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Saturday, Jan 23, 2010 - 21:53 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

To Wit

"My God," said the Queen,
"I'm pregnant! I wonder who did it?"
- Essay Brevity: Religion, Royalty, Sex, Mystery


The new semester's starting in earnest, and not without some small regrets, but one has to move on.

Speech Processing lectures on Friday nights, and flipping through the notes I managed to recognize components and methods (though regrettably not all the details) from, among other modules, Natural Language Processing, Uncertainty Modelling in AI and even Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, so presumably it won't be too heavy. It's not the best of times to begin breaking entirely new ground.

My planned schedule is then:
  • Weekdays: Whatever research project I can get my grubby mitts on...

  • Saturdays: Speech Processing. Alright, and blogging.

  • Sundays: Preparing for the quals.

Recap of past week: Sold A Course in Linear Algebra with Applications by Derek J.S. Robinson, Advanced Macroeconomics by David Romer and Modern Labor Economics (Tenth Ed) by Ehrenberg and Smith. All of which, on hindsight, I was unlikely to touch ever again - even where my work required some linear algebra knowledge last semester, I simply Googled and Wikipedia-ed everything. Collected the takings on Tuesday, swam after that.

Dropped in on the stargazing session that tpk has been assisting with for several years after the Friday lecture, and got a close-up of the craters of the moon. After a bit of craning my neck, I actually discovered that I could make out about a dozen stars in the night sky despite all the light pollution, putting paid to one of my unfounded prejudices.


My God

This has been covered at some length for some time, but only recently has it manifested itself overtly close to home, as mentioned last week. The issue flared up after a Catholic weekly publication won the legal right to use the word Allah to refer to God, which was offensive to some Muslims, who felt that it should refer exclusively to the god of their religion, and others could well use alternatives like Tuhan (lit. Lord) instead, lest the faithful be confused.

All and well if it remained a squabble and wrangle in the courts, but the matter devolved into a spate of attacks on churches in the country, though mercifully no deaths or major injuries. Hearteningly, this seems to be far from the general sentiment of the public, and many Muslim organizations have stepped in to help protect churches.

At this point, it is worth reiterating that I was, am, and for the foreseeable future will be, agnostic, for reasons sporadically spouted on this blog. It is also an opportune time to bring in Harris' argument from The End of Faith, in which he devotes an entire chapter to Islam. His writing is undoubtedly very provocative by local mass media standards, but as the book itself is not banned here, it should be reasonable to discuss, with proper discretion, some of his assertions.

Harris maintains that the Religion of Peace label is in fact a misnomer (shades of how the Ministry of Peace in 1984 actually deals with war), and that the vast preponderance of their holy book advocates struggle with the infidels, with a few cursory reconciliatory lines, and some concessions to "People of the Book", i.e. Jews and Christians, though even in this case they must recognize who's boss in the greater scheme of things (to be fair, this attitude of "I'm right, you're therefore wrong" is hardly unique to Islam).

Now, as Harris quotes from Russell to make his point, this behaviour is only to be expected from the pristinely faithful: Apparently, Spanish conquistadors had the practice of baptizing Indian infants before killing them, thus guaranteeing that the babies went straight to Heaven. Russell's observation was that this act was positively rational, even charitable, given sufficient faith. Simply put:

Proposition 1: Baptism has brought the child to God and salvation.

Proposition 2: The child has had no time to sin between baptism and death.

Conclusion: The child is saved and goes to Heaven to be with God for eternity, without wasting any time on Earth and risking being left out due to future sin. Good job!


If the first proposition is accepted, as it presumably still is among some Christians nowadays, and the second is also, then the conclusion must hold; if the conquistadors were men of sincere faith, it was no less than they could have done, and it is difficult to see how others of the faith could fault them. Yes, Thou shalt not kill, but only without just cause - and what cause can be more just than assuring a cute, adorable baby of paradise? And in the event that God, in his inscrutable wisdom, finds fault with that, surely he would only punish the killer, making the killer a self-sacrificial Buddha?

The key observation then, is that it is not that suicide bombers and terrorists are irrational. They might be invincibly rational (and indeed they are increasingly well-adjusted and well-educated by most measures), and their blowing themselves up at a busy intersection, or flying planes into buildings, simply follows naturally from their initial beliefs (such as the propositions above).

If one is dissatisfied with the conclusions, one might then turn to the propositions and complain that one could not possibly be rational and believe in such drivel... Oh wait.

But: the world is not so gloomy. Nobody does the baptize-whacktize routine nowadays, and it is considered bad form to invoke the Almighty, even if tangentially, on weapons of war; if people nowadays literally carry out the casting into the fire of men who abide not in Jesus (John 15:6) as in the old days, rather than reading it as just a metaphor (though doing so would still be a bit sad), they would be convicted of murder in the civilized world.

