Also recently, I found a documentary on the German church-critic Karlheinz Deschner (unfortunately not in English yet). It was titled: “the Hatefilled Eyes of Karlheinz Deschner”. The documentary is some kind of meta-discussion on his body of work which is, alas, not yet available in english, either. He basically wrote for 30 years, alone, on the “Criminal History of Christianity” in 10 Volumes (!) — currently writing the tenth and last one. Hopefull the whole is translated when he is done.

The title “the Hatefilled …” is a quote of one of the Christian interviewees, who also appears in regular public TV sometimes. It reflects how some of the other Christian participants think. They are quite obsessed in trying to find a reason for Deschners engagement, trying to pull Ad Hominem Arguments against him. Deschner on the other hand is a rather gentle (very) old man, speaking softly and supports his work with tons of supportive evidence. He will probably not witness how his work is received and it may appear to him that it happens what the other side wants: that his book just collects dust (one of the christian interviewee says so).

The editor of his works states that when discovering all the lies, the blood and gore, the torture and extortion, how Christian church supported a great many of the big totalitarian systems in europe, someone like Deschner is the voice of the countless victims and being scandalized at this is a natural reaction. I think so, too.  Perhaps this is to be expected, really.

It is impossible in post-war Germany to look past piles of corpses and stay cool about it. The other causes and perpetrators have been identified and brought to justice, yet the Church and the religion are not only around — No, they are chipper and are happily talking about their values and their Christian love as if nothing ever happened. Nobody ever enters an objection. It sounds like their whole religion brought just peace, love and harmony.  Not only that — they behave as if this is obvious.  By asking for evidence, or god forbid, entering an objection, they are outraged.  In the video they even go as far and claim that Christianity was in resistance against the fascistic regimes in Italy and Germany (there is pretty strong evidence to suggest that this is not true).

This is, in my view, the reason Atheists are bullied into a defensive stance, polite,  rejecting the belief but silently agreeing to their benevolent religion made of golden honey and sunshine that always fought for the good and the love. And this seems fairly harmless on the surface, I guess.

But, there is no possible way to be cool about that. There were very interesting comments from the Christian interviewees. One says bascially: humans are evil. They need a god that watches over them and keeps them in check, e.g. Yaweh, etc, etc.

My own action plan is therefore:

• Restore or correct historical facts of religious authorities
• Highlight the fact that so many “Christian” groups fought hard and bitter against humanistic improvements and only when their opponents succeeded and it was widely adopted, Christians would adopt and assimilate this view as if it was their own from the beginning. Poverty, Slavery, Fascism and so forth. Hundred years into the future, the Christians (fanatics) will claim they always wanted equal rights for gays and women.
• Christianity is NOT solely about love and values. The human rights are superior and were established against the church, not with their help or consent.
• Beating them in their own game: it is morally unacceptable that anyone  (God, Spirit, Demon or Human) tortures human beings for an eternity for nefarious reasons (like disbelief). This is not okay. It is frankly absurd, and also rather hideous in concept. Supporting such a cause is evil and morally dubious at best, methinks.

Once this is done and the skewed, brainwashed views are refuted, there is room for the alternative: humans are good. They like each other without any supernatural agent looking over them or keeping them in check. They have developed values out of their inherent compassion. They are good people who learned gradually how to treat each other with respect how to wield arguments over weapons and use (serious) reasoning to settle disputes. Some ideas, political and religious can overwrite their inherently good nature — we know that. This is, to me, the main difference between (some) religious people, especially of the Abrahamitic religions and being nontheist.

If someone wants to be a Christian, or indeed, even if someone wants to be a racist or whatever, in the public sphere, they are protected by free speech. But the so-called values of Christianity or any other religion really, need be challenged, and vigorously so!

I will, if possible, I will try to find sub-titles somewhere. The film is from 1998.

It’s well worth mentioning that Plantinga’s argument is 18 years old or so, and it has failed to convince any naturalist in the mainstream groups of naturalists (Dennett et al). Unusual, considering that it is supposedly such a powerful argument in it’s explanatory content. Nonetheless, having watched this series of videos, it has become clear to me that Plantinga’s EAAN (Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism) as just as flawed as other theological musings such as the slippery old Cosmological Argument.

Critique of Alvin Plantinga’s “Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism” – Link:http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p … C36901BCEE

Before we can even begin to account the myriad flaws and fallacies of the EAAN’s reasoning and supporting arguments, it is already plain to see that the argument is unworkable. Plantinga is a strong advocate of Theistic Evolution and argues that if God created Man “In his own Image”, by means of biological evolution, then our cognitive faculties would be reliably tuned to truth. However if naturalistic (i.e., non-theistic) evolution is true our faculties would be unreliably tuned to “mere survival”. I find EAAN to be incoherent.

Plantinga argues that evolutionary naturalism is unjustifiable because our accumulated mountains of evidence for it (as well as our cognitive processes for testing/assessing this evidence) would not be trustworthy in the absence of God, the source of absolute truth. He then argues that traditional theism is more defensible on the grounds that our minds were designed by God. His argument falls apart because it intrinsically begs the question. If Plantinga conceded that this rather small point of his was indefensible, then the entire argument would fall flat on it’s face. Now, I will try to squeeze in some of my more detailed thoughts on the actual videos.

Part 1

03:15 (3 minutes and 15 seconds)

:

“And then when I use the word ‘naturalism’, what I really mean is … the belief that there’s no such person as God, or anything like God”

Here it would be well worth noting that Plantinga is making an implicit reference to Positive or “Strong” Atheism rather than naturalism. Positive Atheism being, as everyone knows, taking an epistemically positive stance in the form of atheism, with the positive assertion that a God or gods do not exist. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that Plantinga misunderstands both atheism as it is most commonly understood, as well as misrepresenting naturalism. Naturalism could be better defined as empirical-ism, meaning that it only accepts things on the basis of material, tangible evidence, and all evidence is still subject to be changed, or to be shown false. God, the supernatural “realm” in general, and so forth, all fall into the class of ideas and entities that are wholly unknown given naturalism. Vague, untestable, and unfalsifiable, and thus not subject to naturalistic modes of inquiry.

03:24 (3 minutes and 24 seconds)

:

“Naturalism is stronger than atheism. Naturalism entails atheism … but atheism doesn’t entail naturalism; you can be an atheist without rising to the heights of – or sinking to the depths of (whatever you think is appropriate) – naturalism…”

Here he goes again with his broad and unqualified statements about what “naturalism” means. One is tempted to think that this is a deliberate falsification, and not a mistake. It would have been more technically accurate and indeed, honest – if Plantinga had mentioned that “naturalism” in the context of theistic/antitheistic arguments, exists as two differing stances. One is an epistemological position, while the other is an ontological position. Namely: Metaphysical Naturalism, and Methodological Naturalism.

Methodological Naturalism:

“Methodological naturalism (‘MN’) is the commitment of scientific investigation in practice to studying only naturalistic causes and explanations. Boudry et al. observe, though, that there are really two types of MN:

Intrinsic methodological naturalism (IMN) is the a priori philosophical commitment to not even consider supernatural explanations (see the authors’ definition of “supernatural” below). As Boudry et al. state in a forthcoming paper, under IMN ‘science is simply not equipped to deal with the supernatural and therefore has no authority on the issue.’ This is the view expressed by people like Eugenie Scott, Kenneth Miller, and Rob Pennock. It also appears to be the official position of the National Center for Science Education and the semi-official position of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences.

Provisional (or pragmatic) methodological naturalism (PMN),’a provisory and empirically grounded commitment to naturalistic causes and explanations, which in principle is revocable by extraordinary empirical evidence.’ As the authors note:

According to this conception, MN did not drop from thin air, but is just the best methodological guideline that emerged from the history of science (Shanks 2004; Coyne 2009; Edis 2006), in particular the pattern of consistent success of naturalistic explanations. Appeals to the supernatural have consistently proven to be premature, and science has never made headway by pursuing them. The rationale for PMN thus excludes IMN: if supernatural explanations are rejected because they have failed in the past, this entails that, at least in some sense, they might have succeeded. The fact that they didn’t is of high interest and shows that science does have a bearing on the question of the supernatural.”

Source: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com … ernatural/

Metaphysical Naturalism as detailed by Wikipedia:
“Metaphysical naturalism. also called ontological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, is a philosophical worldview and belief system that holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences, i.e., those required to understand our physical environment by mathematical modeling. It is occasionally referred to as philosophical naturalism, or just naturalism. Methodological naturalism however, refers exclusively to the methodology of science, for which metaphysical naturalism provides only one possible ontological foundation.
Metaphysical naturalism holds that all properties related to consciousness and the mind are reducible to, or supervene upon, nature. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, it rejects the supernatural concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.”

The latter, (Metaphysical Naturalism), is an ontological position, and deals with reality rather than with descriptions of reality, as does the former. Metaphysical, or Philosophical, or more appropriately Ontological Naturalism, deals with the nature of reality, and can be thought of as an extension to Methodological Naturalism. Essentially, it takes Methodological Naturalism, an essential bedrock axiom of scientific inquiry, and extrapolates it positively, to evoke belief in the non-existence of the supernatural. Or rather, that we live in a mechanistically physical reality governed by natural laws. It can be thought of in the same way that Strong Atheism is an epistemologically burdened claim, pertaining to the non-existence of God. But that’s another topic (again).

And contrary to Plantinga’s oversimplification; the naturalistic stance on the existence of God is far more of a vague one. MethodologicalNaturalism (explicitly) – does not directly deny the existence of one or more gods, like Metaphysical adaptations of naturalism do (implicitly). Methodological Naturalism, a key to scientific discovery; merely withholds judgment on the existence or non-existence of a class of “things” of which god(s) are only a part of. Namely, the group that includes the supernatural, and transcendental entities… Supernaturalism in Science should be out-ruled in principle, anyways. As such then, the Atheist vs. Theist debate in this context, and the relevance of the position of the atheist, is not so much the simple statement that there are no gods (which I believe to be an accurate statement), but rather, it is more of a pragmatic sentiment on the knowability or unkowability of the existence of God, in which case, we may as well reject the notion of gods in principle, until physical proof of it’s (or “their”, if we were to include polytheistic religions); existence.

I needn’t mention Plantinga’s later statement about the beliefs of Hegel, as I do not dispute them. The next sentence is a brief statement about the natural evolution of conscious living beings, and it’s place as part of Metaphysical Naturalism, simplistically defined, that is, as well as it’s technical relevance to the ins and outs of the rest of his argument. He also presents a brief summary of the structure of his argument(s).

04:22 (4 minutes and 22 seconds)

… “Evolution is often thought of as kind of a pillar in the temple of naturalism, if indeed naturalism has a temple. But… I want to argue that they don’t fit together. I want to argue that … one can’t sensibly be both a naturalist, and… accept… evolution (as evolution is ordinarily thought of), and that they conflict with each other. They go against each other. The conjunction of the two – naturalism and evolution – I want to argue … shoots itself in the foot! Or as a more complex, learned sounding way of putting it: is self-referentially incoherent. “

I wondered whilst listening to this when he would get to the point, instead of tautologically repeating the same line four or five times! 

Of course, Plantinga himself has in fact shot himself in the foot as well. As I said, the argument has certainly not convinced me, and it has yet to convince any serious naturalist in the thinking world, or anyone on this forum for that matter. Additionally, it’s good to see Plantinga showing his Platonic Colours again, to some degree.  Plantinga has previously made apparent his Platonic Idealism, meaning that he believes that ideas represent some kind of absolute reality, and we can see examples of this cropping up all over his argument if you look hard enough, as in his Reformed Epistemology.

06:20 (6 minutes and 20 seconds)

“So according to theism; belief in God, we human beings have been created by a wholly good, all powerful, and all knowing being, namely God, who has … created us in his own Image, made us like him… who has aims and intentions – he intends certain things – and can act in such a way to accomplish those aims. That’s part of what it is to be a person …”

I trust you will all see the conflict of definitions here, as Plantinga struggles to keep his terms straight. He starts off by using the generic and unqualified term “theism”, a label which does NOT only apply to the Abrahamic Versions of god(s), but applies moreover, to any ’God’, or gods! And then he proceeds to ”qualify” that statement with what is clearly a description of the far more specific – namely – the Judeo-Christian Monotheistic God, and even goes on to allude to the Judeo-Christian myths and mythologies about the creation of the world and universe, such as God creating man in his own image. He also assumes that this God is personal. And so, it ultimately becomes clear that although he uses the very broad term “theism”, what he is really talking about is the Christian God. It seems very strange to me that a sophisticated philosopher such as Alvin Plantinga could confuse his terms in such a bizarre way. It is not the first time he has done this, and we’re not even through with the 1st vide ( represented by*Part 1* – in huge bold green).

09:09 (9 minutes and 9 seconds)

“In brief here’s how my argument will go …

I’ll argue that … if naturalism and evolution were both true, if that conjunction – that pair of propositions – were both correct … then it would be improbable that our cognitive faculties – memory etc. – are in fact reliable …”

This is a truism! The overwhelming majority of naturalists accept this, and so do I! It is not merely “improbable”. It’s a fact. It is empirically verifiable, and well documented, that all of those cognitive functions are highly unreliable! How reliable were the inductive assumptions of old worldy (lol) religions about their gods and deities? How accurate were the Romans and Greeks’ perceptions on such things, with their dozens of gods?? The god of war, the god of fire, the god of… sewage.  Or the Aztecs who had little objections to cutting peoples’ hearts whilst still alive, and sacrificing their parts to their gods? Not to mention the fact that the people were generally acquiescent to this rather obscure fact.

Here is one, rather random example of how our cognitive faculties can fail us: the McGurk Effect. A mysterious perceptual illusion that takes place because your senses, namely vision and hearing, conflict. This is an example of one of the flaws of our cognitions and precognitions.
It seems almost as though Plantinga is trying to assert that our everyday thinking and cognition about the world and universe is reliable and truthful. “Sadly” depending on your perspective, all of the available evidence seems to favour the opposite conclusion: that it’s unreliable, and based on limited perceptual knowledge. Heck, human beings can only ever understand their surroundings to the extent that they can ask “what am I doing now?” — by which time “now” is long, long gone. 

