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!

1) Hitler is Anti-christian.

2) Abortion in America is really akin to the Holocaust.

The second argument is really little more than the application of godwins law into a debate, furthermore the connection between abortion doctors in America today and the Nazis in the 1930′s and 1940′s is more silly and superficial than what Ray and his fellow religious propagandists make it out to be. Yes it is true that the Nazis used forced abortions upon women deemed “unAryan” (women who were Jewish or Slavic, etc.) in order to decrease their number as part of their eugenic policies, however for healthy Women of the Volksgemeinschaft it was a different story, because for them abortions were banned. Indeed in 1936, Heinrich Himmler created a Reich Central Office just for the purpose “for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion”! You know those two things Ray and his fellow religious fundamentalists don’t like. Being sarcastic here like i sometimes am, Does this mean that by ray’s logic he may be *shock horror* akin to a Nazi? In the real world, of course he isn’t!

But for the purposes of this, im going to attempt to rebut his other argument, that Hitler was no Christian.

Let’s begin with an observation about this video, and that simply is, is that ray does what he typically does i guess, which is to reveal his calibre of intelect by interviewing some “greasy Highschool students” as Thunderf00t put it in the Ray Comfort edition of his “WDPLAC” series and being amused when they fail to give a good answer. “Do you know who hitler was?” .”Do you know who hitler was?”, “No?”, “No?”

To paraphrase Tf00t again: “Bravo Ray we can debunk Mathematics by this method too can’t we?”

in addition to the “greasy Highschool students” we are also introduced to a a Neo-nazi that goes by the name of “steve”, who as you can see in the film has some very nasty things to say about Christianity. If you are going to pretend that all Neo-nazis are just like steve, you will be mistaken, Meet “Father” Angelo Idi.

 He works in the parish of St. Francis, in Vigevano, Italy. Apparantly He once saw off a charity box thief with a truncheon And really wishes for you to care about, in his words “how good a priest I am.” If i were to take away the image and present to you only the information already given (without sources). Idi would probably Sound like someone not too far removed from the Priests who works in your local area wouldn’t he? The Thing is of course, i suspect he is very far removed from the priests in your area. As you can see from the image, Idi is a Neo-Nazi and a Christian. He says he is ”proud” of his “right wing beliefs” And even in his part of the world as the Austrian Times expose reveals, He is not alone. Let’s continue with Ray comfort himself!

“Adolf Hilter hated Christianity, he called it a disease and one point said ‘the heaviest blow which ever stuck humanity was Christianity’ and adding ‘it was the invention of the Jew.’

Are we sure that’s a genuine remark there? Ray’s source although he doesn’t cite it is the Trevor-roper translation of the Table-talks, the one that, as i have explained elsewhere, it just so happens to be full of Mistranslations, see the “German Studies Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Oct., 2003), pp. 561-576” for more details. 

“Hitler keineswegs areligiös war,” or  ”Hitler was by no means unreligious” was the conclusion Werner Jochmann gave after surveying Hitler’s remarks on religion in their actual German. Why? well could it be because we can find quotations like this:

“Ich bin auf Grund höherer Gewalt da, wenn ich zu etwas nötig bin. Abgesehen davon, dass sie mir zu grausam ist, die seligmachende Kirche! Ich habe noch nie Gefallen gefunden daran, andere zu schinden, wenn ich auch weiβ, dass es ohne Gewalt nicht möglich ist, sich in der Welt zu behaupten. Es wird nur dem das Leben gegeben, der am stärksten darum ficht. Das Gesetz des Lebens heißt: Verteidige dich!

Die Zeit, inder wir leben, ist die Erscheinung des Zusammenbruchs dieser Sache. Es kann 100 oder 200 Jahre noch dauern. Es tut mir leid, dass ich wie Moses das gelobte Land nur aus der Ferne sehen kann. Wir wachsen in eine sonnige, wirklich tolerante Weltanschauung hinein: Der Mensch soll in der Lage sein, die ihm von Gott gegebenen Fähigkeiten zu entwickeln. Wir müssen nur verhindern, dass eine neue, noch gröβere Lüge entsteht: die Jüdisch-Bolschewistische Welt. Sie muss ich zerbrechen.”

or this:

“Christus war ein Arier. Aber Paulus hat seine Lehre benutzt, die Unterwelt zu mobilisieren und einen Vorbolschewismus zu organisieren. Mit dessen Einbruch geht Die schöne Klarheit der antiken Welt verloren. Was ist das für ein Gott, der nur Wohlgefallen hat, wenn die Menschen sich vor ihm kasteien?”

or even Hitler’s remark with regards to the position of Man in nature:

“Das, was der Mensch vor dem Tier voraushat, der vielleicht wunderbarste Beweis fur die Überlegenheit des Menschen, ist, dass er begriffen hat, dass es eine Schöpferkraft geben muss!”

None of these quotes reveal a “disease of Christianity” that Hitler wishes to get rid of but rather the expediency of his own warped, and im sorry ray, “Christian” ideology. As far as the German is concerned, hitler makes it clear all the way through that he believes in God, Christ, the immortality of the soul, and divine providence. His so-called attacks on Christianity are really falsely translated Hitler attacks on what he sees as false dogmas and the sort of critiques of the Roman Catholic Church you might otherwise expect from a bigoted protestant. Continuing to pwn Comfort some more with his source, despite the faulty translations we see in the Trevor-Roper talks, we can if we look hard enough still see amazingly some glimmers of the Christian Hitler actually was.

“What a queer sort of Christianity they practise down there [in Spain]! We must recognise, of course, that, amongst us, Christianity is coloured by Germanism. All the same, its doctrine signifies: “Pray and work!”"

Hitler on the Ten Commandments, have this quote in mind for a later Comfort claim:

“The Ten Commandments are a code of living to which there’s no refutation. These precepts correspond to irrefragable needs of the human soul; they’re inspired by the best religious spirit, and the Churches here support themselves on a solid foundation.”

It would appear that this is Hitler’s reaction to an FDR suggestion that Hitler might be Anti-christian:

“What repulsive hypocrisy that arrant Freemason, Roosevelt, displays when he speaks of Christianity ! All the Churches should rise up against him—for he acts on principles diametrically opposed to those of the religion of which he boasts.”

