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This is part 2 of my blog series called Religion is Not Required for Morality. Here’s the link for part 1:

Religion is Not Required for Morality: Part 1

 

Let’s look at the argument that religion is required for morality. I ended up discussing this with my fundamentalist Christian former boss because he was more open to discussion than I assumed. He made the claim that you can’t be a good person without the bible. We had a detailed conversation about why I disagree.

 

 

This is why religion is not required for morality. In terms of Christianity, people in every faith group think that their’s in the only right choice. Who is right and who is wrong? No one can know for sure because no one can actually tell you what happens after you die. Maybe Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists are right and everyone else is wrong. Maybe Mormons or Scientologists have the answer. Perhaps every god and version of the afterlife exist. Or what seems more likely to me is that none of them are real. Either way, no one can objectively argue that one book contains the correct recipe for everyone’s moral compass.

 

 

If someone thinks that they get their morality from the bible, there’s nothing inherently wrong with believing that. However, scientifically speaking, they’re partially right at the most. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, we can trace psychological traits associated with morality back through the evolutionary history of our species. Our moral compasses didn’t suddenly spring into existence after the bible or some other book was written.

 

 

There also were countless religions before Christianity and every other religion that exists today. So people were developing morality and associating it with religion for thousands of years. An evolutionary mechanism is partially responsible for us believing that our mythologies give us the moral high ground.

 

 

Evolutionary psychology also tells us that we develop moral compasses whether we want to or not. So it is partially true when someone claims to get their morality from a religious text. But no one ever gets their entire moral framework from one book. Someone can use the bible or the Quran to teach them the difference between right and wrong. However, you would get that from somewhere else if not those books. Our morality is not dependent on religious texts.

 

 

We also evolve a moral compass based on our entire life experiences within our cultures and upbringing. So everything else influences us to an extent, whether we want it to or not. Neuroscience backs up similar claims to those in evolutionary psychology. As Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neuroendocrinologist and professor of biology and neurology explains, our moral compasses are developed by our prefrontal cortexes. That’s a small region in the front of our brains that evolved more recently than the rest of it.

 

 

So evolutionarily speaking, morality is a relatively recent advent. To me, this means it makes sense that we have trouble adapting to and accepting moral frameworks that we disagree with. Our prefrontal cortexes have much less evolutionary practice than the rest of our brains.

 

 

As Sapolsky and plenty of other scientists explain, our prefrontal cortexes adapt to different environments. So depending on where we grow up, we’ll develop different moral compasses. That’s why your religion or lack thereof is highly dependent on your geographical location. There are more Muslims in the Middle East for many reasons, including that it is more common in that local culture. The same applies to people in the West, where we’re more likely to be Christian. Our environments within our cultural upbringing shape our moral compasses. So our interactions with our families and other people throughout our lives construct the way we see the world. Neurological pathways are created by the ways our parents raises us, the friends we have and groups we join, and the local culture. This is another reason that it’s hard to accept different beliefs. We all have neurological tendencies developed through childhood that associate strong emotions with how we define “right” and “wrong.”

 

 

There’s nothing wrong with people choosing to be religious. Seeing religion as an enormous problem in dire need of fixing is a parochial way of viewing the world. That’s a single-factor analysis. However, even militant atheists sometimes make good points. Stereotypes exist because they apply to some people. Even though they get ridiculously tribal sometimes, atheists do a great job of pointing out and demolishing ridiculous fundamentalist claims. Everyone, whether we’re religious or not, believes that our moral compass is superior. The extreme Christian view that we can only be a good person if we follow the bible is ludicrous in several different ways. All you have to do is look at the history of pretty much every religion with an official text. They made the same kinds of claims about their worldviews.

 

 

If that isn’t convincing enough, you can look at studies in evolutionary psychology that show how our moral compasses evolved along with every other aspect of our species. We can also see in neuroscience that our prefrontal cortexes construct our moral worldviews based on our cultural upbringings within our local environments. Religion is not required for morality! It’s an aspect of many of our cultures, so our brains can develop neurological attachments to its importance. That’s fine. But our morality is shaped by our environments and prefrontal cortexes. Religions are often part of these environments. But we would still be moralizing beings even if religion had never existed.

 

 

No one has the moral high ground. However, maybe we can enhance the development of our prefrontal cortexes. Perhaps we can adapt better to different environments by learning to accept different worldviews. I might be idealistic. But I think that if we can all learn to accept different ways of looking at the world that we all share, we might make the our planet a better place and have an easier time solving global issues. I know I sound like a hippy, but we’re all one species, man!

 

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I’ve been defending religion a lot lately. Some people have interpreted that as me being agnostic, which is fine. We all use our own subjective definitions. But the reason some people see me this way seems to often be that they think atheists believe every god objectively does not exist. I’m not an agnostic because that perception seems flawed to me. Not believing in any gods doesn’t necessarily mean you claim to know that no gods are real. For me, I simply don’t think that any gods exist. No one can know anything for sure, and neither can anyone disprove an unfalsifiable proposition.

 

 

I just don’t have a problem with religion in general any more. It’s not my business if people choose to be religious, as long as their beliefs don’t impinge on my free expression, and they don’t use faith as an excuse to harm others. A militant atheist would be more likely to intellectually shit all over religious people. They also often claim to have absolute certainty about all gods being invented by the human mind.

 

 

 

 

However, even anti-theist atheists don’t necessarily offer objective knowledge that no gods exist. We are all individuals who interpret beliefs in different ways. I know atheists who are much more militant than me, but not 100% sure that they’re correct. They just see religion as a bigger problem than me. Another atheist might think they know without a shadow of a doubt that gods are fake. But maybe they are respectful of religious people because they think it’s not their place to change minds.

 

 

The one statement that’s probably true about all atheists is that none of us believe in any gods. Other than that, people have their own different definitions.

 

 

One point I’ve often made lately is that not all religious people are the same. When you talk with the faithful, a lot of atheists’ perceptions of them turn out to be exaggerated stereotypes. So I’ve recently gained much more respect for religious people.

 

 

That being said, there are still many aspects of religion that bother me. People try to push their religion on me sometimes too, which annoys the fuck out of me. Even though probably the minority of believers agree with religious stereotypes, they exist because they’re true for some people.

 

 

The culture where I live is very traditional and conservative in some ways, which includes essentially fundamentalist Christian views. I’ve grown up being pressured about religion every now and then. It probably has only happened maybe a dozen times or so. But they’re so intense when they happen that they’re easy to remember.

 

 

There are many Christians in my home town, and one central claim of the more pushy religious people who I’ve talked to has been this: You cannot be a good person without believing in the Christian God. Everyone has probably heard this argument before. This is the type of shit that bothers me the most.

