Humans and Gods

I listened to an interview with Reza Aslan, his new book is entitled God a human history, on KPFA radio in Berkeley. I heard so many assertions that I consider to be unfounded that I was amazed that the interviewer, Brian Edwards-Tiechert didn't challenge them. Aslan argues, ineffectively in my opinion, that humans have an innate belief in a separation between the material and the spiritual, the body and the mind (brain) and thus an innate need to create gods. I am reminded of two books by Sigmund Freud on this subject. In the first book, The Future of an Illusion, Freud presents his hypothesis (one I share) that all forms of faith/religion are mental illnesses, neuroses or psychoses. The distinction is that belief in an illusion (something which cannot be proved) is a source of neurosis, whereas belief in a delusion (something which can be proved to be false) is a source of psychosis. In that book, Freud presents these ideas with elegant logic, and unlike some of his clinical work (interpretation of dreams, alleged female fantasy of parental rape), his ideas on faith and religion hold up well in my opinion.

In the second book, Civilization and Its Discontents, Dr. Freud discusses the many social problems, such as wars, which these mistaken beliefs can cause. However, I want to focus on the introduction. Freud says that friends of his said to him that they could appreciate his ideas in the first book, but what about the "oceanic feeling" that there is something greater than us in the universe. Freud's response was that he feels no such oceanic feeling and therefore it must be something which is planted in the human brain by society. That is where I think Aslan drops the ball, in my opinion. Are there false beliefs which go back far into human history? Of course there are. Many humans believed that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around the earth. Indeed, you could be severely punished by the medieval Roman Catholic church if you questioned those views. We now know that both ideas are false and can be proven to be false.

Is the universe much more complex than we can perceive? Of course, it is. We see and hear, for example, in a fairly narrow range of frequencies. Other species have wider ranges of frequencies which they can perceive. We have invented devices to perceive way beyond the frequencies we can directly perceive. Add to that the strange architecture of our brains and their mechanisms of cognition and storage of information (for example, we use the same mechanisms to store and retrieve information, and we often overwrite older information). We also have half a dozen processes that operate in our brains and negotiate the thoughts which make up our consciousness. It is a miracle, of sorts, that we have learned and achieved as much as we have with such poorly constructed mental faculties. None of that, however, in any way means that there has to be a nonmaterial part of the universe, for which, by definition, there can be no evidence whatsoever. I reject the notion that there is a spiritual component of the universe precisely for that reason.

Aslan also makes other strange claims. He says that fundamentalism is only about a century old. Galileo would have questioned that, as would the many victims of the inquisition. So would the victims of the Crusades. He says that the predominance of nonreligious beliefs among millennials is a new phenomenon. Has he never heard that many of the founders of the USA were deists, which is precisely a belief in a supreme being without the trappings of religion. Of course, it is also possible that some of them were atheists since Deism was often used as a protective cover by atheists. Openly asserting atheism could be very dangerous to one's personal safety.

Modern cognitive research has revealed a number of innate capabilities in our brains. We are born with a fully formed visual cortex with the ability to interpret the photons that fall on our retinas. We are born with the ability to learn language; Noam Chomsky did pioneering work on that. We are not a blank slate. But the development of our brains is also profoundly influenced by our experiences. Through experience we form neural pathways. I would like to see any evidence which proves that the tendency to form irrational beliefs (faith, religion, flat earth) is innate in our human brains. Arslan speculates that such a tendency evolved either because of a direct advantage or because it is linked to another train which does give us an advantage, but he asserts that the tendency is there in every human. On that, I give the same answer as Freud. I was not born with that tendency and do not have that tendency. Therefore, it is much more likely something introduced socially, i.e., by the interaction with other humans. The tendency of religious social groups to demand belief and to punish disbelief
would have played no small role in propagating and maintaining nonrational beliefs.

In conclusion, I think what most offends me about Arslan is that he tries to lay a scientific basis for something which is precisely non-scientific. He uses the language of science but not the tools of scientific inquiry. Faith and religion have unquestionably played large roles in human history and society. They should, therefore, be studied, but they should not be elevated into something which they are not.

Who Is the Worst US President So Far?

