Archive of June 2009

Fri 12 Jun
12:30 PM

Durak

I think the finest element of Durak is the shaky, ad-hoc alliance between a player and the player sitting across from him. It is not fixed or a priori, as in Euchre and its many cousins; rather, it arises out of mutual expedience and tactical advantage. And unlike Euchre’s partnerships it can therefore be broken or ignored at any time; but unlike Risk, say, whose alliances are also shifting and based on mutual self-interest, there is no offense or injury when the knife is thrust. Every time you go easy on him it is done so in the universal cheerful knowledge that the peace doesn’t necessarily extend past the moment at hand.

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Sun 7 Jun
07:04 AM

A sketchy and clearly underthought-out opinion of Richard Dawkins

I think one of the reasons I am supremely uninterested in Dawkins et al.’s unceasing scornful attack on religion and non-rational belief is that, unlike them, I am not concerned with with how objectively correct other people’s (or my own, frankly) beliefs about the world are. In fact, I don’t think it’s meaningful to talk about how beliefs about the world of a religious or philosophical nature as factual at all. Notwithstanding a certain portion of the religious population which intentionally and explicitly insists on a literal realization of their beliefs (and I should be very clear here that I don’t mean “literal reading”, that is, the notion I’m outlining is not of beliefs about the world that have a factual quality, but are simply metaphorical, and is not that everybody who is not in this portion has simply taken whatever propositions of their tradition to be metaphorical rather than literal accounts of historical events or ontological circumstances; that might be true or not but I am not addressing it), it seems to me that what we call our “beliefs” don’t take the form of facts about the configuration of the world, or of history, that we believe to be true, in the same sense that we believe this desk to be made of wood, etc., but rather as assumptions according to which we determine our behavior.

Assuming a basically scientifically educated population (and I mean: having heard of the laws of motion, knowing that giant turtles have no place in our cosmology, in any physical sense at least), nearly every religious, spiritual or epistemological belief that is possessed by the people I’ve spoken to has much less force or relevance as a concrete fact which might be true or false. I don’t think you need to be an arch-rationalist to understand that something which one takes on faith and which has no concrete perceptible existence does not belong to the same category of knowledge as what is in the tires of a car, or the contents of my desk drawer. Its wrongness never comes into play; but what does come into play rather often in life is the spectacularly expansive constellation of assumptions, beliefs and inclinations we construct for ourselves in order to guide, inform or justify our behavior, ethical and otherwise.

The arch rationalist might come to a similar conclusion but frame it thus: sure, they’re embarassingly wrong, but they allow for an ethical framework. And that is not at all my contention. I don’t think any religious belief should be viewed as slightly pathetic but possibly useful or at least not harmful. I think the nature of religious belief very often has nothing to do with rightness or wrongness. It is very often something which is ascribed by whoever holds it no actual truth value at all, not in any functional sense.

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