And my favourite; Hitler comparing Nazi religious policy to Soviet religious policy:

“It’s senseless to encourage man in the idea that he’s a king of creation, as the scientist of the past century tried to make him believe. … The Russians were entitled to attack their priests, but they had no right to assail the idea of a supreme force. It’s a fact that we’re feeble creatures, and that a creative force exists. To seek to deny it is folly. In that case, it’s better to believe something false than not to believe anything at all. Who’s that little Bolshevik professor who claims to triumph over creation? People like that, we’ll break them. Whether we rely on the catechism or on philosophy, we have possibilities in reserve, whilst they, with their purely materialistic conceptions, can only devour one another.”

Let’s continue down with what else Comfort claims:

He killed and imprisoned genuine pastors and replaced them with his own Nazi pastors.

Yes true. but there is a difference between being Anti-clerical, and being Anti-christian.

he also replaced the Cross with swastika. Printed over a thousand copies of his own twisted Bible.

I could find nowhere directly that said that the Nazis removed crosses or bibles from churches, but conversely I could find nothing that said they didn’t. But this later case is obvious to me, as why would anyone need to say they left the crosses and bibles in the churches? The positive claim of change has to be proven not the negative. But still I was wondering where this claim came about. So i did a little bit of research and from what i can gather the claim appears to have come partly from William Shirer in his book “The rise and fall of the third reich”, although Shirer not being immortal was wrong in this case, or at least inarticulate about it. In his work he talks about the Reich Church and that there was a set of 30 points put up by Rosenberg that made such demands (p213). As a source he uses: Stewart W. Herman Jr’s 1943 book “It’s your Soul We Want”. Now this is where it gets interesting, Herman was a Lutheran pastor who left Germany and fought in the allied armies so right there it seemed a little tainted. And but again Herman uses Rosenberg’s points. What none of this tells you is that Rosenberg’s paganism was rejected by Hitler and many Nazis.

“[which is why] Significantly …. [Rosenberg's book "Der Mythus"] was published as a private work, never becoming an official guide to Nazi thinking, as Mein Kampf was. It never received the official stamp of the NSDAP, nor did the party’s official publisher publish it … The party in fact largely ignored it, as Rosenberg himself would later discover. Over 700 pages long, it was easily the most abstruse book ever written by a Nazi. In keeping with their own religious views, party leaders like Hitler and Goebbels heaped enormous scorn upon it. According to one biographer [Reinhard Bollmus], “Hitler completely rejected… the mysticism with which Rosenberg, in his main work…attempted to give a religious intensity to a racist interpretation of history”" – Richard Steigman-Gall, “The Holy Reich”, p92-93

And Rosenberg had nothing to do with the actual formation of the Reich Church. Herman, from what I can get of his book, is using a pamphlet Rosenberg wrote called the “Protestantische Rompilger” which is an addendum to his “Der Mythus” book that Hitler rejected. Anyway, this was not a publication of policy, it was only Rosenberg’s personal work and wishes, and not published by the party publisher, and Hitler had already rejected Rosenberg’s ideas anyway. And if this were truly Nazi policy than why such a source as this? There would have been a policy statement or order put out by a formal agency, but we only have Rosenbergs pamphlets and works. I at the moment have no claims from others that Crosses were non present, amusingly i would like to point out on a side that the very symbol of the “Deutsche Christen” movement is a Christian Cross with a swastika on it.

Also from Stiegman-gall and others are the statements that the Church downplayed the Jewish parts of the bible (old testament) not that the Bible was banned, just that certain parts were downplayed. And even as early as the turn of the century there were plenty Christian sects that wished to extricate the Old Testament from the ‘Christian’ bible, it was not a particularly uniquely Nazi idea. Indeed as far as i am aware it was even shared by the Kaiser in exile! (perhaps one could note how similar the Kaiser’s ideas were as presented here to Hitler’s own ideology?)

“In the mid-1920S, Wilhelm called for the formation of a ‘Christian International’ to launch the ‘Kampf’ against the Verjudung’ of Germany; after the ‘purification’ of the Fatherland, the struggle would have to be continued against ‘das Judentum’ in the whole world.” He demanded that the Bible be re-written to eliminate most of the Old Testament, so leaving only genuinely Christian elements, which he claimed were Zoroastrian and therefore ‘Aryan’ in origin and ‘not Semitic-Jewish’ at all. ‘Let us free ourselves from the Judentum with its Jawe!’, he cried in one of his last letters to Chamberlain.” And just as the Jews were not our religious forebears’, so of course Jesus was ‘not a Jew’, but a Gallilean, a man, he liked to believe, ‘of exceptional beauty, tall and slim, with a noble face inspiring respect and love; his hair blond shading into chestnut brown, his arms and hands noble and exquisitely formed’.” – source (pdf).

But even this wouldn’t be banning the bible, and evidently the Reich Church didn’t even go that far and only tended to ignore the parts in the Old Testament it didn’t like, (Also not unusual in Christianity, when has any Christian or indeed Ray followed or preached all in Leviticus?) So I have to call bullshit to his claim.  The Rosenberg list was only Rosenberg’s own personal wish list, and not policy, no matter what Shirer wrote (and his sourcing here does not stand up to scrutiny, he never went to any primary source and took the word of someone with an axe to grind). also i could say that what has just been said about the Kaiser (especially if you read that document) renders this line by Comfort:

“He rewrote the Ten Commandments and then created his own Aryan anti-Sematic non-Jewish Jesus”

as meaningless! i guess it’s just part of his no true scotsman fallacy. He continues about how Hitler violated the 10 commandments, but the question i would then ask is How many times has ray violated the idea of “thou shall not lie” which he regards as a sin? He and his buddy Kirk Cameron certainly lied about Darwin in that special intro to the “Origin of species” didn’t he?

Ray then proceds to Quoting or quotemining Hitler; This is what he uses.

“The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human. They cannot be human in the sense of being made in the image of God…” – citing a “May 1923 speech in Munich”

We can see here what Ray omits out.

“The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human. They cannot be human in the sense of being made in the image of God, the Eternal. The Jews are the image of the devil. Jewry means the racial tuberculosis of the nations” – Hitler, quoted in Joachim C. Fest, “Hitler”, p212.

The jews are the image of the devil? Where do you think we might have heard that line before? Oh yes, it was a product of Christian Anti semitism indeed!

