Tuesday, 06 November 2007

• Error Celebration (the corrected kind, that is)

  Error Celebration

  Intro:
  

  In my zeal to correct the errors of others one often forgets how great it can be to be wrong yourself.  Every post I have here at WOE, especially the canonical posts listed to the side, in my mind at least, aren’t dogmatic pronouncements of atheistic truth…they are invitations to be corrected at any meaningful level.  You’ll find in my profile that shows up in any blogring, it says, “here for informal, mutual epistemic accountability” and I'm always willing to be wrong.  If someone would take me to task competently on any issue that'd be great.  I'm just doing the best I can here as an intelligent layperson.  Obviously surface skimming and finding something to blow out of proportion or misrepresent like an irate, intellectually uncharitable scrooge isn’t what I have in mind.  Be sensible. It is a shame that some people are down right surprised when they find that “one can have a civilized conversation with ARU.”  I'm sure that's at least partially my fault at times. 
  

  If you take a survey of my partners in crime, and I'm just guessing here, I imagine I'm probably the most likely person they know that will give them a hard time about their own arguments...or will voice my disgust about the ill-conceived arguments of prominent atheists.  I don’t apologize for bad arguments no matter who makes them.  Granted a lot of that goes on behind the scenes of WOE on AIM and email, but my point is the enemy is error...and only occasionally an individual that turns themselves into one.
  

  
  

  Finding out you are wrong about something should be a cause for celebration, not defensiveness, as it can only be a prelude to being that much more correct in the future.  That is science at it's finest hour and we should at all times and in all places be willing to let our errors be errors…holding even the most near and dear propositions with open hands…so that evidence, logic, and rationality can do their job uninhibited:
  

  
  

  And naturally when we do so, we can then benefit from from being more closely associated with the truth of anything of importance. 
  

  For those of you that are only interested in errors of my apostasy, you may skip the first three sections.
  

  Childhood errors:
  

  I think the biggest error of childhood, right before I started taking Christianity seriously was the naïve idea that despite the obvious fairy tale vibe I got from Scripture in my early teens…that it wasn’t possible for full grown adults to try to make believe on it anyway.  My pastor at the time gave some really cheap faith answers to my critical questions that probably would have killed Christianity forever if I hadn’t stumbled upon other Christians that…went all the way.  Just because an underground movement of apparently intellectually minded adults tried to bridge the gap between myth and science didn’t actually mean they had succeeded.  I was captivated by the underdog movement…the conspiracy theory-ness of creationism and apologetics…and had they not existed, I probably wouldn’t have had to take the decade long, hard scenic route back to my senses.   Who knew that people would take make believe to this kind of level and still respect themselves in the morning?  Not the me at that age.  
  

  It was clear at age fifteen as a cradle Lutheran that science and the Bible were telling two different stories and that the Bible was the less credible one.  Letting go of that state of affairs is probably one of those damaging long term errors of my life as the pathological credulity that one must sustain to defy the scientific method for the sake of the evidence straining plausibility of revelation can be truly a psychologically sickening recipe for disaster.  Every time you have to forgo the argument to the better explanation it is yet another notch of psychosis you may be bringing down on yourself later in life…and I found out the hard way.  Getting back to ground zero where legitimate beliefs are founded…on what is known (not merely assumed for convenience sake)…what is most secure…and then very carefully venturing out only so far as the evidence allows is truly a mentally refreshing experience that has so much more to offer in explanatory power and which defies all the sick minded pathology of apologetics and creationism…something I would never again sacrifice on the altar of any god.   
  

  Lutheran/Creationist errors:
  

  Reading the Bible and taking it seriously is probably second in terms of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made.  As anyone that reads my site on a semi-regular basis can tell you, I quote the Bible non-stop and off the top of my head quite frequently.  The Biblegateway is almost always secondary in the pipeline.  I probably know more about the Bible than I do any other book ever written.  Perhaps only my knowledge of Star Wars and Batman: The Animated Series compare, but unlike that kind of fiction, taking the Bible’s brand of fiction seriously can have serious consequences…especially for a young man’s mind that probably needed a healthy measure of growing up long before being exposed to such gratuitous human error of ages gone by.
  

