the greatest evils: atheism and anarchism

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the outgoing Archbishop of Westminster, says that atheism is the "greatest of evils."

Murphy-O'Connor's comment is an excellent example of the moral depravity of the Catholic Church, depravity which generalizes to most religious institutions and belief systems. Actions, not words or thoughts, are the proper basis for moral judgment. I think people understand that basic principle rather instinctively, and that it takes a huge amount of indoctrination to convince people of anything else, which is quite a feat really. The Catholic Church is a particularly amazing example. An organization that includes large numbers of men who sexually abuse children and that systematically shields these pedophile rapists from the law has managed to position itself as a moral authority, holding as their highest virtue the unquestioning belief in obvious absurdities.

How can that have happened? Like most questions, there are multiple layers of answers.

Many people who recognize the absurdity I'm pointing out attempt to answer the question by just saying the people are stupid, or evil, or both. I understand their frustration but I think they're wrong. My ultimate explanation is that I think that most people are basically good and basically smart, but have a huge blind spot: they conform and obey far too easily. A small number of wicked people take advantage of this, thus consolidating vast amounts of power for themselves, which they use to further reinforce those tendencies towards conformity and obedience. Such people rise to the top of power structures like religions, using the power of those institutions toward their own ends. Look at the history of any religion and you'll see this basic pattern.

There are proximate explanations that I think are also important and worth investigating, meaning the mechanisms by which the indoctrination takes place. The methods of religious indoctrination are obvious, even to religious people when they examine religions or cults besides their own (i.e. outside of their blind spots): start as young as possible, regularly force people to publicly affirm their loyalty and belief in the dogma, discourage critical thinking and exposure to outside thought, etc. How and why some people are able to resist these measures are important questions.

Note that the phenomena of wicked people rising to the top of power structures applies equally well to government and business; politicians are crooked and CEOs are ruthlessly amoral, as everyone understands, albeit with blind spots for "their" guys. And note that the methods of religious indoctrination are also used by the state, most notably through the "education" system, but in numerous other ways. These parallels between religion and state, and the interconnectedness and mutually reinforcing nature of these two morally depraved institutions, are among the reasons why, to me, anarchism and atheism are closely related moral positions.

how it got so square

comic

 i forgot to blog about canadian bowling.  they use a tiny ball with no finger holes and only 5 pins that are spread out in an inverted V shape.  pins have different values, totaling 15!  and you get 3 rolls per turn instead of 2.  you only get a spare, meaning your first roll in the next frame gets added to your previous frame, if you knock them all down by the 2nd roll though.  max score is 450.  weird.

one decent man? i doubt it, but kill him just in case!

again, i know sports is stupid, but sometimes you can learn a lot about people by the way they respond to sports and sports stories.  so take this thing where a a pittsburgh steelers player is not going to go with his teammates to the traditional white house visit that super bowl champs make.  and this is a big deal and people are freaking out about it.  

motherfuckers, the white house is the fucking command center of the world's most devastating human death machine.  why the fuck would anyone want to go there?  now i dont really expect mainstream commentators to say that.  but the speed with which these media idiots drop to their knees to suck the cock of state power is pretty pathetic.

this shit always bugs me

i know sports are stupid, but i want to comment about this, because this kind of thing has always bothered me. in some situations in basketball, the proper defensive strategy is to intentionally foul. but good sportsmanship means you don't actually hit the guy very hard, and because the refs should be and are aware of these situations, often just a tiny swipe at him is enough to get the foul call. and that's how it should be, since by not calling a foul in that situation, a ref effectively is telling the defender that he has to hit harder. that is dangerous. in the specific case of yesterday's game, the refs basically send a message that a 6'8" 220lb man has to hit a league superstar even harder if he wants to get a foul call. in a postseason already characterized by excessively flagrant fouls and injured superstars. pretty smart, NBA!

various stufffffffffff

So I'll get back to my series about evolution and morality eventually. Class has been over for several weeks, but the appendicitis derailed me and now I've got a big report due on Friday May 15. My experiment is over; now I have a crapload of data to analyze to include in that report. Softball has started back up too, which is fun. But I'm very busy.

I'm fairly thoroughly immersed in this whole grad school scene, and I feel very isolated from almost everything I was a part of before I came here. I don't have television, don't read mainstream publications often, and rarely talk to Americans about political issues. Hell I don't even watch sports any more. I'm really in my own world. When I occasionally get a glimpse of the real world, I find it very difficult to process. It makes me realize how all-encompassing the American propaganda barrage really is. Unplugging from that really clears your head, but after a while brief re-exposure to it is quite shocking. I don't know how to describe it. Reality-based reality is so different.

it all fits

I don't know how "stunning" this is, but... yeah.