If Plantinga is attempting to argue that human cognition is somehow perfectly reliable from his viewpoint, and there is no good reason to believe that it is, and good reasons to believe that it isn’t…. then his entire argument will collapse. Rather, the question here is whether or not certain cognitive faculties would be favoured by evolution via natural selection, and which of those faculties can be counted on to produce truthful perceptions of the world.

Next will be the final point I deal with in this video.. but there’s still 5 more….

09:36 (9 minutes and 36 seconds)

“Well once you see that … then once you accept [both] naturalism and evolution, then you now have a defeater for that proposition. For this proposition that your cognitive faculties are reliable…a reason to give that proposition up… a reason not to believe it. And once you have a defeater for that proposition – that your cognitive faculties are reliable, then you also have a defeater for any proposition that you take to be produced by your cognitive faculties…. [ ... ] so then you also have a defeater for naturalism and evolution itself. “

1. If we had to reject all of our belief simply because they might be wrong, then Plantinga’s religious beliefs stand to the same principle as the evolutionary naturalist. Assuming that Plantinga’s reasoning is correct. Unfortunately, it’s not …

2. It is not simply evolution that allows for the possibility of error.

Plantinga seems to be highlighting the fact that has been growing in my mind for quite a while. That all of our faculties, and all knowledge is but axiomatic in it’s nature, no matter how certain we are. Science operates on the possibility of error, as does much else.

Plus, Plantinga also seems to be committing to an implicit fallacy of equivocation, by assuming that all of our cognitive faculties as he puts it, are equal and equally worth mentioning. They are not. It’s pretty evident that some of these functions have been honed to a sharper degree by natural selective pressures, such as vision. In humans, we have full colour vision, and forward-facing eyes, probably one of the most advanced visual systems in the living world. Our olfactory cognition however, is seriously weak compared to other animals such as dogs and cats, as is our hearing, the senses that are usually most acutely tuned in most placental mammals other than primates.

And as for religious beliefs. . .

For an explanation of the cognitions that may lead to religion, I present for your approval, a video made by Dr. Andy. Thomson. According to Thomson, a robust and comprehensive account of religious thinking and beliefs can be arrived at in terms of our species’ biological evolution. God does not exist in our experience; we ascribe an interpretation to our intuitions, but these intuitions are byproducts of brain functioning that can be understood in evolutionary terms. Dr. Thomson: “Religious beliefs are just the extraordinary use of everyday cognitions, everyday adaptations: social cognitions, agency detection, precautionary reasoning. Religious beliefs are a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms designed [by evolution] for other purposes.”

Dr. Andy Thomson: Why We Believe in Gods

I post this as an example of how religion, may in fact have been “designed”, or created as an artifact of evolution, as an adaptation. Thomson provides robust evidence that religious belief is the result of cognitive mechanisms used in unusual ways, and even presents evidence that religious beliefs and/or misassumptions are present even in newborns.  Fascinating indeed …

Part 2

Plantinga now proceeds to quote Thomas Aquinas on the nature of God and it’s “relationships” with human cognitions.

00:14 (0 minutes and 14 seconds)

“Since human beings are said to be in the image of god in virtue of their having a nature that includes an intellect … they’re in the image of God because they’ve got an intellect – they can understand and know – such a nature, one with an intellect, is one most in the image of God in being able most to imitate God. So he thinks of this err … ability to “know” on our part is perhaps the most important aspect of the image of God, in human beings…”

Now I will dissect the flaws in Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology”, and discuss the axiomatic nature of knowledge. Plantinga almost appears to argue that our experience of the world is somehow supernatural, and citation is needed there, methinks.

01:21 (1 minute and 21 seconds)

“Most of us would think [ ... ] that at least a function of our cognitive faculties would be to provide us with true beliefs. That’s what they’re for. And we would normally think that when they’re functioning properly, when there’s no dys/mal – function, that for the most part, that’s what they do … Of course it’s true that err… let’s say err… if there are five different witnesses to an auto[mobile] accident, you might get five different stories. But there will be an underlying level of agreement … “

Is it not dangerous to simply assume that your beliefs are reliable from the outset, when you have no reliable means of demonstrating this? Also note how Plantinga simply assumes that his beliefs about the world/universe are true, and then qualifies his statement with the spurious phrase “for the most part”…. It turns out that he cannot claim to know absolute certainty, anymore than methodological naturalists. It seems that Plantinga is no longer talking about his naive notions of objective truths and realities, but is instead simply stating that apparently: Evolutionary Naturalism has a lesser probability of truth than Evolutionary Supernaturalism (in his view).

02:40 (2 minutes and 40 seconds)

“There would be agreement that there are indeed such things as automobiles… that [beings] use them to accomplish their purposes, which in the case of automobiles – normally – involves going somewhere… That automobiles won’t work well on the surface of the moon or the bottom of the ocean, that if you drop one out of a helicopter it will ordinarily fall down, rather than ascend… and so on…”

According to gravity, a car, not like objects such as sheets of paper, or parachutes, will fall through the air, like humans, at around 30-35 ft, per second per second. Once dropped, the car’s speed terminally accelerates to the point of terminal velocity wherein the medium (air) with which the car is traveling through, prevents further acceleration under gravity. Thus, all of Plantinga’s examples of these “truths” of the world and universe are pragmatic facts about reality, rather than philosophical musings.

Whether or not cars can drive on the moon or underwater is a semantical conundrum about how to define “car”. For example, do Lunar-rovers count as “cars”??

The same is true of cars driving underwater, since some of them can. It is also worthy of note, the kind of truth we are discussing here. It is truth about physical objects and entities such as cars, and alike. This kind of truth, as I briefly mentioned in the introduction can be labeled as empirical, and rational.

This is empirical knowledge because it is knowledge that comes to us through the senses, and as I have said in the past, I subscribe to the view that all is mere conjecture if it is not applicable via empiricism. There is still no one single ”truth”, though, (in spite of the method by which we acquire “truths”).

I like how William S. Burroughs puts it in his essay “On Coincidence” in ‘The Adding Machine’: “Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact.”

Aside from the inductive nature of experience (which some Popperians ignore); we have a curious tendency of by-passing perspectivisms, which bundle their own truths in them. Surely, this deferring of perspective has a pragmatic function, but no more than the practical concrete representations of abstract or ideal mathematical shapes.

Every thing experiential is valuative and evaluative and generates differences, such that they may be comparable but not identical. In other words, the most that can be enjoyed is equivalence alone about pertinent facts. Even more, as a consequent, truths are paradigmatic and their constituent elements cannot be separated from the system in which it is contextualized, not unlike a field. Hence, a positivist’s referent is qualitatively not the same as an idealist’s, nor naturalists’ from supernaturalists’, nor a blind person’s from a schizophrenic’s, nor mine from yours, and so forth.

All that can be arrived at is the set of interacting truths, manifested as claims about perception communicatively, to produce yet another amalgam of truths, ad infinitum. This is not a classical dialectic being spoken of here, since there is not teleological point to it (only teleological paths within it.)
Empirical and Rational observation is our most finely tuned faculty, and is at the root of both science, and scientific naturalism. 

03:05 (3 minutes and 5 seconds)

“So our assumption is that when our faculties are functioning properly, though not always, such as when they’re are wokring at the very limit of their ability such as in contemporary physics and cosmology for example, that – for the most part – they will produce truth when they’re functioning properly … “

If it is really the case that our cognitive faculties as Plantinga says, were designed by the creator of the universe, ‘God’, to produce truth, then why do our cognitive faculties all have such a well established founding for error, at least so it would seem? I mentioned the McGurk effect earlier, but there is also the Monkey Business Illusion, visual trickery and many others. Plus: the Homo S Sapiens’ history of scientific error??

03:24 (3 minutes and 24 seconds)

“But isn’t there a problem here for the naturalist? Or at any rate, for the naturalist who thinks that we’ve arrived on the scene after some billions of years of evolution, by way of natural selection, genetic drift, and other blind processes [ ... ] working on sources of variation like random genetic mutation, [ ... ] if that’s the way you think of it then shouldn’t it come as somewhat of a surprise that the cognitive faculties are in fact reliable?”

Isn’t there a problem here for the supernaturalist who falsely asserts that our cognitions are reliable and truthful? Plus, we have still yet to establish what Plantinga means here by “truth”. .. ???
If it is Plantinga’s contention that our cognitive faculties are god-given functions, and were designed by him, to, as I said earlier, produce truth, then why is it so evident, to repeat myself, that our ancestors made such a volume of mistakes, and so on? Our cognitive faculties are rarely if ever fully reliable. And also, Plantinga seems to argue that if both evolution(ism) and natural(ism) were both true, then the probability of reliable cognitive functions coming about are low. Apparently though, it IS low, since humans are only one species in the history of life. And also, the only example of a finely tuned cognition that he has given us so far, is our perceptual observations of cars.

06:15 (6 minutes and 15 seconds)

“If Darwinism is correct, if Evolution is correct, or if the conjunction of evolution and naturalism were correct, then the ultimate purpose of our cognitive faculties would surely be survival … or perhaps survival by way of reproductive age, or to maximize reproductive fitness. So if they have a purpose then that’s what it is. Their purpose ISN’T to provide us with true beliefs, it’s to maximize fitness. …”

Yes. Our cognitive faculties only exist at all because of their predictive power. For example, eyes and the visual system is something that is said to have evolved independently among animals some 40 times throughout Earth’s history, as have many of the other senses, even though the eyes are probably the most pronounced one. And what is more, there are oceangoing invertebrates such as octopus and squid that have eyes on a par with the sharpness of our own. Or nautilus, with it’s sophisticated pinhole camera eye, as Dawkins phrased it so succinctly.

Evolution did NOT give us cognitive faculties to arrive at the most probable truths, nor is evolution a process with purpose or intent. It just plows on. “It” gave us cognitive faculties for survival purposes, as Plantinga has already said. And given the fact that not only can we only expect a certain number of our beliefs to be accurate and subject to revisions at any time, and there are far more ways to be incorrect in one’s beliefs than to be correct, how does Plantinga recognize the false points of his beliefs, if he believes that his cognitive faculties were designed by the all knowing creator of the universe to generate truth(s)? How could such cognitions ever be proven false, if Plantinga’s reasoning is sound?

Nevertheless, I am not alluding to post-modern theories of truths with my claims, but rather, I am simply stating that there are truths to be found using the vagaries of our perceptions, but it will not be the kind of truth that Plantinga would accept with his puerile clinging to certainty and security. All he is doing here is assuming the truth of his beliefs with no form of evidence, and his actual beliefs in question are meanwhile vague and immeasurable by any empirical means. While we can be very sure that cars and tables and chairs and such, exist, and that all of these objects have the properties that we commonly associate with them despite that we can only ever arrive at them through our limited perceptions. But; since are perceptions are highly unreliable, this is a very tentative form of ‘truth’, no matter how much you guys might protest! 

We do not know that our current model of the world and universe and its formation, is really accurate in an absolutist or 100% certainty form. But the reason for that is because knowledge is axiomatic, and this is the way science now works, as a discipline and practice, through the principle of falsifiability, brought about by Karl Popper et al. Methodological Naturalism is simply pragmatic in it’s assumptions. It does not have to be certain in the same way that religious beliefs always have to. It only has to assume that it’s current picture, such as in scientific discovery, is more accurate, and more factual than any previous model.

I will skip the entire 3rd video, since he seems to spend the whole vid making baseless probability calculations, and quote-mining. So here’s the 4th video debunked.

Part 4 (skipped 3rd vid)

05:47 (5 minutes and 47 seconds)

“By virtue of their content as well as their neurophysiological properties; and are also adaptive [to survive]. What then is the probability here of this possibility that their cognitive faculties are reliable? Well here I have to say, not as high as you might think. Beliefs don’t causally effect behaviours just by themselves, it’s beliefs and desires, and other factors that do so together. [ ... ] So, Imagine that Paul is a prehistoric hominid, and the emergencies of survival cause him to display tiger-avoidance behaviour. [ ... ] There would be many behaviours that [may be] appropriate, fleeing for example. Or climbing a steep face – assuming that tigers aren’t that great at rock-climbing … or crawling into a hole too small to admit the tiger [if] it is a large tiger. Or leaping into a handy lake. Now … when I wrote this I was under the impression that tigers, like house cats, don’t like water. [ ... ] But in fact that turns out to be false. “

In this particular example, Alvin Plantinga admits that by not realizing on his part, that tigers can swim, and in fact, thrive in lakes and rivers, because of bizarre reasoning, assuming that tigers behave in a similar fashion to that of cats that are domesticated, and then changed his belief to the correct stance, after having learned more about it, Plantinga has now highlighted the flaws in this argument against naturalism. Naturalistic Evolution did not simply give us false or failing beliefs and desires. It gave us beliefs that most appropriately matched with the observed empirical data as you might call it, for our survival. And this IS important! And this is exactly why our cognitions may have been at least in some sense geared towards “truth” to a revisable degree, is exactly because of these survival advantages that come attached to discovering these “truths”, by virtue of our highly complex cerebral cortexes also “designed” by evolution. Plantinga’s beliefs about tigers not liking water may very well have got him brutally killed, if the situation occurred when he was faced with a tiger.

Plantinga’s tiger-illustration actually hits the nail quite well. He admits that his logically fallacious reasoning lead him to the erroneous conclusion as he later found out, that tigers are like other cats that he was familiar with. And at some time later, someone or other may have demonstrated to him that tiger in fact DO live in waters, such as rivers, and as such, Plantinga’s belief-forming mechanisms were shown to be false, and he had to change them in accordance with the empirically observed facts.

This illustrates the fact that beliefs are malleable and can change as new evidence comes along. And it’s that new evidence that matters, too. That is to elucidate the fact that beliefs are based on evidence, and few things are simply “self-evident”, as proposed by Evidentialist Foundationalism, in philosophy. Beliefs are not things that we merely accept because of the “fact” (LOL) that they were designed by god or gods to produce truths about the world, but we accept our beliefs based on empirically or rationally based justification for those beliefs, relating to the universe that we can observe. This also goes to demonstrate the rather glaringly obvious fact that the naturalistic world and universe is the first axiom of logic in regards to uncovering truths in reality, rather than God-given precepts, as Plantinga believes.

