8.2 Rethinking Atheism and Anarchy

Atheism and Anarchy are not really ideologies, in that they are not complex ideological organisms. Each of these words represents opposition to a particular type of complex collective idea-organism. They both claim that the Idea-organism they are fighting is not necessary in order for people to lead good lives. There should be one word for both of them, but there is not, mostly because Church and State are not generally recognized as being the same sort of “multi-celled” ideological organism we have described in this book.

Atheism is the idea that a collective religious construct is not necessary.

Anarchy is the idea that a collective political construct is not necessary.

“Individualist” is perhaps the closest word we have to describing the autonomous human, standing apart from any collective mindset. A strong sense of individualism leads us to conclude that no Higher Power has any right to control our minds.

Because both atheism and anarchy stand opposed to a number of large, popular, complex ideas there is a tendency to try to cast these (much simpler) ideas into the same mold; to make them into larger ideological constructs than they are, and to attach other ideas to them; In short, to turn them from simple ideas into complex idea-organisms.

Because of this, those who believe in the ideas of atheism and/or anarchy are often actually convinced to end up doing strangely contradictory things – like having strong faith in their Atheism – or forming Anarchist groups to fight the powers that be.

The typical atheist or anarchist seems to only see half of the concept involved in denying Higher Powers. The funny thing is that they each see different halves of the big picture. This is actually kind of useful, because all they need to do is borrow from each other to get the whole picture.

8.2.1 Atheist

Richard Dawkins is a famous, modern, self-proclaimed atheist. He is also the person who came up with the concept of memetics, but this does not seem to have saved him from going down a typical atheist path. He sees the pain and suffering that hosting religious ideologies has caused in the world, and it angers and saddens him. He sees the “myth” of God as the root cause of this suffering, and decides to fight it. This is a brave choice to make. However, he allows the ideological construct of God to define his fight against it, and misses any real opportunity to reduce the bad effects that the idea of God causes in the world. Here’s how:

Like most all Atheists, Dawkins obsesses over the issue of whether or not God exists. He applies his logic to the issue, and comes up with every reason you can imagine why you should not believe in any sort of Supreme Being who created the universe. He tells people that a belief that gives them great comfort is false. This, of course, causes these people mental pain, and makes them close their minds to Dawkins’ arguments. The more widely he manages to spread his message, the more he sets himself up as a visible opponent to faith, and this increased opposition to faith may actually help to strengthen the hold of religion on people’s minds. In the end, he may actually cause greater pain and suffering than if he had stood mute.

Since God, if he exists, does so outside our physical world, the question of existence will always be debatable. You can make your points about evolution all day, and all you are doing is winning an argument about where God has intervened in the world, not the argument of whether God actually exists or not. However, there is another class of argument, one that the average Anarchist embraces but the average Atheist seems to ignore – possibly because it is really a theological argument. That argument avoids the issue of God’s existence and instead argues the idea that man need not worship anyone or anything. It runs something like this:

Why should it be automatic that, just because a higher being created the universe, that you should worship him? OK, so you are told that GOD is bigger, more powerful, and more knowledgeable. But there are people right here on Earth that are bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter than you. You don’t automatically worship them. You don’t consider yourself to be obligated to do their bidding, and to serve their interests. Why should a god or GOD be any different?

Why would anyone ever assume that GOD would want you to do everything he said? It’s all supposed to be about free will right? GOD would want you to use that brain he put in your head. He would want you to make your own mistakes and learn from them. Maybe when you do bad things, it really does make the baby Jesus cry. But he is probably crying more about the people who always do what they are told without question. It is this blind obedience without thought that causes most of the horrible shit that happens in the world.

If GOD exists, he doesn’t want you to worship him. He is confident enough in his omnipotence not to need that kind of ego boost. He is certainly going to be pissed off if you don’t think for yourself and choose to have someone else tell you what to do. He gave you that brain and he wants you to use it! And if you are one of those people that have a need to tell other people what they can and cannot do, stop it! Don’t try to prevent other people from exercising the Free Will GOD gave them, he would want them to come to the right decisions because they figure it out for themselves, not because you prevented them from doing the things that you think are wrong. Find a better place to get your self-esteem from than controlling others.