Science 1 May 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5927, p. 588
DOI: 10.1126/science.324_588a

American Association of Physical Anthropologists:

Civilization's Cost: The Decline and Fall of Human Health

Ann Gibbons

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS, 31 MARCH-4 APRIL 2009, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

When humans were freed from searching for food from dawn to dusk, they finally had time to build cities, create art, and even muse about the gods. Agriculture and cities made human life better, right? Wrong, say archaeologists who presented stunning new evidence that most people's health deteriorated over the past 3000 years. "We document a general decline in health across Europe and the Mediterranean," says bioarchaeologist Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus. He's a coinvestigator of the European Global History of Health Project, an ambitious new effort to study the health of Europeans during the past 10,000 years.

Bad back. The rise in tuberculosis in the Middle Ages left its mark on the spine of this English skeleton. CREDIT: CHARLOTTE ROBERTS [Larger version of this image]

Most bioarchaeology studies tend to tell the tale of illness and death of people from a single site, such as a burial pit for plague victims or an ancient cemetery. Larsen's project is one of the first—and the largest—to try to reveal broad trends by assembling standardized data from large samples. In a series of posters, the team presented the first analysis of data on 11,000 individuals who lived from 3000 years ago until 200 years ago throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. "This is a real tour de force," says bioarchaeologist George Armelagos of Emory University in Atlanta, after reviewing the posters.

The project has taken 8 years and $1.2 million to organize so far. The goal was to pool 72 researchers' data on standardized indicators of health from skeletal remains, including stature, dental health, degenerative joint disease, anemia, trauma, and the isotopic signatures of what they ate, says project leader Richard Steckel of Ohio State. They also gathered data on settlement size, latitude, and socioeconomic and subsistence patterns so that they could compare rich and poor, urban and rural, farmers and hunter-gatherers.

They found that the health of many Europeans began to worsen markedly about 3000 years ago, after agriculture became widely adopted in Europe and during the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations. They document shrinking stature and growing numbers of skeletal lesions from leprosy and tuberculosis, caused by living close to livestock and other humans in settlements where waste accumulated. The numbers of dental hypoplasias and cavities also increased as people switched to a grain-based diet with fewer nutrients and more sugars.

The so-called Dark Ages were indeed grim for many people who suffered from more cavities, tooth loss, rickets, scurvy, and bone infections than had their ancestors living in hunter-gatherer cultures. People became shorter over time, with males shrinking from an average of 173 centimeters in 400 B.C.E., for example, to 166 centimeters in the 17th century—a sure sign that children who were not members of the elite were eating less nutritious food or suffering from disease.

Why would people want to settle in towns or cities if it made them sick? One answer is that settlers suffered less bone trauma than nomadic hunter-gatherers, suggesting to Steckel that they might have felt safer in villages and, later, towns where an emerging elite punished violent behavior—but also controlled access to food.

The social and political inequities in urban centers meant that for nonelites, moving into cities was "almost a death sentence" for centuries, notes Armelagos. In the Middle Ages, people in the countryside were generally taller than people in cities.

After a long, slow decline through the Middle Ages, health began to improve in the mid-19th century. Stature increased, probably because of several factors: The little Ice Age ended and food production rose, and better trade networks, sanitation, and medicine developed, says Steckel. But take heed: Overall health and stature in the United States has been declining slightly since the 1950s, possibly because obese Americans eat a poor-quality diet, not unlike early farmers whose diet was less diverse and nutritious than that of hunter-gatherers. By understanding how disease and malnutrition spread in the past, researchers hope to apply those lessons in the future. "Our goal is to understand the health context for what we have today," says Larsen.

Happy May Day

The effectiveness of the state-corporate propaganda system is illustrated by the fate of May Day, a workers' holiday throughout the world that originated in response to the judicial murder of several anarchists after the Haymarket affair of May 1886, in a campaign of international solidarity with U.S. workers struggling for an eight-hour day. In the United States, all has been forgotten. May Day has become "Law Day," a jingoist celebration of our "200-year-old partnership between law and liberty" as Ronald Reagan declared while designating May 1 as Law Day 1984, adding that without law there can be only "chaos and disorder." The day before, he had announced that the United States would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice that later condemned the U.S. government for its "unlawful use of force" and violation of treaties in its attack against Nicaragua. "Law Day" also served as the occasion for Reagan's declaration of May 1, 1985, announcing an embargo against Nicaragua "in response to the emergency situation created by the Nicaraguan Government's aggressive activities in Central America," actually declaring a "national emergency," since renewed annually, because "the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" -- all with the approbation of Congress, the media, and the intellectual community generally; or, in some circles, embarrassed silence. "

Noam Chomsky.  Necessary Illusions, pp 29-30.

I added the links.