The Hound of Death

 An unexpected feature of the universe is its order. How do you explain that the universe conforms to laws of nature? Perhaps these laws are the result of God exercising His will. However, God conforms to a law of nature which is that He can (so it is claimed) do anything. He cannot make himself have this ability to do anything. This represents an order of a sort for which God is not responsible, the way in which his thoughts become reality. But how is this order to be explained? Another solution that might be presented is to say there is no explanation as to why nature conforms to laws. The laws of nature are just brute facts. However for each possible world with ordered laws of nature there is a myriad of other possibilities in which brute facts could have become manifested. Thus the chances that a world would be manifested conforming to regularity would be slim. The brute facts proponent might argue that we have assumed that all the other chaotic possibilities each have an equal probability to the ordered possibility. But maybe there is a bias in favour of there being laws of nature. But then this would constitute a mechanism by which order has a good chance of existing. Without such a mechanism, the brute fact of the existence of laws of nature would be an amazing coincidence in which everything just happens to conform to a pattern.

I would argue that if apparent magic or miracles were possible there must be an underlying mechanism. Against this, Rupert Sheldrake in his book The Science Delusion suggested that one of the apparent delusions in the current practice of science was the belief that a mechanism must underlie any process. Essentially Sheldrake was claiming that there could be processes such as telepathy which would work without any such mechanism. I shall use a story by Agatha Christie, The Hound of Death, to illustrate my argument that contrary to Sheldrake, any ordered process must have a mechanism otherwise it would constitute an amazing coincidence. If you want to read The Hound of Death without having it spoiled by revelations in what follows, you may like to stop reading further until you have read the story.

The Hound of Death features a nun with supernatural powers. This would involve causing the death of persons after which objects near their bodies would be arranged in the shape of a hound. She was under the care of a doctor who was interested in learning the secret of her power. This secret would consist of the actions you need to take in order to exercise these powers. The doctor bungled these actions and accidentally caused the death of himself and the nun with the hound of death appearing near their bodies. Now suppose there is no mechanism which could explain how these powers worked. That would mean if you performed certain actions, these actions would invariably be followed by the deaths of certain persons with the hound of death appearing at the scene of death. This would mean the existence of a universe which would normally operate according to rules of science and physics etc but when humans carried out certain actions they would trigger the hound of death phenomenon. Now although the supernatural powers violate the normal laws of the universe they still have an order of their own in that events of a certain type (certain actions performed by humans) lead to events of another certain type (the deaths of certain persons with the hound of death appearing at the scene of their deaths). How is this order to be explained? We are told that there is no explanation, no mechanism. This constitutes the brute facts model of the universe and hence leads to the amazing coincidence as I have argued earlier from this model. Probably such an amazing coincidence would not happen. If the events of this story did happen then there would be an underlying mechanism. Perhaps the doctor would have clues as to what this mechanism was so that he could work out how he might acquire the same powers as the nun. Moreover, if it is just effectively a coincidence that certain actions trigger the hound of death phenomenon, then this casts doubt whether an actual causation is involved as opposed to just a correlation.  Certain actions may be correlated to the deaths of persons with the hound of death appearing, but if we are to say that those actions caused the particular deaths concerned then we need a mechanism to relate the different events concerned otherwise we have just a mere correlation. 

In the case of telepathy for instance if there was no mechanism to explain telepathy then what would be happening is that by an amazing coincidence people who were telepaths were having the same thoughts as other people. If you claim that no it is not an amazing coincidence but that the thoughts in telepaths were caused by the thoughts of other people, then you are attributing a mechanism to the process of telepathy because you are saying that something exists which guarantees that the thoughts appearing in telepaths are the same as those in other people, which is what would be a mechanism.

Alfred Hitchcock produced a film called The Birds which features birds of all kind making coordinated attacks on humans.  No mechanism by which these birds could coordinate their attacks on humans was explored.  The premise of the film seemed to be that the events described were inexplicable, having no underlying explanation or mechanism.  The behaviour of the birds would then be based on the brute facts model of the world concerned.  However, this opens the way for some birds not to cooperate in the attacks against humans, to engage in other random behaviours.  The chances that all these birds would just happen to engage in the same behaviours directed against humans would be pretty slim unless there was a mechanical process which filtered out all other possible random behaviours. 

