I just don't know what to think about the Iraq war.  I read Christopher Hitchens on Iraq, and can't help but feel that getting rid of the torturing genocidal tyrant Saddam was a good thing.   There is no doubt that Saddam had used chemical weapons, both against Kurds and against Iranians during the Iraq/Iran war.

 I do wonder if the Americans hadn't seriously messed up how to deal with the Iraq after the initial victory, reactions might not be what they are now.

I know that international law exists, but I have this very uncomfortable feeling when people talk about the sovereignty of countries which aren't democracies.  It seems to be saying that the people in a country are nothing more than the possessions of a ruler.

On the other hand, it seemed like the weapons inspector Hans Blix could have completed his job given a few more months.

The question I would like answered is this - what was the urgency to remove Saddam?  Why would a delay of six months or a year to allow the UN weapons inspector to have done his best been a problem?  If there were still major questions at that point, then it may have been easier to get UN approval for action.

I'm afraid I don't go for simplistic views that the war was wrong, or that Blair was a liar.  Politics is messy and confusing.    I don't think we have anything like the full story yet.

The iPad could have been so much.  It could have been a device that enabled visual and vocal input.  Where is the camera?  The voice control? It could have allowed real multi-tasking: open a web browser, and slide the link into an e-mail message.  It could have allowed support for the two major technologies of the web:  Flash and Java.  It could have allowed printing, connections to DVD players or TVs.  It could have been a serious tool for collaboration based on wireless networking.

Instead, it is two decades out of date.  I used to use computers that allowed one program to run at once, with a few background services - the iPad is Apple's DOS box!  

There have been claims in France that the burka is a threat to the secular nature of society.   A garment worn by at most a few thousand women is a threat.

There is something odd going on here. Something strange. A state is being threatened. Secularism is being challenged. The structure of a society is so fragile, it is in danger of collapse. Because a few thousand women cover their faces.

If the concerns are real, then it could change human conflict forever. No need for vast armies. No need for subterfuge, or intelligence services risking the lives of agents in foreign lands.

All that is needed to destroy an enemy is a few thousand pieces of cloth, placed just so over the faces of women.

The new battles will be fought between tailors, each desperate to design the more devastating veil. The arms race will be over, replaced by the face race. The great fashion houses will grow into monsters fed by the defence budget.

Meanwhile, there will be great political debates, as part of the struggle to design a free society that can't be brought to its knees by clothing.

It may be a futile effort.

As I'm trying to post daily (and failing!), I thought I would talk a bit more about the controversy about the non-believers campaign for donations to Haiti, and how it is using the donations for self-promotion:

The controversy continues.  And it is fierce.

So let me try and illustrate what my feelings are with a story.

There is a major disaster.  Picture the scene.  Bodies in the street.  Children, newly orphaned, are being guided to trucks to take them away.  Work is still going on to search for people in the rubble.  A camera team are watching.  They see a youngster helping out.  He is well-built, and wearing a college T-shirt.  He is doing a fine job, handing out supplies, and helping to lift rubble. 

An interviewer talks to him: "Hi there.  You are doing a great job.  Where are you from?"
The youngster replies:  "I am from St Atheist's college.  Can I wave to my friends at home?  Hi people!"
Interviewer: "What inspired you to come here?"
Youngster: "I was deeply upset by the suffering here.  I wanted to do my best to help.  So, I took time off work and flew out here to help.  Many have been contributing money to fund my trip.  It has been hard work, but I hope I have done good."
Interviewer: "That's a wonderful story."
Youngster: "Yes, it's awful here, but there is a bright side to all this:  I get to promote my home college, and hopefully sell a few T-shirts by being visible out here!"

The interviewer turns way, hand on face, shaking head.  It was going so well.  The young guy is doing such good work. There is no doubting his good heart and intentions? But why did he have to ruin it at the end: a "bright side"?  With bodies in the streets?

Still, the film is broadcast.

Back home the response is very mixed. 

"How insensitive to try and promote his college based on disaster." say the critics, after having contributed to the youngster's overseas adventure.

