hobbit-humanist
Humanism, atheism, some politics and lots of common sense.
Archive for the category “Books”
Wizard !
Wizards seemingly don’t need hobbit’s like me to cause mischief they can do it on their own well enough. Take Gandalf also known as Sir Ian McKellen who causes his own brand of mischief if he comes across a certain book whilst staying in hotels.
Incidentally I’m in London this coming weekend and may even get chance to go to the pub said wizard is part-owner of so there’s a very small chance I may see him, it would be pretty amazing if I did.
2012
2012 has been a year of enlightenment for me, a year of compare and contrast and a year of creating the hobbit-humanist blog, which began back in March.
I’ve spent more time than ever reading books and debating with people. Strong influences would include H.L. Mencken, Voltaire, Pat Condell, Michel Onfray, Christopher Hitchens, Bertrand Russell (it’s with his words I kicked off the blog), Nietzsche, Simon Blackburn, Sam Harris, Baron D’Holbach, Freud, Bill Mayer, Epicurus, Stephen Hawking, Penn Jillette and Chunky Mark (the artist taxi driver). There’s probably lots I’ve missed including a good number of Greek philosophers.
All of the above and more have taught me to open my eyes and see what is really going on.
I don’t want a personal relationship with God, Jesus, Allah or Odin. I want a relationship with other human beings free of the control and tyranny of religion because in the words of Pat Condell;
Freedom is my religion !
All the best for the coming New Year and thanks for reading, I look forward to getting to know you more in 2013. Never be afraid to examine or question!
Hitchens Remembered
It’s been a little over a year since Christopher Hitchens died. Usually I never get upset about people I’ve never met dying but I did with Hitchens. I sat there that day with my head in my hands on reading the news, it was expected because he had cancer but I always thought he might beat it, sadly he didn’t and I felt devastated at his passing because he was a great influence on me. I think it was at that point I resolved to do a Humanist blog, and of course a little later this came into being.
Few people can match his elegance with words, his skill at debating, his brevity and his knowledge. He was a man of extensive life experience, had a ready wit and love the little indulgences in life. I still read his books, watch him on YouTube and use his lines in debate. In short, I miss not seeing more of him.
Here’s an article with some of his many great quotes.
An Ugly Side Of Faith
I was browsing the internet over the weekend, casually watching videos on YouTube of People such as Richard Carrier, Pat Condell and Richard Dawkins etc. After the video I usually read the comments below to see what people have to say. There’s the usual nonsensical comments, ones that thank the persons involved with the video, constructive comments that make valid debating points and then of course the rabid religious comments. For example;
Richard Dawkins does believe in religion his is Luciferianism.
As I moved to another linked video the same person had commented moments earlier again;
What an impudent turd! I can’t wait until Jesus returns these fools will be on their knees crying like little school girls.
I took a moment to look at the page of the person who had commented which was filled with Christian rhetoric videos usually with some old guy quoting scripture or some videos of vague evidence regarding early Christianity. You know the sort of videos that say it must be true because the Bible says so. I’d like to point out to Christians that if you go into a library you won’t find the Bible in the history section, ever wondered why?
There seems to be a lot of talk regarding aggressive atheism by Christians and Muslims alike lately but the real concern is that people are waking up and smelling the coffee and realising some simple truths and actually fighting back with common sense and facts. If you ask me atheism isn’t as aggressive as it really should be and atheists are right to take a stand towards organised religion that has dogged us for too long. I wouldn’t say it’s aggressive atheism at all, it’s just people saying ‘Look, I don’t need this bullshit to lead a perfectly moral, normal life’.
Evidently there seems to be just as much aggressive religion as the above examples illustrate, only of course if you disagree you are likely to burn in a lake of fire or if you are infidel to Muslims then other similar fates await. Oddly you never find atheists or humanists using the same language as religious people because we recognise, we’re born, we live best we can enjoying the world and trying to do best by our fellow human beings and then we die. There’s no biblical bribery, emotional leverage or agenda, just common sense and goodwill but of course we choose facts over fiction, we respect the right to question and we will defend ourselves with rational debate.
As the author Sam Harris mentions in one of his books;
Consider it; every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of family and friends. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything other than kind to them in the meantime?
What narrow minded religious people don’t realise such as the writer of the above examples is that if they had been born say in India, China or Iran for example they would probably have a completely different faith entirely. Faith is a regional and cultural creature, yes it has spread its ugly bitter fingers through history and around the world and men and women still use it to control what millions do and what they should think. The fact there is so many different faiths and gods reinforces the fact faith is a cultural creation, as the saying goes; On the first day man created god!
So to end, when you read the comments on any YouTube video of atheists or humanists you’re bound to read sneering comments laced with vitriolic hatred written by blinkered religious people who are afraid of a dose of reality because this is what religion makes people do.
