Rights vs being Right

We have an excellent Constitution and Bill of Rights here in the United States, and we owe much of that to our venerable founding fathers.

My favorite is the first amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.


Freedom of speech, in particular, is what sets us apart from many other nations today (and during our founding years, truly distinguished our democracy from the ascendant monarchies and tyrannies that reigned the world over.)

In addition to such freedoms, we also have the seperation of powers - the system of checks and balances that works when one branch of the government becomes overzealous in removing or taking issue with certain freedoms.

We, as humans, are deeply fallible. Freedom of speech is a deep recognition of that falliblity, because it limits the power of the government to determine what is 'right'. The government can say whatever it wants - but it is not allowed to censor the things you want to say. Hate speech must be protected, religious fundamentalism must be protected, because while we might wish to simply do away with those things, the moment we attempt to censor them we allow in the potential to one day ourselves be censored when we speak up with an unpopular view that is, nevertheless, a moral call for change in the society or the government.

The importance of rights and the ability to say what you like are an acknowledgement that we are incredibly bad at actually determining what is 'right'. Only in a pluralistic pantheon of ideas and views will we be likely to find the set that is actually correct - and in many cases, even if we think we have found the 'right' views, we will be wrong in many respects. That's why governments should never be in a position to dictate what is 'right', because they will almost inevitably be wrong - and if they are wrong, who will stop them?

Even today, with the invented rights-less status of 'Enemy Combatants' housed in Guantanamo, we can see the system of checks and balances at work. The executive branch has tried to imprison human beings without charge by claiming that they are not protected by any rights (That is, inventing the category of 'Enemy Combatants' rather than treat the captives housed therein as either international criminals, soldiers, or at worst, spies). The Judicial branch has, if slowly, moved in to put a stop to it, and ruled that holding people of any status without charge or trial is unconstitutional.

All too often I have heard supporting cases for Guantanamo or for torture of 'Enemy Combatants'. Naturally I do not want to censor these views, but merely argue against them - and hopefully provide a better argument than those who support such actions by the government (Which I will do in future posts). At the rist of oversimplifying, often the argument comes down to trading liberty for safety, and given that choice, I advocate that we should nearly always choose liberty.

Unquestionably questioning

There is no greater barrier to our individual search to find truth than our own lack of efforts to perform the search in the first place.

Far too many people are trained to accept and memorize the things they are told. There is great credulity in the population in general, and very little in the way of skepticism or scrutiny of new ideas. People have found their belief systems, and they are comfortable and content in them, and feel little pressure to question whether those beliefs are accurate or not.

This is not just a religious phenomenon. It happens in politics - many of us are staunch Democrats and Republicans. It happens (and in this case often needs to happen) in warfare, where soldiers automatically obey orders from their chain of command.

But at the heart of the search to find truth are deep, hard questions. The reason science is so effective and useful to us is because it actively encourages such questions and rewards those who tear down former beliefs that prove, through questioning, to be false. On the matter of faith, consider that most of us are born into whatever faith we currently hold, and that whether your faith is right or not, if you have never changed your faith, is purely a matter of luck - you were either fortunate enough to be born correct, or (and this is statistically more likely) you were born into an incorrect faith.

I was decidedly fortunate. In not instilling any beliefs in me (or lack thereof), my parents left me with about as close to no preconcieved notions about faith as you can reasonably expect to have. So when I began to question, I suspect I did so from the best position for questioning - in this case, agnosticism, or rather the acknowledgement that we begin the search not knowing the answer.

This is a decidedly important stance to have when we ask questions. If we want to challenge and investigate our own beliefs, it becomes necessarily to suppress (for a time) those beliefs that we are questioning, or we will too easily arrive at the answer we wanted to find. To be objective, we have to let go of whatever answers we want to get, and let the answers we find guide us where they lead. Ask, and let the evidence or expirement answer you.

This is why an atheist should be willing to pray. We do not believe in God or the effectiveness of prayer, but we should make the attempt anyway simply because other people have put forth the idea that God will reveal himself to us if we pray for him to do so.

So we pray. We also, not infrequently, have people praying for us.

If the result surprises us - and God actually does reveal himself, then we should be willing to abide by that result. We then have more questions to ask.

Of course, if we still don't encounter God, then the theists have more questions to ask.


But the most dangerous thing is to stop questioning. The only way that can benefit you is if you already have the truth. If you don't already have it, then it is only by questioning that you can possibly recognize the truth when it is finally presented to you. If you DO already have the truth, then the truth should be able to withstand rigorous scrutiny and hard questions, and questioning it will only help you learn more about it.

Us and Them

When discussing flaws in skepticism and my fellow skeptics, I would say that divisiveness and superiority take the cake. It is all too easy to fall into an Us vs. Them mentality - 'we seekers' have found truth, and 'those others' are trying to rob us and other people of it.