  At the very least in that event perhaps I could have imposed some of my maturity on the Bible instead of it imposing and canonizing its immaturity in me…even if I couldn’t help being seduced by it at a later age.  Regardless, I am a product of it.  Pure and simple.  Even to this day, the foundation of my psychological profile is explicitly Bible-based and I will have to live with that till I die.  I walked, talked, and thought all Bible all the time.  Some might point out that now days aren’t that terribly different.  It is true, I’ve used that foothold to become your friendly neighborhood lay-expert to help others avoid the pitfalls of my own journey.  Surely there is a place in our culture in the atheist camp for at least a few someones to take the time to digest a good deal of what their primary ideological opposition happens to be at this juncture in history.  I certainly don’t recommend it for everyone.  I don’t think this job should last forever, but I do think it has its place in our era.  If as a Christian, you have read even a single apologetic work that criticizes another worldview, you most certainly condone the institution and would be hypocritical to expect every other belief system to merely play dead for the sake of your intellectual convenience.  As Woody Allen would say, “Write about what you know.”  And I’m just doing what I’m good at.  I’m sorry if that happens to be about systematically dismantling something that is most precious from your perspective.  It’s a big world…someone’s gotta be wrong.  Might as well be you.  And even though making unapologetics a life long pursuit isn’t out of the question I really do wish sometimes there had been a warning sticker like this on my Bible and that I’d taken the sticker’s advice to heart.    
  

  -Another significant error of judgment would be having taken a friend’s testimony at face value concerning his encounters with the demonic world.  I just should have been a little more skeptical…at least took a little tour of the skeptical community’s investigation and explanation of such things…and not uncritically bought the investigation killing dichotomy:  “God comes to you, and don’t go looking for demons.”
  

  -I struggled with all sorts of basic theistic proofs in my Christian days but I could never settle on one.  There was an “elephant in the middle of the room” of my mind that I never quite identified…that I recognize only now as “arbitrary ontology.”  It’s the basic idea that God as a disembodied supermind is an arbitrary existential proposition for it to simply just exist for no reason and that all of the so called proofs of God’s existence are basically statements of free association that can’t inherently point to a personal deity.  And…many of the ridiculous things I did think about God I find work perfectly in my Allverse hypothesis.  So all the way around, at the time, I really just wasn’t honest with myself in regard to following my logic to its conclusion and not just circling the idea of God hoping to make a desperate connection.  I never sat back and asked myself, “Why isn’t this working?” as it potentially could have been an even earlier deal breaker with theism.
  

  -I didn’t think the faith based claims meant anything…I was faux empiricist in a fideistic belief system.  I remember early on the Lutheran pastor that introduced me to creationism told me that I was wise for looking at the topic, “Through the eyes of faith.”  I had no clue what he was talking about at the time.  I thought I was looking at the picture, “through the eyes of the best explanation of the facts.”  Little did I know that gratuitous presumption that you are correct despite the mountains of contrary evidence was required in the adult world to prop up the picture.  I was pretty much in denial of that for the entire time and left that for "all the other Christians."  I'd just assumed that faith was something you attached to a good explanation (quite correctly), I didn't realize that faith was the good explanation. 
  

  -I did actually succumb to the idea that there is no reason to be a good person if God isn’t part of the picture…or rather the thought never dawned on me that human behavior is weighted towards relatively positive things (or else our species would have been kaput a long time ago) and that “doing whatever you want” included being good to each other.
  

  -I hadn’t actually refuted “there are no absolutes.”  I’d settled for a cheap rebuttal to relativism.  When they would say something like “There are no absolutes,” it can simply be restated, “As far as I know, I’ve never encountered anything that absolutely holds true in the moral sphere of things,” which isn’t necessarily a self-contradictory statement.  In addition to that, I’ve found that lots and lots of other philosophical perspectives start making more modest sense (whether I completely agree with them or not) when I’m not presuming they are all escapism from the impending truth of Christ.  
  

