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Reason vs. Religion
The Stranger [Seattle] ^ | 10/24/02 | Sean Nelson

Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp

The Recent Nightclub Bombings in Bali Illustrate Just What the "War on Terror" Is Really About

On the night of Saturday, October 12--the second anniversary of the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, a year, month, and day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and mere days after terrorist attacks in Yemen, Kuwait, and the Philippines--two car bombs detonated outside neighboring nightclubs on the island of Bali, triggering a third explosive planted inside, and killing nearly 200 people (the majority of whom were Australian tourists), injuring several others, and redirecting the focus of the war against terror to Indonesia.

Also on the night of Saturday, October 12, the following bands and DJs were playing and spinning at several of Seattle's rock and dance clubs from Re-bar to Rock Bottom: FCS North, Sing-Sing, DJ Greasy, Michiko, Super Furry Animals, Bill Frisell Quintet, the Vells, the Capillaries, the Swains, DJ Che, Redneck Girlfriend, Grunge, Violent Femmes, the Bangs, Better Than Ezra, the Briefs, Tami Hart, the Spitfires, Tullycraft, B-Mello, Cobra High, Randy Schlager, Bobby O, Venus Hum, MC Queen Lucky, Evan Blackstone, and the RC5, among many, many others.

This short list, taken semi-randomly from the pages of The Stranger's music calendar, is designed to illustrate a point that is both facile and essential to reckoning the effects of the Bali bombings. Many of you were at these shows, dancing, smoking, drinking, talking, flirting, kissing, groping, and presumably enjoying yourselves, much like the 180-plus tourists and revelers killed at the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish Pub in Bali. Though no group has come forward to claim responsibility for the bombings, they were almost certainly the work of Muslim radicals launching the latest volley in the war against apostasy.

Whether the attacks turn out to have been the work of al Qaeda or one of the like-purposed, loosely connected, multicellular organizations that function in the region--groups like the Jemaah Islamiyah (an umbrella network that seeks a single Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore), the Indonesian Mujahedeen Council (led by the nefarious Abu Bakar Bashir), Laskar Jihad (which waged holy war on Christians in the Spice Islands before mysteriously disbanding two weeks ago), or the Islam Defenders Front (which makes frequent "sweeps" of bars and nightclubs, attacking non-Muslims, and violently guarding against "prostitution and other bad things")--will ultimately prove to be of little consequence. What matters is that the forces of Islamic fascism have struck again, in a characteristically cowardly, murderous, and yes, blasphemous fashion that must register as an affront to every living human with even a passing interest in freedom.

The facile part: It could have happened here, at any club in Seattle. It's a ludicrous thought, of course--at least as ludicrous as the thought of shutting the Space Needle down on New Year's Eve because some crazy terrorist was arrested at the Canadian border--but that doesn't make it any less true. That doesn't mean we should be looking over our shoulders and under our chairs every time we go to a show. It simply means that it could happen anywhere, because anywhere is exactly where rabid Islamists can find evidence of blasphemy against their precious, imaginary god.

Which brings us to the essential part: The Bali bombings were not an attack against Bali; they were an attack against humankind. In all the jawflap about the whys and wherefores of the multiple conflicts currently dotting our collective radar screen--the war against terror, the war on Iraq, the coming holy war, et al.--it seems worth restating (at the risk of sounding pious) that the war against basic human liberty, waged not by us but on us, is at the heart of the matter. Discourse has justifiably, necessarily turned to complexities of strategy, diplomacy, and consequences. The moral truth, however, remains agonizingly basic. We are still dealing with a small but indefatigable contingent of radicalized, militant absolutists who believe that every living being is accountable to the stricture of Shari'a, under penalty of death. As Salman Rushdie wrote, in an oft-cited Washington Post editorial, the fundamentalist faction is against, "to offer a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex." If these were fictional villains, you'd call them hyperbolic, not believable. But they aren't fictional. Their code would be laughable if it weren't so aggressively despicable.

As headlines about Bali cross-fade into news of North Korean nukes, and there are further debates about the finer points of Iraqi de- and restabilization, it's crucial to remember that there is, in fact, a very real enemy, with a very real will, and the very real power of delusional self-righteousness. How to remember? Consider the scene of the attacks (as reported by various Australian and European news sources):

It's a typical hot, sweaty, drunken, lascivious Saturday night. People, primarily young Aussie tourists from Melbourne, Geelong, Perth, and Adelaide, are crammed into the clubs, mixing it up, spilling out into the street. Rock band noises mix with techno music and innumerable voices as latecomers clamor to squeeze inside. Just after 11:00 p.m., a car bomb explodes outside of Paddy's, followed a few seconds later by a second blast that smashes the façade of the Sari Club and leaves a hole in the street a meter deep and 10 meters across. The second bomb is strong enough to damage buildings miles away. All at once, everything's on fire. People are incinerated. Cars go up in flames. Televisions explode. Ceilings collapse, trapping those still inside. Screams. Blistered, charred flesh. Disembodied limbs. Mangled bodies. Victims covered in blood. Inferno.

