ManipuLie’ted
It’s a fine time of year to get ManipuLie’ted.
“ManipuLie’ted aims to highlight a relationship between the way that belief in Santa can direct certain behaviors in the young - by positive reinforcement - and the way that belief in Satan can discourage certain behaviors in the old - through evocation of fear. This simple theme served as the source for the game’s underlying mechanics and visual design. An element of surrealism was also incorporated through the treatment of the player’s shadow as a distinct character with material presence, without which the parallel-worlds core mechanic of ManipuLie’ted’s could not have been achieved.
The player character is intended to represent a very particular time in personal discovery. It relates to coming to terms with the inherent lack of value in Santa’s gifts in comparison to the threats of eternal damnation, and it thus marks the transition from a naive child that actively does well - in order to please - into an early adult that concentrates instead on merely avoiding mistakes - out of raw fear. This fear is further accentuated by an indomitable will toward conceptual self-preservation, as one childhood belief is outgrown and another more serious one is grown into. The player’s character is not suggested to represent of a “fully developed” person during this personal battle, and it is for this reason that the figure is presented at a considerably lower visual fidelity than the other (already simple) elements in the world.
ManipuLie’ted is not a game meant to be played many times for mastery, but rather it is intended to be experienced and understood mostly in one sitting for any given player. It was constructed to fall into the category of games that researcher Ian Bogost refers to as ‘Casual as in fleeting’ instead of ‘Casual as in Casual Friday.’
I hope that you find it enjoyable, or if nothing else, mildly thought-provoking.”
The previous description was used for the Newgrounds.com post of this game. A much shorter description and with a simpler name (”Manipulated”) was used for the Kongregate crowd. As expected, only a fraction of players in either community “get it,” but I’m doing this for them.
And, to be perfectly fair, some of the negative knee-jerk responses were rightfully critical of my not making the shadow collision better communicated in the first version released. It’s incredible how much worse a game can come across due to overlooking one critical word (!).
As an important confession to anyone that reads my journal: yes, the opening description is largely b.s. However, that description serves a very important role in this piece’s delivery: namely, it is the wrong “b.s.”. I threw together this text for two reasons: (1) get a feel for how members from each community would respond to it (negatively, but my data points are also screwed up from my clumsy instructions mistake!) and (2) to obscure the game’s true meaning, similar to why snow fell up in OnTopOfIt.
There are two messages in this game, one embodied in the mechanics (and more obvious), and one laced deeper into its presentation (but potentially more offensive to many):
- Meaning underlying the Mechanics: Don’t be greedy. Greed is a sin, and if the devil is there to serve any purpose, it’s to punish sins. If you play this game without jumping, and instead wait for gifts to reach ground level, you’ll probably fare significantly better. My response to Jay’s question on the game’s difficulty goes into more detail on how this was built into the mechanics. Santa is rewarding patience. When I was a child this aspect of Christmas tradition was stressed as a core value of the holiday.
- Meaning in the Conceptual Presentation: Santa Claus and God are one in the same - thus the complete reflection between hell and the heavens, with the devil on bottom, and Santa God on top. It is my hope that this subtle overlap of concept might hint at questions about the relationship between the two ideas. Both are elaborate and ethereal beliefs that drive behavior using an opposite method than the devil (ex. rewarding patience instead of punishing greed). One of my fundamental positions as an Atheist is that any reason to believe in God is equally a reason to believe in Santa Claus (”faith”), and any foundation of doubt in Santa Claus is also a foundation of doubt toward God (”where, exactly, is Heaven/North Pole?” or “this looks suspiciously like one big story that someone dreamed up to get people to act nice to each other”).
To that last point - and this is the final meta-purpose illustrated by this game and its massive b.s. description - Christmas is the ultimate wrong b.s. misdirection, and acts as an outlet preventing a naturally curious and intelligent child’s doubts from getting into the equally absurd beliefs of Christianity. At some age, our parents confess that Santa Claus isn’t real; when our parents fail to admit - and they may not recognize this either if their parents didn’t - that the God concept enables the same fiction-driven good behavior to continue uninterrupted, the idea’s perceived validity is reinforced. As children we focused so much of our doubt on the wrong layer of b.s., at the end of which, we were confirmed right about our doubts in Santa. We’re told, as our parents were told by their parents before us and so on for generations, that Christmas isn’t really about Santa at all. It’s about “Jesus”.
The God concept is a fancied up Santa Claus story believed by a considerable fraction of the world’s adults. The latter fiction merely acts as a red herring to distract doubts from the former.
And why is it unhealthy for people to grow up never realizing that their beliefs are founded in fantasy? For the very same reason that it’s unhealthy for people to grow up still believing in Santa Claus. It’s time we stop giving Santa Claus credit and instead turn our appreciation to our family and friends for the good they do. It’s time for civilized people to stop being fooled by the empty milk and half-eaten cookies evidence that religious charity work is accomplishing around the world (to be certain, these are acts of people, not “acts of god”), appreciate considerate people for the progressive work that they do (”miracles of science” are also thanks to the hard work of people, many of whom are Atheists), and start doing things for the right reasons instead of simply dodging imaginary pitchforks from “below” to get imaginary rewards from “above”.
On a side note, Hell hasn’t made sense as “down”, since educated humanity accepted that the world was round.