 

 

I was still Christian when I was a kid, but my parents raised my brother and I with pretty progressive interpretations of the religion. So I was alarmed when I was at school one day, and my friend told my brother and I that you go to Hell if you don’t believe in Jesus. This didn’t make sense to me even though I hadn’t developed my critical thinking abilities. What about people in different religions, like Jews and Muslims?

 

 

A few years later, a girl in school was asking everyone if they were Christian. She was one of the popular kids, so no one said “No,” other than one of my friends. I think he said he was an agnostic, and I had no idea what that meant. The girl told my friend that he’s going to go to Hell. I was shocked by that again. Then she asked me if I’m Christian, and I just said “Yes.” I still viewed myself as a Christian based on a complete lack of personal reflection. Also, I had just seen that hostile reaction to disagreement, and I didn’t want to be ostracized by the “cool kids.” So I answered hesitantly, but didn’t even defend my friend.

 

 

Since I became an adult, (at least on paper) people have occasionally been pushy about religion, but I’ve rarely had anyone say anything that terrible to me. More recently, my friend’s mom told me that I looked like Jesus because I’ve grown my hair out, and then she invited to me to the baptism of my friend’s kid. I would have gone if my friend had asked me, since it was for her child. I care more about my friends than my lack of belief. But she respects my lack of religion too much for that. Her mom seems to not hear it when my friend tells her that I’m an atheist.

 

 

The craziest religious person I’ve ever interacted with is one of my former bosses. He made statements like “He’s a good guy. He reads his bible every day.” Here we go again with assuming that being Christian makes you better, just like claiming that everyone other than Christians go to Hell. The most bizarre thing that he ever said to me happened when he finally asked me if I was an atheist, since I would always just smile and nod when he preached to me. I said “Yes,” and he went into a bat-shit crazy story that was clearly made-up. He said, almost verbatim, “I had a friend who was an atheist once. He went to Hell. Then he saw the error of his ways, found God’s love, and God pulled him out of Hell and up into Heaven.”

 

 

That was the most crazy statement that any religious person has ever made to me. I just replied with “Uh-huh,” with a heavy degree of skepticism. I had an unbelievably hard time restraining myself from saying something like “Oh really? You know a dead person? I would love to meet him. Because if you’re telling the truth, you and he both deserve Nobel prizes since you’ve done something that’s pretty much fucking impossible.”

 

 

…To Be Continued…

 

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Call me a book fascist if you want to, but I think that everyone should read books. Sure, maybe they’re not useful for certain people in particular professions. However, they’re much more than tools for gaining knowledge and learning practical skills. There are not only non-fiction books, there’s fiction too.

 

 

Learning is fucking awesome. That’s why I and tons of other people love reading non-fiction. But novels are amazing too. Some of us prefer only using books to gain information or learn a hobby or skill, which is fine. People are different. The rest of readers either like both novels and non-fiction, or just fiction. That’s cool too. I prefer switching between both, but I understand why people love novels.

 

 

There’s something comforting about the feeling you get when you open up a book and start reading it. You’ll realize that there’s something fascinating that you didn’t know, acquire a new skill, or travel to an exciting new world in your mind. That’s why novels are great. You can get lost in imaginary characters who seem totally real. Empathizing with them, you experience emotions through their thoughts and environments through their senses. You get immersed in the protagonist’s struggles, and get caught up in a suspenseful plot that hopefully rises to a crescendo before the final gripping page.

 

 

Some people are very smart even though they don’t read books. They get all their knowledge from the internet. Or they have a job with a high skill level, like engineering or being an electrician, and they don’t like reading. That’s all good. I admire intelligent people regardless of what they do or how they get their knowledge. But I really think that they would be even better if they read books. In my opinion, it’s good for people to be different. The internet can teach you a fuck of a lot. However, I don’t think that it provides you with the same level of information as books. Maybe you can learn everything you need to know about a new hobby or skill from Youtube and Wikipedia. But if you want to thoroughly educate yourself about ideas, or the history of any practical knowledge, books are probably better.

 

 

People put a lot of time and effort into making educational Youtube videos. You can watch and hear conversations between intellectuals too. Almost everything can be read on Wikipedia or copious other sources. But academics frequently spend years compiling and explaining the most fascinating and relevant aspects of complex knowledge. Books can provide the equivalent of an introductory course in different kinds of philosophy, biology, history, anthropology, physics, and every other field. The internet generally doesn’t give us captivating writing that teaches detailed, focused and well-organized information. A skilled non-fiction author can make learning phenomenally exciting.  For example, my  fairly decent understanding of the science behind human behaviour comes from reading a dozen or so amazing books about it.

 

 

So why not use the internet AND books to learn? You won’t be dumb if you only get your information from the internet, as long as you don’t spend all your time watching cat videos and porn. Entertainment and orgasms are important, but so is learning. If you already learn a hell of a lot from the internet, you’ll be even smarter if you read books.

 

 

Novels and plays used to be the only form of entertainment and imaginary stories. You couldn’t go to watch a movie at a theatre, or check out the newest ones on Netflix. We couldn’t “Netflix and chill” because it didn’t exist. Maybe everyone laid each other down by the fire instead. People had to pretend that stage actors and characters in books were real. The captivating visuals we see in many blockbusters today had to be imagined.

 

 

Yes, some ancient philosophers like Socrates thought that reading and writing would ruin our brains by damaging our memories. Before books, philosophers had to compose and memorize entire speeches in their heads. Socrates apparently believed that people would lose this ability if we relied on writing and reading. He was wrong. Pretty much everyone without mental disabilities is capable of composing and memorizing speeches in thought. But most of us don’t do it because writing makes it so much more convenient. This led to a phenomenally increased amount of science and knowledge. How many people do you know who compose and memorize speeches?

 

 

However, there are professions like politics that require memorizing speeches. I bet that they often get written down. But all kinds of public speakers like teachers and comedians address crowds without constantly glancing at paper. Actors have to recite lines from memory without looking at scripts, once they’re on camera. Not everyone writes everything down either. Jay-Z is known for not writing down any of his raps.

 

 

Let’s also remember that books were not only the precursor to movies. They were the original internet. For the vast majority of human history, you couldn’t Google anything. Writing is a very recent historical advent too. It’s just been around for much longer than the internet. The idea to put words on paper may have existed for thousands of years, rather than decades. Before Google, books were only available to rich people at first. People like Alexander the Great went on epic voyages to find them. His Library of Alexandria was the biggest stockpile of knowledge in the world. Historians still don’t know about all the valuable writing that was lost when it burned to the ground.

 

 

Until the Protestant Reformation, there was a low literacy rate among poor people in particular. Other than books being expensive, they had to be painstakingly copied by scribes until the printing press was invented. This new technology helped increase literacy because books could be mass produced. Martin Luther was the first person to translate The Bible into the language of the people, German. Before then, priests read it aloud in Latin, with their backs facing the congregations. So average people would stare at the priests’ backs while they spoke in a language that no one could fucking understand. Sounds fun, right?