The conclusion of this article then is that if a bodiless mind exists which we call God and He can make anything happen then there must be a mechanism which enables Him to do this.  However, thinking up how an omnipotent spirit could work is a tough proposition. The way that the God hypothesis appears to work is that all the laws of nature are explained as God using his omnipotent powers to make nature work the way prescribed by the laws of nature.  But then you would need to explain how these omnipotent powers themselves work which presumably as an example include making a rhinoceros appear out of nowhere and so forth.  We are making the task of explaining the laws of nature harder for ourselves by insisting that God can do anything as opposed to the minimum necessary that would enable Him to start off the Big Bang.  However, rather than trying to explain God's amazing abilities would it not be easier to come up with a mechanism that directly explains the laws of nature rather than introducing God as a middle man which involves explaining how a rhinoceros can appear out of nowhere or how a dead person with all their brain cells damaged can come back to life?  This would be applying the principle of Occam's Razor where you would only assume the minimum that you need to postulate exists so as to save yourself the job of explaining what does not need to be explained.   

A Weak Link in a Negative Feedback Process

In order for humanity to operate safely within Earth and ensure we act in time to stave off any  forthcoming abrupt changes in the planetary systems so that no runaway positive feedback processes that send us in a tailspin to disaster, it would seem sensible to monitor the Eath's processes.  The idea is that we could detect any sluggishness of Earth's systems in recovering from any natural perturbations, which would indicate they were losing their resilience.  Once we receive our early warning signals, then we could take preventative action.  In effect, we'd be setting up a Negative Feedback loop, to keep Earth within safe limits.
The problem with this, as I see it, is that parts of the machinery involved in the negative feedback loop would constitute human brains which are notorious for blocking out unwanted information.  A typical reaction in the world today, such as it is, might be that all that information collected by the monitoring systems concerned is just 'made up by mad scientists'.  Hence no action is seen to be necessary and is not taken.  The information does not make it through the feedback loop, any more than the theory of evolution, the existence of dinosaurs or the globality of Earth would be accepted by extremist religious believers, of which there are many, including increasingly in positions of power. This slight conflict between religion and science could lead to the extinction of the human race.

Beautiful Machines

A human being is a complex entity and many factors will determine how a human behaves, that in practice it it not always possible to predict exactly what a human being will do, though it is sometimes possible such as predicting that a human being will be at a certain place or at a certain time, as that of a previously arranged meeting or appointment. 

Humans tend to be proud of their unpredictable behaviour, which is fair enough, after all behaving like a simple thermostat would not be, for example, much of  a life.  Many humans will go further and reject the idea that their behaviour can be broken down into a series of mini-steps, each step being a simple disposition to behaving in the same way when a given stimulus is presented. Instead , they may believe that something mysterious, called free will, possessed perhaps by another mysterious entity, called the soul, contributes to determining their actions and that these mysterious entities constitute the essence of being a person, whereas the other machine-like notion is considered to be the essence of a robot.  Even if you tell such humans that they are 'magic meat machines', they will probably not buy it, because even though magic has a certain appeal, the meat 'part' and the 'machine' part has a bitter taste which cannot be suppressed by the sugar of the magic and their faces will screw up as if having bitten into an apple with a maggot inside (a machine-like disposition, dare I say). 

