Complexity and the Limits of Imagination

I’ve harped on these themes before, but what the heck. It’s only opinionating but I like it.

Two items intertwined in my mind to form the double helix of this thread. One is time travel, the other is an atheist’s conversion to Catholicism. What they both have in common are the twin titles of this post: Complexity, and the Limits of Imagination.

I’ve been guilty many times of indulging in the fantasy of time travel, and have written some stories in the genre, knowing full well how absurd an idea it is, but unable to resist and usually unwilling to look too closely into it. I came across the notion recently (I wish I could remember where, and link to it) about how “time” not only does not exist, but cannot possibly exist. What we have is not “time” as we know it, but an infinity of seemingly concurrent changes taking place around us constantly. All you really need to do is look outside. Let’s assume you can see a tree, and on that tree there are leaves (jjust budding out now, as it’s the beginning of springtime in your clime, let us say). Those leaves are each in their own state – at the moment – and are changing their state, growing, living, fading, dying as they do through the seasons. Now to “go back in time”, each of those leaves would have to revert to the state they were in at that supposed “time”. That’s just one tree. Seriously, that tree not only houses leaves, but bark and trunk and branches, and all of those are made up of atoms, molecules, protons, neutrons, all the way down the line. Each of the subatomic particles forming each of those atoms would need to revert the QUANTUM state they were in at that so-called “time”. Quantum being the operative word, because by definition that state CANNOT BE KNOWN at that level. Add the other trees, the weeds, plants and flowers in your neighborhood, and build up from there the entire world, solar system, galaxy, universe and so on. Of course we can’t even begin to do that. We can’t even begin to imagine the basic elements of that one tree! We might think we can imagine, but even the hardiest imaginer would have to confess, sooner or later, that infinity is hard to count up to. So, while the idea of time travel is fun, it’s also ridiculous. Every “moment” is already Humpty Dumpty, and can already not be put back together again, because it never is together in the first place.

Just because our imaginations are limited does not mean that the thing(s) we’re trying to imagine do not exist. This is perhaps the best argument in favor of the potential existence of God. “It could happen!” (shrug). Who knows? Who can say? A science fiction writer had a near-death experience followed by a conversion experience which led him to find God and start a heated debate on his blog wherein he and atheists engage in dispute. Now, lots of people have conversion experiences, sometimes accompanying crises and sometimes not, and there’s really no reason by one person’s experience should be taken as any sort of proof of anything by anybody else. One of his main arguments reminds me of Niezsche’s warning that “life is no argument, for the conditions of life could include error.” This man says: “You are also implying that the human race, all of whom believe in gods, ghosts, magic and miracles of one sort or another, except for that exquisitely tiny minority of persons who are consistent atheists, just so happened to have all made the same lapse of judgment in the matter of paramount and foundational importance in their lives, and continue to do so”. I wonder if he really wants to include ghosts and magic in the same category as God, but doesn’t a lot of it come down to the limits and restrictions of the human imagination? Base any argument on “what most people believe” and you’ll come perilously close to awarding the definition of “greatness” as being “Justin Bieber”. It’s not a “lapse of judgment” to believe in something. It may just be the way the human mind works. It’s useful. As far as I know, there has never been any independent evidence presented – that is, by a species other than humans. Does any other species of creature in the universe believe in God or is it a human invention? I would be very interested to know what parrots believe in – if faith is of any use to them – or any other creature of this planet, for that matter. I cling to the quaint notion that humans are animals of Earth, sharing most of the same DNA as many other animals, as well as the same habits (eating, sleeping, waking, breathing, dreaming, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, reproducing and raising our young … stuff like that). It could be that failing to believe in God is a limit of imagination on my part. Or, on the contrary, taking everything you cannot conceive of or understand and assigning it to some one big bucket called God could also be a fail. I’m just going to say, along with Dirty Harry, that “a man’s got to know his limitations”, and leave it at that.

Fiction, Non-Fiction and Amazon Lists

I’m not making this up. Well, actually I did make it up and I even put “Fiction” in the subtitles, but for some reason Amazon has decided that Orange Car with Stripes and Missy Tonight are “Nonfiction”, so they are currently the number one and number two titles in Amazon Kindle’s list of Nonfiction Atheism titles. I have to admit I enjoy seeing them side by side with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, especially as the books are a sort of satire about the so-called New Atheism. Missy Tonight even begins with the sentence “Who knew there was money to be made in atheism?”

Waking up Godless

Finally had to delete my Quora topic/feed on “atheism” since most of the questions were from “believers” who wanted to know how atheists can wake up in the morning, how can they look in the mirror, how can they go on living, and even how can they read novels! I realize I was being absurdly, even ridiculously ahead of my time with my “atheist comic sci-fi pulp fiction” series consisting, so far, of Orange Car with Stripes and Missy Tonight, in which I postulate a planned atheist urban development complex with its own TV station and university, and in which I have a little fun at the expense of so-called “new atheists” while not in the least putting down atheism itself. I may be a lifelong atheist but in my writing I’m essentially a humorist (a humanist humorist?).

