Here for a short time only, are the Tapescrew letters in full, for your feedback. They are copyright and will appear as an appendix to a forthcoming book
The Tapescrew Letters
Letters from a Senior to a Junior Guru
Preface
I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands. One or two details have been changed to save reputations and immunize myself against the kind of legal action such revelations sometimes provoke. But the letters are substantially unrevised and intact.
Bear in mind that the author - an eminent “Guru” within some minor and fairly recently invented cult - is a charlatan, as are all the Gurus within her cult. She cannot be trusted to tell the truth, not even to her nephew. Her views about mainstream religion – and Christianity in particular – are clearly highly cynical and no doubt in large measure unreliable. I leave you to judge what is true and what is not.
The letters contain few clues as to the specific teaching of the cult. There is a limited amount of jargon. “Glub” seems to be the name of some sort of deity or god, “Boogle” the name of something particularly evil and terrifying being, and “doob” a term that members of this cult use to refer to outsiders. Glub and and Boogle may be two facets of a single cosmic being, or two separate, competing beings involved in some sort of cosmic battle – it is hard to be sure.
Be warned – the letters make pretty depressing and sickening reading. Still, they do usefully reveal just how manipulative and scheming some people are. Thank goodness such deliberate deceivers are few and far between.
Stephen Law
Oxford
19th August 2010
The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
2nd January 2008
My Dear Woodworm
How pleased I was to hear of your graduation from our guru training college – and with a distinction too. Great things are expected of you, as I’m sure you’ve made aware. I see you have been assigned to one of our newest recruitment centres - in Oxford. That is also excellent news. There’s plenty of fodder there. But you now need to prove yourself. And that is where I come in. As you know, our Leader prefers Juniors to be mentored by a Senior they know well. As I am your aunt, I have been asked to watch over you and provide assistance wherever I can.
I cannot be there in person I’m afraid. We are having something of a crisis here at Bodgers – one of our own Juniors was caught indulging in some questionable activity with a couple of very young recruits and we’re having a hard time keeping a lid on it. It’s all hands to the pump at Bodgers, at least for the next few months. Still, I can correspond with you, and advise wherever I can. Just send me regular progress reports, if you will.
After your intensive training, you will be intimately acquainted with both our aims and methods. And you now possess your own copy of The Handbook (which, I need hardly add, you must guard with your life – it must never fall into the hands of a recruit). We have spent thousands of pounds and a year of our time honing your skills, so you won’t be surprised to hear we now expect results.
Our aim is to ensnare human minds, to make them true and faithful servants of our teaching. Let me focus your attention on our Leader’s opening remarks in The Handbook:
Our aim must be to instil in our patients such patterns of thought that his mind becomes wholly ours – so that it becomes an impregnable fortress to anyone else who might try to prise their way in. But we must do this while all the time maintaining the illusion that these ways of thinking are perfectly ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’.
Creating that illusion, Woodworm, is the clincher, the real trick. We must forge minds that are fortresses to those outside, and prisons to those to whom they belong. We must make minds in which we have succeeded in entrenching such effective mental road blocks and self-perpetuating habits of thought that their owners will never be able to think their way free again. For then they will be our willing servants. But our “patients”, as our Leader likes to call them, must never suspect. The faithful must fall for the illusion that they are the ones whose minds have been set free, and that it is everyone else who remains mentally imprisoned!
To become the jailer of another’s mind - what a prospect! An impossible task? By no means. Difficult, yes. But armed with your training, The Handbook, and a firm determination to succeed, let me assure that you will succeed! I have converted literally hundreds of doobs over the last few years, and I am confident that you will do better still.
Which brings me to our movement’s current Achilles’ heel, and my sternest word of warning. As I say, the key to your success lies in maintaining an illusion – your patients must not suspect, not even for a second, that you are deliberately deceiving and manipulating them, that you intend to become their mind’s jailer. We have one very obvious disadvantage compared to the promoters of most other self-sealing bubbles of belief. We know we are deceivers. We know exactly what we are doing as we pull our patients’ strings. Your local religious minister may use many of the same techniques as you, but he really believes the doctrines promotes. He is quite convinced he is doing nothing more than opening people’s eyes to the truth – setting them free. Which means he does not need to fake anything. His voice conveys real warmth. His eyes glisten with genuine fervour. The same is true of the political zealot peddling her leaflets on the street corner. At least she believes the claptrap she peddles. She doesn’t have to pretend.
We, the first generation of Followers, know that the beliefs we are selling are an ingenious fiction concocted by our Leader. While we plan that future generations will be sincere devotes, we, the First Wave, must unfortunately learn to fake that same brand of misty-eyed enthusiasm. Take it form me, it’s an illusion hard to sustain for any length of time.
Knowing you as I do, I think this is what you will find most difficult, the challenge you will have to work hardest to overcome. As that unfortunate incident involving your father’s car made clear, you are not a good liar. And you are prone to over-intellectualize. That might have proved an advantage in the academic world of our college, but out there in the real world, it produces pitfalls.
True, because we know we are deceivers, we have a great advantage over our sincere counterparts in other cults. We have studied the techniques necessary to enslave minds coldly and dispassionately – even scientifically – and have thus became for more knowledgeable and skilful than our competitors in their application. But do not underestimate the advantage our counterparts have over us. An advantage which will become quickly apparent to you as you embark on your first project. The truth is, it is only later that the intellectual traps and snares come into play. You will doubtless be eager to apply the bogus arguments, seductive fallacies, and other intellectual sleights-of-hand that you have mastered so well. But patience, patience! Take that route too quickly, and your patient will smell a rat.
The first step in ensnaring any mind is to focus on your patient’s emotions. Emotion is the unlocked door on which we need only gently push to gain initial entry. Your patients must be seduced into feeling comfortable with you, liking you, admiring you. You must appear to exude warmth and compassion. You must seem to possess both depth and sincerity. You must be able to touch their sleeve, look into their eyes, and make that special connection. If they suspect, even for a second, that you’re a fake, the game is up. Their critical defences will come crashing down and your job will be one hundred times as hard. Fake sincerity - that’s the thing. If only we could bottle it.
Here’s my suggestion. Focus on one patient to begin with. That’s a far more effective way of sharpening your technique. But how to find your first recruit?
My advice is to join some clubs: billiards, chess, knitting, model-making, that sort of thing. It doesn’t matter what, just so long as there’s plenty of opportunity for one-to-one or small group chat. Strike up conversations with people in cafés and bars. Keep returning to the same places, so that you become a familiar presence. Slowly, you will build a circle of acquaintances. Appear confident and positive. Be fun to be around. And remember – no mumbling into your coffee. Be direct. Above all - make eye contact. Then, without appearing to pry, begin to ask them about themselves. They’ll be more eager to tell than you might suppose. Slowly build up a picture of their emotional life, of their hopes and fears, of what they most care about. Pretend to open up to them, you’ll find that they will then open up even more. The more they come to trust you, the more vulnerable to your wiles they will become. Then, slowly and carefully, begin to draw up your plans.
Good hunting!
Your affectionate Aunt
Tapescrew
The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
4th March 2008
Dear Woodworm
My congratulations! You have assembled an impressive collection of “friends”, built up a picture of their emotional vulnerabilities, and even selected your first patient. A thirty-two year old woman somewhat unhappy at work, few close friends, feeling a little lonely, still waiting, with increasing anxiety, for that “special someone” to come along and fill her life with love and meaning. She looks an excellent prospect. You have even let her half imagine that the missing special someone might be you!
The idea of the dinner party was a masterstroke, Woodworm. A small, intimate setting in which the conversation can be steered gently in the direction you desire without anyone becoming particularly suspicious. Just you, your patient, and two other Juniors playing the role of “friends”. I have no idea why, but sharing food worth someone always helps create a special bond. A little wine to lower the inhibitions, just the right questions asked, seemingly in a casual, off hand way: “Do you think that when your dead, that’s it?”. I particularly approve of “I used to worry about where my life was headed”.
You say your little fake confession of earlier torment caused a tear to appear in her eye. Luckily, you didn’t overdo it. You gave just a hint that perhaps you had an inner secret, a source of inner contentment and security, of which she had managed to catch a momentary glimpse. And, once her curiosity was fired, you changed the subject, so she got not even a whiff that of the fact that she’s the fish on your hook. She’s was intrigued and wanting to know more.
Most important of all, she left feeling good. She thought she’d communicated in a special way. She felt she had really been given a rare opportunity to address things that had been gnawing away at her. That feeling, Woodworm, that emotion you caused her to have, is our Archimedean point – the fulcrum on which our whole enterprise now turns.
In a few weeks, you will invite her to one of The Retreat. But not yet. I want to hear you have made real progress in the meantime. First, she must want to know more about that “inner strength” you seem to exude, that quiet certainty you have. Get her wondering where it comes from? If she could acquire it too? Leave clues. But no details just yet.
Why not? The truth is, the core beliefs of almost any cult or religion, if written down in unvarnished prose on the back of an envelope, will strike anyone unfamiliar with such ideas as ridiculous. “You believe that?” they’ll say, dumfounded. “Why on Earth do believe that?!”
That is precisely the reaction you’ll get from this doob if you play your hand too soon.
“Oh, if only…”, I so often find myself thinking. “if only we had access to them when they are children, when their intellectual and emotional defences are so much weaker, while they exhibit such uncritical, sponge-like eagerness to accept whatever a grown-up tells them. One day, I hope, we will have our own schools. Portraits of our Leader will beam serenely down from our classroom walls. Each day will begin with the singing of one of our enervating anthems. The curriculum will devote time every day to the study of our Leaders’ inspiring words. Think of the opportunity such institutions will give us! But it’s early days. But we don’t have them yet.
What such schools are after, of course, is very often not, as some of you novices seem to think, the opportunity to churn out mindless automata uncritically devoted to the cause. No, no. Desirable though that would be, it is an entirely unrealistic expectation, given the unfortunate fact that the little darlings are exposed to so many rival ideas and pressures outside the school gates, ideas and pressures that have a powerfully corrosive effect on those with which they are indoctrinated on the inside.
No, there is no way a school can achieve a high degree of mindless acceptance without, say, the assistance of a family with very tight control over to whom their children speak and to what ideas they are exposed, a family that reinforces our indoctrination with further psychological manipulation both inside and outside the home, including subtle or not so subtle threats of complete social ostracism should the child ever leave the faith. This is the kind of assistance many faith schools don’t have.
Today’s post-Enlightenment, secular culture is wonderful, in that it gives new movements such as our own a voice in the marketplace of ideas. It thus gives us a chance to enslave the minds of the unwitting. But, at the same time, it puts pressure on us to sign up to certain liberal ideals that are, in truth, a great obstacle to our mission – ideals such as that people should be encouraged to think and question, should make their own judgements, should not to be heavily psychologically manipulated as children, and so on. Which is why we have to pretend that we want only to give young people an “opportunity to explore their spiritual side” and other such nonsense.