Now it seems odd to say that this is an Atheist argument, since it starts by saying “OK, let’s suppose there is a GOD” and this is a statement that the ‘faithful’ Atheist can not easily allow himself to make. However, no being, no matter how powerful, is really a god unless people worship him. If they do not then he is just another sentient creature who is bigger, tougher, smarter or whatever. Atheism means not having gods, it does not mean believing that there is no creature in (or outside of) the universe that is more powerful than any or all human beings.

If you have faith in yourself, in your right to choose your own actions, and make your own mistakes, then you can allow for the possibility of a more powerful being, maybe even a creator of the universe, and still be an atheist.

So we would suggest that atheists everywhere stop trying to prove there is no supreme being, and start asking people to look at the consequences of handing their choices over to other people’s versions of what that supreme being wants us to do. Ask people to question why a supreme being would ever want them to do anything to increase his, her, or its glory.

Any ideas that say that a supreme being needs a human to do anything for it are the product of either unscrupulous individuals taking advantage of faith, or an ideological organism with its own agenda.

8.2.2 Anarchist

Timothy McVeigh was a recent, infamous, self-proclaimed Anarchist. As you probably know, he was involved in the bombing of a United States Federal building in Oklahoma City, on April 19th, 1995, and was ultimately executed for his crimes on June 11th, 2001.

If someone tries to tell you why McVeigh did this, you may find yourself arguing that he was a monster or a madman, and being unable to even accept the possibility that there were “reasons” for what he did. However, the ideas in your head that prevent you from opening your mind to McVeigh’s reasons… are the same types of ideas that made it possible for him to do something so monstrous.

McVeigh had his reasons. He saw the pain and suffering in the world caused by clashes between central authority and people with different ideas about how to live their lives. Specifically, he was aware of the events of August 1992 at Ruby Ridge where a family was killed by US Marshals and FBI agents on their own property. He also had in mind the events of April 19th, 1993, in Waco Texas, where, after a 51 day siege, 76 people were killed by ATF agents burning their homes. These events bothered him greatly. He saw The State as the source of the death of innocent people, and he decided to fight it. This was a brave choice to make. However, he allowed the ideological construct of The State to define his fight against it, and missed any real opportunity to reduce the bad effects that the idea of The State causes in the world. Instead he brought more death to innocent individuals – these deaths by his own hand.

Like most all Anarchists, McVeigh was obsessed with the idea of Freedom. He believed that The State should not be able to control his actions through the threat of violence. He may well have tried talking about this over the years, telling people that the beliefs that make them feel safe are false, and that the State offers no safety, only control.

But most people will not understand such a message, or are frightened by it. In the end he decided to retaliate against state violence, perhaps hoping that his retaliation might mitigate violence by The State in the future. Of course, his own violent actions only served to increase people’s sense of danger, and strengthen their feeling of need for The State’s protection.

McVeigh’s own concept of The State allowed him to see other people as evil parts of an evil State, rather than fellow individuals, just because they worked in a government building. He probably did not even understand that other people would see his actions in terms of the individual deaths he caused and not as an act of revenge against The State for the killings at Ruby Ridge and at Waco. Violent actions will never weaken a Collective that exists, for a large part, to give people a sense of safety. Rather, such actions will strengthen that ideological organism.

There is, however, another way to go about things, if one wants to expand personal liberty. It is a method that atheists are very familiar with, even if it is unknown to anarchists. Rather than fighting with violence, or even trying to make people feel that they don’t need the protection The State offers, instead we can challenge the actual existence of The State icon. The argument for this runs something like this:

What is the Nation State? Is it a set of lines drawn on a map? Why should we feel loyalty to some cartographer’s scribbling? We are all individual people, responsible for our own actions. Those that believe that acting on behalf of a piece of Geography automatically makes their actions correct are simply delusional. No one should have greater rights than anyone else, and no one claiming to represent a piece of Geography should ever even be taken seriously.

This is not to say that people shouldn’t make rules about how they interact. However, if these rules are to be enforced with violence, they should always reflect the actual feeling that, on average, individual members of the group would be motivated to use violence to enforce the given rule. In addition, anyone enforcing behavior on behalf of others should be able to point to specific victims of the prohibited action, who would themselves have been willing to use violence if they were so equipped.

