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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 months ago

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By: Richard Dawkins

This is a slightly edited version of the essay written to accompany the transcript of the conversation between myself, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and the late, much-lamented Christopher Hitchens, recorded in Christopher's flat in Washington DC in September 2007 and published in 2019 as The Four Horsemen.

Among the many topics the ‘four horsemen’ discussed in 2007 was how religion and science compared in respect of humility and hubris. Religion, for its part, stands accused of conspicuous overconfidence and sensational lack of humility. The expanding universe, the laws of physics, the fine-tuned physical constants, the laws of chemistry, the slow grind of evolution’s mills – all were set in motion so that, in the 14-billion-year fullness of time, we should come into existence. Even the constantly reiterated insistence that we are miserable offenders, born in sin, is a kind of inverted arrogance: such vanity, to presume that our moral conduct has some sort of cosmic significance, as though the Creator of the Universe wouldn’t have better things to do than tot up our black marks and our brownie points. The universe is all concerned with me. Is that not the arrogance that passeth all understanding?

Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, makes the exculpatory point that our distant ancestors could scarcely escape such cosmic narcissism. With no roof over their heads and no artificial light, they nightly watched the stars wheeling overhead. And what was at the centre of the wheel? The exact location of the observer, of course. No wonder they thought the universe was ‘all about me’. In the other sense of ‘about’, it did indeed revolve ‘about me’. ‘I’ was the epicentre of the cosmos. But that excuse, if it is one, evaporated with Copernicus and Galileo.

Turning, then, to theologians’ overconfidence, admittedly few quite reach the heights scaled by the seventeenth-century archbishop James Ussher, who was so sure of his chronology that he gave the origin of the universe a precise date: 22 October, 4004 bc. Not 21 or 23 October but precisely on the evening of 22 October. Not September or November but definitely, with the immense authority of the Church, October. Not 4003 or 4005, not ‘somewhere around the fourth or fifth millennium bc’ but, no doubt about it, 4004 bc. Others, as I said, are not quite so precise about it, but it is characteristic of theologians that they just make stuff up. Make it up with liberal abandon and force it, with a presumed limitless authority, upon others, sometimes – at least in former times and still today in Islamic theocracies – on pain of torture and death.

Such arbitrary precision shows itself, too, in the bossy rules for living that religious leaders impose on their followers. And when it comes to control-freakery, Islam is way out ahead, in a class of its own. Here are some choice examples from the Concise Commandments of Islam handed down by Ayatollah Ozma Sayyed Mohammad Reda Musavi Golpaygani, a respected Iranian ‘scholar’. Concerning the wet-nursing of babies, alone, there are no fewer than twenty-three minutely specified rules, translated as ‘Issues’. Here’s the first of them, Issue 547. The rest are equally precise, equally bossy, and equally devoid of apparent rationale:

If a woman wet-nurses a child, in accordance to the conditions to be stated in Issue 560, the father of that child cannot marry the woman’s daughters, nor can he marry the daughters of the husband whom the milk belongs to, even his wet-nurse daughters, but it is permissible for him to marry the wet-nurse daughters of the woman . . . [and it goes on].

Here’s another example from the wet-nursing department, Issue 553:

If the wife of a man’s father wet-nurses a girl with his father’s milk, then the man cannot marry that girl.

‘Father’s milk’? What? I suppose in a culture where a woman is the property of her husband, ‘father’s milk’ is not as weird as it sounds to us.

Issue 555 is similarly puzzling, this time about ‘brother’s milk’:

A man cannot marry a girl who has been wet-nursed by his sister or his brother’s wife with his brother’s milk.

I don’t know the origin of this creepy obsession with wet-nursing, but it is not without its scriptural basis:

When the Qur’aan was first revealed, the number of breast-feedings that would make a child a relative (mahram) was ten, then this was abrogated and replaced with the number of five which is well-known.[1]

That was part of the reply from another ‘scholar’ to the following recent cri de coeur from a (pardonably) confused woman on social media:

I breastfed my brother-in-law’s son for a month, and my son was breastfed by my brother-in-law’s wife. I have a daughter and a son who are older than the child who was breastfed by my brother-in-law’s wife, and she also had two children before the child of hers whom I breastfed. I hope that you can describe the kind of breastfeeding that makes the child a mahram and the rulings that apply to the rest of the siblings? Thank you very much.

The precision of ‘five’ breast feedings is typical of this kind of religious control-freakery. It surfaced bizarrely in a 2007 fatwa issued by Dr Izzat Atiyya, a lecturer at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, who was concerned about the prohibition against male and female colleagues being alone together and came up with an ingenious solution. The female colleague should feed her male colleague ‘directly from her breast’ at least five times. This would make them ‘relatives’ and thereby enable them to be alone together at work. Note that four times would not suffice. He apparently wasn’t joking at the time, although he did retract his fatwa after the outcry it provoked. How can people bear to live their lives bound by such insanely specific yet manifestly pointless rules?

With some relief, perhaps, we turn to science. Science is often accused of arrogantly claiming to know everything, but the barb is capaciously wide of the mark. Scientists love not knowing the answer, because it gives us something to do, something to think about. We loudly assert ignorance, in a gleeful proclamation of what needs to be done.

How did life begin? I don’t know, nobody knows, we wish we did, and we eagerly exchange hypotheses, together with suggestions for how to investigate them. What caused the apocalyptic mass extinction at the end of the Permian period, a quarter of a billion years ago? We don’t know, but we have some interesting hypotheses to think about. What did the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees look like? We don’t know, but we do know a bit about it. We know the continent on which it lived (Africa, as Darwin guessed), and molecular evidence tells us roughly when (between 6 million and 8 million years ago). What is dark matter? We don’t know, and a substantial fraction of the physics community would dearly like to.

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up. If you are an authority figure like the Pope, you might do it by thinking privately to yourself and waiting for an answer to pop into your head – which you then proclaim as a ‘revelation’. Or you might do it by ‘interpreting’ a Bronze Age text whose author was even more ignorant than you are.

Popes can promulgate their private opinions as ‘dogma’, but only if those opinions have the backing of a substantial number of Catholics through history: long tradition of belief in a proposition is, somewhat mysteriously to a scientific mind, regarded as evidence for the truth of that proposition. In 1950, Pope Pius XII (unkindly known as ‘Hitler’s Pope’) promulgated the dogma that Jesus’ mother Mary, on her death, was bodily – i.e. not merely spiritually – lifted up into heaven. ‘Bodily’ means that if you’d looked in her grave, you’d have found it empty. The Pope’s reasoning had absolutely nothing to do with evidence. He cited 1 Corinthians 15:54: ‘then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory’. The saying makes no mention of Mary. There is not the smallest reason to suppose the author of the epistle had Mary in mind. We see again the typical theological trick of taking a text and ‘interpreting’ it in a way that just might have some vague, symbolic, hand-waving connection with something else. Presumably, too, like so many religious beliefs, Pius XII’s dogma was at least partly based on a feeling of what would be fitting for one so holy as Mary. But the Pope’s main motivation, according to Dr Kenneth Howell, director of the John Henry Cardinal Newman Institute of Catholic Thought, University of Illinois, came from a different meaning of what was fitting. The world of 1950 was recovering from the devastation of the Second World War and desperately needed the balm of a healing message. Howell quotes the Pope’s words, then gives his own interpretation:

Pius XII clearly expresses his hope that meditation on Mary’s assumption will lead the faithful to a greater awareness of our common dignity as the human family. . . . What would impel human beings to keep their eyes fixed on their supernatural end and to desire the salvation of their fellow human beings? Mary’s assumption was a reminder of, and impetus toward, greater respect for humanity because the Assumption cannot be separated from the rest of Mary’s earthly life.

It’s fascinating to see how the theological mind works: in particular, the lack of interest in – indeed, the contempt for – factual evidence. Never mind whether there’s any evidence that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven; it would be good for people to believe she was. It isn’t that theologians deliberately tell untruths. It’s as though they just don’t care about truth; aren’t interested in truth; don’t know what truth even means; demote truth to negligible status compared with other considerations, such as symbolic or mythic significance. And yet at the same time, Catholics are compelled to believe these made-up ‘truths’ – compelled in no uncertain terms. Even before Pius XII promulgated the Assumption as a dogma, the eighteenth-century Pope Benedict XIV declared the Assumption of Mary to be ‘a probable opinion which to deny were impious and blasphemous’. If to deny a ‘probable opinion’ is ‘impious and blasphemous’, you can imagine the penalty for denying an infallible dogma! Once again, note the brazen confidence with which religious leaders assert ‘facts’ which even they admit are supported by no historical evidence at all.

The Catholic Encyclopedia is a treasury of overconfident sophistry. Purgatory is a sort of celestial waiting room in which the dead are punished for their sins (‘purged’) before eventually being admitted to heaven. The Encyclopedia’s entry on purgatory has a long section on ‘Errors’, listing the mistaken views of heretics such as the Albigenses, Waldenses, Hussites and Apostolici, unsurprisingly joined by Martin Luther and John Calvin.[2]

The biblical evidence for the existence of purgatory is, shall we say, ‘creative’, again employing the common theological trick of vague, hand-waving analogy. For example, the Encyclopedia notes that ‘God forgave the incredulity of Moses and Aaron, but as punishment kept them from the “land of promise”’. That banishment is viewed as a kind of metaphor for purgatory. More gruesomely, when David had Uriah the Hittite killed so that he could marry Uriah’s beautiful wife, the Lord forgave him – but didn’t let him off scot-free: God killed the child of the marriage (2 Samuel 12:13–14). Hard on the innocent child, you might think. But apparently a useful metaphor for the partial punishment that is purgatory, and one not overlooked by the Encyclopedia’s authors.

