Undersea http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/ en-us Nucleus CMS v3.32 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea//nucleus/nucleus2.gif Undersea http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/ Twiddling the Dials of the Universe http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=25 New York City. These are the people who tell each other that algebra is something you'll never use in the "real world."

To all of you I say emphatically No, the universe is not fine-tuned for human life. There is not a magic set of basic constants that, if ever-so-slightly modified, would snuff out our fluttering candle flames. We already live in that universe. If you would care to vacation for a month on Saturn, you might see my point. The volume of the known universe is boggling: 4.1 x 1034 cubic light years. The land surface area of the earth is 148,940,000 km2. Don't even pretend you comprehend the difference in scale, because you don't. If you divide one into the other you just get another number that will make as little practical sense as the two you started with.

Put another way, the land surface area of the Earth is so small compared to the rest of the universe, that we might as well say 0% of the total available space. Let's be super-generous, though, and say that there are billions of other habitable worlds out there, which brings us to...I don't know, 0% of the total available space. Okay, let's pretend it's just barely above zero for argument's sake.

But have you ever spent February in the "fine-tuned" environment of northern Minnesota? You can't live there. Well, of course you can, but it is not what you would call habitation-friendly. That's what's common, though. We can't even survive well on most of our own surface area. About 75 percent of it isn't suitable! We cling to 25% of a scarcely nonzero number, and still we're killed off all the time by too-hot days and too-stormy weather.

So where is this universe designed for my benefit? I don't see it.]]> Science http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=25 Wed, 26 May 2010 10:50:31 -0500 Dismembering Blaise, Part 3 http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=24
Honestly there is a reason for bringing this up aside from mockery. The reason is that appeals to authority are very much like appeals to consequences, and that is what the third part of this criticism of Pascal's Wager is all about.

It's not like I don't make decisions based on consequences. This is a very normal decision-making situation, like whether I should eat yogurt that is three days past the date on the container. However, an appeal is more dangerous territory. In an appeal (a fallacious one anyway), I invoke a consequence as a secondary proposition in order to convince you to accept a primary proposition. For example, sometimes a salesperson, in an attempt to sway my decision-making in favor of a purchase, will throw the following line at me: "Do you like to save money?" You do? Well then you need to buy this thing.

What the salesperson hopes is that I will stop thinking critically about the primary proposition and instead focus on the reward I will allegedly receive. The other option is for me to say that I don't like to save money, and since I don't want to be seen as someone who is careless with his cash, I'll try to avoid that position. So there is a latent punishment if I don't go through with the transaction.

Pascal does this too. His urges you to forget all about the primary proposition - whether God exists - and wants you to think instead about whether or not you would like to get a reward, in this case infinite happiness. Infinite happiness sounds pretty good, although I am not too clear how to measure that against my current state. (Pascal goes on about an infinity of infinite happiness, which is kind of like saying you'll get a kajillion dollars.) If I want in on some of this happiness then I must decide that God exists. The implied alternative is that I do not like happiness.

The fallacy is the tie-in. Whether or not I like to save money has nothing to do with whether or not the item on the sales floor is a good purchase for me. Likewise, whether or not I like happiness has nothing to do with whether or not God exists. The salesperson tells me that I will "gain" some "savings," but there is absolutely no demonstrated connection between this reward and the act they want me to perform. The parallel with Pascal is that he erroneously links an affirmative belief with a supposed reward, when in fact there is no reason to think these two things ought to be connected.

But wait! you may shout. There is a connection between those two things! No, there really isn't. If you want to assert that there is, you must argue that as a separate case. You cannot just tell me that one leads to the other. You have to explain the mechanism, and you have to prove causation through real reasoning. Most of all you have to have observable results. Non-observable ones don't count. If you cannot produce evidence of a single case where someone has saved money by buying your wares, I stand unconvinced.

I want to refer back to the decision matrix about witches from Part 2 in order to point out one last thing. It's an element of the Wager that is, frankly, insulting. The "decision" portion of the matrix has to do with action. In Pascal's version, the action is to behave morally or to behave immorally. Now this is not precisely how he formulated it, but that's what he meant. What other kind of action would prohibit my receiving the reward upon which the Wager is founded? This absurdly suggests that what I am really weighing is whether or not to act like an antisocial maniac. I question this assumption.