  -[DT just had to remind me] I recall this one time I actually did the emotional bullying thing to a friend that was having a low point in his life and feeling all existentially depraved...and I tag teamed him with another Christian friend (an incredibly hot one, btw) with the erroneous conviction (which I even recall was pulled directly from my ass) that "You'll never be happy if you're not a Christian..."  I even remember that I was fishing for something to say…and that just came out and my female friend endorsed the message incidentally.  That was possibly one of the lowest points of my Christian career as a Prot-bot.  I really hope that guy managed to disown that "advice" painlessly.
  

  Eastern Orthodoxy corrected a number of my Protestant errors…as I was able to accept the corrections the Bible didn’t provide on the authority of the Church and 1500 years of semi-empirical monastic research into what works better for human psychology (than the Bible immediately presents).  Perhaps you could say that the bible was the rough seed in the ground that may have its issues, but that the flowering church itself was the real humane marvel of God’s handiwork.   And regardless of how true a picture this is, or what denomination best represents Christianity…the bottom line is they accidentally got me to recognize many personal things that Protestantism in general doesn’t seem to address (Biblically sound or not) that I will always be indebted to.  You don’t forget how to ride a bike and you can’t go back to the wrong way…even if you are supposed to.
  

  -It helped me realize that you should never hand anything the keys to harm you.  That your “inner sanctum” is important and that no conclusion no matter from what source should be allowed to beat you up as a rule.  I was stuck in Protestant thought patterns that pretty much allowed any harsh conclusion from theism to walk all over me at any and every expense without being able to recognize what was going on.  What right did I have to say no to God?  Well apparently any being with self-respect has that right and a good God should never ask you to violate that to serve him…even if you can’t find any intellectual way not to come to that conclusion given scripture…  It’s very odd when such an obvious personal tool never showed its face anywhere in the Bible.  Page one would have been nice.  One wakes up only in horror at what you’ve been doing to yourself pathologically for the last 7 years.
  

  -Prot-botism:  Learning to prioritize the subjective feelings of others over and above the need to evangelize them…or just common sense and tactfulness in general and not putting eternity on the table as an ever ready excuse to be a sociopathic idiot in the immediate sense.  This is something very hard to grasp for your average protestant guy.  Long term acclimation to the perks of eternal truths works better anyway than dropping bombs on them.  It’s very hard to take the “Spread the Gospel, use words if necessary” mantra in Protestantism seriously.  If you are “Sola Scriptora,” the Bible really doesn’t advocate that priority overtly.  Quite the contrary, Paul makes it sound like its a race that you are going to regret not going all out crazy for in the end.  An off-handed Protestant blurb really doesn't hold up to that.  It just sounds like a cute-ism that may be nice sounding but as usual the anxiety still builds that you aren’t always preaching the gospel to every living being as you can’t take the authority of a Protestant church seriously (because it says so).  Having this precedent laid down in a Church that preached its own authority, was plausibly authoritative, and had lots of experience apparently doing the monastic thing right was a much better sell that I could take to heart.  It is the first time it dawned on me that my Protestant idealism was a failure because I wasn’t being realistic or practical…and that failure isn’t in and of itself ideal.     
  

  -The EO don’t believe in the doctrine of total depravity and their insistence that man is basically good…and can work towards perfection was a complete 180 in thinking…a much needed and obviously legitimate 180 regardless of whatever the Bible says.  All of the sudden the world wasn’t filled with evil selfish beasts that needed the gospel pounded into them to be worthwhile…and natural evidence of this was abundant.  I realized it always had been a bit of a flub to have a person identify themselves as “wholly evil” and in need of good…why would an evil creature do this?  Why would other creatures who didn’t have this gospel try to do good?  Why doesn’t every human being really seem like they are that evil?  Why did I as a Christian have to paint conspiracy that into every portrait?  When you start looking at the glass as half full, you see that everyone has a measure of morality to them…its just a matter of how much.  There is honor among thieves; gangsters have their appeal to family…etc.  No one is totally depraved and you have to really bend the beams so to speak to force everyone to fit that Protestant picture.  Every little step of the way, the world started making more and more sense and I couldn’t believe I had ever believed otherwise.
  