The section of the purgatory entry called ‘Proofs’ is interesting because it purports to use a form of logic. Here’s how the argument goes. If the dead went straight to heaven, there’d be no point in our praying for their souls. And we do pray for their souls, don’t we? Therefore it must follow that they don’t go straight to heaven. Therefore there must be purgatory. QED. Are professors of theology really paid to do this kind of thing?

Enough; let’s turn again to science. Scientists know when they don’t know the answer. But they also know when they do, and they shouldn’t be coy about proclaiming it. It’s not hubristic to state known facts when the evidence is secure. Yes, yes, philosophers of science tell us a fact is no more than a hypothesis which may one day be falsified but which has so far withstood strenuous attempts to do so. Let us by all means pay lip service to that incantation, while muttering, in homage to Galileo’s muttered eppur si muove, the sensible words of Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.[3]

Facts in this sense include the following, and not one of them owes anything whatsoever to the many millions of hours devoted to theological ratiocination. The universe began between 13 billion and 14 billion years ago. The sun, and the planets orbiting it, including ours, condensed out of a rotating disk of gas, dust and debris about 4.5 billion years ago. The map of the world changes as the tens of millions of years go by. We know the approximate shape of the continents and where they were at any named time in geological history. And we can project ahead and draw the map of the world as it will change in the future. We know how different the constellations in the sky would have appeared to our ancestors and how they will appear to our descendants.

Matter in the universe is non-randomly distributed in discrete bodies, many of them rotating, each on its own axis, and many of them in elliptical orbit around other such bodies according to mathematical laws which enable us to predict, to the exact second, when notable events such as eclipses and transits will occur. These bodies – stars, planets, planetesimals, knobbly chunks of rock, etc. – are themselves clustered in galaxies, many billions of them, separated by distances orders of magnitude larger than the (already very large) spacing of (again, many billions of) stars within galaxies.

Matter is composed of atoms, and there is a finite number of types of atoms – the hundred or so elements. We know the mass of each of these elemental atoms, and we know why any one element can have more than one isotope with slightly different mass. Chemists have a huge body of knowledge about how and why the elements combine in molecules. In living cells, molecules can be extremely large, constructed of thousands of atoms in precise, and exactly known, spatial relation to one another. The methods by which the exact structures of these macromolecules are discovered are wonderfully ingenious, involving meticulous measurements on the scattering of X-rays beamed through crystals. Among the macromolecules fathomed by this method is DNA, the universal genetic molecule. The strictly digital code by which DNA influences the shape and nature of proteins – another family of macromolecules which are the elegantly honed machine-tools of life – is exactly known in every detail. The ways in which those proteins influence the behaviour of cells in developing embryos, and hence influence the form and functioning of all living things, is work in progress: a great deal is known; much challengingly remains to be learned.

For any particular gene in any individual animal, we can write down the exact sequence of DNA code letters in the gene. This means we can count, with total precision, the number of single-letter discrepancies between two individuals. This is a serviceable measure of how long ago their common ancestor lived. This works for comparisons within a species – between you and Barack Obama, for instance. And it works for comparisons of different species – between you and an aardvark, say. Again, you can count the discrepancies exactly. There are just more discrepancies the further back in time the shared ancestor lived. Such precision lifts the spirit and justifies pride in our species, Homo sapiens. For once, and without hubris, Linnaeus’s specific name seems warranted.

Hubris is unjustified pride. Pride can be justified, and science does so in spades. So does Beethoven, so do Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Christopher Wren. So do the engineers who built the giant telescopes in Hawaii and in the Canary Islands, the giant radio telescopes and very large arrays that stare sightless into the southern sky; or the Hubble orbiting telescope and the spacecraft that launched it. The engineering feats deep underground at CERN, combining monumental size with minutely accurate tolerances of measurement, literally moved me to tears when I was shown around. The engineering, the mathematics, the physics, in the Rosetta mission that successfully soft-landed a robot vehicle on the tiny target of a comet also made me proud to be human. Modified versions of the same technology may one day save our planet by enabling us to divert a dangerous comet like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

Who does not feel a swelling of human pride when they hear about the LIGO instruments which, synchronously in Louisiana and Washington State, detected gravitation waves whose amplitude would be dwarfed by a single proton? This feat of measurement, with its profound significance for cosmology, is equivalent to measuring the distance from Earth to the star Proxima Centauri to an accuracy of one human hair’s breadth.

Comparable accuracy is achieved in experimental tests of quantum theory. And here there is a revealing mismatch between our human capacity to demonstrate, with invincible conviction, the predictions of a theory experimentally and our capacity to visualize the theory itself. Our brains evolved to understand the movement of buffalo-sized objects at lion speeds in the moderately scaled spaces afforded by the African savannah. Evolution didn’t equip us to deal intuitively with what happens to objects when they move at Einsteinian speeds through Einsteinian spaces, or with the sheer weirdness of objects too small to deserve the name ‘object’ at all. Yet somehow the emergent power of our evolved brains has enabled us to develop the crystalline edifice of mathematics by which we accurately predict the behaviour of entities that lie under the radar of our intuitive comprehension. This, too, makes me proud to be human, although to my regret I am not among the mathematically gifted of my species.

Less rarefied but still proud-making is the advanced, and continually advancing, technology that surrounds us in our everyday lives. Your smartphone, your laptop computer, the satnav in your car and the satellites that feed it, your car itself, the giant airliner that can loft not just its own weight plus passengers and cargo but also the 120 tons of fuel it ekes out over a thirteen-hour journey of seven thousand miles.

Less familiar, but destined to become more so, is 3D printing. A computer ‘prints’ a solid object, say a chess bishop, by depositing a sequence of layers, a process radically and interestingly different from the biological version of ‘3D printing’ which is embryology. A 3D printer can make an exact copy of an existing object. One technique is to feed the computer a series of photographs of the object to be copied, taken from all different angles. The computer does the formidably complicated mathematics to synthesize the specification of the solid shape by integrating the angular views. There may be life forms in the universe that make their children in this body-scanning kind of way, but our own reproduction is instructively different. This, incidentally, is why almost all biology textbooks are seriously wrong when they describe DNA as a ‘blueprint’ for life. DNA may be a blueprint for protein, but it is not a blueprint for a baby. It’s more like a recipe or a computer program.

We are not arrogant, not hubristic, to celebrate the sheer bulk and detail of what we know through science. We are simply telling the honest and irrefutable truth. Also honest is the frank admission of how much we don’t yet know – how much more work remains to be done. That is the very antithesis of hubristic arrogance. Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don’t. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.

But I want to suggest a further and less obvious point about the contrast of religion with atheism. I want to argue that the atheistic worldview has an unsung virtue of intellectual courage. Why is there something rather than nothing? Our physicist colleague Lawrence Krauss, in his book A Universe from Nothing,[4] controversially suggests that, for quantum-theoretic reasons, Nothing (the capital letter is deliberate) is unstable. Just as matter and antimatter annihilate each other to make Nothing, so the reverse can happen. A random quantum fluctuation causes matter and antimatter to spring spontaneously out of Nothing. Krauss’s critics largely focus on the definition of Nothing. His version may not be what everybody understands by nothing, but at least it is supremely simple – as simple it must be, if it is to satisfy us as the base of a ‘crane’ explanation (Dan Dennett’s phrase), such as cosmic inflation or evolution. It is simple compared to the world that followed from it by largely understood processes: the big bang, inflation, galaxy formation, star formation, element formation in the interior of stars, supernova explosions blasting the elements into space, condensation of element-rich dust clouds into rocky planets such as Earth, the laws of chemistry by which, on this planet at least, the first self-replicating molecule arose, then evolution by natural selection and the whole of biology which is now, at least in principle, understood.

Why did I speak of intellectual courage? Because the human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have ‘just happened’. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice. Emotion screams: ‘No, it’s too much to believe! You are trying to tell me the entire universe, including me and the trees and the Great Barrier Reef and the Andromeda Galaxy and a tardigrade’s finger, all came about by mindless atomic collisions, no supervisor, no architect? You cannot be serious. All this complexity and glory stemmed from Nothing and a random quantum fluctuation? Give me a break.’ Reason quietly and soberly replies: ‘Yes. Most of the steps in the chain are well understood, although until recently they weren’t. In the case of the biological steps, they’ve been understood since 1859. But more important, even if we never understand all the steps, nothing can change the principle that, however improbable the entity you are trying to explain, postulating a creator god doesn’t help you, because the god would itself need exactly the same kind of explanation.’ However difficult it may be to explain the origin of simplicity, the spontaneous arising of complexity is, by definition, more improbable. And a creative intelligence capable of designing a universe would have to be supremely improbable and supremely in need of explanation in its own right. However improbable the naturalistic answer to the riddle of existence, the theistic alternative is even more so. But it needs a courageous leap of reason to accept the conclusion.

