Rants Within the Undead God

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Second Installment

Rants Within the Undead God

Second Installment

Benjamin Cain

RantsWithinTheUndeadGod.blogspot.ca

Existentialism and the Ideal Religion ____________________________________________________

Ive thrown around the word existentialism a lot in my writings, and its time to consider directly the relevance of existentialism to the philosophy Im working out here. For a good summary of existentialism, I recommend the article in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy, especially sections two and three.

The Philosophy of Existentialism

The most widely-known kind of existentialism begins with the phenomenological method of describing how things seem to the conscious self and then draws ontological conclusions based on those descriptions. Thus, the existentialist takes for granted the anthropocentric structure of the first-person perspective and contrasts objective with subjective orders of being. Tools lying in the environment are ready-to-hand, meaning that their mode of being is instrumental, that they exist for conscious users, whereas the conscious self is absolutely primary and central from that first-personal, solipsistic perspective. Moreover, from that perspective, the self seems autonomous, and the existentialist builds an ethics of personal authenticity, or integrity, on this apparent freewill. When we introspect, we dont detect an objective cause of our conscious state, precisely because we dont perceive--again within that first-person perspective--the self as an object in the field of material causes and effects; after all, the five senses that perceive that material field are all directed outwards and so we dont process our impression of the conscious self as informing us about just another material object. On the contrary, the self is experienced as being detached from the physical world and thus as free from its laws. So even when the body is clearly affected, say, by drinking alcohol

or being punched in the stomach, and the brain is affected which in turn has an impact on consciousness, the conscious self still seems free to decide how to respond to such effects.

The ultimate feeling of freedom is found in the experience of anxiety, when we detach from our practical concerns and come to grips with the subjective arbitrariness of values and social conventions. In that case of alienation, we have difficulty identifying with the social roles we play and just as consciousness seems to itself detached from the body, a person can feel detached from society. Ethics enter into the picture when the existentialist distinguishes between those who accept their freedom and who commit to their life project with integrity, and those who fail to act so responsibly and ignore what we all learn from the first-person perspective, that is, from introspection. Again, what we learn is that when a self fails to define herself by choosing a life path and owning that choice without scapegoating anything, and when she allows herself to be defined by society, her religion, or anything else as though she had no voluntary role to play, she loses her individuality. She becomes an inauthentic person, a subject who pretends to be an object. Thus, existentialism is about the philosophical problem of existing as a human being in the first place, or as this problem is informed by introspection.

Critique of Existentialism
Now you might think that this existential method of just describing how things navely seem and then of taking that level of description at face value is just intellectually reckless. For example, work in cognitive science and in philosophy of mind, including R. Scott Bakkers Blind Brain Theory, shows that how things seem to consciousness can be quite illusory. Just because introspection cant detect the neural causes of conscious states doesnt mean there are none; instead, consciousness may seem self-sufficient merely because, as Bakker says, the brain lacks the needed information to properly map its operations with the same level of detail with which it maps the outer environment. So everything we think we perceive from the first-person perspective might be illusory. The question is whether this is entirely an empirical matter. Could

cognitive science demonstrate that conscious states are entirely erroneous compared to third-personal, scientific reports of whats happening at the neurofunctional level?

I tend to adopt a relaxed neo-Kantian position with respect to this sort of question. The human brain does support a first-person perspective, thus adding to what naturally exists at the neurological level. From the perspective of brain science, introspection can seem to depend on ignorance, but so too neurology can seem parochial and simplistic from, say, the physicists perspective. Natural processes seem to build on themselves and so levels of reality emerge. One such level is that of how a conscious self naively seems to itself. Even if we partially construct that level of reality, by participating in the cultural interpretation of the nature of the inner self, the data obtained by introspection must still be explained. Even cognitive science grants the reality of those data and merely prefers one interpretation of them to another. But whether a neurological explanation, say, of love is superior to a novelistic, first-personal analysis of what the emotion feels like, depends on the purposes at issue, and this is a normative question that cant be scientifically settled. If values and ideals themselves are illusory, theres no reason to favour any explanation of data, and a scientific rejection of the validity of introspection thereby eats its tail. I say, though, that my Kantian position is relaxed, because I leave open the possibility that, for pragmatic reasons, we may come to reject the subjective description of consciousness, just as weve rejected many superstitions once science has given us new ways to think. For example, if technoscience holds forth the promise of transhumanity, of divinizing the self, if only we end our preoccupation with the laypersons understanding of herself, we may either choose to think of ourselves only scientifically (ultrarationally) or be forced to do so as elements of some natural process. The upshot of this is that, for the moment at least, I think we should take the firstpersonal ontology seriously without being so deferential to it (as in theism) that we define the self in a way thats opposed to science and to philosophical naturalism. Thus, I think we are conscious, free, rational, and so anxious or authentic as the case may be, but only to a surprisingly limited extent; in particular, we tend to exaggerate the egos

properties, and cognitive science does show, at the very least, that the nave picture of the self is incomplete, and that when supplemented by scientific details we become less boastful and more inclined to think of the conscious self as partly, if not yet entirely, a hallucination.

Existentialism and Transhumanism

But how do the basic existential categories fit into the philosophy of Rants Within the Undead God? The existentialist takes introspection and freewill to be philosophically central, whereas I begin with my understanding of the scientific picture of the world. In existentialism, anxiety arises as an emotional proof of our freedom: we experience ourselves as isolated and so condemned to freely, independently choose our direction in life. To my way of thinking, anxiety arises not just from introspection but from Reason, from the objective view from nowhere which presents to us the world in all its strange inhumanity. Anxiety is generated by the clash between the nave conception of the self, arrived at through introspection, and the sophisticated, scientific explanation of nature. We feel isolated and estranged from world when we compare what we naively think we are with what we really are, as described at some deeper level. And whereas the existentialist thinks of authenticity, the chief virtue, as the honest way of handling our freedom, I think of this virtue of integrity as a requirement of artistic originality in dealing with that clash between perspectives. Nature builds on itself in its undead complexifications and evolutions, and we should attest to our mystifying presence in the universe by adding a new level of reality, one that creatively reconciles our two main sources of information, introspection and reason. I say creatively, because the standards arent merely epistemic. Its not enough for a worldview to accurately reflect the facts; the worldview should inspire with the power of myth and so should be aesthetically profound. The blueprint of the new level of reality is the philosophical worldview that lays out the ideas that inspire a new religious way of life, one guided by the twin virtues of authenticity (integrity and distaste for delusions) and creativity (originality in contributing to the process of technoscientifically deifying our species).

The role of the artistic, mythical dimension of a worldview is to motivate masses of people to take up certain life projects, and this is either a fully natural process that serves the undead god or a process of existential revolt. Our best, most authentic life project might be to prepare for the advent of the posthuman, as Nietzsche said. That is, our most helpful, satisfying form of creativity might be to explain the world in such a way that we can anticipate and take comfort in the ultimate fruit of technoscience: the transhuman force of nature, which is the biological human bodys complete merging with more and more powerful technology. Authenticity for the transhuman would be the marking of its presence, in opposition to natures self-destructive tendencies, by literally transforming as much of nature as possible and so undoing what looks like the creation of an insane and suicidal divine monarch. That reengineering of nature, that negation of undead decay might well be our highest goal as a species, and the gods that could carry out such a project might fulfill our highest potential. Thus, our merely-human task should be to appreciate the value of that potential in us, not so much to prove how and when the transhuman revolution will happen, as in Ray Kurzweils crass manner, but to take up transhumanism as a thought experiment, to test our convictions. What Im after, then, is a religion thats not just compatible with science, but that inspires the noblest use of science. Its not enough to have vast knowledge; we have to know what to do with our model of nature. It goes without saying that none of the mainstream religions ought to guide us in that endeavor, although the Eastern ones are more useful because they provide process rather than atomistic, individualistic theologies. Meanwhile, liberal secular humanism is a whitewash of the cosmicist implications of philosophical naturalism. Obviously, though, I dont claim to provide the ideas of the great future religion, but am merely speculating on some preconditions. What, then, is personal inauthenticity? The bad life, in my view, is defined by delusion, because delusion dehumanizes us. Instead of lifting us up to the transhuman, we can regress to a subhuman, purely animalistic state. We regress when we surrender our creative potential, when we submit to some degrading ideology such as that of the capitalistic monoculture which serves the twisted oligarchs. Now, there is a Nietzschean reading of oligarchy, which is that the centralization of power is a necessary evil: the

masses must toil in various industries so that power can be amassed and eventually the amorality of those steering the major technoscientific companies will lead to breakthroughs that will divinize at least a minority of people. Thus, as Ive said, the sociopathic oligarchs might be avatars of the undead god, amorally creating and destroying sectors of the economy. But theres a problem with these oligarchs: their natural corruption effectively deprives them of a conscience and thus of the strength of feeling needed to appreciate great art. They are thus poor creators; to be sure, theyre ruthless in pursuing their ambition and theyre not held back by obsolete moral sentiments, but I lack faith in their creative vision. The Western monoculture which theyve sustained for the masses lowers the bar instead of elevating peoples expectations. The dehumanization of the majority may be a necessarily evil stage in the natural development of the transhuman, but to worship gods you need a myth that has emotional resonance, and its hard to sing the praises of capitalistic oligarchs even if they do work towards our apotheosis.

Where does asceticism fit into this worldview? Ive said that renunciation of certain natural processes makes for a noble revolt against the undead gods mindless disintegrations. This is the mystics venerable kind of authenticity. The Gnostic idea is that nature is a pit of despair rather our true home, and that we should psychologically detach ourselves from nature, to appreciate that we truly belong nowhere thats comprehensible, which is the transcendent state of nirvana. I dont go in for this particular kind of mysticism. I do think were doomed to be homeless, since Reason evicts us from most of the fantasy worlds we build for ourselves. Even in the futuristic, pantheistic and naturalistic religion Im contemplating, theres an existential spirit of revolt. But I dont think consciousness is ontologically primary. Im open to the possibility that there was once a transcendent being that we can idolize by personifying it, as long as we concede, with Philipp Mainlander, that such a being is best thought of as having been corrupted by his isolation and so having killed himself in creating the natural universe. But the major god thats obviously manifest in all creative acts is the undead, self-creating god of nature itself. Ironically, the undead god would undo its decay through the transhuman force of nature.

Still, even without the full Eastern mystical backdrop, renunciation (of pop culture, sex, politically correct conventions, theistic delusions, feel-good myths) helps to immunize us in dark times and to preserve our creative spirit. In decadent, anesthetizing cultures, we may be wise to unplug from the matrix, and this entails some degree of detachment. Naturally, Im not saying we should all live as hermits. Indeed, a hermit wouldnt be privy to advances in modern science and so couldnt fully participate in the supreme religion that will hopefully arrive. Nevertheless, any detachment is better than none, even if we merely stop and remind ourselves--while in the throes of sex, voting for a pathological liar, or watching an inane movie thats dominating the box office--that we shouldnt identify with such a degrading activity. When we prove weak-willed and submit to one cultural indignity or another, we should at least mock ourselves in the back of our mind, contrasting the vain, pompous mammals we are at our worst with the sublime, allpowerful and all-knowing posthuman force of nature that our consciousness, freedom and rationality could unleash upon Gods undying corpse.

The Meaning of Death ____________________________________________________

Whats the meaning of death? Whats the role played by death in our existential situation? Is there an escape from the horror of death, at least in our imagination or in a spiritual sense if we live up to certain ideals? Ill address these questions in what follows.

Death as the Great Equalizer

The horror of death is personal for each of us who prefers not to die, since were forced to accept the inevitability of our end and there are different ways of dealing with that knowledge. But the philosophical importance of death as a natural phenomenon transcends any such idiosyncrasy. According to the aphorism, death is the great equalizer, and this tells us the essence of the philosophical problem of death. Death isnt just the end of each of our worlds, of every individuals accumulation of memories and experiences, of every personality and living body. Death is the sameness of that end despite the astonishing diversity of living things, including our body types, abilities (swimming, running, flying, digging, and so on), accomplishments, moral qualities, and positions in space and time. Think of the variety of organisms that have lived on this planet, the trillions of differences between species and between members of those species, and even between the stages of each members life as it passes through its life cycle. There are surely more such differences than there are grains of sand, so they are in fact unimaginable: besides the broad differences between dinosaurs, insects, fish, birds, and mammals, no two individual lives are the same. To take an example thats near and

dear to most people, some individuals try to be selfless and decent while others become selfish and cruel. But while the manner of our dying may be just as heterogeneous as our lives, the outcome of those lives is practically identical: all lives end in death. No apparent recognition of our distinguishing features, no necessary continuation of our plans or positions in our social hierarchies, no validation of our efforts. We try to cheat death in two ways: genetically, we pass on part of our essence that outlives us, and socially we influence our families, friends, coworkers, and fellow citizens, and their memories can outlive us. But Death has the last laugh, because its not just individuals who die; whole species are extinguished as well, and in fact just as death is inevitable for each individual, so too extinction seems inevitable for each species.

What, then, is the meaning of death? I think the value of death fixes the value of life. Take an adequate description of any possible or actual organic pattern, no matter how simple or complex, such as a pattern that might be expressed by a convoluted mathematical formula that would fill hundreds of pages were it to be written down. That description is rendered pointless by the uniformity of all of that varietys result. Tibetan Buddhists illustrate this with their sand mandalas, which are intricate, unique and beautiful geometric patterns built up by coloured grains of sand which the Buddhist ritualistically destroys upon completion. Death is the great equalizer in that our end point is identical whereas our lives are characterized by myriad differences. No matter how unique you are in life, your destination is exactly the same as that of all other living things. Theistic religions maintain that this isnt so, that our station in life is echoed in eternity, as in Dantes circles of hell, for example. Theres no good reason to believe in that continuity between biological life and a spiritual afterlife, but the reality of biological death has clearly given most of us reason to hope that life isn't in some ways reducible to death.

This still, however, only scratches the surface of the meaning of death, because the above pattern is found throughout the universe. All organisms die in the sense that they end, but so too do all cultural expressions, for example. Songs, stories, computer games, movies, paintings, prayers, sexual unions, meals, showers, vacations, elections,

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businesses, and on and on and on. In each case and in a million more cultural patterns than anyone would care to list, theres a great variety that must be extinguished. Think of all the subjects of paintings and also of the many styles of painting, and now reflect on the facts not only that paintings tend to be destroyed in time, but that theyre also limited in space, meaning that a painting is always effectively framed as opposed to being infinitely large. You could try to fill a canvas as large as the world, but theres only so much anyone can paint, which means that a paintings finitude can symbolize that of an organism or of a species. Of course, all cultural products are finite, but so is everything in spacetime. Think of the variety of stars and galaxies. Or think of the waves in the sea, each one surfacing and falling back into the ocean. Wind blows different parts of the seas surface from many different directions and at many different temperatures. There are the current waves, but there were also the waves that would have been seen when Socrates or the Buddha walked the earth. Again, unfathomable richness and variety are contrasted with the sameness of the outcome.

So death is just an example of finitude, and finitude is a feature of all material things. These things can take up only so much space, and because there are very many material things, they tend to collide and thus to change each other. Time is the dimension in which those changes happen. All natural things change and when we understand those changes by applying categories such as stages, phases, species, or individuals, we distinguish between beginnings and endings, and so in the biological cases we have lives and deaths. Whats so special about biological finitude? Well, when a wave in the ocean vanishes, the wave doesnt embody its surroundings by mentally representing them, which is to say that the wave is relatively simple. But when a person dies, the person takes with her memories and ideas of many other things in the world, so that much of the world symbolically ends with her. That is, a worldview ends with each persons death, and so by taking a life the world seems to negate itself as well.

I really want to fix this meaning of death in your mind, so heres another metaphor. Picture all the texts that could be written, as illustrated, for example, by Borgess Library of Babel short story. Take the variety of all the novels, poems, plays, scripts, essays,

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blogs, letters, tweets, recipes, memos, scriptures, computer program codes, and so on. Now ensure that each piece of paper in the physical manifestation of each of those texts is shredded in a paper shredder so that the text becomes unreadable and lost forever. Thats the relationship between life and death: infinite variety on the one hand and the oneness of nullity on the other. Clearly, death contributes to our existential predicament by making life absurd.

On the contrary, you sometimes hear, without death life would be meaningless since its only the threat of death that makes the moments youre alive precious. Our time has worth because our life has a limited span. If we lived forever, there would be no risk in any of our endeavours and so wed become bored. This point about the value of life is valid, and as Ill show later, the point rests on the fact that our conception of immortality is actually of another form of death! Immortality wouldnt be lively. So life has value only because of lifes relation to death and yet we should reflect on what value death therefore brings to the table.

Yes, life is made precious because of our limited span, but what is this preciousness? Its like being stranded on a tiny island in a sea full of sharks, holding your armpits and curling up in a ball at night so as not to let your vital heat escape; life is precious not just because its rare, but because life doesnt belong in nature. Were precious in the same way that a lost and motherless child, wandering the streets with puppy dog eyes and tousled hair is adorable: were pitiful in our homelessness; our inevitable death entails that the value of our lives is akin to that of childishness. Just as a childs efforts are relatively pathetic, so too are an adults, relative to the inevitable oneness of death; just as a childs hand is too small to hold a paintbrush effectively and so that hand splatters paint everywhere, so too an adult is powerless to escape death; just as a child defecates in her diaper and doesnt understand why the onlookers feel awkward and embarrassed, so too an adults strivings to establish herself, to experience a rich, full life, to rise to the top of a social hierarchy are foolish in light of the equal emptiness of our ultimate destination. At least when childhood ends as children become adults, our early follies are practice runs for our life as adults, but when adults die there's not even

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any instrumental value of our adult follies. Death gives life meaning and that meaning is one of absurdity--not in the sense of total meaninglessness, since that would be contradictory, but in the sense that, existentially speaking, death reduces all adults to ridiculous children. Our greatest achievements, our skyscrapers and WMDs, our lessons learned, dangers avoided, and evils conquered are comparable to a childs playtime flounderings, given that the value of life is dependent on death's value. Childhood is ridiculous relative to adult perceptions and adulthood is ridiculous relative to the existential appreciation of the common emptiness of our end as finite beings.

Mysticism and the Illusion of Death

The mystic responds to this melancholic existentialism by saying that death is an illusion, because so is individuality, and that our deaths are not the same after all. On the contrary, when we die our bodies decompose and are recycled by the earth, interacting with different parts of the planet, because matter and energy are only transformed rather than destroyed. Our bodies are not independent, but are part of the totality of the universe, and that universe may have no ultimate beginning or end. Thus, when we identify ourselves with the eternal whole of nature, we neednt fear or despise biological death. To the extent that the relations between things unify them, we may indeed be parts of a greater whole, as the mystic says. But the rational analysis of the whole remains valid and necessary for understanding the patterns in that whole. And that analysis proceeds by dividing the whole into parts, and so were left with the concepts of life and death. The fact is that even if we can appreciate the oneness of the cosmos, in so far as everything is united by causal and logical laws, by circumstantial relationships, by the spatiotemporal dimensions, and so on, the whole clearly isnt simple or inert even if it appears so in an altered state of consciousness, as in meditation. There are patterns and processes in nature, and reason enables us to understand them by applying concepts which draw distinctions. Theres no understanding without distinctions, and once you start distinguishing between things, youll appreciate the utility of

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conceptualizing the difference between individual bodies and minds, and between life and death, and indeed between any finite types or instances. Reason may be insufficient as a method of grappling with ultimate philosophical questions, in which case we may need to turn to myths and other fictions or even to transcendent modes of perception. But the parts of the whole picked out by cognitive distinctions are as real as the whole. If illusory means only relative to a perspective, then the oneness of nature might just as well be called illusory relative to ordinary, rational perception.

Moreover, the mystic here just shifts the sameness of our end from death to the cosmic wholeness. As long as that wholeness is impersonal, the mystic implies that the apparent variety within nature is ultimately identical with an impersonal homogeneity. This is as good as conceding that all finite things end in a way that wipes out their distinguishing features. The reason mysticism comforts many people is that the mystic tends to identify the whole of reality, on the contrary, with something personal such as Atman or some other deity. If you find this metaphysical idealism hard to believe, you wont take much comfort just in our being part of a much greater whole, since this would amount to saying, again, that all finite things end up being not just something other than themselves but the very same something so that the motley complexities of natural processes, levels, dimensions, worlds, and universes are destined to be rendered null and void. Whether its the state of death that replaces each individual thing or the whole of nature that transcends the apparent independence of those things, life still normatively depends on death.

The Fantasy of the Deathless Life

When we consider this idea of death as a part of change and finitude, we might think the opposite of death is some immutable, eternally frozen state. This is Platos idea of immortality, of a godlike, perfect inflexibility, of a sort of static blueprint with all the pieces perfectly in place for all time so that any alteration of the arrangement would amount to an imperfection. This is the idea of the eternal, abstract Forms of things, of

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the perfect dog, tree, or number existing in a heavenly realm of archetypes which are imperfectly copied by finite instances of them in the material world.

Whats curious about this conception of eternal life is that its actually another conception of death. We get a sense of this when we think of whether heaven or hell is more exciting and dynamic. Platos philosophy of abstract Forms influenced the Christian notion of heaven and so spirits in heaven came to be conceived in the West as frozen in time, as changeless and thus as lifeless in the sense of being the opposite of lively. For all the suffering thats thought to occur in hell, any domain pictured as the opposite of Platos heaven is vigorous, animated, active, and exciting. We get a hint of this preference too when were reminded of the clich of the woman whos more attracted to the bad guy, the alpha male who treats her badly, whos selfish, arrogant, and cruel but also thrilling for those same reasons. The bag guy takes her to hell, but thats where she secretly wants to be because you feel more alive in hell than in a stable, boring marriage, which is conventionally praised as a heavenly goal in the platonic mold but which is actually a deathly condition, a frozenness and inertness in which the adventures that make life worth living tend not to happen. This theme is played out in innumerable novels and movies.