In his tiger illustration, Plantinga lists 3 possibilities of how a pre homo s. sapiens like hominid that he called “Paul”, could end up trying to run away from a tiger. His 1st possibility is that he would for some reason like to be eaten, but when faced with a tiger, giving in to his instincts, presumably runs away hoping for a better prospect, if he isn’t killed. The 2nd example, is that Paul may be led to believe that the tiger is in fact a large and friendly cat, which he wants to stroke … but apparently also believes that the “best” way in which to pet it is to run from it. The 3rd point is one we would all obviously concur with, from both our instincts and our educated standpoint as humans. That Paul believes that the tiger could damage or kill him, and he runs to prevent that from happening.

• 1.) So there is thus a conundrum in expaining how Paul’s false belief could naturally arise by evolution, if both evolution and theism are true. Given the fact that God could have designed the beliefs to ensure that they matched with reality. If Paul wants to be eaten by a Tiger, but then runs hoping for a better prospect, how is it possible for Paul to determine the prospects, in Plantinga’s mind?Whatever the causal reasons are for this avoidance-of-tigers behaviour, Plantinga cannot adequately explain how it could be inferred from observation, OR how it could be acquired as a new belief from experience or cognition, by virtue of our “unreliable”, according to Plantinga, Cognitive Faculties.  This, if true, can only be, under Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology, a ”properly basic” belief about reality, and thus his argument is ultimately self-refuting to Plantinga’s broader epistemological positions, if this argument is truly taken to its inevitable conclusions.
• 2.) In the second example of Paul with his bizarre desire to cuddle and to pet the tiger, there is the same logical problem as before, but with added connotations. There are plenty of people who do in fact rather like the idea of cuddling up to a tiger, and some have in the past with relatively no injury. So what would stop a prehuman hominid like Paul from realizing this point?
• 3.) Finally is the false assumption that running away from a tiger is somehow a good or productive means of avoiding a tiger, when it is not., given the fact that tigers can run in excess of 35 mph, while the fastest humans humans can only run a 25 mph or so. And the fastest of tigers may average at 50 mph. As such, it would be more productive to use tools and weapons to fight the tiger, and shift your chances of survival a little.Thus, it seems that Plantinga can only use examples that never actually evolved, in order to prove his case. Plantinga in the 5th video then presents a hideous number of bizarre examples that are not really worth addressing. He spends his time endlessly repeating himself. BUT:Part 6 (skipped 5th vid)02:33 (2 minutes and 33 seconds)
  “The traditional theist on the other hand has no reason to doubt that his faculties are reliable, or that it is the purpose of our cognitive system to produce true beliefs. “

This is nothing short of a spectacular article of faith! Again, he is using the generic and unqualified term “theism”, and is not clear on what he means when uses the word “God”. It seems that he means the Judeo-Christian philosophy. But …. his term ‘theist’ applies to anyone who believes in God or gods. How does he know that a Demonic God could not exist and deliberately make our cognitive faculties Unreliable? Who is to make that judgement, and what is it’s significance if it is true? His whole argument would collapse, and so it seems that his entire argument is based on fundamentally flawed use of terms, and falls flat on it’s face on it’s first premise, that our faculties are reliable and truthful. Thus this argument is invalid, and is not a compelling argument against Evolutionary Naturalism. Thanks for reading.

Out-sources:

“Evolutionary argument against naturalism: An argument proposed by Alvin Plantinga (henceforth EAAN), which purports to show that metaphysical naturalism is self-defeating and hence cannot be rationally accepted. In addition, Plantinga argues that theism does not face self-defeat in the same way that naturalism does. In what follows, I shall descrive EAAN and outline some of the main objections to it.
To begin with, let ‘N’ stand for metaphysical naturalism, the claim that there is no God and nothing like God; let ‘E’ stand for the view that human cognitive faculties have evolved by way of the mechanisms that are studied by contemporary evolutionary theory; and let ‘R’ stand for the claim that the beliefs produced by those cognitive faculties are for the most part true.
EAAN has three stages, each of which involves defending a certain premise:

(1) P(R/N&E) is either low or inscrutable (meaning that we cannot determine whether it is low or high). Call this the Probability Thesis.

(2) Anyone who accepts N and E and the Probability Thesis has a defeater for R. This is the Defeater Thesis.

(3) Anyone who has a defeater for R has an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs.

From these premises, it follows that anyone who accepts N and E and the Probability Thesis has an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs, including his belief in metaphysical naturalism. But one who is a naturalist must accept E (it is, says Plantinga, the only option for the naturalist when it comes to explaining the diversity of life). Hence, naturalism is self-defeating. Let us see how these three premises are defended.
Plantinga defends the Probability Thesis by inviting us to consider the case of a hypothetical population of creatures on a planet a lot like earth, formed by blind, undirected evolution, and to assume that naturalism is true. What is P(R/N&E) specified, not to us, but to them? Plantinga notes that, when we consider this hypothetical population, there are four possibilities:

P1: There is no causal connection between belief and behavior.

P2: Beliefs are the effects of behavior but are not among the causes of behavior.

P3: Beliefs do causally affect behavior, but not by virtue of their content.

P4: Beliefs do causally affect behavior in virtue of their content.

Plantinga then says that, since these four possibilities are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive, the probability we want to assess, namely P(R/N&E), is given by the following weighted average:

P(R/N&E)
=
P(R/N&E&P1)P(P1/N&E)
+P(R/N&E&P2)P(P2/N&E)
+P(R/N&E&P3)P(P3/N&E)
+P(R/N&E&P4)P(P4/N&E).

The Probability Thesis is then justified by estimating this weighted average. P(R/N&E&Pi) is estimated as low for i = 1, 2, 3, because in these cases beliefs will be invisible to natural selection and so there will be no selection pressure towards their being mostly true. It seems, initially, as though P(R/N&E&P4) is going to be very high, but Plantinga contests this estimate by presenting examples of beliefs which are false but which, when combined with strange desires, lead to felicitous action. In the latter case, Plantinga concludes that the probability will be at best moderately high, not very much more than a half.
It now remains to estimate the probabilities of the form P(Pi/N&E), for i = 1, 2, 3, 4. Here, Plantinga thinks that, because of the enormous difficulties that naturalists (almost all of whom are at present materialists) face in avoiding P3, P(P3/N&E) is very high. Now, P1, P2, P3, and P4 are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, and their respective probabilities sum to 1. Thus, each of P1, P2, and P4 must be estimated as having low probability on N&E. Plantinga claims that a reasonable estimate of the probabilities leads to an estimate of P(R/N&E) as being somewhat less than a half.
Plantinga grants, however, that estimating probabilities in this sort of context is a dubious business. So he concedes that it would be proper to take the relevant probabilities to be inscrutable to us, leading to the conclusion that P(R/N&E) is inscrutable to us. In this way, Plantinga arrives at his conclusion that P(R/N&E) is either low or inscrutable.
In his self-profile in this volume, Plantinga has given a new argument for the Probability Thesis, which does not consider different possibilities for the relation between belief and action, and which supports the stronger conclusion that P(R/N&E) is low (rather than the conclusion that it is low or inscrutable).
The Defeater Thesis is defended by appealing to hypothetical cases that, it is claimed, are clearly analogous to the case of the naturalist in EAAN. Since, in these cases, the subject has a defeater for R, the same is true of the naturalist who accepts the Probability Thesis. Two hypothetical cases that have tended to predominate in discussions of EAAN are The Case of the Cartesian Demon and The Case of the Drug XX. The former is described below, and a version of the latter is described in Plantinga’s self-profile in this volume.

The Case of the Cartesian Demon
Suppose a man comes to believe that he is the creation of a demon that, as imagined by Descartes, is immensely knowledgeable. Suppose that he also comes to believe that this demon is not particularly concerned with making his creations cognitively reliable, and on at least some occasions has been quite pleased to make them unreliable, and moreover has made them unreliable in such a way that they continue to think of themselves as paragons of reliability, being unable to detect the cognitive disaster that has befallen them. Thinking about this, the man comes to the conclusion that P(R/D) is low or inscrutable, where R is specified to himself, and D is the proposition that the man has been created by the demon. Then the man has a defeater for R.
Plantinga defends the third premise by arguing that, if the naturalist has a defeater for R, this generates a defeater for the rest of his beliefs as well. The reason is that all of the naturalist’s beliefs are products of his cognitive faculties, which constitute their source. Once the reliability of that source comes into question, so do the beliefs generated by the source. Moreover, the defeater for R that the naturalist acquires cannot itself be defeated, since everything that could be a defeater-defeater is itself subject to defeat. To support this, Plantinga says that to rely on one’s cognitive faculties to form a defeater-defeater of the defeater one has for R would be like trusting a man to tell you he is not a liar when you have already been given excellent reasons to doubt his honesty.
Let us now consider some objections to EAAN. Most of the controversy regarding the argument has focused on the Defeater Thesis. There has been one main worry that critics have had about this claim. The objections to it that we shall describe are manifestations of this worry, which can be expressed as follows: what exactly is the connection between the naturalist’s acceptance of the Probability Thesis on the one hand, and her acquisition of a defeater for R on the other? One of the most natural expressions of this worry is the Perspiration Objection

The Perspiration Objection
The probability that the function of perspiration is to cool the body given (just) N&E is also low. But surely it would be absurd to claim that this gives the naturalist a defeater for this belief. Thus, it is also absurd to claim that the naturalist has a defeater for R in virtue of accepting the Probability Thesis.
There is no defeater in the perspiration case because the naturalist has other evidence for his beliefs about the function of perspiration, beyond just N&E. So could not the naturalist appeal to other evidence for his beliefs about R? This thought leads naturally to the Total Evidence Objection for EAAN.

The Total Evidence Objection
The naturalist has many other beliefs besides N&E. The probability of R relative to N&E conjoined with these other beliefs is quite high. Thus, the naturalist need not have a defeater for R in virtue of accepting the Probability Thesis.
Many philosophers (including Plantinga) hold that, in addition to propositional evidence, beliefs can also be warranted in virtue of non-propositional evidence. This leads to yet another objection, due to Michael Bergmann, which we can call the Non-propositional Evidence Objection.

The Non-propositional Evidence Objection
Even if R has low probability on all the available propositional evidence, the naturalist could still have non-propositional evidence for R which makes it rational to continue to hold on to R. Hence, the naturalist need not have a defeater for R merely in virtue of accepting the Probability Thesis.
These objections comprise just a small sample of the arguments against EAAN that have appeared in the published literature on the argument. Many of these, along with Plantinga’s responses to them, are articulated and discussed in Beilby (2002 [Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument]).”

(“Evolutionary argument against naturalism,” by Omar Mirza. In A Companion to Epistemology, 2nd ed., edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup, 351-354. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.)

As for the technical term “defeater” –

“Following Pollock (1986), we can distinguish between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. Intuitively, where E is evidence for H, an undercutting defeater is evidence which undermines the evidential connection between E and H. Thus, evidence which suggests that you are a pathological liar constitutes an undercutting defeater for your testimony: although your testimony would ordinarily afford excellent reason for me to believe that your name is Fritz, evidence that you are a pathological liar tends to sever the evidential connection between your testimony and that to which you testify. In contrast, a rebutting defeater is evidence which prevents E from justifying belief in H by supporting not-H in a more direct way. Thus, credible testimony from another source that your name is not Fritz but rather Leopold constitutes a rebutting defeater for your original testimony. It is something of an open question how deeply the distinction between ‘undermining’ and ‘rebutting’ defeaters cuts.

Significantly, defeating evidence can itself be defeated by yet further evidence: at a still later point in time, I might acquire evidence E″ which suggests that you are not a pathological liar after all, the evidence to that effect having been an artifice of your sworn enemy. In these circumstances, my initial justification for believing that your name is Fritz afforded by the original evidence E is restored. In principle, there is no limit to the complexity of the relations of defeat that might obtain between the members of a given body of evidence. Such complexity is one source of our fallibility in responding to evidence in the appropriate way. ”

(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-defeasible

Of course, Plantinga did not need to reveal his bizarre ignorance of philosophy, metaphysics, biology, and Palaeoanthropology, by using his equally bizarre tiger examples. There are excellent examples of definitively false beliefs that have lead to better outcomes than ones that are “true”, to whatever standard. Take the placebo effect. Its not just a change of perception, it has measurable effects. Of course, Plantinga is not going to use real-world examples in his lecture, because his own beliefs are not based on anything real, and needs his Christian beliefs to appear at least somewhat more likely to be true at the end of his lecture. As I said, what kind of evil and disingenuous being would create us to have false beliefs? Then again, how could we disprove such a notion…? But if we don’t look at the examples of genuinely beneficial false beliefs that actually exist, and judge their value, we will fail to understand how false beliefs themselves can evolve. Plantinga sets himself up to fail in understanding false beliefs, and does so via a very selective attempt at looking at all the available evidence. Beliefs are part of an evolutionarily unique way of avoiding becoming trapped with mere instinctual mechanisms. Thus we need to examine not only whether or not the conclusions themselves are sound, but whether the method by which we arrive at them is also sound, be they mathematics, logic, deduction, induction, empiricism, abstraction, metaphysics, etc. What we’ve done with our scientific models is to produce a predictive instrument designed to weed out false theories and apprehensions, and it is through this method that it can be seen that Plantinga’s arguments can be seen to be invalid. That is why he want’s to destroy naturalism, even at the methodical level …

Here’s the thing. Yes i believe that my and subsequent generations should be taught about what actually happened in the Soviet Union, including all it’s crimes much more than what is taught at present. The truth in short! A truth about the Sovet Union which according to multiple reports seems no longer to be taught in modern Russia, if ever it was taught at all. Seeing as educational textbooks according to this report are downplaying the crimes of Stalin, is it any wonder Stalin in one public poll was deemed the third greatest Russian in all of history (that he was actually an ethnic Georgian didn’t seem to matter to them too much) and for much of the time he was leading it? Worse still if this article from the Daily Telegraph is to be believed, Textbooks are teaching that the crimes were “justified”. These textbooks are also “Anti-semitic”. In light of these reports again it is my belief that a teaching of the crimes of Stalin and his magnates must be much more paramount than it already is. not being taught in the west. They are! And there is plenty of good literature on the Subject. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “Stalin: The court of the Red Tsar” and Robert Service’s “revolutionary ‘triptych’” of biographies on Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, which i am currently reading are good places to start if you would like to learn more.