This is what I meant when I said the atheistic worldview requires intellectual courage. It requires moral courage, too. As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble. You are going to die, and you’ll never see your dead loved ones again. There’s no holy book to tell you what to do, tell you what’s right or wrong. You are an intellectual adult. You must face up to life, to moral decisions. But there is dignity in that grown-up courage. You stand tall and face into the keen wind of reality. You have company: warm, human arms around you, and a legacy of culture which has built up not only scientific knowledge and the material comforts that applied science brings but also art, music, the rule of law, and civilized discourse on morals. Morality and standards for life can be built up by intelligent design – design by real, intelligent humans who actually exist. Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you’re ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found it.

[1] https://islamqa.info/en/27280 [2] http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=9745 [3] ‘Evolution as fact and theory’. [4] For which I wrote an afterword.

#Richard Dawkins #atheism #moral courage #intellectual courage #intellectual honesty #science #religion is a mental illness

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uboat53 · 1 month ago

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In the last few weeks I've gotten some interesting questions and read some interesting things about the atheist perspective and, being the kind of person I am, I thought other people might find some of my thoughts and answers interesting. This is kind of a LONG RANT (TM), but it's a bit more scattershot than usual.

Fair warning, though, this is written entirely from the perspective of an atheist and I haven't softened anything to make it sound better to religious people, read at your own risk. In no particular order, here goes.

FAITH VS RELIGION

First off, I want to make a distinction between faith and religion because it's important to understanding the rest of this. There's some overlap, but for the most part, religion is an organized system of belief while faith is a belief internal to a single person.

The most important thing I want you to recognize from this is that an atheist may not have religion (after all, what's there to organize around?), but I have as much faith in what I believe as any religious person. An agnostic, someone who says "I do believe in God" is a person without faith, but an atheist, a person who says "I believe there is no God" is a person of faith, though not a person of religion.

Keep all of that in mind when reading the rest of this.

WHAT DOES RELIGION LOOK LIKE FROM OUTSIDE?

The specific question I got, from someone who's on their own journey of faith and was curious, was "does any religion look more or less ridiculous to an atheist?" and the short answer is "no". To be perfectly honest, all metaphysical beliefs and all religious rituals and chants look fairly ridiculous from my point of view, but none of them are particularly more ridiculous than any others.

To me, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Paganism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, and all of the other thousands or even millions of different religious systems out there are almost indistinguishable to me. Once you take away the specific symbols and trappings, they all come down to the same basic thing. And, sure, they believe different metaphysical things, but I assure you that your familiar metaphysical belief is no less impossible, insane, or ridiculous from the outside than those other people's strange and unfamiliar metaphysical belief.

The slightly longer answer, however, is that there is one form of religion that does look more ridiculous to me as an atheist. It's the religion that demands things of people that don't follow it. Look, you can believe whatever you want and practice whatever you want in your own mind, we all have a right to our own thoughts and beliefs, but it takes a special kind of crazy to think, despite the fact that you can't prove any of these things, that your personal beliefs are so important that they should be forced upon other people.

So, yeah, don't worry about whether this belief or that belief is too crazy, they're all crazy to me, but no more than any other. The only time you've crossed the line is when you become so crazy that you decide you're the universe's main character and everyone else has to do what you say.

THE ANGRY ATHEIST

We've all met that guy, heck, I've been that guy, the angry atheist who loves getting in "debates" and discussions about religion, the guy who sounds like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher.

I'll level with you, there is pretty much no atheist who hasn't, at some point, been the angry atheist. You probably would be the angry "insert-religion-here" too if you lived in a society where your system of belief wasn't just a minority or disrespected, but actively despised by most of the people around you.

If you're not atheist, I don't expect you to understand the depth of it because they don't do it to you, but lots of religious people are absolutely awful to atheists, and I have a particular point of comparison because I'm also Jewish (not religiously, but that rarely matters). People, Christians mostly where I live and where I grew up, are so much more accepting of a Jew or any other religious minority than an atheist, and I think it's because a Jew doesn't threaten the very idea of religion. Ultimately, a Jew believes in something metaphysical, and that's enough; an atheist rejects the very concept. You have no idea the number of times I've heard religious people tell me that other religions are wrong, but an atheist is worse because no one can be moral without religion (more on that later). No one cared that I was a Jew growing up, at least, not that much, but multiple times in grade school I would have my entire class spend upwards of a half hour trying to convert me, the atheist; all of them against me. You either get good at arguing and debating or you crumble.

Almost every atheist, really as a matter of survival, will become the angry atheist for at least some period as a way to survive this. Going on the offense is a really good way to throw the hate off balance and it can feel good to push hate right back. It took me a while to get past the angry atheist phase and part of it, at least for me, was finding Christopher Hitchens who, while also an obnoxious atheist like Dawkins and Maher, rooted his critique in a powerful morality. These days I'm probably a good deal less obnoxious than Hitchens was, but that's where it started, with an example that wasn't just about "beating" the religious.

So, while I disagree with the angry atheist and the way they approach society, and, if I'm in a position to do so, I'll try to guide them out of it if only because anger is even more toxic for the person experiencing it than it is for the target, I understand it and I certainly don't blame them. If you're a religious person and you encounter this angry atheist, I'd only ask that you treat them with a bit of sympathy; society is regularly far worse to them than they are to you even if you never get to see it.

SOCIAL NORMS

In a bit of a line with the previous topic, you should also realize how heavily societal norms and standards of politeness are slanted toward religious people. To give you an example of this, take the following:

I've been in situations where I've had some kind of personal loss and someone will say "I'm praying for you", "they're in heaven now", or something to that effect. And, look, it's not the kind of social faux pas that's bad enough for me to call out and make a scene about, but why would someone say that to someone who they know is non-religious? I know the intent behind it, but prayers literally do not mean anything to me, heaven doesn't exist to me, and people know that.

Ultimately, it may not be meant that way, but it really comes across as a power move. The atheist may be the one who's suffered a loss and is grieving, but the religious person still has the societal power to force the situation to conform to their beliefs. If an atheist calls them out on it and/or rejects their prayers or well-wishes, then they become the bad guy for not respecting the other person's beliefs because society values religious beliefs over those of an atheist.

And, look, I'm not saying that religious people are evil for doing this; clearly I'm friends with a good many of them and, most of the time, I can take "I'm praying for you" in exactly the way that it's meant, because it's almost always meant well. But, just as racism tends to express itself not through single, overt acts, but through hundreds of individually small actions (normally called "microaggressions"), the prejudice against atheism is similar and, just as most people committing racial microaggressions are unaware they are doing so because they live in a society where white supremacy is normalized, religious people are also mostly unaware of how what they're doing comes across because religious supremacy is so ingrained in our society.

If you've done this, I'm not saying this to make you feel guilty about it or even to make you stop. Like I said, I know it's meant well and, ultimately, it's not your fault; we live in a society where the atheist perspective is hidden from you so there's really been no way for you to even know how what you're saying comes across. The only thing I would ask is, in the future, if you have an atheist or atheists in your life that you consider to be friends or loved ones, they'll appreciate it if, especially in a vulnerable situation, you think just a bit more about what how what you're saying sounds to them and say something that is comforting to them and not just to you.

FINDING FAITH

Most people don't have faith. Let's start there. I've had religious and theological discussions with all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons, as much for understanding as debate or conversion, and what I can tell you is that most people never think deeply enough about what they truly believe to have actual faith. They have religion.

You see, most people are born into some kind of religious framework. Their parents start taking them to church or some kind of religious observance at an early age and the path of least resistance is to just keep doing whatever that is. Questioning religion or rocking the boat can lead to social stigma, damaged relationships, and sometimes even financial destitution, so for most people it's simply not worth doing to the point where they don't even consider it. They just go through the motions and don't worry too much about it because there's simply no good reason to.

There are some people who will still go through the difficult process of finding faith in that situation, but I've found that most people who truly have faith are the ones who have questioned and often even broken away from what they were brought up with. Specific to atheists, almost none of us were raised atheist. It wasn't a particularly difficult rejection for me because my family wasn't particularly dogmatic about it, but I wasn't raised atheist either; I figured out what I believed, I found my faith, when I started questioning all of the things that I was brought up with and all of the things that others around me believed. Ultimately, I accepted a lot of it in terms of the moral system I follow, but I rejected all of the metaphysical.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people who turn to atheism for reasons like rebellion or to fit in with a (usually small) group, but most adult atheists you see out there are people who have gone through a journey and found faith; it's not a default option for the vast majority of us.

I also don't want you to think I'm saying that only atheists have faith, I've met plenty of religious people who have faith as well and it's something brilliant when you do find it (meeting such a person was also a big part me no longer being an angry atheist). The point is more that, as a percentage, far more atheists than religious people have true faith; it's easy to be religious, but why would one put up with all the problems that being atheist brings if you didn't truly believe it?

ATHEIST MORALITY

So this is the last one and it's a bit of an important one. You see, as I mentioned in the section about angry atheists, much of the prejudice against atheists I've experienced has been justified by the idea that atheists, because we reject the idea of God and the metaphysical, cannot be moral. Specifically, there is an idea in religion that morality can only come from a metaphysical source.

Now, I can't speak for all atheists here. As I mentioned before, there's nothing about atheism that lends itself to organization, so this is just me speaking. That said, I can tell you that those people are 100% wrong here, not least because many of them were genuinely awful people who used their own religion and its metaphysically justified rules as an excuse to be immoral themselves.

