A weedy florilegium

Chris Hedges’ lecture was a long-winded moral argument for the existence of a certain conception of God (his own, whatever it may be) with tinges of the teleological argument for the existence of a certain conception of God.

Both are valid, but have false or uncertain premises. Therefore, the conclusions can follow validly, but the arguments can never be considered sound. That is, the arguments do not express truth. Rational argument for the existence of God as a moral force, considering the intimate—arguably inseparable—connection between God’s essence and existence (expressed in discernible ways, such as a moral force), is unjustified in principle. Their premises can be disputed, and they are disputed. Indeed, the whole point of both arguments, or any argument for the existence of God, must show the truth of God’s existence or essence without assuming God’s essence (as proof) by some arbitrary attribute of God (power, love, etc). Otherwise, the argument is circular—not necessarily false but merely uninformative, unpersuasive. The nature of the epistemological uncertainty that we bear as to the premises makes both arguments circular, but they are valid only if you accept God-premises as true.

He argued for religious pluralism which he neither justified nor did he address openly. He merely asserted that all religious views are valid in so far as they are spiritual views which implies that religious tendencies or feelings are exactly the same as spiritual tendencies or feelings. The equating of these feelings, by definition of spiritual feelings, turns all verbal expression of religious feelings into unintelligible language lest it be assisted by whatever propagandist agenda.

He argued against “New Atheism,” a form of atheism turned propaganda by public intellectuals like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Hedges argued against Harris and “New Atheism” by challenging a hypothetical argument made by Harris which implicates one into a condoning position on the usage torture, [should] that person be unable to adequately argue against the hypothetical argument [based on his or her religious system]. Hedges implicated all New Atheist and all atheist moral systems into this argument (as condoning torture and in support of nuclear war). He never addressed any atheistic arguments or atheistic cultures living today.

He rejected Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment values (his racism), but used Kant’s moral arguments in support of his (Hedges’) own personal views.

He accepted that we must cherry pick the Scripture, and that certain passages are repugnant to reason. However, by implication of this, he should advocate no certain conception of God. God as a merely spiritual force cannot have a “will” in the sense that humans have a will. God as a Willing Agent is described in the Bible. The idea that a maximal spiritual force must essentially maintain a Will requires justification. If we can imagine any singular thing as not having a Will which constitutes its essence, then we can imagine a deity as not having a Will which constitutes its essence. Therefore, a Will is not an essential property of any conceivable thing. Thus, a Deity as a Willing Agent is not an absolute necessity. Any argument which asserts otherwise must justify that premise-assumption.

Hedges identifies himself as a Liberal Christian that gets disenfranchised by “New Atheists” and unfairly caricatured. Nonetheless, he identifies as “Christian,” as a believer of God as a Willing Agent. This is an assertion that precludes anyone, should they believe it, from religious plurality. Greek thinkers, Buddhists, etc do not accept such bold assertions as the Infinite as a Willing Agent. Clearly from the basis of these differing systems of thought, plurality does not hold because disparate moral normative outlooks arise. Again, Hedges did not even justify his implicit argument for religious plurality, so clearly this is a merely mode of the Deus sive Nature, that being that all persons will have uniquely modified philosophical systems which do not adequately reflect the world view of any system or other individuals. Infinitely many modes flow from the essence of the absolutely infinite in infinitely many ways.

He further framed our failing world (Western) ethics as a consequence of the failed values of the Enlightenment. As already said, however, he cherry picked Kant. What is more, he oversimplified the scientific results of the Enlightenment and the purely economical factors which allowed for British Empiricism, a mere philosophical school, to prevail and represent much, if not most, of progressive Europe. The values were not dropped or given up: It’s only that the Empiricists did not agree with Continental Rationalism as expressed by Descartes and Leibniz, who indeed argued for religious ideology, faith, human equality. Hedges grossly misrepresented Enlightenment values by his massive generalization that suggests his ignorance of that which he argues against.

He eventually brought in Spinoza to defend his argument that “atheism of yesterday is the religion of today.” Spinoza never considered himself an atheist, but his Jewish community did. So we have a difference in opinion even at the source that to this day is still researched and debated by Jewish scholars. We can only conclude ignorance on Hedges’ part, or that he was using Spinoza’s plight as a tool to spread his personal views. In either case, respect on his views of atheism should not be granted in so far as his argument pertaining to “atheism as a social movement”; that is, it’s a red herring in so far as it’s used to debate with atheism per se.

When Spinoza was mentioned, I had to leave. It’s insulting to see philosophers’ and great thinkers’ names used as rhetorical tools, but it’s even worse when it is someone as wildly misunderstood and enigmatic as Spinoza.

