But to Hitchens: why not school people in precisely how the human mind does work at this point in the argument? It certainly does obey laws—laws so material that the notions of subjectivity and consciousness on which the theist’s argument rest get blown to smithereens. If a human subject with a “mind” who makes ethical decisions that transfer to his or her immortal soul suffers a brain injury impairing his or her interpretive systems, ability to read human emotions (key to the brain response we know as ‘compassion’) then what’s happened to the soul? If I can remove the part of a person’s brain that enables ethical judgment, have I not surgically removed their moral soul? This connection between what the religious call the soul and what is known about material brain functionality severely undermines the theist’s notion of the “I” that makes choices that bear on “my” eternal soul. If I’m a neuroscientist, I can plug your immortal soul into a machine and map it’s [sic] electricity.

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver’s seat for the soul—the site where “you” make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the “I” that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the “I” isn’t aware of and couldn’t control no matter how hard it tried. The notion of heaven, this place where all the “I”s will someday go because of things they did or didn’t do, is not commensurate with what is known about the brain. The human “I” in other words is little more than the transcendentalizing of an evolved brain phenomenon. If one accepts evolution, as D’Souza does, then one must also accept that these brains once had no ability to conceive of themselves in this way, much less to glorify it so. And so grows a new problem for the theist—not the atheist—to explain, one that isn’t unlike the ensoulment debate regarding abortion. Whence did the soul of the “I” come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

Many have charged the new atheists of wearing out an old argument and passing off as if its [sic] new. But these questions are completely current. Francis Crick proclaimed the brain to be the great frontier of the 21st century and it has only been with the advent of computers in the last 20-30 years that the intensive acceleration in learning has taken place. Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, and Dawkins are not beating dead horses by the name of Russell or Nietzsche. They are pushing back the post-everything world’s increasing tendency to accept bullshit. And their rebuttals to this trend stand on foundations that aren’t hundreds or thousands but mere tens of years old. Hitchens could have been a bit more forward with some of this information. D’Souza could stand to be a bit more aware of it. But hey, the best bullshitters are the ones who believe their own bullshit.

• If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?
  
• What if we took that program and trained a large number of people, say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out the steps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering over China, separate from the consciousnesses of the billion individuals? If they were implementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be some entity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and light-hearted?
  
• Suppose the visual receiving area at the back of your brain was surgically severed from the rest and remained alive in your skull, receiving input from the eyes. By every behavioral measure you are blind. Is there a mute but fully aware visual consciousness sealed off in the back of your head? What if it was removed and kept alive in a dish?
  
• Might your experience of red be the same as my experience of green? Sure, you might label grass as “green” and tomatoes as “red,” just as I do, but perhaps you actually see the grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as red.
  
• Could there be zombies? That is, could there be an android rigged up to act as intelligently and as emotionally as you and me, but in which there is “no one home” who is actually feeling or seeing anything? How do I know that you’re not a zombie?
  
• If someone could download the state of my brain and duplicate it in another collection of molecules, would it have my consciousness? If someone destroyed the original, but the duplicate continued to live my life and think my thoughts and feel my feelings, would I have been murdered? Was Captain Kirk snuffed out and replaced by a twin every time he stepped into the transporter room?
  
• What is it like to be a bat? Do beetles enjoy sex? Does a worm scream silently when a fisherman impales it on a hook?
  
• Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?
  

Beats the heck out of me! I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual confusion of sentience with access [to information] and self-knowledge. [1997, p. 145-147]

Labels: Lib, MorPa, OnVi, OthBlo, RS, Sc

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:50 PM

October 8, 2007

Rev. Scott Imler, medical marijuana’s fallen angel

Scott Imler, a United Methodist minister in West Hollywood, would rather regulate herbs in hell than serve liberated health care customers in heaven. He was willing to appreciate the logic of letting people use cannabis as a healing herb at their own discretion—until too many of his sacred cows were slaughtered by the alleged scandal of medicine’s commingling with capitalism at California’s medical marijuana dispensaries. Americans will stop worrying about health care soon after they learn to think calmly and rationally about it. Imler proves that point in the negative.

Morley Safer interviewed Imler for the September 23 60 Minutes:

The Supreme Court has upheld the DEA’s right to go after dispensaries, no matter what state law might say. And even one of the key proponents of medical marijuana says things have gotten out of hand.

“It’s just ridiculous the amount of money that’s going through these cannabis clubs. It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Scott Imler, a minister in the United Methodist Church who has long been active in promoting medical marijuana.

Eleven years ago, he was working to pass proposition 215, the [statewide] ballot measure that legalized it. Today, Imler has second thoughts.