Now transpose this horrible, fiery mass murder from the seedy, alien lushness of Bali to, say, Pioneer Square, where clubs and bars are lined up in the same teeming proximity as the Sari and Paddy's in the "raunchy" Jalan Legian district, the busiest strip of nightlife in Kuta Beach. Imagine a car blowing up outside the Central Saloon and another, across the street at the New Orleans. Again, it seems too simple an equation, but the fact remains that the victims were not targeted at random, or for merely political purposes. They were doing exactly what any of us might be doing on any night of the week: exercising a liberty so deeply offensive to religious believers as to constitute blasphemy. And the punishment for blasphemy is death.

There is an ongoing lie in the official governmental position on the war against terror, which bends over backwards to assure us that, in the words of our president, "we don't view this as a war of religion in any way, shape, or form." Clearly, in every sense, this is a war of religion, whether it's declared as such or not. And if it isn't, then it certainly should be. Not a war of one religion against another, but of reason against religion--against any belief system that takes its mandate from an invisible spiritual entity and endows its followers with the right to murder or subjugate anyone who fails to come to the same conclusion. This is the war our enemies are fighting. To pretend we're fighting any other--or worse, that this war is somehow not worth fighting, on all fronts--is to dishonor the innocent dead.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: crevolist; islam; religion; terrorism
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To: PatrickHenry
Placemarker.
141 posted on 10/26/2002 6:56:15 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: donh
Fair enough.
142 posted on 10/27/2002 4:59:57 AM PST by stuartcr
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To: tortoise
I can't really know that I saw or experienced what I thought I saw.

Ah...here's the problem. You can't trust your own senses. IOW you have no facility for Reason. If you can't trust your eyes, how can you trust your ears when you hear the answer from the scientist?

Let's say you have cancer. You pray to God and the cancer goes away. The doctors don't know what happened. Let's say I have cancer. I get a new scientific treatment and I pray to God. The cancer goes away. How would "Reason" handle this situation? My guess is that "Reason" would accept the first as a mystery and the second as a result of science because "Reason" has faith in science.

143 posted on 10/27/2002 5:28:57 AM PST by AppyPappy
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To: donh
It may very well have happened, but you can't prove it.

But it did happen. So external proof is not required for an event to occur. Therefore, a person does not need external proof in order to believe an event occurred.

144 posted on 10/27/2002 5:30:37 AM PST by AppyPappy
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To: stanz
If these animals can create words, explain their feelings, and communicate with their human and non-human companions, I believe this is evidence of a latent intellectual capacity.

Then why haven't they built a hospital? All animals have some intelligence. Many animals use tools to get food. But man is the only one to build a car or hospital. Out of all the millions of species, why only man?

145 posted on 10/27/2002 5:33:31 AM PST by AppyPappy
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To: tortoise
Whether or not YOU THINK something happened is completely immaterial to whether it actually happened and whether or not any one else should believe you.

I didn't say "think". I said "did". If something DID happen but there is not external evidence of it, did it happen?

146 posted on 10/27/2002 5:36:31 AM PST by AppyPappy
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To: AppyPappy
If something DID happen but there is not external evidence of it, did it happen?

Sure, something happened. So what? That has no bearing on whether or not anyone should believe you.

147 posted on 10/27/2002 8:20:05 AM PST by tortoise
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To: AppyPappy
You can't trust your own senses. IOW you have no facility for Reason. If you can't trust your eyes, how can you trust your ears when you hear the answer from the scientist?

That sums it up pretty well; scientists are as fallible as the next guy. "Trust but verify". That's why scientists are ignored unless they can give a methodology that allows you to achieve whatever it is they achieved on your own. In science, you don't even begin to believe an assertion by a scientist until a number of other reasonably qualified people have performed the experiment independently and verified the substance of the assertion. This is among the primary reasons that you can't really prove anything in science in a rigorous sense.

