The democratic civilities around religious liberty and all having lots of different views on what happens when we die, is among the widest appreciated and valued items of personal liberty. We remember the Middle Ages history of inquisitions and religious wars, and every time religion comes up we experience the value of our liberty to think something else than the person or group we are talking to. Some follow a politeness tip to avoid it in conversation because of the different views, but folks interested in the subject enjoy exploring the ideas range.
Part of the civil coexistence is to know that we will each apply our own beliefs to each other's deaths. That's common sense. The only exception to the civility is the insultingness and evil fear play involved in threats of hell, and those are obviously a personal hostility and bigotry so they breach civility. All the range of beliefs that are not control threats or hostile like that, but that are civil to imagine, the civility of coexistence applies to. Whatever you believe about death is what you believe has happened.
An author of a well regarded autism book interpreting our community as a civil rights movement, Neurotribes, Steve Silberman, has died suddenly. There is some mourning around on Facebook. But also, there is a post going round, that he posted only a year before, telling everyone how to react to his death. It orders, dictates, not to react to it saying anything that expressed any afterlife beliefs. He calls those "comforting fables", which comes from the hardline atheist astronomer Carl Sagan. He was entitled to his view like anyone, and to have any memorials follow it. But he was not entitled to dictate to everyone else not to react to the event of his death through their beliefs.
He dictates to all to take an anti-afterlife lesson of our impermanence, from his death. Dictates to arrive at his view. That's overbearing dictatorial arrogance. He tried to use instruction on how to handle his death, to trap folks into his belief position, as an outcome of following the instruction. To censor folks' own perceptions in how they react to a death. That was controlling arrogance and a misuse of the civility code around death.
For it he forfeits the civility code. Your beliefs are your human right. It makes it fair to only remember him as an arrogant jerk. To realise from this that he was that, and for it not ceased to merit positive remembering.
Maurice Frank
4 Sep 2024
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Saturday, November 7, 2015
Is there gentle caring society without religious places in it?
Here's proud of a Youtube comment I just made, on how sneery tough antagonistic character types - the human majority - can't get along well in a thinking way and create local social scenes around their ideas. Anyone who wants that to happen needs to be favourable to making social behaviour softer and more including and welcoming than it usually is.
It's an atheist cartoonist, called "DarkMatter2525", - hey I happen to be sceptical of dark matter. In this cartoon www.youtube.com/watch?v=wguAQHWVcZY he complains that urban America is very densely full of churches, and atheists feel hassled by it. This was one of his emotionally serious offerings, probably his most self-troubled one.
He is a prolific maker of comedy cartoons on theology, though like all the Youtube atheists he never looks at the thesis of a God not having any magic omnipotence. The cartoons directly about conservative and morally harsh religious ideas, and how they would really work out for society if practised literally, are addictively incisive and what any conservative theocracy needs to hear. They are really good and deliciously libertarian. Others are turkeys leaving you furious at wasting time on them: those are the ones where he digresses onto lots of unnecessary sex and nudity themes to make himself look cool. Comics with macho characters always do that. Particularly offensive in some of his cartoons are some too harshly head-on uninhibited depictions of violent or medically tragic deaths, within a comedy context, made shockingly coldly unfeelingly by someone who believes in no existence after death, and wishes to attract his viewers to that harsh macho belief too - all those of his cartoons are just as bad as the harsh scriptures he argues for being offended by.
His sense of humour is emotionally gloating and psychologically sneering in the misery ehancing horrible way that has remained popular ever since the barbaric "alternative" comedy of the 80s started it. There was a clue in there to his complaint, to the social imbalance favouring Christians over atheists in having any neighbourhood social life with likeminded folks towards religion and its issues. And it's not only Christians, it's everyone who feels compatible with a church, you might not be a Christian but still feel likdminded enough with a liberal church to belong to it socially. I wrote -
"
" Plenty of nice folks are atheists. But the milder forms of organised religion, regardless of their content's rightness or wrongness, have a social virtue that practically nothing else achieves [besides the aspie scene, hopefully!] - they bring together softer gentler characters and give them a social space to be themselves and accepted, a refuge. From what? From human uncivilisation, from persecution by all the derisive-hearted macho thug chararcters who are a tyranny of conformity to a futile harsh cycle of sneer and violence which destroys everything nice. And because being macho includes deriding every nice idea in religions, not for being wrong but for being nice, macho sneer characters are always atheists.