Of course, where the parallel breaks down is that belief in Santa Claus doesn’t yield special tax breaks, political/military recognition, righteous attitudes towards the systematic slaughter of non-human animals, social conformity, international turmoil, fantasy-as-possible-fact in public school science education, ammunition against homosexuals / minorities / foreigners / intellectuals, nonsensical and incoherent ways of thinking about the world (”Why believe in God?” - “Because someone had to create everything.” - “And what then created God?”), energy wasted on wishing instead of driving change (praying “Dear Santa…”) …
Or does it?
December 20th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
The fact that there is collision detection on the bottom half didn’t occur to me at first (I like to play your games before I read about them). Grabbing things on the top and avoiding things on the bottom at the same time is REALLY hard! But of course that’s what you’re going for right? It’s an interesting game design idea that every action you take toward winning also has an effect toward losing.
December 20th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
“The fact that there is collision detection on the bottom half didn’t occur to me at first (I like to play your games before I read about them).”
Good call. This was a major problem in the initial release. I’m so used to designing games in abstract space lately that I take for granted that things will need to be figured out on the fly - but with a Literal game, players are using their visual clues to set expectations. What I saw as a “White above ground character” and an inverted “Black below ground character”, in two distinct-but-worlds, I think many mistook for a strangely done shadow plus faulty hit detection killing them when they tried to jump over pitchforks with their “White” character.
The instructions used to read, “Avoid the pitchforks.” It now says, “Shadow dodge the pitchforks,” and I think the game is much more likely to be fully enjoyed (first and foremost, understood at a mechanics level) by someone with this new description.
“Grabbing things on the top and avoiding things on the bottom at the same time is REALLY hard! But of course that’s what you’re going for right?”
Nope. It’s really not so hard. Being greedy is hard, but Christmas isn’t about being greedy. If instead of jumping after gifts you wait for them to reach ground level, I think you’ll find that the game is considerably easier to play. This is a deliberate but emergent byproduct of the fact that (A.) you can’t change course mid-air (B.) you can move much faster while on the ground (C.) pitchforks vanish when they hit the ground, so they can’t turn fast enough when near the ground to chase you (and D.) gifts fall slower, so there’s a larger window of time when you can streak past them at ground level to snatch them up.
The devil’s weapon was specifically conceived to punish greed - greed being one of the seven deadly sins.
Thanks for playing, and for the helpful feedback! What you were able to articulate as “The fact that there is collision detection on the bottom half didn’t occur to me at first” came across from at least a few Kongregate players as “this is stupid, fix your hitboxes.”
;)
December 21st, 2007 at 11:23 pm
I’m glad I had the opportunity to work out the shadow-element myself. Though I died a few times in trying to understand the mechanics (initially theorising forks killed me when on the ground, then thinking maybe in a reversal of expectations you’d made the presents deadly and the pitchforks worth points, before twigging), that was the most pleasurable part of the game for me.
I did recognise the theme of duality of course (wonderful character design btw) but never considered Satan as anything other than a generic ‘villain’ - the religious overtones didn’t occur.
As an aside, equating a theory that can’t be proved/disproved with the lie/pretence regarding santa seems a bit closed minded. But that’s a seperate issue.
One thing I want to bring up is the theme of greed. The points system suggests that the goal is to grab presents and if we aim for a high score, we’re still being greedy to some extent.
That notion aside, the game just doesn’t seem to suggest the conclusion you want it to. Jumping is so obviously to our detriment (once we realise the mechanics) that there’s nothing ‘tempting’ us into greed. It just seems such an obvious choice to make that I never even saw the question of being greedy or not. I just saw it as a question of how to survive the pitchforks and eventually found a solution.
Maybe if there were finite presents or a negligible bonus for being ‘greedy’, it might work better? Seems to me that if you want a game to argue against something, the ideal play pattern would be to start following the vice, come to a realisation that the opposite is better, then do the ‘correct’ thing.
Maybe I’m just undervaluing the amount of subconscious influence this has.
Another note - the 2nd choice moment for me was when I finally realised the strategy that allowed me to get a 3k score. At this point, I realised I could probably survive indefinitely but saw no value in doing so. Is an intrinsic ‘moral’ then that a vapid life without unexpected variations, is worthless? That we should seek challenge even at the risk of our own life?
I did then try to have some fun jumping over forks, though the game isn’t that well set up to make this enjoyable.
I understand that the score is purely to pretend to encourage ‘greed’ but the fact that the game seems to deliberately have a moment where gained knowledge makes survival trivial reminded me that we should stop playing games when all that remains are fake rewards and a hollow, empty feeling.
December 22nd, 2007 at 2:16 pm
With regard to figuring out the shadow, one of the other potential solutions to the confusion might have been to leave out instructions altogether. When there are no instructions, a player is more willing to probe and test to learn about the game; when instructions are there, there’s likely a temptation to believe that there’s nothing more to know about it. What I can say for sure is that the way I initially released it was perhaps a mix of the worst aspects from both options.
I do not see the Santa-God comparison as a closed-minded one; rather, and with all due respect (!), I believe that the accusation of closed-mindedness at my suggesting the idea is itself part of a larger pattern in civilization-wide behavior that closes good minds off from perfectly legitimate points. All I intended to do here was suggest an additional perspective for consideration, not to prevent anyone else from sharing views of their own. As Austin Cline writes:
“More common is to call atheism ‘intolerant’ when atheists criticize religious and theistic beliefs. People are upset that atheists don’t treat religion with the sort of respect, deference, and honor which religious believers do. Robert Wright, for example, claims that we shouldn’t say bad things about religion. Nicholas Kristof says that atheists are ‘mean’ and ‘intolerant’ for having the gall to say that there is no good reason for theism and that religion is harmful.