Or maybe I don't. Ironically, it is the people who take Pascal's bet, the people who are swayed by this appeal to consequences, who have the motive to act like maniacs and the track record to prove that they will. Because, you see, that is what Pascal's Wager really says: when there is an infinity of infinite happiness in the balance, all means are justified. Post-mortem consequence is the ugliest and cruelest possible form of moral reasoning.

How about we focus on being decent human beings to each other here and now instead.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=24 Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:11:00 -0500 Metaphors and Experience http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=23
Why should that be the case? Why didn't I stop reading this book as soon as I realized it couldn't possibly be an accurate, fact-based account of events? Frankly, I knew that before I bought it. It was in the science fiction section. There were a lot of other books there, from which I infer many people purchase and read science fiction books (otherwise the store wouldn't stock them). We all willingly go in for a tale we know in advance is completely made up, and we enjoy it nontheless.

I suppose we might all be deranged. Somehow I don't buy that. I often read stories to my kids, and they also know full well that the stories are not about real people or real events. They have never seen an actual talking rabbit, and they're aware you cannot dig through a mountain with just your hands. Getting away from books: the popularity of prime-time television should be evidence enough that people don't care if stories are rooted in actuality or not.

Now, I don't want to draw parallels between whole-cloth fantasy and religion. I'm just saying that we find value in things that aren't based on facts, and whether you believe a religion is fact-based has no bearing on the value of participating in it. Partly this is because even though there is a fact-based universe around us, our experience of living out a human life is somewhat separated from that. Everyone has decoupled conversations in their heads. We run through scenarios of what could happen if we confront a certain person, or turn down an award, or mess up the quarterly presentation. None of those scenarios are real, but we do experience them, and have real reactions from them, and take real actions in the real world based on the original imaginary scenario.

Human experience is a complicated thing. Who cares if religion is factual? It doesn't matter. All that matters is your experience of it, which has value all its own. Maybe I am motivated to be more mindful of suffering, and take actions to reduce it. That is value. Maybe I am motivated to let go of a resentment. Maybe I am reminded that I am not in control of the world, and shouldn't try to be. Those are valuable outcomes. Is it possible to have those experiences without religion? Certainly! But that doesn't devalue the experience of someone who does.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=23 Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:39:17 -0500 Welcome, Humans ! http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=22 Alternate titles for this article: Monkeys On Parade!, The Nose Knows: Snouts in the Spiritual Community.

Taking a break from my cruel treatment of old B.P. to inspect a spongy, brain-like crumb [PDF] from EcoWorldly.com, which seems to be a limb of Green Options Media, who are dutifully Empowering Sustainable Choices for us all.

I am always very excited and happy to see research results like these, because it makes dualistic philosophies that much more unsustainable. Said another way, I get my ego stroked because I am right, which is a sensation I seek out with laser-focused determination. The laughable juxtaposition here is that I am ego-boosted to be classified as an animal. That's what this research really says. Elephants aren't revealed to be more like us. Rather, we are revealed to be among a class of creatures that also includes elephants. It's regarding this point that I think the article goes astray.Don't misunderstand me: I love science, and I appreciate this research. But we have two separate parts here. FACT - Elephants, apes, dolphins, and humans recognize themselves. SPECULATION - They have "higher" mental functions that allow them to do so, i.e., self-awareness. Lumped in with self-awareness (a concept that I do not think holds up quite so well under scrutiny as people would prefer to believe) are empathy and altruism. This speculation won't withstand much attention, or at least it shouldn't; it wrongly confuses similarity with capability.

Before I go further, I will provide a quick primer on scientific methodology, which these good researchers undoubtedly followed. You see, first we get evidence and then we speculate on what the evidence may mean. The real report in this article is the FACT portion, the gathered evidence. This is the part I like. Good show, elephants! (And good show, Plotnik, de Waal, and Reiss.) The rest is hasty pot-stirring to see if any remotely-plausible ideas gurgle up to the surface. Plotnik et al. may not even be very concerned about the (scientific) hypotheses others concoct using their research. I don't know. It's good stuff any way you slice it.