This makes it far harder for atheists than for the religious, to like each other and get along well socially. Consequently, they can't form so many local associations equivalent to churches. The religious outcompete you not on ideas, their ideas can be dumb without limit, but on escape from cruel human nature. If humans were socially nicer than we are, there would be an equal spread of atheist churches. If you want to fight back from being surrounded by churches, encourage atheists to be saintly instead of tough personalities, ignore every macho sod who drops atheism in disgust at it, and look forward to the quality life of basking in warm-hearted tolerant soppy company.
That prospect is not shaking your self-esteem, is it? because that wouldn't be the rational response to its reasoned merits.
"
Maurice Frank
It's an atheist cartoonist, called "DarkMatter2525", - hey I happen to be sceptical of dark matter. In this cartoon www.youtube.com/watch?v=wguAQHWVcZY he complains that urban America is very densely full of churches, and atheists feel hassled by it. This was one of his emotionally serious offerings, probably his most self-troubled one.
He is a prolific maker of comedy cartoons on theology, though like all the Youtube atheists he never looks at the thesis of a God not having any magic omnipotence. The cartoons directly about conservative and morally harsh religious ideas, and how they would really work out for society if practised literally, are addictively incisive and what any conservative theocracy needs to hear. They are really good and deliciously libertarian. Others are turkeys leaving you furious at wasting time on them: those are the ones where he digresses onto lots of unnecessary sex and nudity themes to make himself look cool. Comics with macho characters always do that. Particularly offensive in some of his cartoons are some too harshly head-on uninhibited depictions of violent or medically tragic deaths, within a comedy context, made shockingly coldly unfeelingly by someone who believes in no existence after death, and wishes to attract his viewers to that harsh macho belief too - all those of his cartoons are just as bad as the harsh scriptures he argues for being offended by.
His sense of humour is emotionally gloating and psychologically sneering in the misery ehancing horrible way that has remained popular ever since the barbaric "alternative" comedy of the 80s started it. There was a clue in there to his complaint, to the social imbalance favouring Christians over atheists in having any neighbourhood social life with likeminded folks towards religion and its issues. And it's not only Christians, it's everyone who feels compatible with a church, you might not be a Christian but still feel likdminded enough with a liberal church to belong to it socially. I wrote -
"
" Plenty of nice folks are atheists. But the milder forms of organised religion, regardless of their content's rightness or wrongness, have a social virtue that practically nothing else achieves [besides the aspie scene, hopefully!] - they bring together softer gentler characters and give them a social space to be themselves and accepted, a refuge. From what? From human uncivilisation, from persecution by all the derisive-hearted macho thug chararcters who are a tyranny of conformity to a futile harsh cycle of sneer and violence which destroys everything nice. And because being macho includes deriding every nice idea in religions, not for being wrong but for being nice, macho sneer characters are always atheists.
This makes it far harder for atheists than for the religious, to like each other and get along well socially. Consequently, they can't form so many local associations equivalent to churches. The religious outcompete you not on ideas, their ideas can be dumb without limit, but on escape from cruel human nature. If humans were socially nicer than we are, there would be an equal spread of atheist churches. If you want to fight back from being surrounded by churches, encourage atheists to be saintly instead of tough personalities, ignore every macho sod who drops atheism in disgust at it, and look forward to the quality life of basking in warm-hearted tolerant soppy company.
That prospect is not shaking your self-esteem, is it? because that wouldn't be the rational response to its reasoned merits.
"
Maurice Frank
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Applied parental ideals?
I found Tannice Pendegrass's talk on autism treatments, at Skeptics on the Fringe yesterday, very sketchy and full of gaps.