The injured party should never be a mythical entity like The State or Society. Nothing should be declared a crime unless it is done so to defend real victims against what they could reasonably define as harm worthy of using violence to prevent. Also, the size of “the group” for whom laws are made, should always be as small as possible to keep things individual and personal, in contrast to having a hierarchy of laws that are enforced downward from the level of a mythical Nation State.

It may seem odd to say that this is an anarchistic argument, as we have just allowed justification for a system of laws. However, the claim can be made that we are all just individuals living in anarchy right now, that some people choose freely to believe in The State, and these believers fear that violation of The State’s rules – by anyone – puts them in danger.

If people believe that your actions are a threat to them, then they are simply acting in self defense when they try to stop you. If there is a set of rules that they believe should be enforced, and these rules are very important to their own happiness, then how can any good anarchist suggest that they should not be allowed to act accordingly?

However, the authority for enforcement of such rules does not arise from the land we stand on, or from a symbol like a flag, or from some mythic concept of national identity. It arises from the values of specific individual human beings. If everyone fully appreciated that fact, it would be all that any real anarchist could ever ask for.

When you start believing in the authority of a geographic jurisdiction, and lend credence to “the law of the land,” you elevate these things to the status of Higher Powers. Once this happens, laws that individuals would never otherwise choose to have enforced with violence are imposed upon everyone. The myth of the Higher Power makes people think that this is all OK – or at least to accept it all without thinking about it very much.

It is possible to allow people to choose their own laws in small groups. It is possible to dismiss the idea that anyone can ever be acting on behalf of The State or any other icon. It is possible for rules to be enforced only on the behalf of specific individuals. There is no need to believe in The State.

Provided you recognize that everyone has the right to believe in a different system of rules, and realize that no system of rules stems from any higher authority than individual thought, you can go ahead and believe that some limited system of rules is a good thing, and still be an anarchist.

We would suggest that Anarchists everywhere stop fighting The State with bombs and guns, or even with words about how terrible The State is, and come to understand that The State that they oppose is just a fictional construct. Instead, try to teach people that it is evil to believe in the existence of The State – that patriotic loyalty to a flag, a set of lines on a map, or to anyone claiming to be a voice for such imaginary symbols, is the root of most of the violence in the world.

8.2.3 Individualist

We would also suggest that all atheists be anarchists and that all anarchists be atheists and that everyone should be both. But be both in a non-combative way that stresses Individual free will over collective thinking. That is, everyone should be an individualist and also respect everyone else’s individualism.

Feel free to believe in a supreme being, and to respect the sets of rules that other people expect you to live by in their company. Just don’t believe in Higher Powers. An actual existing supreme being need not be conceptually superior to you, and a human being claiming to represent some icon is definitely not.

Feel free to impose rules of conduct on others, and allow them to impose rules on you; just don’t lend greater authority to a set of rules when it comes from someone claiming to represent a larger group of people. The only people who count, in determining what is and is not acceptable behavior, are those who are actually currently being affected by the behavior in question.

And everyone else should mind their own damn business.

8.2.4 Heroes and Villains

For the record, we have a great deal of respect for the work of Richard Dawkins, and a great deal of contempt for the actions of Timothy McVeigh. However, you will notice reading above that we criticize Dawkins, and cast nobility on McVeigh.

Being able to do this is what being a free thinker is all about. If you are not able to see the occasional truth among the lies of the people you hate, and the trace of evil mixed in with the good of those you love, then you are not thinking past the labels and icons.

Only when you allow yourself to both pity the weakness of your heroes and admire the strength of your villains, will you be seeing the world clearly in terms of individual ideas, rather than through the fog of illogic that is the life’s breath of collective idea-organisms.

You don’t know anything aright until you have favorably considered its opposite.

Looking forward, it seems unlikely that I will be using Facebook much longer, and the extent of my Twitter usage will probably be automated. Many others will probably make the same decision.

Does that mean Facebook is dead?

No. But it does mean that things are likely to get ugly. Facebook has a large network lock in, and in response to G+, they have already started changing things to make it harder for you to change over to another social networking service.