 

 

People being able to read the bible was part of the Protestant Reformation. There was a lot of religious division, controversy, and dramatic change. Other books were printed as well, and cheaper manufacturing costs drove prices down. So for the first time in history, the public had access to all kinds of books. To make a long and complex story short, it all spiralled from there. Everyone who has internet or library access can get plenty of books for free, and literally millions for small costs.

 

 

Maybe I’m just being arrogant about wanting everyone to read books. I would never want to make a law about it, or anything like that. I try to be very libertarian about how other people live as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. But I truly believe that reading books makes you better. They’ll make you even smarter than the internet will, and a good novel is more captivating and rewarding than a movie. I love films. But you can’t get inside characters’ heads in them, feel what they feel, and experience fictional realms through their senses. Books are in some ways closer to virtual reality than movies. They engage not just your eyes and ears, but your thoughts and imagination too. (Although, you obviously don’t hear books unless they’re audiobooks.) You don’t get the same level of evocative detail in a film that you do in a phenomenal novel. Also, a great non-fiction book can be the equivalent of an introductory university course, for way less money than tuition fees. So if you don’t do so already, READ BOOKS! They have the power to transform your life.

 

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Experts get a lot of respect. They have high status in western culture, some of which is deserved. But being an expert doesn’t mean that you’re always right. Experts can see themselves as the information authorities; the high priests of Intellectual Land.

 

 

But even though some people let power go to their heads, we need some experts to perform certain tasks for us, right? Don’t you want a certified mechanic to fix your car? Don’t you want a surgeon with an expensive piece of paper proclaiming him or her as an expert to cut you open and fix you up? We want people with a lot of experience and fancy credentials. Don’t we?

 

 

Well, maybe people don’t need these positions of status to be able to know what they’re talking about and doing. There’s an awesome podcast called Freakonomics, with the authors of the Freakonomics books. In these, a journalist, Stephen Dubner, and an economist, Steven Levitt, examine social issues from an economic perspective. There’s an awesome episode of this that among other things, examines the notion that doctors with more experience are better at their jobs. Dubner interviews a bunch of highly respected doctors. He comes to the startling conclusion that more experienced doctors are actually MORE likely to kill you! I wrote a blog about this idea because it gave me such a huge mindgasm. Check it out here if you’re interested:

https://mindgasms.bplifetime.com/2018/01/23/experienced-doctors-likely-kill/

 

 

Basically, a doctor with grey hair being associated with adept knowledge is a flawed concept. Most doctors tend to get less knowledgeable as they age. There are many great older doctors of course. But think about how often medical information gets updated. It happens so much that by the time you finish medical school, what you learned is out of date and maybe even obsolete.

 

 

Biology is phenomenally complex, and scientists learn more about it all the time. If you’re an older doctor with a successful practice, you don’t necessarily need to keep learning. I can only imagine how busy most doctors are. But if you’re experienced and have plenty of patients, it’s not in your financial interest to keep up with the newest knowledge.

 

 

While older doctors likely have greater experience with treating patients, newer doctors have more updated information. So more experienced doctors might have a better idea of how to account for many variables, particularly in an emergency room. But people who are fresh out of medical school are more likely to know of better treatments for a lot more conditions.

 

 

After listening to an episode of Mixed Mental Arts, I was reminded of my blog about doctors, and the podcast that inspired it. Mixed Mental Arts is a podcast with the author and tutor, Hunter Maats, and the comedian and actor, Bryan Callen. They discuss ideas from a wide variety of fields with fascinating and smart people. In this episode, the postmodernist historian, author and podcaster, Thaddeuss Russell, discusses ideas like postmodernism. Russell and Maats criticize the concept of expertise. But Callen defends them with examples like the fact that we want qualified doctors to treat us. Here’s the link for that podcast:

https://mixedmentalarts.libsyn.com/ep-272-thaddeus-russell-pt-2-no-longer-does-the-ivory-tower-hold-the-microphone

 

 

 

Postmodernism is a branch of philosophy. Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are regarded as seminal postmodernists. They’re French philosophers who developed this way of thinking in the 70s. There are great postmodernist texts like Madness and Civilization, by Foucault. This is about the different ways in which mental illness has been objectively classified by science throughout history. It used to be objective scientific truth that women are “hysterical”, gay people are mentally retarded, and black people are inferior.

 

 

 

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and psychology professor at the University of Toronto with a famous Youtube channel about mythology. He likes to intellectually shit all over postmodernism. He argues that postmodernists want to bring down every institution because they claim that authoritarian scientific definitions deliberately oppress us. He combines postmodernists with Marxists due to their apparent desire to force all of society to cater to their philosophical views.

 

 

I have a great deal of respect for Jordan Peterson, and I’ve learned a lot from him about psychology, mythology, and pragmatic Christianity. I love his biblical lectures even though I’m an atheist. But it seems like he conflates postmodernists with neo-Marxists. Not all postmodernists are Marxists, and not all Marxists are postmodernists. I’m not an expert on postmodernism. But my limited research tells me this: Spreading postmodernist thought over all of society through authoritarianism is not a fundamental aspect of postmodernism. It seems to me that philosophers like Foucault and Derrida accomplish three main tasks. They deconstruct definitions, criticize institutional authority, and highlight that objective scientific truth changes throughout history. I don’t think that they’re calling for a revolution. They’re just trying to take some of the culturally constructed status away from science and institutions.

 

 

Thaddeus Russell points this out in that Mixed Mental Arts podcast; since he used to be a socialist and he travelled in Marxist circles on college campuses, he’s seen and heard many Marxists and postmodernists who hate each other. Authoritarianism seems much more common among Marxists than postmodernists. So it seems like the problem that Jordan Peterson is fighting is authoritarianism rather than postmodernism.

 

 

In my opinion, Jordan Peterson is justifiably angry with authoritarian Marxists and leftists shutting down debate, censoring people, and ruining people’s lives on university campuses. But deconstructing concepts doesn’t automatically mean that you want to force your mindset on all of western culture. Peterson appears to be a huge fan of objective truth and scientific institutions. But he also understands from his perception of Christianity that metaphorical truths can be scientifically false but pragmatically true. So objective truth can sometimes be more false and less pragmatic than metaphorical truth.

 

 

So what is truth? From a postmodernist perspective, it’s a socially and culturally constructed concept. That doesn’t necessarily mean that close approximations to truth are useless. But postmodernists point out that there is no such thing as universal, objective truth that has always and will always be true. So someone claiming to have objective truth is wrong. But it doesn’t mean that they’re evil or that we should throw out the scientific method. I’m paraphrasing this quote, but as Thaddeus Russell says, “Objective truth is authoritarian. If you say that you know the objective truth, it means that it’s established and can’t be questioned. So objective truth is also anti-intellectual and anti-scientific because it means that you’re claiming to have facts that shouldn’t be studied further.” As Russell also asks, shouldn’t we endlessly investigate our fundamental assumptions, like that the earth is round, gravity is a workable theory, and global warming is harming the planet? This is crucial if we want to follow the scientific method.