  -Protestantism is basically one big guilt trip for not being absolutely head over heels in love with Jesus and for exuding good works 24-7 as a natural result.  I thought I wasn’t legalistic, but by the time I was done connecting the dots between verses, there was never an opportunity to be the failure that you could not help but be.  And there was basically no hope other than magic that wasn’t forthcoming to get you out of that mess.  EO helped me realize that “God was okay with baby steps” (yeah, find that in Scripture) and that I didn’t have to superficially fit the mold of a good person instantaneously.  My version of grace was just inverted legalism.  Instead of being held to a given law you’re held to your willingness to follow any given law out of shear love of Jesus.  It’s the same effect, but unfortunately I hadn’t noticed.  If I were a smoker (I’m not)…I could take time to quit and I didn’t have to give everything up cold turkey in the most inhumane way possible…only to be subject to the natural future failures for treating your system so abusively.  Extremes could be avoided.  Acclimation to a new lifestyle could take the appropriate amount of time minus the anxiety that an uber jealous invisible God was about to hit you with a lightening bolt if you didn’t pretend you really really loved Jesus that very moment of decision of whether to have that next proverbial cigarette or not.  Some of this really was just absolutely simplistic common sense…things I probably would have intuitively done if it weren’t for anxiety ridden Bible verses that seemed to have no place for it.  Being able to grade myself as say 70% moral and climbing was a huge deal.  It was so simple…so obvious…and progress was immediately palatable in my mind’s eye as opposed to perpetual impasses of Protestant thinking that I could never admit to without breaking the entire deal.
  

  -EO taught me that my feelings didn’t mean shit (just not in so many words).  Who knows what feeling cache I got or where my theistic confidence happened to fall in another denomination…my job was to take whatever I happened to have (x) and turn it into what God wanted (y) and to use any means necessary to do it…in the correct way with all the new personal management tools they were giving me.  Not taking my feelings for granted was a fairly significant step forward for me into what I would consider adult level maturity.  Otherwise you’re just lost in whatever emotional errors your youth happened to bestow upon you.
  

  Eastern Orthodox errors:
  

  -I’d basically told myself that “If Christianity is true, that EO was the best version of it.”  As usual with just about all meta-scam based thinking you can directly advocate the premise…but tip toe around your lack of confidence.  Of course even finding what I thought was the best Christian church didn’t mean there was a true Christian Church or any true religion.  I just wasn’t willing to question that much at the time and EO was obviously a better version of what I was taking for granted.
  

  -It made sense that the HS would continue to guide the church’s interpretation after the advent of the Bible itself…and granted the church fathers had some interesting things to say that either I’d never heard, or clever things I had heard…from me.  The problem was that the interpretive latitude they gave themselves to merely make plausible logical connections was approximately on par with my own intelligence with or without the HS.  Quite underwhelming.
  

  -The EO priest told me in one class that “violence begets violence” for video games.  While this made sense monastically, the striking contradiction of course is that this wisdom is no where heeded in a very violent Bible.  Was I part of a different religion?
  

  -At first I thought that many of the philosophical nuances EO monastics had added to theology were rather clever.  For instance St. Seraphim said that you knew you were forgiven by god when the sin no longer came to mind.  That’s brilliant!  I can work with that.  Finally a practical definition!  Of course the reason I’d never ventured that way before was because my empirical mind couldn’t stomach the obvious systematic circumvention of reality checks that pervaded monastic thinking.  Sorry, Seraphim…can’t turn off that whole “pattern recognition” with those brain washing prayers.  With every solution came the best case for rejection of the Christian worldview I’d ever had.  
  