Mindless followers are, I repeat, not what the schools of the schools of the mainstream religions aim for (though some do). They aim merely to till the soil and sow the seeds of faith, seeds that they hope may one day bloom.
Here’s the real secret, Woodworm - gain access to the mind of the child and you can apply the anaesthetic of familiarity, enough to last a lifetime. To a child, the barmy doesn’t seem barmy. Get them to feel that these beliefs are actually perfectly natural and sensible, when the child grows up, the harsh, barmy edges of the doctrine will no longer stand out like a sore thumb. The doctrines will seem comfortably familiar, particularly if they have been endlessly associated with powerful emotional experiences and rites of passage – weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and so on, For such an adult, ludicrous doctrine no longer seems particularly ludicrous. In fact, it may feel like “coming home”.
But I digress, Woodworm. Our own schools remain a fantasy for the time being. I mention them only to flag up a further advantage the mainstream religions have over us on the emotional front. Their schools may not churn out true believers. But they do produce minds that have at least been tilled and prepared, that are at least not entirely unreceptive to their doctrines. Indeed, their belief systems have in many cases successfully been woven into the fabric of the societies they occupy. To non-believers living in such a society, accepting even a patently ludicrous set of beliefs can seem remarkably “natural”.
The harsh edges of our nuttiest doctrines, by contrast, would be blindingly obvious to our patients to begin with, were we to reveal them – which is why you must keep them under wraps for the time being. Our patient is not yet ready. The emotional soil must first be tilled.
But it’s not all bad news, Woodworm. We do have at least some advantages over our many of our competitors. Remember that, unlike that of the mainstream religions, our own teaching will seem alien and exciting. While we lack the advantage of our patients having been previously anaesthetized to the barminess of what we teach, we do at least have the advantage that our doctrines, presented in the right way, can seem exotic and new.
So let’s proceed slowly with your patient. Don’t reveal too much. Otherwise the frankly ridiculous character of some of the beliefs we peddle will be detected and she’ll be off. But we do want to convey a sense of the exciting and exotic.
Here’s what I suggest. Randomly drop feel-good words like “peace”, “contentment”, “spiritual”, “moral”, into your conversation rather more often that might be expected. Keep working on exuding that sense of inner strength and certainty that you have been faking so effectively. Radiate warmth. Touch her sleeve. Find some excuse to mention, seemingly only in passing, that you meditate. For goodness sake don’t use the word “pray” - that’s far too familiar and fuddy-duddy. “Meditate” will sound far more exotic, far more mystical, to her naïve ears.
We want her to sense that there’s something exhilaratingly different hidden away inside you – that provides you with a source of inner strength and contentment. Something that, perhaps, she could have too.
The questions will come…
Your affectionate aunt
Agatha Tapescrew
The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
23rd August, 2008
My Dear Woodworm
Yes, as you say, she is hooked. She has heard you speak the name of our movement and she has not flinched. Most importantly, she has agreed to accompany you on to The Retreat to “explore her spiritual side”. Fear not - our people at The Retreat know what they are doing.
The key, of course, is to produce a feeling. I once saw a Bishop engaged in a debate on the whether Jesus was “the way, the truth, and the life” The Bishop, along with a Christian philosopher, was up against a couple of atheists. The atheists were clearly getting the better of argument and many of the Christians in the audience were looking uncomfortable. In one or two cases, doubt was creeping in. You could see it in their eyes.
The Bishop, as last to speak, was masterful. He forgot about reason and argument and all the trappings of “winning” by intellectual means. He lowered his voice and appealed instead to personal experience – an experience relating to what he called “the meaning of life”.
I’ve seen this done before, but the Bishop was particularly good at it. He started with jokes, but then gradually began to speak more softly and with feeling. In our quietest moments, he said, each one of us – yes, even a cynical atheist – is aware, deep down, of a light. It’s an awareness of something fundamentally good, of a yearning to be something better than we are. This something is...
…Jesus!
There was much sombre nodding from the Christian Union contingent. I noticed their eyes were now strangely lit up. When the Bishop sat down, there was moment of quiet, reflective calm before the applause broke out.
Now, at the time, I made the dreadful mistake of thinking that the Bishop had lost the debate. The arguments had all gone against him. Only much later did I realize that the Bishop had actually won – spectacularly so, in fact. The truth is that the Bishop was not out looking for new recruits that day. His real aim was to shore up the faith of waverers – to ensure that the application of reason didn’t result in the raising of doubt. And in that he succeeded.
How? By invoking a feeling. It all begins with a feeling. No one really comes to sincere belief in religious doctrines on the basis of an argument. They come because of how they feel deep down inside.
Different cults rely on different feelings. Some focus in anger and resentment. Others on feelings of helpless, insignificance, or submission. But more often than not, the feelings that really do the trick are hope and, most importantly, joy.
The Bishop reminded his Christian brethren of a feeling. It didn’t really matter what it was. It could be a sense of loss or disappointment. Of a “hole” in their life. A sense of justice, or injustice. It might even be something as tacky and sentimental as “the strength to carry on” that Mariah Carey sings about in the song Hero:
And then a hero comes along
With the strength to carry on
And you cast your fears aside
And you know you can survive
So when you feel like hope is gone
Look inside you and be strong
And you'll finally see the truth
That a hero lies in you
Of course, the Muslims and Jews in the audience had such feelings too. But when they looked deep inside, they find Allah, or Yahweh, or whatever. And the atheists, puzzled, could find nothing more than a feeling. I could see them scratching their heads, wondered what on Earth the Bishop was on about.
But of course the Bishop wasn’t interested in them. His concern was with only the Christians in the audience. The Bishop spoke with soft sincerity and conjured up an feeling – and then reminded the assembled Christians of what they already knew in the hearts – that this inner light is Jesus. And why did this work? Because calling such feelings “Jesus” is such a familiar part of their cultural landscape. They have so often spontaneously felt such feelings and had it suggested to them that they are experiencing Jesus, that, when they have such a feeling right now, well that’s just how it seems to them. They know it’s Jesus. They can just see him there, deep down at the bottom of their soul, glimmering. Nothing could be more obvious to them.
That, my boy, is how the Bishop won. At The Retreat, your patient will be isolated and disorientated. Her mind will be messed with. She will be taught a little about Glub. But, much more importantly, we will ensure that she has feelings. The fasting, music, chanting, incense, meditation, ritual, the sense of community, of belonging, of that special, felt connection with others that is so rare nowadays – all these things will combine to produce powerful and unusual feelings in her, particularly feelings of hope, and above all, joy. Then, when she is deep in a reverie of such emotion, you will take our patient by the hand, look deep into her eyes and say, in a calm, steady voice, “My dear, in your quietest moments you’re aware of something, aren’t you? You might try to deny it, but you know there’s something down there, at the bottom of your soul, don’t you? It’s a light, isn’t it? A small, still light. Can you see it there, glimmering, like the evening star? Look closer... Closer still… See…? Can you see what it is yet…?
It’s Glub, isn’t it?”
And as she looks more and more closely, the recognition will finally break over her: “Oh my gosh! Yes… yes… it really is Glub!”
Once she knows through personal experience the truth and reality of Glub, she will very probably be ours forever. No mere argument will ever be able to loosen our grip on her. For whenever any such intellectual threat pops up, we need only gently remind her of what she already knows deep in her soul! When a critics presents her with an intellectual challenge to her belief, she will quietly and confidently reply with the words of Blaise Pascal: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
Of course, I am simplifying. The recipe we cook up at The Retreat is a complex and heady brew into which is mixed many other important ingredients.
For example, the patient will be shown the good works our Followers do – the compassion they exhibit, helping out in their local community, providing food to the homeless, and so on. That will further lower her guard. “These are good people!” she will think. “So much more generous and caring than the people I have spent my life with up to now.”
And then we will repeatedly ask her the question: “But what if this teaching were true? How wonderful would that be! What a prospect! And you have nothing to lose, do you, so why not make the bet? Why not at least give it a try? Go on take the plunge!”
Chances are, she will take the plunge, particularly if she is surrounded by others whom she sees joyously jumping in. Who wants to be the sad, solitary frump standing at the poolside when everyone else is in there splashing about in delight? She’ll jump. And then we’re in!
But as, I say, it is above all the cultivation of the feeling that we must focus on. Without the feeling, she’ll may only take a quick dip. What we require is a lifetime’s immersion.
Your affectionate aunt
Tapescrew
The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
4th October, 2008
My Dear Woodworm
Everything appears to be going swimmingly. The Retreat has worked its magic. Your patient had a new circle of friends, and is becoming immersed in the new, structured, life-style that we had created for her – the endless round of meditation classes, talks, socials, and so on.
As we planned, the patient is believes she is finding value, meaning and purpose within the social, intellectual, moral framework into which she has now firmly been plugged. She has entered what must seem to her to be an enchanted garden. Of course, the enchantment will eventually wear off somewhat. She will begin to see that it’s not all wonderful inside this world we have created for her. Which is why we must now begin to cultivate another emotion: fear. Even if she comes to see that not everything inside our garden is entirely rosy, she must learn to fear what lies outside its walls. She must eventually become so emotionally dependent upon our garden that the prospect of leaving it must appear to her to be a truly terrible thing. While joy may be what brings them into the garden, it is often fear that keeps them there. Our patient must feel that to leave would be to fall from the light back into darkness - into the cold, lonely, meaningless oblivion from which we have rescued her.
But now to a more specific concern of mine. You write in your last letter of how you have been reasoning with the patient, thereby convincing her of the truth of some of our doctrines. Well, you are a gifted and able thinker. I don’t doubt that this naïve doob, entirely untrained in philosophy and the dark arts of persuasion, is putty in your hands. But you are making a terrible mistake if you place too much emphasis there.
Don’t misunderstand me. Yes, it is desirable that she believes reason is largely consistent with our doctrines, perhaps even supports our doctrines to some extent. But don’t go beyond that. For then she may end up supposing our doctrines rely on reason for their acceptability.
Which, reading between the lines, seems to be precisely what you have been suggesting to her, you fool. Once she believes that it’s only reasonable to believe such things because they are reasonable, well then we are in big trouble. The next time some smart-Alec doob comes along able to pick apart these dainty concoctions of intellectual bullshit you have been serving up to her, her faith will crumble in a minute!
You have been teaching her unqualified respect for reason. That is not the proper attitude to instil. A better attitude is fear. She should fear applying reason, particularly on her own, unsupervised by an appropriate authority such as yourself who can set her back on track should she err. At the very least, should made to feel uncomfortable or guilty about “going it alone” with reason.
I don’t mean she should be concerned about applying reason generally, of course. There’s no reason for her to think twice about applying reason when filling in her tax return or calculating how many tiles she need for her bathroom, or any other mundane matter. There’s no harm, either, in her respecting the role of reason in science. At least up to a point. But get her to acknowledge that there are limits to what reason can reveal. Quote Shakespeare at her – “There are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio”. That sort of thing. But also imply something further. Imply not just that reason cannot properly be applied beyond a certain boundary, but also that it is wrong even to try. It is arrogant and sinful to attempt to exercise reason and freedom of thought beyond a certain point.