So back to speculation. What I dislike about the way it's put in the article - and it isn't all that different in the abstract - is that it employs the concept of "higher" and "lower" brain functions. What does that mean? What is a "higher" function? Maybe they mean that it is more sophisticated, more complex, although I find that too to be meaninglessly imprecise. It is strange to give qualitative labels to a thing just because it's there. I wouldn't call a tail a "higher" organ, even though it opens functional doors that are shut to me.

It is the same with mental machinery. There are many (many!) specialized systems in the mind, quite like mental organs, and they operate in various combinations to produce emergent results. Some species have mental organs that others don't, like one for decoupled imagination and one for representing what others perceive. Look at the list of creatures under discussion. There are apes (social), elephants (social), dolphins (social), and humans (hypersocial). Decoupled representations (e.g., empathic reactions) are highly beneficial to social animals, and that is what is observed here. What would be a shock is if a crocodile had any sense of looking at itself in a mirror. It would not be shocking because crocs are dumb, or are restricted to "lower" mental functions. It would be shocking because crocodiles have no need for empathy, and have only a very meager need to care about what other creatures perceive, for example "Can that delicious-looking deer see me?" The mental organs they don't require never materialized.

It is similarity we see when we look at the elephants' reaction, not complexity. The gated progress charted by the researchers show gates of likeness. It shows how other social animals have developed the same mental organs. We (the socialites) depend greatly on social success, and social success depends greatly on awareness of what others in the group think and feel, in general, and about us in particular. We imagine all the time how others see us, so the mirror image fits easily into our way of thinking.

This isn't information about elephants. It's information about us, about how wrong we usually are about our place in the world.
]]> Science http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=22 Thu, 6 Aug 2009 15:51:31 -0500 Dismembering Blaise, #2 http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=21 last time. In this episode, I turn my withering gaze upon Part Deux of Pascal's Wager, which is that belief in God is a forced decision. According to Pascal, I must decide which side of his false compromise I will throw in with. Well, that doesn't feel very exciting: betting which 0% probability will come true. My math skills may be insufficient for the task, but I somehow expect to come out the loser every time when faced with those odds.Maybe we can give poor Blaise some leeway, and so continue to analyze his wager. I could suppose that there is a fellow who is stuck in a feeling of ambiguity. He is in a state of doubtfulness. He wants to believe, but cannot quite make himself do it. (Really, this fellow uses evidence to arrive at this place of indecision, and that is disallowed by the first part of the wager, but I will generously set that aside for now.)

So now I can address the idea that our murky-headed fellow is compelled to decide. Or was I the murky-headed fellow? No matter. Death will come, there is nothing I can do about it, and when it does I will stand before Judgment. Half the time, anyway. If I manage to die twice I intend to test this hypothesis. There is a 50% chance of nothingness. In all the days from this one to that, I am obligated to conduct myself according to the end I expect to receive - the rewards of heaven, or unconscious wormfood. And, according to Pascal, a non-decision is the same as deciding against belief, so there is no loophole.

I am forced! It turns out these kinds of forced decisions are all around me. I didn't realize it until I began intensively pondering the present Wager. Witches, for one. They have their eye on me and will turn me into a zombie after I die, forced to serve them forever and ever as a tormented, unliving abomination. I smell a decision matrix.


Witches
exist		Witches do
not exist
Do what
witches want		Ordinary lifeOrdinary life
Do not do
what witches want		Zombie!Ordinary life


I am getting a little ahead of myself here, because I am talking about consequences, which is what Part Trois of Pascal's Wager is all about. I want to have this decision matrix here to show that not obeying witches is a genuine, terrifying problem, and that there is no escape from making a decision. I can't pretend witches don't exist, because there is a 50% chance that doing so leads to the zombie outcome, i.e., the only meaningful outcome on the whole chart. Okay, I am getting positively double- or even triple-cheeky now, but the point is made.