Instead of saying such mean and intolerant things, atheists are supposed to be respectful of and deferential towards religion, exactly what religious believers want and exactly what would give the impression that religion and theism are inherently good, positive, and worthy of belief. This means that people want to completely undercut atheists’ critiques by portraying them as inherently unreasonable.”
Independent of the accuracy of my statement (an exercise left to the reader), how does my making a proposition mark me as close-minded? If there is a disagreement with a suggested argument, I should think that a counter-argument might be appropriate, rather than applying a judgmental label to me for my willingness to state a factor in my position clearly and openly. In either case, you’re right that this isn’t really the focus here, and no hard feelings either way I hope.
“Seems to me that if you want a game to argue against something, the ideal play pattern would be to start following the vice, come to a realisation that the opposite is better, then do the ‘correct’ thing. Maybe I’m just undervaluing the amount of subconscious influence this has.”
Nah, I think you just saw through the mechanics faster than most players do. Your healthy tendency to step back from the situation and rethink behavior, the same kind of mental process that LaserLock emphasizes, and your tendency to second guess mechanics (why you picked up on the shadow while so many others got frustrated), together make you a different type of player to communicate with. In other words, I think that the “Ah-ha!” moment that occurs to some players after failing many rounds while trying to jump for gifts came too early and too easily for you, causing it to miss its mark.
“At this point, I realised I could probably survive indefinitely but saw no value in doing so. Is an intrinsic ‘moral’ then that a vapid life without unexpected variations, is worthless? That we should seek challenge even at the risk of our own life?”
This goes back to the earlier question in your post as to why gifts are worth points. As is the case for many of the games I make here, the points are meaningless, and thus so are the gifts. While I might not suggest seeking challenge at the risk of our own life, I am certainly a strong advocate of the idea that living life for the sole purpose of pleasing some concept of external reward (Santa/God/school/economy/other) while avoiding trouble with external punishment (Devil/police/socially) is itself not a sufficiently fulfilling life.
In other words: because I have been a goody two shoes my entire life - I never had the same struggle many of my peers did with “doing the right thing” or “staying out of trouble” - I figured out the personal strategy that allowed me to “get a 3k score… [to] survive indefinitely”, I found that the external reward game was not a sufficiently challenging, compelling, or otherwise meaningful way for me to live my life. In response to this realization, I moved on to other challenging “games”, such as:
“…gained knowledge makes survival trivial…”
I strongly suspect that such knowledge exists in the real world, too. I theorize that some tiny fraction of people have it in their lives (most by fortuitous circumstances outside their own control), most people are missing such knowledge and wind up either woefully unhappy or constantly scrambling, and there does not appear to be much in the way of solid understanding or communication about it inbetween.
“…reminded me that we should stop playing games when all that remains are fake rewards and a hollow, empty feeling.”
Which is why it’s so important to me that I find ways to develop games (or interactive software under some other word) that are about more than fake rewards, so that they don’t leave people with a hollow, empty feeling. In fact, I should very much like to help lead people (myself included) to the discovery of certain knowledge that, when gained, makes actual survival more trivial.
As one final note, since religion is already an open topic within this entry: the earlier comment “…when instructions are there, there’s likely a temptation to believe that there’s nothing more to know about it” is, in large part, my philosophical objection to people living their lives according to written “instruction” scripture, be that the Bible or otherwise.
Thanks, as always, for the feedback!
December 23rd, 2007 at 5:17 am
My accusations of you being ‘closed minded’ weren’t so much to do with you making accusations on a large subset of religions - more that you compared Santa and god as equal lies as if this were a self-evident fact. Your tone - to me - seemed to be closing rather than opening discussion.
I assume that wasn’t intentional so sorry.
I agree that both beliefs are likely to have - originally - originated from our ancestors’ minds and that both theories are actively supported by a % of families when raising children. However, the largest difference is that the presence of a fat man delivering presents to a large number of children can be disproven simply by the fact that the presents would cease if their parents didn’t give them. The presence (or absence) of God, on the other hand, can never be conclusively shown to be true or false.
I felt your words presupposed the absence of any god and it was this that I felt closed-minded.
It is a powerfully shown metaphor and so I applaud you for that. And I suppose that conversations need opinions as well as questions. So good job on putting forward yours.
I personally feel though, that devout belief in the absence of anything is a question of faith just as any religion is - life requires faith even if it’s only in our senses. How many beliefs arose because of those senses, only to be shown wrong?
Some place religion and science on two polar ends of a spectrum - to my mind, those ends should be faith and science. Sometimes a little faith, whether in the supernatural or in humanity, can be necessary to operate.
“Feeling a little ManipuLie’ted? At least you’re (probably) not stuck with a first name that means “Christ Bearer.””
Santa Claus is apparently an Americanism - the original English name being ‘Father Christmas’. If Santa has that meaning, interesting that it should be applied after his genesis.
December 23rd, 2007 at 2:39 pm
“…the presence of a fat man delivering presents to a large number of children can be disproven simply by the fact that the presents would cease if their parents didn’t give them. The presence (or absence) of God, on the other hand, can never be conclusively shown to be true or false.”