Take a leaf out of this book written by these two Jewish scholars, for example:
We have been commanded not to exercise freedom of thought to the point of holding views opposed to those expressed in the Torah; rather, we must limit our thought by setting up a boundary where it must stop, and that boundary is the commandments and the instructions of the Torah... if a person feels that the pursuit of a particular argument is seriously threatening his or her belief in what is clearly a cardinal principle of Judaism, there exists an obligation to take the intellectual equivalent of a cold shower…. [Jewish scholars quoted by Solomon Schimmel in The Tenacity of Unreasonable Belief, (Oxford, OUP 2008) p 47.]
Note this idea of setting up a boundary in the patient’s mind. She must feel that, as she approaches this boundary armed with reason, warning bells are going off and red lights are flashing. She must feel that reason, fine in everyday contexts, is downright dangerous when applied to matters of faith.
Remember those Bible Belt church signs that read, “A freethinker is Satan’s slave”? Preachers erect those signs to encourage the belief that, when it comes to thinking freely about matters of faith, Satan will be at your elbow in a moment to lead you away from the Truth. Such preachers want their followers to suppose that, when it comes to their religion (it doesn’t matter about other religions, of course) the freethinker is a fool whose arrogance will lead him to Hell. A simple, trusting faith must prevail.
True, we have no Satan and no Hell with which to threaten our Followers. But we do have the reverse side of Glub: Boogle. Talk about Boogle to her. But remember fear works best when it is aimed at something hidden and mysterious. Once the monster in the sci-fi film is seen, its terrifying qualities are inevitably diminished. Monsters from your own Id are always far more terrifying. Boogle must remain a cipher in the shadows. Hint at the existence of Boogle, but be vague. That way, and her imagination can take over. Boogle will become her own Room 101.
Actually, none of this is to say that the patient should suppose that her powers of reason can never be applied to our doctrines. They can be used, but only in the service of those doctrines, to deepen our understanding of them, not to challenge them. Given the tiresome, post-Enlightenment respect for this overrated thing called “freedom of thought”, people will eventually accuse us of thought-control – “You want to enslave minds, even children’s minds. You want to turn off their ability to think and reason.”
To this, we can, truthfully, if very misleadingly, reply: “No we want individuals to be able to reason and think well! In fact, we encourage them to question! Come along to one of our sessions and you’ll see.” What we don’t mention is the boundary, the boundary that we set up in the minds of our Followers, the boundary marked by a sign that reads: “By all means think freely and as often as you want, but up to here and no further!”
And of course, having officially signed up to the virtues of reason and freedom of thought, we have the perfect excuse to endlessly fire off at our opponents what our Leader colourfully described as the Blunderbuss of Crap. “Look!” we can say to our new recruits as we let off salvo after salvo at the unbelievers. “See how they struggle to answer our questions! Their respect for ‘reason’ is ironic, don’t you think, when they cannot use it to answer us? You see, in the final analysis, both our belief systems are faith positions. Both require a leap of faith!”
Let our opponents try to dig themselves out from under that load of ordure.
Your affectionate aunt
Tapescrew
The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
12th February, 2009
Dear Woodworm,
Your last letter is a source of serious concern. Her brother is visiting for a week, you say. Bad news indeed. And not just because our patient will be reminded of positive features of her old life, her old habits, her old ways of thinking.
The brother is clearly aware that we’re up to something. He is not a religious man. And he has been asking questions, you say. Questions rather more direct and to the point than we usually get.
This man clearly fails to show the kind of respect that’s usually accorded any sort of “spiritual belief”. The impertinence! This is a critical time for us. The patient could even now escape our clutches, and the arrival on the scene of someone our patient clearly likes and respects, someone who treats our teaching as if it were just a set of beliefs like any other, could wreck havoc.
The brother must be disarmed. You say you have been invited round for dinner to meet him? Here is your opportunity.
As that first glass of wine is poured, he will probably say, ever-so-innocently, something like this: “So, you are the person that has introduced my sister to these new beliefs she has been telling me such about?” If you are not forthcoming with any details, he will eventually follow this up with a series of simple, straightforward questions, apparently expecting straightforward answers.
Do not, under any circumstances give them. Our patient is not yet so caught up in our mindset that she will be entirely immune to the patent absurdity that a succinct and unvarnished statement of our teaching is likely to reveal. Yes we have cast our spell over her, but the magic has not yet set.
I suggest you employ the strategy that our Leader calls Moving the Goal posts. Turn to The Handbook and reread that section with care. Whenever the brother matter-of-factly asks, “So you believe so-and-so, do you?” Suggest, slightly condescendingly that he has misunderstood our teaching. For example, you might say, “Oh dear! You appear to have taken us literally. That’s not what we mean.” Do not, however, edify him. Do not tell him clearly and succinctly what we do mean. That’s for us to know, and him to find out!
If he tries yet again, just continue to move the goalposts around some more, “Ah, I see you have again misunderstood.” Perhaps add, “Of course, you must remember we are using the language of metaphor and analogy – it’s a foolish mistake to interpret such teaching literally, you know.”
If he asks what the analogy is, waffle. Use words like “spiritual”, “transcendent” and “ultimate” a lot. Wave your arms around in a vague way and look up, as if you are have some profound insight, and searching for just the right words to express it, but can’t quite manage it.
In this way, you can endlessly give the brother the run around. True, in some contexts, that you are employing such a sleight-of-hand with words would quickly become clear. However, some things really are difficult to express or articulate properly, aren’t they? Our subjective experiences, for example, can be difficult to articulate. How we feel about something can often only communicated to others in a rather fumbling and imprecise way, which allows much scope for misunderstanding. There’s no denying that saying, “Ah, but that’s not quite what I meant”, is sometimes an entirely reasonable response to a criticism.
Use this to your advantage. Your patient believes she has had an experience of the transcendent, of the “other”. You must stress that our access to what lies beyond is inevitably restricted. We can at best catch only glimpses. It’s all very much “through a glass darkly”. Admit that it’s hard to capture using our everyday vocabulary. As what she had was a feeling, it very probably is very hard for her to put into words! So your excuse will look plausible.
If any picture you paint of what lies “beyond” is inevitably vague and impressionistic, then it will inevitably be vulnerable to misinterpretation. But then any criticism of what we teach about what lies beyond can conveniently be put down to some misunderstanding on the part of our opponents.
Indeed, try saying this: “You see, what we ultimately believe is ineffable, is beyond the ability of language to express.”
Trust me – this works. I have applied this same wheeze over an extended period of time without it ever dawning on my opponents what I was really up to. Do the same!
A little character assassination can enhance the effectiveness of Moving the Goalposts. Remember to imply at every opportunity that the brother is being terribly crude and unsophisticated in his ham-fisted attempts to characterize and criticize what we believe. Notice I said, “imply”! Your patient no doubt loves her brother and may not respond well to a direct accusation. So never explicitly accuse her brother of being an unsophisticated, unspiritual twit. Rather, adopt an air of calm intellectual and spiritual superiority. Be just a little bit condescending. But – and here’s the key – even while adopting that air of superiority, it’s important to keep reminding them both how terribly humble you are. Admit that you cannot articulate the essence of that in which you believe, that you are struggling vainly to express in mere human language what you nevertheless know in your heart to be true.
You might also try one of the list of quotes from people that I’m appending to this letter. You’ll notice that each of the people in the list has unimpeachable moral authority - Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King. You will also notice that the quotes mix moral truth with religious falsehood. Use the one by Bonhoeffer, for example, and then – when the brother resists the religious element – refuse to allow him to separate out the moral element and imply he must be sympathetic to Nazism.
Your humility and calmness will be sure to impress the patient, and the contrast between your calmness and the brother’s mounting anger and frustration as you endlessly shift the goalposts about will become more and more obvious to her. You will seem humble and open-minded. The brother will increasingly appear dogmatic, un-spiritual, and, I very much hope, aggressive. Possibly even a Nazi.
This exercise in character assassination will be nicely rounded off with a suggestion of arrogance – get the patient thinking that her brother is being arrogantly dismissive of things that he doesn’t even properly understand. Remind them both that there are “more things in heaven and earth” than are dreamed of in his philosophy. Shouldn’t her brother being showing a little humility? Notice the delightful switcheroo we pull here. We are the ones claiming certainty, yet we end up appearing humble while he is portrayed as the arrogant know-it-all. You’ll enjoy the delicious irony! But remember - don’t be caught savouring it.
There is a second strategy that will also prove invaluable in dealing with the brother – The Way of Questions. Look it up in The Handbook and study it well. Don’t let the brother be your interrogator. You must become his. For every question he asks you, ask him three back. Get him on the back foot.
Of course you must not come across as inquisitorial. Pretend your questions are merely for “clarification” – you just want to understand more clearly where the brother is coming from, so you can properly address his concerns. But here’s what you actually do: hit him with a series of thorny philosophical puzzles with which he’ll inevitably struggle. I recommend two in particular:
1. Ask him why he supposes the universe exists. Why there is something rather than nothing.
2. Ask him how he is able to know right from wrong. How is he in a position to say that something truly heinous, such as slavery, is wrong? Or, better still, The Holocaust?
If the brother is an atheist, or agnostic, he’s not going to have pat answers to these Big Questions. As you will know from that training in moral and religious philosophy we gave you, they are awfully deep and difficult questions to which there are no simple, easy answers (one of the reasons we provided that training is precisely so you can use it to tie people like this irksome brother up in knots).
The fact is, we don’t have good answers to these questions either. But we pretend to. We say, Glub is the explanation for why there is anything at all. We say, Glub provides us with our moral compass in this otherwise treacherously uncertain and increasingly morally depraved world.
Our patient will be impressed by the fact that, while her brother struggles with such tricky moral and metaphysical questions, we do not. We offer quiet, calm, certainty. As your patient looks back and forth between - on the one hand - your serene, wise, and confident expression, and - on the other hand - the look of exasperation creeping across her brother’s face as he struggles and fails to provide an adequate justification for condemning the Holocaust, your job will be more than half done. Indeed, the thought might even cross your patient’s mind that her brother is morally rudderless!
Even if the brother manages to deal successfully with your first round of questions (which, unless he turns out to be a Professor of Philosophy, he almost certainly won’t) you can just ask another “clarificatory” question, and then another: “Ah, I see. But then let me ask you this….”, “Hmm, that’s interesting, but what do you mean by ….” This will tie him up in knots, very probably leaving your patient with the impression that you are the winner in this little intellectual exchange. The truth, of course, is that you never dealt with his penetrating questions. But the chances are your patient won’t even notice this, or even remember what his questions were, after half an hour of The Way of Questions!
At the very least, if you combine these two techniques, the patient will be left with the impression that the debate between you and her brother is all square – that neither side can be said to have achieved a decisive victory. That is all the space we need in which to operate. At that point we can say, “Ah, so you see, in the end, it all depends on faith.”