It’s a laughing matter that so many people are so threatened by atheism, but on the other hand, it’s not a laughing matter at all. A new study shows that atheists are still subject to persecution in many forms in many parts of the world, including the good old U.S. of A, and in at least seven nations can be executed if their beliefs become known!

The report, “Freedom of Thought 2012″, said “there are laws that deny atheists’ right to exist, curtail their freedom of belief and expression, revoke their right to citizenship, restrict their right to marry.”

Other laws “obstruct their access to public education, prohibit them from holding public office, prevent them from working for the state, criminalize their criticism of religion, and execute them for leaving the religion of their parents.”

While freedom of religion and speech is protected in the United States, the report said, a social and political climate prevails “in which atheists and the non-religious are made to feel like lesser Americans, or non-Americans.”

In at least seven U.S. states, constitutional provisions are in place that bar atheists from public office and one state, Arkansas, has a law that bars an atheist from testifying as a witness at a trial, the report said.

Our time will surely come, but it may indeed come last, after all the ethnic and nationalist issues have been resolved, after all the gender and sexuality issues, after all the religious divisions have been smoothed over somehow, after every other possible “outsider/differentist” issues have been reconciled by a species that will eventually sort all that crap out in a millenium or two, the believers will still insist on persecuting those who merely wish to privately make a distinction between fantasy and reality. Sigh.

Related articles

• Atheists around world suffer persecution and discrimination, report shows (uk.reuters.com)

Too Many Books

Sometimes I do wish I had written fewer books. The ones I have written are all over the map and it’s always been very likely that people who like one of them will not like any of the others. A related problem is the unlikelihood of any random reader happening to pick out the one they might possibly like the most. A lot of hit or miss goes on with my books, I’m afraid.

That’s why it’s especially gratifying when every now and then the random reader picks one they do like, and then I find out about it on Amazon or Smashwords when they very kindly leave a review, like this one:

Orange Car With Stripes (Atheist Comic Sci-Fi Pulp Fiction)

 Lighthearted Satire October 27, 2012

The book has an interesting perspective towards those who think they are always the smartest ones in the room. The serious sci-fi reader might be disappointed, though. It’s more irony than science fiction. But light and enjoyable, none the less.

Orange Car With Stripes is one of those books I wrote which is so very unlikely to find its proper readers – the science fiction elements, as the reviewer notes, are very silly, and the central story is a satire about atheism – and atheists as a group of readers don’t usually come across this sort of thing. We’re far more used to being on the defensive and when people do make fun of us it’s usually with a great deal of hostility, whereas this is more of a friendly poke. There just isn’t a lot of atheist comic sci-fi pulp fiction, as far as I know, aside from Orange Car With Stripes and its sort-of-sequel Missy Tonight. These are books I very much enjoyed writing, but I’m certain they will never find more than a handful of receptive readers.

Cover Art: Missy Tonight

 

The new Missy Tonight cover is from a painting I did several years ago, and gimpified using brightness and contrast changes as well as posterization, and the ‘biometric joe’ font. I often think I did Missy a disservice with her title, seeing as it’s not obvious that this is a rather singular work of “atheist comic fiction”, a genre whose day remains a long way off. It opens with this line: “who knew there was money to be made in atheism?” and follows the misadventures of a hapless portable-toilet-dispatcher who longs to become the new go-to cynical pundit on the popular TV talk show, Missy Tonight. I love this little book as much as any of my guys, but will she ever find the love she deserves? But then again, as Gaff famously said in Blade Runner, who does?

germinating

still so tempting to write the third part of the ‘atheist comic sci-fi pulp fiction’ trilogy, featuring Karmody Tooten as the evil entrepeneur behind the predatory chain giant Atheist Shopping Network. You don’t want to mess with her, not if you’re a tiny independent start-up atheist trinket and gizmo shop, even one located on the far outpost of Galactic Waystation of Novidium 87, where steampunk is more than just a god-awful cutesy genre but a genuine way of life, and nudie scientist trading cards are hoarded by reclusive sand miners. But I don’t know … I want more!