The two problems demonstrated by the witch example are the Problem of Special Case and the Problem of Consideration. By special case I mean that if a decision about God is compelled because eventually the consequences will be thrust upon me, then for anything else that can be imagined for which a consequence is imminent, I must also weigh in. That is, there ought not be a special case for belief in God. I must also decide how to conduct myself with regard to witches, leprechauns, Nirvana, and the possibility that my own descendants learn how to resurrect their great-grandpa. The other problem, Consideration, is the issue of what sort of "payment" I might get as a result of my actions. Pascal assumes there is only one payment: eternal bliss. But really there are any number of "rewards" that might be thrust upon me, like being turned into a zombie. Just because my great-grandchildren raise me from the dead doesn't mean they're doing it out of kindness! There's no telling what kind of sick pranks futurekids will be playing on old folks.

On these grounds I reject the premise that I am forced to decide to believe anything. I will stick with rational inquiry rather than manically trying to please an infinite list of supernatural agents (especially given the instruction manuals for most of them! sheesh!).

I will point out one last item of irritation with what Pascal advances in this part of his wager. It has to do with how you "decide" by your behavior. He prescribes faking it if you can't summon up the belief legitimately. Go through the motions. This, I must assume, sufficiently confuses God into giving you eternal rewards, and so you win the bet. I'll tell you one thing: witches are not so easily fooled.

Next up, the coup d'état for argument from consequences.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=21 Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:57:30 -0500 Dismembering Blaise http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=20
The wager has three basic parts. (1) There is no evidence for or against the existence of God. (2) Belief in God is a forced decision. When you die, it's too late to change your mind; the consequences will be upon you. (3) Because we cannot discern which is the right choice, and the choice must be made, it is rational to choose whichever has the best risk/reward profile.

Now, let the massacre begin.Most people can disembark Pascal's Crazy Gambling Train at #1. Turn around, walk away, and never think about this silly mind game ever again. People think they have reasons for believing in God. Personal revelation, burning bushes, the shadow of Elvis on a piece of toast, what have you. People think they have made a rational choice already, and have no need of analyzing consequences. To go any further down the road with Mr. P, you must abandon this idea and embrace agnosticism. You must say, "I don't know," and believe it.

There is no room in Pascal's house for "intelligent design," for conversion stories or other alleged miracles, for argument from morality, for bananas, for crocaducks, or for good old fashioned I-know-it-in-my-soul. No, sir! If you incline toward any of these, go away now. Pascal's Wager is not for you. Only bona fide agnostics are welcome here.

Ah, but what about your poor agnostics who remain? So sorry, but you too will have to wander off. You see, Pascal apparently did not know about false compromises. For someone who dealt substantially with probability, you would think old Blaise would understand this better. A false compromise is when there seems to be two sides to an issue, and someone says, "Well, then, the reasonable thing is to take a position right in the middle!" This type of thinking implies that in any debate, because there are two sides, and 100% divided by 2 is 50%, it follows that each side has a 50% chance of being correct.

Pascal engages in a false compromise when he takes a position "right in the middle" regarding the existence of God. I understand why he does it. It just happens to be a foolish argument, because there is not a 50% chance of something extraordinary happening simply because I phrase it as a true/false pair of outcomes. For example, I will either win the lottery today or I won't. According to Pascal, this means I have a 50% chance of winning, which is clearly not so.

In fact, the entire position is incorrectly stated. There is only one side to the question, which is to inquire whether God exists. The default state is that he does not exist. There is no need to demonstrate that, just like there is no need to demonstrate the unreality of all other potential concepts. I could claim that giant carnivorous Martian space carrots do not exist, but there is no reason to do so. I do not need to accumulate evidence against their existence, or even produce a statement about them at all, because the default state is that such creatures are nonexistent. It may feel unfair to compare belief in God to belief in space carrots. But I am just making a point about how to take a logical position, not belittling belief.

The only claim that can be properly advanced is that there is a nonzero probability of God's existence, based on a particular set of evidence. Now if Pascal wants to say there is no such evidence, then the probability of God's existence drops back down to zero. It doesn't rest at 50%, buoyed up by the imaginary vacuum of lack of evidence disproving God. Zero percent is the default state.