“A line of anti-Semitic descent from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler is easy to draw. Both Luther and Hitler were obsessed by a demonologized universe inhabited by Jews. ‘Know, Christian,’ wrote Luther, ‘that next to the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous and violent than a true Jew .’ Hitler himself, in that early dialogue with Dietrich Eckhart, asserted that the later Luther – that is, the violently anti-Semitic Luther – was the genuine Luther. Luther’s protective authority was invoked by the Nazis when they came to power, and his anti-Semitic writings enjoyed a revival of popularity. To be sure, the similarities of Luther’s anti-Jewish exhortations with modern racial anti-Semitism and even with Hitler’s racial policies are not merely coincidental. They all derive from a common historic tradition of Jew-hatred, whose provenance can be traced back to Haman’s advice to Ahasuerus. But modern German anti-Semitism had more recent roots than Luther and grew out of a different soil – not that German anti-Semitism was new; it drew part of its sustenance from Christian anti-Semitism, whose foundation had been laid by the Catholic Church and upon which Luther built. It was equally a product of German nationalism. Modern German anti-Semitism was the bastard child of the union of Christian anti-Semitism with German nationalism.” – Lucy Dawidowicz, “The war against the jews”, p23.

And i can guess you can tell Ray is being deliberately dishonest with his portraryl of Hitler by quoting  a Hitler quote gleaned from a piece of fiction and passing it off as non-fictional fact, Perhaps someone ought to tell him to look up the very term “novel”. This is what he quotes:

“history will recognize our movement as a great battle for humanity’s liberation, a liberation from the curse of Mt. Sinai…[God is] a tyrant who orders one to do the very things one doesn’t like.” Source taken from The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code by Armin L.. Robinson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), xiii.

and it’s fictional nature is exactly why i personally have not seen it anywhere in any of the major histories of Nazi Germany that i have read. 

Im going to conclude, Here in this post i did not even bother with answering his trick Moral questions (which in my head i wonder to what extent they could satisfy J.S Mill’s utilitarian ethics. J.S Mill being an atheist which i find amusing in this context.) designed to convince the credulous, instead i’ve gone after his portraryl of Hitler. Ray to me seems to have violated “thou shall not lie” yet again.

Basically, I would argue that while the foetus is absolutely dependent on the mother for nutrients, oxygen, and a safe environment she should be allowed to withdraw that support. The resulting death of the foetus, while predictable, is not murder because it results from the withdrawal of sustenance. I also add an extra requirement of exploring reasonable options that could avoid the need for an abortion but since current technology does not allow aborted embryos to survive and develop independently from the mother, abortion should remain legal.

However, over on M and M (New Zealand’s most popular Christian blog) I found a few counter-examples to my favoured arguments which gave me pause. While some are easy to answer others are a little trickier.

Example 1: “A hiker who breaks her leg a week’s walk from a road will die if her companions do not bring help.”

In New Zealand and other common law jurisdictions there is no duty to rescue. While we might look down on people who leave people to die rather than rescue them, it is not prosecuted as a criminal homicide or any other felony. See this example of mountain climbers being left to die on Everest. I would prefer the general principle that people attempt to rescue others if they are able to do so safely but I also don’t want to force someone into a potentially dangerous action if they are unwilling. This is consistent with my position on abortion. I would prefer if the potential mother to explore all options but if she is unwilling to go through the pregnancy, I would not force it upon her.

Example 2: “An elderly woman may be totally dependant on her children looking after her.”

This is similar to the problem above, there is no legal duty placed upon children to take of their parents in old age. It may be the respectful thing to do, but I do not want the law changed to force children to be responsible for their elderly parents.

Example 3: “A newborn is totally dependent on its mother if it happens to be born in an isolated area where there are no other lactating women and there are no means of bottle-feeding.”

This example I find harder to answer. One point to make is while the above two scenarios are realistic this one is fantastical and unlikely to occur in everyday life. There are always plenty of people around who could look after a new baby if required. Never-the-less, I think this scenario requires an answer: would it be acceptable for a mother to refuse life-sustaining support for her own child? There is a duty to rescue in a parent-child relationship and to refuse aid would be negligence at the least. The expectant mother and the foetus do share an approximation of the parent-child relationship so perhaps the pregnant women does have some duty to provide a life-sustaining environment for her offspring.

I throw it open to you. Is there a relevant difference between the two cases that doesn’t rely on a personhood argument?

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.

Subjectivity
Averick’s main beef with atheistic morality is that is subjective:

“For the atheist, morality is simply a word that is used to describe the type of system that an individual or society subjectively prefers. Each society establishes, maintains, and modifies its values to suit its own needs.”

While some atheists do see morality as subjective there are also moral philosophies based on facts and a shared understanding of reality (i.e., objective). Rabbi Averick also thinks it is a problem that moral philosophy can update itself as new arguments are made and accepted. As someone who works in the sciences I am comfortable with knowledge improving as new facts are discovered and new ideas developed. There will be setbacks, aberrant paths that are found to be wrong, but on the long view a gradual improvement is continuously made. In modern social democracies can we really doubt that we are better off today than in the past? We have more freedoms and more rights than ever before. This is not the result of mere subjective whims that happened to go the right way, but a recognition that some actions of the past (e.g., slavery) were wrong and should no longer be permitted in our society. Dogmas, on the other hand, do not update and are stuck in our less enlightened past.

Peter Singer
Averick spends a significant chunk of the article attacking Peter Singer for his views on consequentialist utilitarianism. Which is an objective moral system. The Rabbi doesn’t seem to recognise that his criticism of moral subjectivism doesn’t apply to Singer but he continues regardless:

“Singer went on to explain that he is a “consequentialist.” For the benefit of the philosophically challenged let me explain “consequentialism” in a nutshell: If you like the consequences it’s ethical, if you don’t like the consequences it’s unethical. Thus, if you enjoy child pornography and having sex with children it’s ethical, if you dislike child pornography and having sex with children it’s unethical.”

What Singer’s philosophy actually entails is the evaluation of harm that results from an action. Utilitarianism considers happiness to be desirable and harm to be deleterious. This means that when assessing an action for its morality you should look at the consequences in terms of the people harmed and the people helped. So if enjoying child pornography and having sex with children harms someone then it is unethical. Since paedophilia often has traumatic effects on the child involved, their parents, and the wider community Singer would most likely find most cases of paedophilia morally wrong. So much for the slippery slope argument.

S.P.A.G.
Averick claims that since we resulted from slime (or from dust if you are Jewish, I guess that’s better?) that means we are morally bereft. The fact that we evolved from primates does not degrade humanity. It is thrilling to think that all species on this planet are interrelated though the process of evolution. What makes humans different, more significant than our jungle dwelling relatives, is our ability to reason. When we exercise our unique intelligence we get to make our own decisions about meaning, value, and morality. Atheists aren’t handed their morality from on high, we have to think about it, and thanks to evolution we have that ability. After spending most of the article decrying the ability of secular philosophers to reason about ethics, Averick engages in the most dishonest part of the article. He simply throws out a bunch of ethical rules without giving any justification for his claims.

