Reductionism, Globalization and Faith

Sorry that I've been so down on religion lately, but to be honest, religion has not been showing its best side and so it has deserved a good scolding! In this more positive and helpful contribution to the blogosphere, I'll explore an idea that I hope we can agree on whether we are religious or not...

We must stop fighting each other over how life was created, and start fighting together to stop those destroying it...

The Big Issues: Anyone up for a Game of End-Times Bingo?

I'm an avowed atheist, but apart from occasional lapses, I try to limit my anti-supernatualist "preaching" to light-hearted piss-taking of thick-skinned religious friends.

Wherever we sit within the many spectra of faith systems though, a conscious concern for Sustainable Human Flourishing forces reflection on the positives and negatives of religion… For me this is especially true at times like this when such madness is again on display in places like Cairo and Benghazi - insanity that has reached my adopted home of Belgium and even as far away as my erstwhile secular homeland of Australia. At times like this, I must pause to reflect on the potential for religious extremism to affect those that I love.

I have to say though, that while I consider religiously motivated terrorism to be a real danger, it seems a massively over-hyped threat when compared with two elephants that quietly share a room with today's most popular religions, specifically:

Religion, Fascism, and Norway

Last week, we heard the Norwegian courts sentence their country's worst ever mass murderer. We all know who he is and what he did, and everyone also knows the verdict and sentence. Everyone also has an opinion on it.

It is my opinion, however, that very few of those opinions reflect positively on the potential for Sustainable Human Flourishing. Most, in fact, have left me shaking my head sadly for our poor, oh-so-human race.

Even normally rational secular humanist groups have been seething with old testament "eye for an eye" insanity since the verdict was announced - Comment threads like this one left me feeling very disillusioned and more than a little pissed at my fellow "humanists".

In my funk, I unfairly lashed out at an old high school friend who posted his opinions on his Farcebook wall. This old school mate who I'll call Max (because he approved that I use his real name) also happens to be a pastor at a "Bible Christian" church in my old home town of Perth in Western Australia… As always, Max was gracious and patient with me, and our extended exchange took some interesting twists and turns over the course of almost a week. Despite my many uncharitable anti-theistic barbs, we remain friends, and he has graciously assented to our conversation being re-published here for (potentially) wider scrutiny than it received on our little corner of Farcebook…

Below is the thread as it appeared on Max's wall - apologies in advance from both of us that our logic lacks crispness in parts, but we were both time-stressed and just chatting amongst friends. Apologies also that it is so long - feel free to read it a bit at a time, over the period of a week to recreate the original experience if you wish ;-) I'm publishing it here in this form because I really want to continue exploring some of the issues for myself, and I find that writing stuff down helps. I left Max last right of reply on his wall and promised to stop bombarding his poor parishioners with my religion bashing, but I respond below and re-open the conversation to Max and anyone else who would like to pick up on the many threads we've left dangling…

“Father Christmas is real… in the imaginary world.”

Thanks to Tim Minchin (and daughter Violet) for the title quote which I stumbled upon when looking for some quick and easy festive wishes.

We appear to have just dodged the "Is Father Christmas real" bullet this year, but I feel certain that I will need to use that one next year - Cheers Tim!.

Our efforts to avoid shattering childhood illusions while refusing to lie to our children have been aided this year by the curious tradition of St Nicolas Day. It seems that our 4.5 year old is churning most of his mental cycles trying to decide whether each of the jolly fellows that we see or hear about is St Nic, Santa, Father Christmas, Pere Noël, or just some random bloke with a pillow up his shirt. So far, this seems to be keeping him busy enough to cut off the desire to question their verisimilitude.

I have had some fairly detailed questions about who lives the furthest away though, which I dodged by saying that I honestly don't know because I've never been to any of their houses. Jas has independently managed to narrow the field slightly by observing that it probably isn't St Nic, because he only rides an old donkey, and he always has that black guy walking alongside...

Anyway, it is now after midnight on Christmas eve and my wife will be furious when she finds out that I'm blogging instead of sleeping.