Personally, I consider myself to be generally Utilitarian in my moral beliefs. It's much more complicated than this, but in simple terms Utilitarianism is a belief that what maximizes the well-being, happiness, and pleasure of all people and what minimizes harm, pain, and unhappiness, is moral. One could summarize it as "the greatest good for the greatest number" if one were being particularly simplistic about it.

Why do I believe that? Simple, I live in a society and that society benefits me, I'd even say it benefits me greatly. Having studied some political theory, it's clear that societies where everyone is better off make do a better job of actually making people, even those at the top, better off and are more stable and consistent in the long run, so it makes sense that I should want to live in such a society. Ultimately, though, societies are made up of people, they're not things of their own, so a society is a reflection of the actions of the people who live in it.

In other words, if I want to live in a society that makes people (like me!) better off, I need to act in a way that makes that society more likely. Now, I obviously don't control anyone other than myself, but if I do what's right, then I can find other people who also do what's right and we can become a community. It's not guaranteed, but that's how anything worth having starts and, if we all continue this long enough, we build what we want to live in. I live my life morally because it's the only way that what I want can come about and, if I cheat, I'll know that I'm damaging the future I hope to build.

After doing this for a long time, though, one of the biggest benefits I've found, though, is that I like myself when I'm moral. That's important because I have to live with me!

No metaphysics required, my morality not only provides me with a rational (to me at least) reason to act morally, it ultimately subjects me to a judge that will see everything I do and never lapses: me. Those who are religious will say that an all-knowing God being their ultimate judge is a stronger motivation to be moral but, to quote Thomas Huxley from Evolution and Ethics, "Every day, we see firm believers in the hell of the theologians commit acts by which, as they believe when cool, they risk eternal punishment; while they hold back from those which are opposed to the sympathies of their associates."

Ultimately, I think that every system of morality is either personal or social (usually some combination of both). Even if you believe in God, gods, or other forms spirituality, none of us understand perfectly their nature or the nature of the universe, so we're all just doing what feels right to us or our community. Atheism doesn't preclude morality any more than religion guarantees it and I've found/developed a moral system that works for me without any need for the metaphysical.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

One of the things I've come to realize over the years is that the concept of atheist is truly alien to people of religion. Yes, they find other religions strange and unfamiliar, but the basic shape of the worldview makes sense to them. Atheism is alien and frightening to many.

Hopefully this gave you a bit of insight into what's going on there. If you have any other questions about atheism or the atheist experience, feel free to ask, I'm more than happy to share.

#religion #atheism #long rant (tm)

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cherrylng · 5 months ago

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Matthew Bellamy exclusive interview - Muse [INROCK (December 2018)]

Matthew Bellamy exclusive interview

Muse's latest album 'Simulation Theory' is out now

"It's got a very colourful sound and it's a progression towards a brighter version of Muse."

Matthew Bellamy / Muse INTERVIEW : P.G. BRUNELLI / INROCK L→R Matthew Bellamy (vo./keys./g.), Dominic Howard (dr.), Chris Wolstenholme (b.)

Fantasy has become reality and simulation technology is now part of our lives. The most frightening part of this is that we can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy. Matthew Bellamy has spotted this and has created Muse's new album, Simulation Theory, their 8th album. Matthew has had a lot of trouble in his personal life, but this has not made his life darker, nor did it in any way influence this album. To begin with, Muse albums have never been straightforward and normal, and this one is no different. This album is also very deep and contains self-analysis and analyses things from many different angles.

Muse has stepped out of the confines of the UK and become one of the world's leading rock artists. So little time was allocated to Japan for the release of 'Simulation Theory', and as a result, INROCK was the only one allowed to cover the event.

'Thought Contagion' is a song about US news and US President Trump, and about other people hijacking your thoughts, but isn't that the same situation in every country, not just the US? Matthew Bellamy (vo./keys./g.): Yeah, I think so. But this song, although it's about the news, has nothing to do with Trump. I don't know why it seems to be misinterpreted. It's actually a song based on the ethics of Richard Dawkins (animal behaviourist). It's about how human thoughts and beliefs are like genes, capable of dividing and replicating. In fact, he also coined the term 'meme' (Meme. A humorous parody of a photo or video that is spread via the internet), which you see a lot on social networking sites. The internet has changed its meaning, though. The term was originally coined to explain that our thoughts behave like genes and expand. In other words, the human brain has the ability to change even the truth into something else. That's what this song is about.

Do you miss the '80s? Matthew: No, I don't really feel that way…

But didn't you once cite the '80s as "the era that had the biggest impact on you"? I mean, technology wasn't as advanced as it is now, but… Matthew: Ah, so you asked if I miss the '80s. If that's the case, the '80s certainly had a big influence on me, and I think that's reflected in this album. I've also been re-discovering some of my childhood influences while making this record. I think the strongest influence on a newly formed band or an artist at the beginning of their career is their teenage years. In our case, it was rock music. I also developed a big interest in classical music in my late teens, so that's part of it, but anyway, I think the first 15 years or so of this band has been based on those teenage influences. But as you can tell by listening to our early songs, there was always an artificial sound somewhere. Like the use of synthesisers. With this album we wanted to go back to that kind of sound. I was heavily influenced by horror film soundtracks as a kid, and that kind of '80s sound is definitely a big influence on this album. It's a reflection of the influences I had before I formed the band.

Dom (Dominic Howard, dr.) spoke to me a few days ago about the music video, but can I ask you one thing about the video for 'Pressure'? Did you always dream of playing guitar while rolling around on stage like Michael J. Fox? (An act from the film Back to the Future) Matthew: Hahaha! I guess you could say that (laughs). I don't really remember. I think I was about seven years old when that film was released.

Yeah, that film was released in '85, so you were born in '78, so you must have been seven years old then. Matthew: The most memorable images you see when you're a kid stick in your head for a long time as an adult, and I think my first guitar player was Michael J. Fox in that film. I think that image came back to me subconsciously as I was re-discovering my childhood influences. Anyway, I had a lot of fun shooting that video.

"Maybe the characters in the game are a lot more intelligent than we think, maybe they'll become conscious and emotional in time…"

There are other influences like 'Gremlins' and various '80s films? That car that appears a few times is also reminiscent of the DeLorean. Matthew: That car is a Lamborghini. It does have a DeLorean look to it. Thanks for noticing all the little details. I played quite a few VR (Virtual Reality) games while I was working on this album, and through them I discovered that not only can you go to different worlds, but you can also go to different times. You can visit places that existed in the past. I've recently been playing a game called Star Trek: Bridge Crew, which is a lot of fun because you get to spend time on a spaceship in the '70s. It's a very strange feeling to be in the 'future' as people imagined it back then. I like that kind of lost time. It's not connected to the present, but it's somehow connected to the past or the future. I like to create experiences where you don't know which era you're in.

You've released eight albums so far, and this is the first time your faces have been on the cover. Is this design also inspired by the gaming world? Matthew: Yeah, the jackets are very much inspired by the game. The idea of being trapped inside the game world is one of the themes of the album. You gradually realise that you've become your own digital avatar and you try to escape from this game world or programme that's trapping you. It might be a very strange idea, but when you play a game for a long time, you start to think about that kind of thing. I think that maybe the characters in the game are a lot more intelligent than we think, and maybe they'll eventually become conscious and have feelings. That's a very strange feeling, don't you think? An artificial intelligence that one day discovers that it was created by humans, but it's trapped inside the game world and can't escape anywhere. Maybe that's an idea that has a connection to our human lives. I think we all have that feeling of being trapped in a programme at times.

"I'm strongly attracted to the feeling of not knowing which era you're in."

Kyle Lambert, who designed the jacket (pictured above), also did the artwork for Stranger Things and designed the jacket for the super deluxe edition (2CD + 2 analogue records + box set including hardcover book, art prints etc). Paul Schipper has done artwork for Star Wars and Marvel films, how important was it for you to work with people involved in the world of film and television? Matthew: It was incredibly important. It's great to work with people who have experience in creating virtual worlds. It's the same with the videos. Making all the videos with Lance Drake [video director], I think we were able to create a certain world. It's the first time for us to make all the videos with the same director, but we like it a lot. It allows us to build a deeper relationship with each other, and when you do four or five videos together, you start to think about the connections between each video, and you can pay attention to the details. Like what kind of connections you want to make and how you want to develop the ideas. That's why the visual world is very important on this album. In the past we weren't so much into the videos, we only focused on the music, but with this album we've really tried to focus on the visual side of it as well.

Just one more question about the video - is 'Dig Down' inspired by Max Headroom (a CG character created in the '80s as a virtual presenter for TV shows)? Matthew: Yeah, exactly. That's where the whole idea of merging the virtual world that the album is about with the future world that we all used to imagine came from. Max Headroom was the first virtual presenter, but it was only on film, someone was actually playing as him. But at the time, the idea of having a CG character as a presenter was still very interesting. I'm very much attracted to that kind of future that people used to imagine. In the early science fiction films, they often depicted a future world where artificial intelligence and robots would appear and rule the world, but we actually live in such a time now, which I think is very interesting.