Your affectionate aunt
Tapescrew
The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
28th June, 2009
Dear Woodworm
I have not heard from you for a while. Gibbons tells me (yes, I have my spies in Oxford) that you haven’t been into our Oxford centre much over the last few weeks. I very much hope that is because you are beavering away with your patient, whose brother, I anticipate, has now been dispatched?
Let us hope so. If you suspect the patient is having doubts, and if the other techniques I recommended are not proving effective enough to allay them, then let me share with some further thoughts passed on to a select group of us Seniors at one of our Leaders training sessions held in the South of France last week.
First of all, our Leaders says he wants us to focus our attention more on morality. He believes we have been missing a trick there. We must get our patients thinking, first of all, that morality depends on religion. That’s to say, get them thinking people won’t be good without religion, that religion provides us with our only moral compass. Take that compass away, and society will eventually slide into moral degeneracy.
Of course, that morality depends on religion is something your patient probably believes already. That is because the mainstream religions hi-jacked morality long ago. They created the myth that morality is their invention. They took the basic universal prohibitions against stealing, lying, murder, and so on, rigidly codified them, added a few idiosyncratic prohibitions of their own (typically concerning sexual practices and foodstuffs), and said “Voila! Religion has created morality! Without us, there is no morality!”
Never mind that there’s growing scientific evidence that our morality is in large part a product of our evolutionary history. Never mind that the least religious Western democracies – Sweden, for example – are in many respects the most socially and morally healthy. Never mind that in traditional Chinese society, in which the dominant cultural force was not religion but a secular ethical doctrine – Confucianism – levels of ordinary morality have been much the same as in parts of the world dominated by transcendental religion. Because “morality depends on religion” has been endlessly repeated by religious folk – it is the one mantra they all share – it has, in many corners of the world, become a factoid, an unquestioned part of the cultural landscape. No one really thinks about it. They just accept it. Even many atheists (some of whom, while not religious, nevertheless suppose religious belief is desirable in others - especially those lower down the socio-economic ladder, who might otherwise burgle their house).
Take advantage of this widespread myth. Say, “Yes, morality does indeed depend on religion.” Then add, “But of course, it has to be the right religion, doesn’t it?”
As I endlessly repeat to you – the key to recruitment is not reason but emotion. However, the fact is that the emotions on which we rely change. As I have already mentioned, we seduce new recruits with joy, but, as they begin to mature into seasoned Followers, we must increasingly come to rely on fear. Fear of loss of friends. Fear of loss of meaning and purpose. Now our Leader wants us to add another fear to the mix - of moral oblivion. Get our followers holding tightly onto nurse, for fear of finding something worse. Our Leader wants our movement to achieve official status. It wants the state to recognise it as an important moral beacon - providing moral guidance to young people who might otherwise fall into degeneracy and sin. This way, we might even receive government funds. Certainly, there will be no official resistance to our starting our own schools.
At the conference (which, I must say, was lavishly catered for – never have I tasted such smoked salmon) our Leader spoke of something else too. What we ultimately want, he forcefully and inspiringly reminded us, is what he calls The Vision Thing.
The vision of which our Leader spoke, is not, of course, a vision – of heaven, or a religious figure descending, or anything like that. No, no. Not that there’s anything wrong with our Followers having that sort of vision, of course – and sometimes they do. But our Leader meant something much less trivial. He was speaking of the all-encompassing mindset. He gave us various examples.
Sometimes a conspiracy theorist will become so enmeshed in their theory that they can just “see” that it is true. Wherever they look, they find their theory fits. Of course, what they are really doing is finding a way to make it fit. They interpret whatever they experience in such a way that it “makes sense” on their world-view. They also develop no end of moves to explain away anything that might look like a rational threat to their belief system. Anything that might seem not to fit - that the conspiracy theorist can’t fully make sense of - is put down to the powerful, mysterious and sometimes inscrutable forces and of The Conspirators. The conspiracy theorist supposes that he is the one whose eyes have been opened to what the rest of us cannot see. He turns on his TV of an evening, and discovers that each news item only further confirms his worst fears about the spread of The Conspiracy. He looks out of the window and sees agents of evil spying on him from that parked car across the street. Eventually, The Conspiracy becomes so obvious to him that he is astonished the rest of us can’t “see it” too, especially after he has pointed it out to us in some detail. So he supposes that we must be part of the Conspiracy. Either that, or our minds have been “got to” somehow. By Them.
The Vision Thing is not uncommon in the political sphere, of course. Witness the Marxist who, wherever he looks, finds that Marx theories account for what happens. It all fits. It all makes sense. So obvious is it to her, in the end, that she is astonished we cannot see what’s going on in front of our eyes. We have somehow been blinded by the forces of Capitalism. Perhaps our senses have been dulled by the opiate of the masses?
The religious person too, can achieve such an all-encompassing Vision. Indeed, people often say that religious faith is something like a perspective on the world, a way of viewing it. We fling open our curtains in the morning and see sunlight. They fling open their curtains and see the glory of God flooding into their room. It’s so obvious to them, they wonder why we can’t see it too. They suppose we must be defective. “Perhaps”, they think, “it is because they have been corrupted by sin? Or led astray by devils?”
The Vision Thing can be produced in all sorts of way. Sometimes it is a product of long immersion in a political ideology, or some internet-based conspiracy theory mindset. Sometimes it is a result of drug abuse. Sometimes mental illness. Sometimes it happens quite spontaneously. Occasionally, people look at the world and suddenly, apparently for no reason at all, just “see” that it is imbued with a kind of cosmic radiance.
Of course, others look and are suddenly consumed by a very different vision – a vision, say, of the world as the product of some awful cosmic malignancy. Those who have the latter sort of experience – and they are more common than you might imagine – tend to be put on medication. Those who have the former sort of experience tend to put on a dog collar. Had we the advantage of being one of the established, mainstream religions, many of those spontaneously having the first sort of experience would walk in through our doors, already converts!
What we are after with every patient is, our Leader helpfully reminded us, The Vision Thing. Our patients must come to see - with their hearts, if not their eyes - that our teaching is The Truth, that it accords in every detail with everything they have ever experienced. They must find that it ultimately “makes sense” of everything.
I am concerned by the lack of communication, Woodworm. Get in touch. Now.
Your aunt,
Tapescrew
The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
14th September, 2009
Woodworm,
Finally, a missive from you. But I would rather not have received it. The brother, it turns out, is a skeptic? And the patient has become one too? She has even signed up for a class in critical thinking? How could you have let this happen, you oaf? Now we discover why you have been so quiet of late. You have failed catastrophically.
Had I been forewarned that the brother is a skeptic, well, we could have made plans. We could have at least prepared to Go Nuclear. But now it is too late.
Remember, at the end of the day, all we have got is a collection of extraordinary claims for which we can provide scarcely a shred of evidence. Other than that we say they are true. That’s it!
Of course, all other cults and religions are in the same boat, yet that has not stopped them from flourishing, sometimes spectacularly so. How do they achieve such extraordinary success? Rule Number One is this. They manage, by one means or another, to obscure this fact: that the evidence for what they believe is simply that they say it’s true. Either that, or they succeed in neutralizing that fact by making it seem unimportant. They insist that the truth of what they say is known, not on the basis of evidence, but in another, deeper way – “with the heart”, or some other codswallop with which they fob off their respective followers.
Ultimately, you had one simple, basic job to do: to deal with the otherwise obvious thought that the only real reason our patient has got to believe any of this twaddle is that we say it's true. Which is hardly much of a reason, is it? That, Woodworm, is the one thought that, above all, you should have suppressed or neutralized. Yet that is the one thought you have allowed to pop – nay, explode – in the patient’s head, and with devastating consequences!
You say she is now doubting even the “experience” we worked so carefully to cultivate at The Retreat. You say she thinks we have been playing with her mind. She supposes she may merely have felt certain powerful emotions which she mistook to be some sort of revelation? Good grief. We are sunk.
How on Earth is our cult to expand if it has to rely on Gurus as incompetent as yourself? The consequences of such an error will be serious, my boy. Our Leader does not forgive failure. You were warned.
Your bitterly disappointed aunt,
Tapescrew
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Feser's criticism
Edward Feser has been criticising my evil God argument over on his bog. I have rattled his cage with a comment (not yet moderated). Wonder if he'll respond?
Here is what Feser said:
Law's argument evidently presupposes a "theistic personalist" or "neo-theist" notion of God and is therefore completely irrelevant to the classical theism of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, et al., according to which God is not "good" in the way a human being is good, as if He and we both instantiated the same property; rather, He just is Goodness Itself, and anything less than that is (for a classical theist) necessarily other than God. Hence it is incoherent to suggest that God might be evil.
Re: the analysis of evil as a privation, I would say that it is hard to makes sense of individual examples of evil on any other view, and hard to make sense of evil as an objective feature of the world at all -- which the atheist himself has to do if he's going to make arguments from evil stick -- except on the privation view. I would also say that the privation view naturally falls out as a consequence of a general classical realist metaphysics (whether Platonist or Aristotelian). In any event, whether the classical theist can argue for this analysis of evil to Law's satisfaction or not is irrelevant to the question at hand, because the analysis is integral to the classical theistic view of God and the world. Thus, if Law says that there might at least in principle be a (classical theist) God who is evil, then he either doesn't understand what classical theism means by "God" or is just begging the question against classical theism. Either way, as I say, his argument is irrelevant.
Now, a critic might at this point say that he isn't familiar with and doesn't understand all this stuff about evil as privation, God as pure act, God as Goodness Itself, etc. But if so, then that's the critic's problem, because in that case he doesn't understand classical theism itself and therefore shouldn't presume that he has raised any challenge to it.
See, this is what annoys the hell out of me: The sort of atheist -- and this is the typical atheist, in fact -- who (if he is even aware of them in the first place) treats concepts like pure act, evil as privation, divine simplicity, the transcendentals, the distinction between per se and accidentally ordered causes, and all the other elements of the classical theistic tradition as if they were a bunch of oddities which the theist brings in in an an hoc way in order to patch up arguments that would otherwise have to be admitted to have been demolished by atheist criticisms; and as if he is under no obligation to try to understand them before judging that the traditional arguments fail. One wants to say: "No, dummy, these elements have always been integral to the tradition of philosophical theology, and if you don't know of or understand them, that only shows that you don't have the first clue about that tradition itself, and thus shouldn't be opening your mouth up about it." Which is, of course, what I often do say.
Accordingly, most atheist arguments, even most of those presented by otherwise serious philosophers (rather than by the Dawkinses of the world), are simply irrelevant to the question of whether classical theism is true. In fairness, though, too many contemporary religious apologists and Christian philosophers of religion have little more knowledge of the classical theist tradition than the typical atheist does. They argue for what is in effect (and whether they realize this or not) a decadent "theistic personalist" or "neo-theist" conception of God, and thus open themselves up to arguments like Law's. But that only shows that, here as in so many other ways, we modern Christians are inferior to our forebears, and are paying the price for forgetting the tradition they tried to pass on to us, and have passed on to us if only we'd listen to them. It doesn't show that there is anything wrong with the tradition itself. And the sooner we re-learn that tradition, the better.