I think machines are beautiful in the sense that mathematics is beautiful.  I think also that if souls were investigated, they would turn out to be beautiful also, assuming they existed.  I suspect that what appears to be a kind of magic would be reducible to machine-like tendencies such as behaving in a certain way according to a certain frequency on reception of the same stimulus, which is a kind of disposition that even a non-personal entity may possess. Alternatively, the signals that a soul may pass on to the human brain and body, may be produced by this free will phenomenon and then there would be the question of how this free will generates its outputs. When such probing questions are pursued, the investigator could well turn up something that even a 'soulful person' would not like.  The root of a belief in a soul or free will (not including machine-like versions of free will, such as compatibilism,which says that free will is emergent phenomenon out of deterministic machine-like behaviour) is a desire for such questions  not to be pursued, because somehow the questions pursued do not have answers.  Then we may ask, well, how is it that such questions have no answer? But this too would be a question without an answer.  But then how could this particular question have no answer?  And so on, ad infinitum.  This default position, which is machine-like in character leads to a kind of stagnation as it kills intellectual inquiry and replaces it with a mindless jaw-dropping awe of mystery, part of which is bolstered by the belief that human brains cannot understand everything.  The root of this belief then leads one  to underestimate what human brains can do.

One reason for believing in the magic of mystery that I have come across is that a system such as a human behaviour is unable to understand something more complex than itself.  I would say that such a contention needs to be expanded on.  The question, "Why not?" springs to my mind given that many of the details of a complex phenomenon are trivial and do not need to be represented by the less complex phenomenon. Rather, it is the general principles which matter and a less complex phenomenon may be perfectly adequate to represent the more complex phenomenon.  Thus as humans we may not have the exact details of how a butterfly flapping its wings may cause a storm on the other side of the world, but we still may derive an understanding, which is of the important sort, of general principles involved, such as sensitive dependence on initial conditions.  Such an understanding would not necessarily leave any mysterious gaps for us to drop our jaws at.  Rather the gaps are trivial , involving the filling in of unnecessary detail, since  it is ignorance of the general principles, which makes a mystery profound, rather than lack of trivial data such as the positions and velocities of each air molecule on Earth at a given time. 

One mystery is that if the essence of a robot or machine is that the machine is governed by dispositions giving the same output for a stream of given input.  How are such dispositions explained?  We cannot appeal to the normal mechanism of a machine since this would involve dispositions also and such an explanation would be circular.  We could be tempted to appeal to a higher entity which chooses the laws of physics that are operate in nature.  But this too appeals to a disposition where any possible output is correlated to the input which is the entity's specification of the laws it wants. 

All in all, we have this great schism between those with a questioning spirit and those without, although the latter may challenge the questioning spirit, perhaps because it undermines their power to dictate all the answers.

Do the Gospels need to be reliable?

After more than a year, I thought I'd talk to myself on this blog again.  Talking to oneself, they say, is a sign of madness.  I doubt that is true, but I am indeed quite mad, schizophrenic to be precise, if I use the technical label.  Now, the subject of this year's article is to discuss the question: Do the Gospels need to be reliable in order to establish the thesis of Jesus' resurrection?  I assume that anyone reading this has a reasonably wide attention span.

William Lane Craig in the preface to his Reasonable Faith rejects  the  thesis
"that a historical case for Jesus' radical self-understanding and resurrection depends upon showing that the Gospels are generally reliable historical documents".  At first, I was inclined to agree.  I thought it could be possible that a document could be generally unreliable, but have nuggets which could attest to a historical truth.  But then I thought in the case of establishing the existence of a God who wants to reveal himself and is all-powerful, an exception could be made to the general rule.  Would it not be the case that if a God wanted to reveal himself and had unlimited powers, he would find that a document that attested to a miracle, attesting to his existence, would be ineffective in propagating the belief in his own existence, if it was found to be unreliable?  Well, perhaps not really.  After all, the particular document in question, namely, the New Testament, has succeeded in making approximately a third of the human race Christians. But then that might be because the NT is reliable.  Of course, I don't think so, because I'm an atheist, but I have yet to argue that it is unreliable and to take this for granted now would be to beg the question. 