• All men are created in the image of God and are therefore inherently and intrinsically precious.
• All men have been endowed by God with unalienable rights and among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• Thou shalt not murder.
• Thou shalt not steal.
• Thou shalt not bear false witness.
• Thou shalt not commit adultery, incest, or bestiality.
• Thou shalt not have sex with children, and if you do you will be looked upon as a disgusting and contemptible criminal and will be treated as such.
• Thou shall teach these laws to your children.

Fortunately, we can recognise the source for some of these claims, and they don’t come from a god. The ones about unalienable rights are from the American Declaration of Independence and the rules about murder, stealing, perjury, and adultery are from the Torah. These moral rules aren’t from God but from the men who wrote the documents. But where do the other bits and pieces come from? Since Averick hasn’t demonstrated God is the moral author, we have to conclude they come from Averick himself. The Rabbi simply prefers it to be the case that paedophilia is immoral and so claims that it is a divine command. This is merely Self-Projection As God. After spending an entire article railing against subjective morality we find that the only justification Averick has is that he just feels paedophilia is wrong (and God agrees with me!) Unfortunately for Averick the main point of his article is that atheism leads to paedophilia. It is rather easily countered by the mention to two religions: Catholicism and Islam. Both of these theistic beliefs have managed to rationalise and accept (respectively) the sexual molestation of children. If theistic societies are also capable of accepting paedophilia then Averick’s point is moot and it seems that God does not totally agree with our hapless Rabbi on the immorality of pedophilia.

Irony, it’s everywhere.

A recent story in the Dominion Post (Commercial benefits lacking in GE trials) reveals the genetic engineering trials being carried out by Crown Research institutions have lead to very few commercial gains. Plant and Food and AgResearch have paid over half a million dollars in application fees to ERMA and only one of the trials has resulted in royalty generating IP. To those familiar with New Zealand’s restrictive requirements for GE research, this outcome is hardly a surprise.

Despite decades of safe use around the world, GE and GMOs remain contentious issues in New Zealand. The regulatory environment alone makes it difficult to carry out even basic research, let alone the commercial research which scientists are now being criticised for not producing. Anti-GE spokeswoman Claire Bleakley decries that the benefit of GE research being completed in New Zealand is lost to the overseas companies. But if private companies are the only ones paying for the research to be carried out then it makes sense they are the ones who reap the economic benefit. Basic funding for GE research is simply not available in New Zealand, the funding bodies know there is little chance any innovation made will be allowed to be used.

If New Zealand wants its scientific organisations to produce applied science using GE technology then it must:
1) relax the regulatory environment so that research time and money is not being consumed navigating expensive legislation
2) fund GE projects so the IP is not captured by overseas companies
3) open the New Zealand market to GMOs so that the benefits of this technology can be accrued here

There is very little risk and huge benefits to allowing GE research to be conducted more freely. The longer New Zealand clings to the anti-GE label, the more we miss out on the exciting commercial opportunities. Rather than be GE-free, let’s free GE!

Cross-posted from IndoctrinatingFreethought.blogspot.com

But what a false picture this is!

Firstly, a proper definition of what a “Dark age” is has nothing to do with morality, One may condem what a certain society did at a paticular time period but that does not alter the fact of how “In Dark” or “In Light” the society in question to acedemia is. The Ancient Greeks, and paticularly the Spartans for example, practiced what could be described as a primitive form of eugenics.

And you can Condem them for that if you please, however as already stated it does not alter how “Dark” the society supposedly was. This is made all the more so because ancient Greek eugenics occured in a period of “Light”. The period of Aristotle and Plato. This is important because there was an actual “Ancient greek dark age” which lasted approximately 1200BC –800 BC. However it is my belief that, as we discover more about that time perion, such a “Dark” description for it will dwindle away into acedemic obscurity, regardless of the perceptions of the popular mind.

This is because the correct definition of a Dark age is simply put a time period that contemporary acedemics know relatively little about. Perhaps out of a lack of investigation, but mostly because of a lack of primary sources from said time and place. Hence the idea that the events of a certain period would seem “dark” to us compared to how much “Light” acedemia has shed with both what came before, and what came after the relevant time period.

Now correctly definied can we apply the Dark ages definition to say, Europe in the 1100′s or the 1200′s or the 1300′s or later? I don’t think so! Do acedemics know relatively little about any time period after say the 1100′s? I think it would be a bit of a stretch to say that, that is indeed the case. Even Wikipedia will tell you many modern scholars who study the Middle Ages tend to avoid the term “Dark ages” altogether for its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate for any part of the Middle Ages.

A case study, Let’s take my home country for example. “Merrye olde England” as the nostalgics call it, because for a good while and even up until the middle part of the 20th century, there was an actual brief interlude in our chronology that actually was called “Dark”. This was Circa 450AD to about 550-600AD.  Here’s a quote.

“For a better part of a century this darkness covers British history, lighted only at intervals by a momentary gleam from archaeology, … we are thus almost ignorant of every vital detail upon the very turning-point of our destiny, when Britain was conquered by the races which, if not making the majority of it’s population, have assuredly determined [our] language, structure of society, and national character. This darkness is felt the more, when we consider the evidence at our disposial [which the author goes on to describe as essentialy being "distant" from the time and place in question]” – Keith Feiling, “A History of England (1950)”, p21.

For Esmé Cecil Wingfield Stratford, this time period was “A Century and a half of almost complete darkness”, although he gives us an undated end to this so-called dark age. “The conversion to Christianity, that was the end of the dark age in Britain”. See his book, “The Foundations of British Patriotism (1939)” p27 and p31 for more details

But this time period was not “Dark” because there was a lack of investigation going on. On the contrary, scholars in the mid 20th century were studying what was going on back then, but they just couldn’t put certain dates onto certain events. As F.M Stenton in 1943 puts it…

“The Chronology of the period, has been studied intensively, but there remains an embarrasing number of incidents of which the the date has not yet been fixed” – preface from the Oxford History of England Vol II, “Anglo-Saxon England”, vi.