Here is what Feser said:
Law's argument evidently presupposes a "theistic personalist" or "neo-theist" notion of God and is therefore completely irrelevant to the classical theism of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, et al., according to which God is not "good" in the way a human being is good, as if He and we both instantiated the same property; rather, He just is Goodness Itself, and anything less than that is (for a classical theist) necessarily other than God. Hence it is incoherent to suggest that God might be evil.
Re: the analysis of evil as a privation, I would say that it is hard to makes sense of individual examples of evil on any other view, and hard to make sense of evil as an objective feature of the world at all -- which the atheist himself has to do if he's going to make arguments from evil stick -- except on the privation view. I would also say that the privation view naturally falls out as a consequence of a general classical realist metaphysics (whether Platonist or Aristotelian). In any event, whether the classical theist can argue for this analysis of evil to Law's satisfaction or not is irrelevant to the question at hand, because the analysis is integral to the classical theistic view of God and the world. Thus, if Law says that there might at least in principle be a (classical theist) God who is evil, then he either doesn't understand what classical theism means by "God" or is just begging the question against classical theism. Either way, as I say, his argument is irrelevant.
Now, a critic might at this point say that he isn't familiar with and doesn't understand all this stuff about evil as privation, God as pure act, God as Goodness Itself, etc. But if so, then that's the critic's problem, because in that case he doesn't understand classical theism itself and therefore shouldn't presume that he has raised any challenge to it.
See, this is what annoys the hell out of me: The sort of atheist -- and this is the typical atheist, in fact -- who (if he is even aware of them in the first place) treats concepts like pure act, evil as privation, divine simplicity, the transcendentals, the distinction between per se and accidentally ordered causes, and all the other elements of the classical theistic tradition as if they were a bunch of oddities which the theist brings in in an an hoc way in order to patch up arguments that would otherwise have to be admitted to have been demolished by atheist criticisms; and as if he is under no obligation to try to understand them before judging that the traditional arguments fail. One wants to say: "No, dummy, these elements have always been integral to the tradition of philosophical theology, and if you don't know of or understand them, that only shows that you don't have the first clue about that tradition itself, and thus shouldn't be opening your mouth up about it." Which is, of course, what I often do say.
Accordingly, most atheist arguments, even most of those presented by otherwise serious philosophers (rather than by the Dawkinses of the world), are simply irrelevant to the question of whether classical theism is true. In fairness, though, too many contemporary religious apologists and Christian philosophers of religion have little more knowledge of the classical theist tradition than the typical atheist does. They argue for what is in effect (and whether they realize this or not) a decadent "theistic personalist" or "neo-theist" conception of God, and thus open themselves up to arguments like Law's. But that only shows that, here as in so many other ways, we modern Christians are inferior to our forebears, and are paying the price for forgetting the tradition they tried to pass on to us, and have passed on to us if only we'd listen to them. It doesn't show that there is anything wrong with the tradition itself. And the sooner we re-learn that tradition, the better.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
The appeal to "prior commitments" or "presuppositions" re. theism
Here's a bit from a paper forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy. I put it up because it concerns a certain move that's often made re evidence of miracles - that whether it's sensible to accept testimony of the miraculous depends on ones "presuppositions" or "prior commitments". This phrase just cropped up in a slightly bad-tempered interchange I am currently having with Glenn Peoples here.
The Ted and Sarah case
Suppose I have two close friends, Ted and Sarah, whom I know to be generally sane and trustworthy individuals. Suppose that Ted and Sarah now tell me that someone called Bert paid them an unexpected visit in their home last night, and stayed a couple of hours drinking tea with them. They recount various details, such as topics of conversation, what Bert was wearing, and so on. Other things being equal, it is fairly reasonable for me to believe, solely on the basis of their testimony, that such a visit occurred.
But now suppose Ted and Sarah also tell me that shortly before leaving, Bert flew around their sitting room by flapping his arms, died, came back to life again, and finished by temporarily transforming their sofa into a donkey. Ted and Sarah appear to say these things in all sincerity. In fact, they seem genuinely disturbed by what they believe they witnessed. They continue to make these claims about Bert even after several weeks of cross-examination by me.
Am I justified in believing that Ted and Sarah witnessed miracles? Surely not. The fact that Ted and Sarah claim these things happened is not nearly good enough evidence. Their testimony presents me with some evidence that miracles were performed in their living room; but, given the extraordinary nature of their claims, I am not yet justified in believing them.
Notice, incidentally, that even if I am unable to construct a plausible explanation for why these otherwise highly trustworthy individuals would make such extraordinary claims – it’s implausible, for example, that Ted and Sarah are deliberate hoaxers (for this does not fit at all with what I otherwise know about them), or are the unwitting victims of an elaborate hoax (why would someone go to such extraordinary lengths to pull this trick?) – that would still not lend their testimony much additional credibility. Ceteris paribus, when dealing with such extraordinary reports – whether they be about alien abductions or supernatural visitations – the fact that it remains blankly mysterious why such reports would be made if they were not true does not provide us with very much additional reason to suppose that they are true.
Consideration of the Ted and Sarah case suggests something like the following moral:
P1 Where a claim’s justification derives solely from evidence, extraordinary claims (e.g. concerning supernatural miracles) require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there is good reason to be sceptical about those claims.
The phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is associated particularly with the scientist Carl Sagan . By “extraordinary evidence” Sagan means, of course, extraordinarily good evidence – evidence much stronger than that required to justify rather more mundane claims. The phrase “extraordinary claims” is admittedly somewhat vague. A claim need not involve a supernatural element to qualify as “extraordinary” in the sense intended here (the claims that I built a time machine over the weekend, or was abducted by aliens, involve no supernatural element, but would also count as “extraordinary”). It suffices, for our purposes, to say that whatever “extraordinary” means here, the claim that a supernatural miracle has occurred qualifies.
Some theists (though of course by no means all) have challenged the application of Sagan’s principle to religious miracles, maintaining that which claims qualify as “extraordinary” depends on our presuppositions. Suppose we begin to examine the historical evidence having presupposed that there is no, or is unlikely to be a, God. Then of course Jesus’ miracles will strike us as highly unlikely events requiring exceptionally good evidence before we might reasonably suppose them to have occurred. But what if we approach the Jesus miracles from the point of view of theism? Then that such miraculous events should be a part of history is not, one might argue, particularly surprising. But then we are not justified in raising the evidential bar with respect to such claims. So theists may, after all, be justified in accepting such events occurred solely on the basis of a limited amount of testimony, just as they would be the occurrence of other unusual, but non-supernatural, events. The application of Sagan’s principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” to the Jesus miracles simply presupposes, prior to any examination of the evidence, that theism is not, or is unlikely to be, true. We might call this response to Sagan’s principle the Presuppositions Move.
That there is something awry with the Presuppositions Move, at least as it stands, is strongly suggested by the fact that it appears to license those of us who believe in Big Foot, psychic powers, the activities of fairies, etc. to adopt the same strategy – e.g. we may insist that we can quite reasonable accept, solely on the basis of Mary and John’s testimony, that fairies danced at the bottom of their garden last night, just so long as we presuppose, prior to any examination of the evidence, that fairies exist. Those making the Presuppositions Move with respect to religious miracles may be prepared to accept this consequence, but I suspect the majority of impartial observers will find it a lot to swallow – and indeed will continue to consider those who accept testimony of dancing fairies to be excessively credulous whether those believers happen to hold fairy-istic presuppositions or not.
I suspect at least part of what has gone wrong here is that, when it comes to assessing evidence for the Jesus miracles and other supernatural events, we do so having now acquired a great deal of evidence about the unreliability of testimony supposedly supporting such claims. We know – or at least ought to know by now – that such testimony is very often very unreliable (sightings of ghosts, fairies, and of course, even religious experiences and miracles, are constantly being debunked, exposed as fraudulent, etc.). But then, armed with this further knowledge about the general unreliability of this kind of testimony, even if we do happen to approach such testimony with theistic or fairy-istic presuppositions, surely we should still raise the evidential bar much higher for eye-witness reports of religious miracles or fairies than we do for more mundane claims.
{{ENDOTE It may be said that there is a relevant disanalogy between the application of the Presuppositions Move with respect to religious miracles and to fairies. We have now acquired good empirical evidence that there’s no such thing as fairies. Starting off an assessment of the empirical evidence with the presupposition that fairies exist is one thing. Retaining that presupposition in the teeth of empirical evidence to the contrary is quite another. The Presuppositions Move surely requires that we have come across no body of empirical evidence throwing into serious doubt the existence of what we have been presupposing exists. This blocks the application of the Presuppositions Move in defence of accepting testimony regarding fairies. However, while there’s good empirical evidence that there’s no such thing as fairies, there’s no such evidence against the existence of God. Thus the Move can still be made with respect to testimony of religious miracles.
An obvious difficulty with the above suggestion is the evidential problem of evil (for an assessment, see my “The Evil God Hypothesis” in Religious Studies 46 (2010), 353-373). Prima facie there is good empirical evidence that there is no God. In which case, the above suggestion looks to be no less an obstacle to the use of the Presuppositions Move with respect to religious miracles. So, prior to employing the Move, those theists insisting on the above disanalogy will need to come up with an adequate solution to the evidential problem of evil (a solution not dependent on the truth of religious miracle claims) – not an easy task.
END OF ENDNOTE]]
So, my suggestion is that P1 is, prima facie, a fairly plausible principle – a principle that is applicable to the testimony concerning the miracles of Jesus. Note that P1 at least allows for the possibility that we might reasonably suppose a miracle has happened. Of course, I do not claim to have provided anything like proof of P1. But it does appear fairly accurately to reflect one of the ways in which we assess evidence. We do, rightly, set the evidential bar much higher for extraordinary claims than we do for more mundane claims.
The Ted and Sarah case
Suppose I have two close friends, Ted and Sarah, whom I know to be generally sane and trustworthy individuals. Suppose that Ted and Sarah now tell me that someone called Bert paid them an unexpected visit in their home last night, and stayed a couple of hours drinking tea with them. They recount various details, such as topics of conversation, what Bert was wearing, and so on. Other things being equal, it is fairly reasonable for me to believe, solely on the basis of their testimony, that such a visit occurred.
But now suppose Ted and Sarah also tell me that shortly before leaving, Bert flew around their sitting room by flapping his arms, died, came back to life again, and finished by temporarily transforming their sofa into a donkey. Ted and Sarah appear to say these things in all sincerity. In fact, they seem genuinely disturbed by what they believe they witnessed. They continue to make these claims about Bert even after several weeks of cross-examination by me.
Am I justified in believing that Ted and Sarah witnessed miracles? Surely not. The fact that Ted and Sarah claim these things happened is not nearly good enough evidence. Their testimony presents me with some evidence that miracles were performed in their living room; but, given the extraordinary nature of their claims, I am not yet justified in believing them.