A question is whether God would want to create mere belief in his existence or actual knowledge of his existence.  This would presumably depend on the reasons he has for revealing himself.  According to Christianity, God or Jesus (one and the same according to the doctrine of the Trinity?) wants a relationship with each one of us.  It seems to me that a not very satisfactory relationship can be held with one who is merely believed in as opposed to known about.  If your existence to your wife or husband was so tenuous that for all they know, there is a good chance that your existence is an illusion then how could such a relationship be fulfilling?  Since God is not human, some may argue that a relationship with God is a different kettle of fish altogether. Such a relationship could actually be fulfilling to the believer, but would it be fulfilling to God?  How would you feel if your partner, for instance, had only limited evidence of your existence?  All circumstances could point to the thesis that you were dead, however, your partner could have faith that you were alive.  Would you not want to confirm the truth of this faith, i.e. provide some corroboration of your living status?  Then again, perhaps God is not as a human is.

Suppose that a document provides sufficient evidence for a miracle, apparently testifying to God's existence.  Whether the miracle would actually be good evidence for God's existence is, I think, debatable but this creates a belief in Christianity in about a third of the human race and God may be satisfied with that belief.  What about the two thirds who do not believe?  Christianity says that they would have rejected God because of sin, which consists of, I would presume, a morally wrong activity.  It could be perhaps argued that a person who fails to see the evidence for the miracle is technically morally wrong, on the other hand, there may be legitimate reasons why a person would fail to see that the document in question evidences the miracle.  Such a person may fail to understand the connections between the evidence and the miracle.  They may be suspicious of the agenda of the person who claims the existence of God, thinking perhaps that the person wants to rob them of their autonomy and this may prevent them from seeing the evidential connections.  According to Christianity, it is sinful to desire to be the captain of one's own ship; one is supposed to hand the wheel over to God.  Why?  Because God designed us to be worshippers of himself and to function better when we are under his control.  This seems to be a sad reflection on God and would cast doubt on his omni-benevolence.  Although we may not be robots and can choose whether to submit to God's control, we are still machines that only work best with a specific operator in charge.  We were created it seems to pander to God's ego.

Moreover, if God did not exist, then who would be the captain of our ships?  Arguably, each person would be the captain of their own ship.  Thus, if there was some doubt as to God's existence, it is hard to see that a person would be wrong to desire their own autonomy and thus be suspicious of any person arguing that this should be given up and passed over to God who although existing has his existence being doubted for legitimate reasons, rather than out of pride or arrogance.  It is still difficult to see why this 'arrogance' would be wrong or 'sinful'.  If a person does not know of God's existence because of a failure of understanding, blocked by a legitimate desire for autonomy or  that at least would be legitimate, if God did not exist, then why should such a position be wrong/'sinful' or arrogant/excessively proud?  After all, if the person disbelieved in God's existence, that same person would have no reason to believe they were designed to function best under God's control.  Even if they did believe that God did exist and that they were designed to be under God's control, they may still feel that autonomy for an individual is valuable in itself and it is better to be autonomous and function less well than they could, rather than function at their best as essentially a slave for God.

The most charitable case we could make is that God wants us to be good but as we have argued above, disbelief in God may not necessarily be bad.  In that case God may wish to make the case for his existence stronger.  Perhaps he could do this by ensuring that the document which attests to his relevatory miracle is in fact reliable.  But this might not necessarily be effective.  It could bring a few more believers to the table, namely those for whom the unreliability of the document in question was a barrier to belief.  Rather, however, God might be better off creating more convincing miracles so that each person directly perceived their own miracle. The reliability of the NT could be better for God, but there are circumstances, which are even better for God that he could initiate.

An individual arguably would best infer that the most likely explanation of the miracle in question is not that the Christian God exists, but that something else was responsible e.g. a demon with the motive of creating religious strife, for example, or maybe some mysterious physical phenomenon, although it is difficult to see what physical phenomen might occur that could cause a resurrection.  However, it is also hard to see how nature could allow a disembodied all-good mind to exist, which can influence the way things are in whatever it willed.  Since the miracle in question would not necessarily establish the existence of God, whether the NT was mostly reliable or not would make no difference.