 The very fact of the literature i’ve just recommended is reason enough i think why conspiricy theories such as the following from Glenn Beck cannot be supported. He states:

“Here’s another story of genocide that for some reason history has erased”

And in the process of me writing this critique, i would like to wish to refute another idea, courtesy of Edvins Snore, the film’s director (Seeing as i’ve already refuted some of the claims made in this film in my Beck Critique, i need not really bring up said points here except only to offer some fresh insight).

In the Nazi Germany, these groups [victims] were also defined by ethnicity, the Jews, for example, and in the soviet union, they defined them by social origin. But the idea was the same. (Typo’s corrected)

As we shall see, that is not the case, and seeing as the event “history has erased” according to Beck’s conspiricy theory is the Holodomor. let’s begin by talking about that shall we?

First, a brief backdrop of economic history of the USSR in the 1920′s is needed. In 1921 Russia’s economy was in a state of heavy ruin due to the nation’s involvement in WW1, then there was the russian Civil War in which the new govt of Lenin put in place a system of so-called “War Communist” economics which he at the time justified on the grounds it was helping to beat the White Army. In practice it meant the nationalization of factories and food being taken from countryside peasants in order to feed townsfolk, city dwellers and ultimately supplying of the Red Army (what came to be known as “Prodrazvyorstka”).

Unsurprisingly you might say these policies didn’t exactly go down too well populace at large. Indeed a direct result of “War Communism” was a growing discontent, especially among the peasantry. Some Rural peasants even went to the task of burning their crops and destroying their livestock rather than handing them over to the state. There were a multitude of left wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks at this time and perhaps the “Kronstadt rebellion” being the most famous example. (I guess we also must mention that a major famine in 1921-22 caused by Prodrazvyorstka plus drought, in which an estimated 5 million died of Hunger, did not help Lenin-peasant relations either).

Is it a surprise Lenin as a result distanced himself from these war communist policies? In an article on Food tax dated to 21st April 1921 titled ’O prodovol’stvennom naloge’, (PSS, Vol 43, pp-218-20), he said that “War communism” was forced upon the Bolsheviks ”by war and ruin”, he continued that War communism “was not, nor could it be, a policy that corresponded to the economic tasks of the proletariat. It was a temporary measure.”

He stuck to this line in the 10th congress, stating:

“it is an unquestionable fact that we went further than was theoretically and politically necessary, and this should not be concealed in our agitation and propaganda.”

And in a speech as reported by Izvestia on 19th october 1921 Lenin said that the war communist policies were “a mistake,” and “in complete contradiction to all we wrote concerning the transition from capitalism to socialism.” To attempt to remedy the economic and political situation, Lenin instituted a little something called the NEP (which was promulgated by decree on 21st March 1921), a sort of quasi-capitalist compromise. In Lenin’s words:

The real nature of the New Economic Policy is this—firstly, the proletarian state has given small producers freedom to trade ; and secondly, in respect of the means of production in large-scale industry, the proletarian state is applying a number of the principles of what in capitalist economics is called “state capitalism ”.

Although the banks, and large industries were still owned by the state. limited private enterprise, especially in the Agricultural sector was allowed, A farmer’s surplus produce for example could be kept and/or sold after taxation (the Soviet govt taking a small amount of the surplus ["Procurement"]) which the effect being the creation of a sort of profit incentive which in turn created the incentive to produce more foodstuffs, which the farmers duly did. As a result Agricultural production rose to pre-War levels. And this quite simply is the reason why there is no major famine during the NEP years.

In spite of any relative success Lenin’s NEP might have had, it did not pursue any real policy of industrialization. This, plus isolationism meant economic growth compared to the growth of the capitalist west was comparitively sluggish. Although the NEP did produce a moderate growth (and had it remained in place it would perhaps have most likely continued to do so) the Gap between the USSR and the most advanced Capitalist nations was growing wider, worse for the leaders so was the gap in Technology (something which was felt to be a major vehicle for socialist progress).

“Stalin and his associates were concerned about the Soviet regime’s persistant failure” – Robert Service, “Stalin: A Biography”, p256.

The profit incentive generated was also responsible for something else too which also deeply annoyed Stalin in the Mid 1920′s (Aside from the “NEP men” who profited much but produced little for example). As the keeping of Grain Surplus materialised itself more in the farmer’s mindset, so they kept more and more of their Grain surplus they were producing to the point where Grain supplies to the state actually fell, this became “critical” to the state by the end of 1927. On 6 January 1928 the Secretariat sent out a secret directive threatening to sack local party leaders who failed to apply ‘tough punishments’ for those who were now said to be “hoarding grain” (see “RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 667, p10-12.”)

Stalin let his feelings show about this in a letter to Sergei Syrtsov and the Siberian Party leadership:

“We hold that this is a road to panic, to the raising of prices- the worst form of barter when it is clearly impossible to meet the needs of a countryside full of peasants with marketable grain stocks: it strengthens the capacity of the powerful stratum of the countryside to rest … The peasant will not hand over his tax on the basis of a pravda editorial – compulsory schedules are crucial for him” – Quoted in Robert Service, “ibid”, p253. Also see J. Hughes, “Stalin, Siberia and the Crisis of the NEP”, p129.

What were these “compulsory schedules”? well it was what Stalin was to do of course, the collectivisation of agriculture but that’s one part of what he did. Stalin also favoured a policy of rapid industrialisation in the name of ‘modernity’ which he outlined in a Speech Delivered at the First All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry on February 4, 1931. Stating:

“[we must] develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy. There is no other way. [...] We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced [capitalist] countries. We must make good this distance in 10 years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.”

Here’s where it all ties in, as i have already said there was not much in the way of a major famine during the NEP years. Indeed it was after the beginning of the implementation of Stalin’s first five year plans, specificaly the implementation of rapid industrialisation and especially following the initial wave of collectivization: as formation of kolkhozes expanded, do we see the food crisis in the USSR, as this document pack from the Russian archives (pdf) bears out to an extent. Here are just a handful of the documents contained within:

Excerpt from the summary number 1 of the Information department of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate]of letters of peasants received by the editors of Krestyanskaya Gazeta [The Peasant’s Gazette] in the beginning of 1929 regarding shortage of bread in villages. Verified copy of the original document. March 26th, 1929. Provided by the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

Fond 2, Record Series 7, File 543, Pages 85 – 100.

“Between January 1st and March 15, 1929 the editors of Krestyanskaya Gazeta [The Peasant’s Gazette] have received 276 letters that described shortages of food in villages, mainly complaints about shortage of bread and high prices of bread.

[...]

Novgorod territory of the Russian Federation, city of Staraya Russa.

In Staraya Russa, Volotovsk, Belebelkovsk, and other districts famine is setting in. 40% of peasants have no bread and by July 1st the number will reach 80%. Currently, the market price of flour is 11 roubles 50 copecks per pood [16 kilograms], fodder oats – 4 roubles. Peasants have slaughtered all smaller farm animals, and now are selling their last remaining cows, selling them to obtain bread. Peasants of the Volotovsk district are abandoning their homesteads and migrating, just to avoid death by starvation.

[...]

Pskov territory, village of Zales’e.

This year we had such terrible famine and 100% of the crops have been destroyed. We are left without any bread. At the moment, we have sold everything of value and now are selling our last farm animals, so we can buy bread from speculators at 9–10 roubles per pood […] as our children are crying at home, left there without a slice of bread. If this continues, by spring we will finish everything and then will die of famine.

[...]

Kaluga Territory, Pyatovsk

district, village of Nikolaevka.

We have fought for freedom and now have to travel to Moscow to buy baked bread as if we don’t know how bake bread locally. Our grain crops have failed 100%, potatoes are also all rotten, and we can’t earn anything. We are now given food assistance of 5 pounds of bread [2.2 kilograms] per month for every dependent. They feed criminals in prisons better, and what crime have we committed? […] You say [in the newspaper] that we have exceeded the pre-war [the 1918–1922 Civil war] quality of life, but when we go to the cooperative shop to buy some chintz [cheap cotton fabric], there is none, only buttons and needles, and even that is [rationed and sold only] by point-books [governmentissued coupons].

December 20th, 1929. Statement of the refugees from the Leninsk village of the Podkolino area to the Buzluk district Executive committee of Middle Volga Region [of the Russian Federation] regarding famine among the villagers. Provided by the Russian State Archive of the Economy.

Fond 8043, Record Series 11, File 16, Page 37 (v.)

“To the Buzluk District Executive Committee.

From the migrant citizens of the Leninsk settlement of the Podkolino village Petition.

We, the abovementioned citizens are asking you not to allow us to die of starvation, since we don’t have any bread at this time, as well as other provisions, nor do we have any animals – can’t slaughter [any]. Our famine happened because we provided to the State seed grain of high quality, which, as you know, shouldn’t be used for daily consumption, and so we turned it all to the State, but we were not compensated in kind, as we had contractual obligations and our seed grain was counted against our debt [of regular grain]. Please, do not let us die – and so we sign:

Baranov, Danilov, Birinov, Petrov, Kulichenko, Smorodin.

December 20th, 1929. This copy from a copy has been verified:

Head of the Secret Department of the Regional Executive Committee – Mavlutov

[Signed and Stamped]“

Memorandum of the territorial representative of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate] for Lower Volga Region regarding food shortage in Stalingrad Region. Original document. January 28th, 1930. Provided by the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

Fond 2, Record Series 8, File 778, Pages 394–398.

“According to very much fractional data collected by the Information department of the territorial agency of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate] in a number of districts of Stalingrad region there is a worsening of food shortage, which now affect wider and wider circles of poor villagers, hired labourers and the village intelligentsia. This increase of food shortages is mainly due to failure of grain crops, noted in certain districts, as well as the 50% reduction of this year’s harvest […] Cases of whole families subsiding entirely on bread surrogates are noted, cases of famine-related hydropsy [oedema] are observed in children and adults. [...] The local authorities are not taking sufficiently drastic measures to reduce the gravity of this food crisis. [Currently,] food shortages have a tendency of growing.”

Excerpt from the secret summary number 27 prepared based on data collected by April 2nd, 1930 by the Information department of the territorial representative of OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate] of the USSR in Middle Volga Region of the Russian Federation regarding preparatory work for the spring sowing campaign. Verified copy of the original document. April 3rd, 1930. Provided by the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

Fond 2, Record Series 8, File 824, Pages 60, 69 – 71, 74.

“Due to poor organization of the issue of accumulation of local food reserves, food shortages in certain communities of Syzran’ and Buguruslan areas are becoming more grave at the moment. In certain districts the number of households experiencing severe shortages of bread is significantly higher (up to 236 households). To an extent, similar situation is observed in the kolkhozes. All of this leads to panicky disposition developing among poor peasants and some of the village middle class, who are noted as saying: “they took from us all bread, and all seed grain, and now don’t offer any assistance, we’ll all have to die of starvation”.

[...]

At some constituencies, the village poor, predominantly women, in person and in groups come to the local Soviets [local authorities] and demand bread: “give us bread or we will ransack barns with the seed grain”; “haven’t had a crumb of brain in a week, already swelling [due to starvation],if you don’t give us bread, we’ll grab you by the throat, we are going to die anyway”

Excerpt from the secret summary number 1 of the Aktyubinsk district department of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate] regarding appearance of signs of famine in villages, based on data collected by April 10th, 1930. Verified copy of the original document, April 11th, 1930. Provided by the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

Fond 2, Record Series 8, File 747, Pages 379 – 383.

“On April 7th, 1930 [OGPU reported that] in the beginning of April [1930] in kolkhoz “Gigant” named in honour of comrade Stalin took place a meeting of the bureau of local communist activists. On the agenda there was one question regarding the mass exodus of members from the kolkhoz, especially due to shortage of food. Collective farmers, who attended the meeting, explained their walkouts by the fear of starvation, saying “the [Communist] party activists know very well that this kolkhoz was organized mostly from poor peasants. Last year’s harvest was less than expected, yet we’ve met the [State] quota for grain procurement by 120% and [because of that] we have [only] 50% of the necessary seed grain and don’t have a single grain of wheat to consume as food. All farm animals are now kolkhoz’ property and nobody has the right to slaughter for personal use even a single ram.” That meeting of the local [Communist] party activists passed a resolution to emphatically request the district committee [of the Communist party] to initiate food distribution for the acutely malnourished members of the kolkhoz at once.”

Memorandum of the territorial representative of OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate] of the USSR in the Middle Asia regarding the extent of starvation in Turkmenistan [Turkmen SSR]. Original document. April 6th, 1930. Provided by the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

Fond 2, Record Series 8, File 810, Pages 307 – 307(v.).

“Memorandum of the deputy representative of OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate] for the Middle Asia to the Asian Bureau of the Central committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks), comrade Shubrikov.

[...]

Several districts of Turkmenistan reported recently that poor villagers are suffering from famine. In some of the auls [villages] there are cases of deaths of typhus due to famine, also hydropsy [oedema] due to starvation.

[...]

Karakilinsk district

25 cases of famine-caused epidemic typhus with deadly outcomes have been recorded in Yartmaryk community. The outbreak of typhus is spreading […] Scurvy caused by famine has appeared in Cherkassk community.

[...]

Tegen district

A crowd of 150 inhabitants of auls [villages] of Mesna and Chaacha came to the USSR Border Guards base and demanded food.

[...]

Serah district

In the Yalovich First aul [village] collective farmers stopped field work and came to the district Executive committee to demand that bread be handed out.