So there are these two conceptions of death. Theres death as a result of finitude: all finite things change and thus are marked by beginning and end points. Where theres change, theres death, extinction, and limitation. But theres also deathliness in the absence of change, in the platonic idea of perfect life as the mere form or blueprint of a thing which is perfect as it stands and so need never change, grow, or live in the sense of being lively. Another way of thinking of the opposite of death and thus of the perfect life, of true immortality is the transhuman one. Suppose your body could be modified by technology so that its impervious to disease or to any other external or internal threat to its survival, and suppose your mind isnt frozen in a state of hibernation but is allowed to evolve for all time. Wouldnt this godlike combination amount to eternal life? Notice, though, that

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evolution is change, and change requires end points. So were the person who enjoys the security of that superhuman body to evolve to such an extent that she loses any mental connection between her earlier and later mental states, such as the connection of memory, that break would effectively be the death of her earlier self. However gradually or suddenly this might happen, shed transform from one self into another. Likewise, each person's infantile stage of several months dies as soon as the child prunes all memories of those earliest mental states. So even were your body made invulnerable, as long as your mind were allowed to change forever, wed still be imagining here a self that dies over and over again. So suppose that along with the body of Superman, the transhuman is given an infinite memory so that there are no breaks between any two stages in the persons mental life. Wouldnt such a person be truly deathless? Notice now, though, that this person would be in danger of the inertness of the platonic Form. As this mind is allowed to change, she must remember at least some experiences from every stage of her life, so that eventually her memory would consist of a vast amount of information that would have to remain frozen throughout time. Any change in that memory would kill the earlier self, and the more her mind is filled with a permanent store of information, the more shes effectively mummified, locked into the same patterns of behaviour; that is, the more her life resembles that of someone following a perfect, timeless blueprint. So although her body could move from place to place and interact with its surroundings, the person would become dead inside, frozen in a set way of thinking by the vastness of her memories. To escape that fate, shed have to edit those memories and so die and be reborn. What, then, is my point here? Its that we lack an escape from death even in our fantasy of the immortal being. Death truly has the last laugh on us: death gives life meaning but only by adding to our existential predicament, by trivializing our efforts, mocking our accomplishments, and infantilizing the lot of us; moreover, death surrounds us even in our imagination, in our fantasy of a deathless life. The life of that so-called immortal,

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godlike transhuman isnt lively and so the best we can do in imagining a deathless life is to picture a deathly one.

Death and the Existential Hero

Does existential cosmicism offer a way out of this absurdity? Suppose someone appreciates this existential pickle were in and responds by attempting to live up to aesthetic standards, boldly creating an original way of life with just a minimum of clichs or delusions. Such a hero will still die, of course, but will she somehow spiritually escape death? Will she ennoble her life, making its meaning less ridiculous by her rebellion? Will she be elevated above the folly of the unknowing herd? In some ways, yes. Return to the analogy of the child. Suppose that child whos forced to splash paint everywhere, to defecate in her diaper, and to babble because she cant yet speak happens also to know shes in such a foolish position. Suppose, for example, this is one of those children in a horror movie that has scary, super-intelligence, and yet shes still a child so shes forced to behave like one. Nevertheless, when she poops in her pants and the adults standing around look knowingly at each other and pity the poor child, saying, There, there, youll get to that toilet next time, every so often the child shoots those adults a terrifying glance, revealing that even though she must live effectively as a clown, shes not duped; she understands shes forced into one foolish situation after another, but although she must surrender some of her dignity she retains the right to look askance at the world, at all its barbarism for torturing a child in the first place. The existential hero is rather like that creepy child. Still, death has the last laugh! Each creative act makes our life more unique, but that only increases the variety and complexity of life, and so adds to deaths triumph. If all living things were very simple organisms, death wouldnt be so tragic because that which death would eliminate could be reconstructed with relative ease. But when you have sentient, self-guiding beings that carry mental representations and that can even discover the horror of the real world and rebel in however doomed and tragic a fashion, the nullification of all of those subtle interactions, meaningful coincidences, and

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sandcastle social hierarchies is all the more egregious. Thus, by rebelling against nature, the existential hero serves ironically as a champion of Death, ultimately intensifying lifes absurdity.

Perhaps the only real vindication to be found here is in the suspicion that Death has no sting, after all, not because theres an afterlife, but because all of nature is undead. Even if the cosmos is a machine bent on disposing of all possibilities so that Gods infinite being might finally be exhausted, this is still an energetic machine that feigns vitality and purpose. Only after the Big Rip, after the cauldron of quantum fluctuations stops bubbling over with actualizations, would Death truly reign as absolute nothingness. But until then, the world that takes every life and ends every finite thing is forced to throw up ever more creations, because the world is an undead, evolving god (creator of all things). This means that while we live, at least, the deadly world must laugh at itself, as it were, if its going to mock the pseudo-independence of all the parts of itself that end. Nature brings all things to naught, but the forces that guarantee those infinite endings have just as much appearance of vitality as does a persons material body. There are no spirits but only zombies, only naturally selected bodies that simulate supernatural life, so we can die knowing both that the variety and richness of what ends in nature are only so many ways for the cosmic whole to decay, and that our executioner is likewise infected with the spark of pseudo-life. Cold comfort, I know, but youre a zombie after all.

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Islam and the Secret of Monotheism ____________________________________________________

The major Western religions are monotheistic, at least in principle, but in both theory and practice Islam is the worlds purest form of monotheism. However, I believe monotheists keep a secret about their God from others and also from themselves. They worship one supreme God, or at least they claim they do, but they dont think through the psychological implications of any theology that holds as axiomatic Gods oneness and supremacy. Most monotheists, then, find themselves exotericists, meaning that their understanding of monotheistic teachings is superficial. The esoteric meaning of monotheism, which Ive laid out elsewhere, was unraveled by a German philosopher, Philipp Mainlander, and by Gnostics before him. The inner meaning of monotheistic religions is mostly forgotten, ignored, or misunderstood, because when you put the implications into words you cant help but thereby say the worst thing that can ever be communicated. The secret of monotheism is darker than a black hole; its blacker than black, the worst, most depressing thing you can imagine, and for that reason we should test our mettle and our reserves of creativity, by conceiving of ways of sublimating the horror stirred up by this secret. Even if there is no God, atheists can benefit, in the Nietzschean manner, from contemplating monotheism as a challenging work of fiction.

In what follows, though, Id like to test my hypothesis, if you will, by analyzing the basic distinguishing features of Islam, since if any religion offers clues that monotheists generally repress the meaning of the idea that theres just one God, that religion is Islam. Ill summarize first the forgotten secret, then the basics of Islam, and then Ill show how Islam whispers the secret to those heroic or twisted enough to want to hear it.

The Dark Secret

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Monotheism is the idea that if there are many gods or at least impersonal forces, one god reigns over them all and this is the only god worth worshipping. This god is The God, and because this supreme deity stands alone, God transcends our comprehension. For example, since God isnt part of any society or lineage, having no parents, children, or lovers, God is neither male nor female. God is the creator and sustainer of all natural kinds and thus is supernatural. So far, monotheism is consistent with the sort of mysticism that in turn is consistent with atheism. Where monotheists depart from mysticism, and where they construct an exoteric worldview that allows most people to live happily, albeit with existential inauthenticity, is by nevertheless personalizing and idealizing this transcendent source of everything we can know. Thus, God is supposed to be good, mighty, wise, just, and merciful. The familiar contradictions follow, and these have been laid bare by skeptics at least as far back as Xenophanes. But the secret of monotheism isnt that this idea of God is incoherent. No, the secret is that if we accept the idea that this transcendent source of nature is somehow personal, or at least best thought of by us as such, and we apply some rudimentary psychological analysis of any person in that divine position, the finding must be that God is the most horrible monster and that the main theme of monotheism is one of destruction, not creation. You can read a sketch of the analysis elsewhere in RWUG, but the gist is that an almighty God would become corrupted by his concentration of power as well insane by his isolation. The upshot is that if we entertain monotheism, were thinking of a tyrant that hopefully would have destroyed himself--perhaps precisely by turning himself into the natural universe and so creating it--even if by doing so this God would have doomed us all to our existential predicament.

The Principles of Islam

Now to Islam: Islam means peace through submission to God. What distinguishes this religion, though, is its explicitness in laying out a legal framework to apply strictly monotheistic principles to every aspect of human life. Judaism, too, has the Talmud, a

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great body of commentary on Jewish scripture, the Torah, addressing the minutest questions of theological interpretation. But as even the Torah shows, Jews havent always been so monotheistic. When ordinary Jews were not worshipping golden calves, Pharisees idolized Jewish law. The Essenes and Christian monastic orders likewise had strict, all-encompassing codes of conduct, but the Essenes were ascetics and, according to Muslims (and commonsense), Christianity is much less monotheistic than Judaism. So Islam distinguishes itself by systematically applying the principles of monotheism to all aspects of everyday life. This system of laws is called Sharia, derived from the Koran and the Hadith (traditional accounts of the prophet Muhammads life), and the Muslim way of life is called, in the opening of the Koran, the straight path. Westerners have come to separate politics and the public sphere from religion, because Westerners succumbed to greed; specifically, Westerners saw the opportunity for progress in the form mainly of material advancement thanks to the Scientific Revolution, and so enshrined the principles of individual autonomy and of private property in Europe and North America. Muslims see this separation as obviously sinful and, from a theistic viewpoint, their judgment here is impeccable. If youre a genuine monotheist, you should think first and foremost about submitting to God in all aspects of your life and not just in superficial, verbal ways. Thus, society should be regulated by monotheistic principles, with no compromises made to atheists or agnostics who are preoccupied with the prospect for mere human-made progress in nature. Ill come back to this point about submission, but returning to the basics of Islam, I should add that Muslims affirm the exoteric principles of monotheism, as summarized above, and maintain that Muhammad was Gods last prophet. Muhammad is believed to have been helped by an angelic messenger to have written the Koran, and so the Koran is Islams central scripture. What Ive just said amounts to the Islamic creed, which is the first of five pillars of Islam. The remaining four are mainly ways of applying that creed. Thus, Muslims are obliged to pray often, to give charity to those in need, to fast during the month of Ramadan, and to make a pilgrimage at least once to Mecca. Constant prayer means frequent interruptions to secular preoccupations, reminding the Muslim that only God is worthy of being worshipped and that we, Gods lowly creatures,

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are not divine and are thus imperfect and liable to sin. For example, we often err in deifying ourselves or our creations, and so constant prayer is meant to put us in our place. Only the one God, creator of the universe, is worthy of being worshipped and our main task in life is to worship God by submitting to Gods will as revealed by all of the prophets but most practically by Muhammad. Likewise, charity is meant to prevent us from worshipping idols; we should curb our greed and apply the main lesson of Christianity, which is the Golden Rule. Now in authentic Christianity, which has been mostly extinct since the time of Constantine, charity was just the tip of the iceberg of asceticism on which Jesus stood. Authentic monotheism is quite subversive from a secular humanistic perspective, because submitting to God entails that we detach ourselves from the many distractions in nature, such as our jobs, our earthly families and friends, and our sinful desires and animal instincts. The average Muslim is much more ascetic and thus authentically Christian than the average Christian, and charity is only part of that detachment from natural concerns. As I said, the Muslim fasts for a whole month every year, but also abstains from gambling and intoxication. Finally, pilgrimage to Mecca shows Muslims their equality, since there Muslims exchange their clothes and thus their status symbols with humble uniforms and pray with equal submissiveness.

Now, because the Muslim subscribes to the exoteric notion of Gods identity and character, according to which God is (for no good reason) preoccupied with morality, God is expected to judge our actions after the last human-made social orders, in which were free to live outside of the straight path, end in apocalypse. Thus, the Muslim takes seriously the metaphor that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, meaning that God knows everything we do and has the power to reward or punish us as we deserve. Simultaneously, the Muslim affirms that humans have freewill, so that it makes sense to speak of morality and of Gods interest in it in the first place. Again, the familiar contradictions follow (how can we be free to act against Gods will if God has power over everything?), but these are of little consequence from the esoteric perspective,

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according to which this picture of God is just a metaphor and is indeed a fiction in the full sense.

Echoes of the Dark Secret

So what are some connections between Islam and the hidden implications of monotheism? A detective looking for clues of a secret unconsciously kept by Muslims might well begin with the meanings of Islam: submission and peace. Muslims believe that submitting to the will of Allah is our highest obligation, and indeed that our submission should be systematic. Now, in Muhammads time, Arabia was barbaric and polytheistic, and so historically the point of emphasizing the need to submit only to one, true God was surely to improve that society. By downgrading those many gods and by declaring that theres an all-powerful God rather than just limited desert demons (jinn), Muhammad was effectively scaring the population into adopting a moral perspective. You can scare off jinn by wearing an amulet, but theres no escape from Allah. Nevertheless, the Muslims obsession with submitting to God is suspicious. As a moral crusader, Muhammad would have found monotheism and the fear of an almighty God socially useful, but skeptics have long appreciated the strangeness of the idea that such a deity would want or need to be worshipped. The desire to be praised stems from character flaws, such as a lack of self-confidence or shame and the need to cover up your failings. If God is all-knowing, he knows hes supreme so he clearly wouldnt need anyone else to inform him of that fact, let alone a creature as comparatively inferior as any of us. The Muslim must say, then, that submission to God is for our sake alone, not Gods. Were the ones who need to submit to prevent us from sinning out of hubris. This is the pragmatic aspect of Islam which Ill come to in a moment. But first, I just want to point out the obvious: the injunction to systematically submit to God is consistent with the idea that God is an insane tyrant, and this idea follows from the most plausible psychological analysis of Gods character.

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If you think through the conventional notion of Gods personality, youll realize pretty quickly that the notion is incoherent. If God is all-knowing and benevolent rather than evil, he wouldnt have made creatures that could find peace rather than eternal hellfire only by sacrificing themselves as slaves to God as their master. Just imagine that scientists eventually create intelligent life and they arrange circumstances so that these artificial creatures either suffer forever as a punishment for their misdeeds or find happiness only by worshipping their makers as slaves. Mind you, these creatures would have the potential to guide themselves according to their limited abilities, but would have to choose to forsake their individuality. What would we think of the character of such scientists? Surely, theyd be closer to deranged sadists rather than benevolent parents. And the freewill defense doesnt rescue monotheism from this incoherence. A good God wouldnt gamble by creating free creatures in the first place, knowing that the gamble wouldnt pay off for many of them who would choose poor life paths and suffer forever for those choices.

Islam is supposed to respect our individuality; indeed, Muslims affirm that each person has an immortal, free soul, and that this soul is highly valuable. But John Stuart Mills writings on liberty are relevant here: whats valuable about free individuals is their potential for a variety of actions as long as those actions dont prevent other individuals from likewise expressing themselves. Thus, when freedom is socially prized, we should expect to see some idiosyncratic, eccentric behaviour. So if God implanted in us the power to choose how we should act, why would God punish us for exercising that freedom by acting contrary to Gods preference for how we should live? Presumably, the answer is that we tend to abuse our freedom; we violate Mills principle and become so proud of our self-control that we set ourselves up as gods and try to rule over others. But this is to concede that individuality is not so valuable after all and that God erred in creating such free beings if the only way to save us is for us to pretend that were not free, after all, and to live as slaves to Allah, training ourselves to eliminate any trace of pride in our individuality, for fear that the flaw in Gods creation--the potential for free creatures to deify themselves and create chaos--would bode ill for Gods worthiness of being worshipped.

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No, the dark secret of monotheism offers the best way out of this mess. God would have created free creatures because God himself would be insane and tyrannical, and if were liable to misuse our freedom and turn on each other, acting as tyrants ourselves, that only indicates that God indeed would have made us in his image. Just as we tend to misuse our freedom, so God would eventually misuse his independence. Just as any free creature becomes alienated and terrified by the power that comes with freedom, such as the power to take a persons life, so too God would be horrified by the lack of any constraint on his actions. The difference is just that Gods alienation would be inescapable because his freedom and power would be infinite and unmatched. Free creatures are relatively equal and so theres at least the possibility of deterring each other with the threat of punishment. No one could threaten to punish God, so his freedom would be unlimited. As I point out elsewhere, this means that our best models for understanding Gods character are the infant and the dictator. The infant holds its parents hostage to its whims and the dictator likewise commands obedience, because the dictator is paranoid and sadistic, thrilling to each opportunity to degrade his minions by having them debase themselves. This implication of monotheism would tend to find its way into any insistent form of this religion, and so we have the Islamic fixation on our need to submit to God.

What of the second meaning of Islam, peace? At first, you might think this is a harmless and indeed laudable goal for any religion. What could be wrong with seeking inner and outer peace, meaning peace within and between us? But notice that peace is not the same as happiness. Peace is a kind of stillness which might remind you of the Buddhist idea of nirvana. Inner peace is the death of the self. And permanent peace between individuals and nations likewise signals an absence of life in the form of what Nietzsche called the will to power, the interest in pursuing your unique vision even if this entails conflict with competing visions. Were there global peace, this would mean erasing the divisions between nations and so outer peace would reduce to the inner kind; that is, everyone would effectively be clones of each other, with the same goals,

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and so peace between individuals or nations would be trivially impossible, since there would be just one type of character or nation in question.

Inner peace, then, would amount to psychological or cultural inactivity, as in Buddhism; peace would require detachment from the flow of thoughts, a carefreeness due to a lack of egoistic ambition, a renunciation of your natural self. As I say elsewhere, the theists notion of eternal life is actually based on a conception of deathliness, the opposite of liveliness. Likewise, the peace of the Muslims soul, as found through servitude to God, is a form of death; what dies is the Muslims independence as an individual. By pointing out whats theologically obvious, that each of us would be metaphysically dependent on God, since God could destroy everything if he wished and thus chooses to sustain our being, the Muslim goes several steps further and demands such psychological dependence that our individuality is annihilated when we function as Gods slaves. Inner peace for the Muslim must be the feeling of this loss of individual identity.

So the esoteric meaning of Islam is that submitting to Gods plan brings us a deathly peace, that God plans for our destruction. As well see in the next two sections, death would lie even at the end of all Creation, because an eventual peace of nonbeing would be natures purpose. The creation of nature would have been Gods way of systematically annihilating himself, transducing his infinite being into a multiverse of material bodies that could be destroyed in a heat death or in a Big Rip at the end of time. The mass death in question is precisely one of perfect peace: the stillness of nonbeing, the erasure of the absurdity of an almighty God who becomes a monster that needs to be put down. Gods suicide is the secret of monotheism and you can read this secret in the very name of Islam.

Apocalypse and the Death of God

Buttressing this interpretation is the Muslims exoteric view of history, according to which there will be an apocalyptic Judgment Day at historys end, when God will finally reveal himself and give everyone their due, establishing the divine kingdom after wiping

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out our upstart civilizations. This linear, apocalyptic conception of history is a nod to Eastern dualism, according to which the present reality is relatively insignificant and at any rate illusory compared to Gods transcendent reality. Were Gods hand to break into nature at the end of all things and take full, direct control over Creation, the implication is that this would confirm the irony of Jesus ascetic, anti-nature message that those who are first will be last and those who are last will be first.

But the idea of an apocalyptic, once-and-for-all end of history is very strange. Why would God be confined to just one attempt at Creation? Why couldnt God create an infinite variety of universes, letting each take its course? Obviously, wed be most concerned about the fate of our world, but the point is that the End Time is only subjectively apocalyptic. Our world might end on some Judgment Day, but why think this particular day is so important to God? Perhaps Gods presided over trillions of other Judgment Days, sending untold alien sinners to their equivalent hells. Theres no hint of any such downgrading of the importance of our Judgment Day, however, the assumption being that the time of our reckoning will be just as important to God as it is to us. I see this monotheistic talk of the end of days, then, as a garbled telling of the dark secret: what will end is not just human reign over our particular planet, but Gods reign too. At the end of all things, God himself will be no more; more precisely, the truth at the heart of the monotheistic myth is that such a God would be so horrible that he ought to die, and so hopefully in some transcendent dimension hes somehow done away with himself, since no one else could slay that dragon. Thats the apocalyptic event, the death of God, and thats why monotheists assume that God is so concerned with that End Time. On the one hand, then, Islam is about the peace of death through strict adherence to Gods plan, and on the other, theres this dark cloud hanging over monotheists, an expectation of some barely imaginable catastrophe that Gods planned all along. What ends is the life of God for all its intolerability and what comes after is the absurd decay of Gods undead corpse, which is the self-transformation of the cosmos. And after that, perhaps: total extinction so that no one will be the wiser.

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Algorithms of Islamic Law

Finally, Id like to return to the explicitness and practicality of Islam. Surely, its no accident that the algorithm was invented by a Muslim, al-Khwarizmi--and soon after Muhammad, in the ninth century CE. Muhammads Koran and the applications in Sharia had already laid the groundwork for this idea of a step-by-step procedure leading to an inevitable result, by designing a religion as precisely a set of such explicit procedures for pleasing God and avoiding hell. The explicitness of these procedures in Islamic law virtually presupposes the idea of the algorithm, of a program in the technical sense thats central now to computer programming. In his book Darwins Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett identifies natural selection as an algorithm in the sense that the evolution of life is a formal, mindless process that has a guaranteed result (the design of species that fit their environments). At the most general level, an algorithm is any mechanical process and so any natural process qualifies, even those whose results dont interest us. Now, by submitting so systematically to Gods will, the Muslim turns herself into a robotic slave, following an established procedure that belittles and ultimately eliminates her individuality: she prays constantly and applies every detail of Islamic law to her life. A Muslim wont even shrink from the coldbloodedness and obsoleteness of many of these laws, such as the law that a thief should have his arm amputated. If we draw back in horror from such laws, we merely betray our pride in our independent judgment which of course is folly compared to Allahs. Moreover, the function of Islamic law is to set the Muslim on the straight path, to turn an independent sinner and pseudo-god into a drone that follows Gods program, the end point of which is the peace of nonbeing.