As far as the sound is concerned, you seem to have combined a lot of different elements at random, without setting any limits? Some are quite electronic, some are quite rock, some are acoustic like 'Something Human' and some are mellow like 'The Void'. Matthew: I think we live in a time where we are inspired by multiple different art forms. Even in our day-to-day lives, we're influenced by a lot of different things, and as a result, we can easily go in a lot of different directions. It used to be taboo to do something retro, but now we've moved past that. We don't feel the need to stick to one idea or one genre anymore. Nowadays, listeners listen to a lot of different genres, and there are a lot of artists who fuse everything from hip-hop to urban, dance, modern rock - and create new genres and styles of music. But by fusing different genres, sounds, and styles from different eras, as I mentioned earlier, you get the feeling that you don't know which era you're in, and as I said before, I'm strongly attracted to that kind of thing.

You collaborated with the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Bruin Marching Band on another version of 'Pressure' on the Super Deluxe version, where did that idea come from? Matthew: There are a lot of synthesisers and electronic sounds on the eleven songs on the album, and the sound concept of the album was to blend that with an organic sound, and the Super Deluxe version is very organic, plus a lot of extra stuff. We wanted to include eleven organic, stripped-down versions of the songs (ten are actually on the Super Deluxe version). The result is that some of the songs are acoustic, some are piano-only, and all of them are very simple, except for 'Pressure', where we were like, "How the hell can we do this?" I was struggling with that one… It's a very up-tempo song, so I didn't think it could be done with just acoustic guitar. Then the idea of using a brass band came to me. There's actually a bit of that in the original. So I thought it would be great if a brass band could play on it, and I immediately thought of the UCLA brass band. They've actually performed Muse songs at halftime of college football games in the past. I saw the video on YouTube and thought it was great. Incidentally, they performed a medley of Muse songs including 'MK Ultra', 'United States of Eurasia', 'Resistance' and 'Knights of Cydonia' at halftime of a game against the University of Southern California in 2010, and again in 2013 when they performed 'Unnatural Selection' after a game against the University of California, Berkeley.

'Dig Down' is also an acoustic gospel version, which is totally different from the original concept, isn't it? Matthew: Yeah, that song is totally different from the original. The original is the most electronic song on the album, with a lot of synthesisers. If the original is more artificial and manufactured, the other version is all organic and natural sounding. If you listen to the other version, you can hear how the songs on the album were written. It's before all kinds of sounds were added.

What made you feel the need to make a super deluxe version? Matthew: I like expressing myself through music. That's my favourite part of the job. I think it all fits together and it all flows well as a piece of work, even though each song is a completely different version. The way albums are made nowadays is completely different from the way they used to be. There's a completely different concept. Because it's digital music, there's no limit to the number of songs you can have, you can have 50 songs on it, you can have eight songs on it. We came up with different versions of each song when we were making this album, but in this day and age we didn't want to put a limit on the number of songs, so we didn't feel the need to reject them.

You wanted to move away from the heavier, darker vibe of your previous album, 'Drones', didn't you? However, the album's content is not lightweight either, is it? 'Propaganda' is a very dangerous song, and 'Break It To Me' is so dark, it doesn't sound that different from 'Drones'. Matthew: There are definitely some darker themes, and I think they will continue to be present on future albums. But I think there's a big difference between the last album and this one in terms of style and atmosphere. 'Drones' was a very dark album, and the show was very dark as well. We wore black every night. Everything was black. Of course this album still has elements from the last one, but I think it's more colourful in terms of the sound. There's always been a dark element in Muse's music and I don't think it's going to change. Still, this album is quite bright for Muse. Anyway, we've moved towards a brighter version of Muse. The tour will definitely be more fun too.

Translator’s Note: This interview took so much of my time to read through each and every line in Japanese to get it right. Why? Because for some reason, the text gets printed in weird ways that it ends up missing a small yet very important thing: the ‘ー’. It’s a long vowel mark, usually only used in katakana. That missing long vowel mark can mess up the translating software so much, as it affects not only the word, but also entire sentences.

To put it simply, without that long vowel mark, there’s a VERY big difference between “ダーク (dark)” and “ダク (dork)”. And a VERY big difference between “'Drones' was a very dark album” and “'Drones' was a very dorky album”.

#Matt Bellamy #Dom Howard #Chris Wolstenholme #Muse #Simulation Theory era #my scan #translation #interview #Muse band #INROCK #INROCK December 2018

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o-craven-canto · 1 year ago

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Biological essentialism treats tapirs and rabbits, pangolins and dromedaries, as though they were triangles, rhombuses, parabolas or dodecahedrons. The rabbits that we see are wan shadows of the perfect 'idea' of rabbit, the ideal, essential, Platonic rabbit, hanging somewhere out in conceptual space along with all the perfect forms of geometry. Flesh-and-blood rabbits may vary, but their variations are always to be seen as flawed deviations from the ideal essence of rabbit.

How desperately unevolutionary that picture is! The Platonist regards any change in rabbits as a messy departure from the essential rabbit, and there will always be resistance to change - as if all real rabbits were tethered by an invisible elastic cord to the Essential Rabbit in the Sky. The evolutionary view of life is radically opposite. Descendants can depart indefinitely from the ancestral form, and each departure becomes a potential ancestor to future variants. [...]

On the 'population-thinking' evolutionary view, every animal is linked to every other animal, say rabbit to leopard, by a chain of intermediates, each so similar to the next that every link could in principle mate with its neighbours in the chain and produce fertile offspring. You can't violate the essentialist taboo more comprehensively than that. And it is not some vague thought-experiment confined to the imagination. On the evolutionary view, there really is a series of intermediate animals connecting a rabbit to a leopard, every one of whom lived and breathed, every one of whom would have been placed in exactly the same species as its immediate neighbours on either side in the long, sliding continuum. Indeed, every one of the series was the child of its neighbour on one side and the parent of its neighbour on the other. Yet the whole series constitutes a continuous bridge from rabbit to leopard - although, as we shall see later, there never was a 'rabbipard'. There are similar bridges from rabbit to wombat, from leopard to lobster, from every animal or plant to every other.

-- Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth (2009), chapter 2

#quotes #books #biology #philosophy #fully endorsed

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gobcorend · 1 year ago

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"Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though." - Richard Dawkins

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cigaretteliker · 27 days ago

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please say more about your jordan peterson and/or richard dawkins papers?

i wrote a paper on dawkin's the god delusion for a course on christian apologetics. i argued that dawkins' book fails because although he sets out to prove that since creative intelligence is a late evolution in the universe, it cannot be responsible for its own design, and thus god is a "pernicious delusion." my criticism is that he does not actually succeed in doing this because his focus ends up being fairly libellous and often fallacious or outright incorrect criticism of religion. if you're criticising religion, you're not disproving the existence of god: you're criticising religion, which is a legitimate thing to do, unless you- like dawkins- stray frequently into questionable territory that reeks of personal stances (an audacious oversight from an evolutionary biologist) on ethnography, race, culture, and ability. the book puts him dangerously close to bigotry or worse, enough to rival the most deplorable members of the very religions against which he argues. what, then, separates dawkins’ criticism of religion from his own beliefs? his arguments are unable to engage in the very exercise of self-awareness which he ardently urges religion to undertake in order to be logical, which begs the further question: is dawkins setting out to disprove the existence of God and the ridiculousness of religion, or is the book a exhibition of dawkins’ own fundamental refusal to engage in a view he disagrees with, making it instead of a philosophical debate, a creed of atheism refusing to engage with the opposite view except through tirade, and thus rooted in the very sorts of ignorance and illogic he claims classifies religion as a fool’s project? a close reading of dawkins reveals that his shortcoming is not that he hates or doesn't believe in god: on the contrary, dawkins does not hate god, he simply hates religion. but because of his project- proving that god does not exist- falls short of its aim. he engages in a logical fallacy of proving his argument by simply not addressing its rebuttal, instead confusing the existence of religion with the existence of god, and scapegoating something he does not believe exists for the behaviour of those professing religious credo. its a really bad book lol even though i legitimately agree with a lot of his criticism of religion, but he was too caught up in post-911 scaremongering to actually create something of worth.

wrt jordan peterson, my semester project last year was about mystical bodies and erotic space and the idea of feminine chaos as part of theological studies. peterson has written extensively and worryingly about feminine chaos, and i cited this quote in particular from his book 12 rules for life: an antidote to chaos in the footnotes of that paper:

Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none). It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date.

i'm simply going to paste my response to this view of feminine chaos- which is absolutely not new and has dominated the treatment of women since the rise of christian supremacy in the west. as always the idea that women = chaos is rooted almost entirely in views of female sexuality and continues to dictate how women are treated (the paper was mostly about mary, so i was focusing on the madonna/whore dichotomy from a freudian theological perspective).

like dawkins peterson is largely incapable of forming coherent arguments, instead relying on his ability to cobble together scholarship into something vaguely resembling intelligent thought and then hawking it to the most vulnerable and reactionary people who will give him money. whether or not he is a bad person is not up to me to decide but he is a terrible scholar who does not actually say anything of worth, only glomming onto christianity now because he's noticed the rise of "trad" culture online and knows he can make a few bucks off the poor suckers. anyway this was my response to chaos and femininity:

Critically, Audre Lorde resuscitated the view of feminine eroticism by connecting it to chaos: “born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony,” an assertion of feminine life forces that empower and must be reclaimed. While second wave feminism sought reclamation and derived authority from feminine eroticism as irrupting from primordial Chaos, contemporary male supremacist pseudo-theorists have attempted to appropriate this view as a means to further marginalise feminine sexuality as base and responsible for male impotency. More seriously, the association of feminine sexuality with chaos has also been used to obfuscate the feminine “No” by treating it as a means of natural selection rather than as an untapped, unacknowledged source of individual authority. Nancy Nienhuis has drawn a revelatory link between domestic abuse and rape, and the belief purported by churches that women are of an "inferior" or weaker nature that must be subjected to the control of men "lest society find itself in [moral] chaos.” Cishetero male supremacy derives its means of controlling the feminine chaos of women’s life-giving (procreative) and life-sustaining (“No”) impulses by treating chaos as a void without God rather than the void from which God draws the material of his own creation and incarnation. In Genesis 1:1, God’s spirit does not rest or hover over the water but broods, as a bird over its nest, and by implication the spirit relaxes into the creative act. The language of “hovering” or “resting” over the water suggests a hierarchical, dominating relationship between God and the void to tragic cultural effect. The original image of a god of order who nests over the abyss reveals the cosmic interrelationship between chaos and cosmos, the intimacy and requirement of both aspects for both the act of creation (creation ex nihilo) and the irruption of the sacred (the Logos). This creative relationship between chaos and the cosmos constitutes the life-energy which I argue is the presence of a theological, cosmological Eros. This Eros derives its authority from God and is capable of both a divinely authoritative Yes and a divinely authoritative No. Both Yes and No constitute a threat to dominant patriarchal dogmas because they reveal that those whom dogma wishes to subjugate receive authority from God and are capable of unbounded creative power. The threat of the “void” of femininity, the “uninhabited chaos” that threatens patriarchy, dogma, and systems of domination, is that it is the space from which the Trinitarian God chose to derive his incarnation (and the space from which God in the other Abrahamic traditions derives emanations of his existence or manifestations of his attributes). Where the erotic spirit exists unbounded and unstigmatized, not subjected to a pornographic soul or reduced to its commodity value, there also is God.

#replies

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autisticandroids · 3 months ago

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What's the deal w the black tapes I keep on hearing stuff about it but I never got a sense of why it was so good everyone seemed to know it but it's ending was so bad everyone unanimously dropped it

so i was never around for the online following of tbt so i can only give you my opinion, not broad opinion. my opinion is that the first three episodes work really well as like. sincerely, unironically good episodic horror. like genuinely it's the kind of stuff i CRAVE because it straight facedly pretends to be like. an npr-alike nonfiction podcast. to the point that the actors and writers aren't even credited until the end of each season. and it totally plays in this space of like. stuff that's JUST non-paranormal enough to feel like it could almost be a real story, but is scary as shit. like the unsound scared the bejesus out of me when i first heard it.

but then starting in ep four and continuing for the rest of the season it 1) jumps into campy, ouijia board and the exorcist inspired satanic panic lore, and 2) becomes serialized in a way that kills horror.

later, in the second season, it manages to jump the shark into charmingly intentional camp and i start liking it again. mostly as like. a salacious and journalistically unethical romance between our protagonist and sexy richard dawkins.

but even though i like the later stuff, it still frustrates me because the podcast that it started out as is a podcast i genuinely want to listen to SO bad.

#asks #anonymous

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nyssabong · 1 year ago

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‘Do memes provide a useful way of understanding politics?’

Before we get into our topic, what exactly is a memes? These days, memes have grown in popularity. A meme, in my opinion, is a piece of information that is hilarious, goes viral on the internet, and may be remixed and changed over time. These are also the main elements that define a meme. As to Pettis's (2018) study, Richard Dawkins provided the initial definition of the term "meme" in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’. The term "memes" was first used by Dawkins (1976) to describe the transmission of ideas virally. Memes are similar to biological "genes" in that they are self-replicating and convey information, opinions, perceptions, and beliefs that are shared across individuals (Kasirye 2019). Dawkins defined a meme as any unit of culture that might be copied and transmitted among humans; examples of such units of culture include popular songs, fashion trends, or religious traditions (Pettis 2018). Dawkins did not define memes only as pictures and videos.

Do memes provide a useful way of understanding politics?

Even though memes might be a fun method to share knowledge, they are not a reliable tool for understanding political topics in their entirety. For what reason? Memes frequently employ humour, satire, or exaggeration to express a point; it is impossible to determine if the content is real or fabricated. It could also include bias from the author. For instance, if I dislike a politician, my memes will highlight all of their flaws, even if they are good politicians overall. However, it also offers a useful way of knowing politics, as shown in the memes below. Through this meme, teens will know that who is our Prime Minister and what happen between them.

Memes provide a useful way of understanding politics because of the funny point, it can attract teenagers easily, compared to news. It can serve as a gateway for young people to become more politically aware and involved.

Simplified Political Messaging

Besides, the complexity of political messages is another reason why the majority of people in today's society don't fully understand politics. Political information is more widely available to the general public because to memes, which frequently create complicated political messaging into formats that are easy to understand. For instance, the government usually makes announcements through news or videos during the MCO time. Personally, I am lazy to bother watching these announcements, especially because the most of them are in Bahasa Melayu. Because of memes, they made the announcement in this instance easier for me to understand. Memes need to be humorous and relatable, like I already stated. On these two main components, they simplified political message, people began to share with their friends, and the general public began to understand politics. However, this can also lead to the dissemination of false information or misinformation due to the bias of the authors.

Impact of Politics Memes

In 2019, the government officially announced that the voting age would be lowered from 21 to 18 years old. But when it comes to voting, memes could have an impact. Since those teens have minimal political knowledge, they will select politicians who frequently appear in memes. Participants may also use an anonymous account to publish their own memes in order to market themselves and make teens remember them. In the book "Memes in Digital Culture," Shifman explains how memes were effectively used in the US election of 2008. Because to memes, Obama received around 70% of the vote among Americans under 25 in the 2008 US presidential election (Oakes 2020). Politicians may create humorous content and advertise a nice, friendly image to the public by using memes. They will be able attract more teenagers to vote for them if they use this strategy.

Conclusion

Memes, in my opinion, can help us understand politics, but only if we are able to identify the difference between information that is true and that is fake. Political memes may make politics easier for pupils to recognise and comprehend than heavy textbooks, especially for those taking history exams. Additionally, because of its hilarious element, which makes politics less boring, and since it is simple to attract people in, it is also a helpful approach to learn about politics.

youtube

References

Dawkins, R 1976, The Selfish Gene , download.booklibrary.website, viewed 19 October 2023, < https://download.booklibrary.website/the-selfish-gene-richard-dawkins.pdf>.

Kasirye, F 2019, ‘THE EFFECTIVENESS OF POLITICAL MEMES AS A FORM OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AMONGST MILLENNIALS IN UGANDA’, Journal of Education and Social Sciences, vol. 13, no. 1, viewed 20 October 2023, <https://www.jesoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/KC13_032.pdf >.

Limor Shifman 2014, Memes in Digital Culture, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, viewed 20 October 2023, <https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=348695e0-233d-3fc5-9070-95351505ffab>.

Oakes, A 2020, How has social media changed the US presidential election?, New Digital Age, viewed 21 October 2023, <https://newdigitalage.co/social-media/how-has-social-media-changed-the-us-presidential-election/>.

Pettis, B 2018, ‘Pepe the Frog: A Case Study of the Internet Meme and its Potential Subversive Power to Challenge Cultural Hegemonies’, Scholars’ Bank (University of Oregon), University of Oregon, viewed 17 October 2023, <https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/24067/Final%20Thesis-Pettis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y>.

Shifman, L 2013, ‘Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 362–377, viewed 20 October 2023, < https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/18/3/362/4067545>.

#mda20009 #week 5 #blogging #practice #meme #politics memes #just for fun #Youtube

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 9 months ago

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By; Andrew Doyle

Published: Feb 28, 2024

Many years ago I gave a talk at the London Metropolitan Archives in which I outlined my reasons for rejecting the then fashionable theory of social constructionism in relation to human sexuality. In the coffee break that followed, I was approached by a lesbian activist, who claimed to have chosen her orientation as a means to oppose the patriarchy. She demanded to know why I would not accept that sexuality had no biological basis, even though I had spent the best part of an hour answering this very question. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’ve already explained why I don’t agree with you’. ‘But why won’t you agree?’ she shouted in response. ‘Why?’

Primary school teachers are familiar with such frustrated pleas. The anger of children is so often connected with incomprehension, a sense of injustice, or both. When it persists into adulthood it represents a failure of socialisation. We frequently hear talk of our degraded political discourse – and there is some truth to that – but really we are dealing with mass infantilism. Its impact is evident wherever one cares to look: online, in the media, even in Parliament. Argumentation is so often reduced to a matter of tribal loyalty; whether one is right or wrong becomes secondary to the satisfaction of one’s ego through the submission of an opponent. This is not, as some imagine, simply a consequence of the ubiquity of social media, but rather a general failure over a number of years to instil critical thinking at every level of our educational institutions.

To be a freethinker has little to do with mastery of rhetoric and everything to do with introspection. It is all very well engaging in a debate in order to refine our persuasive skills, but it is a futile exercise unless we can entertain the possibility that we might be wrong. In Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion (2006), he relates an anecdote about his time as an undergraduate at Oxford. A visiting academic from America gave a talk on the Golgi apparatus, a microscopic organelle found in plant and animal cells, and in doing so provided incontrovertible evidence of its existence. An elderly member of the Zoology Department, who had asserted for many years that the Golgi apparatus was a myth, was present at the lecture. Dawkins relates how, as the speaker drew to a close, ‘The old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red’.