To the same degree, and no less. This is precisely my point. The presents would cease if their parents didn’t give them, yes, and every claimed worldly promise of Christianity would vanish if the distributed organization of religion stopped doing charity work, giving shelter to people in need, putting Christmas trees in public, pushing to get the 10 commandments placed in courtrooms, wanting nativity scenes in front of schools/businesses, teaching children Christmas songs in elementary school, and otherwise fabricating evidence by “putting gifts under the tree.” This is what I was referring to in my previous comment with regard to “being fooled by the empty milk and half-eaten cookies evidence.”
I must stress that it is certainly not my intent to discourage people from doing nice things; rather, it is my hope that people might one day do nice things for one another from genuine compassion, rather than from fear of (perceived) torturous hellfire or the (claimed) incentive of intricate, imaginary dreamworlds after the biological heart, mind, and body cease to function.
When someone does “good” (charity, help, community kindness) only because they believe (1) that a genie will offer them magical wishes for doing so, and (2) that a fire-breathing dragon will harm them unless they do so, to my mind that isn’t charity or goodwill at all. It is an assault on the capacity that an adult has for reason, and turns a natural puppeteer into a marionette. It is a dangerous disconnect from reality, and one that can be easily abused by overloading the word “good” to justify any behavior as righteous: exterminating, torturing, and otherwise imposing will.
That the number of Christians in the world today is an outgrowth of periods of history including the torture of non-Christians into “repentance”, the public burning of outspoken “heretics”, the silencing of efforts by scientific/philosophical genius to aid humanity, and the outright extermination/subjugation of populations that led non-Christian lives (crusades; or, in case the “act of God” that is Smallpox didn’t kill enough Native Americans on my continent, enslaving and slaughtering most of the rest is what Christianized America). Christianity spread beyond the reach of competing beliefs in no part because it was either “good” or “truthful”, but rather because out of almost any world belief it has been historically among the most willing to maim, torture, and kill in asserting its collective will.
My position - and in fact the position of most Atheists that I have met - is perhaps better described as Celestial Teapotist. This is in reference to Bertrand Russell’s Celestial Teapot, a metaphor used to draw attention to the Argument from Ignorance fallacy. In short, I give equal weight to the possibility that God exists as I do that there’s a giant china teapot (yet barely too small for current telescopes) orbiting the Sun - which is to say, I have every reason to suspect that this humorous contrivance is a byproduct of the human imagination, much like Flying Spaghetti Monster, and it would be equally silly for me to live my life according to that teapot, God, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
In other words, someone’s inability to expressly “disprove” that the Easter Bunny is hiding somewhere does not, in any sense, validate belief in the Easter Bunny. Or the Tooth Fairy. Or Unicorns. Or Dracula. Or Santa. Or God.
(I have had Christians interpret the argument I just presented as a valid reason to maybe give weight to the possibility that the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Unicorns, Dracula, and Santa actually exist someplace. I find this response hopelessly infuriating.)
God as a substantive entity can very easily be reasoned to be a nonsensical construction that is logically inconsistent with a rational understanding of the world. God used to have a home: the heavens; that home used to have a place: up in the sky. Likewise for the devil in hell and “below”. When the world became round, up became space, and the earth’s core became high pressure magma, these myths survived by claiming that the orbitting teapot is a little bit smaller, inventing a new claim that neither heaven nor hell are physical places. Of course, this method of adaptation continues on well outside of astronomy. When biological sciences identified that this notion of God wasn’t needed to explain the root causes or variation of life on earth, Kansas school boards began requiring “Intelligent Design” be taught in public schools with equal time share to the “possibility” of evolution.
But rather than second guess the underlying sources of religious beliefs (”maybe there’s no teapot after all?”), every time someone builds a better telescope Christians just claim that their teapot is a little bit smaller (or worse, deny historical evidence and claim “it has always been that small”).
A few other easily seen logical inconsistencies:
“I personally feel though, that devout belief in the absence of anything is a question of faith just as any religion is - life requires faith even if it’s only in our senses. How many beliefs arose because of those senses, only to be shown wrong?”
Nothing in modern science or philosophy presupposes first-order significance to the senses. Much of the work from both fields is built around challenging our natural/cultural assumptions about how things work. All aspects of both fields are entirely open to further development, questioning, adaptation, correction, and rethinking, in a way that religion expressly excludes [links to a Douglas Adams speech at Cambridge].
“Sometimes a little faith, whether in the supernatural or in humanity, can be necessary to operate.”
How is faith in humanity an appropriate comparison to faith in the supernatural? “Faith” to me explicitly indicates “without supporting evidence”, but I assume the word is being used here in a manner close to “belief”. Among the two vaguely similar concepts that belief can refer to, (A) “I think this exists” and (B) “I trust in this”, A is empirically necessary toward people, B is optional toward people, A is empirically unsound toward religious myth (Thor no less than God), and B toward religion is the aspect that many choose but I openly discourage.
And on what grounds is faith in either of these necessary to operate? Most living things, mostly non-human but including some rather stubbornly determined humans, operate just fine from birth to death without faith in anything.
“Santa Claus is apparently an Americanism - the original English name being ‘Father Christmas’.”