Why the Islamic obsession with practicality? Muslims assume theres such a thing as Gods will for each of us, that theres a program were meant to follow and that if only we follow it, well be guaranteed peace in the deathly afterlife in which everything loses its value because change then is nonexistent or illusory. (When a virgin woman in heaven

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is enjoyed by a recreated man, does she grow her virginity back? What happens, then, to the meaning of virgin?) But if the idea of the algorithm is implicit in Islamic law, and as Dennett argues, an algorithm is substrate neutral, meaning that any process that can be formalized counts as algorithmic, nature is full of algorithms. In this case, if the end of nature is the Big Rip or some other cosmic catastrophe, theres a formal level of explanation--tantamount to a teleological level--according to which all natural processes are mindless steps in the securing of that endstate.

The algorithm, then, is at the heart of natures undeadness. As Ive argued elsewhere, nature is best intuited as being neither living nor dead but undead, meaning that natural processes arent caused or infused by any mind, but neither are they inert and lifeless: instead, these processes are simulations of mental labours. The universe creates forms in an orderly fashion that allows for scientific explanation, but theres no mind at the bottom of those creations. The cosmic body of nature is a corpse, but an animated one, and so nature is comparable to a zombie. This phony rationality in nature is explainable in terms of the algorithm: theres a formal, mindless process that can perform any task a mind might just as well perform. But this algorithmic level of explanation reintroduces teleology and is thus part of the scientific re-enchantment of nature.

As far as I know, scientific theories of the end of our universe predict tragedy for all forms of life, which is to be expected if the universe wasnt designed with life in anyones mind. But if natural laws imply algorithms at work everywhere in nature, this raises the philosophical (nonscientific) question of whether the guaranteed ultimate end of all of these programs was at some point intended by an intelligent designer. I dont think the concept of a natural algorithm requires this theistic interpretation, but I do think the most aesthetically satisfying interpretation of this formal description of natural order is the theistic one--at least for imperfectly rational mammals such as us. (Scientific explanations are confined to nature, whereas the foregoing teleological question is of some supernatural purpose of nature about which we can only speculate with stories. Even if the universe was intelligently designed, the best explanation of that process is to assume that God created nature by destroying himself, so at most this myth of natures

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undeadness would be deistic.) So if the end of nature entails the peace of everyones death, monotheism implies that this end was chosen by God, that God created nature as a colossal mechanism for carrying out the extinction of all life and perhaps also the destruction of everything whatsoever. Natural selection is a process of filtering those species that can thrive in an environment, but any such process is ambiguous: what looks like a process that favours some configuration of traits, by selecting for it, could just as well be thought of as disfavouring it by trying out the species only so that it can be discarded, making room for a new configuration. Natural selection looks like the ultimate disposal service for some anti-life purpose: each possible species is likely created somewhere in the multiverse and each is eventually extinguished in its turn. And if all natural processes implement algorithms, again natural regularities in general look like methods of disposing of quantum possibilities. If the catastrophic end of nature is a deathly peace, as implied by Islam and predicted by modern cosmologists, and quantum mechanics tells us that a multiverse of actual universes brings into being infinite quantum possibilities, this amounts to saying that nature is a system for disposing of infinite being by actualizing quantum possibilities in finite forms that can play themselves out to some deathly state or other, such as heat death or the Big Rip. Perhaps theres some lucky universe in which life has the last laugh by creating an actual timeless heaven, but for the most part organisms are unable to survive the termination of their universe. And so Islams explicitness and practicality call to mind the destructive purpose behind all of Creation. The exoteric conceit is that God is a generous, benevolent creator, whereas the esoteric reality is that the opposite would be true (on the monotheistic assumption that theres a God at all). Gods apparent creativity would be a means of systematic destruction, and Islamic monotheism alludes to this with its naturalization of Gods will: Islam is the detailed program for psychologically killing ourselves, for turning ambitious, curious mammals into neutered slaves, which is what Allah is supposed to want, and likewise all of nature can be thought of as a giant, self-destructive machine. The destruction proceeds by the converting of all timeless possibilities into finite

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actualities so that those possibilities can be ended in some suitable dimensions. Allah would be bent ultimately on destruction because monotheism is so absurd, and anyone put in the position of being the one true, almighty God ought to put herself out of her misery.

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Is the Devil a Hero? ____________________________________________________

The fictional character Satan is a rebel against God. In mainstream religions, the devil is the personification of evil, but these religions have a dubious understanding of the deity. Our best idea of what God would be like is that God would be rendered insane by his uniqueness, isolation, and perfect knowledge; that he'd be spiritually lifeless due to his immortality and corrupted by his omnipotence. In short, as far as we could tell, the monotheistic Gods character would be that of an infantile tyrant. Rebellion against such a God would be existentially obligatory and tragically heroic, but the mythical rebel Satan has, of course, been demonized because the conventional myths serve a questionable political function as well as the theological one of explaining away evil.

Theodicy and Dominance Hierarchy

Whether you think God made us or we made God, our conception of God is taken from our experience of more familiar things and thus that conception is analogical. Were most familiar with ourselves and with our social structures. Biology imparts one of those structures: the dominance hierarchy, or pecking order, in which those who are genetically fittest symbolically dominate the weaker members of the group to stabilize the group and to avoid what Hobbes called the war of all against all. In our species, this natural hierarchy produces monarchs, plutocrats, kleptocrats, or oligarchs at the top who enjoy godlike power that no one is equipped to handle. Thus, the Iron Law of Oligarchy, according to which the larger the group, the more the group can be efficiently managed only by concentrating power, should be combined with Lord Actons dictum that power corrupts. And so weve always had models for the ruler of the universe, namely the human rulers of our societies.

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Theres been, therefore, an ambiguity in theistic myths, since these myths can be told from the rulers perspective (the 1%) or from that of the ruled (the 99%). If we add to the above axioms the aphorism that history is written by the winners, we neednt be surprised to learn that the most popular myths implicitly legitimate our power inequalities. Whether a myth is written or edited directly by the rulers, their underlings, or those trying to ingratiate themselves and fit into the society, the myth becomes conventional only if it serves the biological imperative of preserving relative social stability. Thus, the image of God in monotheistic religions, for example, is of a tyrant who were nonetheless supposed not just to tolerate but to love. In the Jewish and Islamic scriptures, God is obsessed with promulgating a moral code that enslaves us to him. Rebelling against Gods laws is punished by hellfire; after all, in the supernatural social order, God is stronger than we are and so for what are actually biological reasons, we should know our place and bow to our master, allowing God to peck us at will. In short, theres apparently the interdimensional version of the dominance hierarchy, which we project onto the possible relationship between nature and something that transcends our comprehension, and that version justifies the more local, purely human inequalities.

Then there are the subversive myths, such as the original form of Buddhism and Gnosticism or authentic Christianity, as well as various mystical traditions in Islam, Judaism, and in many other great religions. Christianity was originally a religion for losers, but some of its leaders sold out Jesus teachings for worldly power, reinterpreting or editing out Jesuss uncompromising anti-naturalism, and scapegoating the Jews to let the Romans off the hook for executing Jesus. The Christian Bible came to consist of books that allowed Christianity to survive because they made peace with the natural order and the prevalence of dominance hierarchies, whether the rulers were Romans, Spaniards, Britons, or Americans. But the point is that a myth that projects the idea of a dominance hierarchy onto the relation between our world and a supernatural one can be told from the perspective of those who are poorly served by that

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arrangement and who are thus open to rebelling--against both human society and Gods plan.

The split between these two perspectives on God becomes apparent in their theodicies. The mainstream religion blames evil and suffering on anything but God, demonizing some angels or locating the problem in human freewill, thus blaming the victims. By analogy, these religions implicitly justify the suffering caused or made necessary by naturally corrupt human rulers. The lawgivers who rule over us are above the laws that subjugate the poor masses. Even a so-called free society like the US, in which the government is supposed to be held hostage to the majority of voters in a democratic fashion, works more like a republic in which the representatives are captured by oligarchs who are too big to fail or to be prosecuted. Likewise, Job was foolish for daring to call out God on his obvious and inevitable insanity and moral corruption. God put Job in his place and American plutocrats put the 99% of voters in theirs. God is best understood by us as a sociopathic, alpha male tyrant and the US is a stealth oligarchy using democracy as a cover to make most Americans feel guilty about the thought of rebelling like the Jacobins. But socially subversive myths like Gnosticism are more dualistic. Evil and unnecessary pain are blamed on the more apparent Creator of the universe, while only the mystics perfectly unknowable Source of everything is excused as somehow innocent. Thus, the gnostic is liable to renounce the human social order run by the tyrant who both causes and profits most from tremendous suffering. And so we find heretical secret societies of ascetics and other omegas. According to many Gnostic cosmologies, though, theres a transcendent Source of all things that emanates lower deities, one of which becomes corrupted and presumes to be able to create as well as the Source. Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible, was that tyrannical lesser deity who means to imprison us in the natural order, whereas our task is to liberate ourselves and be united with the true God. As I said, the counterpart of this spiritual rebellion is a natural one, requiring the Gnostic to detach from worldly affairs instead of contributing to the injustice of the natural dominance hierarchy. From the Gnostic perspective, which is that of the ruled rather

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than of the ruler, the serpent in the Garden of Eden was a saviour since the tempter was opposed to Yahweh, the false God. By contrast, from the perspective of mainstream monotheism, which is told by or for the winners in the struggle for worldly power, the serpent was evil for upsetting Gods plan, for causing the Fall and all of our woes. Again, mainstream religion, which defends the edifice of natural injustice, the mammalian dominance hierarchy and thus whichever monarchy, oligarchy, or dictatorship the religion grows out of, blames suffering on the ultimate victims and demonizes the rebels who would overturn the social structure that imposes that suffering. However, subversive and thus unpopular or short-lived cults which ironically aim to speak for the majority, prescribe an ascetic lifestyle that would, if generally adopted, utterly destroy our power hierarchies. And so these cults glorify rebels against the knowable God, since whats known about that God is that hes similar to the insane and corrupt human rulers.

The Ambiguity of Satanic Rebellion

There are many demonized rebels in ancient religions, since each culture needs a theodicy, not so much for philosophical reasons but so that the religion can serve as ideology in the political sense, that is, as propaganda to preserve a particular dominance hierarchy. In Zoroastrianism, theres Angra Mainyu, a daeva (deceitful, false god) who opposes Ahura Mazda. In Canaanite myths, theres Attar who attempts to take the throne of Lord Baal but fails because hes literally too small for the job and so is forced to rule the Underworld. The Babylonian goddess of fertility Ishtar likewise descends to the underworld. (These gods were identified with celestial bodies that pass below Earths horizon only to be reborn as they later rise again into the nights sky.) In ancient Egypt, theres Set who becomes jealous of his brother Osiris and kills him to take his throne. Set then battles Horus, the son of Isis and Osiriss corpse, and in some versions of the myth Horus defeats him. In Greek myths, theres the Titan Prometheus who pities humans, gifts us with fire and teaches us science, and who is punished by

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the jealous God Zeus. In Judaism, theres the serpent in Eden and the angel Satan in Job who challenges the perfection of Yahwehs creation at Jobs expense. In Enochian Judaism, theres Azazel, the scapegoat and fallen angel who is similar to Prometheus: he degrades humans, from Gods perspective, liberating us with progressive knowledge to distract us from Gods plan for us, and God punishes Azazel by casting him into hell. In Christianity, theres the demon Satan who tempts Jesus and tries to corrupt us all by deceiving us about Gods character and about our potential to liberate ourselves from God. The popular forms of these myths demonize the rebel and glorify the all-powerful God and rightful ruler. In some cases, the alternative perspective survives, as in the case of Prometheus who is honoured as a champion of human progress. Ancient Greece was the birthplace of Western rationalism and even atheism, and so the subversive message of the conflict between Prometheus and Zeus was irrepressible. In Christianity, of course, the opposite has proven true: since the fourth century CE, the dominant form of the religion has unified itself with secular dominance hierarchies such as the ancient Roman Empire, and so God is lauded as a rightful ruler, a loving father figure, and a symbol of the emperor Constantine, while the rebel Satan is literally demonized. Satan is good and angelic only as long as he bows before God, but becomes evil and doomed once he rebels. The relationship here between God and the rebel is obvious: if God is good, the rebel is evil, whereas if God is bad, the rebel is good. Two other points are equally clear. First, human societies develop into dominance hierarchies which elevate and curse certain rulers who are naturally corrupted by their concentrated power. Second, mainstream religions take Gods side, providing propaganda for the social status quo, glorifying the symbol of the human sovereign, God the creator (or as hes known in American circles, the job creator) and lawgiver, and demonizing the symbolic rebel against the social order. What follows from the first point is the disturbing monotheism of Philipp Mainlander. If were forced to think of God in metaphorical terms, extending what we know about people to the supposed supernatural realm, God must be just as insane

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and sociopathic as the typical human ruler. If thats the most rational and perfectly subversive form of monotheism, it follows that the best interpretation of the rebel against God is that this rebel is heroic rather than demonic. However, historically speaking, the exoteric form of the myth--the form that makes no sense as far as we can tell from what happens to people who become so powerful--carries the day and so God is praised and the rebel is pictured as so unthinkably evil that even to speak his name is taboo.

Critique of Modern Satanism

Lets focus on the rebel Satan for a moment. Despite centuries of demonization and Catholic persecutions of heresies, theres still a cult that worships or praises Satan. This cult has two forms, the theistic and the atheistic. Theistic Satanists worship Satan as a real deity. I leave this aside as preposterous. By contrast, atheistic Satanists, such as Anton LaVey who wrote The Satanic Bible, worship Satan only as a symbol of human egoism, freedom, and power. The ethics of this modern Satanism are just Ayn Rands, whose libertarianism bastardizes Nietzsches thesis of the will to power. Modern Satanists regard themselves as magicians/occultists who follow the so-called left-hand path of skepticism and iconoclasm. Marylyn Manson is an example of this sort of atheistic Satanist, or rebel against society. By contrast, the right-hand path submits to social conventions. This Tantric distinction between the heterodox and the orthodox is consistent with that between the esoteric and the exoteric and in generous Hinduism, both paths are spiritually valid for different kinds of people; that is, both paths lead ultimately to salvation, although the exoteric path is for those who are furthest from the heaven of moksha (liberation from corrupting and illusory nature). The heterodox path is to spiritualize what the public regards as sinful, based on the monist assumption that all is one anyway. The danger, though, is that you succumb to the sins and lose any insight into their spiritual aspect. In any case, the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric also maps on to the ambiguity I discussed in the last two sections. The mainstream myths that demonize rebels against society are propaganda for orthodoxy.

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Modern Satanists, though, adhere to the exclusivist interpretation, according to which their way of life is much better than the alternative.

To the extent that modern Satanism is libertarian, it has a number of problems. Ayn Rands egoism is prone to the naturalistic fallacy of simplistically equating what is with what ought to be. Just because were instinctively selfish doesnt mean selfishness is a virtue. What this leaves out is our existential predicament, which is that a rational being tends to self-destruct since reason leads us not just to understand nature but to be horrified by it. Reason supplies us with the objective perspective, which humbles and humiliates us by allowing us to discover our insignificance in the cosmic scheme. By worshipping the ego, the modern Satanist actually opts for the orthodox path of validating the powers that be, since the freest ego will naturally belong to the alpha male atop a power hierarchy, as I explain elsewhere. Moreover, libertarian individualism defends the modern status quo, by infantilizing the Satanist, which is good for business. The ego that needs to cater to its whims, to express itself as an unrestrained god will surely want to avail itself of the host of products designed to peak our interest. Also, Satanic egoism runs up against cognitive science which shows that the selfs independence is largely if not wholly illusory.

Finally, even were Satanic rebellion noble, the label of Satanism is so tainted after millennia of demonization that the movement becomes obnoxious and thus impractical (counterproductive). Granted, the symbol of Satan has power precisely because its taboo, but much of that power is based on the confusions that led to such demonization of rebellion against God in the first place. Those confusions are bound to distract not just the ignorant and manipulated herd, but the modern Satanist herself. In particular, shes going to fail to appreciate the existential problem which is central to the conflict between the twisted and tyrannical deity and the tragic hero who is doomed to resist the natural and social orders imposed on her. So is Satan an existential hero? Well, the demonized character of the rebel against God is of course the opposite of any kind of hero. So too, the modern Satanist isnt so heroic

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in the existential sense, although some of her skepticism and countercultural preferences may be laudable. But the underlying, pre-demonized character of Satan, of the angel that chose to rebel must indeed be heroic, given the subversive version of monotheism, according to which God is hideous from the perspective of oppressed and suffering people everywhere. The problem is that the character of this rebel has no content. The surviving stories about Satans reasons for rebelling are told from Gods perspective. Miltons Paradise Lost makes Satan a heroic, Promethean figure and the modern Satanist gives a libertarian interpretation of that heroism, but the latter is flawed for the above reasons, and the rationalist, Promethean tradition tends to be Scientistic and thus can at best be part of the story of the rebels heroism. To be sure, standing up to natural and social establishments requires reason to empower the rebel. But what does the rebel fight for? What are her ideals? If the angel Satan thought God was a monster, how would the angel have improved on Gods creation? How could anyone cope with Gods knowledge and power? Such questions are left as mysteries because religions are typically preoccupied with the demonic version of the existential rebel, since most theists ally themselves with the alphas idea of God because theyre understandably terrified of how a tyrant would treat a malcontent.

The Devil and the Libertarian

Finally, Id like to highlight the awkward fact that the American Tea Party, which is the trumped up name of the current libertarian movement, has the same ethics as modern Satanism, the link being Ayn Rand. In both case, the ideal is individual liberty, the rebels freedom to do as she pleases instead of being controlled, for example, by a tyrannical dictator or by God. In terms of Isaiah Berlins helpful distinction between negative and positive liberty, the freedom from constraint and the freedom of selfempowerment to tackle a particular goal, the American libertarian and the modern Satanist are each interested only in negative freedom. Thus, in answer to the question of what the American revolutionary fought for, the answer is the individuals freedom to decide what to do with her life. Theres no pre-established direction to take and the individual must assume responsibility for her choice of goals. Note the similarity

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between this negative liberty and the devils home in the hell of the outer darkness, the void in which all sins are permitted but nothing has any meaning. The devil rejects Gods grand design and fights for negative liberty, for the breaking of Gods chains so that the devil might pursue any passing whim. The problem with this liberty is precisely the existential one of homelessness and absurdity. Any direction we freely choose just because we can is arbitrary and uninspiring, and once we reach that destination were left empty and unfulfilled. This is the justification of the aphorism that money cant buy you happiness. Money gives us negative liberty (financial independence), but if all were blessed with is the power to do whatever we want, were still left with the ultimate normative question of what we ought to want. What should we do with that money, with that independence? How could Satan do better than the God that must have succumbed to that same independence? This is why I said that the subversive character of the rebel against God is unfortunately empty. We know that resistance against tyranny is good, but we dont know what the rebel ought to do instead of becoming just another tyrant; in this respect, the French Revolution is archetypal since the revolutionary Jacobins became actual tyrants. This is the problem of positive freedom and its central to the existential predicament. Reason empowers us with some autonomy, some freedom from our genes and our environment, to control ourselves as we see fit. But how ought we to see? What direction should we take? What should we do with all of our technoscience, our skepticism, our political freedoms and civil liberties? What should a democracy do in the world? Enlightening and uplifting answers to these questions are currently unknown, but we do know what actually happens to free individuals. Enter another axiom: power abhors a vacuum. So when the free individual doesnt know what to do with herself, powerful people will enter the picture and show her what to do and where to go. This is the role of demagogues in a democracy.

So in a stealth oligarchy like the US, in which bankers happen to rule, the ideal of most Americans happens to be the one thats good for business: materialistic consumerism. The free individual just wants to be happy, but she has no positive conception of

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happiness. Because of what the ads, movies, and other propaganda in her environment tell her, she trusts that owning and using things gives you pleasure, as does social interaction. Also, she trusts her genetic impulse to have a family. But these answers to the existential question represent only the powers that be filling the vacuum left behind by mere negative liberty. So the Tea Party is Satanic in that, like the rebellious angel, the libertarian is doomed to the outer darkness, to the tragically heroic freedom from any pre-existing path. Like the devil, the libertarian walks alone; she must be her own god and autonomously decide her every course of action, selfishly and vainly taking credit wherever she can. And like the devil, who is thought by the orthodox to be Gods pawn in the end, the merely free, isolated, fragile individual is bound to succumb to the stealth oligarchs power.

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Kazantzakis and The Saviours of God ____________________________________________________

Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek philosopher and author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. Some readers of this blog alerted me to the fact that he also wrote a sort of epic prose-poetic rant thats on the same wavelength as the philosophy/religion Im exploring here and similar in particular to a summary of this blog I wrote, called The Rant Within the Undead God. Kazantzakiss epic rant is called The Saviours of God (SG). After reading it, I was intrigued by the similarities and differences between our views. What follows are some of my thoughts on that text, so fair warning: this commentary contains spoilers. If you havent yet read SG, you might want to do so before reading this article. And if you do read it, I found that the second half, beginning with the section, The Vision, is the more important one. But the whole piece is full of rich, idiosyncratic and darkly poetic imagery so I do recommend the whole piece.