“The purpose of proposition 215 was not to create a new industry. It was to protect legitimate patients from criminal prosecution,” Imler says.

The aim back then, reflected in television spots, was for a highly regulated system in which licensed pharmacies would dispense medical marijuana to the seriously ill. Proposition 215’s backers had people with AIDS, cancer, and glaucoma in mind.

“What happened when we were writing it was, as you can imagine, every patient group in the state and they all have their lobbies. You know, the kidney patients and the heart patient. Every patient group wanted to be included in the list,” Imler recalls. “And so we didn’t wanna get in the position of deciding what it could be used for and what it couldn’t be used for. We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists. We weren’t researchers. We were just patients with a problem.”

Imler says they were forced to make the proposition vague.

So the law voters passed mentioned not only cancer and AIDS but “...any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.” A decade later, if you’ve got a note from a doctor, you can buy medical pot for just about any imaginable condition.

“Let me just ask you plain and simple. Is there this proliferation because people are simply using, quote, unquote, medical marijuana, to get high?” Safer asks.

“I think there’s a lot of that. And I think you know, a lot of what we have now is basically pot dealers in storefronts,” Imler says.

Many businesses calling themselves dispensaries or cannabis clubs advertise in alternative papers, as do doctors around the state who will give you a quick once-over and, for a price, a permit to buy.

Regrettably, Safer doesn’t see through the phony scandal of adult citizens purchasing an amazingly safe herb for the difficult to explain but very real benefits of getting high. I credit Imler with intellectual humility when he says, “We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists.” I wish he would take that reasoning a little further. Why doesn’t Imler notice the alarming discrepancy between the scientific and political processes? Why doesn’t he then apply the same standard of intellectual humility to politicians (and the health care workers they have forcefully deputized) that he does to himself?

If I could, I would deny any doctor or pharmacist the prerogative of vetoing my request for any medicine. Generations of government growth have taught many Americans to think of health care (and education) as things that come down from the government like manna from heaven. But the laws of economics are nearly as dependable as the laws of physics. It always sucks to be relatively poor. It entails relative deprivation in every worldly good and service, including health care. Meanwhile, free markets regulated minimally to avoid coercion, fraud, and gross threats to public safety are the historically proven way to make all goods and services continually better and more available. California’s medically sound Proposition 215 is a model for taking health care in general away from slow-witted bureaucrats and back to the people.

In other words, I am the final authority on whether getting high is beneficial to my health. Rev. Imler prattles onward:

“Most of these cannabis centers are buying their marijuana off the black market. They’re dumping millions of dollars into the criminal black market,” Imler says.

“Marijuana—what? Coming in from Mexico or wherever?” Safer asks.

“Some of it is,” Imler says. “Some of these places sell hashish, which comes in from the Becca Valley in Lebanon.”

“What you’re suggesting is that the traditional black market or part of the traditional black market is now legal?” Safer asks.

“Yeah. That’s essentially what’s happened,” Imler agrees.

....

And looking back on a decade of controversy, Rev. Scott Imler concedes that good Samaritans with good intentions weren’t enough. He argues it’s time for the federal government to step in and legalize and properly control medical marijuana.

“Until that happens, we’re gonna have what we have now, which is chaos,” he says.

Those are the last words of the 60 Minutes story. For some reason, what Imler calls chaos is supposed to be scary, like a movie presented by Count Floyd. Unless Imler can justify his fear of that kind of chaos without regurgitating hoaxes about marijuana, his newfound hypocrisy ought to diminish his reputation in the medical marijuana community.

Go fuck yourself, Reverend! You’re a Falwell in sheep’s clothing!

Labels: DruPo, Lib, Lit, MorPa, RS, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:16 AM

August 14, 2007

I want India to invade the Playboy Mansion

No major “Bollywood” production from India’s feature film industry will be freeze-framed in Playboy’s annual “Sex in Cinema” pictorial for some time yet. Only a few years ago have the gorgeous male and female leads in these elaborate song-and-dance melodramas been allowed to kiss on screen for the first time since the nation’s independence (60 years ago tomorrow). But I still think that the 2001 blockbuster Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India could be a hit at one of Hugh Hefner’s movie parties.

Bollywood style is sometimes said to parallel the musical extravaganzas of American cinema of the 1930s, part of the cultural environment of Hefner’s childhood. The music itself sounds vastly different, but anyone who can learn to enjoy the Beatles’ tribute to Indian music from Sgt. Pepper’s can love the crowd-pleasing tunes of the best of Bollywood. Lagaan takes place in a remote district of British-occupied India in 1893. Indian farmers are threatened with hunger because of drought and the lagaan (Hindi for land tax) they have to pay every year: a portion of their harvest to the British government. Naturally, Indian audiences love to hate the smug, vicious colonial racism of the tax-collecting villain, Captain Russell. Audiences from every country on earth will cheerfully boo and hiss along. The farmers notice that the game the Englishmen call cricket looks like a “boys’ game” native to India. Out of desperation, they goad Russell into betting the lagaan on the outcome of a cricket match between the Indians and the Englishmen. If the Indians lose, they pay triple. If they win, they pay nothing for three years.

This is not only an engaging sports movie but also a romance with remarkable sex appeal. Pay attention to the subtitles in the video clip below. Surely, the song’s Hindi lyrics describe part of the eternal game of human mating all over the world. Only a little grounding in Hinduism is needed: The occasion is the religious festival of the god Krishna’s birthday. In his reckless youth, Krishna is said to have had many pretty young cowherdesses, Gopis, as playmates. But the main goddess in his life is his consort, Radha. The rest will sound all too familiar.


2001 Playmate of the Year Brande Roderick is the leading lady in the recent Bollywood production Out of Control. But I can’t lie. Lagaan is a much better movie.

Extra-credit question: How much would you pay to see a Mel Brooks tribute to Bollywood?

Labels: Cintv, He, Mansi, NPH, OnVi, PM, Rom, RS, Sp

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:43 PM

July 12, 2007

Attention, Senate prayer hecklers: Hinduism is monotheistic

I would love to see President Bush apologize to India for the tasteless bigotry of the Christianists who disrupted this morning’s opening prayer in the U.S. Senate (video). For the first time in its history, the Senate had invited a Hindu chaplain to lead the prayer. Although Rajan Zed invoked “the transcendental glory of the Deity Supreme” to help the senators “strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world,” the hecklers knew the work of the devil when they saw it. Why waste time studying comparative religion when the Holy Spirit and the inerrant Bible tell you who the troublemakers are?

For Christianists, the main problem with Hinduism seems to be its alleged polytheism. Religious scholar Huston Smith would surprise them by pointing out that the multitude of gods and goddesses in Hindu iconography represent only one Supreme Being:

How is [devotion to God] to be engendered? Obviously, the task will not be easy. The things of this world clamor for our affection so incessantly that it may be marveled that a Being who can neither be seen nor heard can ever become their rival.

Enter Hinduism’s myths, her magnificent symbols, her several hundred images of God, her rituals that keep turning night and day like never-ending prayer wheels. Valued as ends in themselves these could, of course, usurp God’s place, but this is not their intent. They are matchmakers whose vocation is to introduce the human heart to what they represent but themselves are not. It is obtuse to confuse Hinduism’s images with idolatry, and their multiplicity with polytheism. They are runways from which the sense-laden human spirit can rise for its “flight of the alone to the Alone.” [The World’s Religions, 1991, p. 34]

Libertarians and psychonauts, take note: in another of his books, Smith argues in qualified favor of the religious use of psychedelics.

Labels: MorPa, OnVi, RS

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:06 PM

April 6, 2007

For my upcoming 35th birthday, a relaxed publishing schedule

The big day is April 23, but the partial blogging hiatus starts now and may continue for another month after that date. I want to emphasize some other areas of my life besides this blog for a little while. Tonight, my stream of consciousness runs quickly from one Playboy-related April birthday to another:

Hugh Hefner turns 81 on April 9. Congratulations and best wishes in advance.

“This is a good birthday present for Playboy,” said Erwin Arnada, speaking of an Indonesian court’s decision to throw out charges of indecency against that country’s year-old version of the magazine, which Arnada edits. (Hat tip.) I’m happy to see Islamic fundamentalism lose some of its coercive power over the people of Indonesia—for all the same reasons I like to see Christian fundamentalism lose power in my country. Even without nudity, Indonesian Playboy symbolizes more freedom and pleasure than some wish to allow. Personally, I think God appreciates those who lighten up and mind their own business.

Labels: ForPo, He, MorPa, PJ, RS

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:39 PM

March 8, 2007

The Notorious Bettie Page takes no cheap shots

In her “20 Questions” interview for the February Playboy, Bettie Page, Miss January 1955, gives a mostly negative review of the 2005 film version of her life. But actress Gretchen Mol, director and co-writer Mary Harron, and co-writer Guinevere Turner interpret the pinup legend as a woman of remarkable courage and dignity. By refusing to take a side in any “culture war,” they avoid condescension towards the recent past. American sexuality in the 1950s is recognized as the first cousin of American sexuality in the 2000s: painfully aware of its own cruelty, yet managing to find some degree of grace. The religious implications of the word grace fit, because Page’s spirituality is taken as seriously as her sexuality. More people should view American social history through a lens so finely cut.

Labels: ArtPic, Cintv, NPH, PM, RS, VW

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:14 AM

February 28, 2007

The Great Prude War of February 2007

Who can predict the outcome when two logically challenged, self-righteous bigots go to war? Thanks to the intrepid correspondence of Hit & Run, this epic struggle has been thoroughly documented.

Orthodox feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte, who hates Catholicism and men, was fired from John Edwards’ presidential campaign, thanks in some significant part to Catholic League president William A. Donohue, who hates Judaism and gays. In hindsight, I think I see why Donohue was more likely to win. His Catholic education, complete with the seven deadly sins, probably gave him an edge in worldly wisdom over Marcotte and her doctrine of the noble savage. Not enough of an edge to actually know what he’s talking about, of course. Just enough to win between the two of them. (To be fair, Andrew M. Greeley has been rather well served by his Catholic upbringing.)

As I’ve said recently, American conservatives have a problem with sex while American liberals have a problem with money. Just as sex scandals encourage people who otherwise wouldn’t to talk about sex, any corporate malfeasance (no matter how small the consequences in comparison to government malfeasance) encourages some of us in the free, developed world to make a big show of feeling guilty about the relative misfortune of other parts of the world. As a libertarian, I strongly support the right to self-flagellate. (I should; I’ve done it.) But I resent the implication—as in this elaborate guilt trip from one of Marcotte’s colleagues at Pandagon—that libertarians simply don’t know or don’t care about the children who work in factories to make our clothes. We’re just pure evil, aren’t we?

My earlier skirmishes with Amanda Marcotte:
Libertarianism as Pandagon misunderstands it
Playboy can no longer tell friend from foe
File this under “No such thing as bad publicity”

Labels: BGC, BlaSla, Femi, Lib, MorPa, MR, OthBlo, RS, Sc, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:08 PM

January 22, 2007

This blog is proudly halal

In other words, this blog is proudly the Muslim equivalent of kosher. I have recently traded links with a Muslim woman in Minneapolis. While she chooses to wear a head scarf in public, she agrees with me that a woman has the prerogative to either conceal or display her body. I like to think that our friendship follows the example set by Playboy in the 1960s, when it engaged organized religion in a surprising amount of dialogue. Sadly, the magazine appears to have lost much of that open-mindedness. These days, it publishes essays by fanatical atheist Sam Harris, who essentially says about all religious people what drunken Mel Gibson said about Jews. But after all, how can I not believe in a Higher Power after seeing Playboy?

Labels: ArtPic, Femi, MorPa, OthBlo, RS

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:42 PM

December 6, 2006

Roman Catholicism has a sensual side

At a time when organized religion is often blamed—unfairly, in my opinion—for inventing sexual repression, these words from the first two pages of When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City by Robert J. Hutchinson merit our consideration:

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that you get to see a lot of beautiful naked women.

You may never have realized that before, but it’s true. I never could understand why thick-headed, drooling Protestants would accuse us of being prudes when they gave the world the Puritans and the Moral Majority and we gave the world Rodin’s The Kiss.

From Michelangelo to Madonna, Donatello to Salvador Dalí, Catholic artists have felt little compunction about letting it all hang out ad majorem Dei gloriam [Latin: “for the greater glory of God”]. The billboards outside our apartment in Rome, which each week featured a new topless model advertising perfume or a new brand of blue jeans, are merely carrying on an artistic tradition that goes back to Botticelli and Caravaggio, Titian and Bellini.

Everywhere you go in the Vatican, you see nudity.

The Sistine Chapel, of course—inside of whose echoing walls the cardinals elect the pope—is covered with naked men and women, all piled on top of one another in what looks for all the world like some sort of biblical orgy. In the Vatican Treasury there is a magnificent bronze tomb of Sixtus IV, the patron of the arts and founder of the Vatican Library, completely covered by a series of topless, buxom nymphs each representing one of the liberal arts (Arithmetic, Astrology, Music, Grammar, and so on). It’s a testimony to the Catholic erotic sensibility, I think, that a pope’s tomb is covered by a dozen bronze nudes.

The papal apartments in Castel Sant’Angelo are likewise decorated in frescoes that would have made Hugh Hefner proud: tall, lithe young women all raising their pendulous breasts with cupped hands to what one can only imagine were admiring papal eyes. The Stufetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, today the seat of the Vatican Secretary of State in the Apostolic Palace, features a colorful painting of a tumescent Pan about to pounce upon a naked blond nymph combing her hair. And in the oldest part of the Secret Archives, above the wooden cabinets filled with all those red-sealed papal bulls, are brightly painted seventeenth-century murals depicting scenes with bishops and popes—but interspersed throughout are full-sized decorative paintings of beautiful young women dressed in loose tunics that invariably fall off a shoulder to expose at least one jutting nipple.

Imagine the ruckus that would arise if a university or public library today decorated its walls with murals of topless teenage girls.

I’m sorry I couldn’t find good links to more of the images Hutchinson describes.

Related earlier posts:
Bring back the ribald classics!
Song parody: Everyone’s a little bit prudish
The consumerism of the Renaissance

Labels: RS

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:13 AM

October 7, 2006

Naomi at Martian Anthropologist thinks I’m a Bible-thumper

brian423: we’re bored with you. Simple as that. Obviously, we’re not going to follow your link, nor are we going to visit your website.

You get your info from tainted, biased-against-reality, regressive/repressive sources.

As your religious institutions atrophy and crumble from lack of relevance in the 21st century, you’ll be left with nothing.

Unless you renounce your addiction, you’ll be on your own. But we do have a nice 12-step recovery program for you, if you’re interested.

Now, go back to your bibble-study. Your heaven is waiting for you...

Naomi

What did the author of Reflections on Playboy do to deserve this unlikely abuse? The post is about a 17–year-old woman who was easily persuaded to get into the parked car of a 38–year-old male stranger impersonating a police officer. She safely left the car a few minutes later, but not before giving him her address, phone number, and parents’ names. A comment penned by “reaper” called her a “dumbass.” Naomi more or less agreed, adding that only a Christian could be so stupid:

Fundie Alert: the next section will contain ideas that will cause extreme distress!

Blind, unquestioning obedience starts in church! Well, maybe in church-y families...

Twenty bucks say her parents were interviewed and stated, “God saved our daughter from that monster”, or something along those lines.

No, I didn’t google(tm) it, so that’s just a guess. But we all know how commonplace it is to thank him for “delivering from evil”; conversely, he never gets blamed for “delivering to evil”. Why is that?

Come on, xtians! This is right up your alley. Reminder: this is, for the most part, an atheist blog. So if we drag theism into the discussion of an Oklahoma mayor (whose wife posed “largely” nude on the Internets), why can’t we drag it into this topic? (The Rapid City SD mayor, arrested at the Iowa State Fair, did not meet our standards for blaming gaud...)

Naomi [italics and bold in the original]

I contributed this comment:

reaper, you’re blaming the victim.

Naomi, you’re placing blame on the wrong institution. Most likely, the young woman got in the car because compulsory schooling has led her to believe she is still a child. If you don’t believe me, please read my call for teenage liberation. (I thank TerraPraeta for making me aware of this post of yours.)

From that, Naomi jumped to the conclusion that I study the bibble, whatever that is. Despite its misleading title, she knew instantly that Reflections on Playboy is a “fundie” site. She already knows everything about all opposing points of view.

Where does self-righteousness come from? Religion per se doesn’t create it, or else atheists like Naomi wouldn’t show it. Some historians of philosophy blame Platonism, but I don’t buy that theory, either. The tragedy of Hippolytus, a polytheistic study of a self-righteous man, was first produced at about the time that Plato was born. To be so inspired, Euripides must have seen self-righteousness around him even then. “Indeed, the problem with Homo sapiens may not be that we have too little morality,” says cognitive scientist (and atheist) Steven Pinker. “The problem may be that we have too much.” My source for the quote—however tainted it may seem to Naomi—is “The Sanctimonious Animal,” chapter 15 of his book The Blank Slate. Whether or not they’ll admit it, atheists are just as capable of intolerant fanaticism as the rest of us.

Labels: AgeMaj, BlaSla, Educ, Lit, MorPa, OthBlo, RS, Sc

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:06 PM

September 13, 2006

You’re not mad, Tim Cavanaugh; you’re in a moral panic

Et tu, Reason magazine? At least one editor of America’s foremost watchdog journal against moral panics of all political stripes is in a moral panic himself over the intoxicating allure of organized religion. “Is the world mad or am I?” asks Tim Cavanaugh in response to a Tampa, Florida, woman’s conversion to Islam a few years after she lost eight relatives in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At least as far back as February, Cavanaugh has seen moderate religious faith as the gateway drug that leads to the harder stuff pushed by Al Qaeda. Doing so, he puts himself in the embarrassing company of evangelical atheist Sam Harris