 

 

As with truth, the concept of expertise is also culturally constructed. Different cultures across different times and places associate wildly varying characteristics with the status of experts. What qualifies someone as an expert is different in the western world than it is in other countries. It’s also not the same as it used to be, and it will change in the future.

 

 

That doesn’t mean that if you want your car fixed or you need surgery, you should get some random dude on the street to do if for you. As Hunter Maats pointed out in that Mixed Mental Arts podcast episode, if you need your car fixed, you use your social intelligence to ask around. People will tell you who has done the best job. We can use the wisdom of crowds. So if someone is a good mechanic or doctor, people will notice. Credentials and experience don’t automatically make someone good at their job. There are experienced people with fancy pieces of paper who are terrible doctors and mechanics. If you’re bad at fixing cars and treating patients, you arguably won’t survive in these careers. People who don’t use their social intelligence to find good mechanics and doctors are the probably the only ones who will pay you. You won’t get a whole lot of repeat customers if you’re killing patients and destroying cars.

 

 

This is why the concept of expertise is authoritarian. The subjective status symbols that we associate with experts allow them get away with sometimes being delusional about their abilities. They are just as capable of causing harm as inexperienced idiots who pretend to know what they’re doing. Amateurs are equally able to understand a field as someone with an expensive piece of paper. They just need the right amount of discipline to learn enough. But today, they won’t be taken as seriously, even if they’re smarter about a subject than someone with several degrees.

 

 

Everyone makes mistakes, so no one’s words should be taken as gospel. But amateurs can be more knowledgeable than experts and experts can be less knowledgeable than amateurs. So the concept of experts is authoritarian. Are you worried about random people with no medical knowledge buying people’s organs and pimply teenagers offering to fix your car? Then ask yourself if you know anyone who would agree to that. There are definitely desperate and gullible idiots out there. But I don’t think that very many people would trust someone to do something that requires a lot of skill unless many others can vouch for them.

 

 

Maybe in an ideal world, an expert would be defined as someone with a lot of skill who is promoted by word of mouth. This could happen instead of institutions holding the keys to credentials and shutting down career opportunities for smart people who don’t have expensive degrees. Perhaps then, the world would be better for all of us. This may sound ludicrous. But I bet that there are many historical and cultural examples of societies looking at experts in this way. Changing mindsets this much is almost a naive goal, but it might be achievable. All we can do is hope, and explain the subjective nature of expertise when people call us anti-intellectual for criticizing intellectuals. Deconstructing concepts is important for the scientific method. The more that ideas are questioned, the more society benefits as a whole.

 

 

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I’ve been learning a lot about emotions and psychology lately, and it’s made me think about philosophy. All three of these are connected, so it makes sense that the philosophy of cognition has been on my mind.

 

 

There are many perspectives on all aspects of these subjects. What I’ve been thinking about in particular is the T. V. show, True Detective. Season One is one of my favourite shows because it has a lot to do with the philosophies of nihilism and pessimism. Matthew McConaughey and Woodey Harrelson’s acting in it is spectacular, and so is the plot. I also love the skipping back in forth in time. It’s one of those shows that I notice more depth to the more I watch it. I realized the last time I saw it that it seems to have a mythological structure. But that’s an idea for a whole other blog.

 

 

One specific line has been running through my head. Rust, played by Matthew McConaughey, says it. His nihilistic perspective on life is that we’re all living in “a dream inside a locked room.” What I think his elaboration of this means is that we hallucinate our own subjective interpretations of objective reality. Rust also seems to argue that everyone’s perceptions are unique. No one can experience them in the same way as us, no matter how well perceptions are described or measured. So the metaphorical dream is our hallucinated and inaccurate experiences throughout life. The locked room is each of our brains. That’s because even though societal interactions and cultural upbringings influence biology, no one can access our thoughts. Nobody interprets reality in exactly the same way as anyone else. So we’re all kind of having our own independent dreams of life inside the locked rooms of our minds.

 

 

Learning more about psychology helped me understand what “a dream inside a locked room” means. To an extent, our environmental experiences shape our perceptions. However, every person’s interpretation of reality is different. No one can know how anyone else’s thoughts feel. This is partially why our perceptions give us inaccurate information.

 

 

This is why a long time ago, a philosopher named Thomas Nagel wrote a paper about perception. It’s called What it is Like to be a Bat. The conclusion is essentially this: Since we cannot experience the perceptions of any other living creature, no one’s interpretation of any behaviour is entirely correct. This extends to empirical scientific data in general because scientists don’t have more accurate hallucinations of reality than anyone else.

 

 

These types of arguments were used to dismantle classical psychological studies that used methods of behaviourism. This philosophical approach to psychology was popularized by B. F. Skinner from the 1930s to at least the 80s.

 

 

In experiments, behaviourism involved measuring the response to a stimulus, assuming that it gives you useful information. This is related to the misconception of classical science that human brains are reactive rather than predictive.

 

 

A fundamental problem with behaviourism is that people who observe the responses to stimuli are inevitably influenced by their preconceptions. They also miss important data because no human being is perfect. We can’t fully understand how any scientist interprets data because we are incapable of experiencing their thoughts. It’s pretty much impossible to know exactly what the person measuring the behaviour is observing. They could be witnessing the response or the stimulus. But either of these could be reactions to something completely different, or the stimulus behind another response. This is why scientists control for a wide variety of variables in experiments. But even though science helps us learn mountains of valuable information, no scientific observation or study is 100% objectively true.

 

 

In case you were wondering, I don’t actually think that we’re all having dreams inside locked rooms. It’s a fascinating metaphor, but I’m not quite that pessimistic and over-dramatic. However, it makes a lot of valid points and provides interesting food for thought. There are ample mind-boggling aspects of human cognition. Scientists are continuously making progress in putting the pieces of this puzzle together. Pragmatically, our experiences are as real as we can possibly know. But I think that we should always remember this: No one actually knows what is really going on!

 

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Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher, offered a ton of profound wisdom. But like everyone does, he made mistakes. In my opinion, his famous assertion “I think, therefore I am,” is one of them. I’m not even close to the first person to critique this, but I don’t buy it.

 

 

What he said takes the idea that we think for granted. Sure, it’s a reasonable assumption. According to some scientists and philosophers, cognition is what sets us apart from other species. But I’ve heard many theories about what makes humans “special.” None of them seem any more or less plausible than thinking. People have convincingly argued for many different unique ingredients for human evolution. They include language, psychedelic mushroom use, creativity, using tools, and many other skills. Maybe one of them is it. Perhaps all of them are. Or each of them could have played important roles in our development, in wildly varying degrees.