Some Christians might claim, however, that the above is academic.  In actuality, they would say, the reason why nonbelievers reject God is not because of legitimate reasons, but because of a wilful desire to ignore the evidences for God's existence, stemming from a desire for autonomy.  It is still hard to see why a desire for autonomy should be wrong.  For each of us nonbelievers, we feel as if we are sincere in our disbelief.  Introspection fails to reveal any evidences of God's existence.  However, the way the brain works is such that it sees only what it wants to see.  Perhaps this could be argued to be wantonly 'sinful', but you would think that God would design our brains to work in a more objective way.  If it is our own sin that is responsible for the brain's confirmation bias, why would it be so difficult to overcome this confirmation bias?  The way our brains work raises a dilemma.  Do we continue in the beliefs we hold or do we try and challenge them?  Even if we try to criticize our own beliefs, we would then try to pick holes in our criticisms.  We could challenge these holes with further criticisms but then we would pick holes in these further criticisms.  And so it goes on.  The end result apparently is that we continue to maintain the beliefs that we hold.  We might then ask what is the point of trying to challenge our own beliefs?  Still, some people do succeed in changing their minds.  Perhaps this is evidence that it is still worth trying to approach questions objectively and being aware of our own biases.  Failure to do this and therefore to perceive the reality of God could then be construed as a 'sin'.

However, there are those of us who as far as they can determine are trying their best to be objective but still conclude that God does not exist and it is difficult for them to see how they could improve their ability to see evidence of God's existence. For all they know, the reason they do not see reliable evidence for God's existence could be that it is simply not there.  It would then seem a bit much to judge that they are wilfully arrogant.  The Christian might say that their judgement is clouded by their desire to do what they want i.e. be free of God's rules of living and to be autonomous.  However, if the desire for autonomy is no bad thing, having one's judgement clouded by it may be no bad thing.  Or is this necessarily the case?  After all, it is good to consider that men and women are equal, but the desire for equality between men and women can cloud our judgement as to whether there are any, say, psychological differences between the sexes and this may be a bad thing since it prevents us from seeing the politically incorrect truth of the matter, even though the desire for equality is a good thing.

However, a nonbeliever may then try to consider whether there are any circumstances in which seeking autonomy would be bad and may fail to find any, despite looking as hard as they can.  It is hard to see how they could do better than this as there are no criteria for assessing whether you have tried hard enough.  (The criterion that you have failed to infer that God exists would not be good enough, since this would beg the question.  To assess whether God exists, we would need criteria, which are ultimately independent of whether God exists or not and do not prejudge the issue.)  But in this case also, whether or not the gospels are reliable is largely irrelevant and hence, arguably, they do not need to be reliable.  But an individual could infer that since the case for God's existence is not stronger than it could be that God probably does not exist and that the miracle in question must have some other explanation.

If God wishes to produce knowledge of his own existence, as opposed to mere belief, there is even greater reason for God to make a more powerful case for his existence.  However, it is not clear that this could be done by simply ensuring that the NT is reliable.  The case for God's nonexistence would be stronger because of the greater reason God would have for strengthening the case to everyone of his own existence and the fact that despite this, he does not bother. 

My conclusion is that the question of whether the NT needs to be at least mostly reliable in order to establish the actuality of a miracle or not is loaded.  If you say yes to the question, the implication is that you think the reliability of the NT is sufficient to establish the existence of God.  If you say no to the question, the implication is that you think that just the evidences of the miracle are sufficient to establish the existence of God.  However, I would reject both these implications, because it seems to me the possibility of an alternative explanation for the miracle could obtain.  It would then be difficult to see why God does not create a stronger case for his existence.  The lack of such a stronger case would suggest that such a being does not exist.  It is not the general reliability of the NT that is needed to help establish God's existence but something else entirely, something that would be a lot more powerful than an ancient document attesting to some one-off miracle.

I have considered the case where the miracle is assumed to be evidenced by the NT.  In practice, as an atheist, I do not think that any of the miracles described in the NT are well evidenced.  Of course, I would think that, but to argue a case for such a viewpoint is outside the scope of this article.  Since some people may have no concept of an essay having specific terms of reference, they may think I am simply dodging this question.  So to counter this impression, I suppose a subsequent article I write will address whether the resurrection of Jesus is well-evidenced.  Next year perhaps.