Interesting! Thanks for sharing this tidbit. :)
I realize that I can come across as rather matter-of-fact, and that this raises defensiveness which could potentially disrupt my primary intent, which is to communicate. However my absolute and unwavering certainty that religion goes well beyond an annoyance into the realm of dangerous, unsound, and insane influences on global human behavior is an important and inseparable part of what I wish to communite. I don’t “wonder” if this might be the case, this isn’t something I heard someone else talk about, and this isn’t what the parents I was born from believed; after many years of digging into science, history, philosophy, religions, and global culture, and after much deliberation and analysis, I escaped Christianity, and from the outside looking in the intellectual destruction wrecked by religion is nothing short of phenomenal. Unforgivable, even.
Perhaps it may help to consider my personal background in the greater context of how religion is treated as “fact” by my nation’s politicians and by the overwhelming majority of people that I grew up alongside. I was raised on the border of Kansas (the “Intelligent Design” state…), I’ve seen otherwise “good” people endorse horrible international abominations on religious grounds, and I routinely face of overhear biblical passage “counter-arguments” against political positions and scientific understanding.
This isn’t abstract philosophy to me, this is the world that I live in. TV my mother watches claims the world may be flat (an inversion of Celestial Teapot reasoning, using the Argument from Ignorance fallacy as a core foundation for knowledge), and that nothing predates Christianity, while serious presidential candidates get uproarious applause for outwardly claiming evolution is ridiculous. At a national and personal level, when things go wrong here, many people pray, instead of thinking about how their actions, reactions, and inaction may play a role in fueling the problems that plague the world.
If science and reason are food, religion provides a wide variety of drugs. The former leads to advances in irrigation, while the latter leads to more fervent rain dances. The former can be used to alleviate systematic problems, while the latter is used to help people feel like their problems are alleviated (but aren’t), or will be alleviated automatically (but won’t).
In a short but brilliant ted.com presentation by Richard Dawkins, Dawkins points out that due to the direct correlation between intelligence and Atheism, and the inverse correlation between Atheism and a voter’s willingness to consider that candidate, it’s nearly impossible for a political leader in this country to be at once intelligent and honest. By speaking out about Atheism, I open myself up to serious risk in terms of my personal, professional, or political life in most parts of the United States.
What I say must reflect what I believe (I aim to be both intelligent and honest, disqualifying me as a United States politician [re-link to Dawkins video]), what I believe is rooted in evidence and ethics. I can neither let myself pretend there is any sound justification to believe in a massive space teapot, nor can I let myself sit by the sidelines quietly while this pattern of self-paralysis (”everything will take care of itself”), self-delusion (”the universe was built for use by us”), self-slavery (”I must live according to 2000+ year old ideas”), self-blame (”we’re all sinners”), self-centeredness (”everyone outside our cult is crazy and untrustworthy”), self-denial (”only devils eat from the Tree of Knowledge”), and selfishness (”I want to be in heaven”) goes on behind claims associated with a particular type of teapot.
I am of the conclusion that living as if the Teapot or God are there is fundamentally preposterous. When I am uncertain of something, I speak with uncertainty. I have zero uncertainty about the illegitimacy or danger of Christianity. After personal investigation into several other major world religions I am comfortable extending those concerns to include other religions, even though few of the others appear to be so fundamentally destructive to human reason as Christianity.
I am neither neutral nor uncertain on matters of reason, and I think I would be doing a disservice to those around me to speak or behave in a way that leaves any room for subjective, unfounded feeling to be confused with objective, empirical reality. One side can be wrong.
January 5th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
To be honest, I was never trying to argue for Christianity or any other organised religion - just for the possibility of something beyond what scientific evidence may suggest - whether that is a guiding force, a radical shift in someone’s future behaviour, a celestial teapot or the notion of free will.
I completely agree - when evidence strongly weighs on one side rather than the other, it seems foolish to treat both with equal merit. Whilst our senses can be decieved, for the most part it seems prudent to treat them as infallible, simply taking it as a given that whatever we see/touch/etc. is true. However, the shortcomings of our senses should be kept in mind at times - our mind can fool us as can specific inputs, so to speak.
In the same way, no data, experiments or such are perfect. I believe that anything is possible and whether that possibility’s 1×10^-9999999999999999999999999 or 1×10^-99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999, it still exists.
I can understand that in a country where it was suggested that faith or wild hypotheses be taught in classrooms, you’d be eager to show the fallacies in Christianity. However, when I speak of ‘god’ I refer not to any deity as imagined in any religion I know - rather the possibility that there be some near omnipotent being with sentience. Whether it would give a fig about our wellfare, whether it would bother to use any of that power, whether it can even communicate with us or knows of our existence etc. is entirely open to debate.
Given a person who has followed one path their entire life, or whose life has been steadily diverting in one direction, the data would suggest that trends will continue. But chaos can ensue, or else stock markets would be predictable.
It is entirely possible that the person can change their life - far more so than the entirety of the Bible being true of course - but the chance would appear to be less than 50%.
When it is ourselves or a close friend, hope and faith in what is statistically improbable can help that become reality.
The faith that what we do will have a difference. Faith that people can change. Faith that this life actually matters at all.
My basic point is that sometimes faith can benefit us. We’re not robots - we can’t optimise all our behaviour. We need reasons for our goals. We need emotional attachment to life and faith that it can change.
Actually, my real point is that everything has a possibility, however small, and we should remember that.