As we can see Food problems were reported as far back as 1929, and it was in 1932-33 do we see the crisis reaching peak. Also interestingly, if you read the document pack, Ukraine wasn’t even the first place to report food problems. In the year of 1932-33 famine affected not only Ukraine, but also multiple provinces of Russia: the Upper, Middle and Lower Volga regions, North Caucuses, Central Chernozem region, the Urals, Western Siberia, as well as the Republic of Kazakhstan and other regions of the USSR. Both the rural and the urban populations ended up starving. All of which due to Stalin’s economic policies. But what that document pack does not tell you is the way Ukraine was marked out for a special and much more cruel treatment than the rest of the USSR courtesy of Stalin and his govt. Even the exiled Trotsky spoke of it in 1939 when he said:

“Nowhere did the purges and repressions assume such a savage and mass character as they did in the Ukraine.”

So for this, im going to turn to an excellent book written by Timothy Snyder titled “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” which lists “Seven crucial policies [which] were applied only, or mainly, in soviet Ukraine in late 1932 or early 1933. Each of them may seem like an anodyne administrative measure, and each of them was certainly presented as such at the time, and yet each had to kill” (p42)

“1. On 18 November 1932, peasants in Ukraine were required to return grain advances that they had previously earned by meeting grain requisition targets. This meant that the few localities where peasants had had good yields were deprived of what little surplus they earned. The party brigades and the state police were unleashed on these regions, in a feverish hunt for whatever food could be found. Because peasants were not given receipts for the grain that they did hand over, they were subject to endless searches and abuse. The Ukrainian party leadership tried to protect the seed grain, but without success.

2. Two days later on 20th November, a meat penalty was introduced. Peasants who were unable to make grain quotas were now required to to pay a special tax in meat. Peasants who still had livestock were now forced to surrender it to the state. Cattle and swine had been a last reserve against starvation. As a peasant girl remembered, “whoever had a cow didn’t starve.” A cow gives milk. and as a last resort it can be slaughtered. Another peasant girl remembered that the familys one pig was seized, and then the family’s one cow. She held it’s horns as it was led away. This was, perhaps, the attachment that teenaged girls on farms feel for their animals. But it was also desperation. Even after the meat penalty was paid, peasants still had to fulfill the original grain quota. lf they could not do this under the threat of losing their animals. they certainly could not do so afterward. They starved.

3. Eight days later on 28th november 1932 Eight days later, on 28 November 193 2, Soviet authorities introduced the ” blacklist.” According to this new regulation, collective farms that failed to meet grain targets were required, immediately, to surrender fifteen times the amount of grain that was normally due in a whole month. ln practice this meant, again, the arrival of hordes of party activists and police, with the mission and the legal right to take everything. No village could meet the multiplied quota, and so whole communities lost all of the food that they had. Communities on the black list had no right to trade, or to receive deliveries of any kind from the rest of the country. They were cut off from food or indeed any other sort of supply from anywhere else. The black-listed communities in Soviet Ukraine, sometimes selected from as far away as Moscow, became zones of death

4. On 5 december 1932, Stalin’s handpicked security chief for Ukraine presented the justification for terrorizing Ukrainian party officials to collect the grain. Vsevolod Balytskyi had spoken with Stalin personally in Moscow on 15 and 24 november. The Famine in Ukraine was to be understood, according to Balytskyi, as the result of a plot of Ukrainian nationalists—in particular, of exiles with connections to Poland. Thus anyone who failed to do his part in requisitions was a traitor to the state.

Yet this policy line had still deeper implications. The connection of Ukrainian nationalism to Ukrainian famine authorized the punishment of those who had taken part in earlier Soviet policies to support the development of the Ukrainian nation. Stalin believed that the national question was in essence a peasant question. and as he undid Lenin’s compromise with the peasants he also found himself undoing Lenin’s compromise with the nations. On 14 December Moscow authorized the deportation of local Ukrainian communists to concentration camps, on the logic that they had abused Soviet policies in order to spread Ukrainian nationalism, thus allowing nationalists to sabotage the grain collection. Balytskyithen claimed to have unmasked a “Ukrainian Military Organization” as as well as Polish rebel groups. He would report, in January 1933, the discovery of more than a thousand illegal organizations and. in February, the plans of Polish and Ukrainian nationalists to overthrow Soviet rule in Ukraine.

The justifications were fabricated, but the policy had consequences. Poland had withdrawn its agents from Ukraine, and had given up any hope of exploiting the disaster of collectivization. The Polish government, attempting to be loyal to the Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact signed in July 1932, declined even to draw international attention to the worsening Soviet famine. Yet Balytsky’s policy, though it rode the coattails of phantoms, generated local obedience to Moscow’s policy. The mass arrests and mass deportations he ordered sent a very clear message: anyone who defended the peasants would be condemned as an enemy. In these crucial weeks of late December, as the death toll in Soviet Ukraine rose into the hundreds of thousands, Ukrainian activists and administrators knew better than to resist the party line. If they did not carry out requisitions, they would find themselves (in the best case) in the Gulag.

5. On 21 december 1932, Stalin (through Kaganovich) affirmed the annual grain requisition quota for Soviet Ukraine, to be reached by January 1933. On 27 November the Soviet politburo had assigned Ukraine a full third of the remaining collections for the entire Soviet Union, now hundreds of thousands of deaths later, Stalin sent Kaganovich to hold the whip hand over the Ukrainian party leadership in Kharkiv. Right after Kaganovich arrived on the evening of 20 December, the Ukrainian politburo was ordered to convene. Sitting until four o’ clock the next morning, it resolved that requisition targets were to be met. This was a death sentence for about three million people . As everyone in that room knew in those early morning hours, grain could not be collected from an already starving population without the most horrific of consequences. A simple respite from requisitions for three months would not have harmed the soviet economy, and would have saved most of those three million lives. Yet Stalin and Kaganovich insisted on exactly the contrary. The state would fight “ferociously,” as Kaganovich put it, to fulfill the plan.

Having achieved his misson in Kharkiv, Kaganovich then traveled through Soviet Ukraine, demanding “100 percent” fulfillment of the plan and sentencing local officials and ordering deportations of families as he went. He returned to Kharkiv on 29 december 1932 to remind Ukrainian party leaders that the seed grain was also to be collected.

6. As starvation raged throughout Ukraine in the first weeks of 1933. Stalin sealed the borders of the republic so that peasants could not flee, and closed the cities so that peasants could not beg. As of 14 January 1933 Soviet citizens had to carry internal passports in order to reside in cities legally. Peasants were not to receive them. On 22 January 1933 Balytskyi warned Moscow that Ukrainian peasants were fleeing the republic, and Stalin and Molotov ordered the state police to prevent their flight. The next day the sale of long-distance rail tickets to peasants was banned. Stalin’s justification was that the peasant refugees were not in fact begging bread but, rather, engaging in a “counterrevolutionary plot,” by serving as living propaganda for Poland and other capitalist states that wished to discredit the collective farm. By the end of Feburary 1933 some 190,000 peasants had been caught and sent back to their home villages to starve.

Stalin had his “fortress” in Ukraine, but it was a stronghold that resembled a giant starvation camp. with watchtowers, sealed borders, pointless and painful labor, and endless and predictable death.

7. Even after the annual requisition target for 1932 was met in late January 1933, collection of grain continued. Requisitions went forward in February and March, as party members sought grain for the spring sowing. At the end of December 1932, Stalin had approved Kaganovichs proposal that the seed grain for the spring be seized to make the annual target. This left the collective farms with nothing to plant for the coming fall, Seed grain for the spring sowing might have been drawn from the trainloads bound at that very moment for export, or taken from the three million tons that the Soviet Union had stored as a reserve. Instead it was seized from what little the peasants in Soviet Ukraine still had. This was very often the last bit of food that peasants needed to survive until the spring harvest. Some 37,392 people were arrested in Soviet Ukrainian villages that month, of them presumably trying to save their families from starvation. This final collection was murder, even if those who executed it very often believed that they were doing the right thing. As one activist remembered, that spring he “saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes.” Yet he “saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide.” He had faith: “As before, I believed because I wanted to believe.” Other activists, no doubt, were less faithful and more fearful. Every level of the Ukrainian party had been purged in the previous year; in January 1953, Stalin sent in his own men to control it’s heights. Those communists who no longer expressed their faith formed a “wall of silence” that doomed those it surrounded. They had learned to resist was to be purged, and to be purged was to share the fate of those whose deaths they were now bringing about.” – Snyder, “ibid”, p42-46.

Okay, so what about the numbers that perished of Famine not just only in the Ukraine, but of all of experienced famine during this time? Soviet officials who in “private conversations” at the time most often suggested a figure of “5.5 million dead from hunger” (Snyder, “ibid”, p53.) More recently, a demographic calculation carried out by the authorities of the now independant Ukraine government provided a figure of “3.89 million” in the Ukraine alone (“ibid”, p53.) The truth concerning the number of victims in the Ukraine according to Snyder is somewhere between that 3.89 million estimate and a 2.5 million estimate which was deemed “too close to the recorded figure of excess deaths, which is about 2.4 million”, a “substantially low” figure “since many deaths were not recorded” (ibid, “p53″.) Snyder gives us his own estimate of “3.3 million” Ukrainians (ibid, “p53″) This document heightens up what could be deemed a reasonable estimate, up to 4-5 million dead.

Whatever the precise number of dead may be, namely because the exact number of deaths is hard to determine, due to a lack of records and incomplete data. According to registry offices data, in 1931 for example, before the famine, 514.7 thousand deaths in Ukraine were recorded. In 1932, the mortality rate rose to 668.2 thousand. In 1933, the officially registered deaths amounted to 1850.3 thousand. (A.V Shubin, “10 mifov sovetskoi strany. (10 myths of the Soviet state)”, p198.) Thus, if we consider the mortality rate in 1931 as a “background rate”, the number of victims of the 1932 – 1933 famine in Ukraine would end up being around 1.4891 million. (Shubin, “ibid”) Not a very high number is it? Little wonder historians consider these figures far from complete.

This brings the figure of “7 million Ukrainians alone”, as quoted in the film into context. Assuming the population of the Ukrainian SSR during 1932-34 was roughly 30 million, a 5 million loss would represent a loss of just about 17% of the total population (A 7 million loss would equal a 23-24% loss here). In fact a “7 million” figure would seem to me, to more accurately describe the total losses of all the famine affected regions of the USSR. although depending on calculations, the total number could vary between 6-8 million. It should be pointed most reasonable estimates come within appx 3.5 – 5 million famine victims in the Ukraine and 7-8 million famine victims in total. And the actions in the Ukraine were specific enough to be counted as Genocidal.

Note that none of what i said invalidates too much the Soviet Story’s treatment of the Holodomor. What i’ve done here is to give it a little bit of a larger context. I would say the treatment for the most part is valid, but lacks originality.

But the Holodomor is not the main thrust of the movie, nor is it the thing i am truly interested in about. but rather the superficial Nazi-Soviet comparisons this movie makes. The critiquing of which will form the main body of this work. We’re only 11 mins into the movie, but i would like to address the point of Marx believing in a “dictatorship of the Proletariat” which is brought up, because out of alkl Marx’s ideas, this one arguably is the one most woefully misunderstood.

When Marx uses that phrase, he doesn’t mean an actual physical dictatorship but is referring to how society is structured through the concept of the “Base” and the “Superstructure” and the interplay between the two. According to Marx, we  live now in something called ”the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (again not a physical dictatorship)” as the social structure is apparantly mainly geared to support them and their interests and it is the bourgeoisie that really run the political structure for their own benefit only. All Marx is saying is that a Worker’s democracy that is run for the workers will change that and the base and the Superstructure will be set in accordance with worker’s needs and not capitalists. What Marx was striving for in the dictatorship of the Proletariat was in fact a radical democracy. Marx and Engels were democracts. And his views on the masses and revolution could be summarised from a single sentence uttered in an  interview to the Chicago Tribune,

“No revolution can be made by a party, but By a Nation.”

In other words the great masses, and not human leaders, will lead to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state. Lenin disagreed with Marx on this critical point. “The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness”, wrote Lenin in What is to be done? (1902). “The theory of socialism, however,” was developed by “educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals.”

Revolution according to Lenin required an elite leading it, not the masses. And here we can see the difference most clearly between Lenin and Marx. There is a good reason why Lenin’s ideas are designated “Marxist-Leninist” rather than singularly “Marxist”, and that reason is that he and the subsequent Soviet leaders’ approaches to interpreting the works of Marx and Engels were rather selective or utilitarian at most. They were still Marxist inspired self styled socialist dictators so don’t get me wrong but a good example of Stalin’s  hypocrisy for example can be found in 1934 when in the July of that year Stalin decided to find it “inappropriate” to publish Engels’s article “The foreign policy of Russian Tsarism” in the “Bolshevik” magazine, and yet in August of the same year he claimed Engels was his “teacher”. There is no reason to suggest either Marx or Engels had they lived long enough would have supported the crimes of the Soviet Union (save for those silly quotemines that will soon come up). It should be telling enough that Karl Kautsky, the German editor of Marx’s works, opposed the Soviet Union, stating:

“The Bolsheviki under Lenin’s leadership, however, succeeded in capturing control of the armed forces in Petrograd and later in Moscow and thus laid the foundation for a new dictatorship in place of the old Czarist dictatorship.”

And another thing to note, under Marxist theory, not only is the USSR not a Communist state but also the very idea of a Communist state is an oxymoron. Communism is a stateless ideology as is evident from the words of Engels!

“[Under socialism] the proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, of an organisation of the particular class, which was pro tempore the exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). The state was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out..” – Friedrich Engels, “Anti-Dühring (1877), Part III: Socialism“

And this thing about Marx wanting a new man, where the Soviet Story get’s that idea from, im not sure, although the Soviet Union did! However the comparison made between both regimes (Nazi and Soviet) ambitions of wanting a” new man” is slightly superficial, and i find the idea put forth that the “New man” of the USSR was based on false sociology wheras Nazi’s “New man” was based on false biology to be slightly relativistic. Actually the Nazis went further than what the USSR ever did, basing their “New man” on both false biology and false sociology!

“Unlike the Soviet Experiment in engineering souls, the Nazis went a stage further in seeking to engineer bodies as well as minds, although the inhuman characteristics both regimes sought to incalcate, especially on the young, were often hard to distinguish” – Michael Burleigh, “The Third Reich: A new History”, p6.