The defenders have a range of approaches, many confusing:

"How dare you criticise him - he's a nice chap."
"How hypocritical of you to mention the college, when you you are complaining about his mentioning it?"
"Stop going on about anything other than the help!  No-one has mentioned anything other than the help!"
"What's wrong with talking about a bright side to a disaster?  Stop being so sensitive!"
"How dare you accuse him of being insensitive!  Are you calling him corrupt, or immoral?"

And these critics forget that a few days ago, when someone in the same situation from a different (St Christian's) college said the same thing, they did not hold back with the ferocity of their condemnation.

Pat Roberston says that the earthquake in Haiti is a consequence of evil rituals performed a long time ago.

Rex Murphy, in an article in the National Post, criticises Robertson for being un-Christian.

Miranda Celeste Hale, a well known atheist and rationalist blogs (sort of – I'll explain this more later) that if anyone is a true Christian, it's Robertson.

Her approach to criticising extreme religious views is common. I think it's flawed, but in interesting ways that can help illuminate the differences between religious and rational thinking, and the problems in trying to deal with religious views, both extreme and moderate, with this approach.

For that reason, I'll ignore much of her article, and concentrate on this “real Christian” aspect.

I don't believe Miranda really is intending to define some true Christianity. That's clearly not the case. I believe what she is trying to do is to point out that by the standards of Christianity, on its own terms, Pat Robertson should be considered “truer”, because his views are closer to those of God as they more conform to those of the God of the whole Bible.

The problem is that (as Miranda acknowledges) there are no clear “standards” for Christianity. Some Christians may consider that the closer one follows the words of the Bible, then better a Christian one is. But some don't. Some believe that much of the Bible should be taken as metaphor, and even that some of it is meaningless. It doesn't matter for my argument whether or not such Christians are in the majority, just that they aren't neglible in number.

So Miranda's argument, her playing of the game of “who is the best” seems really only effective against those Christians who believe that closeness to the Bible is a measure of their Christianity. And it will only be appreciated by those Christians, and by rationalists who are trying to insist that Christianity treats literalism as an important standard.

I'll discuss this more in a bit. Now on to something else Miranda writes:

“Try as they might, those who claim to be “enlightened” “real” Christians cannot, in the end, distance themselves from the vile and vicious God of their “Good Book” without practicing a galling level of intellectual dishonesty.”

This is simply factually wrong, as the intellectually honest Christians are the ones who understand and accept that the Bible isn't all factual. Who is more intellectually dishonest – the person who ignores all of the history of the authorship of the Bible, or the person who ignores some of it, while retaining a belief that there are core facts and messages that are true? Surely, by rational standards, it is the first person. It is the Pat Robertsons who score highest on the dishonesty scale, who won't even moderate their beliefs based on rational and ethical considerations.

This whole approach fascinates me, because I think it highlights a flawed approach to dealing with religion, that fails for a really interesting reason: it fails because there are hidden assumptions that the rationalist has already won the argument they are trying to make.

In this example, these assumptions exists at two levels of obviousness (or lack of).

The first assumption is that the rationalist has won the argument about the standards that a religious person should use to judge themselves. (You can't even play the game of what a “true” religious person is until you have agreed the terms of that “truth”).

The second assumption is far less obvious, but, I think, is more important. It is the assumption that any discussion of the nature of religious belief can be discussed in rational terms. Religious belief isn't like that at all. It is about hopes, wishes, emotions. It is about fear of the unknown, and a love of traditions. It doesn't really use the language of rationalism at all (when it tries, as in the recent writings of Karen Armstrong, it comes out as gibberish). I'll give an example of what can result from this. There is a Jewish tradition called Kabbalah. It is a series of mystical teachings. Scholars spend years studying the books. It is rumoured that Madonna follows this tradition, but believes that she can get the appropriate influence from the books simply by having them in her house. Now this sounds absurd, and it may be nonsense, but it shows how language falls apart: what does "influenced by the books of the Kabbalah" mean? When someone says that “the Bible is true”, how on Earth can we know what they mean? We can only make sense of such statements in rational terms if we have already convinced that person to talk in rational terms. But if they were doing that, the intellectual battle would be almost won already.