Yes she did some important good by itemising the serious harm that can be done by hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) treatment, chelation and names of 4 kids apparently killed by heart failiure or lack of substances resulting from treatments that come from speculative theories of autism's causes that there is no proven evidence for. But when she mentioned the MMR issue she said no more than, this should not be mentioned in an autism talk at all, and moved on - Then in her summing up at the end told folks to help by passing on the news that there is no MMR autism issue as if they had heard actual evidence on it! Several other times with proposed physical causes of autism she just declared they are wrong without going into any details of why.
This approach seems completely wrong for a talk on evidence based scepticism! It seemed to say that the folks she was talking about had an obligation to support their statements with evidence but she had not. But this was likely to go down well with a Skeptics on the Fringe audience and slip by totally unnoticed by them: because, as I and another Elas member have both noticed, this is exactly the same approach as they take towards the paranormal all the time.
Skeptics on the Fringe is a now annual season by the local humanists, held to broadcast their opposition to religion and the paranormal. It sounds quite odd for a talk on autism to feature in that at all. The reason was to show how broad a reach the principle of scepticism has, by featuring scepticism towards quack cures. It is certainly a good message that the evidence for all proposed treatments should be questioned with a presupposition of scepticism, the onus put on the treaters to prove their case. That they not be taken on trust as experts will be familiar to all survivors of arrogance from child psychiatry.
But this whole scene of hardline opponents of religion and the paranormal is a scene with a big ego investment in pushing its own predetermined view, a doctrine, hence exactly like religion would do. If you attend much of Skeptics on the Fringe with a genuinely 2-way open mind, or if you scrutinise the frantic biased rantings in Carl Sagan's later writings, including his shocking wriggle "There are no authorities, only experts," or if you consider whether Richard Dawkins's call for everyone who has seen a ghost to be "gently pointed towards the nearest psychiatrist" is compatible with civil liberty over religion: you can easily notice their sceptical approach is one-sided. They do not apply it even handedly nor believe they need to. Folks who hold the beliefs they oppose, they hold responsible to jump through every possible hoop of evidence and proof, while too often any voice on the disbelieving side they generously and keenly accept on trust as expert, then actually cite their expert opinion as an argument! No surprise then, when the same one-sided accepting as expert with little scrutiny what a voice in sympathy with them says, happens in an entirely secular topic of medicine too. It happened at Pendegrass's talk.
She is a defender of Applied Behaviour Analysis, and she sanitised it by saying it is used with small kids and with more severe deficits of functioning - implying it is only used with them, and only used to find ways out of actual inabilities to function. She did not all discuss it getting used to change behaviours and social choices, to say stop doing this do that instead, in kids who certainly can function.
I got a question in at the end, on the objections I have heard raised from experience, to ABA, for being used for social control like this with older and more functionally able youth, even adults. I have come across such very credible objections, that match all we know of child psychiatry's own behaviour, in the online community. I asked Pendegrass what safeguards there are or there should be, to prevent ABA being used to force a patient into an ideal normal personality decided for them, to take away their own lifestyle choices.
I did not get a straight answer, not any answer about safeguards at all. All the answer given was, it's not about taking away folks' character, oh I have never come across it being used to make all folk's choices for them, and that in the Analysis part of it there is a 2 way discussion of the results a behaviour has, to work out whether they are good or bad. But all that is just defensive talk keeping it sounding right, relying on an appeal for trust, it is not actual safeguards. She said something else that quite gave the game away and points against giving ABA that trust: she said it is about "helping them not to end up ostracising themselves."
All ostracising is a hate crime and instrument of group tyranny over personal lifestyle choices, it is there to be resisted and defied. The entire idea of "ostracising yourself" is about blaming the victim. It is the worst of all ways of saying, conform and be normal or else suffer oppression in society. It is a way of saying the oppression is the victim's fault because they have not chosen to avert it by bowing to the crushing communism of peer groups and giving up all their own distinctive personality. Everyone who belongs to one of the many minorities with histories of unpopularity and persecution will spot a mile off that doctors can tell you, stop being what you are and become what the tabloid mob tell you or else you are "ostracising yourself". The entire idea "ostracising yourself" is a blank cheque invitation for that crushing level of control, for ordering you to make choices that don't work for you, e.g. to obey dress norms that are physically wrong for your body's sensitivities, with the added misery of seeing anyone else succeed in not obeying them.