I can hardly think of anything for which we can be grateful to Donald Trump; however, he has resolved the debate about who has been the worst US president in his own favor. I am not a historian, though I do know a lot about the histories of the Middle East, Africa, and other places. So, I tend to be better able to evaluate presidents I have seen in action while I have been alive. To be sure there were villainous 19th century presidents. Consider, for example, Andrew Jackson who led the genocide against Native Americans and set the stage for later US war crimes throughout the world. In the 20th century, consider the devout racism of Woodrow Wilson. Still, in looking for the lowest points, prior to Trump I saw Ronald Reagan as the worst president ever. He led a major downhill change in direction by the US government aided by his confusion of cinema with reality. Bill Clinton did awful things, but he should be viewed as an implementer of Reagan's terrible ideas. In the same way, Barack Obama continued many of the worst policies of George W. Bush, who was pretty awful but not nearly so awful as Reagan. Still, we have to thank Trump because the debate now is about who is the second worst president in US history.

On Inaccurate Language and Sloppy Thinking

Two of the most bitter debates underway in mid-2017 are over Syria and over the campaign against Russia. Many charges are thrown around loosely and without evidence. I'll give two examples. You are not an apologist for the Syrian government simply because your provide evidence that that government has been falsely accused of using chemical weapons. The Syrian government is a very repressive government, though it has a long secular history in a region which is far from secular. The enemies of the Syrian government include both an internal democratic opposition as well as foreign powers and salafist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. The latter are doing most of the fighting against the Syrian government with aid from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and Turkey. Seymour Hersh has written extensively on attempts by Turkey and Western intelligence agencies to pin fake charges on the Syrian government that it has used chemical weapons in the current war. Hersh's normal US outlets, such as the New Yorker, have declined to publish his work. To argue that Hersh is right is not to be an apologist for the Syrian government, which has enough documented crimes in its record without these bogus charges. Those charges are intended only to "justify" direct attacks by Western governments on the Syrian government and the campaign to remove it. They do not address what is really going on in Syria, and they will not lead to a just end to the conflict in Syria.

By the same token, the charges of Russian intervention into the 2016 US election are filling the news every day. It started with the charge that the Russian government was behind the release of DNC Emails proving their conspiracy against the Sanders candidacy to Wikileaks. There is still zero public evidence that this charge is true, and some convincing evidence that it is not true. Now, the charges are escalating, though it is very interesting that nobody has provided any evidence of information from Russia being used to discredit candidate Clinton in the actual election. There is no charge, for example, of Russian involvement concerning Clinton's private Email fiasco. I find it very sloppy thinking, therefore, to believe that anything that the Russian government may or may not have done had any significant effect on the election. It may very well be that members of Trump's inner circle has had traitorous and despicable relations with the Russian government, and they should be held to account for that if it can be proven. But none of that should be fuel for a new cold war against Russia. We all have minds, and we should be able to parse not only what is proven from what is not proven and what is important from what is not important. Three US intelligence agencies (not 17) say they are confident that the Russian government interfered in our election. A fourth, the NSA, says it thinks that is true but with lower confidence. If such interference involved releasing DNC Emails to Wikileaks (Wikileaks maintains that an insider leaked them), that was a service to the American electorate, but it seems far-fetched to believe that those released Emails swayed the election. How else might Russians have interfered? There is a charge that they hacked some of our famously insecure voting machines (strong Republican opposition has prevented us from having more security in voting), but no charge that they actually did anything to affect vote counts. As the famous commercial once asked, "Where's the beef?" What exactly is that the Russians, who also have real crimes to answer for, such as their totally unjustified annexation of Ukrainian Crimea and meddling on Ukraine's eastern border, what is it exactly that Russia did to influence our election? Meanwhile, the Trump regime's program to deregulate everything, from clean water to net neutrality, marches on. I understand the desire to stick charges of treason on Trump and his cronies, but there isn't likely enough substance to make those charges stick, even if every allegation were proven to be true. And if they do, we'll get Mike Pence, an ultraright Christian supremacist, who conceivably would be much more effective in pushing Trump's agenda than Trump himself. Progressives are often contemptuous of how Trump's supporters are being manipulated to support things that will hurt them. When will many progressives wake up to the manipulation which is doing the same to them?