The problem is that, generally speaking (although not always) because of these assumptions the only effective audience for arguments like these is the writer and fellow rationalists. Because it isn't even speaking the same language as used by the believer. It's equivalent to the alleged British practice of speaking loudly and slowly at foreigners, assuming that anyone should really be able to understand English. It's shouting in Rationalist at the religious. You will mostly get a rather puzzled response, and little or no communication.

 

It's fair to say there has been some controversy about the "Non-Believers Giving Aid" campaign: http://givingaid.richarddawkins.net/

The Executive Director of The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science attempts to defend this campaign here:
http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2010/01/helping_haiti.php

"Is there really anything wrong with attempting to show that as humans, we have more in common than not, despite our various views of the world.."

No there isn't anything wrong with this at all.  At the appropriate time.  But to do this right now, when people are dying and suffering, is just not right.  It's exploiting tragedy, and will be seen as such.

Sure, set up a donation on a popular site accessed by atheists and secularists.  Indicate that the money will go to the best suppliers of aid.  Keep track of the contributions.  Then, when things have settled down, it might be appropriate to point out how much has been contributed if challenged about this matter.

But to try and score points now is surely not the right thing to do.  You don't make use of tragedy in this way.

It is said that the inner workings of two things should never be seen: politics and sausage making.  It's not just gruesome to see politics in action in this situation, it's undignified grandstanding.

Some have justified the partial nature of the campaign (to show how non-believers can be good at charity and caring for others) as encouraging more donations.  I find that insulting to non-believers, as it is a self-defeating strategy - it implies that some non-believers will only give if there is a chance of self-promotion.  Even if it did bring in more money, there are always some money-making strategies that a decent charity would consider unacceptable.

Attempts to use Haiti to promote beliefs and political positions have been critised elsewhere.  There was a recent telling off of fellow journalist Rachel Maddow by Jon Stewart, who found her mention of how much the American government's policies had helped send support to Haiti to be inappropriate.  This illustrates how sensitive feelings are about this awful situation.

I fear that this lack of sensitivity will be seen as yet another political setback for the cause of political atheism and secularism, after last year's disastrous giving of the Richard Dawkins award to medical crackpot Bill Maher.

I hope that people will contribute generously to which ever charity they feel will best able to help.  But let's do it with some dignity, and self-respect.  There should be one thought on our minds right now, and one only - relieving suffering.

This is a neat way to think about space and time and speed that I came across years ago that makes some of Einstein's work very easy to understand. It worked on a friend yesterday, so I thought it would make a fun post.

People often ask why there should be an ultimate speed limit - the speed of light.  And, why should time slow down and strange things happen to distances?

Think of things this way:  There is only one speed, and we are all going at it.  That speed is the speed of light.  The thing is, that we are traveling in different directions through space and time.  Light travels only through space and not through time, so it experiences no time passing.  If we are stationary, we are traveling only through time and not through space.  If we start to move through space, then we aren't actually speeding up, we are changing direction through space and time:  so, the faster we move through space, the less we will move through time.  If we approach the speed of light then we will be hardly moving through time at all.

So, the changes in the experience of time described by Special Relativity aren't strange at all.  It's no more strange than if we are in a car with cruise control on and we turn from North to North-East, we won't be moving North as fast.

A journalist that I generally admire, Johann Hari, has written a piece in the Independent about economic policy.  A friend who understands economics far, far more than I do, has criticised the piece.  I am not in a position to judge his criticism.  But then, I'm also not in a position to judge the validity of Hari's original piece.  The point I want to make is that Johann Hari is not in a position to judge the validity of his own piece either. Hari only has formal education in Politics, not economics.

Something strange and worrying is going on here.  It isn't just that there is some general cult of celebrity, where the opinions of Jennifer Aniston on shampoo influence the decisions of the public. Things are worse than that.  What's going on here is that the views of someone who has gained celebrity because of their supposed rationalism and clear thinking are being promoted simply because of their celebrity, and not their expertise. 

The question is this:  why does someone who is well known for their support of reason and rationality think that their lay person's views on a subject are worth anything at all?  Why do they think their views have enough value to be published in a national newspaper?

How much more I would have respected Hari if he had admitted his ignorance, or explained how much a problem it is for a lay person to form a view.  

The Secret Life of Chaos is a recent BBC programme, viewable within the UK here.  You don't have to have watched it to read this post, but it helps!