 

 

Do we actually think? Sometimes, dumb questions are important. I write in many of my blogs about how I follow Socrates’ wisdom: I know nothing. I don’t believe in 100% objective truth because our entire species has been wrong before. It’s virtually a guarantee that we will make enormous mistakes countless more times. Scientists used to think that Earth was flat and that there’s only one planet. It also was accepted consensus that black people are inferior and homosexuals are mentally ill, along with plenty of other examples. Slavery is another one, which was widely practiced for the majority of human civilization.

 

 

Physicists have fairly recently written papers with complex calculations that theorize insane propositions. They’re also supported by philosophers, and famous people like Elon Musk. Steven Hawking agrees with one or two of them too. These ideas include the universe being a hologram, a simulation, and that parallel universes co-exist with our own. Some theories involve these “bubble” universes interacting with the only one that scientists are very sure exists.

 

 

All of these crazy theories about the universe aside, neuroscientists HAVE shown the brain lighting up in FMRI scans in reaction to countless things. So along with a lot of other scientific evidence, this can be used to argue that we think. It’s likely that we do.

 

 

However, meditation, psychedelic drug use, and neuropsychological diseases show us the flawed and subjective nature of human perception. Our conscious sense of self can vanish. It can seem like we’re communicating telepathically with magical beings made of love and shifting spectrums of colours, who control the universe. A schizophrenic can think that they are more than one person. People with Capgras Syndrome, or Impostor Syndrome, can mistake close friends and family members for evil doppelganger versions of themselves.

 

 

Also everyone probably has at least slightly different definitions for every word and concept. Thinking has wildly varying meaning for each person. There is no objectively correct way to understand it. I don’t even know what cognition is because I don’t have a decent enough comprehension of neuroscience, psychology, epigenetics, anthropology and philosophy. Do you know what thinking is?

 

 

We invent words attached to concepts and categories that we create. They sure as fuck help us because we could easily still be grunting cave people, without language. But these symbols and their associated meaning don’t actually exist. Pragmatically, we think, but it is technically not something that we do.

 

 

Even if we assume that we think, does this really mean that we exist? This seems like a massive logical jump to me. I could be thinking inside a simulation or a hologram. Or an alien or demon could be controlling me without me knowing it. These possibilities are unlikely. However, they raise the question of whether what my brain is doing is actually thought in that type of scenario. But that’s an idea for a whole other blog.

 

 

It’s possible that existence itself is just an illusion. Other than holograms or simulations, maybe consciousness tricks us into believing that we are real even though we’re inside someone else’s dream. Perhaps consciousness doesn’t exist either. An external force or intelligence, or unconscious nature, could be tricking us into believing in consciousness and existence.

 

 

 

This is all a lot to think about. (Hehehe) I’m certainly not saying that there’s no such thing as thought, or that reality doesn’t exist. Neither am I claiming that the universe is objectively different from the way we believe it is. But whether thought and existence are real are fascinating questions. We may never figure out the answers. But science is always forming a more accurate worldview. Perhaps scientists will eventually find better explanations for complex ideas like cognition and existence. I just enjoy speculating and debating endlessly about them, and my views sometimes change with better information. Just ask anyone who knows me well. Learning is awesome. Even if it’s only an illusion, so is thinking.

 

 

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As I often say, people on polar opposite sides of various issues are often more similar than different. Extremists tend to not be neutral, open-minded, and accepting of the possibility of being wrong. They have unwarranted certainty, oversimplify their positions, and act as if people who disagree with them are delusional idiots.

 

 

In my opinion, anti-intellectuals and elitists demonstrate this principle. This is a subject in which my views have changed through learning and thinking. I used to be very elitist. I thought that science always has the correct answer, it shouldn’t be disputed, and that scientists are smarter than everyone else. I believed that logic and reason were the solutions to every problem.

 

 

Now, I’m certainly not an anti-science person. I believe that the scientific method is the best way to find most answers, and that experts overwhelmingly often know more about their chosen fields than amateurs. I also think that generally, scientists are smarter than the average Joe who rarely bothers to learn and think.

 

 

However, scientists are not special. They’re just as human as everyone else, and they’re not super-geniuses with awe-inspiring intellectual superpowers (with a few obvious exceptions like Stephen Hawking.) They’re just as capable of being wrong and making mistakes as everyone else. In my opinion, the most honest scientists like Lawrence Krauss and Neil Degrasse Tyson admit that no one can be 100% certain about anything. Krauss has talked many times about how he enjoys being wrong because that’s how you learn.

 

 

This goes back to the Socratic method of always asking questions. There’s a story about Socrates being called the wisest man by the Oracle of Delphi. He didn’t believe it, so he sought out the other contenders for the title. He found out that they all claimed to know things that they couldn’t possibly know. Assuming that Socrates actually existed and that there is a grain of truth to this story, since he never wrote anything down, this lead to one of his most famous quotes: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

 

 

Sometimes, elitists have the attitude about science that I used to follow. In my opinion, this is arrogant and unwarranted because it’s always possible that we’re wrong about even the most basic assumptions. This is because, among many other reasons, we don’t know with 100% certainty that our view of reality is correct. We could be living in a simulation, which seems very unlikely, but has been mathematically calculated and theorized by physicists. Also, even the great physicist named Richard Feynman said that no one understands quantum mechanics. According to my amateur understanding, this makes it more possible that reality could be very different than we might think. Quantum mechanics is bizarre and counterintuitive. Particles can be in superposition, which basically means that they can be stationary but  simultaneously moving. They can also be in two places at once, if I understand this correctly. (Though this is a simplified explanation.)

 

 

Like I said, I don’t believe that this all means that we should throw science out the window. That sounds like a terrible idea, and it’s why in my opinion, anti-intellectuals take their occasionally valid criticisms way too far. This is how elitists and anti-intellectuals think the same way. They’re both arrogant about how smart they think they are, and they demonize the other side. Yes, there’s a lot of uncertainty in science, but less so than anywhere else. Yes, science has been wrong in the past, but it still gives us the closest approximations to the truth.

 

 

Anti-intellectuals seem to think that since science doesn’t offer objective truths, even though some scientists claim to have it, this means that it’s all bullshit. This kind of flawed, lazy thinking can easily lead to anti-vaxxers, flat earth proponents, climate change denial, (though the 97% consensus and predictions seem to be smaller and less accurate than some people claim) and all manner of conspiracy theories. These include the moon landings being faked, the goverment dropping “chemtrails” from planes to poison populations, and that 9/11 was a false flag attack. You don’t have to spend much time investigating these claims to find out that they’re at the very least, oversimplified and exaggerated.