If that was the way things appeared back then in the middle of the 20th century, what about today? Well if Dan Snow’s 2009 BBC 4 documentary series “How the Celts Saved Britain (Unfortunately not available for you all on Youtube)” is anything to go by. Esmé Cecil Wingfield Stratford’s point would appear to still generaly hold true, perhaps minus some of the darkness. For you see our understanding of the relevant time period [like our understanding of other time periods in general], has grown much deeper over the last 60 odd years. And as to his point about Christianity, Snow claims something (can we say similar?) which is indeed quite interesting. That “bound up with the spread of Christianity from Ireland [to Britain] is the spread of modernity” [Quoted from the Daily Telegraph]

Ok so, that’s one side of my understanding, that the notion of a 1000yr long European Dark age is i consider essentialy to be a myth. Even the very [and proper] definition of what a Dark age is makes it so and it would appear that it was Christianity that saved the British isles from it’s 100 to 150 yr long “Dark age” if we can call it Dark in the 21st century. But what about Christianity in General, The religious element to Middle age society? 

Well i am not really a fan of the Conflict thesis on it’s own, Sure one can cherrypick examples of “opposition”, as John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White did in the late 1800′s and make sweeping conclusions out of it, but to do so ignores a larger picture and one could say alot can come down to as much to political circumstance and location as much to anything else. I am aware that in the ottoman Empire there is a different story than to what happened in Europe, in that the Clergy there did contribute heavily there to snuff out Scientific development. If there is one thing that explains the decline of the islamic world relative to it’s European counterpart, it is that the scientific revolution did not really happen there at all, despite Istanbul being not too far away from Christian Europe, and despite the great traditions of Muslim Science from the days of the 10th century Abbasid Caliphate [So far as the Conflict thesis is concerned, Context is key]. There’s an interesting figure by the name of “Ibrahim müteferrika”, it was he that persuaded the Sultan to allow the printing press in 1729, think of how much later that was than in Europe. One of his first publications was titled “Rational basis for the politics of nations” wherby he argued that..

“The ottoman Empire’s failure to adopt European methods of Governence and Scientific exploration was the root of it’s inability to compete geo-politically” – Tim Jacoby and Michael Mann, “Social Power and the Turkish State”, p67.

In other words, at his time of Writing, the European states were governed by the principles of Reason and the Ottoman Empire was not. How did this come to be? Arguably the first Turkish politican to really get the idea that Science is key to progress was perhaps “Mustafa Kemal Atatürk”, a secularist in Turkish politics and the founder of modern Turkey.

As far as i understand, Reason’d politics in Europe first really came to be in a time period known as the renaissance, that great flowering of the Arts, Science and Political philosophy. But you cannot have a flowering without a bud, and that bud came out the scientific work after the time of Charlemagne, which was not so much concerned with original investigation as it was with the active study and investigation of ancient Roman scientific texts, and it was this investigation which paved the way for the later effort of Western scholars to recover and translate ancient Greek texts in philosophy and the sciences, and it was out of this that reason began to emerge. So in essence one could say Medieval Christianity created the conditions ripe for that “Explosion in Art and Science, and reason and political philosophies”. [There was also the case that "The spread of Christianity in the Carolingian era had a beneficial effect on medical knowledge and treatment. Several of the church fathers expressed interest in medicine. Some of them even knew something about it" - John P. Mckay, Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler, "A History of Western Society" p246.] But here’s an interesting question, perhaps one of you can help answer it. regarding the “revival of ancient learning” in the 12th and 13th centuries [again created by the conditions of the scientific work after Charlemagne], at the height of Medieval Christendom, what happenes to the idea that medieval Christianity was not “interested” in reviving all the Greco-Roman wonderfulness in the first place?

Nonetheless, To call the 12th and 13th Centuries a  time of “superstiton, ignorance and Barbarism”, with the commonly used misnomer of “Dark ages [with all the negativity that alone entails] being applied to it is not a correct one.

“But this [image just described] is a caricature, the acceptance of which has proved an obstacle to an understanding of the Middle Ages as they really were. It is true that the early centuries of the Medieval period, LIKE [my emphasis] those of late antiquity, saw a great deal of political and social turmoil. It is true that literacy and learning, in this early period, were in a state of decline. But an account that fails to acknowledge differences among geographical regions and change over time cannot do justice to the complex medieval reality. An accurate account will reveal that learning grew from small beginnings in the early Middle Ages to become a thriving industry in the later Middle Ages; that important scientific achievements emerged during this period; and that the church and it’s theology maintained a relationship to the natural sciences far too complicated to be captured by simple black and white categories such as adversaries or allies. Unquestionably some portions of the classical tradition gave rise to suspicion, hostility, and even ecclesiastical condemnation. However such cases were exceptional; Far more commonly, critical reflection about the nature of the world was tolerated and even encouraged. In their quest to understand the world in which they lived, medieval scholars employed all of the resources at their disposial, including inherited scientific ideas, personal observation, rational influence and religious tradition. And they did so with as much integrity as one finds today in the average university professor and with far less interference from the church than the caricature [that many hold to] of the middle ages would suggest” – “David C. Lindberg, “The Medieval Church Encounters the Classical Tradition: Saint Augustine, Roger Bacon, and the Handmaiden Metaphor”, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, ed. “When Science & Christianity Meet”, p8.

Overall, i would say that the relationship between Science and religion was a fruitful one, certainly not a “Cozy” or “perfect” one, but they had a better relationship than the one that the conflict thesis suggests.

“While some historians had always regarded the Draper-White thesis as oversimplifying and distorting a complex relationship, in the late 20th century it went under a more systematic reevaluation. The result is the growing recognition among historians of science that the relationship of religion and science has been much more positive than is sometimes thought. Although popular images of controversy continue to exemplify the supposed hostility of Christianity to new scientific theories, studies have shown that Christianity has often nurtured and encouraged scientific endeavour, while at other times the two have co-existed without either tension or attempts at harmonization. If Galileo and the Scopes trial come to mind as examples of conflict, they were the exceptions rather than the rule. In the words of David Lindberg … “There was no warfare between Science and the Church. The story of Science and Christianity in the middle ages is not a story of suppression nor one of it’s polar opposite, [complete] support and encouragement. What we find is an interaction exhibiting all the variety and complexity, with which we are familliar in other realms of Human endeavour; Conflict, compromise, understanding, misunderstanding, accomadation, dialouge, alienation, the making of common cause, and the going of seperate ways” (pp70-71). What Lindberg writes of Europe can be said to describe much of Western History. Evidence that the relationship between Science and religion has exhibited a multiciplity of attitudes, reflecting local conditions and particular historical circumstance, has led John Brooke to speak of a ‘complexity thesis’ as a more accurate model than the ‘Conflict thesis’. But while Brooke’s view has gained widespread acceptance among professional Historians of Science, the traditional view remains strong elsewhere, not least in the popular mind.” – Gary Ferngren, “Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction”, p. ix – x.