Tyrannical Scripture
I recently discovered the Pat Condell channel on YouTube by accident, you know how you view one video then another in the list down the right hand side catches your eye? Evidently Pat has been posting videos for a good while and has a book out called ‘Godless and Free’ which I intend to order. I love his brevity, his humour and concise observations but mostly I like the way he tears down religion and shows it for the shambles it really is in such an articulate way. Compulsive viewing for any rational thinker or atheist and of course any Christian that wants to wake up from their fantasy world and smell the coffee.
Anyway here is Pat in action talking about the tyranny of scripture.
The Champion of Reason
Jean Calas was an ordinary Frenchman, a shopkeeper and a married father six children who lived in Toulouse during an extraordinary time of religious oppression, intolerance and persecution. To fall foul of the dominant catholic church of the time meant courting serious danger. For 40 years Jean Calas lived a life of quiet anonymity until 1762 when events would take a deadly turn. One of Calas’s sons distraught after his ambition to become a lawyer was thwarted on account of his protestantism committed suicide. Shortly after a rumour circulated that Calas had murdered his son, to prevent him from converting to Catholicism.
On March 16th Calas was seized and despite lack of any evidence and an unblemished record was sentenced to be tortured and killed. First he was tied between two iron rings and stretched until all his four limbs were dislocated. Calas didn’t die, in fact he continued to protest his innocence. This annoyed the religious powers that presided over this grisly affair, so Calas was asked the question extraordinaire which involved water being forcibly poured down his throat until his body swelled to twice its usual size. Still unable to extract a confession his torturers then bound him to a scaffold and smashed his limbs to pulp. Two hours later, finding Calas was still alive they took pity and strangled him.
During this time in France one man was at the height of his powers, a friend of influential people, someone who’d had dialogue with royalty, a rich man through business dealings, an author, rogue and even one time prisoner of the Bastille – that man was the champion of reason, a man called Voltaire.
On hearing of the Calas incident Voltaire moved to clear the dead man’s name. It took Voltaire three years involving a campaign of letter writing, a considerable amount of his own money being spent and the publication of ‘Treatise of Tolerance’ to secure the pardon of Jean Calas.
Though initially a deist, believing in a creator of sorts Voltaire championed reason and challenged oppression. He later grew pessimistic by the senseless and arbitrary nature of much human misery. The Lisbon earthquake that occurred on All Saints day in 1755, when the churches were full and 9,000 buildings were destroyed killing around 30,000 people did nothing for Voltaire’s optimism.
The story of Voltaire’s life is compelling reading, a rebel to some, an infidel to others and a hero to many he remains one of the great figures of the Enlightenment period. He wasn’t one of the great philosophers in a sense of being a brilliantly original thinker, he’s not a Hume or a Kant. Voltaire’s greatness comes from the role he played in the emergence of reason in the face of myth and superstition, and in the eventual triumph of the Enlightenment.
Even today Voltaire’s name can provoke reaction, especially to people committed to the bible, they’ll happily tell you (falsely) he died in turmoil, bitterly regretting his heresey (they’ll also try to tell you this about Nietzsche too). For many though Voltaire stood for the shining light of reason in the face of intolerance and religious bigotry.
As Robert Green Ingersoll once put it;
‘For half a century, past rack and stake, past dungeon and cathedral, past altar and throne, he carried with brave hands the sacred torch of reason, whose light at last will flood the world’
Purely Platonic
Plato was a Greek philosopher who thought about a wide range of subjects and had some rather odd ideas. One of his major works was The Republic, in which he tried to envisage the most perfectly run city state. Within it we get narratives by philosophers and friends alike discussing all manner of things from justice, poetry and the theory of forms. Later in his works he imagines a city called Magnesia which is kind of a new and improved version of his first imagined one called Kallipolis (Greek for ‘beautiful city’) which is quite sinister in the sense it is a sort of theocracy. Magnesia consists of 5,040 eugenically selected land owning citizens who are serviced by a larger population of workers who have no political rights. The city is overseen and run by 37 guardians and 12 scrutinisers who make sure there is no corruption. All citizens are state educated so they are politically intelligent and dutiful members of society, citizens also understand the laws which are eternal and non-negotiable. In fact the laws come from the gods themselves and are applied by the ominously sounding ‘Nocturnal Council’ who have supreme controls of censorship and control all art and literature. Spies are also used and any blasphemy or irregular behaviour is stamped out, dissenters being locked up and re-educated or executed.
It all sounds very dystopian doesn’t it? In his works are arguments and discussions about different styles of government, Plato isn’t very keen on democracy that’s for sure, he deems it corrupt. In fact this probably stems from him being one of the Athenian elite at the time, he views the lower class mobs as easily influenced and never really forgave them for the fervour in executing one of his earlier influences and mentors ‘Socrates’.