So it turns out that agnostics are really atheists in disguise. Or, they are given the constraints Pascal has put on the situation. By disallowing evidence, he makes it very hard to go forward with his cosmic bet, since betting on a 0% outcome is not attractive.

But wait, there is more! Parts 2 and 3 of the wager are equally disappointing. I will get to Part 2 next.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=20 Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:11:53 -0500 In Defense of Danbury http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=19
What began in the early days of our country as the freedom of religion has today become freedom from religion, which clearly has nothing to do with the meaning of religious freedom that was laid down in the constitution.
The implication that there is a Constitutional forbiddance of atheism is not clear by any means. The Establishment Clause to the First Amendment says only that Congress is prohibited from making laws that establish a state religion, and the Free Exercise Clause says only that Congress cannot tell me how to practice my religion. Nowhere are the words "freedom of religion" found in this document.

But even if it did say those words, the idea that it is a legal obligation to believe is hard to digest. The First Amendment also provides for freedom of speech. Does this prohibit me from remaining silent?]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=19 Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:22:32 -0500 Stop Scorching My Shrubbery http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=17 1) and (b2). What is advanced in (b2) is, I suppose, intended to lever me into accepting (a). Alas, this is what we in "the biz" (i.e., the business of starting up arguments and then verbally beating the crap out of our opponents) call a fallacious appeal to consequences. Claim (b1) is also a fallacy, only this time it's called a false dichotomy. Not only are both of these formulations wrong, they are burdened by serious philosophical problems.First I will show why these positions constitute fallacies. The false dichotomy says this: Either morality comes from religion or morality doesn't exist. Put another way, it says that the only possible source of morality is religion. People who reject a religious origin for morality are said to have "no moral foundation." This is incorrect reasoning because there are, in fact, other possible origins for morality. It isn't an either/or proposition. For example, it is rather easy to come up with entirely naturalistic explanations for any moral behavior you can think of. I will show how this is so in a little bit. For now, it is sufficient that as long as I can come up with any other plausible origin for morality, the false dichotomy doesn't hold. A revised statement should therefore say morality might come from religion, or it might come from something else.

Now the appeal to consequences is just fear-mongering. It attempts to browbeat me into accepting a premise by holding scary results over my head. Looking at it more calmly, the consequence - anything goes - isn't necessarily true even if you accept the false dichotomy that morality cannot exist in the absence of religion. In a completely amoral world, anything would not, as they say, go. You'd still have self-interest, and if we are to keep each others' company in this mirror universe, self-interest alone would require making representations of trustworthiness. You can't have tea with someone who might murder you. More than likely, we would have to perform actions that prove our trustworthiness, for safety's sake, and I expect these proof-actions would look astonishingly like moral actions.

So even in a moral vacuum it's hard to demonstrate the kind of rampant abuses that we are meant to imagine. But we don't live in a moral vacuum. There are people walking around behaving morally all the time. We can take it as fact that morality exists. Putting aside for the moment where morals come from, I want to pose the question, "Why do people comply with the morals we can observe?"

This is where things get hairy for religious-based explanations. Under that scheme, I comply with morals because they are God's commands, and complying with God's commands is what I am supposed to do. Except then we must ask why I am supposed to comply with God's commands. Because God says so? That is an unacceptable tautology. Perhaps it is because such compliance is for my own good. Unfortunately, this is neither altruistic nor obedient. I am only acting in my own self-interest! That sounds just like the amoral mirror universe.

What is really awful, and much more like a genuine moral vacuum, is that most people insist the reason for complying with God's commands is that you will be punished if you don't. This is about as rotten a world as I can imagine. It is the world of the torturer. If a poverty-stricken man breaks into my home, hooks me up to a car battery, and shocks me until I hand over some money, my "donation" to him can hardly be considered charity. If the man only strips me, ties to me a chair, connects the battery leads, and threatens to pull the switch, the effect is the same. Morality ceases to exist. Quite probably no one's interest at all is served in such a nightmare scenario. Certainly not mine. (We don't need to analyze whether the shocker's interests are served, because the shocker is a stand-in for God in this metaphor.)