I put this point of unpopular minorities and the wrongness of forced norms straight back to her, and all she did then was revert to taking about severely affected small kids who were not the point of my question: she said surely it can't be wrong to help a kid who just suits staring at a light all day to function more effectively than that. This was dodging the question. But at this point another of the audience threw in a point on her side, said all parents and folks working with kids are trying to bring them up in a certain way, which means directing their characters, and Pendegrass grabbed this gratefully, said "That's a really good point".
Then, as too often happens under the time pressure of such events, that was the end of the time slot for this question. No chance to come back and challenge the oppression these 2 folks were both defending, and for that to go unchellenged is particularly striking in the setting of Skeptics on the Fringe. ABA was blatantly not given the same level of questioning as as the more physically medical quack cures were. Oddly that is even though Pendegrass admitted ABA is often offered at rip-off prices of several thousand pounds, and when one of her pieces of moral shock info against the quack cures had been the costs they are sold at.
On bringing up kids in character directed ways: the whole point of sceptics and humanists is they are supposed to expose that as the evil oppression and life destruction it is, because often the controlling ideals of parents or teachers come from religion and are about making the kid follow that religion. We have in Elas a member done a lot of life damage to in exactly that way by a too fervently Christian parent. Are the sceptics and humanists going to defend that type of parenting? It would startle all their supporters if they did, it would contradict their fight against religion in schools, a fight that liberally religious folks like me agree with totally. But otherwise, they should have challenged that audience speaker who favoured controlling agendas towards kids, and they have a duty of scepticism towards ABA until they obtain a satisfaction on that point that was was not obtained at that talk yesterday.
Maurice Frank
Yes she did some important good by itemising the serious harm that can be done by hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) treatment, chelation and names of 4 kids apparently killed by heart failiure or lack of substances resulting from treatments that come from speculative theories of autism's causes that there is no proven evidence for. But when she mentioned the MMR issue she said no more than, this should not be mentioned in an autism talk at all, and moved on - Then in her summing up at the end told folks to help by passing on the news that there is no MMR autism issue as if they had heard actual evidence on it! Several other times with proposed physical causes of autism she just declared they are wrong without going into any details of why.
This approach seems completely wrong for a talk on evidence based scepticism! It seemed to say that the folks she was talking about had an obligation to support their statements with evidence but she had not. But this was likely to go down well with a Skeptics on the Fringe audience and slip by totally unnoticed by them: because, as I and another Elas member have both noticed, this is exactly the same approach as they take towards the paranormal all the time.
Skeptics on the Fringe is a now annual season by the local humanists, held to broadcast their opposition to religion and the paranormal. It sounds quite odd for a talk on autism to feature in that at all. The reason was to show how broad a reach the principle of scepticism has, by featuring scepticism towards quack cures. It is certainly a good message that the evidence for all proposed treatments should be questioned with a presupposition of scepticism, the onus put on the treaters to prove their case. That they not be taken on trust as experts will be familiar to all survivors of arrogance from child psychiatry.
But this whole scene of hardline opponents of religion and the paranormal is a scene with a big ego investment in pushing its own predetermined view, a doctrine, hence exactly like religion would do. If you attend much of Skeptics on the Fringe with a genuinely 2-way open mind, or if you scrutinise the frantic biased rantings in Carl Sagan's later writings, including his shocking wriggle "There are no authorities, only experts," or if you consider whether Richard Dawkins's call for everyone who has seen a ghost to be "gently pointed towards the nearest psychiatrist" is compatible with civil liberty over religion: you can easily notice their sceptical approach is one-sided. They do not apply it even handedly nor believe they need to. Folks who hold the beliefs they oppose, they hold responsible to jump through every possible hoop of evidence and proof, while too often any voice on the disbelieving side they generously and keenly accept on trust as expert, then actually cite their expert opinion as an argument! No surprise then, when the same one-sided accepting as expert with little scrutiny what a voice in sympathy with them says, happens in an entirely secular topic of medicine too. It happened at Pendegrass's talk.