The probability of Santa actually existing , all parents having false memories (it was actually Santa, not them, that gave the gifts) a disturbance in the established laws of physics to allow the gift-giving etc etc. is yet more infinitesmal than one of the depictions of a god actually being correct. Both are almost certainly untrue, but surely you must agree, that for the ‘celestial teapot’ theory to hold for Santa, there’s a lot of false memories alive and a lot of ‘lies to our senses’ we need to suspend disbelief for.
You must agree that Santaism is a much more flimsy religion than Christianity or any other monotheistic religion, even if we are
I agree that in school, the more supported theses should be taught - certainly not the Bible by any means, as creationists seemed to hope for a while back. However, I think that hope or ‘faith’ in a few improbable or near-impossible things can help our own mind.
Frankly, it can be a crutch, yes.
Actually, this whole post is just my pedantic side coming to the fore and I do regret that part of me still exists. Maybe I should apologies for all 3 posts.
Regarding the explanation of ‘empty milk and half-eaten cookies evidence’, I didn’t realise that anyone was using the aid of Christian groups as an argument for God.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:17 am
[Although written as a direct reply to the above, I wish to stress that the following message isn’t targeted “at” anyone. For the purpose of future visitors coming across this page, I wanted to leave my thoughts regarding the questions that Bez has stated in his reply. This is typed as a blog comment - not as a book - and as such it has not received thorough editing, so as a whole it’s organized only in the order of questions received, and it may contain a few ideas stated in their briefest form for sake of time. If further questions arise, I recommend Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell [entirely online! free!], The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, or at least browsing (really) Ausin Cline’s about.com sections on Atheism; I see no utility in re-explaining what these previous writers have already done a fine job of explaining in detail.]
“To be honest, I was never trying to argue for Christianity or any other organised religion - just for the possibility of something beyond what scientific evidence may suggest…”
The possibility of something beyond what we currently know is precisely what science allows for, which is entirely contrary to what religion is about in trying to provide concrete answers to what isn’t known. When an atheist doesn’t know something, the answer is, “I don’t know,” or, “My best guess, based on the evidence, is…”, but when a religious person doesn’t know something, the answer turns into something absurd such as, “I’ll know after I die,” or “Because God made it so.”
“However, the shortcomings of our senses should be kept in mind at times - our mind can fool us as can specific inputs, so to speak.”
Again, science of all varieties does not give first order trust to our senses. When science in general was still in that state (as modern “Christian Scientists” are), it was thousands of years ago, still classified as philosophy, and involved “theories” of motion such as “all objects naturally come to a rest.” My senses suggest that the Earth is flat, clouds don’t look like they should float, and cars are magical. An animal’s senses were a successful evolutionary trait because they were sufficient to aid in avoiding common threats and leading myself to nourishment; past that, they aren’t particularly trustworthy, and that’s why science employs a tremendous amount of instrumentation, independent verification, cross-analysis, statistics, and so on.
“However, when I speak of ‘god’ I refer not to any deity as imagined in any religion I know - rather the possibility that there be some near omnipotent being with sentience.”
That’s based heavily on assumptions surrounding the Christian conception of God. That in turn an adaptation of the God Jewish people believed in, before that Zeus/Thor, before that it was the Sun that people worshipped. It is an idea which is out of touch with many, if not most, other religious belief systems out there, except insofar as most uncivilized societies had a way of imagining their gods to look a lot like them (but some chose cats, elephants, elements of nature, etc.). Zooming out to a vague version of something that has its roots in something very concrete does not afford it any extra degree of legitimacy, any more than me claiming “Santa Claus is real, but he isn’t exactly what people think; also he lives in Syberia, not the North Pole.”
“Whether it would give a fig about our wellfare, whether it would bother to use any of that power, whether it can even communicate with us or knows of our existence etc. is entirely open to debate.”
Not in any respectable meaning of the word. Not unless there’s something there to give a fig about welfare, bother to use any power (what power?), communicate, or know of something. Is it up for debate whether the bright red unicorn standing behind you wants to play chess? Questions about a thing’s properties are nonsense unless there’s a thing itself. Is it up for debate whether my twin is responsible for starting the God myth? I don’t have a twin. That’s my point. Null-pointer exception.
“It is entirely possible that the person can change their life - far more so than the entirety of the Bible being true of course - but the chance would appear to be less than 50%.”
This is a misuse of probability. If we choose to include dogs, fish, birds, ants, trees, and tribal people in the statistics, the number of living things that don’t believe in god outrageously overwhelms the number of living things that do. A lot of people don’t change, but a lot of monkeys also throw dung, and a lot of dogs chew on it. The sheer fact that there are arbitrary or unwise things happening on earth does not justify you, I, or anyone else participating in them.
“The faith that what we do will have a difference. Faith that people can change. Faith that this life actually matters at all.”
Agreed! I want people to put their trust in themselves and in each other, instead of going home each night and giving their attention and hopes to an imaginary friend, the lack of which will leave them sorely disappointed when all is said and done. Note that I am once again using the word trust, since faith (like many religious or political words) has multiple meanings that confuses how people talk about it; I trust people, and I believe with high certainty that people exist - neither of which involves “faith” as it’s used when someone says, “You have to have faith that God is there”.
“My basic point is that sometimes faith can benefit us. We’re not robots - we can’t optimise all our behaviour. We need reasons for our goals. We need emotional attachment to life and faith that it can change.”