This is the ideal that so few embody, particularly when it comes to the unexamined tenets of political ideology. We often see examples of media commentators or politicians being discredited in interviews or discussions, but how often do we see them concede their errors, even when they are exposed beyond doubt? There is a very good reason why the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer opened his First Principles (1862) by asserting that there exists ‘a soul of truth in things erroneous’; but such concessions can only be made by those who are able to prioritise being right over being seen to be right. Too many are seemingly determined to turn difficult arguments into zero-sum games in which to give any ground whatsoever is to automatically surrender it to an opponent.

The discipline of critical thinking invites us to consider the origins of our knowledge and convictions. A man may speak with the certainty of an Old Testament prophet, but has he reached his conclusions for himself? Or is he a mere resurrectionist, plundering his bookshelves for the leather-bound corpses of other people’s ideas? Hazlitt expounded at length on how sophistry might be mistaken for critical faculties, noting that the man who sees only one half of a subject may still be able to express it fluently. ‘You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch,’ he wrote, ‘as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum’.

The natural human instinct for confirmation bias presents a further problem, one especially prominent among ideologues. Anything can be taken to bolster one’s position so long as it is perceived through the lens of prejudgment. We can see this most notably in the proponents of Critical Social Justice, who start from the premise that unequal outcomes – disparities in average earnings between men and women, for instance – are evidence of structural inequalities in society. They are beginning with the conclusion and working backwards, mistaking their own arguments for proof.

Worse still, such an approach often correlates with a distinctly moralistic standpoint. Many of the most abusive individuals on social media cannot recognise their behaviour for what it is because they have cast themselves in the role of the virtuous. If we are morally good, the logic goes, it must be assumed that our detractors are motivated by evil and we are therefore relieved of the obligation to treat them as human beings. What they lack in empathy they make up in their capacity for invective.

Again, we must be alert to the danger of cheapening argumentation and analysis to the mere satisfaction of ego. One of the reasons why disagreements on social media tend towards the bellicose is that the forum is public. Where there is an audience, there is always the risk that critical thinking will be subordinated to the performative desire for victory or the humiliation of a rival. In these circumstances, complexities that require a nuanced approach are refashioned into misleading binaries, and opponents are mischaracterised out of all recognition so that people effectively end up arguing with spectres of their imagination. The Socratic method, by contrast, urges us to see disputation as essentially cooperative. This is the ideal that should be embedded into our national curricula. Children need to be taught that there are few instances in which serious discussions can be simplified to a matter of right or wrong, and fewer still in which one person’s rightness should be taken as proof of another’s wrongness. In the lexicon of Critical Thinking, this is called the fallacy of ‘affirming a disjunct’; that is to say, ‘either you are right or I am right, which means that if you are wrong I must be right’. One cannot think critically in such reductionist terms.

To attempt seriously to understand an alternative worldview involves, as Bertrand Russell put it, ‘some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think’. In the study of psychology this is termed the ‘cognitive miser’ model, which acknowledges that most human brains will favour the easiest solution to any given problem. These mental shortcuts – known as heuristics – are hardwired into us, which is why being told what to think is more pleasurable than thinking for ourselves. I remember an English lesson in which I had initiated a discussion with my students about the representation of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a topic that routinely comes up in exams. I wanted to know what they thought, and why. One student was sufficiently bold to ask: ‘Can’t you just tell us what we need to write to get the highest marks?’

This was not the fault of the student; there has been a trend in recent years, most likely influenced by the pressures of league tables, for schools to engage in ‘spoon-feeding’. Schemes of work and assessment criteria are made readily available to the pupils so that they can systematically hit the necessary targets in order to elevate their grades. The notion of education for education’s sake no longer carries any weight. I have even seen talented pupils marked down by moderators for an excess of individuality in their answers. In such circumstances, even a subject like English Literature can be reduced to a kind of memory test in which essays are regurgitated by rote.

It is hardly surprising, then, that pupils who opt for Critical Thinking courses at GCSE or A-level often perceive it to be a light option, a means to enhance the curriculum vitae without too much exertion. Courses are generally divided into Problem Solving and Critical Thinking, the former concerned with processing and interpreting data, and the latter covering the fundamentals of analysis and argumentation. Pupils learn about common fallacies such as the ad hominem (personal attack), tu quoque (counter-attack) and post hoc, ergo propter hoc (mistaking correlation for causality), along with others derived from Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. The Latin may be off-putting, but in truth these are simple ideas which are readily digestible. If one were to discount arguments in which these fallacies were committed, virtually all online disputes would disappear.

That said, the existence of Critical Thinking as an academic subject in its own right might not be the best way to achieve this. As the psychologist Daniel T. Willingham has argued, cognitive abilities are redundant without secure contextual knowledge. Critical thinking is already embedded into any pedagogical practice that focuses on how to think rather than what to think. The increased influence of the new puritans in education presents a problem in this regard, given that they are particularly hostile to divergent viewpoints. Any institution which becomes ideologically driven is unlikely to successfully foster critical thinking, and this is particularly the case when teachers are at times expected to proselytise in accordance with fashionable identity politics. The depoliticisation of schools is just the first step. Critical thinking requires humility; this involves not just the ability to admit that one might be wrong, but also to recognise that an uninformed opinion is worthless, however stridently expressed. Interpretative skills are key, but only when developed on a secure foundation of subject-specific knowledge. This is the basis for Camille Paglia’s view that art history should be built into the national curriculum from primary school level. In her book, Glittering Images (2012), Paglia explains that children require ‘a historical framework of objective knowledge about art’, rather than merely treating art as ‘therapeutic praxis’ to ‘unleash children’s hidden creativity’. Potato prints and zigzag scissors have their place, but we mustn’t forget about the textbooks.

When I was a part-time English teacher at a private secondary school for girls in London, one of my favourite exercises for the younger pupils was to ask them to study a photograph of a well-known work of art for five minutes without speaking, after which time they would share their observations with the rest of the class. So, for instance, I would give them each a copy of Paul Delaroche’s ‘Les Enfants d’Edouard’ (1831), which depicts the two nephews of Richard III in their chamber in the Tower of London just prior to their murder. My pupils knew nothing of the historical context, but after minutes of silent consideration were able to pick out details – the ominous shadows under the door, the dog alerted to the assassins’ footfall, how the older boy stares out at us with a sense of resignation – and offer some personal reflections on their cumulative impact. To create, one must first learn how to interpret.

The kind of humility fostered in the appreciation of great art could act as a corrective to the rise of narcissism and decline of empathy that psychologists have observed over the past thirty years. According to the National Institutes of Health, millennials are three times more likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder than those of the baby boomer generation. Writers such as Peter Whittle, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett have traced the rise of hyper-individualism in Western culture. One particular study revealed that in 1950 only 12 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement ‘I am a very important person’. By 1990, this figure had risen to 80 per cent and the trajectory shows no signs of stopping. One of the ways in which this trend manifests itself is the now common tendency for arguments to deteriorate into accusations of dishonesty. After all, it takes an extreme form of egotism to assume that the only possible explanation for an alternative point of view is that one’s opponent must be lying. In order to think critically, we cannot be in the business of simply assessing conclusions on the basis of whether or not they accord with our own.

An education underpinned by critical thinking is the very bedrock of civilisation, the means by which chaos is tamed into order. Tribalism, mudslinging, the inability to critique one’s own position: these are the telltale markers of the boorish and the hidebound. A society is ill-served by a generation of adults who have not been educated beyond the solipsistic impulses of childhood. At a time when so many are lamenting the degradation of public discourse, a conversation about how best to incorporate critical thinking into our schools is long overdue. Our civilisation might just depend on it.

This is an excerpt from The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. You can buy the book here. It’s also available as an audiobook.

#Andrew Doyle #The New Puritans #critical thinking #critical social justice #authoritarianism #ideological capture #ideological corruption #academic corruption #instititional capture #institutional corruption #religion is a mental illness

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yana-marie · 26 days ago

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Trump voters

Your brother is a successful neurologist, his wife an equally successful veterinarian and researcher — the STEM part of the family. They live somewhere rural, in a big house, your brother apparently is very lonely and goes insane. They have like four of five little annoying dogs and a cat called Anne (because she never leaves the attic…). He likes Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson and damn both of them (sister in law+brother) (but definitely also Peterson) will vote for Trump.

How I cannot wait to grow older and wiser, work more and get more degrees together with you… in order to become the humanities part of the family. The one that is not just arrogant assholes. Family gatherings would be so much fun. Funny though how we are so much of the opposite: poor, left and into arts&culture. Quite the cliché, no? As much as I would love not to, but I always have this certain suspicion against STEM people…

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canmom · 1 year ago

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L’Aventure de Canmom à Annecy - Dimanche/Lundi

Bonsoir mes amis!

I am in Annecy, the unreasonably picturesque home of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival! I have discovered that the Annecy International Animated Film Festival involves a lot more standing in long queues in the hot sun than I expected! Nevertheless, I’m here and making the best of it.

So.

dimanche - le voyage à annecy

First of all, Sunday! I set off at 3am on Sunday morning, taking a bus, followed by two tubes, followed by another bus to the airport. The last bus was late. I met a couple of nice PhD students on their way to the same airport, and they were gonna get all of us an uber, but then the bus showed up after all.