Sometimes I think that the organisation seen in life and to a lesser extent throughout the universe is one of the strangest things I have seen.  At other times it seems like nothing at all.

It has been said by a theistic biologist that life surprisingly survives on the boundary between order and chaos.

But why should it be a surprise?

When there are realms of order and there are realms of chaos then where they meet things have to get interesting.  How could it be otherwise?  It's like being surprised that between land and sea, there is a beach where waves drift over sand.

Is what happens in living systems "self organisation"?  What is it that is doing the organising?  It's the equisite programming in the nucleic acids, selected by random but refined exploration of the boundaries of chaos.

Does the flap of a butterfly's wing cause a hurricaine in Texas?  Perhaps, but if there is a hurricaine, then something had to have caused it.

Thinking about self-organisation can lead to illusions.  When we look at the patterns of life and see simple mathematics, it can be a short mental step through the looking glass into imaginary world where the mathematics is the force for change and not just a description of it.  Mathematics can't be a force.  But if that is the case, what is the meaning of the Feigenbaum constants, which turn up all the time in dynamical systems? Looking at the organisation in life leads me to wonder about what <i>things</i> are real.  Are electrons any more real than an equation?

My feeling is that we find the patterns we look for, just as life naturally selects the patterns and organisation that works.  There are perhaps infinities of mathematical systems that don't show feedback and coupling that produce such amazing results.  We end up discovering chaos in the weather because a simple environment lacking in that richness would not be a place with life.  We talk of organising principles, when what we actually see are forms of organisation selected because they are what life has to involve.

Perhaps there is a mathematical anthropic principle.  We seem surprised to discover complexity, chaos, feedback and organisation when that is, after all, the nature of environment in which we evolved.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/05/healthandwellbeing

"There's a characteristically brilliant Peanuts strip which opens with Linus sitting on the living room floor, anxiously clutching his mouth. Lucy enters and asks what's wrong. "I'm aware of my tongue," he explains. "It's an awful feeling! Every now and then I become aware that I have a tongue inside my mouth, and then it starts to feel lumped up ... I can't help it ... I can't put it out of my mind ... I keep thinking about where my tongue would be if I weren't thinking about it, and then I can feel it sort of pressing against my teeth."

Loudly declaring this the dumbest thing she's ever heard, Lucy scowls away. But a few steps down the corridor, she stops dead in her tracks. She clutches her own mouth. Suddenly she's aware of her tongue too. She runs back and chases him round the room, shouting, "You blockhead!" with her gigantic booming gob.

Occasionally, late at night, while trying to sleep and failing, I experience something similar - except instead of being aware of my tongue, I'm aware of my entire body, the entire world, and the whole of reality itself. It's like waking from a dream, or a light going on, or a giant "YOU ARE HERE" sign appearing in the sky. The mere fact that I'm actually real and actually breathing suddenly hits me in the head with a thwack. It leaves me giddy. It causes a brief surge of clammy, bubbling anxiety, like the opening stages of a panic attack. The moment soon passes, but while it lasts it's strangely terrifying."

But what if the moment doesn't soon pass?  What if the panic attack, the bubbling anxiety does not end? 

Welcome to my life.  At age 9 I examined my own thoughts, discovered what I later found out was the problem of "qualia", and felt the clammy, bubbling anxiety.  It was something that recurred, and I realised I had to live with.

It's quite comforting to realise that others experience existential anxiety.  It's perhaps not that comforting to find out that for others, it is a passing thing, and not something that is part of their thoughts every day, sometimes every minute, of their life, as it can be for me.

Why am I posting this now?  Because I have never read a better description of what this feeling is like.  Indeed, I have never read anything about anyone sharing the experience.

There have been times when I have posted on RichardDawkins.net, and times when I have not.  There is someone who no longer is present on that site, but who I often had intense arguments with about many things during my times of posting.  Although we have very different political views, and those have resulted in fierce arguments, we each realise that we have posted sincere and honest opinions.   Some while ago, we had an idea.  To continue our debates in a less immediate medium - blogs.

This may, or may not work, but I think it is worth trying.

And so, in the next few days, I'll post the start of a possible discussion with "Styrer".