 

 

On the other end of the spectrum, elitists appear to believe that science offers objective truths, is always right, and that anti-intellectuals never have valid criticisms. Countering arrogant certainty with arrogant certainty doesn’t lead to productive conversations and learning. It just makes people more entrenched in their positions. Yes, many opinions of anti-intellectuals are dumb. But scientists make mistakes because this is part of human nature, and sometimes, amateurs can have more correct information than experts. Asserting that elitists should control the world is an awful idea in my opinion because no one knows everything, and arrogance can easily lead to flawed thinking. The more you think you have the intellectual high ground, the easier it can be to make enormous avoidable errors.

 

 

Intellectuals in different fields also have agreed-upon assumptions that are incompatible with those in other subjects. Sociology seems to argue against basic principles in biology, and vice versa. Historians don’t appear to examine topics from philosophical and psychological perspectives. This parochial mindset seems to extend to psychology and philosophy too, though to a much lesser extent with the latter. I love philosophy, but in one of my classes, my teacher didn’t want to discuss a different subset of it when I mentioned free will in terms of philosophy of mind. This seemed crazy to me because free will is almost inevitably relevant in that subject. That’s anecdotal, and these are generalizations, but I think that it’s largely true that science is too narrow-focused. In physics, even the so-called theory of everything wouldn’t actually be that. Figuring out the equation for how particles and atoms are organized and interact in the universe would explain very little. It wouldn’t tell you how to fix a car, what shirt to wear on a date, or how to be a good person. Spiros Michalakis, who is a physicist, mentioned this in a Mixed Mental Arts podcast.

 

 

I think that science is phenomenally important. It benefits society in countless ways, and helps us solve ample problems. But it doesn’t answer every question, it may never do so, and it’s crucial to question it instead of taking it as gospel. The good thing about anti-intellectuals is that they cast doubt on science. They take their conclusions too far in my opinion, but arrogance seems harmful, regardless of which ideology it comes from. Scientists are human, so they can be wrong, but they help society a lot more than people who argue that the earth is flat, or other seemingly crazy claims.

 

 

I think that questioning everything is important, which doesn’t mean replacing arrogance about science with arrogance about uncertainty. The more people accept science with a grain of salt, but give less credibility to specious arguments and anti-intellectuals, the more we can all learn from each other. Hopefully, this can help us more easily solve the world’s problems, while getting along with each other enough to avoid unnecessary violence. Maybe this is idealistic, and animosity about ideas can be good because drama helps people learn. But there doesn’t need to be a war between elitists and anti-intellectuals for us to make the world a better place. Perhaps, the more we respectfully talk to people we vehemently disagree with, the more we can reduce cognitive blind spots and transform society.

 

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It’s easy to think that multitasking is a great idea. If you listen to a podcast while making supper, you can get two things done simultaneously, and save time, right? Who wouldn’t want to do that?

 

 

As it turns out, it’s probably a bad idea for everyone. I’m not a neuroscientist, but recent research seems to have shown that multitasking is not even a thing. Our brains are apparently incapable of focusing on 2 tasks at once. So when you’re watching T. V., tweetering, and reading a book, all three of them will suffer. Basically, you end up doing each task less efficiently because your focus gets phenomenally diluted.

 

 

If I understand the science, when you’re doing 2 or more things at once, your brain focuses on whichever task draws your immediate attention. It’s kind of like you adapt to the mindset of only one, as in, “All right; tweetering time.” Your brain mostly ignores the T.V. show and book when you’re looking at your phone, and devotes the majority of your focus to the tweetering. When you read the book, you don’t pay much attention to your phone and the T. V. Then when you look at the T. V., you primarily stop thinking about the book and tweetering.

 

 

However, since you have three things going on simultaneously, you can’t completely ignore all of them. So when you’re tweetering, you’re doing it significantly slower than you would otherwise. That’s because you can’t help but hear the T.V., and think about fragments of the single paragraph you just read before switching tasks. You read the book much less quickly than you are capable of too, for the same reason; distractions.

 

 

Not only do you complete all three tasks more slowly; you do them less efficiently. This makes you sloppy and unproductive. Efficiency requires focus. The deeper into concentration you go, the more productive you can be. This is because you forget distractions, which makes your thinking more fluid.

 

 

Think about it. If you tweeter, then read a paragraph, then watch 2 minutes of a show, you won’t fully grasp any of them. It’s a reinforced negative effect because you’re sloppy, and can’t help being distracted. The result of multitasking is the opposite of what we desire. We do things more slowly, with poorer quality. It’ll take you three times as long to tweeter, you’ll re-read the same sentences of the book over and over, and you’ll miss aspects of the show.

 

 

Other than these consequences, recent Stanford studies found that multitasking reduces grey matter in your brain. I learned this from a fascinating book called Singletasking. I love that term, and I’ve started using it all the time. Singletasking seems to be a waaay better strategy than multitasking.

 

 

Other studies in the U. K. found that multitasking can damage the anterior cingulate cortex in your brain. More research needs to be done to determine whether the harm to these brain components is temporary or permanent. There is debate among scientists about it, even though more recent studies have apparently shown that the damage is irreversible.

 

 

You might be thinking, “What the hell are grey matter and the anterior cingulate cortex?” Great question. Like I said, I’m not a neuroscientist, but this is my amateur understanding: Grey matter and white matter compose the central nervous system. They are made of different ingredients and have separate functions. No brain region does things completely independently of others, and they all contribute to every task. But grey matter aids in processes like making decisions, sensory perception, emotions, memory, controlling our muscles and impulses, and talking. The anterior cingulate cortex helps us regulate our emotions and thoughts, and gives us empathy. Basically, all of these functions are hindered by multitasking. This is because these cognitive components get damaged, and may even shrink.

 

 

Maybe future science will prove these conclusions to be false. But for now, it seems like this common practice is a terrible idea. I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s such easy behaviour to slip into that it’s almost like an addiction. I have to ruthlessly train myself to do one thing at a time.

 

 

People should of course multitask if they want to. But if you desire improving your brain, being more productive, doing better quality work, and enjoying life, you need focus. So don’t tweeter, read a book, and watch T. V. simultaneously. Do one thing at a time. Don’t multitask. Singletask!

 

We all have unwarranted certainty about innumerable things. Critical thinking can help reduce ignorance, and make us less certain, but even learning and pondering can lead us to replace one ideology with another.

This is what happened to me. I was raised as a Christian, and made an unwitting participant in that cult. I accepted this worldview until I was a teenager, particularly because my parents were ministers.

Their parents had more conservative interpretations of their religion. My grandfather on my mom’s side of the family was a minister as well, as was his father. So the strong religious history of my family goes back at least three generations. My parents’ religious views got more moderate, throughout the course of them being practising preachers. Their interpretations of the bible gradually moved from moderately liberal, to radically progressive. This is best demonstrated by the fact that my dad performed a wedding for a lesbian couple. The decision was fully supported by my mom. It happened at the request of a member of their congregation, before same sex marriage was legal here in Canada. This resulted in so much outrage that my parents resigned. I was too young to fully understand the ramifications of this, at the age of around 10, and I was far from questioning religious beliefs.