However, we do have faculties for reason inasmuch as we have faculties for mathematics. Unlike science, mathematics is observer independent (both inside AND outside our universe, as it happens). Therefore, we can use mathematics to evaluate science and can know the evaluation is correct even if we can't prove the science itself. You end up with the case where mathematics can tell you whether or not a belief is rational and reasonable, but it can't tell you anything as to whether or not a belief is actually true or based in reality. For better or worse, since we can't trust our senses, the only metric we have to evaluate them in a rigorous sense is a determination of rationality. And even that's not fool proof for most people, as it is possible to construct an internally self-rational world view that does not necessarily have any basis in reality, though this actually results from uneven application of rationality analysis. Most people regularly engage in only limited rationality analysis of their own beliefs, and therefore live inside a superficially consistent, but invalid, world view (see: "liberals").

148 posted on 10/27/2002 8:50:13 AM PST by tortoise
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To: tortoise
I have a question regarding your post. You said:

Unlike science, mathematics is observer independent (both inside AND outside our universe, as it happens).

How did you arrive at the conclusion: AND outside our universe?

In other words, how can you presume the physical laws or logic of any other universe or domain outside this universe?

149 posted on 10/27/2002 8:58:38 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: stanz; gore3000; Phaedrus; PatrickHenry; Alamo-Girl
stanz, thank you very much for providing the summary of these various animal studies. I am already aware of most of them; but it's good for the record to have this information posted here for those who may not be.

At the end of the day, however, IMHO what all this boils down to are the questions: What is language? What is learning?

The way these terms have come to be understood has had to be drastically "defined down" in order for Koko's vocabulary, the ability of apes to learn American Sign Language, or to teach their young how to use sticks to skewer tasty morsels, etc., to even begin to minimally qualify as meeting the criteria of what language is, or what learning is.

When definitions are this "flexible," we can stretch them to accommodate almost any particular set of facts.

One could say on this basis that a horse weaving in his stall is effectively little different than a ballet dancer; for both can be observed to display regular, patterned motions. Or that there's no real, significant difference between the "output" of a songbird, and what Placido Domingo does.

I think there's been a big fad lately of "anthropomorphizing" the animals. This seems to be PETA's specialty.

But then maybe the point I'm trying to make here is so obvious it's actually difficult to see. To paraphrase an observation of S.I. Hayakawa, if we can see in a given situation only what "everybody else" [e.g., the "experts" and the trendy types] sees, than it can we said that we are so representative of our culture as to be a victim of it.

150 posted on 10/27/2002 9:02:17 AM PST by betty boop
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To: betty boop
BB: if it's any comfort, I share your views on animal "intelligence." My dogs have some intelligence, (and some memory too), but their behavior seems to be nothing more complex than response to observations and stimuli. I doubt that they can do any abstract reasoning. That requires a special set of tools -- language -- because we think in words, and some of us think in numbers and symbols too. The lower animals don't seem very capable of that. I've never followed the ape/monkey studies. Or the dolphin studies either. They may do some very limited kinds of abstract thinking, but compared to what we humans do, it's just not in our league. Or so it seems to me.
151 posted on 10/27/2002 9:17:01 AM PST by PatrickHenry
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To: Alamo-Girl
In other words, how can you presume the physical laws or logic of any other universe or domain outside this universe?

You misunderstand. Physical laws and science in general is highly context dependent i.e. it only applies to the universe we happen to live in. Mathematics can be applied to all possible universes, and is regularly. There is some application for proving mathematics in spaces that don't exist in our universe, so it isn't purely mental masturbation. Things like logic, which is grounded purely in mathematics, are transferable to all spaces and would work as well outside our universe as inside it. The presumption that most people have that mathematics only extends as far as the boundaries of our universe is wrong, and leads to idle speculation of dubious value.

The "how"s and "why"s are serious esoterica, so I won't go there. The only thing to remember is that physical laws only apply to our universe, but mathematics apply everywhere. Trying to get around inconvenient mathematics is a fool's errand in any universe/space. This means, among other things, that there can exist no universe where "liberal logic" is actually valid in any kind of mathematical sense.

152 posted on 10/27/2002 9:24:31 AM PST by tortoise
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To: betty boop
Thank you so much for the heads up on your analysis!

I agree with your position in this debate (no surprise.) But I would like to extend it beyond intelligence and language.

IMHO, there is also a huge ego difference between man and animal. Man is exceedingly more willful ranging from greed, rebellion, murder, jealousy - to generosity, obedience, self sacrifice and altruism.

Certainly we see very rudimentary forms of this among the animals - mothers protecting their young, fighting over food, killing infants to breed again. But it would be astonishing indeed to see a hungry grizzly offer his kill to an injured wolf.

In my view, animals fulfill their environmental niche in this universe while man rebels against it. They aren't in the same league.

153 posted on 10/27/2002 9:33:07 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: PatrickHenry
I doubt that they can do any abstract reasoning. That requires a special set of tools -- language -- because we think in words, and some of us think in numbers and symbols too.