Let’s not write old Plato off though, he’s been much discussed in the world of philosophy and indeed still is. Whilst he may have had some odd ideas he was influenced very much by the era, in which Athenians could take time to think about things whilst slaves did the menial stuff, except they didn’t really debate slaves!! Though much deep thinking was going on in Athens around this time technology advancement was standing still, why invent a windmill to grind when you can get 20 slaves to grind it for you!
Plato also wrote about love in The Symposium but not the standard boy meets girl love, more about homosexual love. Most upper class male Athenians like to hang out together, women were thought of as an inferior procreative urges and largely confined to domestic duty out of public life, marriage was not a partnership of equals, it strikes me christianity and Islam latched onto that idea too.
Plato believed that physical homosexual love could be transformed into something transcendentally spiritual which is where we get the term ‘platonic’ from as it is used to describe non-physical relationship and friendships. Christianity and Islam didn’t latch on to that idea though!
Back to the main thread though, and imagining a city, country or even world run by a theocracy, it makes you shudder really though obviously religious minded people would welcome it and of course people who easily relinquish control as life is just easier that way. Many say that North Korea though technically a communist dictatorship is a kind of theocracy as the same family rules and is revered.
So let’s imagine a state along the lines of Plato’s Magnesia, ruled by a theocratic council whilst it would be well ordered and efficient it wouldn’t be an ideal place to live in reality. Plato doesn’t allow for checks, balances or change and as we know dictatorships produce more human misery than democracies. The good thing about democracy is that if a government isn’t any good we can vote them out, so more stable societies are those that have a more rapid and painless forms of change. That said people can vote in or support corrupt people, it happens, take Hitler for instance.
If we could go back in time and bring Plato to the present day in a time machine to view modern day governments and rulers I wonder what he would make of it? though he’d probably still view modern democracies as being corrupt. I think if we could do that then he’d see that some of his ideas weren’t very feasible at all and be gracious about it. The point I’ve been coming to all along though, ok I admit I’ve been a bit long winded in coming to it is what if we could bring the first writers of the Bible back to the present day and say this is what your book influenced, this is what came about after, this is what happened, this is all the trouble, cruelty, wars and bother you caused. What would they say? My guess is they wouldn’t like how factional Christianity is nowadays, how much of it revolves around money, influence and power. Religion is power though, so I suspect some of them would want in on the controlling side of the act. Personally though I think they’d just be as ignorant to the world as the day when they started to write folk stories down. Despite his flaws Plato believed in dialogue, thinking and argument, even though he had some odd ideas, he was open to debate and reason – the writers of the Bible and Koran are not.
And lastly, we have Plato to thank for the first university called ‘The Academy’ which was set up around 387 B.C.E in Athens. It went on for many centuries until in C.E 529 the Christian emperor Justinian had it closed down, Christianity it would seem has never liked the thinking sort.
Jesus, Fact Or Fiction (Part Two)
I ended part one of this series by saying I’d look at and examine ‘Messiah’ type characters of the period. There’s no historical shortage of exalted madmen, fantastical prophets and mystical pretenders from that area of the world. When you look back at the Roman occupation of the region we notice the old world and traditions crumbling away to be replaced by a new order, a highly efficient one at that. Much was at stake and there was no lack of gnostic fervour.
On the banks of the Jordan, an area associated with Jesus and his followers in around 45 CE (CE = common era replacing AD in some respects) we have Theudas who claimed to be Joshua the prophet of salvation. Joshua is also an etymon or earlier form for the name of Jesus. He arrived from Egypt with around 400 followers he claimed to be able to divide water as was spoiling for a fight. He’s mentioned by the later pro-Roman historian Josephus and also in Acts. This poor man’s Moses was soon despatched by Roman soldiery.
On another occasion again in 45 CE we have Jacob and Simon, sons of Judas the Galilean (another place name associated with Jesus). Their uprising ended as badly as their fathers in the year 6, all were slain or crucified.
Then there’s Menahem heralding from a family of freedom fighters who rebelled in 66 which instigated the Jewish War that ended in 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem, an event also well documented.
Next we have an unnamed Egyptian visionary who between 52-58 with 40,000 followers wandered in the desert and then occupied the Garden of Olives. He claimed his voice alone could shatter the walls of Jerusalem and his men would be able to enter and occupy it. Flavius Josephus wrote in the Jewish War 2.259 regarding this and many other such men during the governorship of Festus;
‘Men who deceived and deluded the people under pretence of divine inspiration, but were in fact for procuring innovations and changes of the government. These men prevailed with the multitude to act like madmen, and went before them into the wilderness, pretending that God would there show them the signals of liberty.’