I won't deny that every pseudoscience and religion has their share of charlatans who are all too eager to fleece the flock. But the vast majority of believers - the flock itself - are not in it for the money or power, but out of a genuine desire to know the truth and to get answers to life's big questions. In terms of attitudes, skeptics and believers can easily be mirror images of each other - both have a fair amount of people who feel superior because they have found truth, and both have people who compassionately reach out to help others, who are no worse or inferior or stupid than they are for having been mistaken, to find such truth.

I think that this sense of superiority is a universal facet of humanity. It has in roots in that deadliest of sins, pride. It crops up not just in faith and skepticism, but is also the basis of racism, patriotism, and the fact that my college is in all ways better than that college down the street.

But of course, the sense that 'we' have a monopoly on truth, and that theism or various superstitions are universally bad or evil, is unconstructive. It is easy to point out the bad things that religion has done through history - the deplorable witch hunts, the crusades, trying to take away our booze, and most recently knocking down our favorite skyscrapers.

But keep in mind - the United States' history involves the genocide of the native inhabitants of the land we occupy. At one time our forefathers were every bit as immoral and heartless towards an entire group of people as any crusader or Nazi - and let's not forget slavery, we can make that two groups of people. And yet we don't generally hate the United States as it stands today the same way some of my fellow skeptics seem to hate religion. If we're unhappy with this nation, we seek to change it rather than to destroy it. We should be well pleased when a religion decides that it will no longer engage in crusades or witch hunts or terrorism, and we should not hold the theists of today accountable for the sins of the theists of yesterday.

There is a fine line between hating theism and hating theists, and I find it much easier to not hate theism in the first place. Never having been a theist probably plays into my lack of animosity - in general, I have found that people who have left a group are more hostile towards it than those who were never in it at all. A former theist is more inclined to feel as though he were betrayed and lied to when he discovers that his belief no longer works for him, or becomes an idea he cannot see as true any more. So I cannot entirely fault my fellow skeptics for disliking something they see themselves as having been freed from - but I can certainly ask that they recognize that everyone else who is still a part of that particular faith is merely in the same boat that they were, and they are not deserving of contempt, rudeness, or mockery for having fallen into - or been born into - the same situation. Such actions will only serve to drive them away from a careful examination of their own faith - after all, see what a rude person that 'backslider' has become! They don't want that to happen to them!

We are not different. Theists, by and large, are good people. They are kindred spirits who, like us, have a desire to understand the world and the universe around them. We have reached a different understanding, and we recognize that one or both sides must be wrong about it. We are two men in our own life rafts that meet in the ocean, and both become immediately convinced that the other man's life raft is sinking. At that point it is clear that simply calling the other man an idiot for not realizing that his raft is going down is unconstructive (and makes him inclined to do the same to you). It is far better that you end up with the odd situation of both men trying to calmly convince each other to switch rafts, because in the end it's possible that one might actually convince the other to get on - or at worst, they agree to disagree on the condition of their respective rafts, and each merrily take their own craft on into the unknown seas.

The Monster in the Closet

Many young children develop a fear of monsters.

The monsters are always close to them - they are in the closet, or under the bed, or hiding in the dresser drawer. Perhaps they are under the stairs. They live just out of sight, in the hidden places of the house, waiting until the lights go out.

When the lights go out and the darkness closes in, the monsters will get you.

Parental assurance that there are no such monsters does no good. 'Please check' they ask. The closet must be opened, the bed must be looked under, before the child will accept that there are no monsters there... at least tonight. Monsters even have their own rules - sometimes the closet must be left open, to prevent monsters from hiding in it. Other times the closet must be left closed, to keep any monsters who appear inside it from coming out. Seldom do the monsters ever have terribly imaginative qualities - the monsters are usually not invisible or intangible, but they are merely hiding, and would indeed prove to be visible if we could catch one in the open. That is why the child is safe when the lights are on and no monsters can be seen.

Confident that the child's belief in monsters will eventually pass, parents indulge their children. Closets are left open or shut, beds are checked, and nightlights are purchased to keep the darkness at bay. We do it all to assuage the child's fear, for while we are confident that there are no monsters, we know that their fear is real and that it torments them. Kids are not lying when they tell us about the monsters - their fears and their beliefs are genuine. After a glimpse of motion outside the window, or waking from a terrifying dream, they may even be convinced that they have seen the monster that was moments away from getting them.

Children do eventually stop believing in such things, and they grow into adults. But what if adults still believed in monsters? What if the rules given to the monsters made it so that the act of simply illuminating the area provided no protection - now the monster is invisible. Now the monster is intangible. Now the monster can be everywhere at once. Now the monster is believed in by a majority of people, and instead of dissuading their children of the belief in this monster, it is encouraged and reinforced. People will not simply grow out of their belief in such a monster, and turning on the lights and showing a room devoid of monsters does nothing to convince believers that they are safe, even for a moment. The rules even include a self-reinforcing nature - because it is no longer a matter of light and dark that determines when the monster gets you.

Now? If you don't believe in the monster, it will get you.


I don't believe in monsters. I'm beginning this blog as an attempt to light a metaphorical candle, and be one among many such monster-deniers that can reassure my fellow humans that there are no monsters in the closet, under the bed, in the sky, or everywhere at once.