I have to post something though because it has been weeks. We've got Nana visiting and all the usual end of year work and home stuff means that you've all been neglected. I know that any reader who chooses to come here more than once will understand though, so no apologies :-)

So, anyway, what I actually went to Tim's page for was to share this with all you beautiful people:

White Wine in the Sun is the best atheist Christmas carol that I know, and I'm sure it is sending fellow members of the Aussie diaspora teary the world over tonight.

I hope that you all have a wondrous, loving, family day today...

Is there a fractal nature to human failings?

I started to write a reply to CT's very interesting response to my last post, but realised that I had started rambling about sustainable human flourishing again. So I promoted my response to a post where I could unravel the thread a bit more easily. This is the result...

Edit: Before I go any further, some friends complained that I lost them with this post... I suspect that the word "fractal" started their eyes glazing over before they even started, so I'll try set that straight. What is a fractal? Well, to help get the picture (pun intended) here is one of the most famous and beautiful fractals, thanks to the mathematical legend Benoît Mandelbrot (who died late last year - a terrible loss)

The Mandelbrot Set: Click to see zoom sequence (Wikipedia)

Now that sure is beautiful, but why did CT write about human nature being fractal?

The Big Issues: Economics for flourishing Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this post, I gave my thoughts on some of the more widely discussed problems with neoclassical economics, but in this final installment (for now), I will tie this all back onto the theme of this blog - Sustainable Human Flourishing... More specifically, I will try to finish the thought process about just how a system that is so demonstrably damaging to SHF as the Chicago school ideology has become so bloody influential? This side of the story is far less widely discussed, and so I would particularly like to hear from economics insiders...

One of the most detailed yet approachable explorations of this idea that I have found is Naomi Klein's eye-opening book The Shock Doctrine.

The Big Issues: Economics for flourishing Part 2

In part 1 of this post, I threw my hat in with many in the blogosphere who consider neoclassical economics to be a disappointingly unscientific undertaking. For me though, the substantive question is not whether neoclassical economics is a science, but whether we should entrust our collective futures to it?

If we believe (and I admit that this is highly contentious) that one of the most important roles of an economy is to serve human development (or, in other words, to support Sustainable Human Flourishing) then all evidence seems to suggest that Chicago School neoliberalism is simply not fit for purpose.

For this reason, what concerns me even more than the current global economic crisis is the fact that even most honest, reflective economists seem only to want to get things back on the track that they were on before the crisis, refusing to acknowledge that the track itself was unsustainable. As professor Tim Jackson notes in his brilliant "Prosperity Without Growth" report on behalf of the Sustainable Development Commission

The Big Issues: Economics for flourishing Part 1

Update: I originally published these three articles as a single, unreadably long post - To show more respect for my readers, and to try enforce some self-discipline, I have now broken it into separate, and I hope more digestible parts...

I've been struggling for a while to find the right angle to express my Sustainable Human Flourishing-related concerns about Chicago school neoclassical economics - (Note: If those words mean nothing to you, then you should look into it a bit, because this is the school of macroeconomic thought that pretty much runs the world today.)

Noah Smith has saved me from an important part of that struggle with this brilliant post, in which he expresses some very valid concerns on the widely debated topic of whether modern economics is a science (there are some stellar follow-up comments too). I've recently started following Noah because he seems to be a rather clever economics (almost) grad who eloquently expresses many of the same concerns I've heard in various forms from other younger generation economists. Some great quotes from Noah's post include:

A Little Thought Provoker: What's up with all the earthquakes lately?

We seem to hear about some new seismic event almost every other day, and from a quick check of the Web I’m not the only one wondering whether the earth might be falling apart...?

The Google-equipped inquisitive mind finds a figurative tsunami of pages exhorting that recent natural disasters are signs that we are in the "End Times". At time of writing a Google search for "earthquakes, end times" yielded literally millions of results (Well, for me it does anyway)

When pondering Sustainable Human Flourishing, religion of all flavours warrants very serious cogitation, so you can bet that I'll share some thoughts on biblical end times prophecies in later blogs - today though, I want to share an interesting hypothesis that I came across in my search for “the truth” about all those earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc...