually invented them before Islam existed, the arabs persians only brought knowledge of them to the europe later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81_al-Khw%C4%81rizm%C4%AB).

Oh I have no clue. I imagine they were huge contributors to science. You can tell he was giving them as much credit as possible before he criticized him due to potential backlash. I'll just say they were awesome and then they were not. It should be taken as a lesson as the human race advances. We should not fall prey to anti-science/anti-intellectualism otherwise US culture will (and slowly is) failing. I hope it'll rebound and I hope Islam will get better too.

[drillkicker]

he's wrong about arabic numerals, the Indians actually invented them before Islam existed, the arabs persians only brought knowledge of them to the europe later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81_al-Khw%C4%81rizm%C4%AB).

Arabs call them Indian numerals.

[Brisbot]

 

he's wrong about arabic numerals, the Indians actually invented them before Islam existed, the arabs persians only brought knowledge of them to the europe later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81_al-Khw%C4%81rizm%C4%AB).

Arabs call them Indian numerals.

 

Makes sense to me

[drillkicker]

Also, I think it's a flawed statistic to judge the culture's contributions by how many Nobel Prizes have been given to Muslims, especially considering that the Nobel Prize is a European thing.

[Brisbot]

It is just one critique among many. Islam is anti-scientific. At least the effect it's having on the muslim world IS anti-scientific. Thing is, the bible is anti-scientific too, but it just doesn't have the stranglehold that Islam does in this regard.

It's evident in the cultural heritage.

I also do not see what it being a European thing has to do with anything. 1.2 billion people consider themselves Islamists, and many more, now and into the past,. have only gotten 2 Nobel peace prizes.

One last thing, he was only using it to show that the religion has become a stranglehold on the advancement of that part of the world. As he said, projected they should have most of the awards.

[Brisbot]

Look I'm not happy to admit it and do not have some strange intrinsic hate of Islam, but it is more than evident that it's a big problem.

If Islam was the exact same way it is now, and it is NOT evident in the cultural heritage then I would agree with the reason the thread was made.

[caze]

It is just one critique among many. Islam is anti-scientific. At least the effect it's having on the muslim world IS anti-scientific. Thing is, the bible is anti-scientific too, but it just doesn't have the stranglehold that Islam does in this regard.

 

It's evident in the cultural heritage.

 

I also do not see what it being a European thing has to do with anything. 1.2 billion people consider themselves Islamists, and many more, now and into the past,. have only gotten 2 Nobel peace prizes.

 

One last thing, he was only using it to show that the religion has become a stranglehold on the advancement of that part of the world. As he said, projected they should have most of the awards.

 

Sorry to be pedantic here, but I think it's important due to the way misrepresentations and misunderstandings are so common in these discussions, but there are nowhere near 1.2 billion Islamists. Islamism is the theocratic political form of Islam. Was it just a typo? The conservative estimate would be around 15% overall (around 200 million), though it varies drastically from country to country.

 

I agree with his, and your broader point though. And it's a great shame, the loss of that culture was a great loss to humanity as a whole, and you could say the same about the Sephardim as well (and their disappearance was closely related).

 

It's interesting to note that the historical context which allowed the discovery of the modern scientific method (the rediscovery of Greek and Roman knowledge, the Protestant reformation and the explosion of merchant capitalism at the end of the late middle ages primarily), had big parallels with the early Muslim world that developed into the Golden Age. Like with the reformation, the Islamic world then did not have a top down authoritarian structure (this is a relatively recent phenomenon, due to the likes of the Deobandi and Salafi movements, though has always been there in some respect) this led to a more pluralistic and tolerant society (relatively speaking), the Abbasids also funded the building of libraries and the translation of Roman, Greek, Indian, and Persian texts (and also had a new technology to help them from China, paper, analogous to the reformation innovation of the printing press), and they were also the pre-eminent economic power on the planet at the time (controlling most of the worlds major trade routes). Comparing those contexts to the situation in the middle east today, and it should be obvious why there's so much cultural regression.

 

______________

 

Here's another recent Harris video, this one with Maajid Nawaz, another good indication of how ridiculous this thread title is.

 

 

looking forward to reading this: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674088700

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425169/sam-harris-maajid-nawaz-islam-book

[delet...]

Look I'm not happy to admit it and do not have some strange intrinsic hate of Islam, but it is more than evident that it's a big problem.

 

If Islam was the exact same way it is now, and it is NOT evident in the cultural heritage then I would agree with the reason the thread was made.

 

I intrinsically don't trust or value the ideological judgement of people in a modern state that follow any religion, or sport. I think it presumes a certain follow the leader, off with the fairies brain state. I don't trust or value the judgement of those that turn their anti-religion into a kind of cultic sense of entitlement program either. That brainstate also sickens me.

[goDel]

Thanks for posting the Harris/Nawaz video. Very interesting.