For most of my childhood, I thought that being Christian was normal. I believed that everyone was that way. I didn’t know that people followed different religions. When I discovered this, I wasn’t reflective enough to ask why this was the case. A long time passed before I thought about why people believe in different gods and holy books. I remember that one time in school, another kid asked me if I was Christian in front of a bunch of others. I had an impulse to not be sure, but I succumbed to peer pressure, and said yes. Another time, one other kid told my brother and I that people who don’t believe in Jesus go to Hell. We had been raised to believe than no one goes there, so we were confused. I think that my brother, even though he was only around 8 years old, asked something like, “What about all the people in other religions, who don’t believe in Jesus? Why are they going to Hell?” We told my parents about this when we got home from school that day. I think that my mom told us to not listen to him, and explained why some people have this opinion.

My parents stopped pursuing their passion because there weren’t other ministry jobs in town, and we didn’t want to move away from all our friends. My mom had also become disabled due to a doctor’s surgery fuck-up, and had to work less and less until she went on permanent disability leave. My dad had to get a handful of shitty jobs that were way beneath his intellectual ability to support his struggling family. He still has to work in a job that has nothing to do with his interests, even though he went to school for 8 years to pursue his passion.

I think that I only liked going to church when I was a kid, and I kept getting dragged there for years after my parents were no longer ministers. I didn’t have any philosophical objections. I just didn’t like getting up early on Sundays, and I was always bored at church, so my mom let me bring books to read during sermons.

I ironically first heard the term, “agnostic” from a pastor. My parents were ministers at the United Church, and after they stopped working there, we started going to the Presbyterian one. My mom still preached sometimes, but she did it for free. The priest at the Presbyterian church, named Irwin, used the word, “agnostic” in a sermon, and I didn’t know what it meant. I asked my mom, and she said that an agnostic is someone who isn’t sure whether god exists or not. My pre-teen brain was dumbfounded by this. “That’s an option?” I thought. At this point, I barely understood that there were religions other than Christianity. I had no idea that not everyone believes in God.

I didn’t think about this much, but I probably gradually became agnostic when I was going to high school. I might have been one before then, without realizing it. This was around the time when my parents stopped making my brother and I go to church. It was helped by the fact that my dad stopped going too, other than on holidays.

I was never a very good student in school, and I was diagnosed with A.D.D., and O.C.D. character traits when I was a child. So I developed a hatred for learning. However, a year or two after high school, when I grew tired of partying, I started learning more than I ever had before. My hatred for knowledge slowly morphed into profound passion. I consider it an addiction of mine today. So without intending to do so, I gradually shifted my emotional context for learning.

This got me interested in atheism, which is in some ways, a logical step after moving from Christian, to philosophically lazy agnostic. Without realizing it, I began replacing one ideology for another, in spite of being smarter than I was before. Atheists make a lot of excellent arguments, particularly the so-called New Atheists, who I was exposed to more than anyone else. I was already an atheist when I began reading their books and watching their debates. I loved how they decimated religious arguments at every turn. Disillusioned by my experience with religion, (even though many people have had exponentially worse experiences than me), I collected arguments that showed religion’s deception and evil. No one claimed that it is 100% bad. However, people like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens convinced me that religion is inherently malicious, and that it causes a hell of a lot more harm than good.

So I became a militant atheist, angrily preaching from my soapbox about the evils and stupidity of fairy tales. I stayed this way until very recently. It took several more years of learning, thinking, and questioning before I considered the possibility that my actions were wrong.

Learning about politics helped lay the ground work for this change. As happens with almost every subject I learn about, doing so with this one made my views more moderate and nuanced. I began rejecting some of my parents’ progressive principles. I was a liberal for a long time when I was completely ignorant about politics. But learning about it from every place on the political spectrum made me see that every political team has merit. I agreed with some conservative and libertarian values, and realized that the problem with any political view is extremism. I now am just as annoyed by the far right as I am by the far left, and extremist libertarians too.

Finding more political nuance helped me see the merit in religious values, as well as libertarian ones such as freedom of speech. This, combined with learning about history, helped me understand that religion might have had a large role in constructing Western societies.

The clincher for changing my opinions further was hearing about the inexorable link between rationality and emotion. Until Bryan Callen and Hunter Maats discussed it on the Mixed Mental Arts podcast, I had no idea that scientists like Jonathan Haidt and David Sloan Wilson had been researching the subject for many years. I learned that for the most part, when we think we are rational, we actually had an intuition first, and reasoned forward from that intuition. I was flabbergasted by this! We might think we’re being super reasonable, but we’re just rationalizing our emotional impulses.

This created cognitive dissonance for me because the New Atheists advocate for overpowering our damaging emotions with strong rationality. They view reason as a holy value, which should always be obeyed more than intuition. I realized that militant atheists replace the Christian god with the god of rationality. They don’t seem to notice or acknowledge that they’re not necessarily more reasonable than fundamentalists. They might just be way better at articulating and rationalizing their intuitions. The militant atheists are extremists too!

This all made me think a lot, and it’s been aided tremendously by extremely smart religious people like Jordan Peterson, the clinical psychologist, and psychology professor at the University of Toronto. He talks at great length about religious archetypes, in the tradition of people like Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell. I don’t agree with all of his conclusions because he seems to value the narratives of Christianity more than other religions. But I always enjoy seeing and hearing him talk about the subject because his views are so fascinating and admirable. He’s a brilliant speaker. To me, his interpretation of Christianity is similar to Buddhism or Stoicism, valuing enlightenment, mindfulness, and the free expression of the individual. This helps bring order to the inevitable chaos and suffering in life.

My thinking on religion has changed drastically throughout my life. I’ve gone from Christian, to agnostic, to atheist, to militant atheist, and back to just an atheist. I don’t think I’m ever going to stop being an atheist, but I’m more open to being proven wrong than I was before. I also try to be more accepting of people, regardless of their beliefs. I don’t need to be militant about my atheism because people disagreeing with me doesn’t make them evil or ignorant. Religion sometimes helps people too. Also, my belief that God doesn’t exist cannot be proven or disproven, so what’s the point in shoving that view down people’s throats? In my opinion, If I am still a fundamentalist in any way now, I only am in terms of nuance and uncertainty. I think that everyone, including me, is both right and wrong about something, no matter who they are, and that anyone could turn out to be completely incorrect. Even the smartest people in the world are probably only right half of the time, and ludicrous claims can always end up being true. I moved from one delusional mindset to another. I think I’m less delusional now. But I always try to remember that I could eventually discover that I’m wrong about half of my opinions. No one has the authority on absolute truth.

I’m not the first person to point this out, but it seems like nuclear weapons are the strongest representation of at least a few important philosophical concepts. They show both humanity’s incredible penchant for destructive power, and our profound desire for innovation.