Special tools are not required for abstraction, just more neurons. The takeoff as a function of computational resources (measured in memory, not processor) is relatively sharp, hence why even small differences in mental resources in humans lead to large differences in ability. The mathematics is actually pretty startling; a resource delta of only a few percentage points is the difference between a retard and a genius. Add a few more percentage points to the smartest person you know, and you end up with somebody who is unimaginably intelligent. Relatively minor improvements in resources have a profound impact on intelligence, particularly when you are near the bottom end of the curve.

154 posted on 10/27/2002 9:35:50 AM PST by tortoise
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To: tortoise
Thank you for your explanation! However, I respectfully disagree.

I see no requirement that pi would be the same in an alternate universe, much less Schwarzchild, Riemannian or Euclidean Geometry and so forth.

I say this because space/time itself is a quality of the extension of field - physical laws - and may not be the same, or may be dimensionally skewed or not exist at all - in an alternate universe or domain.

Likewise, any logic conditioned on the arrow of time could be invalid in an alternate universe - even the concept of numbers (e.g. "three") requires a material existence, i.e. physical law.

For lurkers: What is Mathematics?

155 posted on 10/27/2002 9:48:39 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl
The problem is that you are treading into the area of applied mathematics, with the obvious implication that it is mathematics that uses our particular space (i.e. our universe) as an axiom. You have to eliminate that axiom for any space not like ours if the mathematics is to be correct.

Mathematics can work in an arbitrary number of dimensions imagined or not, and does so regularly. The fact that an alternate universe may not have any dimensions that we recognize certainly doesn't invalidate the fact that the mathematics is perfectly capable of operating in the dimensions that it does have. Space and time are arbitrary labels that we give dimensions in our universe, but mathematics only makes the distinction when applied to our universe and universes like it, mostly for our own convenience. Note that theoretical physicists regularly work on models of the universe with vastly more dimensions than four even though that is the only dimensions we can perceive, and often work in spaces that are entirely constructs of the imagination. Everything is still correctly derivable in those spaces if you take those spaces as axioms for deriving applied mathematics.

Logic in mathematics has no concept of time or any other property of our universe, hence why it is easily applied to all. You have confused applied logic, which takes our universe as an axiomatic environment and derives the consequences of mathematical logic in that environment, with pure logic from which the applied logic you are referring to was actually derived. If you look up first-order logic, it is essentially set theory type mathematics and spaceless. Rhetorical or applied logic is first-order logic applied to our universe (and sometimes not even that). You could just as easily re-derive "applied logic" for any other universe as well. If you stick with strict mathematical logic in arguments and avoid derivative applied logic, your logic is portable to other universes.

Numbers definitely do exist in mathematics independent of a physical existence. We take them to mean something slightly different in practice (i.e. there are some subtle differences based on the axiomatic existence of our universe), but a material existence is immaterial (no pun intended). You can count things that don't physically exist.

156 posted on 10/27/2002 10:42:21 AM PST by tortoise
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To: tortoise
The important point to all this is that I routinely see people assert things which take our universe as axiomatic even when applied to concepts not strictly in our universe. This is a very slippery kind of bad reasoning, as most people have a hard time even thinking about things that don't use our universe as an axiom, and so most don't notice. One of the problems of living in this universe is that our pervasive immersion in it biases our thinking even when discussing things that are outside our universe.

A lot of people understand first-order logic as it is applied to our universe, but few understand the sense in which it exists and works when we are talking about universes that aren't strictly like ours.

157 posted on 10/27/2002 10:51:14 AM PST by tortoise
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To: tortoise
Cheese...holes---gas!
158 posted on 10/27/2002 10:59:28 AM PST by f.Christian
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To: tortoise; longshadow; Godel
Numbers definitely do exist in mathematics independent of a physical existence.

Well now ... I'm no expert here, and you do seem quite certain of what you're saying. Perhaps what I'm about to say is wrong; it's certainly simplistic. But to me, if there's no universe there are no numbers. I think of numbers as nothing but abstractions. They are imposed upon us by the nature of the universe, but that imperative, if gone, would obviate the numbers too. Or so it seems to me. (I'm pinging some folks who know more than I do about this. I'm always willing to learn.)

159 posted on 10/27/2002 11:16:32 AM PST by PatrickHenry
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To: tortoise
That has no bearing on whether or not anyone should believe you.

The discussion was never over whether someone believed me or not. It was whether a personal experience is enough to prove something. It is enough to prove something to the person with the experience.

I can prove God to myself. That is proof enough for me.

160 posted on 10/27/2002 11:44:42 AM PST by AppyPappy
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