The first thing they have done is to block an easy export of your contact information – making it harder to take your friends with you. Inevitably, the next thing they will do is make it harder for you to move your pictures and other information.

Currently you can request a download of all the information you have put into facebook in the form of one big .zip file.

If you want the option of easily using this data on another social networking site, I would suggest that you do this immediately. In the near future this option may be blocked to you. At the very least, it is likely that they will play a game of regularly changing the format of this data export so that easy tools for importing the data to another service will have to be constantly updated.

So, the sooner you do this, the less locked in you are.

To do this:

• Select the Facebook “Account” tab at the top right
• Choose “Account Settings”
• Click on “learn more” next to “Download your information”
• Click the “Download” button.

That’s it!

[Update: I just tried this and now it is telling me that I have to wait for an email when my download is ready.

I don't remember this being the case when I did this while playing around with Facebook features early on. I guess the idea is that if you don't get the file immediately, you might lose steam and not bother to transfer your data.

Just another sign that you should get out now while you still can...]

[Update 2: It has been almost an hour and no email yet...]

[Update 3: Got the link to download the file after a couple hours. A friend tells me that it has always taken about that long.

The format of the .zip file looks easily machine parsable. It will be interesting to see if that changes.]

There are two category errors that sometimes arise from the concept of property that tend to reduce value. One is the idea that the body and/or actions of one economic actor can become the property of another. The other is the idea that some pattern for using or improving scarce resources can become the property of an economic actor.

The first of these category errors is obviously slavery, although it can appear in more subtle forms – the concept of “Intellectual Property” is an example of the second error.

The claim that is made in defense of Intellectual Property is that, much in the way that people will do more to improve property if they believe that it will not be taken form them, that people will also create more and better patterns for using and improving property if they can see greater personal value by being able to prevent others from using those patterns as they choose.

The problem is, patterns are not scarce resources, they are infinitely replicable. So, the use of force to prevent copying creates a false scarcity that reduces the amount of possible value to a degree that can not likely be matched by the value of any manufactured incentives. This is true even before any enforcement costs are considered.

In fact, the manufactured incentives aren’t even necessarily all positive. A lot of “reinventing the wheel” to get around these enforced monopolies is encouraged, competing directly with the scarce brain power allocated to new invention.

Also, marketing waste arises from Intellectual Property. A lot of resources are used to convince people that one IP owners IP is better than others. Without the concept of IP, the best way to do something is more likely to become widely known. With IP, our limited personal bandwidth is flooded with claims as to which is best, and the option backed by the bigest marketing budget (not nescessarily the best) is more likely to be widely known.  Value is now expended on promoting the old rather than creating the new.

Instead of choosing from your options concerning how important or hard the problem is, I will just solve it for you.

At the core of the problem is the fact that the idea that we ever think or do anything for any given rational reason is itself a self deception.

The only real “reason” for any behavior or belief is just that some neural pathways are given to greater traffic based on previous repeated use and connection to biologically hardwired releases of reward/punishment chemicals.

Almost everyone has been conditioned (to some degree or another) to need to be able to produce some rationalization for their beliefs and behavior. A good rationalization can be described as a logical chain of reasoning that supports what we do or think. This conditioning tends to takes the form of a chemical punishment response when we realize that our thinking has been in error. But once a wrong idea has gotten entrenched (strongly repeated neural pathways – tied to chemical reward response by instinct to seek social acceptance, etc) it becomes much easier to accept a bad rationalization (to avoid the internal punishment) than to actually rewire.

To get around this, we must instead condition people to produce a reward response on noticing bad thinking and an even stronger reward on correcting the problem.

Strong rationalists have already arrived at this situation. They get excited when they notice they are thinking about something incorrectly, rather than chastising themselves, and they get a little “eureka” shot of endorphin when they solve the problem.

This sort of brain setup almost certainly has some genetic basis, and is probably the root cause for a genetic component to intelligence, even though intelligence is clearly a factor of brain development in response to environment. The geek is more hardwired for pleasure from intellectual success – the jock gets more endorphins from physical activity, etc – and these traits are almost certainly heritable.