The Saviours of God

Kazantzakis poetic rant is about life, the universe, and everything. Its just the sort of writing that I most prefer: its inspired, which is to say that it reads like the author was possessed when he wrote it. The writing seems to flow directly from the unconscious, bypassing the ego censor and tapping into deep truths. This is how I try to write in this blogs rants and its why I call them rants, although I try to mix more argumentation with the poetic or comedic tangents. The ideal would be to produce a piece of writing that reads like it was written by an alien force, by some transcendent power from the future that gets to the heart of the matter, blasting past all obfuscation, social games, and politically correct conventions. In other words, the goal is to read or to write prophetic

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religious scripture, a text thats so powerful, people wrongly idolize it and invent myths to explain its origin. Whats called divine revelation in textual form is just an inspired work of rhetorical art, nothing more. But the fun of consuming or of producing this art is that you feel swept away, like your blinders are torn off and you catch a glimpse of the code behind the matrix. Thats what I aim for and SG feels inspired to me. As Kazantzakis himself says,

You shall never be able to establish in words that you live in ecstasy. But struggle unceasingly to establish it in words. Battle with myths, with comparisons, with allegories, with rare and common words, with exclamations and rhymes, to embody it in flesh, to transfix it! God, the Great Ecstatic, works in the same way. He speaks and struggles to speak in every way He can, with seas and with fires, with colors, with wings, with horns, with claws, with constellations and butterflies, that he may establish His ecstasy. SG takes the form of a prophets plea to change our conception of God so that we can live better. Kazantzakis assumes theres a difference between the esoteric and the exoteric, between the unknowable mystical truth and the mere masks of God. And Kazantzakiss vision of divinity is quite peculiar. It reminds me of the myth of Sisyphus. Whereas the mainstream monotheistic idea is that God is a flawless person, Kazantzakis says that God is imperfect, that hes a vagabond who struggles between two eternally opposing forces, one pulling him down into entropy and lifelessness and the other raising him up to freedom. My own body, and all the visible world, all heaven and earth, are the gravestone which God is struggling to heave upwardGod struggles in every thing, his hands flung upward toward the light. What light? Beyond and above every thing!... God cries to my heart: "Save me!" God cries to men, to animals, to plants, to matter: "Save me!" Listen to your heart and follow him. Shatter your body and awake: We are all one So may the enterprise of the Universe, for an ephemeral moment, for as long as you are alive, become your own enterprise. This, Comrades, is our new Decalogue.

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The metaphysical dualism here is similar to the presocratic philosopher Empedocless distinction between the powers of Love and Strife, which he says explains the mix of harmony and conflict in nature. And like Sisyphus, who is forced to roll a boulder up a hill with no guarantee of success, God can actually fail, bringing the whole universe down with him. The meaning of our life is to save God and thus ourselves, by fighting on Gods side in his eternal struggle: Whatever rushes upward and helps God to ascend is good. Whatever drags downward and impedes God from ascending is evil.

There are wonderful chapters in SG on the oneness of all living things. Take this passage, for example:

You are not one; you are a body of troops, One of your faces lights up for a moment under the sun. Then suddenly it vanishes, and another, a younger one, lights up behind you. The race of men from which you come is the huge body of the past, the present, and the future. It is the face itself; you are a passing expression. You are the shadow; it is the meat. You are not free. Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them, When you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth; when you make love, an ancestral caveman growls with lust; when you sleep, tombs open in your memory till your skull brims with ghosts. Your skull is a pit of blood round which the shades of the dead gather in myriad flocks to drink of you and be revived. If only libertarian individualists would take that mystical perception to heart. And again: An erotic wind blows over Earth, a giddiness overpowers all living creatures till they unite in the sea, in caves, in the air, under the ground, transferring from body to body a great, incomprehensible message. Only now, as we feel the onslaught behind us, do we begin dimly to apprehend why the animals fought, begot, and died; and behind them the plants; and behind these the huge reserve of inorganic forces. We are moved by pity, gratitude, and esteem for our old comrades-in-arms. They toiled, loved, and died to open a road for our coming. We also toil with the same delight, agony, and exaltation for the sake of Someone Else who with every courageous deed of ours proceeds one step farther.

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This is just the sort of idea I had in mind when I wrote Should We Procreate to Honour our Ancestors? although I took the idea from Richard Dawkins.

The military imagery in SG, too, lends itself to existential interpretation. Living things march along with God and should choose to fight with him for freedom: battle to give meaning to the confused struggles of man. Existential authenticity is a struggle because the prognosis is not good: in the end, were all doomed, because life is absurd and tragic. Weve all been thrust into a bad spot, cursed with reason in an uncaring universe. The basis for the military imagery in Kazantzakiss vision of God seems to be the existential sense of lifes grimness or perhaps the Buddhists understanding of lifes inherent suffering. But whereas I follow Schopenhauers sort of monism, Kazantzakiss view is, as I said, dualistic. The downward pressure on God and Gods imperfection serve the purpose of theodicy, whereas the upward, constructive force and the potential for freedom are sources of encouragement. And yet, because Kazantzakiss view is perfectly dualistic, hes neither pessimistic nor optimistic. Whats left, I think, is Stoic resignation in the face of existential absurdity. Gods struggle is eminently worthy but ultimately futile because the two governing forces are equally matched. God is a little like Buridans Ass, stuck between two equidistant haystacks. In Kazantzakiss words:

These two armies, the dark and the light, the armies of life and of death, collide eternally. The visible signs of this collision are, for us, plants, animals, men. The antithetical powers collide eternally; they meet, fight, conquer and are conquered, become reconciled for a brief moment, and then begin to battle again throughout the Universe - from the invisible whirlpool in a drop of water to the endless cataclysm of stars in the Galaxy. Even the most humble insect and the most insignificant idea are the military encampments of God. Within them, all of God is arranged in fighting position for a critical battle. Even in the most meaningless particle of earth and sky I hear God crying out: "Help me!" What is the struggles purpose? At first, Kazantzakiss answer is similar to Yahwehs answer to Job:

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This is what the wretched self-seeking mind of man is always asking, forgetting that the Great Spirit does not toil within the bounds of human time, place, or causality. The Great Spirit is superior to these human questionings. It teems with many rich and wandering drives which to our shallow minds seem contradictory; but in the essence of divinity they fraternize and struggle together, faithful comrades-inarms. The primordial Spirit branches out, overflows, struggles, fails, succeeds, trains itself. It is the Rose of the Winds. Whether we want to or not, we also sail on and voyage, consciously or unconsciously, amid divine endeavors. Indeed, even our march has eternal elements, without beginning or end, assisting God and sharing His perils. But he discovers a clue, instead of leaving his reader completely in the dark:

We discern a crimson line on this earth, a red, blood-splattered line which ascends, struggling, from matter to plants, from plants to animals, from animals to man. This indestructible prehuman rhythm is the only visible journey of the Invisible on this earth. Plants, animals, and men are the steps which God creates on which to tread and to mount upward. Difficult, dreadful, unending ascension! Shall God conquer or be conquered in this onslaught? Does victory exist? Does defeat exist? Our bodies shall rot and turn to dust, but what will become of Him who for a moment passed beyond the body? Yet these are all lesser concerns, for all hopes and despairs vanish in the voracious, funneling whirlwind of God. God laughs, wails, kills, sets us on fire, and then leaves us in the middle of the way, charred embers.

Pantheism and the Existential Struggle

My interpretation of this clue rests on a broader interpretation of Kazantzakiss peculiar God. What sort of God needs saving by his creatures? As I said, hes explicit about the difference between insider and outsider levels of understanding: I do not care what face other ages and other people have given to the enormous, faceless essence. They have crammed it with human virtues, with rewards and punishments, with certain ties. They have given a face to their hopes and fears, they have submitted their anarchy to a rhythm, they have found a higher justification by which to live and labor. They have fulfilled their duty.

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But today we have gone beyond these needs; we have shattered this particular mask of the Abyss; our God no longer fits under the old features. Our hearts have overbrimmed with new agonies, with new luster and silence. The mystery has grown savage, and God has grown greater. The dark powers ascend, for they have also grown greater, and the entire human island quakes. Let us stoop down to our hearts and confront the Abyss valiantly. Let us try to mold once more, with our flesh and blood, the new, contemporary face of God. As I said, this new, contemporary face of God is that of the fragile, homeless being who needs our help in his struggles. I think the key influence on Kazantzakis here is Darwin. When Kazantzakis says, The mystery has grown savage, he seems to have in mind the brutal, Darwinian view of life, and this leads Kazantzakis to a process theology as opposed to a Platonic one as in standard Christianity, in which God and heaven are fixed, static, and as I say elsewhere, therefore lifeless. But Id go further and say that the simplest interpretation of Kazantzakiss myth of God, the desperate freedom fighter, is to think of this God in pantheistic terms. After all, if anythings struggling, torn between constructive and destructive forces, its the natural universe. God, then, represents the organisms potential to shape the universes evolution. God is a lost vagabond in that hes the average between the two extremes, the void of chaotic quantum fluctuations and the freedom to create and to enjoy creations. God is caught between death and life, annihilation and plenitude because the universe can go either way. Nevertheless, God is different from Buridans Ass, because God has a preferred direction, whereas according to the determinist, the donkey would be frozen and unable to decide which haystack to eat. God prefers life, freedom, and creation. He struggles upwards to save himself, to fight the forces that oppose him.

Now this makes for an interesting comparison with the Gnostic, Mainlanderian theology Ive been recently exploring. According to these dark, but eminently plausible myths, God would indeed be beset by negative forces since no person could cope with Gods position. The role of God would turn anyone into an infantile tyrant. Such is the wisdom of psychology and social science to which the monotheist is committed as soon as she

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personifies the presumed transcendent source of natural order. So the monotheistic God would indeed struggle not to go completely insane and perhaps not to destroy himself to end his torment. Kazantzakis leaves open the possibility that God could falter on his way up the cosmic hill, that he could give up as the downward pressure against his transhuman impulse overcomes him. But his theology implies, rather, a stalemate, since he says the two sides are eternally in contention.

I read Kazantzakis as saying, then, that God represents Lifes preference for nature to evolve in a way that favours either life or, more realistically and less hubristically, some unfathomable, awe-inspiring end that somehow, at least, vindicates or honours Lifes struggles. The worst-case scenario would be for all our suffering to be pointless, for the universe to peter out and for the transhuman dream of perfect autonomy and creative power to be dashed as some countervailing forces degrade Life and everything else. Theres a hint of just this demonic architecture in the natural utility of the dominance hierarchy and in social powers ironic corruption of its user, both principles combining to guarantee the tragicomedy of politics we see throughout history. Powerful leaders emerge because power must be centralized for the governing of large groups, the alternative being anarchy and total war. But the leaders are inevitably corrupted by their role and when they fall, society falls with them until a new society emerges, thanks to the ambition or lucky placement of a new leader, and so on. Whats demonic about this is the natural regularity of this pattern, as though there were some invisible barrier that prevents societies from evolving in a healthier, more sustainable way.

As to Kazantzakiss ideal of freedom, I have hopes as well as doubts. What Isaiah Berlin called the negative view of freedom is actually the amoral permission to sin. Above the doorway to hell could well be found a plaque that reads, Here youll be free to do whatever you want, as long as you know you can want anything at all. Without some direction, which is to say some constraint on freedom, perfect freedom to do whatever you want is a precondition of hell. But Kazantzakis doesnt prescribe any such open-ended freedom. He offers specific advice on how to live, based on his metaphysics and theology. For example, because all living things are united in their

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suffering, we should take pity on fellow creatures. I happen to agree with this, more or less, but the point is that theres some imprecision, not to mention emptiness, in saying with Kazantzakis that the ultimate ideal is freedom. This sounds rather like a US Republican weasel word that distracts from the true goal (maintaining the stealth oligarchy as the most natural and therefore best social order). At best, then, freedom can be only part of the reason to save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit. The hard questions remain: How should freedom be used? What would an awakened, posthuman intelligence do with its perfect self-control? Why go on living at all? Why join the struggling God or why prefer natures creative potential, if theres just as much destruction as creation in the universe?

As I pointed out, Kazantzakis sees a clue in what Ive called the complexification and evolution of natural processes. In particular, he says, theres implicit purpose in Lifes march from a state of dumb simplicity to our godlike level of sentience. Of course, science doesnt recognize any such destiny of lifes evolution. And Im inclined, rather, to think that if theres any purpose of evolutions creativity, its the negative one of eliminating as many options for finite embodiment as possible, so as to more fully transmute the transcendent source we call God into a manageable form that might be destroyed for all time. In any case, theres surely great power in the myth (fictional story) that all living things are united by our struggles not just to spread our genes but to adapt to environments, to heroically overcome obstacles, to deal with predators and with our physical and mental limitations. You can even dispense with the boundaries between individuals and species, and think of the great Tree of Life.

I think Kazantzakis is a little more optimistic than I am, though, about Lifes potential for greatness. Hes enough of an insider to avoid blindly anthropomorphizing natural processes. He knows that God (the power of natural creativity) wouldnt be partial to living things, let alone humans, since organisms are united also with nonliving things by their physical finitude. But he seems hopeful that Life has a purpose that vindicates all our struggles. I too am hopeful that existential integrity, which is to say contentment with harsh truth and a distaste for delusion, makes for a heroic life, despite the ascetic

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implications. And I too naturalize the aesthetic ideal of creativity, by comparing our creativity in overcoming angst with the complexification and evolution of all natural forces, our task being to create the enlightened, posthuman form. But Im inclined to think of our salvation as the result of a rebellion against nature and God, not of a joining with them. For Kazantzakis, the war is between our highest self, which sides with the best in nature, and the annihilating force that would defile the ideal of creativity. For me, the war is entirely within us, because everything is tainted, including us: the struggle is for a state of existential grace in spite of the whole universe which mocks that goal. Even when someone is enlightened, the result is ironic, as in Eastern mysticism, since the hero wins only the deathlike state of nirvana, as she recognizes shes really no thing and that the best freedom is liberation from all of nature.

Between Idolatry and Mysticism

Theres an ascetic balance between relenting to the temptation to project ourselves onto inhuman nature and so vainly idolize the masks of God, and nihilistic mysticism that ends ultimately in suicide. Despite Kazantzakiss poetry about the unity of all living things, the fact is that people alone are truly cursed by reason, and thus our war with nature is unlike most animals struggle for survival. Moreover, the human ascetic or omega person is the real-life struggling vagabond, the tragic hero that should have inspired Kazantzakiss myth of the marching God. Certainly, all animals struggle, but what makes Gods struggle excruciating in SG is that his human qualities make him merely godlike. God knows enough to be cursed by reason but not enough to escape from that curse without suffering; for example, God doesnt know whether hell succeed in the end, but he knows hes got to try because his ideals lead him on. Of course, there is no such God. Nature is thoroughly inhumane because the world is impersonal; living things are cosmic aberrations. So the real existential heroes are the actual, marginalized creatures, the introverted outcasts and losers who are compelled to sabotage their prospects for happiness, because they suspect that happiness is only for dead souls, for weak-willed, self-made, albeit hard-working robots. The existential hero battles the horror and the angst with which reason punishes her, as well as the social

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forces of conformity for the sake of superficial happiness, and she trusts that theres some nobility in sublimating that horror and angst with some creative endeavour and in disengaging with that society and renouncing unworthy idols.

Kazantzakis himself strikes this balance in the last chapter of SG when he errs on the side of pure mysticism. He speculates that the ultimate truth, beyond even the myth of the struggling God that needs to be saved by us, is the silent peace in the Abyss, in the unmasked, transcendent source of everything: Silence means: Every person, after completing his service in all labors, reaches finally the highest summit of endeavor, beyond every labor, where he no longer struggles or shouts, where he ripens fully in silence, indestructibly, eternally, with the entire Universe. There he merges with the Abyss and nestles within it like the seed of man in the womb of woman. But then he ends SG with a surprise. Capitalizing his summary of his poetic rant, he says, BLESSED BE ALL THOSE WHO FREE YOU AND BECOME UNITED WITH YOU, LORD, AND WHO SAY: "YOU AND I ARE ONE." THRICE BLESSED BE THOSE WHO BEAR ON THEIR SHOULDERS AND DO NOT BUCKLE UNDER THIS GREAT, SUBLIME, AND TERRIFYING SECRET: THAT EVEN THIS ONE DOES NOT EXIST! Where this leaves Kazantzakis, I think, is with the merely aesthetic ideal of creativity. SG, his myth of God, is just a work of art, nothing more. Is there really a God? Is there really a best way for everyone to live? Will all our struggles really be vindicated one day? Theres dubious Scientism in assuming that we can know the answers to these philosophical questions or even that we should settle for answers were they offered. The factual truth, as best as we can tell, is what scientists tell us: we clever animals are anomalies in a mostly lifeless cosmos. Our brains are limited compared to what exists, so like naive children we ask questions that are too big for us and we tell tall tales to satisfy our curiosity. Thats the achievement of philosophical speculations and of theological myths.

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Introversion and the Esoteric ____________________________________________________

People are evenly split between introverts and extroverts and yet for various reasons, some societies marginalize either personality type. Psychologists tell us how those personality types differ, but I think we inevitably interpret those findings from our philosophical and religious perspectives. After laying out the psychological distinction, based on psychologist Laurie Helgoes article, Revenge of the Introvert, I delve into some philosophical and religious interpretations.

Introverts vs Extroverts
In Revenge of the Introvert, Helgoe explains the psychological differences between introverts and extroverts, and speaks to the conflicts that can arise between someone of either personality type and her society, depending on whether that society is friendlier to one type or the other. Part of her introduction summarizes her article, which Ill quote here:

Although there is no precise dividing line, there are plenty of introverts around. It's just that perceptual biases lead us all to overestimate the number of extraverts among us (they are noisier and hog the spotlight). Often confused with shyness, introversion does not imply social reticence or discomfort. Rather than being averse to social engagement, introverts become overwhelmed by too much of it, which explains why the introvert is ready to leave a party after an hour and the extravert gains steam as the night goes on.

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Scientists now know that, while introverts have no special advantage in intelligence, they do seem to process more information than others in any given situation. To digest it, they do best in quiet environments, interacting one on one. Further, their brains are less dependent on external stimuli and rewards to feel good. As a result, introverts are not driven to seek big hits of positive emotional arousal-they'd rather find meaning than bliss--making them relatively immune to the search for happiness that permeates contemporary American culture. In fact, the cultural emphasis on happiness may actually threaten their mental health. As American life becomes increasingly competitive and aggressive, to say nothing of blindingly fast, the pressures to produce on demand, be a team player, and make snap decisions cut introverts off from their inner power source, leaving them stressed and depleted. Introverts today face one overarching challenge--not to feel like misfits in their own culture. So introversion isnt the same as shyness. The shy person wants more social interaction but lacks the knowhow, whereas the introvert isnt even interested in that interaction. As Helgoes headline says, introverts would rather be entertained by whats going on in their heads than by seeking happiness. Introverts prefer thinking to action. Science shows that the introvert cognitively processes more of what she perceives than does the extrovert, and so the introvert needs time and silence to think about that deeper experience. The introvert has a preference for solitude, reflection, internal exploration of ideas vs. active engagement and pursuit of rewards in the external/social world. Scientists theorize that given their higher level of brain activity and reactivity, introverts limit input from the environment in order to maintain an optimal level of arousal. Extraverts, on the other hand, seek out external stimulation to get their brain juices flowing. The extrovert doesnt analyze her thoughts as much as the introvert, and so is stimulated more by whats going on in her environment; in fact, the extrovert has larger brain structures responsible for sensitivity to rewards, and so seeks out external stimulation to satisfy her need for social validation. By contrast, Introverts are collectors of thoughts, and solitude is where the collection is curated and rearranged to make sense of the present and future.

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Helgoe points to some interesting negative consequences of introversion. First, extensive internal dialogue, especially in response to negative experiences, can set off a downward spiral of affect. And indeed, anxiety and depression are more common among introverts than extraverts. Moreover, introverts are more self-critical than others--but also more realistic in their self-assessments. Call it depressive realism. Ill return to this in a moment. Second, though, theres the social conflict in countries like the United States, which is home to a cult of extraversion. In that sort of materialistic, socially Darwinian society, the ultimate goal in life is not to philosophize, to understand, or to create; rather, the goal is to be happy, which means to feel the pleasure that comes with success in the marketplace and to enjoy the popularity and material wealth sustained or brought by that success. This is to say that since the 1970s, after the backlash against the socialist revolution in the 60s, the effective American religion, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus, has been crafted by that economys biggest players, the large corporations and related think tanks, infotainment outlets, lobbyists and captured politicians. As has been known since the ancient Greeks, the more open the society the more vulnerable it is to demagogues, and in the US in recent decades the demagogues that have most shaped American culture advocate ideals that presuppose extroversion. The economic reasons for this are clear: theres more money to be made from extroverts than from introverts. Those who have a greater neurological need for external stimulation are more easily tempted and trained by sellers of products, most of which arent needed and thus have to be sold by dubious lines of reasoning. An introvert sees a clumsily fallacious ad and thinks long and hard before acting, whereas an extrovert is more likely to make an impulse purchase. The introvert is thus the harder sell, so in a capitalistic economy with no strong cultural counterweight to the capitalistic ideology (in the Marxist sense of ideology), like the US where its Christianity is laughably irrelevant, that sort of economic consideration comes to determine the populations highest values.