“Sometimes” is not a very convincing argument for something that has done so much to enslave, slaughter, confuse, silence, torture, and otherwise hold the world back from some of its most intelligent would-be contributors, and from reaching global compromises or at least speaking the same language about the same things and being able to appreciate differences in values. Sometimes turning the steering wheel in my car to the right helps me get someplace, but that in itself isn’t a reason to lock it in that position, pretending it’s the only thing a car is capable of. And once again, trust/”faith” in people has absolutely nothing to do with any superstitious myths, just like respectable and law-abiding behavior.
I optimize many of my behaviors. I am not a robot. How is that seen as something that “can’t” be done?
And your last two sentences are implying that Atheists cannot have reasons for goals. I plainly have goals, and reasons for them, and if I may say so, I’ve done much more with my life toward reaching them than most religious people that I know - I’m not trusting in something besides myself to do the work that I decided to do. Einstein: Goals. Andrew Carnegie: Goals. Aldous Huxley: Goals. Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Bertrand Russell, Voltaire, Galileo Galilei, George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx (love’em or hate’em), George Orwell, Robert A. Heinlen, Vincent Van Gogh, Thomas Edison - had very lofty goals and reasons for them.
Religion tells people what their goal is, and what their reason is for having that goal. I’m unconvinced based on my experiences with religious people that enough of them buy into that goal or those reasons, except to say their reason of not wanting to wind up in Hell, and it’s a very sad state of affairs to find adults unwilling to think about certain topics for fear that the monster under their bed may come up to eat them.
“Actually, my real point is that everything has a possibility, however small, and we should remember that.”
I’m not denying that. In fact, lets run with that. Everything might be true. Why not Hinduism? Or Buddhism? Or perhaps some traditional Mayan beliefs? I’m not sure how things are on your side of the pond, but in major parts of the US, there’s a dangerous assumption in the air that all religions are kind of like Christianity, albeit with a different word for “Hell”, a different character for “the Devil”, a different set of “10 Commandments”, and so on. This is of course offensive rubbish, with there being tremendous incompatibilities between multiple major and non-major world religions. They cannot meaningfully be simultaneously all regarded as true - it’s a uselessly inconsistent picture of the world; I can say from experience that they can all very well be regarded as false, and it leads in time to a more consistent view of the world than any religious belief can afford, since it doesn’t require ignoring events and circumstances in the world that don’t align with fiction from thousands of years ago.
Also, as a reminder, the difference between a “major” and “non-major” world religion: a “major” world religion is one that converted more people, or made substantially more babies. In the case of Christianity, for a long time it was among the most effective in “converting” so many people because it openly threatened, stoned, beheaded, and otherwise executed people or entire civilizations that disagreed with it. I’d particularly like to emphasize that such a trend in history would have driven entire family lines to believe in literally any garbage one might dream up, which I say with full certainty because it’s difficult to conceive of stories and claims less in touch with reality than those of Christian doctrine.
The difference between a cult and a religion are the number of participants. Number of participants, in the case of Christianity, was grown through unspeakable violence, and in peacetime, by psychological threat of hellfire, and when all else fails, by social threat of being shunned and silently exiled just short of being physically removed from the community. There is nothing holy in this highly contagious virus of the imagination.
“The probability of Santa actually existing , all parents having false memories (it was actually Santa, not them, that gave the gifts) a disturbance in the established laws of physics to allow the gift-giving etc etc. is yet more infinitesmal than one of the depictions of a god actually being correct.”
You have said nothing to support that claim. Both appear quite plainly to me as concoctions of human imagination, and nothing more. In fact, there are substantially more claims involved in the depictions of god than there are with Santa, which is to say that there’s an even larger pile of misunderstandings wrapped up in the god delusion. But the religious mind has grown and developed throughout childhood to imagine the universe in such a broken, illogical manner as to ignore the gross inconsistencies: where is God, where do monkeys go when they die, how does being in heaven “work”, why is the entire foundation of nature one of suffering, how does it make any sense that the human sacrifice of Jesus was of any real loss for god if Jesus is “still alive” (and why does an omnipotent anything need to ceremonially inflict pain upon anyone to accomplish anything?).
What would happen if all religious people outgrew their religion tomorrow - would God come down and lay waste to the Earth, or do nothing at all and relegate history hereafter to be a one-way trip into Hell? At what threshold, or under what circumstance, does a religious person imagine any of these beliefs would come into practical relevance?
I once asked a Christian if they would abandon their religion if the animal deity of another faith came to earth, walked into their room, calmly and rationally explained that Christianity is absurd, blah blah blah, this other religious is the real deal, look I’ll prove it by performing a small magic spell (”miracle”, Christians call it), then flew away into the night sky. Of course they’d still be Christian, I was told - they’d just figure it was God testing them.
It works precisely because it’s nonsense. It trains the mind into accepting things without a second thought that not only are unsupported by evidence, but are in fact contracted by an avalanche of observable, logical, repeatable, grounded evidence. That evidence isn’t something people are “guessing” about - it’s the same types of rational scientific thinking that made cell phones, the internet, airplanes, skyscrapers, bridges, and the rest of the human experience on earth possible. Science, reason, and technology have done to help the human condition in the past 500 years since the enlightenment than ~100,000 years of dancing around stones singing and praying.