14 mins into the film and we come now to the curious claim that ”only socialists publicaly advocated genocide in the 19th and 20th centuries” courtesy of George Watson. I find that claim a little bit odd, seeing as for one example, a certain ”Lothar von Trotha” more than proclaim he was going to carry out a genocide to the Herero and namaqua peoples, he actualy carried one out (and isnt that more important?). if you want more details. See “The Kaiser’s Holocaust. Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism” by David Olusoga and Casper W Erichsen.

Oh, and perhaps Watson doesn’t know that the Kaiser, after his abdication too advocated genocide, namely a genocide of the Jews (although perhaps not so much in public).

“In the bitterness of exile Kaiser Wilhelm II made the final dreadful leap into the anti-semitism of extermination. ‘The hebrew race’, he wrote in english to an american friend ‘are my most inveterate enemies at home and abroad; they remain what they are and always were: the forgers of lies and the masterminds governing unrest, revolution, upheaval by spreading infamy with the help of their poisoned, caustic, satyrical [sic] spirit. If the world wakes up it should mete out to them the punishment in store for them, which they deserve.’ On 2 dec 1919, he wrote “Manu Proprio” to General August von Mackensen, referring to his own abdication; ‘The deepest, most disguisting shame ever perpetrated by a people in history, the Germans have ever done onto themselves. Egged on and misled by the Tribe of Juda whom they hated, who were guests among them! That was their thanks! Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated [vertilgt und ausgerottet] from German soil! This poisonous mushroom on the German Oak tree’. He called for a ‘regular international all-worlds progrom à la Russe’ as ‘the best cure’. ‘Jews and mosquitoes’ were ‘a nuisence that humanity must get rid of in some way or other,’ he proclaimed, and added again in his own hand: ‘i believe the best would be Gas!’” – John C. G. Röhl, “The Kaiser and his court: Wilhelm II and the government of Germany”, p210-211.

And never have i heard that the Kaiser was a socialist, if he were to claim more broadly that only socialists advocated genocide, well as we have seen that’s sheer nonsense

Straight after that, and a slide titled “Why killing is essential”, “George Watson” continues his nonsense,  by making a complete hash of an article Engels wrote titled the “Magyar Struggle“. Engels is not calling for a genocide or for the extermination of anyone. he is just relating the situation as it is occurring in the tumultuous times of 1848 and the aggressors and perpetrators are the capitalist counter-revolutionary forces themselves. He is merely saying, “watch out; look what’s likely to happen”. More importantly he is not making the prediction as a threat as Hitler did. He is describing a situation ALREADY in progress. And by ‘reactionary people’ he does not mean some kind of coherent ‘race’ but only those that push for the unnatural formation of a pan-Slav state, a “Slav Sonderbund” as he calls it. A manufactured false community and idea that has no historic bearing among its many diversified components.

“Pan-Slavism means the union of all the small Slav nations and nationalities of Austria, and secondarily of Turkey, for struggle against the Austrian Germans, the Magyars and, eventually, against the Turks”

The Racial trash quote? Well remember what i said about usage of the word “race” in the 19th century in this thread. And besides which, it would have been the capitalist nations who would have put these peoples “in the trash can (if we really must be using this sort of rhetoric)”

15 mins in and we cross to “Pierre Rigoulot” who, without  showing any quotes whatsoever to back his claims, tells us ”Marx believed Poland had no reason to exist”. I take it im expected to believe this to be true simply because it is being said out loud right? Well either way, it is, as should be expected from these types of films, a lie! Both Marx and Engels were very much in favour of an independant poland. This by Engels sums it up best i think:

“Allow me, dear friends, to speak here today as an exception in my capacity as a German. For we German democrats have a special interest in the liberation of Poland. It was German princes who derived great advantages from the division of Poland and it is German soldiers who are still holding down Galicia and Posen. The responsibility for removing this disgrace from our nation rests on us Germans, on us German. democrats above all. A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations. The liberation of Germany cannot therefore take place without the liberation of Poland from German oppression. And because of this, Poland and Germany have a common interest, and because of this, Polish and German democrats can work together for the liberation of both nations.” – Engels, “On Poland; from a speech at the International Meeting held in London on November 29th ,1847 to mark the 17th Anniversary of the Polish Uprising of 1830“

So if they really opposed Polish independance, they sure were taking rather odd positions for it weren’t they? What directly follows next is arguably the film’s most infamous quotemine, and the direct inspiration for the title of Beck’s documentary.

“The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way… They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust.”

Both segments i have already dealt with in the Beck critique! but i bring it up again because what i wrote there refutes the claim followed afterwards by George Watson that “Marx began it … he was the ancestor of modern political genocide”. And seeing as no other genuine Marx/Engels quotes are brought out, i have come to the conclusion that Marx did not begin modern political genocide.

As to anyone advocating Genocide before Marx and Engels, Well it isn’t too hard to turn Andrew Jackson into more of a monster by i guess Watson’s standards is it? Here’s an example:

“My original convictions upon this subject have been confirmed by the course of events for several years, and experience is every day adding to their strength. That those tribes can not exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens is certain. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.” – Andrew Jackson, “Fifth Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1833“.

But  what i will not do is claim Jackson or the Kaiser really influenced Hitler without solid evidence, to do so would be to do what Watson is doing, and that is to commit the “Genetic fallacy”

—

Now for the following i would like you to pay attention, as much to the Visual imagery used as well to the talking heads or what the narrator are saying,  in this excerpt uploaded to youtube, 3:08 onwards (Im Skipping the Goebbels speech due to it being covered elsewhere).

we see the the well known Hitler painting ”In the Beginning was the Word (taken from John 1:1)” being compared to a similar looking painting of Lenin, with the inference of “Similar imagery = similar ideology”. The title of the Hitler painting, and the actual portraryl of Hitler and Lenin as being the source of light in a darkened atmosphere obviously reveals a Messianic allegory which really ought to be yet more obvious when we compare both paintings to something else (click to enlarge)!

The painting in the middle is titled “Jesus among his Students” and was painted by the famous Dutch painter “Rembrandt” all the way back in 1634. It would be absurd to suggest Rembrandt is somehow now a Nazi/Communist! And i do not see how the adaptions of it are evidence of similar ideologies, but rather both Hitler and Lenin utilising a type of character portraryl (for their own purposes) which streches back centuries, a character portraryl which mannifested itself in various “secular” ways. Here are three radically different examples:

The next thing the film shows off, is one of these:

I guess i have to explain it right? These little badges were dished out to the more socialistic/communistic leaning “workers” as a way of “reasurring them” ie really “winning them over to the Nazi cause” on the May day bank holidays (this one in 1934 as you can see), something that the Trade Unions had been campaigning for during the Weimar republic and which the Nazis gave them in 1933. Of course the very next day, Hitler abolished the Unions. So these badges were little more than propaganda trinkets. All that is left of the youtube excerpt is the “similar posters” nonsense (What a laugh!), a quotation by Hermann Rauschning (although George Watson doesn’t cite the source) which i’ll get to, and the “Argument by name” which i shall now debunk!

The Argument by name is a very simple one to explain, the very reason why they called themselves “National Socialist”, is the same reason why trinkets like that badge was produced. It was really all about winning over the masses to nationalism.

The ‘national’ part should therfore be really be obvious. Aside from it being the one element of the party name that was actualy descriptive, Hitler and Drexler by Putting the word ‘National’ into the party name was designed to attract those already nationalist like for example those who liked/supported the Conservative DNVP for example (The “German National[ist] People’s Party [So were they really a party for the people?].

The ‘German workers’ part was the original title of Drexler’s party who had a fear of eastern europeans [in paticular czechs] coming in and taking the ‘German jobs’. His preference was wanting german workers in German jobs over foreign workers

“In march 1918 he [Drexler] set up a commitiee of independant workmen with an anti-semitic and anti-foreigner emphasis. This was formalized in january 1919 as the German workers party” – James Taylor and Warren shaw, Penguin dictionary of the third reich, p79.

“All they really wanted said Drexler, was “to be ruled by Germans” – John Toland, “Adolf Hitler” p86.

Again, Very simple, So this part of the name came from the plain Right wing Xenophobia Drexler had!

Now onto the juicy bit, You must understand the word ‘socialist’ had great popular appeal in the late 19th century, and well into the early 20th century especialy in Germany. and get this the conservative parties at the time ALSO ADOPTED IT to try and tap into that appeal. Certainly from 1878 (Interestingly the same year as the “Anti-Socialist” legislation) Onwards, It was the Conservatives who were the ones founding anti-semitic political parties based on race and using anti-semitism in party platforms. That was really their main (though not the only) plank. Now here’s the really juicy irony, In Germany, it was these very Conservative political parties which sought to disenfrahise or in some other way to victimize Jews, were the ones who described themselves from the first as ‘social’ or ’socialist’. Hitler’s party, in step with this Conservative tradition, would later call itself “national Socialist”.

there was for example, Adolf Stocker’s “Christian Social(ist) workers party”. Which…

“in a working alliance with the Conservative Party, aimed at reaching the workers [even] through anti-capitalistic and anti-Semitic slogans. Stocker, who had a decisive influence upon German Conservativism of the late nineteenth century, upon the Kaiser as well as Friedrich Naumann, also was one of the main precursors of National Socialism. The affinity between the new conservatism of the twentieth century and National Socialism, insofar as it existed, was already foreshadowed in him.” – Klemens von Klemperer, “Germany’s New Conservatism” p58.

 

“In particular they identified the Jewish influence as the source of Germany’s economic woes, political unrest, and moral decline. The remedies they proposed included the exclusion of Jews from positions of public authority (such as teaching and judicial posts) within what they defined as “the Christian state”; strict laws against usury; [as that was a traditional Christian value] protection of classes allegedly oppressed by Jewish middlemen; restrictions on the stock exchange; and heavier taxes on the profits from what they called “mobile capital.” [We have to remember that this is not an attempt at socialism but rather the rationale behind this "program" was to remove the Jews and just the Jews, from economic society] With this program, of course, Conservative anti-Semites joined a chorus of other Germans and Europeans who denounced the “Golden International.” – James Retallack, “Anti-Semitism, Conservative propaganda and Regional Politics in Late Nineteenth Century Germany”. German Studies Review, Vol. 11, no.3 (Oct 1988), pp. 377 -403.

And just to be sure of what we’re dealing with: 

“For in the service of their socio-economic goals Hammerstein and Stocker also argued for a more active style of Conservative politics. They believed that in some new commitment to Christian, social, and “popular” goals lay the key to giving Conservatism a stamp of popularity (Volkstiiinlichkeit).” – Retallack, Ibid.

So as you can see, there was a tradition of the political Right using the word ‘socialist’ in order to attempt to steal some of the populism that the term evoked at the time. And the name was chosen because Drexler and Hitler wanted to appeal to a wider audience.

“Drexler’s party sought in the longer term to win the working class over from Marxism and enlist it in the pan-German cause. The fledgling party was in fact another creation of the hyperactive Thule Society. There was nothing unusual about Drexler or his tiny party in the FAR-RIGHT hothouse of Munich after the defeat of the revolution.” - Richard Evans,”The Coming of the Third Reich”, p170.

So the whole “Argument by name” is a very silly argument indeed, as is the poster argument (see here for a proper refutation of it), especially when you realise that some of the Soviet examples seen actually date from after the war! So who is copying who?

“My happiness depends on your successes” is dated to 1947 .

“We demand peace!” is dated to 1950.

“Be observant when standing sentinel” is dated to 1953.

“Peace.Socialism. Democracy” is dated to 1970.

“The Lenin’s party — a vanguard of communistic building” is dated to 1981.

This leaves us left with Rauschning, and this quote courtesy of George Watson:

“I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit, … I don’t mean their tire-some social doctrine or the materialist conception of history, or their absurd ‘marginal utility’ theories and so on. But I have learned from their methods. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and penpushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it.”

Unfortunately for Watson, there is no evidence Hitler uttered those words. The book where he got it from (and actually i gave the full quote here), “The Voice of destruction”, or “Hitler speaks” depending on translation, like the Hitler diaries is now known to be fraudulent and has been exposed by Wolfgang Hänel. See his “Hermann Rauschnings ‘Gespräche mit Hitler’: Eine Geschichtsfälschung” for more details (This 1985 newspaper article gives a brief synopsis of the book’s contents)

There are a few others that question the authenticity of the so called conversations, See Eckhard Jesse, “Herman Rauschning – Der fragwürdige Kronzeuge,” in Ronald Smelser et al (eds.), Die braune Elite II: 21 weitere biographische skizzen, p201-202. And also see Fritz Tobas, “Auch Fälschungen haben lange beine: Des senatpräsidenten Rauschnings ‘Gespräche mit Hitler’,” in K, Corino (ed), Gefälscht: Betrug in Literatur, Kunst, musik Wissenschaft und politik.”.

And before all of that, Eberhard Jäckel in 1969 in his “Hitler’s Worldview: A Blueprint for Power (p15-17)” mde the point that the Hitler presented by Rauschning’s conversations was so one-dimensional, mainly as an opputunist, that it makes it look like his Anti-semitism ended up having nothing to do with the Holocaust!

Ian Kershaw in the Introduction to his book “Hubris” sums up this source best:

“I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether.”

And im going to use the end of that youtube excerpt as a stopping point. This post is already quite long, and we’re only 20 mins into the movie. And if you want me to continue, there is plenty more stuff to cover!

This book is a must read for anyone who is slightly apprehensive about reading books on complex physics due to it’s mathematical nature. Greene steers clear of any complex jargon, and explains ideas clearly an concisely, though you might find his use of characters from the Simpsons, and the X-files to explain relativity and quantum physics etc. somewhat patronizing (I certainly cringed a little bit at first, but I got used to it).

For example, he employs Lisa and Bart Simpson to explain Einstein’s theory of special relativity. He asks us to imagine Lisa shooting a laser off into the distance, and Bart chasing it on his high powered skateboard. The skateboard can travel 500 million miles per hour, whilst the laser travels at 670 million miles an hour. From Lisa’s stand point she would say that the beam of light was speeding away from Bart at 170 million miles an hour, however when Bart returns he states that the speed of the light was racing away from him at 670 million miles per hour. “If Lisa had been able to see Bart’s watch as he sped along at 500 million miles per hour, she would have seen that it was ticking about two-thirds as fast as her own,” he writes. The conclusion is stunning: the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time – an amazing truth, but I think it could have been explained without having to invoke Bart and Lisa Simpson!