The entire lecture was stacked with straw men arguments, but I believe his aim, either known or unknown (consciously unable; he doesn’t know what atheism actually is) by him, was never to attack atheism itself. However, his implied moral and teleological arguments suggest that he does not agree with atheism in so far as atheistic persons, by lacking observance of a deity either overtly or unknowingly, do not derive moral understanding from a deity or any deity.

Original Question:
If the atheist purports that a practical and naturalistic morality without a god is possible just as a practical morality with a god is possible, what is the disadvantage of having a society live by either standards? The truth of the existence of the god aside, and if we can confine ourselves to a pragmatic observation of the question: What practical value does defending a personal conception of god provide if both moral systems produce the same results?

Someone before me asked a possibly philosophical question which pertains to the effects of language in the midst of the battle between religion and the caricatured ideology of popular Enlightenment philosophers as harmful to humanity. How is language used as a propagandist tool? How is religious language and scientific nomenclature used to coerce beliefs on either side of the debate?

Our bodies are perpetually biologically conditioned to certain vitamin and amino acid intakes, vaguely understood as based by the ever-changing combination thresholds brought about by the cumbrously gradual process we like to describe as “By Means of Natural Selection,”—that is, not to strictly eating the flesh of animals. If you wish to assume that vitamin supplements or unconventional dietary habits are “unnatural,” then we may need to quibble over the definition of “nature,” and possibly take up issue with unjustified ethnocentrism. If your definition of what is “natural” is what is conventionally done, then you have a pretty weak argument. I should not need to spell out why or give example as to how argumentum ad populum is a clear cut fallacy.

I am vegetarian because as far as meat goes, if I am to condone the consumption of animal flesh,—then homo sapiens sapiens is a subspecies of species within an animal kingdom! What is the animal? Are we the “animal” only in the laboratory and under the microscope? Society does not condone “human cannibalism,”—the dictionaries cannot decide consistently on a single either anthropocentric or unhelpfully general definition—and I particularly am not interested in eating my comrades. By that reasoning, I would not eat my kingdom fellows¹.

My stronger argument—one popularized by Peter Singer²—is that I’d prefer to eat something that did not, by definition of sentience, have to suffer any physical pain whatsoever to provide whatever pleasure I would receive from consuming it or of it. The robbing of eggs from hens or the possible psychological issue of captivity still disturb me, but my ignorance and misunderstanding of ethical theory pertaining to animals keeps me from full on veganism.

The defense for the consumption of meat is usually debated by means of convenience arguments or what’s pleasurable. These are both unconvincing. Should anyone argue from a basic theory on human nature as dominant over or ontologically superior to that of animals—that’s just plain bogus. Drop all affiliation with science (evolution) if you wish to employ such equivocation: Either you are animal or you are not. Don’t turn to the Judeo-Christian Scripture for status leverage, for we find at Genesis 1:29:

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

It’s been shown that vegetables, seeds, nuts, soy and so forth carry just as much nutritional value as dietary paths as the radical consumption³ of meat. In any event, interpretation of Scripture does us no good for the truth of the matter. We’ve all got our exiguous but orgulous interpretations. We boil down to preference and social coercion. I merely advance that we should extinguish all pain where we see it. If we wish to assume that Human Pain is more severe and more “painful” than Animal Pain, then we’ve yet again assumed something that is not supported by the biological, psychological, and neurological sciences. Not that these silly fields of discourse are any basis for argument, truly, for they are only overelaborated ways of saying what we clearly observe in the moans and yelps of crawling creatures. Where do we get this human-centrist notion? Clearly it isn’t an argument per se to call someone such, but can animals be degraded and disrespect so easily? I think not.

In truth, no side is more valid in its argument, and we find ourselves leaning to dispositions and mere preference.

Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights. [...] The philosopher seeks to hear within himself the echoes of the world symphony and to re-project them in the form of concepts. While he is contemplative-perceptive like the artist, compassionate like the religious, a seeker of purposes and causalities like the scientist, even while he feels himself swelling into a macrocosm, he all the while retains a certain self-possession, a way of viewing himself coldly as a mirror of the world.
—Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche

When you say that if I deny, that the operations of seeing, hearing, attending, wishing, &c., can be ascribed to God, or that they exist in Him in any eminent fashion, you do not know what sort of God mine is; I suspect that you believe there is no greater perfection than such as can be explained by the aforesaid attributes. I am not astonished; for I believe that, if a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped.
—Letter 56 (60), to Hugo Boxel (1674), Spinoza