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Some Philosophical Context of Introversion

Helgoes article is informative but limited. On the one hand, the psychologist models her discipline on the hard sciences like physics, mathematics, and chemistry. Thus, psychology is supposed to be purely descriptive and objective, not to mention rigorous and exact. On the other hand, psychology distinguishes between health and illness, and between function and dysfunction, and these distinctions are normative. The psychologist borrows the values and ideals needed to generate those distinctions from society. As for a discussion of those values, thats where psychology needs to become philosophical rather than scientific. So Helgoes article walks the tightrope of describing the difference between the two personality types and of highlighting dangers for introverts, but the needed social context to understand introversion at the philosophical level is naturally absent from her article.

For example, when she says that the introvert isnt just highly self-critical but also realistic in her self-assessment, and that the introvert is prone to anxiety and depression, she implies that what spares the extrovert is delusion (as opposed to realism). Helgoe calls the introverts anxiety and depression the results of a downward spiral of affect, which is a pseudoscientific way of making a value judgment. Moreover, theres a contradiction here. First, Helgoe says that extensive internal dialogue leads to this downward spiral of emotion such as anxiety, but then she says the introvert is more realistic than the extrovert. If the introverts thoughts are based more in reality, why speak of anxiety as though it were disconnected from reality, lying at the bottom of a downward spiral? One point thats missing from Helgoes article and that makes sense of these tensions can be summed up in three words: reason is accursed. The introvert thinks more than the extrovert (which isnt to say the introvert is more intelligent); those who think a lot tend to perceive more of the real world; ultimately, the real world isnt as wed prefer it to be and indeed confronts us with an existential predicament; therefore, the introvert

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tends to be anxious and depressed rather than happy. That argument reveals the philosophical aspect of introversion.

An objection springs to mind: highly deluded people can think a lot too, because they have overactive imaginations, so just because youre stimulated more by your thoughts than by the outer world, doesnt mean youre more in touch with reality. But imagining is only one kind of thinking. An introvert may create a worldview, collecting and curating thoughts, as Helgoe says, but she also strives to improve that worldview by asking questions, raising doubts, and following logical implications. Anxiety disorders are indeed matters of following rules that have lost touch with reality in that the rules lack proportion. For example, theres the irrational fear of germs. But once again, this is creativity run amok. So if introverts tend to think more in general, as opposed to being just more likely to imagine unrealities, introverts will stay humble enough to ask tough questions about their ideas, thus keeping some sense of proportion. That is, the introvert will test her ideas by rational methods and so shell be less likely to succumb to politically correct delusions. By contrast, to fit in and be happy, the extrovert will need to appear, at least, to affirm popular opinions regardless of whether those opinions are realistic. As to whether the extrovert really is more deluded than the introvert, this is hard to say, assuming the extrovert doesnt think so much, because the test of whether someone really believes something or is just faking it has two parts. First, you check whether the person holds the belief even after she thinks long and hard about it. Second, you check whether she puts that belief into practice. The extrovert cant pass either part of the test, but thats only because she may not have beliefs at all. She has no deep thoughts, because she doesnt usually stop and think. Sure, there will be patterns in her behaviour, but those will be shaped by her genetics and her environment, not by her independent mental activity. However, this would be so only for the pure extrovert. As Helgoe points out, though, theres a continuum between the two personality types, and most people are partly introverted and partly extroverted. Most extroverts are thus only more extroverted than introverted.

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As for the connection between depressive realism and the conflict between the individual and society, knowing the reality of the happiness industry tends to detach the knower from the culture created to serve that industry, and so again the introverts conflict with capitalistic societies isnt just about brain structures. Perhaps the extroverts brain is more driven to seek happiness in the form of a wealth of social rewards, but theres an interesting philosophical point here as well: such happiness is delusory. Those who recognize our common existential predicament, that the world is not what wed prefer it to be and that we dont truly belong anywhere; that death makes life ridiculous by being the great equalizer and that sex is embarrassing and horrific and thus kept secret; and that there is no God or perfect justice, nor much rational justification of morality appreciate that happiness is unbecoming. To seek a life that will make you happy, you have to ignore or deny all of that and fill your head, if anything, with memes, corporate jingles, and politically correct happy-talk, which conventional thoughts usually begin as instruments of social control. A class of consumers had to be created and must now be maintained for the sake of the new world order. Countries like China produce cheap goods and other countries must purchase those goods. Advertisements consist literally of lies or of grossly deficient arguments, and the extroverts who try to be happy in the conventional sense literally buy into the materialistic worldview thats only an economically useful distraction rather than being philosophically (existentially, ethically, or aesthetically) well-justified. What Ive been calling existential cosmicism is an example of a worldview that I believe is well-justified in those ways. Introverts are more likely to gravitate to it, because such a dark worldview is obviously detrimental to the most conventional life project of being a useful member of the American-led social order, and the introvert has contempt for that project or is at least indifferent to it. To think much about the reality of that project, and to notice how it conflicts with the call for existential authenticity, is to remove yourself--to some extent at least--from that social order. The more youre appalled by advertisements, for example, the fewer goods youll buy, but assuming you live in a country thats supposed to consume more than it produces, the less you consume the

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less economically useful you are. And in a society in which the dominant values spring ultimately from the cynical defense of a stealth oligarchy, the economically useless members of society are marginalized and demonized.

But these relatively useless citizens are also in the know. In fact, there are two groups that understand the dark reality of how the new world order (the technoscientific, democratic, capitalistic, American-led, and effectively atheistic one) works. There are the oligarchs and especially the plutocrats who benefit the most from this world order, and there are the introverts who, for philosophical or religious reasons, detach themselves from it as omegas. The oligarch is most likely a sociopath, and its interesting to note that a sociopath combines traits of pure introverts and of pure extroverts. The sociopath thinks a lot but feels very little, thus having no moral compunctions to prevent him from achieving his goals by harming others. But to harm others he must disguise his nature and indeed must be an expert liar. Thus, hell seem friendly and outgoing even though he wont really care about anyone else. Hell act as an extrovert, but hell think like an introvert. Hell need to be socially accepted to avoid being identified and locked up, but hell understand the danger he poses and that his life is a lie. When a sociopath rises to the top of a power hierarchy because of his lack of compassion, he becomes a key player in shaping the propaganda that exploits extroverts, turning them into robotic consumers. Then there are the outcasts, omegas, artists, philosophers, and seekers who likewise understand that social conventions in a materialistic society are instruments of social control rather than truths that connect us with reality. But these hyper-rational introverts also have the emotions that take them out of the social game. Introverts understand social reality and are horrified by it, whereas oligarchs understand and run the social systems. So when Helgoe says that an introvert needs to worry about being a misfit in a materialistic society that favours extroverts, I take it the above is part of the philosophical context that gives meaning to that statement.

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Religion and the Personality Types

Just as the psychological distinction between the personality types is incomplete without the philosophical context that can deal directly with the normative issues, without the threat of scientism, so too that context is incomplete. At some point, we reach the ultimate questions of what sort of person we ought to be and what society should be like. These questions are the least practical because theyre the most idealistic. Certainly, only an introvert would ponder them at any length and only then to curate the art gallery of her ideas, as it were, to see whether her worldview is maximally coherent. But when we move to the deepest questions, we come up against matters of ultimate concern, which the existential theologian Paul Tillich did well to identify with matters of religious faith.

As I said, American-led societies are effectively atheistic and materialistic; elsewhere, Ive stressed their Scientism, meaning their secular humanism and the centrality of technoscience to their discourses. Their nominal religion is some brand of monotheism, but their ultimate concerns are defined by transhumanism, pragmatism, and consumerism. What Westerners care about most is empowering themselves with science and technology (transhumanism), to give them greater control over their natural life (pragmatism) but also to distract them from philosophically understanding that life; in place of that understanding, Westerners want to be happy in the materialistic sense (consumerism). As Helgoe points out, extroverts are more useful in these societies than introverts. Extroverts are attracted by the rewards derived from power (transhumanism), they prefer action to thinking (pragmatism), and theyre susceptible to the delusions of materialistic happiness that are needed to sell schlock (consumerism). By contrast, introverts are more likely to be outsiders in those societies.

And so the introvert seems to face a hard choice. Should she try to be more extroverted to fit into a Western society and be happier? Which is the better life in a deluded society, that of the anxious misfit or that of the contented winner? In terms given by the movie The Matrix, should the introvert be like Neo or like Cypher who tries to get back

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into the matrix? Mind you, I dont think we choose our religions in the sense of our ultimate concerns, so much as try to discover what weve most cared about all along. Religions arent like manufactured products that are all lined up on the shelf, waiting for you to select your favourite. Those who do shop around for a religion, perhaps creating their own eclectic worldview have never been true members of any religion theyve sampled; instead, theyre seekers or skeptics. Introverts care a lot about thinking, and thinking puts them in touch with unpleasant truths. They learn that reason is a curse, that it shows us our existential predicament which wed rather ignore. By contrast, the extrovert prefers action and adventure, deeds rather than just talk, social interaction rather than withdrawal. She affirms the world as it is rather than stewing in self-pitying worries, but she too will confront the downside of her personality type: shes more susceptible to manipulation by the powers that be, by the sociopathic rulers of the science-centered, American-led social order. The key distinction in the introverts type of religion is that between the esoteric and exoteric, since this distinction makes sense of the social dynamic outlined above. In the modern context, the conflict between introverts and their society is overtly economical, because a science-centered religion (secular humanistic consumerism) has had to replace obsolete theism as the effective religion of the dominant social order. So the society that now most conflicts with introverts values happiness derived from labour and consumption. Introverts are marginalized in such a society and come to appreciate its absurdity. The introvert feels privileged to possess esoteric, subversive and thus unpopular wisdom, whereas the extrovert is content with superficial, conventional, exoteric knowledge. Before modern science, the introverts esoteric viewpoint was understood in theistic terms: the introvert was thought to have a better grasp of Gods revelation, and he withdrew from society as an ascetic because he believed he belonged to a higher, spiritual plane. In the modern age, existentialism should replace that theistic framework. The introvert isnt vindicated in any afterlife and there is no supernatural revelation. At best, she has existential authenticity and deals heroically with the curse of her over-active brain; moreover, she enjoys the dark comedy thats apparent only from the social outsiders grasp of our existential situation.

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The extroverts type of religion is quite different. For her, thinking a lot is self-indulgent and self-defeating. Extroverts want to contribute by building things, making a difference, learning about the world through an array of experiences, and relating to people rather than just to an inner museum of abstract ideas. The extrovert is interested most in people, places, and possessions, not in ideas. Philosophy itself is a distraction from the pursuit of a rich, full life. Theres no need to think so much, because the world is full of potential experiences and all you have to do to have them is act. Whereas the introvert collects ideas, the extrovert collects experiences, and so perhaps a fitting symbol of extroversion is the vacation photo album (or computer directory). The introvert dotes on her ideas, whereas the extrovert lavishes attention on her social networks, vacation plans, and material objects. When shes on vacation, collecting exotic experiences, she may capture a host of snapshots so the experience can be converted into a series of material objects. That way, she objectifies the places she visits and can more easily manage her memories of them. Still, merely remembering an experience is a nod to introversion. An extrovert should always want to actually broaden her experiences rather than live in the past. Whereas the introverts hero is the ascetic or antiheroic drifter, the extroverts is some combination of the explorer and the alpha winner of social games.

Of course, none of the monotheistic religions suits the extrovert. Jewish laws and customs unnecessarily restrict the experiences you can have and Islam restricts them even more, while (authentic) Christianity espouses asceticism in light of dualistic revelations about the relative inferiority of fallen nature. In extroverted societies like the US, the extroverts effective religion is just the set of myths and practices that celebrate the dominant cultures governing values, which Ive already discussed (transhumanism, pragmatism, and happiness/consumerism). The modern, post-theistic form of the introverts religion is still inchoate, although I think existentialism and cosmicism would be elements of it. As it stands, modern introverts are on their own, although the internet paradoxically enables them to organize and form special interest groups. Some Western introverts take refuge in antiquated and preposterous worldviews, becoming

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priests in sell-out religious institutions. Eastern introverts have more venerable ascetic traditions in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, but these are still premodern and not fully coherent ways of understanding natural reality. Perhaps an unembarrassing postmodern religion for introverts will arise, so that the ultimate clash of civilizations wont be between the secular West and the Islamic world, but between the Western cult of extroversion and a culture based on the introverts religion that begins with existential cosmicism.

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Homelessness and the Transhuman: Some Existential Implications of Cognitive Science ____________________________________________________

If science and commonsense about human nature are in conflict, and cognitive science and R. Scott Bakkers Blind Brain Theory are swiftly bringing this conflict to a head, what are the social implications? After explaining the conflict and putting it in the broader contexts of homelessness and alienation, I contrast the potential dystopian and utopian outcomes for society, focusing on the transhuman utopia in which, quite ironically, science and technology make the fantasy of the manifest image a reality, by turning people into gods. I use the sociopathic oligarch and the savvy politician as models to try to understand the transhumans sophisticated self-conception.

Our Self-Destructing Home

Richard Dawkins called the genetically-determined, artificial transformation of the environment--for example, the spiders web, beavers dam, or human-made shelter--an organisms extended body. So to see why alienation is part of our destiny, compare a persons situation with that of a web-spinning spider. Remove the spider entirely from its web, deprive it of its ability to weave a new one, and the spider would be discombobulated from its homelessness. The spider that spins webs cant function without them. This creatures body evolved to walk on silk threads, to eat the prey that can be caught in that net, and to sense threats through vibrations in the web. To the extent that a spider thinks of the world, its viewpoint is web-centric. The spider surely feels most at home in its web where its lord of the land; from its perspective, the world beyond is webless and out of its control. So a spider has external and internal means of reorganizing the world, although its internal means are indirect. Its body crafts a tool,

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the web, for transmuting part of the world into a form thats compatible with the spiders way of life, and its brain states lump the world into categories so that the spider can deal with threats and opportunities.

A typical person likewise has a home in the world, although a persons home is much more flexible. When someone takes a broom to a spiders web, the spider must weave a new one and once woven, the spider is committed to that location. The web isnt portable, although it can withstand minor disturbances. By contrast, a person adapts her outer home to suit the environment, and so in a snowy climate a person builds an igloo, while in a rainy place she adds a roof that causes the rain to roll harmlessly down the roofs slope. And we add a wide variety of buildings to achieve our many purposes, building not just houses but towns, cities, and civilizations. The relevant difference between a spider and a person is that the spiders body is highly specialized whereas a persons physiological capacities are more open-ended. All of the web-spinning spiders physical traits are put to optimal use in the web which the spider must build for itself, whereas a persons main outer advantage is her opposable thumb which gives her a capacity for infinite manipulations of the environment. Thus, were not so committed to just one kind of artificial home, but can adapt our extended body to suit the natural circumstances. To do this, we must understand those circumstances, and so the main web we weave, as it were, is inside rather than outside us. We weave this with our mind or more specifically with our brain. This web is made not of silk threads but of electrical currents which pass between neurons. The web of our thoughts allows us to make many subtle distinctions and so to exploit much more of the environment. Whereas a spider requires an outer web to feel at home and even to live as a spider, a person requires a mind made up of an inner web of memories, imaginings, feelings, categories, speculations, and inferences.

But theres a paradox. A persons mind accesses the world through the five senses and processes the information received. That task is what the mind is mainly for in evolutionary terms. But those senses dont similarly access the mind itself or the brain. The senses are all pointed outward. They could conceivably be extended by technology

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and then directed inward to observe the brain as it processes the information generated by its activities. In fact, this is what dreams or psychedelic drugs may do; the hallucinations you perceive when sleeping or stoned may reflect deeper mental processes than those with which ordinary consciousness is familiar. In any case, observation doesnt suffice for understanding, so the impressions of what the brain does while its thinking would have to be interpreted, and we dont yet have as much experience of the brains intricacies as we do, say, of elements in the outer world like earth, water, and fire. The paradox, then, is that our primary shelter and source of comfort is internal and yet this shelter dissolves itself. We belong not so much to the brick and concrete homes we build--those are not the worlds we truly live in--but to the cherished beliefs of our religious, political, and other ideologies. The degree to which we live in our heads is the degree to which we live as persons, as mammals that are highly curious and reflective not just about the physical environment but about our capacities for understanding it. Self-awareness is a necessary condition of personhood. But the more we look at ourselves, the more we shrink from our withering glare until the self we imagine we are is lost. Were most at home in the world when we feel free to fill the unobserved void of our inner self with speculations and fantasies. They form the so-called manifest image, the nave, intuitive picture of the self that we dream up because were extremely curious and wont settle for such a blind spot. We replace ignorance about the brain and the mind with fanciful, flattering notions such as those you find in religious myths and in other social conventions. But the more we think about our inner nature, the more rigorous and scientific our self-reflections become until we discover that the manifest image is largely or perhaps even entirely a fiction; certainly, that image is a work of art rather than a self-empowering scientific theory.

We learn that there is no inner self in the ordinary, comforting sense, but were not adapted to identify with our body because our body is pitifully weak. Again, our main physiological advantage is our opposable thumb, and its our brainpower that permits us to reinforce our body, to engineer an airplane because we have no wings, a saw

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because we have no claws, clothes because we have no fur, and so on. In effect, were most proud of our brain--except when we learn what the brain actually is and does. As cognitive science and BBT in particular show (and as the philosopher Immanuel Kant maintained), the mind prefers delusion to a humble admission of ignorance. As those who attempt to still their thoughts in meditation will testify, the mind loves to think and wont shut up unless the thinker exerts herself in ignoring its spontaneous ramblings. We fill our head with chitchat, with rumours and all manner of mental associations, often on the basis of scarce input. We take that input and run with it and were drawn especially to those speculations that flatter us. Like a hermit crab, we climb inside the net of those speculations and we live there, meaning that we identify our self with them. Most of us dont know exactly what the inner self is, but we surmise that the self is rational, conscious, free, unified, and even immaterial and immortal. Then we take a closer look, with science, and we find that we can look past the illusion. Of course were not as we naively picture we are: look at the brain, see what it does, and notice that theres no ghost inside! If we were hermit crabs, wed learn that our shell isnt so sturdy after all, that it dissolves on contact. The difference is that whereas the crab needs that shell to protect it from others, we need the manifest image to protect us from ourselves, or rather from our capacity to discover that we have no self.

Mind you, we erase not just the nave image of the self, but that of the outer world as well. The senses and the brain present a colourful, three-dimensional world thats relative to each viewers perspective, thus effectively flattering the ego. Moreover, we perceive all events as having a past, a future, and a present moment in consciousness. Einsteinian physics teaches, though, that space and time are not as we so intuit them. Again, we think of causes and effects as mechanisms, as though the cosmos were a machine, but thats a nave, deistic conception. We think of the universe as governed by laws even though the scientist no longer assumes theres an intelligent designer to issue them or to ensure that the universe follows them. We perceive the environment as made up of whole, solid things even though matter at the quantum level isnt solid or neatly divided. Modern science thus undermines all intuitive conceptions, both those of the self and of everything else. This is just to say that the brains spontaneous chatter

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about this or that which happens to mesmerize us isnt likely to be the brains last word on the subject.

The Horror of Alienation

The paradox of reason, which makes reason an evolutionary curse rather than just a gift, is that we live mainly in the ideational home we make in our heads, but those ideas eventually lead us to recognize that our heads are empty of anything with which wed prefer to identify ourselves. Reason thus evicts us from our homes, kicking us to the curb, whereupon we may wander the cultural byways as outsiders, unable to lose the selves we cease to believe in in the cultural products that cater to the mass delusions. As least, thats one path for the evicted to travel. Another is for them to sneak back into their homes, to forget that they dont belong there and to pretend that theyre full-fledged home owners even though they know theyre dressed in rags and smell like urine. Thats an illustration of the difference between existential authenticity and inauthenticity. To understand what I mean by that distinction, we need to consider the idea of alienation. The way I like to approach this is through the melancholic philosophy that Lovecraft dramatized in his cosmicist short stories. And it seems to me that this philosophy is analogous to the philosophical upshot of BBT. So what BBT contends is that scientific truth is opposed to personal truth, that what a self actually is is very different from what is naively presumed. This opposition raises the likelihood of cultural apocalypse and of the intriguing possibility of transhumanity to which Ill turn in the next section. But what Lovecraft realized is that theres a more general opposition, between the potential science of a superhuman species and even our supreme rational output. Just as the manifest image is inadequate to our scientific image, so too our scientific image may be inadequate to the superhuman conception of the world. To get an idea of the relevant sort of superhuman, picture Superman, the fictional hero whose superpowers are confined to his physiological and perhaps moral capacities, and now add superhuman intelligence plus the important levels of reality that may be exposed only to someone of that mental caliber. Of course, Lovecraft stressed that this more

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general scenario of what philosophers call mysterianism, which is a plausible result of atheistic naturalism, makes for psychological horror. Whereas BBT and cognitive science kick us to the curb, Lovecraft removes the curb, the street, and the whole planet and leaves us floating in a void that only a hideously indifferent alien could comprehend and use to its inhuman advantage. What, then, is alienation? Its just the futile feeling of homesickness, of not belonging somewhere youd like to be or indeed of not belonging anywhere at all. Science alienates us from our preference to see ourselves in terms of the manifest image. Wed prefer to identify with that nave conception of the ego or of the immortal spirit, but informed people with intellectual integrity or perhaps with the foolishness to take human knowledge so seriously as to upset their chance for a happy life, are estranged from that conception. Married people who get divorced may feel terribly awkward when theyre then forced to be together, say, in some legal hearing. Likewise, science and especially cognitive science seem to push us towards a reckoning with the nave selfimage so that even if were forced to project that image onto the brain, were sickened by or bored with that particular painting. In this context, alienation is the fear that that reckoning leaves us nowhere, or at least unsure of where to go next. And an existentially authentic, self-evicted mammal stays true to that homelessness, whereas an inauthentic one settles for a delusion rather than the reality.