  Agnostic errors:
  

  -I didn’t know about Josephus recording the martyrdom of James.  PastorMaster blew this slight oversight way out of proportion.  At first it seemed like all the martyrdoms of the apostles could be blown off as legendary, but there was one exception.  Of course, any vague mentioning works well for the confirmation bias of Christians who “already know” the traditional accounts are 100% true (by faith of course).  However with a tad bit of impartiality, one notes that all we know for sure from non-Christian history is that this one Christian who may or may not have been the same kind of James the Bible explains, was executed for something.  Was it because he was a Christian?  Was it because of some legal violation otherwise?  Was his version of Christianity the same as the orthodox?  Could he have been a Gnostic that the proto-orthodox assimilated for convenience sake?  Christians will no doubt always be certain that this James was the exact same version of James found in the Bible, who believed the exact same things they do, who upheld every pretense of logic and evidence, and who died (along side all the other Apostles not mentioned in other situations) purely for the literal historical reality that he knew first hand that Jesus rose from the dead in physical form.  Try to get even a tenth of that from Josephus.  But regardless…some how I’d missed this one meek factoid…probably because it wasn’t that impressive.
  

  -I still thought there was some sense to genocide.  Aren't you permanently getting rid of the problem?  I’m glad some of the things Richard Carrier had said on the subject finally jogged me to my senses.  Of course there is “some sense,” but not any moral sense…or even long term practical sense as pretty much any serious level of violence creates a never ending hostile environment for future generations.  Every nation starts thinking crazy pre-emptive war is a great idea and they always have lots of historical justifications for it. 
  

  -I didn’t realize my definition of agnostic at the time was basically the same definition as atheist.  “I lack reasons to believe God exists.”  And, “I have no active belief in God.”  That’s how many atheists define themselves anyway.  Though eventually I ended up filling up the entire spectrum from agnostic, to apatheist, to anti-theist (in terms of thinking theism is harmful), to atheism in weak and strong forms.  So it really just doesn’t matter how you define it anymore, because I have arguments that fill up all the slots.  
  

  -I thought I was never going to find anyone I could respect in the skeptical community.  I was still tainted by my Christian inferences at the time and really needed a shining beacon of pure epistemology to reveal itself before I would suffer through the convoluted biases of skeptics who were skeptics because they were skeptics.  I think Farrell Till was the poster boy of infidels.org at the time in my mind and I sure as hell wasn’t going to sort through all that bullshit.  Then came that blessed day I stumbled upon a Richard Carrier article and I was in love.  Sometimes when I realize how damn awesome he is, I think I’m Fight Club crazy and that I made him up out of the necessity of his existence.  So he’d be the Tyler Durgen character and I’d be the no name pathetic dude that needs some self esteem.  And I’m just imagining that this epistemic god has covered all this historical ground for me…when apparently I must be doing that when I black out.  Well, either way, lots of other people have bought the same Carrier delusion.  Or have they?  Lol.  Sam Harris was a welcome addition with powerful dispassionate rhetoric that brought some hardy philosophy to atheism in the public eye.  And I’ve even been surprised that Christopher Hitchens can pull off quite a bit of sense making despite some of his more or less demonizable traits.  And it took a while of adapting but Stephen Novella of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast has really helped take a consistent mature view of how to deal with pseudoscientific topics.
  

  -I over-focused on the “evils” of adoption in a debate on abortion with Goodgreypoet with my DNA_demon account.  There’s no reason to put down one option to accept another.
  

  Atheist errors:
  

  -At first I thought my Allverse hypothesis could justify belief in "elementals."  If there is no reason why simple things do what they do here, then why not simple things that do complicated things (like be conscious) elsewhere?  I think the problem is that a "simple complicated" thing is a contradiction in terms and hence not a part of the set of all possibility.  To my credit, this was "Allverse hypothesis B" since I recognized intuitively up front there was something wrong with it (and I favored hypothesis A), but couldn't put my finger on it until later.  I'm sure I confused the crap out of manonfire_reasons in the meantime.  Oopsie. 
  