Conditioning can override genetic potential here. Very good athletes and thinkers can certainly be created by the right external pressures. But the great ones almost certainly start out with the right genetic bias and then have external pressures in the right direction as well.

So – given all that – to solve your problem, take the following steps:

1.) Figure out how to scan the brain in such a way as to be able to recognize the mental patterns of:

A.) Noticing wrong thinking, and

B.)  Solving problems.

2.) Build a device that tickles the pleasure centers of the brain appropriately in each of these cases.

3.) Wire it into your brain.

It should be possible to stimulate reward responses stronger than even the combination of the correct genetic bias and external conditioning, so within 5 years you should be the most rational genius on the planet.

8.3 Spreading the Word

Let’s say you really liked the ideas in this book, and wanted to spread them, but it occurred to you that some of the ideas might be dangerous, and you didn’t want anyone to get hurt. We faced this same problem ourselves in the writing of this book. We had to ask ourselves the following questions:
How do you help potentially good but scary ideas along into the world, in such a way that they do the most good, and cause the least harm? How do you pass along interesting information without it turning into Gospel and Dogma? How do you make sure that people really understand ideas, rather than having faith in them?

If our ideas are correct, this all boils down to the following question: How do you make sure that these ideas won’t become the core of some new Collective Identity that starts feeding on individuals for its own survival and growth at the expense of their own?

8.3.1 Avoiding Collectivism

To answer this, we reviewed our thoughts on the ways in which simple memes become dangerous collective idea-organisms, to see if there were ways in which we might avoid that trap. As we have related elsewhere in this book, we believe that Collectives are born from three basic errors of logic:

• A. Taking a set of ideas as being an inseparable whole.
• B. Lending greater credence to ideas based on their source.
• C. Putting forward an untouchable icon as the source of a set of ideas.

Thinking about how these points related to our book, and what we could do to address each of them, here is what we came up with:

1. In order to address the issue of ideas acting together, we decide to make it very clear that the ideas in this book are to be considered entirely separable. To this end we must be willing to change the text of this book as errors are inevitably discovered. If you disagree with any part of this book, and can articulate your reasons, please tell us why you think we are wrong. If we agree with your analysis, we will change the book. If we disagree, but feel your argument has enough merit to be addressed, we will include a discussion of the issue. You can direct such response to www.godwantsyoudead.com/feedback.html

2. In order to address the issue of source, we attempted to stress that nothing makes our ideas any better than your own ideas or anyone else’s, beyond the content of the ideas themselves. We are just regular guys. (I mean, sure, we both happen to be smart, athletic, good looking, and incredibly well endowed, but we’re still just regular guys…) We are not going to try to impress you with our credentials, noble ancestry, previous good deeds, IQ scores, or anything else – these ideas will stand on their own merits or not at all.

3. In order to address the issue of an icon, we had to give up one of our original ideas. One of our first thoughts in writing this book was to not use our real names. It occurred to us that someone who did not like our ideas might decide to take it out on us personally – whether that meant yelling obscenities at us on the street, or actually physically attacking us. So we had decided to use a fake name for the author of the book. His name was going to be “Lester Faith” or “LES” to his friends, as a play on the words “less faith.” And “LES” was also going to stand for Life Extension Science, because the possibility of immortality through science is one of the specific themes of the book. It was all really very clever…

Then it occurred to us that making up a fake but cool sounding name was playing right into criteria C above. While “LES Faith” couldn’t be beaten on the street for his writings, this is also a big part of the reason that he might actually turn out to be a very dangerous fellow. He could become an icon, whereas a couple of regular guys probably could not. So we decided that the right thing to do was to brave the inherent dangers of using our real names.

So, if you do not like our ideas, and are interested in actively attacking them, we would ask that you do us a few good turns in consideration of the steps we took to introduce these ideas with an eye to being careful not to create a collective idea-organism to compete with the one you are hosting.