The outpost is run by L.E. Jasper, where the L.E. stands for ‘none of your damn business’. Alone, she runs the only store-type operation on the remote planet, and it’s a pretty shabby operation, mainly because the miners of Novidium export their crafts and goods for free, being otherwise utterly self-sufficient. The sand they mine has a special quality that allows it to be used in universal hourglasses – it automatically adapts to a planet’s gravitational field to measure off the same absolute amount of time wherever they are. There are other uses for this special sand, including a kind of compass that always points to the original center of the universe, a kind of sand paper on which one can write a limitless amount (or draw infinite lines), and they also  hand-craft ‘sand dollars’ which are used elsewhere in the galaxy as a kind of rare currency. All of their crafts are rare and unique and of extreme value, except on their own planet, where they are completely useless, hence give away. In return, all they will accept are the very latest in atheist trinkets and novelties, which can only be obtained through the almighty Atheist Shopping Network. The trade flows through L.E. Jasper’s Procopian Emporium, which becomes the target of a hostile takeover by the ASN itself. Like a Starbucks which can leave no independent coffee shop alone, or an Amazon which must dominate at all costs, the Atheist Shopping Network, under the fearless stewardship of Karmody Tooten, tolerates no competition, not even from the tiniest, most insignificant little outpost on the edge of known space. Her problem, though, is to find the price. After all, everyone has one, don’t they?

Nonsense

Those who claim atheism is also faith i say, if a man tells you his fingernail is 37 chocolate-covered infinite rainbows and you say you don’t believe him, your disbelief is not equally irrational as his belief. Good luck with that.

Tortured

Came across a comment on Andrew Sullivan’s blog about Jesus and Christ to the effect that, since God mad himself flesh and got himself tortured, that that justified His creation of evil. Really? He gave it the old thumbs up, did He? Just because he had a bad day once two thousand years ago, then it’s all right to make millions of babies and children suffer and die from poverty and disease (which is what i call ‘evil’). Makes me want to ask, if your God walked off a cliff, would you do it too?

The return of God, or ‘how can we miss You if You won’t go away?’

In this otherwise interesting article by Karen Armstrong via The Daily Dish, contemporary atheists are accused of being “wrong” about God because, hey, people still believe in God and people will always believe in God. Once again, defenders of faith conflate the existence of something with people’s belief in it. Atheists merely do not believe in God. They don’t disbelieve that other people do believe. It’s such a silly argument.

On the other hand, it is true that belief in God is not the root of all evil, a conflation of facts that some atheists assert. Holy wars are like all wars, political. Oppression of women is enhanced by religion but religion is not its source. Religion is often used as a window dressing for power. Doing away with religion would hardly change that fundamental fact of human societies, as attempts to do just that have indicated.

People are pack animals. Packs have hierarchies and leaders and therefore power struggles. Why drag more fictions into this equation than necessary? Does it help to outsource ultimate power to a fiction? Perhaps it does, but it ought to be admitted that this is what we do.

In some early societies, the leader was the same as God (Pharoah, Inca), which made it difficult to have political transitions. The idea of removing God one level allowed for usurpers, who could always claim to have God on their side, and therefore, political power could change without disturbing the God-thing. This turned out to be much more practical in the long run. Of course there have been other societies that attempted more benevolent styles of pack leadership and were successful for long periods of stability. Most of these were wiped out by the not-so-benevolent ones.

There is another aspect of religion, the “spiritual” side of the question, where believers ask, what about Who Created Everything and What is the Meaning of Life? I’ve always wondered why people expect and settle for simple answers to difficult questions, but it could be that a simple, but different, answer suffices for the first question. Someday through science we will one day understand that the definition of “Life” is “what happens on planets”, that on all the gazillions of planets in the universe there is some of it in some form. As for meaning, it is what you make it. That’s what meaning “means”, after all.

rant of the day

Some members of my Kiva Atheist’s group are upset with this article attacking us. My rant of the day is in response to their calls to flood the media with angry emails about it:

Sending angry mail to the LA Times about Charlotte Allen’s article would only reinforce several of her main points – that atheists are angry, self-centered, bitter whiners!

I didn’t read her article as bigoted or hate-speech – I’ve found it a common reaction for religious people to get sick and tired of being ridiculed and put down as “stupid, idiots and morons” by such seemingly arrogant figureheads as Dawkins et al.

As a lifelong (fifty plus years) atheist, I’m of several minds about “the new atheism”. Part of me is glad that atheism is beginning to be heard, another part of me is not always so pleased with its messengers, and yet another part of me is wondering, ‘how can I cash in on atheism the way these guys are’?

by the way, that last bit is a joke. is it me, or is just there a serious lack of a sense of humor among these so-called ‘new atheists’?

my own atheism is simply my personal perception that the world was probably not built like a doll house by some creature intent on using it as a testing ground to determine which of its inhabitants can love it enough to be rewarded with eternal happiness, and which of them should be tortured indefinitely.

others may have a different opinion. :}

but seriously, i know how tempting it is to mock fundamentalists of all stripes. I do it myself all the time. But I can also empathize with their frustration of having nothing at all to back up their claims except the scribblings of some ancient old men. It’s a lot easier to fall back on the same old simple notions than to try to really comprehend the extraordinary vastness and complexity of reality.