Selections from an atheist's library

A long time ago, when I was using different blogging software, I used to maintain a book page, in which I listed some of the more important atheism-related books in my library. I’ve decided to revive this, and I’m using my Amazon Associates aStore to do so. If you click through to the store, you can browse about 50 of the more influential volumes that I’ve read which are relevant to the subject of atheism. I don’t agree with all of them – that would be tedious – but all have made me think. The list is relatively light on works of academic philosophy, because in the near future I’m going to organize my favourite philosophy books along similar lines.
I’m adding a permalink to the store in the right sidebar of the blog.
Anyway, enjoy the list. And no, I’m not looking for click-through sales. I’m just using this as a convenience, and letting Amazon.com do the heavy lifting for me.

"If this is a success, I'd hate to see a failure."

Juan Cole comments on recent Republican claims of success in Iraq, and the way journalists are writing about them.

It is a measure of the Orwellian state of the US media and politics that he should have to bother. I mean, the place is a burned out hulk where hundreds die every month in political violence, where armed militias are ubiquitous, where nearly 5 million people remain displaced from their homes, where you have unemployment rates of 50% in some major cities, and where pro-Iranian Shiite fundamentalists face off against Sunni Arab nationalists and Salafis and Kurdish separatists. If this is a success, I’d hate to see a failure.

Building a nervous system from everyday parts

File this under “things that I expected to happen, but not so soon”:

Researchers from the Cybernetic Intelligence Research Group at the University of Reading have developed a robot whose movements are controlled by neurons growing in a culture dish.

The really beautiful bit of the experiment is that the neurons seem to have self-organized into a trainable network. I wonder what happens when we scale up and go 3-D….
UPDATE: This may not be as radical as first thought. I still think it’s really cool.

"You really cannot have it both ways."

Andrew Sullivan on the hypocrisy of American protests over Russia’s actions in Georgia:

Once you trash the international system, declare yourself above the law and even the most basic of international conventions against war crimes, you have forfeited the kind of moral authority that the US once had. Bush and his cronies speak as if none of this has happened. Their rigid, absolutist denial even of the bleeding obvious allows them to preach to the world about international norms that, when they would have constrained American actions, were derided as quaint and irrelevant. You really cannot have it both ways.

Utterly, unredeemably negative

I went to see “The Dark Knight”. I saw it in Cinerama, in a packed cinema, and I was in the middle of the row. This meant that I couldn’t easily do what I wanted to: leave.
I hated it.
It was, without doubt, the most negative, life-denying film I have ever seen.
This was quite clearly a post-9/11 film. Back on September 16, 2001, Dick Cheney notoriously said:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

In this film, there is only the dark side. The light side is lost, swallowed up in the shadows. Oh sure, the director tosses us a bone in the form of the two ferries at the end, but by then the pointless, inchoate mayhem has numbed us to the point where we can hardly appreciate it. All of the good guys have given up on the values they professed, and the best we can do is lie about them or make them our scapegoat.
As we left the cinema, I looked around me. Everybody seemed subdued; nobody looked happy. For myself, I jammed my headphones into my ears and cranked up the loudest music that I had on my iPhone; when I got home I knocked back half a bottle of wine in a couple of minutes. I felt as though I had lost something. I want to un-see the film, to have that bit of my life back.
Brilliant? Oh, sure, but so very, very cynical. Others have invited us to look into the pit, have shown us the fragility of civilization – Dante, Picasso, Golding, Bosch, Spiegelman – but none of them laughed at us as they did so.
UPDATE: I’ve been reading some of the reviews over at RottenTomatoes. Only one reviewer seems to have seen the film as I did: Armond White of the NY Press. Money quote:

Aaron Eckhart’s cop role in The Black Dahlia humanized the complexity of crime and morality. But as Harvey Dent, sorrow transforms him into the vengeful Two-Face, another Armageddon freak in Nolan’s sideshow. The idea is that Dent proves heroism is improbable or unlikely in this life. Dent says, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” What kind of crap is that to teach our children, or swallow ourselves? Such illogic sums up hipster nihilism, just like Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Putting that crap in a Batman movie panders to the naiveté of those who have not outgrown the moral simplifications of old comics but relish cynicism as smartness. That’s the point of The Joker telling Batman, “You complete me.” Tim Burton might have ridiculed that Jerry Maguire canard, but Nolan means it—his hero is as sick as his villain.

And here’s the oddly-named Camila Batmanghelidjh in the Independent:

What worries me even more than the violence was the lack of human compassion surrounding it. Human life is presented as worthless. For me, the apathetic bystanders who facilitate violence are more disturbing than the Joker himself. His perversion, at least, has a sad logic to it. The indifference of the onlookers, though, is shocking.

Humanism and religion

Mark Rowlands posted a piece at Secular Philosophy in which he argued that humanism is…

… in essence, a secular form of Christianity. The idea that humans are the most valuable animals in the world makes no sense when it is removed from a theological context in which that animal is created in the image of God.