Morality driven by fear of punishment also does not match my observation or experience. I don't refrain from breaking my neighbors' windows simply because I don't think I can get away with it.

Here is a different way of thinking. Humans are social animals, with a hyperdeveloped social intelligence. Social interactions among humans are vastly more complex, and vastly more important, than we can observe in any other species. We quite simply do not exist apart from our social selves, which is evidenced by the enormous quantity of time and energy we spend on seemingly useless social maintenance. I mean, it is logically not required to continuously express how much we value members of our families. Unless there is a change in attitude, further communication on the subject is wasting resources. Yet we spend all kinds of effort (and endure all kinds of "waste") doing precisely this.

In an environment where social structures are primary, harms against social structures are counterproductive. It threatens me, and also others connected to me. Behavioral policies that strengthen social structures are encouraged; behavioral policies that threaten social structures are discouraged. It's as simple as that. One day someone phrases a beneficial policy in a catchy way, and it spreads ("A penny saved is a penny earned!"). A moral is born.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=17 Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:10:03 -0500 The Lied-To Generation http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=16 The Lied-To Generation. It is hard to pinpoint when that began, because it varied from state to state and from school to school. But it most certainly includes nearly everyone born after 1980.While there are many ways that people have always been lied to by the world they grew up in, none have been lied to as much as those born near the end of or after the twentieth century. Those of you who fall into that era have been lied to in regard to just about every significant aspect of life, and mostly by people who sincerely believed in what they said to you. So what you have been told may sound right to you. But what you may not know is that you are living in a world that is almost as bizarre as the Matrix. What's more, the few people who are trying to tell you the truth have been so discredited by their own poor track record as well as by those who lie that you who have grown up in this world have almost no way to find your red pill.

Here is just a short list of some of the things you have been lied to about:

Character: In 1992 we had an unofficial national debate about whether character mattered in a leader, or whether a person's personal character and his or her ability to lead were two different things. A hundred years ago, such a debate would have been unthinkable! Everyone knew that character was a an essential component of leadership. Without it you could not lead anything. To think otherwise you would have to be mentally unstable. And although there have always been people of questionable character in positions of leadership, everyone knew that it was an illegitimate role. Today the main qualification for becoming a leader seems to be either one's own ruthlessness or good salesmanship, promising everyone whatever they want to hear. What no one will tell you is that putting people of poor character in positions of leadership is what causes nations to fail.

Education: You have been terribly misled in regard to your own education. Somehow you have been given a very strong impression that because you live in a technically advanced age that you know far more than your parents and grandparents. The truth is that the average college student today would fail even the most basic eighth-grade test given in 1900. Almost any teacher who has been teaching for more than 30 years knows that the whole system has been dumbed down several times to accommodate the poor attention span of your generation and the general unwillingness to learn. Fifty years ago, everyone knew that learning was more the responsibility of the student than the teacher. And they were expected to do what it took to learn the material. Today, everyone thinks that the teacher's job is to dispense the answers to test questions so that students can all get A's. High-school students can tell you all the personal details of the latest Idol star, but cannot find the United States on a globe or give you change back from your dollar. All the while that you are being told how smart you are, employers all over the country are scrambling to figure out how to prepare for the future, because there are fewer and fewer graduates with any useful knowledge or problem-solving skills. But no one is telling you the truth, that you have been given the absolute worst education since the dawn of public schooling.

History: By some strange failure of education, you have been led to believe that nothing matters if it happened before you were born. You do not even believe that there is such a thing as wisdom that can be passed down from one generation to the next. You have been told that you are the master of your own destiny, and that by virtue of your autonomy you can make all the decisions about life you need to make without the slightest regard for the lessons of those who have gone before. Nothing that happened to anyone else or any other country has the slightest implications for what you might do or not do, or what things you might think are important. What no one will tell you is that by cutting lose the cords of history and the lessons from the last three thousand years of history, you have about a 100% chance of destroying Western civilization. I know that sounds ridiculous to you, because you have such an incredible belief in your own power, that whatever you want to be true will be true. But that is all part of the massive Matrix that you have been taught to believe, none of which has any bearing on reality. The truth is that our civilization is already in a steep decline, rapidly deteriorating and ejecting all means of recovery as fast as it can. No one over thirty will tell you this, because: (1) they are hiding out, hoping they will die before the end comes; or (2) they know you won't believe them anyway;
or (3) they do not want you to know they don't know what they are doing; or (4) they are just as misinformed as you are. The truth is that history teaches us what works and what does not, what kinds of mistakes lead to terrible losses, and what kinds of values are needed to keep society intact.