These ideas are interconnected, especially in terms of atomic and thermonuclear bombs. Innovation can feed the urge to devastate your enemy because the better your advancements are, the greater ability you have to inflict harm. By the same token, when you have a stronger desire to decimate, it can ignite a white hot fire of motivation to improve your technology. We saw this with World War Two and the Cold War, particularly the former. During the latter, weapons advancements improved significantly. But according to my amateur knowledge, they mostly built on technology that already existed. In terms of World War Two, as Joe Rogan likes to say, there was less than 50 years between when the airplane was invented, and when it was used to drop the atomic bomb! That’s insane! To me, it’s evidence of our desire to innovate to a fault, and of how homicidal urges can lead to greater advances.

The time gap between when scientists first split the atom, and when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was even shorter. There is debate on whether Ernest Rutherford first split the atom in 1917, or Enrico Fermi did in 1934. Regardless of who did it first, that means that this time period was only about 20 or 30 years. So 30 years at the most passed between humans splitting the atom, and dropping atomic bombs! This is even more impressive than the gap between inventing airplanes, and using the knowledge of splitting the atom to kill people.

It seems like the urges to conquer and innovate are so powerful that they are evolutionary. Our flawed psychological characteristics appear to make us wary of giving up any influence or territory once it is gained. A lot of that is probably due to overzealous egos, which can be fixed. But it kind of makes sense for people to behave this way in terms of evolution. Anyone who knows anything about the subject seems to agree that xenophobia, or demonizing people outside of your group, is innate. With that in mind, it seems like conquering and killing could serve valuable purposes. That’s because the more land and influence you possess, the greater the chances are of the genes of your tribe spreading. If more people are around who agree with you, it’s easier to promulgate your ideas and values.

The desire to innovate could be evolutionary because we don’t generally stop if we keep making improvements. I’m not a historian, but it appears to be true that we only stop advancing if we hit a development road block. Some projects have been abandoned permanently due to this. Others stalled until the required tools were invented. But I think that if we have adequate resources and knowledge, we keep innovating forever; unless our population gets decimated by natural disasters. Since at least most of the Western world is not necessarily under any urgent threat, can you imagine companies deciding to cease improvement? There are threats like terrorism and climate change, but since they are unlikely to kill you and your entire family tomorrow, they are not the focus of most people. If these problems were even more imminent than they are, the situation would probably be different. Since it isn’t right now, we’re likely going to be needlessly innovating for a while. Weapons, cars, phones, computers, and tons of other things that a lot of people use, are better than they ever need to be. However, they can always improve. Technology can always get faster, easier to use, and applicable to more tasks. Weapons can always get more efficient at killing more bad guys with greater precision, and less effort.

Obviously, there have been further advancements since nuclear bombs, like drones, which are a different philosophical issue in some ways. They’re more of an improvement in precision than damage, but are not to be dismissed. I’m putting them in a separate category because they’re more similar to planes than bombs.

Nuclear weapons are the type that I and countless others find far more terrifying than anything else. I don’t think that magic exists, but bombs and missiles with that much power are the closest thing to my imagination of dark magic. I watched a documentary called Command and Control recently, which is based on a book with the same name. It’s about the fragility of nuclear weapons and power. It’s also about how many times people have gotten phenomenally close to accidentally wiping out entire states, or even small countries. I had no idea that this happened so often! There are so many times that people made simple mistakes, which came terrifyingly close to slaughtering thousands and thousands of people!

In Command and Control, there’s footage of an old atomic bomb test. Just seeing videos like that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Something so tiny falls, vanishes from the frame, and after a brief wait, an enormous fireball erupts. You start to get underwhelmed, but then the fire grows exponentially, more quickly than you can imagine. I don’t have any religious beliefs, but it looks like Hell rising up through the earth, bringing forth an eternal fire to destroy the world. Then, the mushroom cloud expands from the growing fire, shooting up higher, hundreds of feet into the air. The grey smoke rushes outward with a percussive force, assaulting the surroundings with shooting smoke, flames, and ash. I’m sometimes moved to tears when I see the profound carnage that human beings are capable of inflicting on others. If I was a nuclear physicist, or President Truman during World War Two, maybe I wouldn’t see it this way. But to someone with little understanding of the science of nuclear bombs, who isn’t living during global war, this power seems like black magic. I can imagine evil sorcerers casting spells on people, conjuring atomic explosions from the dark realm to torture their enemies.

On the other hand, none of this means that I think the bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were completely unjustified. I get annoyed by the polarizing views that people tend to have on this subject. Like I said, I’m no historian, but it seems like whether the use of the bombs was justified is open to interpretation. I’ve read papers by historians who think that Japan would never have surrendered, even though they were losing the war. Others claim that the Japanese were going to stop fighting, and that the bombs being dropped were unnecessary, malicious acts. But if I understand the situation correctly, the Japanese were unsure about whether they should surrender or not. It makes sense to be so uncertain about that, right?

Even if Japan never would have surrendered, does that justify killing so many innocent people, in horrifying, agonizing ways? It feels like overkill to me, to say the least. Some people who approve of the bomb offer calculations showing the greater numbers of casualties that would have been seen otherwise. That’s because firebombings would probably have occurred, which are arguably even messier than atomic bombs. That might be true. But there’s no way that anyone can know how many people would have been killed without the use of nuclear weapons. Hypotheticals are not facts.

If the Japanese were going to surrender, maybe dropping the bomb was not justified. If this is the case, then perhaps a large reason that nuclear weapons were used was sheer curiosity. They had been tested before, but not in an urban environment, with so many people around. I don’t know how valid this motivation was, but it’s possible. However, I think that there’s a low probability that the bombs were used by the Allies out of an evil desire to slaughter countless people. There are only about a handful of historical figures I know of who appear to have thought that way. I wouldn’t put President Truman, and other leaders of the Allies, into this category. I would only accuse Axis leaders like Hitler and Stalin of having this motivation. We also don’t know what it’s like to be a leader in times of war. I can only imagine the incredible pressure on people who had to make these decisions. It’s even harder to speculate about their thoughts when innocents get lumped in with enemies.

These questions would probably not have been pondered as much if nuclear weapons were never invented. They are the main factor in discussions of how justifiable it is to use them. Whether you think they are a good idea or not, they are undeniably catastrophic. This technology improved so much during the Cold War that apparently, the entire world can be destroyed several times over! It’s amazing and horrifying that we have so much power. I think that it’s always good to contemplate what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were the only times when we subjected people to this devastation. We are always worried about escalating tensions across the world. But I think that nuclear weapons show the consequences of us not resolving our differences. They prove that if things get bad enough, people get slaughtered by dark magic. When there’s enough outrage, innocent people get obliterated and poisoned by demons from the fiery depths of Hell.