Notice, incidentally, that even if I am unable to construct a plausible explanation for why these otherwise highly trustworthy individuals would make such extraordinary claims – it’s implausible, for example, that Ted and Sarah are deliberate hoaxers (for this does not fit at all with what I otherwise know about them), or are the unwitting victims of an elaborate hoax (why would someone go to such extraordinary lengths to pull this trick?) – that would still not lend their testimony much additional credibility. Ceteris paribus, when dealing with such extraordinary reports – whether they be about alien abductions or supernatural visitations – the fact that it remains blankly mysterious why such reports would be made if they were not true does not provide us with very much additional reason to suppose that they are true.
Consideration of the Ted and Sarah case suggests something like the following moral:
P1 Where a claim’s justification derives solely from evidence, extraordinary claims (e.g. concerning supernatural miracles) require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there is good reason to be sceptical about those claims.
The phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is associated particularly with the scientist Carl Sagan . By “extraordinary evidence” Sagan means, of course, extraordinarily good evidence – evidence much stronger than that required to justify rather more mundane claims. The phrase “extraordinary claims” is admittedly somewhat vague. A claim need not involve a supernatural element to qualify as “extraordinary” in the sense intended here (the claims that I built a time machine over the weekend, or was abducted by aliens, involve no supernatural element, but would also count as “extraordinary”). It suffices, for our purposes, to say that whatever “extraordinary” means here, the claim that a supernatural miracle has occurred qualifies.
Some theists (though of course by no means all) have challenged the application of Sagan’s principle to religious miracles, maintaining that which claims qualify as “extraordinary” depends on our presuppositions. Suppose we begin to examine the historical evidence having presupposed that there is no, or is unlikely to be a, God. Then of course Jesus’ miracles will strike us as highly unlikely events requiring exceptionally good evidence before we might reasonably suppose them to have occurred. But what if we approach the Jesus miracles from the point of view of theism? Then that such miraculous events should be a part of history is not, one might argue, particularly surprising. But then we are not justified in raising the evidential bar with respect to such claims. So theists may, after all, be justified in accepting such events occurred solely on the basis of a limited amount of testimony, just as they would be the occurrence of other unusual, but non-supernatural, events. The application of Sagan’s principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” to the Jesus miracles simply presupposes, prior to any examination of the evidence, that theism is not, or is unlikely to be, true. We might call this response to Sagan’s principle the Presuppositions Move.
That there is something awry with the Presuppositions Move, at least as it stands, is strongly suggested by the fact that it appears to license those of us who believe in Big Foot, psychic powers, the activities of fairies, etc. to adopt the same strategy – e.g. we may insist that we can quite reasonable accept, solely on the basis of Mary and John’s testimony, that fairies danced at the bottom of their garden last night, just so long as we presuppose, prior to any examination of the evidence, that fairies exist. Those making the Presuppositions Move with respect to religious miracles may be prepared to accept this consequence, but I suspect the majority of impartial observers will find it a lot to swallow – and indeed will continue to consider those who accept testimony of dancing fairies to be excessively credulous whether those believers happen to hold fairy-istic presuppositions or not.
I suspect at least part of what has gone wrong here is that, when it comes to assessing evidence for the Jesus miracles and other supernatural events, we do so having now acquired a great deal of evidence about the unreliability of testimony supposedly supporting such claims. We know – or at least ought to know by now – that such testimony is very often very unreliable (sightings of ghosts, fairies, and of course, even religious experiences and miracles, are constantly being debunked, exposed as fraudulent, etc.). But then, armed with this further knowledge about the general unreliability of this kind of testimony, even if we do happen to approach such testimony with theistic or fairy-istic presuppositions, surely we should still raise the evidential bar much higher for eye-witness reports of religious miracles or fairies than we do for more mundane claims.
{{ENDOTE It may be said that there is a relevant disanalogy between the application of the Presuppositions Move with respect to religious miracles and to fairies. We have now acquired good empirical evidence that there’s no such thing as fairies. Starting off an assessment of the empirical evidence with the presupposition that fairies exist is one thing. Retaining that presupposition in the teeth of empirical evidence to the contrary is quite another. The Presuppositions Move surely requires that we have come across no body of empirical evidence throwing into serious doubt the existence of what we have been presupposing exists. This blocks the application of the Presuppositions Move in defence of accepting testimony regarding fairies. However, while there’s good empirical evidence that there’s no such thing as fairies, there’s no such evidence against the existence of God. Thus the Move can still be made with respect to testimony of religious miracles.
An obvious difficulty with the above suggestion is the evidential problem of evil (for an assessment, see my “The Evil God Hypothesis” in Religious Studies 46 (2010), 353-373). Prima facie there is good empirical evidence that there is no God. In which case, the above suggestion looks to be no less an obstacle to the use of the Presuppositions Move with respect to religious miracles. So, prior to employing the Move, those theists insisting on the above disanalogy will need to come up with an adequate solution to the evidential problem of evil (a solution not dependent on the truth of religious miracle claims) – not an easy task.
END OF ENDNOTE]]
So, my suggestion is that P1 is, prima facie, a fairly plausible principle – a principle that is applicable to the testimony concerning the miracles of Jesus. Note that P1 at least allows for the possibility that we might reasonably suppose a miracle has happened. Of course, I do not claim to have provided anything like proof of P1. But it does appear fairly accurately to reflect one of the ways in which we assess evidence. We do, rightly, set the evidential bar much higher for extraordinary claims than we do for more mundane claims.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
The Third Wave
This might be worth introducing int a few British classrooms...
Remembering the 3rd Wave by Leslie Weinfield
Peninsula, September 1991
Although the specter of fascist resurgence seems largely forgotten in the euphoria of German reunification, it may not be far beneath the peaceful veneer of that nation, or any other, for that matter. Even the most ostensibly free and open societies are not immune to fascism's lure - including places like Palo Alto.
What came to be known as the "Third Wave" began at Cubberly High School in Palo Alto as a game without any direct reference to Nazi Germany, says Ron Jones, who had just begun his first teaching job in the 1966-67 academic year. When a social studies student asked about the German public's responsibility for the rise of the Third Reich, Jones decided to try and simulate what happened in Germany by having his students "basically follow instructions" for a day.
But one day turned into five, and what happened by the end of the school week spawned several documentaries, studies and related social experiments illuminating a dark side of human nature - and a major weakness in public education.
Before students arrived for class on Monday, Jones vigorously cleaned his classroom and arranged the desks in unusually straight rows. He dimmed the lights and played Wagnerian music as students drifted in for class. Then Jones, a popular instructor who normally avoided even such regimentation as taking roll, told his students that he could give them the keys to power and success - "Strength Through Discipline."
"It was thoroughly out of character for Ron Jones to say "Let's help the class out with a little more discipline," recalls a former student Philip Neel, now a television producer in Los Angeles. But because Jones was an interesting teacher, the class went along.
Classmate Mark Hancock remembers Jones adding a political cast and a set of incentives soon thereafter. "It was something like, if you're a good party member and play the game well, you can get an A. If you have a revolution and fail, you get an F. For a successful revolution, you get an A," recounts Hancock, currently a regional development director for a Los Angeles property company.
Jones next commanded the class to assume a new seating posture to strengthen student concentration and will: feet flat on the floor, hands across the small of the back, spines straight. And he added speed drills, after which the entire group could move from loitering outside the room to silent, seated attention in less than 30 seconds.
"Even when we started with Strength Through Discipline, it was easy for me to see the benefits of the posture," remarks Steve Coniglio, who now helps run a Truckee retail store. "Even on that very first day, I could notice that I was breathing better. I was more attentive in class."
Jones closed the first day's session with a few rules. Students had to be sitting at attention before the second bell, had to stand up to ask or answer questions and had to do it in three words or less, and were required to preface each remark with "Mr. Jones."
"At the end of that day, I was grandly happy. I mean, it seemed to work and everyone seemed to get into it," Jones still marvels. Grades were based on participation, and no one accepted the study hall alternative that Jones offered prior to commencing the exercise that day. But neither did anyone make a connection to the German history lessons they'd just completed. "Most of us were headed toward college," says Hancock. "It wasn't Nazi German life that mattered, it was Palo Alto grades."
Jones says he assumed the class would return to its usual format the next day. "But when I came in, the class was all sitting..." His voice trails off as his body snaps to military attention.
Jones considered calling a halt, but then went to the blackboard and wrote "Strength Through Community" below the previous day's slogan, "Strength Through Discipline."
"I began to lecture on community - something bigger than oneself, something enjoyable. They really bought that argument," Jones recalls.
A powerful sense of belonging had sprung up among lowly sophomores at the bottom of the rung of the three-year school, and Jones admits he soon became a part of the exercise as well as its leader.
"It was really a mistake, a terrible thing to do. My curiosity pulled me in at first, and then I liked it. They learned fast, didn't ask questions. It was easier as a teacher."
As his Strength Through Community lecture ended, he created a class salute by bringing his right hand toward his right shoulder in an outwardly curled position, resembling a wave. Jones named it the Third Wave, and - despite its similarity to Third Reich - claims he borrowed the term from beach folklore, which holds that the last wave in every series of three is the largest.
Students acknowledging each other this way in the halls attracted the attention of upper classmen, who clamored to know the salute's significance, Coniglio says. Cubberley students began skipping their regular classes, asking to be part of the Third Wave. In three days Jones' class had expanded to 60 students.
After telling the enlarged class that "strength is fine, now you must act," Jones assigned everyone a task to be completed that day. Some were to memorize the names and addresses of everyone in the group; others were to make Third Wave banners, armbands and membership cards. And since that day's theme was "Strength Through Action," everyone was to proselytize.
By day's end Coniglio says banners were all over the school, including a 20 footer in the library. Members brought in some 200 converts from other classes to be "sworn in."
"It just swept through the school," recalls Jones, who is still teaching, now at the San Francisco Recreation Center for the Handicapped. "It was like walking on slippery rock...by the third or fourth day, there was an obvious explosion of emotion that I couldn't control."
Several boys were assigned to "protect" Jones as he walked the school's corridors, wearing Third Wave armbands to signify their responsibility.
"It was a black band. When I went home, it got my parents worried," says Steve Benson, now a Palo Alto mechanic. "They thought it was the equivalent of the SS." Although his mother called Jones to express her concern, the teacher reassured her it was merely a class exercise.
Everyone involved in the Third Wave received a membership card, three of which Jones randomly marked with an X. Those holding the marked cards were told to note who transgressed class rules, which now dictated such matters as what campus paths members could walk and with whom they could associate.
"There were three or four stoolies," Jones explains bluntly. "I wanted to see how this was being taken outside of class."
By the end of four days, approximately half the class had approached Jones with detailed information about the transgressions of others, ranging from improper salutes to coup plots against him.
"It was phenomenal. There was a whole underground of activity. People were assigning themselves as guards," Jones says. "I knew exactly what was going on in class because of this strange snitching that was going on."