Moral Knowledge: You have been told over and over that morality is a social construct or something that is taught by religion which may or may not have anything to do with you. You have been told that there is no absolute truth about these things and no one should try to tell you what is right and wrong. The truth? Until very recently, everyone in the Western world knew what moral knowledge was and where it found its roots, including those who rejected that knowledge. Those principles had guided Western civilization for centuries and gave us an unprecedented way of life. Yes, the West has had its failures. And every one of them can be traced to the disregard of those values that everyone in their better moments knew were true. Yet today we are in the process of throwing them out. And everywhere around us we hear this talked about as an enlightened process. But we are already reaping the consequences of rejecting what can truly be known about human morality. And we have only seen the beginning.

Christianity: What most of you know of Christianity has come to you from comedians, charlatans, or those who hate anything religious at all. What makes it worse is that these parodies of the Christian faith are presented in a social vacuum where religion has been given no place, and in the wake of a Western Christian church that has largely lost its way. So you have probably never seen the real thing or have anything to compare your opinions to. It was not always this way. Up until fifty years ago, almost all historians acknowledged the tremendous role that Christianity played in shaping the modern world, and especially its role in establishing free societies. And if one were to dig deeper still, you would find a vast array of lives that have been totally transformed from terrible circumstances, from vile life-styles, and from nearly every form of dreadful existence, by the power and love of the Christian God. But this has all been hidden from view since before you were born – partly on account of the failure of many Christians in recent generations to develop an authentic relationship with God, and partly on account of those who could not stand Christianity and made it a point to eject it from the public mind.

Freedom From Religion: You have been told over and over that religion has no place in the public sphere, that religious ideas must not be allowed to voice their opinions in places of government. Actually, the question of whether religion should have any say in the general public has been a matter of debate for a long time. No one probably ever bothered to tell you about the 1864 court case in which a public school in Pennsylvania was taken to court because it had stopped using the Bible in its curriculum (which had always been required reading up to that point). The court's ruling? Decisions of what is taught in the public school should be left to the local school board. So if they wished to stop teaching the Bible, they could do so. However, they would no longer be eligible for Federal funding to assist them! That was the understanding of government and religion back when they could still remember how this country was founded. What began in the early days of our country as the freedom of religion has today become freedom from religion, which clearly has nothing to do with the meaning of religious freedom that was laid down in the constitution. Everyone back then knew that moral knowledge was absolutely necessary for a free society to survive. But you have been lied to about all of that.

Sexuality: You have lied to in almost every way in regard to sexuality. Sexual power is revered today as if it were the most important aspect of one's personal value. Every girl wants to be called a hottie, and every guy wants to date one. “Hooking up” is now a recreational pastime that kids do for fun. A virgin who is past a certain age is someone to laugh at because it means they are naive and immature. Up until about 1960, this was not so. Everyone knew that sexuality was supposed to be a matter of self-control and that promiscuity was a vice not an achievement. Overtly sexual dress was known to be an inappropriate public display of loose morals. You have been told from before you knew what it was that it's “hot.” What you have not been told it that promiscuity has a cost. Instead, you have been told that there is such a thing as “safe” sex for those who want to play. But there is no such thing.