  -I didn’t realize apologists use Acts to date the gospels early.  I’d focused all of my attention on the gospels themselves and had to reorient when the Gabester mentioned the relevancy of Acts.  Ultimately however, the fact that Acts ends when it does isn’t much to go on and all the evidence of the gospels still has precedence.
  

  -I went on a long tangent about the Iraq war on SwordandSacrifices’ site…and the topic was Afghanistan.  That was quite embarrassing.  I apologized and asked for my comment to be deleted.
  

  -I accused FFF of not giving me any credit on one occasion…when clearly he had.  It was Pychen who wasn’t giving me any credit at the time one debate over and I’d mushed the two together quite erroneously.
  

  -Someone actually managed to momentarily one up me polemically.  That almost NEVER happens:
  

  ARU: But those things are also inherent in our being…taking them away is de-constituting us. The Bible is not allowed to undefined what clearly is on its own terms.
  
  Dan: -Calvinists would say that some relationship with God is also inherent in our being.
  
  Touché. You got me there. I wish I could give you a dollar. However I would ask you consider hypothetically that there are atheists that according to Calvinism (+ honest observation) have successfully circumvented the part of them that needs God and have found happiness and contentment in this world. It would follow that if this is so, there’s simply no excuse that God could defer to as being logically impossible according to the way divine things ontologically are that he can’t provide a middle ground afterlife solution for people that simply want their own space (i.e. not hell or heaven). An omnipotent God would have nothing to lose by providing it…even for eternity. It can’t be a logical impossibility if we can see it going on right now on earth.

  -In a conversation with Walter_Rat, I actually thought Richard Carrier had gotten something wrong with his monkeybutt and bumpypoo examples…and man was I ever wrong to question his command of the subject.  The error was mine.
  

  -There is a whole section on the errors I made during an "Open Forum" public speaking event here.

  -I used to think that I didn't get a certain type of feedback, because my arguments were well fortified, but that model of things was a bit too self-serving.  People just don't understand what I say a good portion of the time.  Hopefully I won't have to add the error, "I thought I was smart, but turns out I'm just crazy."  We'll see how the "smart" theory goes. 
  

  -I used a picture of "Ross Taylor" that was supposed to be "J. P. Holding".  He comes up in a google search, and man do they look similar anyway.   Oh well.
  

  -I botched the title of my own concept, "glory profiteering."  It's redundant.  It should have been "glory mongering" and "sin profiteering." 
  

  -Dan strikes again.  I originally said that the fulcrum of religion was at best inert, whereas its perfectly obvious religion directly causes good in the world.  Dan noted this was unfair of me and I revised my post accordingly.
  

  -I really was thinking it was Jamie Kennedy who was behind the "Beware the Believers" video, cuz it seemed to fit so well.  I wasn't absolutely certain and certainly noted it could go either way from the beginning, but it's worth pointing out the hypothesis I supported most turned out to be false.  I guess there are certainly shades of error.
  

  Outro:
  

  This will be a continually updated post as more of my errors come to my attention.  Theists can cross their fingers, right?!?!  lol
  

  While I invite comments on what I’ve done with my own errors, it seems appropriate to ask anyone out there to share a few of their own errors that they have grown the most from…and even come back as you find yourself with more.  As you can see, I’ve put this post first in my canonical posts that will always be listed on the side of my xanga for anyone to peruse.  Perhaps this would make a good national atheist holiday…one day a year to celebrate being wrong about something…and now finding yourself in better standing with the truth.  Maybe instead of the pretentiousness of the “Brights” label we should be called, the “Delectable Correctables” as that implies coolness as well as adherence to rationality, science, evidence…as well as the mental health inspiring willingness to be corrected when presented with better information.  There's no crime in being wrong...everyone is wrong about something.  It happens.  The only crime is being stubbornly uncorrectable. 
  

  I really do look forward to adding to this post in the future.  Even on something big.  Being wrong is an adventure in finding out where you went astray and subsequently learning something about the world that you didn’t know before.  For those of you that just want to know what the truth is regardless of what it is, this should be a no brainer.
  

  Ben
  

  
  

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