Home for the Transhuman

I want to consider some possible refuges for those who are existentially homeless. The most likely scenario, I fear, is the dark one that RSB speaks of and that is in fact a staple of dark science fiction. In this scenario, most people are reduced to the inauthentic state. What may happen, then, is that the majority either arent permitted to understand the natural facts of human identity or they prefer not to understand them, in which case they become subhuman: slaves to the technocrats who perfect technoscientific means of engineering cultural and mental spaces to suit the twisted purposes of the sociopathic oligarchs that tend to rule; automatons trained to consume

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material goods like cattle, whose manifest image functions as a blinder to keep them on the straight and narrow path; or hypocrites who have the opportunity and intelligence to recognize the sad truth but prefer what the philosopher Robert Nozick calls the Happiness Machine (the capitalistic monoculture) and so suffer from severe cognitive dissonance and a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. These arent dubious predictions, but are descriptions of what most people, to some extent, are currently like in modern societies. The prediction is only that these dynamics will be intensified and perhaps perfected, so that wed have on our hands the technoscientific dystopia described by Orwell, Huxley, and others. I should add that on a Lovecraftian view, its possible that human scientific control of our nature will never be absolute, because part of our nature may fall within the ambit of reality that transcends our comprehension.

Is there a more favourable outcome? Many transhumanists speak optimistically about a mergence between our biological body and our extended, technological one. If we arent immaterial spirits who pass on to a supernatural realm after our physical death, we can still approximate that dualistic dream with technoscience. We can build heaven on earth and deify ourselves with superhuman knowledge and power; cast off our genetic leash/noose, through genetic engineering; overcome all natural obstacles through the internets dissemination of knowledge and nanoengineering; and even live forever by downloading our mental patterns into machines. In short, even though the manifest image of a conscious, rational, free, and immortal self is currently only an illusion that conceals the biological reality, the hope is that technoscience can actually make us more rational, conscious, free, and immortal than weve ever imagined. Of course, there are many empirical questions as to the feasibility of various technologies, and theres also the dystopian or perhaps just realistic scenario in which such godlike power benefits the minority at the majoritys expense. But theres also the preliminary question of the existential significance of optimistic transhumanism, granting at least the possibility of that future. How should we understand the evolutionary stage in which we set aside our dualistic myths and merge fully with our technology to become more efficient natural machines? Indeed, how would such transhumans think of themselves, given that theyd no longer entertain the manifest image?

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I think we should conceive of this in terms of a natural process. Atoms bond to become molecules, molecules join to form macroscopic things like rocks, animals, and planets, and some animals incorporate their handiwork to become creatures that can interact more fully with the rest of nature. Theres the mereological process of complexification and the temporal process of evolution, and these may come together to produce transhumans. Lacking the manifest image and the vanity but also the moral limitations which that image subserves, a transhuman would have to conceive of itself as strictly part of some such natural process. The universe changes itself, and the transhuman can bring about many more of those changes than can a deluded, self-limited mammal. Currently, we transform much of our planet, whereas a transhuman who accepts only the scientific image of human nature may acquire the power to transform star systems, galaxies, or untold dimensions. A transhuman wouldnt think in normative or teleological terms; such a natural god would have no goals or individualistic hallucinations, and would take to heart the Jokers lines in the movie, The Dark Knight, Do I really look like a guy with a plan?...You know, I justdo things. We have a model of such a transhuman god and thats the oligarch. An oligarch is a very powerful person whos reached the top of a national pecking order and is either sufficiently sociopathic to have reached that position with finesse or is naturally corrupted by the power he thereby acquires, in which case he conditions himself to be sociopathic. What I mean by sociopathy in this context is that power corrupts in the specific sense that the very powerful person tends to lose not just a sense of morality but the capacity for empathy. A transhuman would share that incapacity, since morality is part of the illusion of the manifest image. However, a transhuman and a corrupted ruler would differ significantly in that the latter would still act egoistically; indeed, such a person is a megalomaniac who believes hes entitled to so much wealth and power because of his personal magnificence. By contrast, the transhuman would have no illusion of personhood: a transhuman would be only an instrument that ushers in galactic transformations; these wouldnt be intended or preferred, but would be understood as just meaningless, natural evolutions of the cosmic landscape.

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Another model that can help us get a sense of what transhuman life would be like is the democratic politician. I may be slightly more cynical than the average person living in a democracy, but I just take it for granted that a politician never speaks the truth in public. More precisely, the politician never tells the people at large exactly what shes thinking. This is because when a politician speaks publicly, shes on the job and so must carry out the functions of her office. As is said in the business, the politician--and the lobbyist, political handler, public relations expert, spin doctor, partisan, and so forth--speak publicly only in talking points, never leveling with the public or having anything as pedestrian as a conversation or a dialogue with a presumed equal. This is to say, then, that the politician eliminates semantics in her side of the public discourse: the meaning of her statements is irrelevant to their function, and the politician is interested only in that function, which is to say in the statements shaping of public opinion to the politicians advantage. In other words, a politicians public statements are guided only by what we might call their political syntax, which is the set of social scientific laws that make plausible various Machiavellian strategies for manipulating people, for exploiting their weaknesses and biases as a means to some end. The ends of the politicians purely instrumental use of language are usually the limited ones of maintaining the politicians privileged position and of stroking her ego, but may rarely include the purpose of benefitting the country at large according to the politicians principles. Again, there are interesting differences between this politician and the transhuman. A politician has goals whereas the transhuman has none. We might prefer to say that the transhuman has implicit purposes, but this would be sheer personification, since anything in the universe can be interpreted as acting towards some end point that isnt mentally represented by that which is so acting. This would just amount to reading intelligent design into everything and positing some transcendent designer that does so represent the goals which that designers creations would be built to achieve. No, a transhuman who has fully embraced the scientific image and so abandoned the crude conception of personhood wouldnt conceive of herself as mentally representing anything, which is to say that she would understand her mental states to be

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meaningless pseudo-instruments, as elements of a natural process. She would have neither beliefs nor desires in the ordinary sense and so she wouldnt seek her enrichment or even the continuation of her life (although her vast technoscientific knowledge and power would render her invulnerable, in any case). The transhuman would be a new force of nature, as blind, deaf, and dumb as the wind or as sunshine. By contrast, a politicians instrumentalism is petty, the scheme of a child playing at being a god. A politician may flatter herself that in her political role she acts as a savvy machine that sees past the delusions of the herd and can manipulate the masses at will by pushing their proverbial buttons, uttering a code word or two to initiate the news cycle, and so forth. But as long as the politician labours under the quaint delusion that she personally plans or desires anything, shes better thought of as a wannabe god, as a child who hasnt yet grown into her shoes. At best, the cynical politician would be the harbinger of the god to come, the Silver Surfer to the future Galactus. Where, then, would the transhuman call home? The universe would be the transhumans playground, just as a force of nature works wherever its naturally able. A transhuman identifies not with a figment of its imagination, with a particular mind or consciousness, but with all of nature, since the transhumans knowledge and power would encompass that whole domain, or at least enough of the universe that the transhuman would effectively be divine. The transhumans reach would extend very far in space and time, and her body would be the extended one of technology that only morally-neutral science could unleash. And the transhuman would understand natural processes at a highly technical level; shed be immortal, fearless, and enmeshed in the universes course of self-creation, as opposed to being limited, alienated, and homeless. Perhaps technoscience is the means of building gods, of ironically turning the manifest image, which is currently a fantasy, into a reality, and we are mere strands in the cocoon that will birth that new form of life. This transhumanism seems to me the most uplifting way of imagining the outcome of the clash between science and commonsense, but of course this doesnt mean the scenario is plausible or likely. At any rate, if BBT is correct, we are primarily not individual persons with private agendas, but

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are stages of some natural process that we cant yet see clearly, because our vision is obscured by smoke and mirrors.

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Against the Theists Nightmare of Hell

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Would you be surprised to learn that great multitudes of people still talk seriously about an afterlife of heaven or hell--even after science has demonstrated that the ancient worldviews are replete with superstitions; after humans have been physically up to the heavens and on the moon and havent found any gods (or even any super-intelligent aliens); after weve come to understand the geological function of volcanoes; and have social scientific knowledge of religions, according to which, for example, the religious metaphor of the divine Judge derives from psychedelic experience and was exploited in the ancient world and in the current Muslim one to justify earthly dominance hierarchies, by implicitly deifying human monarchs? You shouldnt be so surprised, for the reason given by Richard Dawkins: preposterous religious memes persist because theyre taught to children who will, for obvious evolutionary reasons, accept and repeat absolutely anything you tell them and then grow up and have to assimilate that early input with what they later more responsibly come to learn about the world, as adults. People who are born again, who convert to a religion after a traumatic experience arent exceptions to this rule, since the trauma reduces them to childlike, passive receivers of information, which is why even an adult can join the most ludicrous cult. And as I hypothesize elsewhere, the memes originate from the hallucinations reported by those with altered states of consciousness; the vision of hell, in particular, would derive from nightmares (bad DMT trips). Given this dynamic, there are two sorts of theists who believe theres an eternal hell awaiting many of us in the afterlife. First, theres the unapologetic fire-and-brimstone preacher who sides with the most primitive, literalistic theology, backlashing against

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modern naturalism. This is the sort of person who stands on a big city street corner and tries to scare modern, educated people with an image of God as a sadistic torturer. In short, this is a child in an adults body. Her fiery sermons are literally echoes of the tales implanted in her when she was either too young to know any better or too vulnerable to ask questions. When dodging the saliva emitted by the fundamentalists exoteric declarations about the afterlife, you might consider bringing along a pacifier and offering it to that babe in the woods whos throwing a tantrum.

Then theres the theist whos forced as an adult to reconsider her religious lessons because of the perceived force of the chief alternative, science-centered worldview. This sort of theist is embarrassed by the blatant foolishness of espousing ancient ignorance in the midst of so much scientific knowledge and technological power. At the very least, if youre going to hold on to theism even in the 21st century, youve got to be humble about it; moreover, youve got to be clever and subtle, slipping the gist of the ancient worldview past savvy modernists, hiding the core absurdities in Trojan Horses rather than shouting unmodified forms of them from the rooftops.

A Moderate Defense of Hell

C. S. Lewis was a paradigmatic example of the latter sort of theist, since he taught at Oxford and Cambridge, which are places filled with very smart people. Lewis was brought up in a Christian family, and he rebelled as a teenager by turning to atheism and then re-embraced Christianity as an adult. He popularized the Christian creed by taking the ancient edge off of it, modernizing it so that Christians wouldnt have to feel ashamed of repeating their memes. The author of the Thinking Christian blog, Tom Gilson, is in Lewiss camp and summarizes Lewiss formulation of the doctrine of hell:

For centuries Christian imagery of hell was dominated by the fire metaphor. In the 20th century, C.S. Lewiss The Great Divorce led many of us to see it instead as a place where people continue their lifes trajectory into eternity.

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Both groups [those who obey God and those whom God obeys] continue to live the lives they created for themselves. The one who seeks God on earth will find him in eternity. The one who rejects God on earth will live in eternity without God, just as he or she has chosen on earth. So as each person carries his or her personality into eternity, whats different about heaven or hell? Simply this: the presence or absence of God and all of his goodness. Here on earth, God is active even among those who deny him. Where there is love on earth it is an expression of Gods reality and his action. Where there is goodness here it is his goodness being manifested.

In heaven that goodness will be multiplied infinitely. In hell it will be gone. So instead of picturing God as a zealous defender of his moral principles, eagerly torturing sinners for daring to defy him or for pretending that he doesnt even exist and that Jesus wasnt a superhuman action hero, the moderate Christian thinks of God as only an accidental, indirect torturer. For this Christian, its axiomatic that God is the source of all good things while humans and demons are the sources of all bad things. Thus, heaven is caused directly by God, since heaven is being in Gods presence, while hell is caused directly by sinners. Hell is Gods withdrawing from the scene in obedience to those who dont want him around. In this way God, who is perfectly moral and loving, would still do no harm despite the eternal suffering of billions of sentient beings whom God created, since God would merely respect their free choice to reject his offer of salvation. God rushed out a flawed species when he created Humanity 1.0, but the patch for our software is freely available if only were willing to accept that we require Jesus sacrificial punishment for our sins, in which case we become Humanity 2.0, fit for eternal life with God. If instead you value your ego and your independence, God will let you reap what you sow, and only later when its too late will you rue the error of your ways, and weep and gnash your teeth in frustration that what you wanted all along, a life apart from God, isnt worth what you thought. You vainly figure you know best in rejecting theism and Christianity in particular, but it turns out your God-given intellect is

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flawed and youll ironically create only hell for yourself, a hell thats the destiny of modern secular civilization.

The Arbitrariness of Theistic Metaphors

Thus runs this pitch for Christian respectability despite the baggage of the ancient hell doctrine. What annoys me most about this explanation of hell is the Orwellian doublespeak in which its couched. You know those stereotypical defense attorneys who are charged with defending a rapist and who brazenly continue the rapists attack in the courtroom by blaming the victim, dragging her name through the mud, accusing her of seducing the rapist, of wearing sexy clothes, of being a liar and a whore, and all while praising the rapists character? The moderate Christian who apologizes for the Christian notion of hell in C. S. Lewiss way is rather like one of those lawyers. Granted, there are many people who do escape earthly life without receiving just punishment for their misdeeds, but there are also many non-Christians whose crucial misdeeds would be merely that they dont measure up to Gods irrelevant, superhuman standards and that they reject Christianity. In other words, there are plenty of non-Christians who lead decent lives--flawed, to be sure, but on the whole much closer to Good than to Evil. And yet even the moderate Christian, who doesnt spit while screeching mantras about hell and Jezus, maintains that those decent folks will be punished forever when they physically die. But the kicker is that this Christian blames those decent people for their eternal suffering, since Gods hands are tied; indeed, the unsaved sinners merely punish themselves, by ironically getting exactly what they wanted all along because they didnt know any better. For this Christian, God is a rewarder and not a punisher, since he cant get his hands dirty, being the almighty transcendent entity that occupies a higher plane. God must delegate the job of torturing sinners to demons or to the sinners themselves; God cant personally thrust the pitchfork, because then he wouldnt be a dignified father figure worthy of worship. Of course this is nonsense on the face of it. God supposedly incarnated himself as a lowly Jew in Roman-occupied Judea in the first century CE. You cant get any lower

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than that, and indeed Christians worship God precisely because they believe he lowered himself to our level. Why shouldnt God then lower himself to the level of a fallen angel to ensure that sinners receive their just punishment, by personally torturing them? At least, God should be metaphysically capable of doing so and this shouldnt tarnish Gods reputation for being--at heart, as it were--a transcendent entity, since the Christian already praises God for debasing himself.

No, the moderate Christian says God is blameless for hell, because this Christian is forced to select which parts of the Bible to count as literal and her interpretation of scripture is guided by the social aim of having her religion conform to modern expectations. Thus, Gilson speaks of the lake of fire and of the weeping and gnashing of teeth in outer darkness as metaphors, but insists that God is literally good. Heaven is where earthly goodness is infinitely multiplied, he says; indeed, all earthly goodness is only a manifestation of Gods goodness. Again, God is responsible for everything thats right while humans and our demonic allies are to blame for everything thats wrong. But again, one problem with this is that, from an esoteric, mystical viewpoint, the Christians choice of which parts of the Bible to treat as metaphorical is arbitrary. If as Gilson says, There is definitely a hell but No one on earth knows exactly what it will be like, how do we know that God is good? Leaving aside the atrocious Old Testament descriptions of Gods character, why arent the Bibles comforting descriptions of God just as metaphorical as its terrifying descriptions of hell? Clearly, if God is an infinite, transcendent, supernatural cause of everything in the universe, and isnt identical with anything he created, God cant literally be good or fatherly since those are understood to be natural properties. The Christian has two responses to this point. First, she can maintain, on the contrary, that goodness is supernatural and miraculous and that therefore a transcendent being can literally be good. There are at least two problems with this response. First, there are naturalistic explanations of morality which the Christian must then entirely reject. Second and more important, if goodness is supernatural, transcendent, and miraculous, so that God can be said to literally have that quality, we lose our reason for thinking that

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God should be good, because we lose our understanding of what goodness is in the first place. All we understand of goodness is the limited kind of virtue and altruism were familiar with in social species such as ours. If goodness is really something supernatural, our notion of goodness must be just as metaphorical as our notion of hell, in which case the cost of saying that God is literally good is that this statement loses its meaning.

The second response is that we know God is good, because we know God through Jesus, and Jesus was good in a way that we can understand. Unfortunately, this response rests likewise on verbal sleight of hand. Given that the metaphorical nature of a description of transcendent reality can mislead and confuse us, a physical model of that reality should be just as flawed and thus idolatrous. This is why Jews and Muslims forbid all representations of God. The Christian comes along and says that Jesus represents God, because Jesus was miraculously connected to the deity, allowing Gods transcendent reality to flow into his natural body. Jesus had a miraculous birth and thus hes an exceptional image of divine reality, not a misleading idol but a reflection of Gods character. Jesus alone was begotten, not made. Alas, this response merely substitutes the emptiness of Jesuss miraculous birth for that of transcendent goodness. Just as no one would have any idea what Gods literal goodness would be like, assuming goodness is really supernatural and thus naturally inconceivable, no one would know what the connection between God and Jesus amounts to were this connection one of a miraculous birth. Thus, we couldnt understand how a mammal could embody an infinite creator of the universe, let alone confirm the embodiment. So on the contrary, we wouldnt know God through Jesus; sure, you could mouth the words, but you wouldnt know what youre talking about. The verbal trick, you see, is to rely on the now-archaic meaning of beget, which is of course a word for the very natural process of procreation. The distinction, then, between making and begetting is just that between designing and building something, on the one hand, and sexually reproducing, causing DNA and proteins to design and build the thing, on the other. Both are natural processes to the extent that theyre understood,

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and so even if Jesus was begotten rather than made by God, this wouldnt make for any supernatural bridge between the two.

The upshot is that the exoteric preference for any description of transcendent reality is arbitrary. For the theist, everything in nature is indirectly touched by God, including every word of so-called divinely inspired scripture and even each piece of feces left behind by everything that walks, crawls, flies, or swims. Thus, goodness and Jesus both lose their special connection to God. If God is literally good, he might as well also literally be feces. This is because the distinction between the supernatural and the natural is lost in theism: if everything is an effect of God, everything indicates some aspect of its divine source, and so everything in the universe represents God to some extent. Jesus would be nothing special and you might as well worship feces for representing Gods potentials for brownness and funky odours. The problem is that if everything represents God to some extent, we still know nothing about the divine being, because nature offers no univocal, coherent picture of its source. For example, theres both good and evil in nature, so wed need some conception that combines those opposites, to coherently picture the all-encompassing, transcendent seed. You would truly need a grand theory of everything which reconciles all natural opposites, to learn about God by learning about the results of his work. Short of that theory, fragmentary knowledge of nature is useless for theistic purposes, and so all metaphorical descriptions of God are misleading and arbitrary due to their incompleteness. Besides the social reason for saying that God is good rather than also evil, theres an existential reason for doing so. The moderate Christian wants a comforting myth to escape her obligation to face up to her alienation. As I argue elsewhere, when you follow the logic of the root monotheistic metaphor, which compares the transcendent cause of nature to a person, you end up with Mainlanders conjecture that even a good deity would become corrupt and insane because of his omnipotence and isolation. Thus, far from being merely good, according to the moderate Christians politically correct, G-rated theism for domesticated pantywaists, God would indeed be a tyrant who, we can only hope, would have killed himself in the process of creating the undead

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cosmos we inhabit. The notion that Gods character would be defined by goodness is just part of an adorable scheme for some mammals to feel at home in ultimate reality, whereas the existential task for grownups is to reconcile ourselves to our metaphysical homelessness. If God is good, or as Muslims say, great, hell might as well be a lake of fire. If anything, taking the anthropomorphic notion of transcendent reality seriously, God would be a monster beyond our wildest nightmares and that monster would be our landlord for all time. Thats authentic monotheism, and this is why polytheists like the ancient Romans were appalled by Judaism. Theism for extroverts pictures a society of gods rather than just a solitary and thus alienated deity who would be horrified to look in a mirror.

So, then, God would be neither good nor bad, but would have to be both, which is just to say that Gods character would transcend our understanding. The moderate Christians explanation of hell just arbitrarily replaces one dubious theistic metaphor with another. The preferred metaphor is in fact an idol, whether its the image of God as benevolence (rather than also as evil) or as Jesus (rather than also as feces). And so when the theist says that God benevolently gives us unrepentant sinners what we want, by leaving us alone for eternity, which just so happens to bring these sinners unremitting misery, you can take comfort in knowing that this metaphor of Gods pure goodness is no more credible than the ancient Aztecs more manly and aggressive metaphor of God as a bloodthirsty tyrant.