And that sums it up for me. As to that graph in the beginning, well i think it’s rhetorical nonsense, and not an accurate picture of what really went on back then.

The doctor prescribed my Dad some pain killers that my Mum promptly set off to collect. Whilst doing so she, being the caring sort she is, asked if there was anything else she could get that would help with my Dad’s discomfort. The helpful pharmacist recommended something that she stated she had used many times herself and my Mum, being the caring but rather un-skeptical sort she is, promptly purchased a pack of 12 Relief-Xtra Magnetic Plasters. Later when she informed me of this fact she admitted to not being exactly surprised by my reaction.

The Relief-Xtra Magnetic Plasters are basically small ceramic magnets mounted on circular plasters which are said to produce a magnetic field with a strength of 800 GAUSS. They are, of course, just one of many products that you can buy that fall under the heading of Magnetic Therapy, a pseudoscientific alternative medical “treatment” with, dare I say it, not a jot of evidence supporting its efficacy.

Now I am no expert on this sort of thing and will admit that 800 GAUSS sounded pretty impressive to me, and clearly the manufactures agreed as it is one for the main selling points on the box. Having no idea how strong this was I did a simple experiment. I placed one of the magnetic plasters on a metal surface and turned it upside-down. It stuck. Next I placed a single piece of paper between the magnet and the metal surface and again turned it upside-down. This time it did not stick. I repeated this a few times and the best result I got was the magnet hanging on for a few seconds as I rotated the surface past the 90 degree mark. So clearly 800 GAUSS is not the strongest of magnetic fields. For comparison a similar sized fridge magnet selected at random from my Mum’s vast collection effectively held ten times as many bits of paper, at which point I stopped counting. So the magnets used in these plasters are at least ten times weaker than those on your fridge and barely strong enough to make it through a single sheet of paper. Kind of makes you wonder how they are meant to make it through flesh and muscle to ease the pain in my Dad’s aching knees?

But of course even if the magnetic fields produced by these plasters were strong enough to make to where they were needed the evidence that they would actually have an effect once they got there is pretty much non-existent. Research shows that magnetic fields of equivalent and higher strength have no effect upon blood flow, contrary to one of the main claims put forward by proponents of magnetic therapy. Further more additional research on similar magnetic therapy devices shows that beyond “non-specific placebo effects” magnets are ineffective in the management of pain caused by arthritis, the specific issue for which they were recommended to my Mother. Robert Park, in his 2000 book Voodoo Science, summed it up perfectly when he said “Not only are magnetic fields of no value in healing, you might characterize these as “homeopathic” magnetic fields.” They don’t do anything and they are too weak to do so even if they did.

But believe it or not my frustration here is not aimed at the people who produce these completely ineffective products, as least not this time, nor at my Mum for buying them and certainly not at my Dad for walking around with two of them stuck to his knee. No my frustration is aimed squarely at Boots, the UKs most recognised and trusted pharmacy chain, for stocking, promoting and, in this case, directly recommending a product that is simply not up to the purpose for which it was sold. In fact, and this is unsurprising if you know anything about advertising laws, even the people who make this product do not claim it actually does anything. In fact the only claims made on the box are that magnetic therapy is recognised by modern science, has been used for thousands of years and that you should notice some undefined benefits after 24 hours. It makes no claim to treat pain of any sort, let alone arthritic pain. As with implied support from GPs when a trusted company like Boots sells a product like this they are, whether they intend to or not, conveying a message to their customers that the product works, that it will do what it is being sold to do and that it, like Boots themselves, can be trusted. This is simply not the case when it comes to magnetic therapy, or almost any alternative health care products for that matter. Less than two years ago Paul Bennett, a spokesman for Boots, stood up before a committee of MPs and told them that they sell homeopathic products basically because people buy them and not because they actually work. I strongly suspect something similar is going on here.

Further Reading:

Magnet Therapy: A Skeptical View

Magnet therapy doesn’t work

Magnet Therapy: Positive or Negative?

Let’s start with an easy one: excise taxes. These are taxes on specific goods usually with the aim of discouraging use. They help overcome the problem of market failure caused by negative externalities. One example is petrol. When a buyer and seller agree to a price for this good they are taking into account the personal cost and benefit of exchanging a certain volume of fuel for a certain price. What they are not taking into account is their negative impacts of the rest of society. Using more petrol means the buyer and seller are contributing to pollution, global warming, traffic congestion, and negative health effects like higher asthma rates. By leveling an excise tax, the government makes sure more transaction costs are paid for and not passed on to unwilling third parties, including future generations. Even better, the government can take this revenue stream and use it to help mitigate the effect of excise taxes of poor citizens and to start developing alternatives so the negative consequences of the market are eliminated entirely.

So what about property taxes? This will depend on your view of property rights. I find it rather difficult to believe in absolute property rights because I do not see how a legitimate ownership assertion can be made over a non-owned resource in the first place. If the original ownership claim is illegitimate then any sale or inheritance of that resource is insufficient to continue asserting absolute ownership. On the other hand, it would very be difficult to run a functional economy without the convenient fiction of property rights. These rights allow stability and development, taking them away completely would allow resources to change hands so many times that nothing could get done. But the cost of allowing these property rights has to be paid by the people who gain the advantages. Property taxes are the compensation owed to the wider community who are giving up their claim to your resources in order to allow you to benefit. These taxes can then be used to support others who missed out on the appropriation of resources or to develop public property such as roads and parks that benefit everyone who wishes to use them.

Finally, income taxes. Wealth is not earned in a vacuum; it is instead the result of a well developed and functioning society. Taxes pay for education, health services, transport networks, safety inspections, police, fire-fighters, and the justice system – all the things that keep a modern nation a vibrant place to do business. An income tax is a fundamental part of this system allowing the provision of all these services – it is the cost of earning a living in this type of society. If you are not paying for the services you use, then you are not doing your fair share. Income taxes are not imposed, but are agreed as part of taking on employment. They are part of your employment agreement and, as everyone knows a priori income will be taxed, there’s no excuse for calling it coercion. Further, income taxes can be made highly progressive helping to increase equality within a society. Benefits can even be given to those with low pay packets boosting their incomes. With higher wage equality comes higher levels of employment and a sustained demand for goods and services in what is called ‘wage-led growth’. This is the Scandinavian model of development and has proven itself to be one of the fairest ways to organise a growing economy while maintaining a healthy, happy population.