8.3.2 All We Ask

i. In consideration for us admitting that every portion of our thesis must stand on its own, please do not try to attack an idea that you do not like (but can not directly refute) by pointing out some entirely different mistake that we have made. It is all too common for people who don’t like one thing that someone said to try to dismiss it by attacking some other thing they said. They then make the claim that, since the source of the ideas is not infallible; all the ideas are somehow suspect. Hopefully you will not stoop to that level. If you don’t like a specific idea, attack that idea on its own merits, not some other stupid thing we said.

ii. In consideration for us not trying to claim that we are smarter than anyone else, please don’t try to attack us based on who we are. Try not to make the argument that you are somehow better suited to judge the truth than we are. Stick to the merits or flaws of the ideas, and your arguments will be stronger than if you claim to know better because you have an advanced degree or lofty position in some organization. Show us your evidence, not your credentials.

iii. In consideration for us using our own names, and thus opening ourselves up to personal attacks, we ask you one last favor. If somehow, by our writing this book, you feel we have caused you some sort of injury, and that we need to be punished, we only ask that you first make very sure that we really deserve that punishment. To this end, we ask (and we think not unfairly) that you have actually read this book from cover to cover. You should be sure that we really deserve your wrath. If you have not carefully read each word, and clearly understood all of our arguments, you can not be sure that we are wrong. (Also, you might have missed the bit where we admit that it was all just a big joke, not to be taken at all seriously.)

If after you have carefully read every word we have written, you still think we deserve to be punished, and decide that you need to yell insults at us on the street, or march back and forth in front of our houses carrying picket signs. Well… we are big believers in free speech. What can we say – yell and march as much as you need to make you feel better. However, if our words have hurt your feelings so much that you feel the need to hurt us back in a physical way, we would suggest that you carefully reconsider this extreme action, and think about an alternative.

Perhaps it is actually the printed words themselves that are at fault, and not us. Maybe what you really need to do, to get back at those words and to make yourself feel better, is go out and buy a very large number of copies of this book and burn them. Try it – it might just do the trick. (Repeat as often as necessary to make you feel better.)

If after trying that, you still really feel the need to throw one or both of us a beating, please consider jumping to the end of the book and looking at that whole list of people we have credited as helping us or being our influences. Maybe we were serious when we said we couldn’t have done it without them. If that’s true, this book might really be more their fault than ours.

Seriously, now that we think about it, they are all totally to blame for this book! Go get them!

8.3.3 Things to Do for Fun

If on the other hand, you really like our ideas and want to spread them to other people, please also consider the possible downside of this. Be sure to take similar steps to the ones we did. If you want to get together to talk about these ideas, make sure that you don’t form a group with leaders. Everyone should be an equal. Don’t even let anyone be the “first among equals,” or “more equal than others” to quote George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Whatever you do, for God’s sake, don’t give your group a cool name!

Keep in mind that we do not condone the formation of even a non-group with non-leaders trying to promote the ideas in this book. We think it is a really bad idea. I mean, what kind of things would such a non-group do anyway?

Actually, we have thought of a few things that an atheist anarchist individualist transhumanist non-group might decide to do for fun, and to advance the non-cause. We have recorded them here for information purposes only. If you think of any other such ideas that we might have missed, send them to us, and we will include them on this list without using your name, to protect the guilty.Here is our current list of bad ideas, ranging from borderline acceptable to the very bad indeed, and from not even mildly amusing to the very funny. If these ideas all seem somehow negative, or controversial, this is only because that is what gets attention, and therefore, that is what spreads the word. (If we thought that a puppy petting event would be likely to help, we would have included it here too.)

In no particular order:

• Join the Libertarian party and/or the Free State Project.

• Raise funds to have the bodies of executed criminals cryo-preserved.

• Deface churches and governmental offices, signs, websites, etc…, with info-hazard symbols like the one on the back cover of this book. You can get Info-hazard stickers at www.godwantsyoudead.com/shop.html

• Start a political movement to privatize police protection in your local jurisdiction – allow multiple private justice services with overlapping jurisdictions to act based on contracts with Individuals.

• Take a page from the abortion wars, and set up an operation rescue style organization for cryonics. This would involve stealing bodies (or just the heads) from undertakers before they can be embalmed, cremated, or buried, and having them cryonically suspended. If cryonics works, you will be saving lives. You can also show up at pro-life vs. pro-choice shouting matches as the “anti-death” faction, declaring that corpses are important and should be saved, not fetuses.