Cutting Out the Real World

Today I’m going to talk about (to myself possibly) philosophy and in particular idealism.

My understanding of idealism is that there is no world out there beyond our experiences.  Only our experiences are real. I plump for the orthodox common sense point of view of realism, that there is a real world out there unless I am provided with a good reason to think otherwise.  To me if you keep strictly to the point of view that nothing exists beyond experience then as far as I’m concerned only my experience exists and the experiences of you lot do not exist.  In other words it seems to me strict idealism implies solipsism.  Then I’d really be talking to myself.  However, Berkeley I believe if I remember right from the Open University philosophy course I undertook, introduces the notion of this God, a concept that you might have heard of, consisting of a supreme mind or conscious experience which ties all our experiences together, perhaps because our experiences are all part of his experience.  This means strictly speaking there is something out there beyond my own personal experience even if only it is the rest of God’s mind.

Berkeley applies Occam’s Razor to cut out the world out there.  The external real world is an unnecessary entity that need not be postulated because it doesn’t explain anything.  (I am not referring to any text of Berkeley’s; I am just going by what I remember was said about him in the OU course I took.) But I think it does explain something, which is the nature of our experiences.  Why not apply Occam’s Razor to the God concept instead?  (Ockham would not approve of this.  As far he was concerned the razor should be applied to all those gods besides the Christian God.  However , as Richard Dawkins (our lord and master) once said:

Or to put it another way:

However, one could respond by saying that the nature of our experiences is explained by God rather than the real world.  Thus you have God to explain all our experiences and thus we do not need the external world to explain them.

The illusion of an external world could be the doing of the supreme mind.  But why would God create this illusion?  Perhaps it makes our existence more enjoyable.   He may also be providing us with a vale of tears for us to develop some moral fibre.  Perhaps.  One objection is that some people’s experiences are so horrible (e.g.torture, being buried alive, being burned alive) that one would expect God to intervene as such experiences do not usually develop good moral character but instead damage people’s minds, which means they find themselves unable to contribute positively to their experiences (if their experience is not either terminated or converted to one of blissful existence).  The Christian may respond with the free will defence. Divine intervention may interfere with the free will of those causing suffering.  But some suffering is not caused by other people (earthquakes, volcanoes).  In any case God could uncouple the effect on a possible victim’s experience from the experience of a would-be oppressor.  A Nazi officer may think he is causing suffering to one of his concentration camp inmates but these inmates need not be real people. Perhaps it would then all get too complicated.  Even so, I would argue that preventing horrific suffering takes priority or precedence over the Nazi officer’s free will.  A policeman could not argue that he decided not to save a victim from a crime on the grounds that it would interfere with the criminal’s right to self-determination.  Still, maybe the Christian can offer other defences for the problem of evil so let us suppose there is some good reason for horrific suffering, although this does mean postulating entities that need not exist if we postulated just a real world instead.

Another thing is that this talk of a mind that is supreme no less smells of the human desire to impress.  There seems to be no reason why reality should reflect human desires and wishes, in particular the desire that there is this big boss who makes all the rules which you ought to obey or else.  Why not just a network of interlinked minds with diverse levels of control over the experiences of others?  But we’ll leave this aside as well.

There is also the question of how this divine mind works.  When God wills for example that another mind’s experience contains certain features, how is the causal link established?  It seems that some sort of mechanism needs to be postulated to explain these causal links.  Otherwise there would be no reason why the big boss mind could count on these causal links to have the expected effect.  What guarantees that God’s control will continue for eternity?  The idealist could reply by saying that at bottom we don’t know the ultimate mechanisms responsible for establishing causal links in an external real world.  So then we do not have extra unknown mechanisms to postulate in the idealist scenario because the realist scenario possesses such extra unknown mechanisms too.  However, in the external world as we experience it there is clearly some complicated machinery in place which establishes the causal links between our desires and getting what we want.  There are things like nerves, muscles etc not to mention all the paraphernalia outside our bodies.  These ultimately break down in terms of simple or at least simpler relations between particles of matter.  But in the idealist scenario we must somehow explain how, for example the desires of God or even those of his peasant children, translate into actual effects.  We cannot appeal to any complicated machinery like nerves, muscles etc. because nothing outside of our experiences is supposed to exist.  So what makes our experiences conform to certain rules?  Saying that God does indicates a failure to understand properly my argument.   For the next question then becomes: what guarantees that God’s desires will be implemented for eternity?  (Experience suggests that this point can be difficult to get across to a mind that is used to thinking along certain rigid heavily trodden lines.)