There was betrayal among teens who had been close friends since childhood. A group of buddies could be sharing a cigarette in the bathroom, discussing a plan to "kidnap" Jones the next day and fulfill the exercise's requirement for a top grade, but "it wouldn't happen," say Coniglio. "Somebody - one of those two or three - would inform Ron Jones of the plot."
Continue reading here.
Remembering the 3rd Wave by Leslie Weinfield
Peninsula, September 1991
Although the specter of fascist resurgence seems largely forgotten in the euphoria of German reunification, it may not be far beneath the peaceful veneer of that nation, or any other, for that matter. Even the most ostensibly free and open societies are not immune to fascism's lure - including places like Palo Alto.
What came to be known as the "Third Wave" began at Cubberly High School in Palo Alto as a game without any direct reference to Nazi Germany, says Ron Jones, who had just begun his first teaching job in the 1966-67 academic year. When a social studies student asked about the German public's responsibility for the rise of the Third Reich, Jones decided to try and simulate what happened in Germany by having his students "basically follow instructions" for a day.
But one day turned into five, and what happened by the end of the school week spawned several documentaries, studies and related social experiments illuminating a dark side of human nature - and a major weakness in public education.
Before students arrived for class on Monday, Jones vigorously cleaned his classroom and arranged the desks in unusually straight rows. He dimmed the lights and played Wagnerian music as students drifted in for class. Then Jones, a popular instructor who normally avoided even such regimentation as taking roll, told his students that he could give them the keys to power and success - "Strength Through Discipline."
"It was thoroughly out of character for Ron Jones to say "Let's help the class out with a little more discipline," recalls a former student Philip Neel, now a television producer in Los Angeles. But because Jones was an interesting teacher, the class went along.
Classmate Mark Hancock remembers Jones adding a political cast and a set of incentives soon thereafter. "It was something like, if you're a good party member and play the game well, you can get an A. If you have a revolution and fail, you get an F. For a successful revolution, you get an A," recounts Hancock, currently a regional development director for a Los Angeles property company.
Jones next commanded the class to assume a new seating posture to strengthen student concentration and will: feet flat on the floor, hands across the small of the back, spines straight. And he added speed drills, after which the entire group could move from loitering outside the room to silent, seated attention in less than 30 seconds.
"Even when we started with Strength Through Discipline, it was easy for me to see the benefits of the posture," remarks Steve Coniglio, who now helps run a Truckee retail store. "Even on that very first day, I could notice that I was breathing better. I was more attentive in class."
Jones closed the first day's session with a few rules. Students had to be sitting at attention before the second bell, had to stand up to ask or answer questions and had to do it in three words or less, and were required to preface each remark with "Mr. Jones."
"At the end of that day, I was grandly happy. I mean, it seemed to work and everyone seemed to get into it," Jones still marvels. Grades were based on participation, and no one accepted the study hall alternative that Jones offered prior to commencing the exercise that day. But neither did anyone make a connection to the German history lessons they'd just completed. "Most of us were headed toward college," says Hancock. "It wasn't Nazi German life that mattered, it was Palo Alto grades."
Jones says he assumed the class would return to its usual format the next day. "But when I came in, the class was all sitting..." His voice trails off as his body snaps to military attention.
Jones considered calling a halt, but then went to the blackboard and wrote "Strength Through Community" below the previous day's slogan, "Strength Through Discipline."
"I began to lecture on community - something bigger than oneself, something enjoyable. They really bought that argument," Jones recalls.
A powerful sense of belonging had sprung up among lowly sophomores at the bottom of the rung of the three-year school, and Jones admits he soon became a part of the exercise as well as its leader.
"It was really a mistake, a terrible thing to do. My curiosity pulled me in at first, and then I liked it. They learned fast, didn't ask questions. It was easier as a teacher."
As his Strength Through Community lecture ended, he created a class salute by bringing his right hand toward his right shoulder in an outwardly curled position, resembling a wave. Jones named it the Third Wave, and - despite its similarity to Third Reich - claims he borrowed the term from beach folklore, which holds that the last wave in every series of three is the largest.
Students acknowledging each other this way in the halls attracted the attention of upper classmen, who clamored to know the salute's significance, Coniglio says. Cubberley students began skipping their regular classes, asking to be part of the Third Wave. In three days Jones' class had expanded to 60 students.
After telling the enlarged class that "strength is fine, now you must act," Jones assigned everyone a task to be completed that day. Some were to memorize the names and addresses of everyone in the group; others were to make Third Wave banners, armbands and membership cards. And since that day's theme was "Strength Through Action," everyone was to proselytize.
By day's end Coniglio says banners were all over the school, including a 20 footer in the library. Members brought in some 200 converts from other classes to be "sworn in."
"It just swept through the school," recalls Jones, who is still teaching, now at the San Francisco Recreation Center for the Handicapped. "It was like walking on slippery rock...by the third or fourth day, there was an obvious explosion of emotion that I couldn't control."
Several boys were assigned to "protect" Jones as he walked the school's corridors, wearing Third Wave armbands to signify their responsibility.
"It was a black band. When I went home, it got my parents worried," says Steve Benson, now a Palo Alto mechanic. "They thought it was the equivalent of the SS." Although his mother called Jones to express her concern, the teacher reassured her it was merely a class exercise.
Everyone involved in the Third Wave received a membership card, three of which Jones randomly marked with an X. Those holding the marked cards were told to note who transgressed class rules, which now dictated such matters as what campus paths members could walk and with whom they could associate.
"There were three or four stoolies," Jones explains bluntly. "I wanted to see how this was being taken outside of class."
By the end of four days, approximately half the class had approached Jones with detailed information about the transgressions of others, ranging from improper salutes to coup plots against him.
"It was phenomenal. There was a whole underground of activity. People were assigning themselves as guards," Jones says. "I knew exactly what was going on in class because of this strange snitching that was going on."
There was betrayal among teens who had been close friends since childhood. A group of buddies could be sharing a cigarette in the bathroom, discussing a plan to "kidnap" Jones the next day and fulfill the exercise's requirement for a top grade, but "it wouldn't happen," say Coniglio. "Somebody - one of those two or three - would inform Ron Jones of the plot."
Continue reading here.
My Children's Event, Edinburgh Lit. Festival 29th August
My event is 1pm 29th August, Edinburgh Festival. Tickets here.
Really Big Questions with Stephen Law
VENUE : Charlotte Square Gardens
FESTIVAL: Edinburgh International Book Festival
CATEGORY: Children
£4.00
Really Big Questions with Stephen Law
VENUE : Charlotte Square Gardens
FESTIVAL: Edinburgh International Book Festival
CATEGORY: Children
£4.00
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The Tapescrew Letters - letter one
For comments, please. Not sure if it works?
Preface
I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands. One or two details have been changed to save reputations and immunize myself against the inevitable legal action that this sort of revelation provokes. But the letters are substantially unrevised and intact.
Bear in mind that the author, whoever she is, is a liar. She can’t be trusted to tell the truth, even to her nephew. I leave you to figure what is true, and what is not.
Be warned – this correspondence makes pretty depressing and sickening reading. Still, it does usefully reveal just how manipulative and scheming some people are. Thank goodness such deliberate deceivers are very few and far between.
Stephen Law
Oxford
19th August 2010
LETTER ONE
The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
My Dear Woodworm
How pleased I was to hear of your graduation from our training centre – and with a distinction too. Great things are expected of you, as I’m sure you’ve made aware. I see you have been assigned to one of our newest recruitment centres - in Oxford. That is also excellent news. There’s plenty of fodder there. But of course you now need to prove yourself. And that is where I come in. As you know, The Leader likes Juniors to be mentored by a Senior they already know quite well. As I am your aunt, I have been asked to watch over you and provide assistance wherever I can.
I can’t be there in person I’m afraid. We are having something of a crisis here at Bodgers – one of our Juniors was caught indulging in some questionable activity with a couple of young recruits, and we’re having a hard time keeping a lid on it. So it’s all hands to the pump at Bodgers, at least for the next few months. ButI can correspond with you, and advise wherever I can. Just send me regular progress reports, if you will.
After your intensive training, you will be intimately acquainted with both our aims and methods. And you now possess your own copy of Our Leader’s Handbook (which, I need hardly add, you must guard with your life – it must never fall into the hands of a recruit). We have spent thousands of pounds and a whole year of our valuable time honing your skills, so you won’t be surprised to hear we now expect results.
Our aim is to ensnare human minds, to make them true and faithful servants of our teaching. Let me focus your attention on our Leader’s opening remarks in The Handbook:
Our aim must be to instill in our victim such patterns of thought that his mind becomes wholly ours – so that it becomes an impregnable fortress to anyone else who might try to prise their way in. But we must do this while all the time maintaining the illusion that these ways of thinking are perfectly ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’.
Creating that illusion, Woodworm, is the clincher, the real trick. We must forge minds that are fortresses to those outside, and prisons to the subject inside, minds in which we have succeeded in entrenching such effective mental road blocks and self-perpetuating habits of thought that their owners will never be able to think their way free again. For then they will be our willing servants – our trusty tools. But our victims must never suspect. The faithful must fall for the illusion that they are the ones whose minds have been set free, and that it is everyone else who is mentally imprisoned!
To become the jailer of another’s mind. What a prospect! An impossible task? By no means. Difficult, yes. But armed with your training, the Handbook, and a firm determination to succeed, let me assure that you will succeed! I have converted literally hundreds of doobs over the last thirty years, and I am confident that you will do even better.
Which brings me to our particular movement’s Achilles’ heel, and my sternest word of warning. As I say, the key to your success lies in maintaining an illusion – your victims must not suspect, not even for a second, that you are deliberately deceiving and manipulating them, that you intend to become their mind’s jailer. We have one very obvious disadvantage compared to the promoters of most other self-sealing bubbles of belief. We know that we are deceivers. We know exactly what we are doing as we pull our victims’ strings. Your local vicar may use many of the same techniques as you. But he himself really believes in the doctrines he is promoting. He is quite convinced that he is doing nothing more than opening people’s eyes to the truth – setting them free. Which means he does not have to fake anything. His voice will convey genuine warmth and sincerity. His eyes will glisten with sincere, misty-eyed enthusiasm for the doctrines he promotes. The same is true of the political zealot peddling her leaflets and newspapers on a street corner. She too may be use the same techniques to ensnare minds. But she probably believes in the truth of the political doctrines she is peddling. Which means she doesn’t have to pretend.
We, on the other hand, know that the doctrines we promote are false – are merely an ingenious fiction concocted by our dear and ingenious Leader. So we must learn to fake that same brand of misty-eyed enthusiasm. Take it form me – it’s a hard to illusion to sustain for any length of time.
Knowing you as I do, I think this is what you will find most difficult, the challenge you will have to work hardest to overcome. As that unfortunate incident involving your father’s car made clear, you are not a good liar. And you are prone to over-intellectualize. That might proved an advantage in the academic world of our college, but out here in the real world, it generates many potential pitfalls.