And it is also probably unfair to pigeonhole religious people. To illustrate, I refer to a survey that claims that just 39% of the members of the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States agree or strongly agree that "only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved", and perhaps even more surprisingly, the pastors were less likely to believe that than the average member; Just as incredibly, the majority did not disagree that "all the world's religions are equally good ways of helping a person find ultimate truth"!

I was gobsmacked by the findings, assuming that they are accurate, and frankly would not have guessed at their degree of tolerance, even if it still leaves out the god-doubters and godless (I wonder if they do acknowledge godless Buddhism and other such faiths as paths to the ultimate truth?).

Of course, other denominations and churches might well be horrified and/or contemptuous (who do they think they are to go against John 14:6 and Acts 4:12? The cheek!), which is one of the reasons why there are so many denominations in the first place - the presence of so much disagreement in the interpretation and practice of the same holy book, should at least raise some doubts; but as with politicians, indecisiveness and a honest admission of ignorance by teachers of the faith is seldom looked kindly upon.

Personally, I felt the survey results extremely heartwarming, and it raised my estimation of Presbyterians, and of God (if He exists).


Saith the Queen

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully
as when they do it from religious conviction."
- Blaise Pascal


Since the post is structured into quarters by my whim, I will now make the tenuous connection between royalty and authority, and the even more tenuous connection between objective and subjective morality, and continue.

I take morality to be the study of right and wrong, of good and evil. Then, an objective morality refers to the assertion that some acts are always and forever good, under some standard, while a subjective one claims that good and evil are not universal, and whether an act is good can change in different places and times. In either case, there might be difficult choices to make (what is the lesser of two evils?).

Objective morality, then, is heavily linked to religion, since it is often the case that holy books command that they be obeyed forever. So, if it is written that, say, homosexuality is abberant, then homosexuality is always abberant.



There are certain issues with this degree of objectivity, however, as is highlighted by the clip above, and elsewhere; Just one example:

"My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev. 24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)"

Now, Lev. 19:19 is abundantly clear, I would suppose. When God commands one not to plant fields with two kinds of seed, or wear clothes with mixed weaves, in such simple language, it should be reasonable to suppose that it is exactly what He means, in the same way as He means that a man should not lie with a man as he lies with a woman in Lev. 18:22.

I mean, what else could He mean? It is also not obvious from the text whether wearing cotton/polyester blend is less evil than homosexuality. Alright, perhaps the command against such clothes might actually be against vanity, or self-absorption, or somesuch, and the act is forgivable as long as it does not arise from such intentions; but in that case, should homosexuality not be likewise explained away when it happens?


Mixed Metaphors (Source: Russell's Teapot)


In practice, from observation, even the objectives are very often subjective. One argument derives from the "innate sense of right and wrong" - but to me it is a vast oversimplification.

There are, of course, good acts that are recognized as good, and bad acts as bad, by the overwhelming majority of humans. No mainstream culture claims that killing innocent newborn babies is good, for example (unless you're a devout Spanish conquistador or the like, I suppose; lest I appear too biased, godless regimes do sanction forced abortions to keep to population targets). Innately, one might feel that, say, stealing is bad. Giving alms good. Lying bad. Peace good.

But Robin Hood stealing from tyrannical landlords to give to the poor? Giving money to an aggressive homeless man who is almost certain to use it for booze and drugs? Lying about a person's location to a mob who seem not to have the best of intentions? Refuse to mount a surgical strike to overthrow a thoroughly repugnant dictatorship?

A counter would be that the reactions to these situations would also be reasonably innate - but I am certain that any arbitrary number of situations might be constructed, where the assumed-universal intuitions of humans would be split more or less down the middle; one example that occurs about every four years is the U.S. presidental election.

If one asks simple enough questions, the innate answer might - for almost all people - concur. But, as a whole, these very simple questions are not those that are debated and fought over. Back to the original topic: Is allowing Catholics to use the word Allah right or wrong, and why? To me at least, it is not innately clear why wearing clothes woven of two threads is wrong, or trimming my hair (Lev. 19:27), or eating shellfish (Lev. 11:10, Deu. 14:9), or touching pork (Lev. 11:6-8).

And if one travels the wide world, I would suspect that on very many matters, that gut feeling, that innate sense, that divine gift of right and wrong, might not be so universal after all.


I'll leave the second half of this for another time, and sign off with the weekly prediction. Portsmouth vs. Birmingham last week was, alas, snowed out too, and so we have:

$200 on Arsenal to beat Stoke City (at 1.70)



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