Mother Theresa's Advice

Tom Rapsas on Patheos descibes how John Templeton asked a question that stopped him in his tracks

Was the Earth a better place because you were born?

Mother Theresa apparently had some advice on how to achieve this noble goal.  Although Christopher Hitchens has made some allegations in a book (which I have not read) saying Mother Theresa deliberately increased the suffering of the poor for some religious reason, one might think this would be irrelevant since otherwise we would have an ad hominem fallacy.  On the other hand you'd expect she would take her own advice and thus make the world a better place but unless the allegations are false this seems not to have worked in Theresa's case.  

Her advice was to go home and love your family.  Taking this in spirit, this didn't seem bad advice as the proceess of caring other people would then one would expect make one sensitive to the cares and woes of people in general.  

Apparently she also thought our society was poor in spirit.  Being anti-religious this could ruffle my feathers a bit, but it could be interpreted as our society lacks empathy for those less fortunate than ourselves which I would agree with: we live in a society where people (mostly the fortunate) care more about money than other people.  For example, Gawker Media cares more about making money than avoiding ruining people's lives by spreading salacious gossip and rumour.  Apparently by caring for people at home this would make you a more caring person generally.  Maybe that's not necessarily so.  But then she talks about spreading love everywhere you go: leaving people who approach you happier.  A bit mushy: love is perhaps too strong a word for my tastte but the underlying principle might work.  Pratice would make perfect.  Also small acts of kindness seem more realistic tusually than grand plans to achieve world peace etc.  

Kaepernick's Protest

Today I'm going to ramble on about an article I read on Patheos which is available at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2016/08/30/answering-the-pseudo-patriots-on-kaepernicks-protest/?.   I shall present my view on whether Kaepernick's protest is justified although this view may change as and if I learn more about what's going on.  On the whole I have some sympathy with such protest.  Patriotism I think is over-rated because most countries seem to be doing bad stuff.  Should one be a patriot if one lives in Saudi Arabia?  My country is the UK which our former prime minister David Cameron insisted is a Christian country.  I'm not exactly wild about Christianity such as the part which says nonChristians burn in hell as I think that's not a good way to treat people who don't follow a particular religion.  I do admit there is a good part of Christianity which is to help people less fortunate than ourselves.  However, this part is probably ignored by many UK citizens especially those wealthy and powerful who might be inclined out of greed to squeeze every last penny from vulnerable people whose credit card was abused.  In all,  the UK contains a mixture of bad and good and singing or standing for the national anthem like Corbyn has been forced to do now by the media could be construed as endorsing the whole package, the bad as well as the good.  So if you don't think your country is up to scratch, why pretend that you think your country is wonderful?

The quibble I have with Ed Brayton is the claim "cops gunning down unarmed black men routinely".   The question is whether the worfd "routinely" truthfully describes the situation at hand.  The stats say more white people are shot though that is of course black people represent only 13% of the population.  More black people seem to be shot than you would expect from blacks being 13% of the population.  However this does not account for the higher crime rate amongst black people which presumably has something to do with black poverty.  Also my impression is that many of the cases of police shootings of unarmed civilians had some circumstances attached which made the shooting justified such as the so-called victim trying to use the police officer's gun against the officer.  So I am not sure and somewhat wary of the Black Lives Matter movement paricularly in view of slogans on banners or chanted inciting the killing of cops which in one case seems to have worked. 

But at least most of the David Cross video that Brayton presents at the end I identify with.