• Spread the rumor that some other country (whichever country your government is currently trying to play up as a competing economic or military power is probably a good one to mention) is very close to curing aging. Say that you heard that soon people of that nationality will be living forever, but they are not going to let us have the technology.

• Have copies of this book delivered to school libraries or, labeled as social studies text books, sent to private religious schools and public school districts that decide to teach Intelligent Design Theory. Or leave the book on the shelf at Wal-Mart or any bookstore refusing to stock it.

• Wrap copies of this book up as “Suspicious Packages” and leave them in public places. Remember that the more flashing lights a package has, and the more beeping noises it makes, the more “suspicious” it is.

• Assault famous people by throwing copies of this book at them – especially while the cameras are rolling. Actors and singers are fine choices. Politicians and religious figures are more appropriate but they are usually harder targets. The more famous a person you hit with a copy of this book, the more people will want to read it. We seriously doubt that anyone will be clever enough to score a “bull’s-eye” on a head of state – or pontiff of a religion – not that you should consider this challenge, but we would be very impressed… oh, and any famous talk show host who has chosen not to include our book on her well-known book list would also make an especially good target.

• If you happen to be a famous person, avoid having copies of this book thrown at you by always carrying one with you, prominently displayed for cameras. This can also be useful when you are caught naked or in some other compromising situation by the paparazzi – this book is the perfect size to cover your face with at such embarrassing moments.

• Or, you and all your friends could all just shave your heads and stand around on street corners, and outside airports, passing out pamphlets and flowers, and asking for donations. To find out how to send us all your money go to www.godwantsyoudead.com/donations.html

But seriously – do have fun, but think carefully before doing anything to upset the brainwashed too much… They just might kill you for it!

]]> http://www.whysean.com/2010/10/13/559/feed/ 0 http://www.whysean.com/2010/04/14/kill-or-be-killed/ http://www.whysean.com/2010/04/14/kill-or-be-killed/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 12:36:13 +0000 Sean Hastings http://www.whysean.com/?p=539 [This post may not stand well on its own, as it was written as a response to my friend Jim Davidson's facebook note concerning a person's rights to kill another person in certain situations.]

I prefer to analyze moral actions based on expected resultant value, rather than any idea of absolute rights. Doing so, the inherent need for proportionality becomes self evident:

Consider the idea that a good act creates net value and an evil act destroys net value. When faced with a choice between actions, the moral choice is the one that you believe will result in the greatest overall net value, not just for you, but summed over all affected human beings.

Now, killing someone who will otherwise kill you is usually an easy calculation – you probably believe that your value in the world is approximately equal to (if not, because of your exceptional virtues, greater than) that of others. Furthermore, this person is identifying themselves as a killer who may well kill others in the future. Thus, the statement “Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill ‘em right back!” seems obvious and rational.

But does it represent an absolute moral right?

Consider that you are trapped without food and have one fellow refugee trapped with you. If the other person tries to kill you for food, they are revealed as a killer – but only a specifically conditional killer. This situation is unlikely to be repeated, so now the question of who has a life of more overall value is not so easy and things become more interesting. Consider these scenarios:

1.) The other person is great medical researcher working on a vaccine for a plague that is ravaging the world.

2.) You know that she has already invented a vaccine, and if she lives to bring it to the world, the plague will be over.

3.) You are sick and wounded and probably dying soon anyway.

4.) You are dying of the zombie virus and will soon turn into an undead brain eating monster – thus you are a known likely future killer.

If you believe that self defense is an absolute right, you may feel morally correct in killing the other person in each of these cases, but, if you feel that overall expected future value to all human beings is the correct moral criteria, somewhere down that list, you may decide that it is no longer morally correct to defend yourself.

However, please note that the morality of your actions are a separate issue from the question of whether or not it is morally correct for someone else to punish you for those actions. There is a lot of value to be found in simplicity of normal responses to the perceived misdeeds of others. Granting the absolute “legal” right for someone to defend their life is a simple rule that is almost always beneficial. Likewise, the rule that deadly force should not be used in defense of property is also a simple one, although perhaps fuzzier in its degree of benefit.

Thus one should be clear, in this sort of discussion, whether one is talking about what deeds are morally correct or what deeds should be punished.