To be fair, life on earth used to be so miserable that sane and rational people couldn’t stand much of a chance. We’ve come a long way in the past 100,000 years. About 2,000 years ago, in particular, civilization was in reasonably good shape, then the ruling shadow of religion known as the dark ages set almost everyone in Europe back by a few dozen centuries.
“You must agree that Santaism is a much more flimsy religion than Christianity or any other monotheistic religion, even if we are”
Again, no. Christianity, as all monotheistic religions, does not have so much as a speck of credibility. Rational thinking doesn’t work based on “which is more flimsy.” They’re both as absurd as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which makes for a fine and fun story, but someone living their life according to it is certainly doing so in folly.
“Regarding the explanation of ‘empty milk and half-eaten cookies evidence’, I didn’t realise that anyone was using the aid of Christian groups as an argument for God.”
Consciously, no, but if more was happening consciously, Christianity wouldn’t be the problem that it is. It’s a fallacy from considering the state of things, without regard for the mechanisms by which they came to be in that state. Thought #1: “God does good deeds.” Thought #2: “I see evidence that God does good deeds… through people.” False Conclusion: “God must exist.” It’s also very similar to the effect by which Atheists traditionally have faced limited social and political opportunities: Thought #1: “God rewards Christians.” Thought #2: “I see evidence that Atheists are shunned… by Christians.” False Conclusion: “God must exist.” (Although this last point has improved by leaps and bounds over the centuries, polls still show Atheists - in the US - as categorically the most frowned upon group that might run for office or teach at a school.)
I find the inclusion of god in such a chain of thinking offensive. It’s similar to the way that weather phenomenon (as late as the ~1700’s in America, probably later) were still being treated as an indication of god’s presence and power, because no one had a decent grasp on what was going on. It turns out that lightning strikes church steeples because it’s the highest conductive point in a town, not because god is marking the building; droughts are systematic byproducts of countless environmental variables (I know mid-US Christians that deny global warming problems because they still imagine the weather as something simple that god will look after ); hurricanes and other natural disasters occur because nature is a complex and utterly indifferent series of forces that don’t always behave in stable ways, not because god is unhappy with people.
I’ve heard adults discussing the fact that America had to attack Iraq because the devil was hiding there.
I’ve heard people argue, in all seriousness, that AIDS isn’t a disease worth finding a cure for, because God sent it to punish gay people.
This isn’t a matter of “does someone prefer red or blue”, or “does this idea make someone happy or not,” this is a matter of simultaneously (1.) justifying ongoing damage being done to the world and people in it, (2.) holding back scientific advancement from widespread application, (3.) destroying the minds of perfectly good, capable people, leaving them operating as slaves to their imaginations as conditioned by their churches, instead of operating as rational citizens of the world.
The only good news to speak of (besides the fact that my country no longer murders Atheists, although we’re of course not able to run openly for elected office) is that the damage isn’t permanent. People can change. When people do not choose to set themselves free, then the damage might as well be permanent. Which is a shame, because life does not need to be so mysterious, illogical, disconnected, and out of control - Christianity claiming it is so makes it that way for many people.
It’s precisely because I care about people that I speak openly of these things. Speaking together from rational perspective is a major step toward being able to bring down the otherwise unresolvable impasse religious differences places between people and borders. Thinking from a rational perspective - one that basis decisions on matters of high probability, instead of a few arbitrarily chosen events that have never happened and can only be assigned a theoretically non-zero probability - I have learned found in my own experience to be a path of greater fascination with the universe, greater awareness and influence over my own life, and greater satisfaction with the world through understanding the plethora of differences in world cultures as legitimate rather than seeing other parts of the world as inferior, evil, or uneducated.
There are places in the world, at this point in history, where the damage dealt by religion is much more quiet, subversive, and subtle. I am not from such a part of the world. I am also entirely unwilling to ignore eras of history that I believe we must learn from if we are to prevent such atrocities from happening again - Nazi Eugenics, the Inquisitions, the Crusades, the centuries of ethnic cleansing against Native Americans… the first in the list was a secular threat, the next two are religious, the last a combination of both, but all of these brutalities were founded on the fundamentally primitive Christian principle that the suffering of some living things is critical to the success of other living things. I don’t live in a world with demons that must be punished, tortured, or made extinct; I don’t live in a world where an enlarged, humanoid frontal cortex plays any role in pain sensations; to my mind, I live in a world of living things, some human but many that are not, some that think like me and many that do not, all of which are fragile, and all of which, if nothing else can be said of them as a whole, desire to avoid undue suffering.
Because it is closely related to my Atheism:
I am Vegan in large part because I believe that an entirely scientific civilization, devoid of any deeper principle or basic value assigned to another’s suffering, will eventually turn in on itself with justifications for human experimentation. A classical value-consistency argument for eugenics has been that a farmer would be shocked if told that he could not selectively breed his farm animals to produce strains that best meet his needs; my solution to that inconsistency is to live in a way that does not treat any life in that way, thus taking away the impetus to extend such rationale onto humans.
The material/economic cost of 500 murdered persons is substantially higher than the associated cost of 500 murdered birds or pigs, but that cost is an artificial contrivance of human civilization. The cost in direct suffering is identical. In Genesis, Christian scripture claims that animals are put on earth the be used by people. My detest for this cannot be understated; I find it quite nearly as objectionable as someone else might find it if the Bible stated, “People with brown hair are to made slaves, then slaughtered for meat before they’re too weak from being overworked.”