Greene takes you through classical Newtonian physics, to the strange and counter intuitive realms of relativity and quantum physics (subjects I’d previously found daunting, but was surprised to find that I could actually grasp the basics of it and even explain it to people after reading), before asking questions about the nature of time at the level of both the Einsteinian and the quantum, moving on the origin of the universe, string theory and M-theory, and finally the prospects of teleportation and time travel.

Though the chapters themselves are quite long, each chapter is divided up into several parts under subheadings, so it’s an easy book to pick up and put down again, without feeling too lost. There’s plenty of illustrations, to aid your understanding of some of the concepts that he explains (this is particularly helpful when it comes to the quantum physics).

All in all, I would highly recommend this book to someone who, like me who initially feels challenged by physics and cosmology. It’s a really clear and easy to understand book, and you will find yourself being thrilled by many of the strange and wonderful concepts that it takes you through. If you’re already well versed in physics and cosmology, you will probably find the explanations and analogies in this book too patronizing and laboured, but for someone who feels daunted by the subjects covered, it is a perfect book to give you a basic grasp of the laws that govern the universe we live in. The Fabric of The Cosmos is an inspiring and enlightening read.

Rating: 9/10

Review by: Laurens

The major driver behind our inability to admit mistakes is the need to reduce cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling of simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs. In this case the belief that ‘I am a good person’ conflicts with the belief ‘I made a mistake’ and rationalisation kicks in to try and eliminate one of these two beliefs. The easiest one to avoid is ‘I made a mistake’ and that is often the one to go. The authors talk about the numerous ways in which we all try and reduce dissonance. We blame other people, we come up with justifications for our actions, and we ignore evidence that shows we are wrong. Interestingly, we also rewrite our very memories of events to make them seem more favourable to our point of view. This chapter really made me question how accurate anyone (including myself) could be when trying to recall past events.

The most illuminating example(s) in Mistakes Were Made were those that dealt with recovered memories. Recovering memories used to be a legitimate psychiatric practice and helped thousands of people ‘remember’ child abuse, sexual assaults, satanic rituals, and even alien abductions. You’d think by the time aliens came up, the accuracy of the technique might be called into question but the authors do a great job of explaining how accepting small steps can lead to ending at ludicrous (even criminal) outcomes that would not have been accepted in the beginning. The allegations of parental sexual abuse had devastating impacts of real families and some of those involved still can’t admit they were wrong.

Mistakes Were Made contains numerous lessons that anyone could apply to their own lives. I learned a lot from this book and it changed the way I think about how other think and act. The central message from this book is that we all would be better off admitting to each other (and ourselves) when we are wrong.

Overall: 9/10 fantastic read.

Books, and their content, can challenge our political, religious, and moral sensibilities. Well written literature can change the ethical zeitgeist, inspire a revolution, and even start a new faith – 26 lead soldiers can indeed conquer the world. Because of this, books are often seen by current authorities as divisive and dangerous. If they cannot dispute or counter the ideas contained within, they will resort to destroying the method of propagation in order to prevent the spread of such thoughts. One of the earliest notable book-burning was carried out by the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who ordered all philosophy and history books from states other than Qin to be burned. Soon, dissenting scholars who refused to carry out the orders to destroy these important works were being buried alive. The main effect of this book-burning was the loss of the Hundred Schools of Thought which influenced Chinese life. After the persecution ended only the School of Scholars (Confucianism) and the School of Law retained a prominent position. Lost were the schools that focussed on empiricism, reason, and logic – potentially a great setback for the development of Chinese culture.

In 1478 the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, also known as the Spanish inquisition, was established. The aim of this inquisition was to hold trials for adherents of other faiths (Jews and Muslims) and attempt to convert them to Christianity. If they would not convert or agreed to conversion but were later caught taking part in religious rituals from their original faith, they were put to death. Eventually, the suspicion that Muslims were secretly practicing religious rituals led to the majority of them to be expelled from Spain. During the persecution, several religious books including the Koran were burned en masse. In this case, it was the competition of religious sensibilities which led to the attempted extermination of Muslim ideas. The German playwright Heinrich Heine wrote about the Spanish inquisition in the tragedy Almansor, in the mouth of a persecuted Muslim he puts the words “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” As burning books cannot completely eliminate an idea , authorities will eventually have to burn people to completely purge the threatening idea from society – and so it was during the inquisition of Spain. In a bit of black irony, Heine’s works were including amongst the Jewish, socialist, and dissident books burned by the Nazi’s in 1933. His quote from Almansor above is engraved on the ground at the site of the burning.

In the category of censorship in the name of moral outrage, nothing comes close to the bonfires of vanities which were especially common in Italy during the fifteenth century. In the most famous fire – lit by Savonarola in Florence – mirrors, statues, cosmetics, art, chess pieces, and lewd books were all burned to ashes. One book in particular was the Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) written by the Roman poet Ovid. The book contains advice on how to find women, seduce them, and then keep them from being stolen away. Savonarola, the theocratic ruler of Florence, decided that this work was too lascivious to be available to the public and so had Ovid’s book consigned to the flames. The bodies soon followed as acts of homosexuality, previously tolerated, became a crime punishable by execution. Many others were sent to the flames for their own acts of immorality. Savonarola was eventually burned to death himself after being excommunicated by the Pope. Ovid’s Art of Love must be particularly bad because further censorship occurred when US customs seized an English translation in the 1930s, almost two thousands years after it was originally written.

In modern times the 451°C threat appears less menacing. With the advent of mass printing and the spread of ebooks online eliminating ideas is much more difficult. However, book-burnings are still a powerful symbol in which various groups declare certain ideas are off-limits to society.  Today I learned that a Christian group, the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida, is promoting September 11 as International Burn the Koran Day. Led by Fireman Terry Jones, the evangelical church plans to build a pyre of Korans and they hope their example will be copied around the world. Not much offends me, but I find book-burnings to be completely unacceptable no matter what book is being torched. Even more galling is the pastor’s comments that burning the Koran will give Muslims a chance to convert! This church is so bigoted that they see the Koran as a dangerous book that it needs to be destroyed before people have a chance to read it and are willing to use tactics reminiscent of the Spanish inquisition. They are the latest incarnation of a dangerous movement which seeks the destruction of our cultural and intellectual heritage, and as such they must be opposed. So this September 11, rather than burn a Koran I’m going to read one. Rather than attempting to eliminate certain ideas, I’m going to integrate them a little further into our collective society. Anyone interested in joining me?

Star trek provides many clear examples of morality portrayed through the lens of science fiction. The most prominent ethical instruction which permeates many episodes is the ‘Prime Directive’ which constrains the actions of Starfleet personnel. Simply put, the Prime Directive prevents intervention into pre-warp alien societies so as not to interfere with the natural course of their cultural development.  In principle the Prime Directive is an absolute rule to be obeyed even when the inhabitants of a primitive planet are about to be wiped out. In practice, the crew sometimes engage in exceptions to prevent genocides (e.g., Patterns of Force) or stop devastating asteroid impacts (e.g., For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky). Although these violations are not without consequences for both crew and captain, the interventions are usually portrayed as the right action given the circumstances. The real-world political doctrine of non-intervention can be seen as the contemporary equivalent of the Prime Directive. Based on the principles of state sovereignty and self-determination it says that states cannot and should not interfere in the domestic affairs of others. This doctrine is also supposed to be absolute, frowning upon alliances and wars on foreign soil; it instead opts for the containment of problems within local regions. However, just like the Prime Directive, non-interventionism has been violated in recent history by several prominent countries. One clear example is the UN intervention in Kosovo which was carried out under dubious legal authority. The justification given was the prevention of a humanitarian crisis, similar to the reason in Patterns of Force. States will also rush to provide humanitarian aid in countries, like Haiti, which have been hit with natural disasters. Star Trek managed to give us a discussion of non-interventionism, covering both the reasons for it and the horrid situations that result from pursing it to the limit. All this was done in a neutral setting where the idea could be freely discussed away from any real-world political divides which hamper proper dialogue. Star Trek also gave us the moral reasons for breaking the Prime Directive long before humanitarian concerns motivated us on Earth to get involved in the domestic crises of others.

Although science-fiction regularly deals with broad, societal-scale ethics there is also a deep theme of personal morality promoted through the hero or heroine of each series. They are the ones faced with tough decisions and regularly have to balance competing interests when confronted with moral dilemmas. Because they are our heroes they usually make the decision that result in the best outcome in every situation, but sci-fi asks whether merely doing the right thing is enough. If the hero does the right thing but acts for the wrong reasons they will lose our respect and we will begin to question their ethical status.  Delenn, our heroine of Babylon 5, has to face this additional layer of complexity for her moral decisions.  In Comes the Inquisitor she enters a crucible designed to force out the motivations for her actions. Over and over the inquisitor asks who she is. Is she someone filled with pride, puffed up with her own self-importance, and desperate for the glory that will come should she save the universe from destruction? Or is she someone motivated solely by the desire to preserve life and even willing to pay the ultimate price “For one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know, or see”²? According to consequentialist moral theories, what determines the rightness of an act is the outcome alone. No consideration is given to the intentions that the actor was trying to put into practice. Babylon 5 asks whether the outcomes are enough to determine the morally of a given situation and the answers given is a resounding “No!” As is said in the episode, “If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, the work becomes corrupt, impure, and ultimately self-destructive.”² Consider the war in Iraq, there’s no question that Saddam Hussein was a cruel and corrupt dictator and that removing him was a good thing for the Iraqi people. However, it would be hard to maintain that the political leaders at the time were acting with the intension of helping Iraq rather than for the wrong reasons which included political and strategic gain. These intensions corrupted the entire exercise and, quite rightly, leave a foul taste in many a mouth. This example shows that a person who performs a kind deed for another solely because of a selfish benefit is not truly acting in an altruistic manner. Without the right intentions, the moral actor is not really moral at all. Furthermore, good intentions are more likely to lead to good outcomes, while the cases of bad intentions leading to good outcomes are rare.  Promoting good intentions as morally necessary is one way to improve the consequences of our ethical decision making in the real world.

Speaking of wartime conflict, science-fiction offers a way to discuss the morality of war without getting bogged down in the politics of more local events. We Earthers have a saying: in war, all things are permitted. This statement is explored and taken to its logical conclusion in Battlestar Galactica. In this alternate reality, humanity has built an army of advanced robots and employed them as slaves to perform the menial work necessary to keep a civilisation running. But the Cylons became something greater than their original design and have reached the point where they think and feel so much like their human counterparts it is difficult to tell them apart. The Cylons then turn on their former masters, determined to conquer all humankind. As the show progresses and most of the human military is destroyed, the remaining resistance turns to increasingly brutal acts in order to prevent the Cylons from achieving a complete victory. If the Cylons were merely mindless robots, the actions of the humans would not be morally questionable but because the Cylons share many of the same properties as humans the tactics used by the resistance are open to scrutiny. Even in the context of war, some lines should not be crossed. In the episode Flesh and Bone, a Cylon operative convinces the crew that he has planted a nuclear bomb aboard one of their ships. In this clear case of a ‘ticking bomb’ the interrogation turns to torture in order to learn its location. The bomb scenario is brought up ad nausem in the debates on torture and is usually seen as a trump card. However, Battlestar Galactica highlights a big problem with its use because, as it turns out, there is no bomb and the torture was ultimately pointless. The problem with all ticking bomb scenarios is that, in a real-life situation, the interrogator cannot know that there is a bomb, that the bomber will give up its whereabouts, or that the bomb can actually be stopped. It might be said that the Cylon should not have lied about the existence of the bomb in the first place and so the torture was justified, but this literally makes torture the punishment for lying, a completely unacceptable situation. The second wartime issue conveyed to us by Battlestar Galactica is that of suicide bombing civilian targets in the name of resisting occupation. In the episode rightly called Occupation, members of the human resistance start suicide bombing Cylon and, more controversially, Cylon-friendly human targets. Most people would consider any such act to be morally abominable but set in an alternate universe with humanity on the brink of extinction, Battlestar Galatica manages to make us sympathise with the beleaguered resistance and perhaps even elicits some approval for their actions. Although, by itself, the episode is not enough to change our minds on the tactic of suicide bombing, it is enough to give us pause when we hear of similar instances on this planet and ask ourselves whether we would do the same if under occupation by foreign forces.

We have now seen how science fiction can enlighten us on issues as broad ranging as non-interventionism, intention/consequence approaches to ethics, and the morality of war. By removing the cultural and political barriers that exist in everyday life, science fiction allows for an unprejudiced discussion of moral dilemmas. The fantastic tales provide a narrative that lets us approach ethics in an indirect manner but, as I’ve shown, the results are very much applicable in the terrestrial world. Science fiction is a moral thought experiment performed at the cosmic scale. Ultimately, science fiction gives us an external standard and a common frame of reference to draw upon when faced with our own ethical decisions. If you’ve never considered the problematic aspects of the Prime Directive, never understood why the Vorlons require pure intentions, or never felt pity for a robot in agony then you haven’t grasped the full range of ethical lessons that science fiction has to offer. Without an appreciation of scifi, how can you be moral?

1. Gene Roddenberry (paraphrase).
2. Comes the inquisitor,  J. Michael Straczynski

But, if life ends at the grave, it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. As the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky rightly said: “If if there is immortality, then all things are permitted.” Given the finality of death, it really does not matter how you live.