The results of a sensible tax investment can be seen in more efficient markets that take account of externalities, as compensation for allowing some unequal access to resources, and producing a vibrant and egalitarian economy with a happy population. I for one am happy to invest in this kind of future.

AndromedasWake and I attended a conversation between Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers yesterday. Well, we tried. But we were slightly obstructed by the protesters who forcibly entered the theatre and then hippied up the whole damn shooting match.

Protesters? Oh, yes. You may count upon it.

Members of the Education Activist Network spent about half an hour sitting on the stage and talking nonsense. I gather they’re annoyed with Dawkins for his involvement with AC Grayling’s New College for the Humanities, about which they are disgusted, I tell you.

The gist seems to be a) it costs a lot and b) we can’t afford it therefore it is c) an affront to the laws of God and Man. According to the EAN, education is a “human right”, which I don’t think really follows, but even if it is, how do you quantify exactly how MUCH education is a human right? Is it basic levels of numeracy and literacy? Or is it the kind of suave service Grayling aims to provide?

I had to wonder about these protesters, these predominately young, groomed and foppish types as they flounced around the stage. The purpose seemed mainly to have good hair and pose dramatically, rather than effect any meaningful dialogue. I don’t imagine many involved will have donated all their spare money to educational charities, or devoted their spare time to mentoring and private tutoring. They probably like bursting into rooms and then not making sense.

Let’s dismantle the notion that expensive, private education is somehow bad. Assume that I, over a period of years, create an institute to teach guitar. It takes me a lot of time, money and effort, and is done with the aid of many people. In order to recoup my losses and in order to pay for the highest standards of tutelage, the costs are high. Does anyone have the right to complain? Nope. It’s my college and I can charge what I like. No-one has the right to free or cheap guitar tuition; it’s an exchange of money for a service. Even if education is a human right, is an exceptional education a human right? Grayling et al are trying to create extraordinarily high standards of service; costs will, correspondingly, be high.

Let’s make it even simpler. You go to Greggs (a bakery chain in the UK, not sure if it’s worldwide) and a cake is cheap. Got to Les Cakery de Pierre van de Gateaux, in Richtown, and a cake is expensive. But it will be a damn nice cake. Does anyone protest the fact that some cakes are too expensive for people to afford? Hell no. If a bunch of people decide to set up a private institution to offer a service, and the service is an elite one that cannot be sustained without high fees, how is it the right of poor people to demand the abolishment of same? At least it’s an institution devoted to the dissemination of knowledge, even if everyone can’t afford it. What the EAN are actually trying to do is reduce the number of educational establishments, on the grounds that they can’t afford them even though they have no right to expect to be able to afford them.

There was a Q&A at the end, but it seemed that the remaining protesters (many having been removed by police earlier) didn’t want to rush to the microphones, which you might have thought would be their purpose. Mainly they remained in their seats and heckled rather than taking the chance to directly converse with Dawkins on the subject.

Class act, guys.

The data collected was from two surveys taken in 2004 and 2008 asking 983 and 1,893 people respectively. The first effect looked at was the direct relationship between religion and support for torure. The researchers found a negative correlation on this point. That is, a religious person was less likely – on average – to support torture. This was described as an organic influence, something about the precepts of religion and opposition to torture were simultaneously appealing to the survey respondents.

However, the authors had also expected a discursive influence of religion and torture because of the popular view that religion and conservative politics ‘go together’ in the US and conservative politics lead to support for torture. When they separated out the progressive and conservative respondents, the moderating impact of religion was overwhelmed and a strong positive relationship between religion and support for torture was observed. A discursive relationship is one that arises through common perception, such as an ideological framework. Compare this to an organic relationship caused by innate features which people may not be consciously aware of. To show the three part relationship between religiosity, conservatism, and torture the researchers looked at one final factor: education level.

The authors of this study reasoned that conservatives with higher education levels would hold more consistent political views. Those with less education would be more likely to follow the common, organic, threads even if they were inconsistent with their stated political position. The data were consistent with this hypothesis showing conservative religious people who were highly educated were even more likely to support torture. So there we are, being religious is negatively correlated with supporting torture but being educated and politically engaged is positively correlated with it, at least if you are a conservative.

Malka and Soto (2011) The Conflicting Influences of Religiosity on Attitude Toward Torture. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Students could choose between four options to describe their view on this relationship.

1. Conflict – I consider myself on the side of religion
2. Conflict – I consider myself on the side of science
3. Independence – they refer to different aspects of reality
4. Collaboration – each can be used to help support the other

Categories three and four were lumped together into a ‘non-conflict’ answer.

Of this sample 83% of the students were religious. Unsurprisingly then, this means that 86% of the respondents went with non-conflict (69%) or sided with religion (17%). That leaves 17% non-religious students, 14% of whom sided exclusively with science. Given the large proportion of Christians in the US and that most are not of the fundamental variety, meaning they will have their science and eat it too, this seems a fairly straight-forward result.

Interestingly by their junior year, 73% of those who had originally sided with religion had come to adopt a non-conflict or pro-science position. This shift perhaps reflects the secularising effect of education. However, 47% of those who had originally picked science had also shifted their position. Not as large of a percentage of those who changed from a pro-religion stand-point but a substantial proportion of students. Even when the researcher looked into the data for only science students, the moderating effect of education was still present. Apparently, learning more about science decreased the view that science and religion were in conflict.

What I would have liked to be able to look at is the detailed data for both the independence and collaboration viewpoints instead of having them lumped together in a single category. If it’s correct that more education promotes a more secular viewpoint I would expect to see the ‘independence’ category increase. Whereas if education was actually supporting religion, I would expect to see a growth in the number of students picking ‘collaboration’. With the data in their current form, it’s impossible to make such judgements.

1. SHEP is funded by the Templeton foundation; any true sceptics will now hum the Jaws theme.

Scheitle, C. P. (2011) U.S. College Students’ Perception of Religion and Science: Conflict, Collaboration, or Independence? A Research Note. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 50(1), 175-186.

But in Short, He’s all my Nightmares wrapped up in one disgusting cowardly person who’se level of insanity approaches and possibly exceeds that of a “Nephilimfree” or “VenomFangX”

What does one do when approached by such characters like Nephy or OFU? What do you do when someone simply dismisses all the Documentation and evidence i have provided to support my side as nothing more than “Zionist Propaganda”?