Government: You have been told over and over that our best hope for the future will come from electing the right people, passing the right laws, and making people do the right things. This will never happen. The truth is you no longer are being taught what at one time was well known: that given enough time government has always, in every country and in every period of history, always taken from people their lives and dreams. That is why our founding fathers tried to create a government that would not grow too big. But we found a way to undo their limitations, and that will be the undoing of our country, not its salvation. By its very nature government has a monopoly on the use of force in order to maintain order and peace. So it would only follow that we should be very careful what else we give them, because that could lead to a tyrannical government. So what have we given them in the last thirty years? A blank check. You have been told that is our best hope. I tell you it will become our worst nightmare before it is over. Witness the financial meltdown of 2008-2009. You were told it was because government did not monitor the private sector well enough. The truth is that it was the government that changed the rules of the game, causing the cascading collapse of the system that had been in place for many years. They then pointed the finger at banks and other private companies and took the opportunity to gain even more control over our lives.

Happiness: You have been told not only that you have a right to happiness, but that it is achievable by fairly direct means. All you have to do is want it and go after it, pursuing it at every opportunity. But it's all lies. Happiness is a byproduct of a life well-lived and a great many factors that are out of your control. Going after it directly will not only disappoint you greatly, but may even kill you. A far more achievable goal is contentment. But no one will tell you that, because it doesn't sell too well. What's more, the whole “me/my” orientation that you have been seduced by is the surest way to make you into a miserable persona by the time you retire.

We could go on. But the list is almost endless. You have been lied to about nearly everything that matters, and trained to think in ways that without a doubt will eventually fail you. I'm sorry. But that is indeed the case. I wish I could offer you more hope, but the resources we need in order to stop this terrible loss of life knowledge have all but been destroyed by the misuse of language, the pressures of modern culture, and the crusades of those who have shaped our institutions of higher learning for the last fifty years or so.

There is but one hope, one that you will probably not believe when I tell you. So let me ask one thing of you. For just a moment, for the sake of argument, pretend that you have discovered the Matrix of the world you live in, and that the only thing you know for sure is that you have been lied to about everything. Then let me suggest that there is a real source of knowledge that you can have. That once you begin to access it, in the ways that it was meant to be accessed, ways you have never been told about before, then you will know by the clarity it contains and the freshness of life it breathes into your soul, that you have indeed found the truth. You can only know this truth by believing it and taking part in the manner of life it portrays. Any attempt to assess its value from where you now stand would be as futile as a blind person trying to make a choice between two shades of purple.

With that said, let me add one more caveat. What I am about to suggest to you, you have heard of in name before, but in name only. Almost everything else you have heard about this has been twisted and distorted so badly that it bears little to no resemblance to the original truth. So do not judge it by what you have heard before. Consider that like everything else, the truth about the Truth has been hidden from you in every conceivable manner. So you must consider it anew, like one freshly born, without prejudice or previous conviction about that matter.

What you need to know, what everyone has tried to hide from you, is that the person of Jesus Christ really did live here on this planet and bring to humankind a way of life that brings together truth and joy and love and peace in ways that nothing else can begin to match. And what makes all of this possible is the relationship that he offers us today with himself. When we fully believe that he is our only hope and ask him to save us from this pervasive darkness we all live in, he will come into our life and begin to transform our hearts and minds so that we can see the world more and more as he sees it. In so doing, we will be freed from the Matrix and find truth that will satisfy our souls. Bear in mind that I am not speaking about going to a boring church service and acting out religious behavior. I am talking about getting to know God, one-on-one, and having conversations with Him about our life.

There is much about this life that I cannot go into here. But let me say one thing. The key to this changed life that you need to know about more than anything, is this: We know far less about life than we think we do, and only God can mentor us in our day-to-day existence or heal our past wounds. And He accomplishes these things primarily by directly speaking into our hearts what He wants us to know. When we learn how to listen to His voice and engage with Him for all of our needs, He shows us the truth about life and gives us the kind of heart we need to live that life.

As The Lied-To Generation, you have been, above all, robbed of this most-important life-giving truth, that God is here and He wants to have a real relationship with you. This is the Red Pill. If you will take it, receive it, and begin to seek out those who know what this means, you will find a life you never thought possible. My hope for you is that you will let Him show you what you do not now know.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=16 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:07:50 -0500 God Is a Communist http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=15 Notes http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=15 Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:19:53 -0600