William Lane Craig, of course, repeats an oft misquoted passage from The Brother Karamazov and for a professional philosopher, as he routinely claims to be, one would think he’d know better; likewise, there’s something about Mr. Craig’s suggestion that ‘professional’ legitimatizes ‘philosopher’ that leads me to believe that he shouldn’t be the former and isn’t the latter. It’s difficult to attribute an author the philosophical views of the characters he creates, but Mr. Craig probably depends less on the person of Dostoevsky than the content of the sentence, the philosophy itself. Ivan Karamazov was certainly concerned with the implications of immortality of the soul, both as a matter of metaphysics and as a matter of belief, as Constance Garnett’s translation suggests: “If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover,” Karamazov continues, “Nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. [...] For every individual [...] who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position.” For the sake of drawing the distinction, if Karamozov, in this passage, is concerned with belief in existence of God or the non-existence of God as the cause of moral actions, then we can allay his concerns with empirical certainty: atheism does not cause immorality. But, this concern about the belief in God suggests to me that Karamazov might imagine that there would be no difference between believing in God in a universe in which God happens to exist or believing in that same God as matter of actual fiction; in either universe, whether there is actually a God, belief in God is what actually fosters moral behavior, which I don’t think is Mr. Craig’s contention, nor would it stand to evidence. Rather, I think Mr. Craig and those others who misuse this quote from Dostoevsky are suggesting that, considering those two universes, the universe without a God may contain moral actions, but those moral actions are arbitrary and meaningless and the people in that universe without a God might just as well go around killing each other – it doesn’t really matter. I’ve never entirely understood this argument beyond reading it as a brute assertion; it seems like the meaningless of moral actions in a universe without a God in part stems from the fact that moral laws would then simply be contrived through the power of the few or the many, but also from the fact that any sort of consequence we might experience can be escaped through death into annihilation. I’m not sure why agreed upon rules are meaningless and, more importantly, I’m not sure why Karamazov, and Craig, I would imagine, would suppose that people, left to our own devices without God to give us rules and reward us eternally for following them or breaking the slightest among them, would descend into cannibalism and then what… dogs and cats living together.

I mean: why wouldn’t we descend into socialized medicine? Or greater funding for the arts?

Fundamentally, I think this contest doesn’t comes down God; it comes down to people. To my mind, we can gain some insight from two of the greatest and most important thinkers of the late twentieth century and their frequent discussions on God, mortality, and consequence.

I enjoy this particular moment between Calvin and Hobbes – it captures Hobbes’ cynicism and Calvin nicely illustrates that whether our lives have consequence in the afterlife or whether live is ultimately inconsequential, with the right attitude, both could be a bad thing. Calvin raises an important point and that is the question of attitude because many of the claims which will fundamentally justify the argument behind Mr. Craig’s quoting of Dostoevsky – the theistic depiction of atheism as inept when it comes to moral questions – are ultimately rooted in broad, emotional matters that are not easily answered.

To a certain extent, I think literature engages the question of life with or with eternal consequences by testing narration in worlds without any consequences. The question of whether society could survive if there were no real authorities to punish is very much at the heart of Lord of the Flies by William Golding. We all remember the story from high school, but for the sake of orienting us all: a plane full of children crash on an island and before long, they divide into groups and start waring, and in the chaos, some of the children are killed. For our purposes, Lord of the Flies seems to be suggesting that without consequences, society descends into chaos and savagery; Mr. Craig might be tempted to reference Lord of the Flies but that would rather careless for such a professional philosopher, especially because Lord of the Flies also contains a rather strong indictment of religion. Early in the book, the children begin to imagine that the island is inhabited by a beast and they take to hunting the beast, initially, in addition to gathering meat from the wild pigs that live on the island and then instead. Their hunts become ritualized and the ritual soon takes over and becomes more important than the hunt itself; one tempestuous night, while chanting and stomping around a bonfire, the children, in the heat and lust of the hunt, kill one their own. The idea of ritual then approaches religion when the children begin to present offerings to the beast in an attempt to appease it, the most famous being the head of a pig on a stick which adorns the cover of the book. So, to return to the question, William Golding suggests that without eternal consequences, we would descend into chaos, violence, savagery, and religion.

To some extent, I must admit that both Messers Golding and Craig proceed from places of emotion and attitude, so neither convince me; so, to conclude and simply illustrate the point again, I would like turn to yet another example of literature tackling the question of life in a world without consequence.

In Groundhog Day (1993), Phil Connors is geographically trapped in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and temporally trapped in February 2, Groundhog Day, reliving the exact same day over and over again. When Phil realizes that he is not subject to the ordinary rules of moral consequence, he takes advantage of the situation, stealing money, seducing women, driving drunk, and even committing suicide. But, without any reference to eternal consequences and seemingly without purpose, Phil turns instead to self-improvement, reading classical literature and French poetry, learning to play piano, helping others, and finding a place for himself in Punxsutawney. So, to return to the question, Groundhog Day suggests that without eternal consequences, we would descend into art, culture, and kindness.

Sometimes when I discuss morality and God with people, I encounter the idea that without theism to civilize us, whether through the actual metaphysical reality of moral absolutes which we can apprehend through proper use of reason or through the force of deeply believed fictions, man would descend into his baser instincts. Sometimes the evidence of this is children who are not yet civilized and utterly evil – this piece of evidence has always struck me as disturbing since most of the children I’ve met in my life have been rather sweet and gentle. And, to be frank, I see no evidence that our baser instincts are all that bad; if we are a social species, our base instincts must involve supporting one another and thinking about the tribe.

* Forty-two, innit!

Every week there’s some exciting new scandal involving a Leaguer, and I can’t tell you how proud this makes me. After all, scandal makes the world go round*. Perhaps then, you can imagine the smile on my face when our very own Godless-Romanian-Vampire-Gypsy-Witch captured the attention of not only atheist overlord PZ Myers, but also the Huffington Post. There’s no need for me to explain this story, when you can just watch the video after the break. Then read on…

Yes, I think that says it all.

Obviously, the popularity of this video is a victory for any right-minded individual who is worried about this slimy new tactic from Ray and Kirk’s ministry. Even if you don’t accept Darwin’s work or the mountain of supporting evidence, the sheer act of republishing an abridged copy of any piece of classic literature with your own introduction attached – full of quote-mines and slander – is just reprehensible. Of course, this kind of behaviour is par for the course when it comes to these two clowns. It seems like only yesterday that Ray Comfort was trying to sell his “unedited” debate with Thunderf00t after removing ten minutes of it.

That’s not to say that Ray isn’t aware of his own failings. Since ZOMGitsCriss posted her video, he’s even stated changes he intends to make to his abortion of a foreword:

Thanks to advice from Atheists and others, the new Introduction will address Darwin’s “racism”–and how he was truly a gentle-man who was admantly against slavery.

And it will qualify his apparant denegration of women. Besides, the moral character of Charles Darwin is irrelevant to the Theory of Evolution, just as the Theory of Relativity should stand on its own merits, and not on the morality of Albert Einstein.

I will also make it clear that Hitler abused his theory, and is also irrelevant to whether or not it’s true.

I want this Introduction to be fair-minded, free from prejudice against Darwin, no straw men or quote-mining. I’m sure many of you won’t believe that, but it’s the truth.

No straw-men or quote-mining? Gosh Ray, have you read your own work? There wouldn’t be much left if all the straw-men and quote-mines were removed. I highly doubt we’ll be seeing the removal of Ray’s quote-mine of Darwin on the eye (page 27), but how does he even expect to get away with this? He’s attaching the mined quote to the mine itself. People need only refer to the actual book to experience the full force of Ray’s dishonesty.

One could argue that Ray and Kirk will be damaging their own cause with this campaign, since they will be introducing copies of Origin into thousands of homes in America. Sadly, it’s not the original book. Aside from their ‘Special Introduction’, the book has been abridged to 280 pages. For comparison, my Oxford World’s Classics edition has 396 pages (not including notes). That’s an awful lot of pages missing; I wonder what’s been cut. Could it be things they can’t even slander, let alone refute?

Can you imagine Richard Dawkins handing out abridged copies of Ray’s Magnum Opus with a foreword slandering him and misrepresenting just about everything he’s ever said? No, I can’t imagine it either, because it wouldn’t happen. It’s not how genuine, honest people operate. Instead, they reference their opponent accurately whilst addressing their claims (and allowing the original to stand on its own merits) by writing a legitimate refutation. In other words, they actually publish their own work.

I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of this story, and watch this space for updates. But before you click away, did you notice this line?

I will also make it clear that Hitler abused his theory, and is also irrelevant to whether or not it’s true.

If Ray acknowledges this, why in Asgard does Hitler even need to be mentioned? If I were him I’d be far more worried about the obvious connection between Newton and every modern, long-range ballistic weapon that has ever been used to maim or kill.

Next up, my abridged copy of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica with a ‘Special Introduction’: Newtonists, And What You Can Do About Them. Be sure to notify your local university!

*…or the Universe, if you’re a geocentrist.

I have uploaded my review of The Greatest Show on Earth to my YouTube channel. It is a 2 parter and I will be auctioning off my copy of the book this weekend on dprjones BlogTV charity drive. Hope you enjoy my review.

In “The Greatest Show on Earth The evidence for evolution”, Richard Dawkins takes on creationists and intelligent design proponentsists whilst taking the reader on a detective trail of evidence to show why evolution through natural selection is a fact and a theory.

Part 1

Richard Dawkins The greatest show on Earth Part1

Part 2

Richard Dawkins The greatest show on Earth Part 2

The details of the charity auction for Medicines sans frontiers (Doctors without borders) is here,

Dprjones BlogTV room:http://www.blogtv.com/people/dprjones

The site at which you can make donations is:

http://www.firstgiving.com/dprjonesblogtv

http://www.justgiving.com/dprjonescharityblogtvshow/

Don’t be intimidated by large donations,
simply donating what you can spare is appreciated; the small amounts make a big difference.

The website for Medicens Sans Frontiere (“MSF”):http://www.msf.org.uk/

In the US the charity (it is the same charity) is know as “Doctors without Borders”:

http://doctorswithoutborders.org/

The msfuk youtube site is here:http://www.youtube.com/user/msfuk

The eBay auctions have started and will be added to as the show date approaches:

http://tinyurl.com/m2jb3e

DJ

This stance neatly condemns any attacks on “soft” theism/deism whilst open-endedly permitting criticism of religion that does directly affect me, or people in general.

I am constantly at pains to sculpt my position with the utmost clarity. I don’t like religion. I don’t like unfounded beliefs that have more in common with delusional fairy tales than a rational response to the universe; similarly I am compelled to wax vitriol against beliefs in the supernatural, in the pseudoscientific. But as far as religion goes, I am restrained.

People often assume that I’m unrestrained, the kind of person who would cheerfully punch an old lady if she was wearing a crucifix. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t like religion, but I can cope with it if I never have to hear about it. More or less by definition, the people I debate and argue with (or “attack”, if you want the negative labelling) are the fundamentalists; the irrational, outspoken children of whatever God or Gods they follow. If you’re a 65 year old vicar with a flock of hens as your parish, the odds are slim that I’m going to come to your door and demand you explain the quote mining of Darwin. But if you approach me in the street with your beliefs, tell me I’m going to hell, support the death penalty for apostasy, preach unscientific nonsense and generally act like a dick – you’re fair game. I refute the people who make the noise, not the people who quietly pray and leave their religion inside their own heads. When was the last time I accosted a stranger on the street and asked them if they’d considered atheism? Well, it’s never happened. My stance is reactionary. 

Surely that’s fair enough? If you lie and harass people, spread inflammatory bigotry and lie about what is patently true . . . aren’t we free to call such people out on their actions, if they’re impinging on other people? But of course we all know about that side of things. I’m not really aiming to discuss that right now.

The thing is that, despite my live and let live attitude toward “soft” theism, people who quietly worship in their own way, I do care. As soon as you think about what a religious belief entails – the notion that an invisible being not only created everything, but guides it, and also speaks to you in your head and you can talk back despite absolutely no positive proof - isn’t that uncomfortably close to not only delusion, but insanity? Somehow, billions of people have devised a truly frightening psychosis that is lauded rather than questioned, a delusional state not even given a second thought despite being kissing distance from madness. 

It’s been said before by better folk than I – sanity in numbers. What is believed by one person is madness, when believed by a few hundred it’s a cult, but at some nebulous point the threshold is crossed; culthood becomes a religion, madness becomes a fiercely protected way of life. Think about what is is to follow a religion. And think about how you would react if you discovered a friend, or just a co-worker or colleague, believed in something bizarre:

everyone is made of chocolate on the inside but as soon as you get cut or x-rayed it turns to regular flesh

an invisible hat runs the universe, and the hat talks to you

We are fortunate to live in a society where the gentle insanity of religion is tolerated; it’s for precisely this reason that religion isn’t seen as delusional, because there is little societal friction and no demand to explain yourself. People walk down the street thinking things that, should they exist in isolation, would lead potentially to medication and possibly incarceration. Hundreds, thousands of infants have their genitals mutilated in sanctioned religious barbarism. If an isolated family was discovered to be cutting the ears of new-born males with razors, how shocked would public reaction be?

So even if you are a gentle village vicar with snow-white hair, I care. I’m affected. Because you are delusional, and in a very real (if specific) sense mentally unwell. Something has gone wrong with your brain, and it’s only the society we live in that allows you to think everything is fine when equally nonsensical beliefs would be considered potentially harmful if taken in isolation. 

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Sounds sweeping and cruel and generalised. But when you realise that believing in God is simply a more complex version of a child’s imaginary friend, doesn’t it seem strange . . . the extent to which these beliefs are left to run free? 

I keep quiet. I hold my tongue when I see someone wearing a crucifix or a yamulke, if they’re not disseminating. But I can no more ignore the implications of religious faith (or faith in mediums, or astrology, or homeopathy) than I can ignore the implications of someone who is convinced that the world is actually run by reptilian aliens. Those people are considered cranks. Why are you a balanced person if you quietly believe in God?

The final thing is this: religions provide succour, provide comfort. This is clearly true, and one of the foundations of the “Why do you care?” argument . . . yet I believe in nothing but the beauty of the universe, see morals as nothing more than social constructs, see no purpose or fate beyond that which we create for ourselves, and I don’t need comfort from God. I’m not even a particularly well balanced person, and I’m fine by myself. For every person that gains comfort from religion, there’s someone like me who doesn’t need it – and someone else who is confused and conflicted by their faith. I may as well argue that playing guitar provides comfort so everyone should do it.

I can stand to leave you alone if you believe quietly. I can respect how you may need it, or think you need it. But, as strangely Christian as this may sound, I’m worried for you. Because you believe in stuff that isn’t there, and brother, that be a whole pile of no good.

I think such morally sanctimonious mealy-mouthed sentiments signal the end of this.