The Implausibility of Theistic Metaphors

Thats just the underlying problem with the C. S. Lewis-style defense of hell. There are many more specific problems with it. For starters, can we say that God merely leaves bad people to their devices, that they are solely responsible for their eternal suffering, since God merely respects their free choice even though God knows the dire consequence of that choice? This is analogous to the parent who allows her daughter to walk across a highway blindfolded, knowing that shell be run over and have to spend the rest of her life suffering in a wheelchair. Would that child be solely to blame for her

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recklessness? Well, were the child old enough to know better, shed at least be partly to blame, but since shed also be immature compared to her parent, the parent would share some of the responsibility for the consequent suffering. Now, the Christian can pretend that the evidence of what will happen if we die without accepting Jesus as our saviour is as clear as that of what will happen if you walk down a highway blindfolded, but this would be an empty bluff. Christian beliefs are mostly irrational. In any case, God would be more responsible for hell than would that human parent for her daughters poor decision, since God would sustain hell by keeping the souls of the non-Christian sinners alive, whereas the human parent wouldnt be free to end her childs suffering by killing her. Even were hell only in the minds of sinners, God could end hell by annihilating the sinners. God isnt bound by social laws that protect peoples right to life, and he should be able to break what hes made, such as a human soul. Moreover, to say that God keeps those sinners alive forever even though he knows that their afterlife will be nothing but suffering, out of respect for their freedom or love of their individuality is just to engage in the callous defense lawyers sort of doubletalk. Suppose a person offers her pet dog a choice between drinking poison or water, the dog drinks the poison, and is forced to live thereafter in agony because the dog owner refuses to have the dog humanely killed to end its suffering. Would we praise the character of this dog owner? No, instead wed suspect that she sadistically derives some satisfaction from witnessing the natural result of the dogs poor choice of food. Likewise, however many signs God might deploy to point us in the right direction while were in our mortal bodies, God would still have much superior knowledge of the consequences of our actions as well as the power to spare us the pain we might earn for ourselves, by putting us down in a humane fashion. If instead God allows hell to continue forever, we might just as well call God sadistic than respectful or loving towards everyone. In fact, calling this sort of God simply good would be as grotesque as calling a cult leader good for allowing his minions to torture themselves when he could put an end to the charade by coming clean on his lies of omission.

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It goes without saying, though, that the foregoing defense of the myth of hell is a nonstarter, because the notion of freedom here is a pernicious oversimplification. Theres a fallacy in assuming that because a person chooses his personality while alive on Earth, therefore she chooses it for eternity. On the contrary, a person may make lifealtering choices on the explicit assumption that theyre suitable only under the natural circumstances she finds herself in here and now. For example, someone born in a Brazilian slum may choose to become a criminal, but this choice is context-dependent. Our knowledge of our natural circumstances would be far different from that of our supernatural ones: for example, an atheist justifies her life decisions according to her knowledge of where she stands merely in the natural world, because she thinks her knowledge of that world is far more certain than any speculation about what will happen to her when she dies. The theist knows no better but just frivolously gambles on a fantasy. And anyway, most so-called theists reason in the atheistic (rational, protoscientific) manner, ignoring their religion when real-world consequences are at stake. So the theist demonstrates her effrontery when she blames the suffering in hell entirely on the sufferers, because they supposedly choose that fate and God only lets that choice unfold. Theres no such choice, so theres nothing here for God to honour. Theres no choice to reject the overwhelming evidence for theism, since theres no longer any such evidence (after globalizations culture clashes, Enlightenment philosophy, and the Scientific Revolution), and theres no choice of how we want to live for eternity, since almost no one lives as if she really think shell live that long. (The moderate theist should look into the philosophical distinction between a symbols intension and its extension. Our knowledge extends to the intensional meaning of our thoughts, to how we conceive of things, not necessarily to the facts that may underlie those meanings. For example, you may admire Mark Twain but not Samuel Clemens, not realizing that the two people are identical. Likewise, you might approve of your criminality as a way of dealing with your current situation, not appreciating the supernatural consequences of that decision.)

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The Legends of Heaven and Hell

In so far as hell is worth speaking of at all today, we should think of the idea of hell as a legend deriving from the psychedelic nature of ancient near-death experiences. What seems to happen when you die is that your brain loses sensory input and manufactures a dream world to keep your mind occupied as your body tries futilely to repair itself. Before brain death, different parts of your brain are enlisted in this final project, one of which is your conscience. In the back of your mind, you must know or fear that youre dying and so you philosophically survey the events of your life and ask yourself how you think you fared. Your life flashes before your lives and you judge yourself. Just as time can feel sped up or slowed down in an altered state of consciousness, brought on by an entheogen, for example, so too time might seem to stop altogether when youre in your last dream state, as DMT floods your consciousness with bizarre imagery. If you approve of your life and you generally think well of yourself, or at least if you think you did the best you could while alive, youll forgive your faults and bless yourself with a pleasant final dream that seems to last forever (until your brain expires and your dream ends). If instead you feel generally ashamed of what you did with your life, youll curse yourself with a lasting experience of hell. Evidently, people have had some such experience and have then sometimes recuperated, living to interpret it in the nave, theistic fashion. They then ranted and raved about the spirit world and started a cult which evolved into or contributed to a religion. Moreover, we all have lesser, preparatory versions of these experiences in our nightly dreams and while we lie in bed, dwelling on the days events and visualizing what we want to do tomorrow. So the God who allegedly judges us is really just a deeper part of our mind, the part thats left when our egoistic illusions are stripped away, when we lose the incentive to play our social games, and were entirely on our own to think about ourselves, to play the introverts favourite game. Then we render our honest, final judgment and use the same neural machinery that conjures both our sleeping and our waking dreams, to bring that judgment to life in a subjectively everlasting experience of bliss or pain. Of course,

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if you happen to die by having your brain somehow instantly destroyed, youll pass over this experience of the afterlife, thus slipping through the cracks of Gods hands.

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Steven Hawkings Scientific Atheism ____________________________________________________

The great Stephen Hawking is a lousy philosopher. Theres just no way around it. But if you could tell him so to his face, hed say, Yeah? So what? After all, in his book The Grand Design, he and his co-author say, infamously, that philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. This is like saying that physics is dead because physicists havent kept up with modern developments in fly fishing. But the point is that Hawking has no respect for philosophy, and so hes naturally disinclined to devote himself to the task of learning much philosophy, to philosophize well. This is the tragic undoing of positivism: the positivist loves science so much that she sees all problems in scientific terms. Shes like Kramer from Seinfeld who thinks that all you need in life is a shower; you can spend all hours there, eating and sleeping beneath the shower head so you never have to leave and suffer the annoying change of temperature. Likewise, the neo-positivists (as opposed to the founders of positivism) think all legitimate questions that potentially add to our knowledge are scientific.

Philosophers call this prejudice scientism and most scientists dont care because they dont think theres any such prejudice. As Jerry Coyne likes to say, no one ever provides an example of a nonscientific way of increasing our knowledge; theres no progress in nonscientific cognitive disciplines because theyre at best pseudoscientific. Of course, this presupposes that knowledge is entirely about lengthening our list of empirical facts. Scientists make discoveries because they go out into the world and observe the details and test hypotheses, whereas philosophers dont. But having knowledge is not the same as having a list of facts. If it were, computers would know much more than

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humans. Instead, computers currently know nothing at all because they dont grasp the meaning or the value of those facts. As Ive said elsewhere, to have knowledge you need a coherent worldview, and this means you need a way to make your list of facts unite with your values, ideals, and intuitions. Sometimes, youll have to discard obsolete intuitions or update your values, if the facts speak loudly enough, whereas other times youll have to interpret the facts to protect your values, because the facts are ambiguous. Either way, science cannot by itself make your worldview coherent. This is because science doesnt answer normative questions. Also needed are philosophy, religion (but not the obsolete theistic kind), culture, and the institutions that protect a democratic exchange of ideas. As Ive argued elsewhere, atheists presuppose a religion in their effort to unite naturalism with their typical liberal values: this religion is secular humanism, Scientism, positivism, or pragmatism. But when a religion is only presupposed rather than openly acknowledged, the religion is bound to be clumsy and lackluster, and thats the case with Hawkings atheistic argument.

Hawkings Arguments for Atheism

Hawkings positivism is philosophically deficient since it leads him to argue so shoddily against the opposing, theistic philosophy. Take his argument in his Discovery Curiosity TV episode, Does God Exist?" This argument is philosophical, perhaps even religious, but Hawkings philosophy is absurdly antiphilosophical, so hes forced to pretend that his atheism is purely scientific. Here is Hawkings stripped-down argument for Gods nonexistence: the universe was created in the Big Bang, which means that in its earliest stage the universe was infinitesimal and so the laws of quantum mechanics apply to its origin, and we know from those laws that quantum events can happen spontaneously without any cause; moreover, the Big Bangs gravitational singularity was in effect a black hole and we know that in modern-day black holes time stops inside of them, which means there was no time before the Big Bang and thus no time for anyone to create the universe.

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Now as it stands, this argument is useless since it would show only that theres no cause of the universe that acted in time, whereas God is supposed to be eternal (outside of time). Suppose Hawking is right and the Big Bang singularity was effectively a black hole and that time was created by the Big Bang. Assuming all temporal causes are natural, this means only that the Big Bang lacked this kind of natural cause. But what do you know: the theistic proposition is that God is supernatural. Even Boethius said in the fifth and sixth centuries CE that Gods eternity entails that God doesnt act in time (and so humans can have freewill even though Gods omniscient.) Of course God couldnt create the universe in time, if time is part of the natural fabric of the universe and God somehow created the whole universe. This is why theists say youve got to have faith at some point because reason runs out of its ability to answer all of the questions were capable of asking. And of course religious metaphors make God out to be a natural person who has feelings and plans and whose actions thus would seem to take place in the temporal dimension. But this is when youve got to crack open a scripture or a philosophy of religion textbook, and learn the difference between exoteric and esoteric religious traditions. So even if Hawkings argument is valid and factual, the most it demonstrates is that if God is a natural being, no such being is needed to scientifically, naturalistically explain the origin of the universe. No major religion identifies God as such, and thus Hawkings argument is ineffective against all major forms of theism. So why did Hawking bother to formulate this argument? Because he presumes that science must take up the slack when philosophy fails, that since philosophy is getting us nowhere wed better turn to science to answer philosophical questions, including the question of whether God exists. Of course, then youve got to translate the question into terms with which a scientist is familiar; for example, youve got to reduce God to a natural being since scientists study nature. Indeed, scientists presuppose the philosophical position of methodological naturalism, which means that they pragmatically assume that all phenomena are natural and capable of being explained by scientific methods. In this way, the science-centered atheist/positivist/ultrarationalist misses the point of religion, which is effectively the point of cosmicism: reason can be expected to take us only so

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far in our quest for knowledge, and emotions, intuitions, and faith must contribute in our pursuit of a coherent worldview. Scientists might be able to explain everything in nature, but not any supernatural origin of nature. When we ask questions of how things work in nature, we can turn to science to provide the answer. But when we ask the question of how all of nature came to be, were asking a nonscientific, philosophical question. That question may be meaningless or profound; either way, scientific methods alone will not satisfy us and instead weve got to turn to art, myth, intuition, life experience, altered states of consciousness, and philosophical standards of rationality which are looser than the scientific ones. But Hawkings argument in the Does God Exist? episode isnt his best case for atheism. The fuller picture is given in his book, The Grand Design, in which Hawking and his co-author add many details, the two most relevant and interesting being the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics and what they call model-dependent realism. As I understand it (and I have only a laypersons grasp of physics and cosmology), the multiverse is the mind-independent actualization of all quantum potentials. Microscopic bits of matter are fundamentally random and probabilistic, capable of behaving like waves rather than definite, concrete particles. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, those bits of matter arent fully real until theyre observed, in which case they lose their superposition and the observer who takes the measurement collapses the wave function. By contrast, the multiverse interpretation says that every superposition or possible state of a bit of matter is realized without the need of an observer to take the measurement, since the bit of matter spins off into a different universe. As Hawking and his coauthor summarize Feynmans theory, if we observe a particle move from one position to another, the particle simultaneously takes all possible paths between those positions, and we observe only one of those paths because the others are observable in other universes.

So how does the multiverse eliminate God? In the Darwinian fashion. Just as God isnt needed to explain biological designs, since those designs evolve largely by natural selection, God isnt needed to explain the creation of any universe or its laws, since a

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universe evolves with its laws in the multiverse. A universes natural laws reflect only one general way of actualizing all quantum possibilities, but just as theres no mind needed to observe the particles to make them real, contrary to the Copenhagen interpretation, theres no God needed to choose which universe to create, because all possible universes exist! So our universe has one set of physical laws and a different universe has its own set which may vary slightly, and both universes are created as spontaneous quantum fluctuations, according to an interpretation of the laws of quantum mechanics. Youve probably realized, though, that the multiverse theory only pushes the theistic question back a step, since now the question becomes not whether God created our universe (God wouldnt have, since our universe would have been created by a random quantum fluctuation in the field of possibilities that produces the multiverse), but whether God created that field of quantum possibilities, including the laws of quantum mechanics and M-theory that physicists use to explain the origin of universes within the multiverse. All Hawking does is increase the size of nature (or of rationally explainable existence), from our universe to the multiverse, and then argue that God isnt needed to explain our part of that domain. Once again, this just misses the point! The idea of God is of something that at least transcends our rational comprehension. Why would such an idea be needed, you ask? Just to answer our irrational questions, like the question of how everything came to be (where a thing is that which is rationally explainable). As far as I can tell, The Grand Design explains only how sets of physical laws of macroscopic universes arise by atheistic evolution, not how the underlying laws that explain how that evolution arise. Do the laws of cosmic evolution also evolve according to a deeper set of similar laws, and so on to infinity? No, just as the biological theory of natural selection presupposes the replicators in each of the species that undergoes evolution, the multiverse idea depends on quantum mechanics to explain how universes spontaneously pop into being within the field of quantum possibilities. So the theist will ask how that field of possibilities came to be. As chaotic as that field may be, there must be some order to the origin of universes, since otherwise the multiverse interpretation

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wouldnt be scientific. Science explains only that which is intelligible, and the question of theism is always whether theres a nonrational, transcendent cause of whatever intelligible order we rationally take to be fundamental, whether thats the Big Bang or whatever dimension the multiverse subsists in. But perhaps Hawkings model-dependent realism offers an answer to theistic irrationalism. The theist wants a narrative that satisfies not just reason but the nonrational parts of our mind, including our emotions, instincts, aesthetic taste, and so on. And even though Hawking says philosophy is dead, he philosophizes when he stipulates that rational models are best. According to Hawkings Kantian philosophy, theres no practical difference between speaking of noumenal reality thats conceived of as independent of our conceptual schemes and phenomenal reality thats thought of as dependent on them. This is because however we think of the outside world, we always impose our ways of thinking onto it, so the notion of mind-independent reality is empty. Thus, when choosing which model of reality is best, we neednt waste time speaking of whether the model corresponds to noumenal reality; instead, we should evaluate models according to some pragmatic criteria. The Grand Design lists four such criteria: a good model is elegant (as simple or compressed as possible), not ad hoc (having few arbitrary elements), agrees with and explains all known observations, and is empirically falsifiable. According to Hawkings philosophy of science, then, a theistic model that posits God as the cause of the multiverse would be unacceptable, since that model would fail according to those scientific criteria. Theism would be ad hoc, since the ideas in Gods mind can be arbitrarily posited by us to explain all possible data, and so theism wouldnt be falsifiable. But once again, what this really shows is that Hawking, the scientific atheist, misses the point of theism. Of course theism fails as a scientific theory: theism is the idea that science and reason generally are inadequate tools for constructing a complete worldview. Hawking implies that his atheism rests only on science, but then he trots out a transparently philosophical notion which rules out theism by fiat. Unfortunately for Hawking, once you start to play the philosophical game, youve got to

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play by its more relaxed rules. So if you think of metaphysics pragmatically, taking up the neo-Kantian form of realism, as Hawking and his co-author do, youre going to need philosophical reasons why, say, the above four criteria of excellence in model-building are the only ones allowed. Those four may suffice for scientists and their models, but this just begs the question against theism and the question remains whether those four suffice for human beings.

Specifically, what if we add another aesthetic criterion, besides elegance, such as the criterion that a good model should make for an inspiring story in literary terms? Note that only the full-blown metaphysical realist is entitled to scoff at this point, since of course mind-independent reality can be as it is regardless of whether we think the history of that reality makes for a satisfying story. But Hawking loses the right to this dismissal of additional aesthetic considerations, since he stipulates that we should think of reality as being dependent on how we model it (the contrary contention being empty). So who says elegance/simplicity is the only relevant aesthetic value? What if a worldview should be not just rational but aesthetically pleasing in a more thoroughgoing way? In that case, quantum mechanics and the multiverse may be aesthetically deficient and thus incomplete as a worldview. One way of rectifying this would be to think of the multiverse as Gods decaying corpse: God becomes corrupted by his power and insane by his isolation, and so to kill himself he transforms his infinite being into something that can be completely destroyed; thus we have the multiverse of infinite possibilities, each of which is somewhere actualized so that it can be overcome by the next one until all are exhausted and the loathsomeness of the monotheistic deity is finally erased. This is just a myth or a philosophical speculation, not a scientific theory, but so what? How does Hawkings science refute that myth? By presupposing scientific standards of rationality and model-building? That begs the question and misses the point.

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Scientism, Political Correctness, and Atheistic Religion

Now, when I check my handy PC meter, which measures the field of political correctness that holds people spellbound to certain social conventions, I find that the PC field surrounding Stephen Hawking is off the charts. Theres a double whammy here, you see, since first, youve got the fact that Stephen Hawking is in a wheelchair and is severely physically handicapped (or physically challenged or whatever the current faddish term is). And if youd consult your cultural handbook, you could remind yourself that all physically handicapped people are saints. Thus, criticism of anything such a person does or says is politically incorrect and anathema. Second, theres the fact that Hawking is a physicist and indeed a great physicist, and again your cultural handbook declares that scientists have all the power and they can do no wrong; their authority extends to all matters and we should take their every utterance as gospel truth. Unfortunately, our cultural handbook is out of date and should be amended to read that scientific authority is highly impressive when applied to areas of the scientists expertise. There are no strictly rational experts when it comes to assessing artistic, emotional, or philosophical matters, since these areas of inquiry arent purely rational. Still, some judgments in these areas are better than others, but reason alone doesnt make those calls. Thus, just because a physicist has mastered a highly difficult subject matter, doesnt mean she has special authority in a nonscientific area of inquiry. Hawking would say Im begging the question and hed maintain that science alone can tell us whether God exists. But the previous section has just shown that Im not begging the question, since Ive shown that Hawkings argument is weak as a piece of philosophical reasoning. I assume Hawkings actual scientific work is impressive rather than refutable in a jiffy, which leads me to conclude that Hawkings atheistic argument isnt scientific. Were Hawking tackling merely a scientific problem, in considering whether God made the universe, presumably his treatment of the issue wouldnt be so weak. No, Hawking s atheistic argument is unimpressive only because the problem is philosophical and religious rather than scientific, whereas Hawking is trying to solve that problem using

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only scientific methods. Likewise, if you try to write a physics textbook using nothing but fly fishing gear, the fruit of your labour will be worse than useless.

At the source of this folly is Scientism. And one of my main points in these Rants Within the Undead God is that atheists need a proper atheistic religion, not a silly one thats afraid of its shadow like positivism, Scientism, or pragmatism. Just as a homosexual person who pretends to be straight or a kind person who pretends to be mean can become a laughingstock, because that persons performance will likely be poor, so too philosophy or religion thats dressed to look just like science (or pure reason) will be a grotesque piece of work. Scientific (as opposed to philosophical) atheism is thus oxymoronic and self-disqualifying. The conflict between atheism and theism is philosophical, religious, and cultural, and although science is relevant to the debate, science isnt central to it or sufficient to ending it. Scientific atheists overreach just as badly as do religious fundamentalists who pretend that their memorization of primitive texts gives them special authority to tell us how the universe works. Scientists and religious people both can overreach in the opposite directions, each stepping into the others territory and embarrassing herself by bringing reason in to appreciate the nonrational or by using just intuition to explain a natural mechanism.

Ultimately, the culprit is hubris, the lack of self-knowledge and of the humility that follows from that knowledge. The more you know about yourself the humbler you get since you learn that your rational ego depends on delusions and vices such as gullibility and greed, and when you give up those delusions you tend to drop out of society and become an omega, an outsider who lacks the ambition or the confidence to participate fully in social games. What scientific atheists dont seem to appreciate is that they too have the theists animalistic impulse to worship, to trust, and to wallow in irrationality. (As I never tire of saying, just ask them about the details of their sex lives and watch them squirm. Note that a Vulcan, Data, or Sheldon Cooper could never be put into such an embarrassing, hypocritical position.) The main difference is that theists admit to that impulse and try to glorify it by name (embarrassing themselves in countless other ways), whereas a scientific atheist like Hawking pretends to be hyperrational, to

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eliminate emotion or full-blown aesthetics from the picture and to follow merely science wherever it leads. Unfortunately for Hawking, the science of the Big Bang or of the multiverse alone doesnt take you to atheism. Youve got to add bad philosophical (partly aesthetic, intuitive, or faith-based) reasoning to arrive at that conclusion from that starting point. So if you want atheism that will give you the opportunity to laugh at others rather than force you to be the laughingstock, get into philosophy and esoteric religion. Mind you, philosophical atheism leads at least initially to a very dark worldview according to which everything under the sun is ridiculous, including everything you and I personally say or do, but thats another story

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The Vileness of Guns and of Just Wars ____________________________________________________

The Newtown school massacre has already begun to fade from North American news, as the NRA had anticipated. Theres probably a satanic magic number of child shootings in a single massacre that would galvanize Americans to ride the NRA out of town, but apparently twenty doesnt rise to that level. As it stands, though, American gun enthusiasts are more passionate than American gun control advocates, and so there likely wont be meaningful restriction of gun ownership in that country. One reason for the asymmetry is that guns work so well whereas laws alone dont. If you pick up a gun, you have the power of God to take a life in the blink of an eye. Only if the gun jams or is very old and it no longer works may you miss that frisson from holding godlike power in the palm of your hand. By contrast, outlawing some practice on paper may or may not succeed, depending on the strength of the demand for that practice. Thus, prohibition of alcohol failed in the US and gun control would surely fare no better, because alcohol and guns are so potent; if outlawed, they flourish underground. Like guns, alcohol works immediately and universally: anyone can get drunk from just a few shots or several beers, and anyone can kill or maim with nearly any gun. The demand for those products cant be curtailed just with legislation.