At the airport, security threw away my 200ml bottle of sunblock. Can never be too careful I guess >< Inevitably, Richard Dawkins and his little pot of honey leapt unbidden into my brain. I promise I did not call anyone a “dundridge”.

The flight itself was uneventful! I was behind three other Annecy-goers, a very sweet gay couple and their friend... we hit it off pretty well but they were on a later bus and I haven’t seen them since I got here ^^’ Once I landed in Geneva I was racing across the city to try to get to the Annecy bus in time (I left myself an hour, which turned out to be way too little time to get through customs, out the airport, onto the train etc.) Trains in Switzerland are nuts, some of them are split across multiple levels and even the ones that aren’t have like, steep steps to get aboard.

Like “fuck you if you’re in a wheelchair” I guess.

Luckily the bus to Annecy was late! So by midday on Sunday I was in Annecy!

I ran into a group of Swiss animation students who were happy to let me tag along for a while. They just finished their graduation films and they were terribly excited about Spider-Verse. They ended up arranging to meet a couple of animators at Cartoon Saloon so I ended up witnessing some honest to god Networking. The imposter syndrome kicked in about when they were showing the cartoon saloon animators clips from their demo reels. I didn’t even have business cards. Apparently that’s a thing people bring???

pictured: swiss animation students approaching Lake Annecy.

Anyway my legs got really tired from standing up and no sleep. I bought myself an expensive crêpe and sat down on the floor to eat it. No films were due to start for hours.

I went down to a comic book shop in Bonlieu. French comic book shops are fucking insane. All the books are enormous glossy hardbacks that cost like 50+ euros. I could totally walk away with the complete works of Moebius or Enki Bilal if things like ‘money’ and ‘getting through the airport’ and ‘not reading French’ weren’t factors. But equally there’s so much stuff that I’ve just plain never heard of. I could spend a month in this one shop easy.

At 3am my hotel checkin opened! Though in French you don’t say ‘check in’, you say j’ai un reservation. By this point I had been awake for more than 24 hours so I decided to go have a nap and eat the falafels I brought with me (very good idea, would recommend having a snack) and wake up for the opening ceremony.

Hotel comments: It’s pretty comfy! Nothing super fancy but I don’t need super fancy. The breakfast is kind of crazy expensive. I had a bit of a scare when it turned out that they hadn’t charged me when I booked the room, and wanted payment now, but thankfully I have a job now so I could take that in stride ^^’

At this point I discovered my plug adapter supports the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan... but not Europe. Fortunately I had a power bank with me so I could keep my phone alive (its battery is pretty shot) so I resolved to buy a new adapter on Monday.

I woke up shortly before the opening ceremony and quickly concluded that there was no way I was going to be making it down to the opening ceremony and went back to sleep. I slept a really long time. But I think I needed it. Shame to miss the ceremony but odds are I probably wouldn’t have even been able to get in, someone else said she’d queued for two hours.

lundi - les files d'attente

(lmao is that really the french for ‘queues’? ‘files d’attente’?)

A beautiful morning in Annecy! I walked over to the supermarché and got myself some pasta ingredients and a ‘veggie dog’ (falafels in a baguette) from a French bakery. I learned just how limited my French vocab is. But it’s a little reassuring to find French people who speak about as much English as I speak French. (Have not yet tried to speak Japanese to any French person but it will probably happen.)

Anyway. Films time, at last!

So the way Annecy works is, you get a certain number of reservations per day depending on your ticket type. If you don’t have a reservation you can optimistically show up at the theatre anyway, and whatever seats they have left go to the line. From the website it sounded like you’d have a pretty good chance to get in.

My friends. That is a lie.

To get in to a popular non-reserved screening you have to turn up basically hours in advance. Otherwise you arrive at the back of a queue like this, stand in line for a while, and then someone in a red shirt comes out and tells you you’re too late and you go find something else to do.

I have already become very familiar with this particular stretch of ground outside Cinema Pathé. That said, the queues are a good chance to meet people! So I ended up making a couple of connections, mostly with animation students from various places. It turns out a ‘Grand Public’ ticket is a bit of an odd duck.

As you can see in that picture, a lot of people had umbrellas. This is something I neglected, and had to use my bag instead, like so:

Guess where I got sunburned.

One of those something elses I did was walk into the VR films room. This runs on its own reservation system, with each film having somewhere between 2 and 6 headsets, which get sanitised between viewings. The whole room looks kinda scifi with its cables dangling from the ceiling...

The only VR film available when I arrived was called Black Hole Museum + Body Browser by Su Wen-Chi from Taiwan. This was very demoscene, with a lot of particles flying around under force fields in a black and white space; the second part involved a dancer who’d been photoscanned somehow and was displayed using waves of particles. It was neat, but I can’t say I was hugely moved? The display device was a Quest 2, but I’m not sure if it was running the particle sim on Quest 2 hardware. If it was, I’m impressed.

The other VR films were all but fully booked so I resolved to come back another day.

I tried to get into the anime film The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes. Predictably, I was too late. However, the next queue over was for a Spanish film called Inspector Sun and the Curse of the Black Widow, and, wanting to see at least one film I hopped onto that queue and found myself inside the cinema in short order.

The auditorium was packed and I got to witness firsthand such Annecy traditions as throwing paper aeroplanes at the screen, shouting ‘Lapin!’ whenever a rabbit appears onscreen, and making a weird popping sound with your mouth while waiting for the film to start (??? it sounded like frogs ig???). The movie itself was greeted with excitement but honestly? It was pretty eh, which is a shame since the idea of a world of bugs is a fun one! The story concerns a bumbling spider detective, his aspiring sidekick spider, and his feud with the leader of a locust underworld, playing out on a seaplane en route to San Francisco. The characters are all very one-note archetypes, and the dialogue felt like it was trying way too hard to be funny quippy movie dialogue... only to land on the painfully obvious. A big shame.

But what’s worse is that I had spent my one daily reservation on Mars Express by Jérémie Périn at 4:30 and I’d completely lost track of time. By the time I walked out of Inspector Sun my phone was almost dead (see above about the adapter) so I popped into a French electronics store and bought a couple of EU adapters and set off to charge my phone. But then on the bus I thought, hold on a minute, when is Mars Express, I have like an hour right---oh fuck. Well fine it’s at Bonlieu right? I can just walk there? ...it’s at Le Mikado Novel? Where the fuck is that? Half an hour away?

...so to make a long story short I got off the bus, walked down the street, my phone died, there was no way I could find my way to Le Mikado in time to get in even with my reservation, so I had to go back to my hotel and waste my precious reservation. And I hear the film was great. Sob.

There are a bunch of other screenings this week but they’re all packed so who knows if I’ll get to see this movie.

Despite this big oof I charged up my phone and headed back to meet up with my friend (hi to my friend!) who was in the queue for Production I.G.’s new film The Concierge. My friend was more than an hour early, so we thought we had a pretty good chance... lol nope. After standing in line for 45 minutes we were informed the cinema is full and had to leave.

It wasn’t a complete waste though. We met up with another friend and had a little picnic of bagels. Unfortunately the bagel I got was not the bagel I thought I was getting (idk what happened) but even so, it was nice to meet two online friends who by bizarre coincidence both turned out to be from Singapore.

To close the night I decided to take one more shot at getting in to see a movie, and went for a late showing of The Sacred Cave, a movie from Cameroon. Which is pretty neat, it’s not every day you see a movie from Cameroon. This one was... well, technically it’s definitely rough, but I don’t wanna be hard on it. The story is a fairy tale: a traditional healer is called in to attempt to save a dying king, and he dispatches his son on a mission to retrieve special medicine alongside the Prince.

On the way the son encounters a weird forest wizard, then a princess of a neighbouring clan who’s been turned into an anthro frog by an evil wizard; as he tries to head back with the medicine, he’s captured by said clan and almost executed, but because of his pure nature he alone can draw the special magic sword, and using this power he helps his captors overcome the evil wizard’s raiding party. But on the way home he gets betrayed by the Prince! A whole lot of betraying unfolds, killing off the old seer, and it turns out that our boy is actually the true son of the King. Despite the whole ‘executing his adoptive father on spurious charges’ thing, it all shakes out; the baddies are driven off, the princess unfrogged, and our very special good boy is rewarded.

It’s animated largely in Flash, and it has the feel of an online Flash video. All the same, I believe this is the first feature-length animated film from Cameroon. Bootstrapping an animation industry capable of putting together a coherent film is a hell of a feat, and must take an enormous degree of passion and dedication to make that happen. (Also not to put too fine a point on it but there are certain historical reasons why France has a much more developed animation industry than the country it had colonised until 1971.) Anyway, although principally made in Cameroon, the credits name a whole bunch of different countries, mostly in West Africa. Probably it would make sense to compare it to Princess Iron Fan or something like that, and I’m excited to see what comes down the line. And it was a very sincere movie, the setting presented with a great deal of love, especially when it came to costumes. I’m glad to have seen it.

Tomorrow morning Im gonna get up very early and take another shot at The Concierge, and try and plan better around the queuing system to try to make the best of it and catch more of the short films. It’s definitely not been the day of back to back films I was expecting, but honestly despite all that I’m having a good time just being in Annecy and the week is yet young...

good god is it expensive here though

#annecy #annecy film festival #animation #film #l'aventure de canmom à annecy

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