What does one do with someone who has an unhealthy obsession with the hair shaven from the victims before they went into the Gas Chambers. I explained Via quoting some Nazi Docs that the hair shaven off was used in the Textiles industry. One of those Docs mentions a usage of hair in the manufacturing of hair-yarn socks for U-boat crews. He picked that line up and tried to bastardize my broader point by now he’s demanding examples of, In his words “Jew Hair Socks”. What am i to do?

Well it turns out that i dont think there is not alot i can do. No matter how much evidence one puts forward to support my case, No matter how long and detailed my arguments are. [Im one of those rare people that doesn't see the 500 character limit on youtube as a limit.] It’s going to be ignored or distorted anyways, The best thing to do is argue not for the sake of winning my opponent over [I clearly do not think i can] but better to get the truth to a potential third party who may read the lies and distortions given by such loons. That is what i believe the essence of the public sphere and debate is. Winning others over.

There is a reason why i ask “what can i do?” here, on a Forum designed to promote Critical Thinking and whose members alot of them specialise in the rebuttial of creationist claims. It is because i believe Holocaust denial and Creationism have their similarities. Yes i know With one, are denying something which i, Like any other decent person considers to be a well demonstrated and well proven fact of Nature. With the other, You’re denying something which I any other decent person considers to be a well demonstrated and well proven fact of History. Both employ similar methods of denial. Ranging From Quote-mines to inserting things which really aren’t, and so on! Gleaning your info from ideological Hacks which is what both do doesn’t do you any favours

But is this superficial? Im hoping it isn’t. I have plenty of experience debating Beck-heads as anyone on the chat will verify. But my experience of debating pure fundamentalists like OFU is minimal. If anyone experienced with debating creationists can help me out with these questions, They are more than welcome, especialy as with regards to how to engage idiots like OFU

In two short years I’ve seen so much original and unrestricted discussion here it’s hard to believe it was once just getting off the ground.

I just want to thank all our members, new and old, for making this community as open and awesome as it is.

Rock on!

AW out.

In his Christmas speech the Pope addressed the subject of child abuse by saying that “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children”. Yup, apparently in the 1970 everyone was just fine and dandy with the sexual abuse of children and so the Catholic Church, I’m guessing in an attempt to try and seem relevant and keep with the times, decided to start abusing children as well. See, it is all the secular worlds fault, they did it first, the Catholic Church was just going with the crowd. Seriously Catholic Church, if the secular world jumped off a bridge would you do it too?

Now I myself wasn’t born until near the end of the 1970s so I have no first-hand knowledge of whether child abuse was just considered run of the mill and acceptable during that time, but somehow I don’t think that was the case. But it does raise an issue about morality that the Pope seems to have missed. He went on to talk about the growth of child pornography saying “We cannot remain silent about the context of these times in which these events have come to light…that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society”. So it is acceptable to society so the Church cannot be held fully to blame if they did it as well, is that what you’re saying? Now one thing I remember clearly from when I was a Christian is the whole “in the world but not of it” line. Christian’s are called by Jesus to live up to a higher standard of morality than everyone else. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the world is a bunch of lying, stealing, murdering child rapists, as a follower of Jesus you are to be above such things and set an example by the moral life you choose to live. Seems the Pope may have forgotten this point when offer up his “well they did it first” argument.

Strangely all this got me thinking about Ray Comfort’s latest post over on his Atheist Central blog. Here Ray attempt to explain how you can have perfect justice and perfect mercy when mercy is, pretty much by definition, a suspension of justice. Once again, given that he only actually has like three lines of argument, he offers up the highly flawed analogy of a man in a court of law being found guilty and told to pay a $100,000 fine only for the judge to pay the fine himself because “he cares about the man”. According to Ray this would be an example where both mercy and justice were satisfied.

Now if you are anything like me you will find yourself scratching your head at this line of reasoning and being amazed by the fact that anyone could say such a thing with a straight face. This, like the Pope’s defence of priestly kiddy fiddling, only seems to work as an argument if you are already completely convinced that you are in the right. No one would watch a judge pay another man’s fine, or to make the analogy more accurate have someone else serve another man’s sentence, and say justice had been done, just as no one would accept the statement of “well everyone was doing it back then so why make such a big deal about the children buggered by priests” as a reason to forgive the Catholic Church for the horrors it inflicted on hundreds of innocent children. But then maybe I just don’t get religious morality.

I would love to hear your thoughts on either of these matters.

For those of you who haven’t heard about this let me give you the thrust of the story. The UK Government is currently working on plans to have internet service providers block their customers’ access to pornographic material as a matter of course, the idea behind this being to protect children from “accidently” accessing mature websites. Now if the idea of going without internet porn makes your life seem barely worth living don’t worry as the Government include in the plan a way that you can still get your fix of Japanese anorexic vomit porn, all you need to do is phone up your ISP and ask them to grant you access. I am sure that won’t be too awkward.

Personally I have never been a big user of porn, however it is good to know that if I do have the urge to find out what two girls and a midget can do with a bucket of jelly and six foot of garden hose that the option is available to me without having to phone someone up and tell them about it first. Now obviously I am making light of this story but it does have serious implications. This is very much a case of the Government decided what people can and cannot view in the comfort of their own homes. Porn, except in specific cases, is not illegal and while I agree that there should be things in place to make it hard for children to access it should that really be the responsibility of the Government or should it rest on the shoulders of the individual parents?

Now there is obviously a long hard slippery slope argument that can be made here. Once the Government has blocked easy access to porn how long before they make it illegal to look at it at all. What other things might they decide should be blocked “for the sake of the children” once the ability to do so is in place? Who decides what constitutes porn anyway? After all one man’s porn is another man’s art.

I know this is a little off the usual topic of this blog but I think the heart of the story is very much League of Reason territory. This is censorship, this is telling people what they can and cannot look at, even when it is perfectly legal to do so, and it has implications far beyond what is being proposed. I would love to know your thoughts on this one. Am I overreacting here or am I right in viewing the Government as trying to bend us over and shaft us where it hurts?

PS. Th1sWasATriumph so should have written this post. My attempts to use innuendos pales in comparison to his mastery of the art.

Whatever you’re up to, I hope you have a good one and continue to stop by at League of Reason in 2011.

Clear skies!

P.S. Don’t forget to swing by The Official Xmas Thread!

NASA’s release: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/dec/HQ_10-320_Toxic_Life.html

So, how do you think this will affect the search for life elsewhere? It might not be life on Titan (as some speculated the news release might be about), but it’s still pretty cool.

Forum topic for convenience: http://forums.leagueofreason.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6453