The deep question, then, is why Americans love guns more than do, say, Canadians, Europeans, or the Japanese. Gun control works in those other countries because the demand there isnt off the chart; nevertheless, guns obviously work just as well there as they do in the US. One well-known reason for the differences in demand is historical, and its just the one I give elsewhere, that the US has a bloody anarchical history, which bred Americans to value individualism and self-reliance. Americans love guns for the same reason they love cars, because these technologies empower the individual.

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But that reason is insufficient, because lots of other countries have violent pasts, and individualism also has a genetic and thus a universal basis. I think a more complete reason emerges when we consider the dubious but oft heard platitude that guns are morally neutral instruments, that guns by themselves dont kill people and can be used for good or for ill depending on the users intention. On the contrary, Marshal McLuhan was right: technologies have unexpected background effects rather than just the obvious foreground ones. Of course guns dont pick themselves up, walk around, and shoot people; guns arent artificially intelligent (yet). But to contrast this wild scenario with the moral neutrality of guns is to set up a false dichotomy.

Why Guns are for Sissies

To see the background effect of guns on users and nonusers alike, compare projectile weapons with nonprojectile ones like the sword, club, or axe. These latter weapons are armaments in the strict sense that theyre extensions of the arm; theyre limited by the human arms strength and length. As a consequence, to kill with a sword, for example, you have to put yourself in danger since you have to get close to your enemy. Of course, if that enemy is unarmed, the person with the sword has the advantage, but even such a fight is more equal than that between a shooter and an unarmed person. A bow can kill from a greater distance than the sword, ensuring the killers safety even when the bow threatens the targeted person. The point is that you cant kill with a sword without putting yourself at some risk, whereas theres at least a possibility of killing with a projectile weapon from a position of complete safety. Granted, this distinction between projectile and nonprojectile weapons isnt absolute; a spear, for example, greatly extends the arm and so puts the spear user in something closer to the safe position enjoyed by a shooter. (Plus, a spear can be thrown.) Even so, the difference in degree is highly significant. Im hardly a weapons expert, but Id assume that, historically speaking, projectile weapons began with the bow and arrow and the dagger and then evolved into the canon and the crossbow, and finally these led

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to the gun and the bomb. With a bow and arrow, you can kill from perhaps forty yards away from the target. Daggers have less range and ability to penetrate. Canons have a much greater range, and the crossbow requires less skill and strength to use than the regular bow and arrow. The gun has even more advantages, since its much more mobile than a canon (its a miniaturized canon), and can still kill from a distance of two hundred or more yards. A sniper rifle can kill from over two thousands yards (see this Wikipedia article). And then theres the drone predator, much beloved by the postmodern liberal, President Obama, which can slaughter from miles away with the operators perfectly safe in an underground bunker. You can bat away a spear or block a sword with a shield and throw sand in the swordsmans eyes, but if a shooter gets the drop on you, you have no defense at all. You can be killed without even seeing your foe or knowing what hit you. Whats my point, then? Well, although evil people can pick up a nonprojectile weapon and kill with it, doing so is more often correlated with certain virtues which are absent in the use of projectile weapons. You put yourself in danger when you menace someone with a sword or a club, and so youve got to firmly believe youre in the right so that the risk becomes worthwhile. You can kill with a gun at much less risk to you and this lowers the threshold for reasons to kill. In a world without projectile weapons, life is held to be more precious because killing is a riskier endeavor. With projectile weapons, killing becomes a more trivial act. You neednt even look your victim in the eye when you shoot or bomb him, and so your conscience is challenged only by the abstract thought that youve taken a life, not by the flesh-and-blood, man-to-man struggle involved in strangling someone or running him through with a sword. With a gun you merely pull a trigger! A child can do that, but a child cant strangle anyone or club someone to death.

Thus, when compared to killing with a nonprojectile weapon, shooting a person is for sissies. Oh, I know that gun cultures are full of macho bravado, but shooters protest too much (in the Shakespearian sense). Theres comparatively little honour or even skill in killing with a gun. Granted, in a fight in which both sides are armed, both shooters are

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greatly at risk and so courage is needed to stick your head out to get off a shot. This is why the Wild West shootout has such mythical status, because it approaches the level of virtue needed to kill with a nonprojectile weapon. In place of the equality when the weapons are limited by the human arm, the stereotypical shootout features the equalities of position (both shooters stand facing each other and out in the open with nothing to hide behind) and even of the time of day (the shootout occurs at high noon so that everything is visible and theres no refuge in shadow). You have to believe in your cause to face someone squarely in a gun duel, since your advantage with the gun is negated by the fact that your enemy is likewise armed. Still, this sort of perfect equality in a gun fight is relatively rare; its the exception that proves the rule since again whats noble about the shootout or the duel is that it approximates the more typical equality in fights between those who have only nonprojectile weapons. Of course, modern wars are highly dangerous for the soldiers who fight in them because so many people shoot from all sides in such combat. For just that reason, though, killing in war is taken out of human hands and left up to chance. No one can see all the bullets whizzing by, let alone dodge any of them, and so fighting in a modern war is like putting yourself through a meat grinder. Even if you come out unscathed, youll likely suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder, because of the chaotic and inhuman aspects of such pervasive gun use.

Science fiction predicts that humans will one day fight against machines, but that already happens whenever someone kills with a gun. As in most shootings in the US, the victim is usually killed without standing a chance, without having the ability to defend herself or to fight for what she believes is right, and even the shooter is dehumanized by the ease of killing in that way. In a sense, the guns inhumanity transfers to the shooter. With the advent of projectile weapons, people are set at war not just with each other but with those relatively independent tools. A gun isnt wholly independent of the shooter, but the fact that all you have to do to kill with it is point it and pull the trigger means that the gun does most of the work by itself. We must now live in a world in which machines make killing easy. Guns dont yet kill people all by themselves, but they do create an environment in which were all dehumanized because we see for ourselves the

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cheapness of human life; guns thus dishonor all of us. When you can be shot on a whim, by a stray bullet, by a child who accidentally gets hold of a gun, or when your back is turned and you have no idea youre even in someones crosshairs, you learn that machines are much more powerful than the human body and that mindless chance reigns in nature. Guns make killing so easy that they open up a niche for the soulless functionary and anti-warrior who becomes the robotic extension of a military or a gang, who just follows orders without understanding or believing in the cause. In the Crusades, soldiers with swords had to believe fervently in their religion, because they had to look their enemy in the face as they attempted to kill him. Of course, those soldiers ran amok in their bloodlust, raping and pillaging, but this was because the brainwashing had to advance to demonization to inspire so many people to such heroic death defiance. Modern soldiers are likewise taught to love their country and to hate their foes, but these soldiers are professional in a way that more primitive (and thus honourable) warriors never were: modern soldiers serve the manifest machine--not just the state bureaucracy, but the godlike power of projectile weapons which are capable of taking life at the drop of a hat. Modern soldiers are functionaries in that theyre extensions of guns rather than the other way around. Primitive weapons serve the human user, whereas the modern weapon overwhelms human users and nonusers alike. (Lewis Mumford argued that there was an ancient equivalent of the modern machine, which he called the megamachine, the system of conventions which I think of as the power hierarchy, the system of natural and social laws that divide people and distribute power, wealth, and status. Because were hosts for genes rather than being central to the cosmos, the default state of our social systems is one of corrupt oligarchy (kleptocracy). But while the ancient megamachine, such as the rigid society that built the Egyptian pyramids, does enslave the average person to the regime and to its oligarchic avatars, the system of myths that kept the ancient oligarchs in power wasnt as opposed to human interests as is the literal, modern machine such as the gun. This is because the ancient megamachine ran largely on convention and thus on consent

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which lives in the minds of that societys members. By contrast, while a gun must still be picked up to be fired, the gun literally exists outside of our mind as an independent entity with its own causal power. Indeed, modern machines can already be set to kill automatically, as in the case of an electrified fence. The point is that the direction were headed in leads to the artificially intelligent robot, and the modern machine is closer to that end than is the social one which existed even in ancient times.)

At any rate, with regard to the gun, you dont have to fire a gun for your heart to sink as the guns cold indifference to humanity seeps into you and you lose your honour as a potential human hero who faces off against our existential predicament. No, just knowing that guns are out there is bad enough; just knowing how they work and seeing them in the news and in movies has made us all existentially worse off in this sense: weve come to think much less of ourselves, to submit to machines as their effective servants rather than their masters. We adapt to suit the environment we make for us, and an environment in which projectile weapons abound may require us to change for the worse, both from biological and existential perspectives. Just holding a gun, too, fills you with some of the dread you feel when youve got a gun pointed at you. You may think you feel superhuman, with that rush of power, but thats actually a process of dehumanization, a depletion of the feelings that we all should struggle with together in our same existential boat. Holding a gun, you may instead fear you lack the willpower to avoid thinking like an inhuman machine or even to avoid killing for no good reason. Youll feel giddy from the thought that you can now kill with just a flick of your finger, and youll forget the cost of that power which is that you come to respect machines more than people; thus, youll willingly dehumanize yourself to live in a world dominated by machines and by the sociopathic oligarchs who rule that world. Likewise, when youve got a gun pointed at you and youre unarmed, youre appalled by your fragility and by the godlessness of nature, since your life which you value most of all is left to the mercy of the shooters finger-flick which can happen by accident if the gun has a hair-trigger. Suddenly, whether you live or die is left so obviously up to chance that you wonder what extravagant credulity is needed to share the theists

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anthropocentrism. Youre disgusted that such a diabolical instrument as a gun exists in the first place, since the gun illustrates the undeadness of all natural processes. Guns are machines that work according to cause and effect, and at some level so are we and there is no supernatural spirit that overpowers the mechanisms that carry out natures undead evolutions. Only rarely do movies show this natural reaction to having a gun trained on you. Often that person goes about business as usual except that her hands are raised in surrender. More realistically, I imagine, the person whos put at the mercies of chance, the machine, and the shooters whim will be terrified but also enraged; shell feel opposed not just to the shooter but to the existence of guns and to the nature of reality which guns make apparent--to the detriment of our fantasies of the supernatural.

By the way, this subliminal impact of guns on our morale is likely a main reason for the growing popularity of mixed martial arts in the US. Heres a sport that allows men to be masculine again, to forget for a while that we live at the beck and call of machines (of mobile devices, television, the internet, the supercomputers that dominate the stock market, and so on); heres a return to our savage ways, to our animal nature which trains its practitioners to be honourable or at least to survive in desperate poverty, as in Brazil or places in the US. Even as the UFC exalts the US military, the ethics of MMA are opposed to the presuppositions of the gun culture. Guns cheapen human life, whereas fist-fighting quickens your will to live, as the novel Fight Club dramatizes. See also the popularity of the movie 300.

More evidence is found in the comic book superhero. Rarely do the most popular and thus archetypal heroes shoot people. For all their superhuman advantages in strength and speed, fictional heroes like Batman, Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Thor typically dispatch the bad guy with their bare hands. Indeed, shooting with guns is reserved for the evil henchmen who are often depicted as brainless and incompetent, like dumb robots. Again, compared to fighting or killing with a nonprojectile weapon, shooting is for sissies not for genuine heroes.

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So whats my bottom-line response to the gun enthusiasts meme that guns dont kill people, people kill people? This meme is a pitiful rationalization that looks like it was concocted by the mindless guns themselves. Certainly, the meme serves the machines at our expense, as it pretends that were not animals forced to adapt to whatever environment we inhabit. Projectile weapons affect us even if were not shooting or being shot; they do so by denigrating and belittling us, by teaching us not just that life isnt precious but that it cant even be made so. Guns teach us that life is cheap, that you can be killed in the blink of an eye thanks entirely to chance. As it happens, existentially inauthentic life is repulsive rather than precious, and gun enthusiasts shouldnt be entrusted with that godlike power, because theyre only clever mammals who reveal their animal nature in the bedroom. Animals are not gods, and it takes superhuman effort to be more than an animal. Guns make us less than human even as they give us the power of gods, and if anything will destroy us utterly in the near future its that imbalance.

Why Most Americans Love Guns

To return to the initial mystery, then, the reason Americans love guns more than most other modern societies is that the US is still the most powerful, privileged, and thus decadent of those countries, and decadent folks whove grown accustomed to their privileges are like spoiled children; they want immediate, pain-free results or theyll throw a temper tantrum. Their expectations are high but they dont appreciate the struggles of their forebears who had to suffer to so empower the US. Decadent folks, then, will appreciate guns without giving a second thought to the ethical consequences Ive laid out here, because their dominant global position has infantilized them. A child wants his toys and doesnt care if immediate gratification tends to spoil the personality. In short, guns are toys for the corrupted, childlike gods at the peak of the global pecking order. Nonprojectile weapons are for socialists who stress our equality, whereas those who take for granted their being the leaders of the free world prefer weapons that allow more easily for grotesque inequalities.

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I should clarify that Im not calling American gun lovers sissies. In many ways, Canadians and Europeans have weaker wills than those Americans, due to the formers postmodern liberalism. My point stands, though: killing with a gun takes fewer martial virtues than killing with a sword. After all, who would you rather be, the Jedi with the light saber or the clone or droid with the laser that never hits anything? But Americans love their guns, which is to say that their gun-filled environment has dehumanized them. What follows from my argument, then, is that the modern American military has fewer martial virtues than, say, the ancient Roman one. The US is far more powerful, and the ancient Romans were hardly altruists, but Im not talking about that kind of morality. Im talking about heroism, the sort thats akin to the strength of will needed to face our existential predicament, the flash of sublime posthumanity in mere clever mammals.

American soldiers are highly trained and professional, but their machines do most of the fighting for them, which doesnt provide much incentive for the cultivation of what authors like Ralph Peters and Michael Scheuer call the bloody-minded will to kill. American soldiers may be as patriotic as the Roman ones were, but Americans dont have to test that patriotism by fighting on a more equal footing with their enemies. Take away the US advantage in weaponry, which allows the US to kill with impunity, and the question is whether the American youth who fill their militarys ranks would be as eager to risk death for the American kleptocracy. The last time the US fought a prolonged war with an equally well-armed and disciplined foe was in the Vietnam War, and we all know the toll that struggle took on American morale.

The war on militant Muslim fundamentalists throws into sharp relief the imbalance between the American military might and its decadence. Americans have all the military power in the world, but questionable interest in true heroism, while the terrorists have virtually no weapons but insane faith and determination. The terrorists are not existential heroes, because their worldview is preposterous and the jihadists are often duped into sacrificing themselves. But Id expect an impoverished population that cant rely on the latest in weapons technology, to build up a tolerance for pain thats absent in wealthier militaries that have an overreliance on projectile weapons. That tolerance, that being

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inured to harsh reality seems necessary to the authentic warrior--whether this be on the military or on the existential battlefield. And while many American soldiers do come from poor neighbourhoods, they too become extensions of their high-tech military machine.

Just War Theory

While Im on the unpleasant subjects of guns and warfare, Id like to share my personal Just War Theory. Its inspired by the Octospiders in Arthur C. Clarkes Rama series of novels. In that series, the Octospiders are aliens that have mastered genetic engineering. They go to war only as the absolute last resort when their species faces an existential threat, and then they wage total war with no interest in what Just War Theory calls jus in bello (right conduct in war); that is, they exterminate the threat to their existence using biological weapons of mass destruction. Far from glorifying war, these aliens regard war as repulsive; indeed, the military commanders who take part in the needed genocide are not offered promotion, but they kill themselves so as not to taint the peaceful Octospider society with their presence. Heres a Just War Theory, then: a war is just if the side entering into it does all it can to settle the issue peacefully, and if those efforts fail this can only be due to one of the sides subhumanity, in which case that side--and it could be either one--has no human rights and the other side is justified in exterminating them. Take, for example, the war against Muslim terrorists. Have Westerners done all they can to settle the dispute peacefully? Is there a reasonable expectation that the terrorists would stop their suicide bombings if certain negotiations were made? Osama bin Ladin once wrote a letter to Americans, detailing his grievances (bin Ladin wanted the US to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, stop supporting dictatorships in the Muslim world, stop oppressing the Palestinians through Israel, and so on). American neoconservatives responded by saying that those demands were phony and that the terrorists want to rule the world and force everyone to convert to their religion or be killed. I suspect the latter is closer to the truth.

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However, this doesnt begin to exhaust the potential for peaceful resolutions. How about a public debate between George W. Bush and bin Ladin? Could that have worked? Better yet, how about a debate between the philosophical champions of Western secularism and the theological champions of militant Islamic fundamentalism? I see an enormous stage with dozens of representatives from each side, with all their arguments and evidence at their fingertips, and I see the clash of civilizations playing out as a formal debate for the ages. I dont think its a foregone conclusion that the Western secularists could so successfully defend the capitalistic and democratic way of life. Were that debate allowed to play out, I think both sides would lose, which is to say that the weaknesses of each of those societies would outweigh their advantages. Then the task would be to synthesize the strengths to create a way of life that would then be shared by both sides. I know this is impractical, pie-in-the-sky idealism. Nevertheless, I doubt that war is ever actually waged as the very last resort, which is to say that all wars are unjust. But the point of this condition should be to test whether both sides deserve human rights. If one side is so truculent and bellicose that they wouldnt settle the conflict peacefully even under ideal circumstances, such as those of the grand debate, that side may be irretrievably and dangerously ill, in which case they should be just as quickly exterminated as a viral strain or a zombie horde. (If their illness is curable, there you have your peaceful solution.) On the contrary, assuming no population of people is ever so deranged, there should always be a peaceful remedy, in which case the horror of war is unnecessary. The test of whether a conflict could ever be peacefully resolved works at least, then, as a thought experiment. What actually happens, instead of either extreme effort towards establishing peace or towards exterminating the enemy, is a piecemeal approach to both peace and war. No side goes all-out for either end. Thus, there tends to be a global state of permanent, low-scale war, with all militaries occupied to some degree, somewhere. War is waged with a view both to winning and to respecting the human dignity of the foe, but this is untenable. If a people are bad enough to justify a military assault on them, theyre bad

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enough to be exterminated in their entirety using weapons of mass destruction, including biological and nuclear ones. The notion that there should be rules in war is absurd in the Kafkaesque sense. Rules and rights are forfeited in the decision that some nation is so evil that its members will to fight should be eliminated which necessitates destroying them. (A warmongering people might surrender after being beaten militarily, but that would only be temporary since theyd seek revenge and so eventually they would have to be exterminated.) War is the end of morality, when the moral order proves an irrelevant mirage and overwhelming power is needed to prune the world tree. As with the Octospiders, moral rights are thrown to the wind by both sides in a war, by those who deserve to be destroyed because they would never live in peace and by those who must sacrifice their dignity to put down the threat with such force. Thus, the end of a truly just war is the extinction of all parties involved. But again, I doubt that any war has ever been perfectly just, because theres likely always some peaceful arrangement that could have been made instead of military action, which is to say that no population is so evil that a war against its members can be justified.

PostScript
As of mid-February, 2013, the US military is honouring drone pilots with the Distinguished Warfare Medal, for their extraordinary achievements that directly impact on combat operations, but do not involve acts of valor or physical risks that combat entails. As this article points out, the new medal is more prestigious than the Bronze Medal or the Purple Heart, meaning that someone who sits in an air conditioned basement playing the equivalent of a video game can receive a higher honour than someone who risks his life as a soldier in the field, getting shot at by the enemy.

A spokesman for a US veterans group called the decision to honour drone pilots in this way boneheaded. I think this adjective is unintentionally revealing. Whats boneheaded about Leon Panettas decision to award the medal is that it indicates the extent to which a leader of a decadent military, whose fighting is done for the soldiers more and more by machines, comes to think himself more like a machine.

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My explanation of why the US military would praise drone warfare follows from the above sections. In a decadent society, actual courage and other martial virtues mean less, because human life itself is trivialized by the populations high-tech environment. People lose in their competition with machines. For example, many manufacturing jobs are currently being lost. And guns and drones kill more efficiently than swords. Assuming efficiency is your greatest concern, because youre a postmodern liberal whos lost faith in your Enlightenment ideals of individual freedom and rationalist utopia, and so youve been reduced to a nihilistic, pragmatic systems manager, youll be in favour of winning wars regardless of the moral cost to your society. Youll think less of old school martial virtues and youll scientistically assume that heroism can be measured. Because drone strikes are more precise, because they kill the enemy without endangering friendly soldiers, because drones are relatively cheap to produce-for those utilitarian, Philistine reasons, youll really think that drone pilots are heroic. Your notion of heroism will have thus been warped by the environment youve been stewing in. Youll mistake decadence and mere usefulness for heroism. The cowardly act of killing with impunity, with a projectile weapon from a position of complete safety, will be honoured with a medal as though the act were an extraordinary achievement. This is Orwellian and our first task should be to appreciate the dark humour in it.