True, because we know we are deceivers, we also have a great advantage over our sincere counterparts in other cults. We have studied the techniques necessary to enslave minds coldly and dispassionately – even scientifically – and have thus became for more knowledgeable and skilful than our competitors in their application. But do not underestimate the advantage our competitors have over us. An advantage which will become quickly apparent to you as you embark on your first project. The truth is, it is only later that the intellectual traps and snares come into play. You will be eager to apply the bogus arguments, seductive fallacies, and other intellectual sleights-of-hand that you have mastered so well. But patience, patience! Take that route too quickly, and your victim will smell a rat.
The first step in ensnaring any mind is to focus on your victim’s emotions. Emotion is the unlocked door on which we need only gently push to gain initial entry to their minds. They must be ever-so-gently seduced into feeling comfortable with you, liking you, admiring you. You must appear to exude warmth and compassion. You must seem to possess both depth and sincerity. You must be able to touch their sleeve, look into their eyes, and make that special connection. If they suspect, even for a second, that you are a fake, the game is up. Their critical defences will come crashing down and your job will be one hundred times as hard. Fake sincerity - that’s the thing. If only we could bottle it.
Here’s my suggestion. Focus on one victim to begin with. That’s a far more effective way of sharpening your technique. But how to find your first recruit? Join some clubs – billiards, chess, knitting, model-making: it doesn’t matter what, just so long as there’s plenty of opportunity for one-to-one or small group chat. And strike up conversations with people in café’s and bars. Keep returning to the same places, so that you become a familiar presence. Slowly, you will build up a circle of acquaintances. Appear confident and positive. Be fun to be around. And remember – no mumbling into your coffee. Be direct. Above all - make eye contact. Then, without appearing to pry, ask them about themselves. People love talking about themselves, so it won’t be difficult. Slowly build up a picture of their emotional life, of what they are worried or concerned about, what their hopes are, what they most care about. If you pretend to open up to them, you’ll find that they open up even more. The more they come to trust you, and the more they will reveal, and the more vulnerable to your wiles they will become.
Good hunting!
Your affectionate Aunt
Tapescrew
Preface
I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands. One or two details have been changed to save reputations and immunize myself against the inevitable legal action that this sort of revelation provokes. But the letters are substantially unrevised and intact.
Bear in mind that the author, whoever she is, is a liar. She can’t be trusted to tell the truth, even to her nephew. I leave you to figure what is true, and what is not.
Be warned – this correspondence makes pretty depressing and sickening reading. Still, it does usefully reveal just how manipulative and scheming some people are. Thank goodness such deliberate deceivers are very few and far between.
Stephen Law
Oxford
19th August 2010
LETTER ONE
The Bodgers Centre
Newcastle
My Dear Woodworm
How pleased I was to hear of your graduation from our training centre – and with a distinction too. Great things are expected of you, as I’m sure you’ve made aware. I see you have been assigned to one of our newest recruitment centres - in Oxford. That is also excellent news. There’s plenty of fodder there. But of course you now need to prove yourself. And that is where I come in. As you know, The Leader likes Juniors to be mentored by a Senior they already know quite well. As I am your aunt, I have been asked to watch over you and provide assistance wherever I can.
I can’t be there in person I’m afraid. We are having something of a crisis here at Bodgers – one of our Juniors was caught indulging in some questionable activity with a couple of young recruits, and we’re having a hard time keeping a lid on it. So it’s all hands to the pump at Bodgers, at least for the next few months. ButI can correspond with you, and advise wherever I can. Just send me regular progress reports, if you will.
After your intensive training, you will be intimately acquainted with both our aims and methods. And you now possess your own copy of Our Leader’s Handbook (which, I need hardly add, you must guard with your life – it must never fall into the hands of a recruit). We have spent thousands of pounds and a whole year of our valuable time honing your skills, so you won’t be surprised to hear we now expect results.
Our aim is to ensnare human minds, to make them true and faithful servants of our teaching. Let me focus your attention on our Leader’s opening remarks in The Handbook:
Our aim must be to instill in our victim such patterns of thought that his mind becomes wholly ours – so that it becomes an impregnable fortress to anyone else who might try to prise their way in. But we must do this while all the time maintaining the illusion that these ways of thinking are perfectly ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’.
Creating that illusion, Woodworm, is the clincher, the real trick. We must forge minds that are fortresses to those outside, and prisons to the subject inside, minds in which we have succeeded in entrenching such effective mental road blocks and self-perpetuating habits of thought that their owners will never be able to think their way free again. For then they will be our willing servants – our trusty tools. But our victims must never suspect. The faithful must fall for the illusion that they are the ones whose minds have been set free, and that it is everyone else who is mentally imprisoned!
To become the jailer of another’s mind. What a prospect! An impossible task? By no means. Difficult, yes. But armed with your training, the Handbook, and a firm determination to succeed, let me assure that you will succeed! I have converted literally hundreds of doobs over the last thirty years, and I am confident that you will do even better.
Which brings me to our particular movement’s Achilles’ heel, and my sternest word of warning. As I say, the key to your success lies in maintaining an illusion – your victims must not suspect, not even for a second, that you are deliberately deceiving and manipulating them, that you intend to become their mind’s jailer. We have one very obvious disadvantage compared to the promoters of most other self-sealing bubbles of belief. We know that we are deceivers. We know exactly what we are doing as we pull our victims’ strings. Your local vicar may use many of the same techniques as you. But he himself really believes in the doctrines he is promoting. He is quite convinced that he is doing nothing more than opening people’s eyes to the truth – setting them free. Which means he does not have to fake anything. His voice will convey genuine warmth and sincerity. His eyes will glisten with sincere, misty-eyed enthusiasm for the doctrines he promotes. The same is true of the political zealot peddling her leaflets and newspapers on a street corner. She too may be use the same techniques to ensnare minds. But she probably believes in the truth of the political doctrines she is peddling. Which means she doesn’t have to pretend.
We, on the other hand, know that the doctrines we promote are false – are merely an ingenious fiction concocted by our dear and ingenious Leader. So we must learn to fake that same brand of misty-eyed enthusiasm. Take it form me – it’s a hard to illusion to sustain for any length of time.
Knowing you as I do, I think this is what you will find most difficult, the challenge you will have to work hardest to overcome. As that unfortunate incident involving your father’s car made clear, you are not a good liar. And you are prone to over-intellectualize. That might proved an advantage in the academic world of our college, but out here in the real world, it generates many potential pitfalls.
True, because we know we are deceivers, we also have a great advantage over our sincere counterparts in other cults. We have studied the techniques necessary to enslave minds coldly and dispassionately – even scientifically – and have thus became for more knowledgeable and skilful than our competitors in their application. But do not underestimate the advantage our competitors have over us. An advantage which will become quickly apparent to you as you embark on your first project. The truth is, it is only later that the intellectual traps and snares come into play. You will be eager to apply the bogus arguments, seductive fallacies, and other intellectual sleights-of-hand that you have mastered so well. But patience, patience! Take that route too quickly, and your victim will smell a rat.
The first step in ensnaring any mind is to focus on your victim’s emotions. Emotion is the unlocked door on which we need only gently push to gain initial entry to their minds. They must be ever-so-gently seduced into feeling comfortable with you, liking you, admiring you. You must appear to exude warmth and compassion. You must seem to possess both depth and sincerity. You must be able to touch their sleeve, look into their eyes, and make that special connection. If they suspect, even for a second, that you are a fake, the game is up. Their critical defences will come crashing down and your job will be one hundred times as hard. Fake sincerity - that’s the thing. If only we could bottle it.
Here’s my suggestion. Focus on one victim to begin with. That’s a far more effective way of sharpening your technique. But how to find your first recruit? Join some clubs – billiards, chess, knitting, model-making: it doesn’t matter what, just so long as there’s plenty of opportunity for one-to-one or small group chat. And strike up conversations with people in café’s and bars. Keep returning to the same places, so that you become a familiar presence. Slowly, you will build up a circle of acquaintances. Appear confident and positive. Be fun to be around. And remember – no mumbling into your coffee. Be direct. Above all - make eye contact. Then, without appearing to pry, ask them about themselves. People love talking about themselves, so it won’t be difficult. Slowly build up a picture of their emotional life, of what they are worried or concerned about, what their hopes are, what they most care about. If you pretend to open up to them, you’ll find that they open up even more. The more they come to trust you, and the more they will reveal, and the more vulnerable to your wiles they will become.
Good hunting!
Your affectionate Aunt
Tapescrew
Monday, August 16, 2010
Interview.
Interview with me available here if you are interested - at common sense atheism. It's about 40 mins long.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Plantinga on evolution and naturalism
I just came across pharyngula's criticism of Plantinga's short, sweet version of his argument against naturalism. It is here if you are interested.
Plantinga still runs the following type of argument that false beliefs are just as adapative as true beliefs, and so evolution won't particularly favour true-belief-producing mechanisms:
Consider a frog sitting on a lily pad. A fly passes by; the frog flicks out its tongue to capture it. Perhaps the neurophysiology that causes it to do so, also causes beliefs. As far as survival and reproduction is concerned, it won't matter at all what these beliefs are: if that adaptive neurophysiology causes true belief (e.g., those little black things are good to eat), fine. But if it causes false belief (e.g., if I catch the right one, I'll turn into a prince), that's fine too.
I have a paper coming out shortly in Religious Studies that demolishes this argument. The paper is here if you are interested. I'll send as an attachment a more reader friendly version on email request.
Plantinga still runs the following type of argument that false beliefs are just as adapative as true beliefs, and so evolution won't particularly favour true-belief-producing mechanisms:
Consider a frog sitting on a lily pad. A fly passes by; the frog flicks out its tongue to capture it. Perhaps the neurophysiology that causes it to do so, also causes beliefs. As far as survival and reproduction is concerned, it won't matter at all what these beliefs are: if that adaptive neurophysiology causes true belief (e.g., those little black things are good to eat), fine. But if it causes false belief (e.g., if I catch the right one, I'll turn into a prince), that's fine too.
I have a paper coming out shortly in Religious Studies that demolishes this argument. The paper is here if you are interested. I'll send as an attachment a more reader friendly version on email request.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Drumming
Time wasting this afternoon trying different tunings on snare drum - medium/high, then high...
Chris Hallquist's book
I have been reading Chris Hallquist's UFOs, Ghosts and a Rising God, and I must say that, while I initially approached it with caution (I guess because the title makes it sound like it belongs on the shelves of a New Age bookstore), it is very well researched and written. The arguments are very strong. And entertaining, I should add. It's a discussion of the testimony-based evidence for the resurrection in light of what we know about other cults, testimony made about ghosts, alien abduction and so on.
No doubt many Biblical scholars would consider a close look at claims about ghosts and UFOs to be beneath them; but, actually, these are precisely the sort of claims they need to know more about if they are to have a genuinely balanced view of the historical evidence for the resurrection.
No doubt many Biblical scholars would consider a close look at claims about ghosts and UFOs to be beneath them; but, actually, these are precisely the sort of claims they need to know more about if they are to have a genuinely balanced view of the historical evidence for the resurrection.
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