I think that this is bullshit, frankly. While both humanism and Christianity are socially-constructed systems based on admixtures of faith, idealism, and pragmatism, the “image of God” idea is not something that they have in common. What follows is a slightly edited version of my comment on that thread.

It is reasonable to suppose that every creature has an innate bias in favour of the survival of its kin, simply because such a preference has strong survival value for its genes… [It]makes perfect sense for me to regard my child as the most important creature on the planet.

For simple creatures, this innate bias is expressed in a variety of behaviours: mating patterns, competition with non-kin, protective and even self-sacrificial ways of defending offspring. For thinking, social creatures one would expect a variety of cognitive and social mechanisms to emerge that would reinforce this same bias. Unlike instinctive behaviours, such mechanisms are more plastic, since they interact with and are affected by a wide range of other social forces.

How big is the circle of “kin”? This is a critical factor that we see in many social creatures, from termites to chimpanzees. Over human history the original kin circle of the nomadic group has been broadened under a variety of pressures: tribal, racial, national, and so forth.

So what of humanism and Christianity? They are similar in that both seek to exploit the “kin bias” instinct to advance a particular idea. However their objectives seem to be diametrically opposed. Christianity, and all religions, seek to inject a supernatural authority into a worldview, and declare that only those who accept this authority are “kin”. Humanism proposes that there is no supernatural authority, and that the only reasonable way of defining “kin” is in terms of the species homo sapiens. All other definitions have historically been exploited for sectarian, tribal, or racial purposes, and should be rejected because of this.

While McCain and the WSJ declare victory….

A useful reminder by Leon Hadar in The American Conservative:

The benchmarks to measure success in Iraq should be the ones that Bush, McCain and the other cheer-leaders had provided before Congress authorized Bush to go to war. That should be the context for the debate on Iraq during this election:

1. We would discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

2. We would uncover the ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin.

3. The war in Iraq would be as short and relatively costless in terms of American lives and U.S. dollars as the war in Afghanistan.

4. “Liberated” Iraq would be a unified nation-state and free of ethnic and religious rivalries as well as of foreign occupation.

5. A democratic and secular Iraq would become a political model for the entire Broader Middle East and would create the conditions for a political and economic liberalization in the Arab world.

6. Iraq would not require American economic assistance since it economy would grow and the country would become prosperous thanks to its growing oil revenues.

7. The U.S. military victory in Iraq would strengthen U.S. strategic position in the Middle East

(a) encouraging other global and regional powers to jump on the American bandwagon,

(b) weakening the power of anti-Americans governments (Iran) and terrorist groups,

(c) helping revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process (”The road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad”),

and (d) putting pressure on North Korea and Iran to end their nuclear military programs.

Now…based on these high standards set-up by the Bush Administration, it has failed in achieving all these seven goals (and related others). Seven F’s. Time to switch that kid to another school.

Observations of an hotel

While I was in Chennai, I stayed at the Asiana Hotel. In general, I was quite pleased with it, but there were a few things that seemed out of place:

  • Internet service was provided through an open WiFi. I had been expecting the ridiculously overpriced WiFi that seems de rigeur for up-market hotels, but I was pleasantly surprised – at least for the first few minutes. I soon discovered that they were running a proxy server on port 80 which would periodically substitute a hotel advertisement for the page you had requested. Perhaps it was intended to be an dynamic interstitial, but under Safari it simply loaded and stayed there. The side-effects were bizarre: at one point, I brought up an Apple Help page, chose “More…”, and got the Asiana ad instead of the extended help from apple.com. The solution, apparently, was to run everything through a VPN, but that wasn’t available on my personal MacBook Air, nor on my iPhone.
  • On Tuesday, I was sick, and stayed at the hotel rather than going in to the office. I delayed checkout until 2pm, and then hung around in the lounge and courtyard, drinking weak tea and hoping for recovery. As with most places in the hotel, there was background music playing. Unfortunately, they were playing just one track: “After the Sunrise”, by Yanni. Over and over again. It’s 4:38 long, so it was repeating 13 times an hour. I was in the lounge for two hours. Brain damage is a distinct possibility….
  • The hotel bar was OK, even though they mixed most of the cocktails too sweet, and the tonic (not Schweppes) was so strong that it killed the taste of the gin. But the entertainment was simply disconcerting: two young women in hot pants, backed up by an older guy on guitar and synths. They had a wide repertoire, from Abba to the Cranberries, but their favourite seemed to be “Hotel California”. Did they play it because the girls liked to sing it, or because the guy wanted the chance to come forward and play the epic guitar passage at the end? We’ll never know.

Dawkins on Darwin

The first episode of Richard Dawkins’ three-part documentary on Charles Darwin has been broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK. I’m not sure if/when it’ll be shown in the USA, but in the meantime it’s up on Google Video:

48 minutes. Highly recommended.