She is a defender of Applied Behaviour Analysis, and she sanitised it by saying it is used with small kids and with more severe deficits of functioning - implying it is only used with them, and only used to find ways out of actual inabilities to function. She did not all discuss it getting used to change behaviours and social choices, to say stop doing this do that instead, in kids who certainly can function.
I got a question in at the end, on the objections I have heard raised from experience, to ABA, for being used for social control like this with older and more functionally able youth, even adults. I have come across such very credible objections, that match all we know of child psychiatry's own behaviour, in the online community. I asked Pendegrass what safeguards there are or there should be, to prevent ABA being used to force a patient into an ideal normal personality decided for them, to take away their own lifestyle choices.
I did not get a straight answer, not any answer about safeguards at all. All the answer given was, it's not about taking away folks' character, oh I have never come across it being used to make all folk's choices for them, and that in the Analysis part of it there is a 2 way discussion of the results a behaviour has, to work out whether they are good or bad. But all that is just defensive talk keeping it sounding right, relying on an appeal for trust, it is not actual safeguards. She said something else that quite gave the game away and points against giving ABA that trust: she said it is about "helping them not to end up ostracising themselves."
All ostracising is a hate crime and instrument of group tyranny over personal lifestyle choices, it is there to be resisted and defied. The entire idea of "ostracising yourself" is about blaming the victim. It is the worst of all ways of saying, conform and be normal or else suffer oppression in society. It is a way of saying the oppression is the victim's fault because they have not chosen to avert it by bowing to the crushing communism of peer groups and giving up all their own distinctive personality. Everyone who belongs to one of the many minorities with histories of unpopularity and persecution will spot a mile off that doctors can tell you, stop being what you are and become what the tabloid mob tell you or else you are "ostracising yourself". The entire idea "ostracising yourself" is a blank cheque invitation for that crushing level of control, for ordering you to make choices that don't work for you, e.g. to obey dress norms that are physically wrong for your body's sensitivities, with the added misery of seeing anyone else succeed in not obeying them.
I put this point of unpopular minorities and the wrongness of forced norms straight back to her, and all she did then was revert to taking about severely affected small kids who were not the point of my question: she said surely it can't be wrong to help a kid who just suits staring at a light all day to function more effectively than that. This was dodging the question. But at this point another of the audience threw in a point on her side, said all parents and folks working with kids are trying to bring them up in a certain way, which means directing their characters, and Pendegrass grabbed this gratefully, said "That's a really good point".
Then, as too often happens under the time pressure of such events, that was the end of the time slot for this question. No chance to come back and challenge the oppression these 2 folks were both defending, and for that to go unchellenged is particularly striking in the setting of Skeptics on the Fringe. ABA was blatantly not given the same level of questioning as as the more physically medical quack cures were. Oddly that is even though Pendegrass admitted ABA is often offered at rip-off prices of several thousand pounds, and when one of her pieces of moral shock info against the quack cures had been the costs they are sold at.
On bringing up kids in character directed ways: the whole point of sceptics and humanists is they are supposed to expose that as the evil oppression and life destruction it is, because often the controlling ideals of parents or teachers come from religion and are about making the kid follow that religion. We have in Elas a member done a lot of life damage to in exactly that way by a too fervently Christian parent. Are the sceptics and humanists going to defend that type of parenting? It would startle all their supporters if they did, it would contradict their fight against religion in schools, a fight that liberally religious folks like me agree with totally. But otherwise, they should have challenged that audience speaker who favoured controlling agendas towards kids, and they have a duty of scepticism towards ABA until they obtain a satisfaction on that point that was was not obtained at that talk yesterday.
Maurice Frank
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