Hey people. Just a quick post.

I stumbled on this post today. I left a response which was left to moderation for approval. I suspected it would be deleted, so I copied it to my computer just in case. Disappointingly, I was right.

I could let it slide – but it’s an example of a particularly ghoulish tendency I’ve noticed amongst a certain kind of religious believer. They’ll take some tragedy, and then twist that tragedy into something they can use to tar those they disagree with. It’s feeding on the suffering of others. It’s vulturish, disgusting, and – in this particular case – very unchristian.

For all my dissagreements with Christians and other theists, I can at least take on board that the vast majority are moderate, average human beings. Sure, we dissagree on a few things, and I have a beef with certain aspects of those disagreements. But I can happily co-exist with most believers.

But there are some people who call themselves a Christian that must make other Christians cringe with embarrassment. The Wintery Knight post above – and this is not the first time I’ve had a comment deleted by this individual – is just such a cringe-worthy example. I don’t feel comfortable letting it slide. I need to show the reasonable believers out there exactly why belief can sometimes get under my skin. Sometimes we atheists froth at the mouth, it’s true. But sometimes, it’s for good reason.

Here is Wintery Knight’s post, just in case he (I presume it’s a he) deletes or edits it later.

Excerpt:

A Christian woman accused of distributing the Bible, a book banned in communist North Korea, was publicly executed last month for the crime, South Korean activists said Friday.

The 33-year-old mother of three, Ri Hyon Ok, also was accused of spying for South Korea and the United States, and of organizing dissidents, a rights group said in Seoul, citing documents obtained from the North.

The Investigative Commission on Crime Against Humanity report included a copy of Ri’s government-issued photo ID and said her husband, children and parents were sent to a political prison the day after her June 16 execution.

A woman’s human rights are violated by a left-wing communist dictator. Where is the outcry from the secular left? Where is the Hollywood elite? Where is the ACLU? Is she not the right kind of victim?

Is there a difference between the atheist Kim Jong Il and other atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens? Is the murder of this woman wrong, on atheism? Why is it wrong? Why is it rational to not murder innocent people, on atheism?

Below is my comment, now deleted.

Is there a difference between the atheist Kim Jong Il and other atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens?

I challenge you thus: Find a single reference from something that Harris, Dawkins, or Hitchens actually wrote that suggests that any of them would be anything but dismayed at the plight of the woman so executed.

Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens are free thinkers. They are committed to freedom of speech and freedom of thought – particularly Hitchens. The death penalty for practicing religion is against everything they stand for.

You are correct that an execution over religious opinion and practice is deplorable. Your attempt to twist this unfortunate and tragic event so you can use it to tar the names of free-thinkers over their opinions, with which you disagree, is as ghoulish as it is hypocritical and disgusting.

I just want to re-iterate that I’m not holding this up as an example of all believers. Happily, many of my friends are religious believers, and I know that they would never be so base as to stoop to Wintery Knight’s tactics of bearing false witness against atheists in order to attempt a ghoulish act of emotional blackmail.

I’m not going to let this stand unchallenged. I call you out, Wintery Knight. You’ve borne false witness against atheists – that’s supposed to be a sin to you. My challenge stands. Find me a single reference relating to something that Harris, Dawkins, or Hitchens actually wrote or said that supports your conception that any of them would be anything but aghast at the plight of the woman who was so executed.

I am confident you’ll be unable to produce one. Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens are freethinkers – all three of them are ardent supporters of free speech. As are Daniel Dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Victor Stegner, Stephen Pinker, and many thousands and perhaps millions of other atheists who are not so well known as these.

You have borne false witness against we atheists, Wintery Knight. You’ve lied about us. You owe us – and God – an apology.

I invite you to set the record straight.

Or: Deconstruction via Inversion of Rhetorical Symmetries

Hey guys,

This is a post I’ve been meaning to make for ages now – work’s been a major pain recently, so I’ve been spending what little free time I have relaxing with the mates. That said, I’m feeling sick today – I think I’m contagious – so I’ve opted to stay in this Friday night. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to flick this up while I have some spare time to burn.

I’m demonstrating a technique for deconstructing an argument to get at the meat. The vast majority of arguments that we come across, in the paper, online, with friends and family, politicians, and even professional debaters contain vast portions of text that are superficially persuasive but don’t actually carry any substance. Because of this, if you wish to perform a critical reading of the text to work out exactly what’s going on it can be hard to work out what the core of the argument actually is.

If this is the case, its useful to first deconstruct the argument to try and weed out the hollow phrases and find the actual hard framework on which the flesh of the argument rests.

Note: This isn’t to say that hollow phrases are always a bad thing – they’re just a bad thing for the purpose of a critical reading, but in a persuasive or strategic sense they can be very useful.

This is a technique of deconstruction that I stumbled on – it was inspired by Gorgias if you’re curious. I’m not sure if this method of deconstruction already exists – I’m an armchair rhetor and largely self-taught, so I’m actually pretty ignorant of what’s already out there.

Disclaimer aside, here’s a bit of theory. There is a certain class of speech that conveys information. There is another class of speech that sounds like it conveys information, but doesn’t. The first class is the framework of the argument, and the second one is an important element of persuasion – the flesh that rests on the hard skeleton. Deciding which is which can be tricky.

Consider the following two statements:

1) Loving your children more than God is sinful.
2) Loving your children more than God is noble.

I apologize for jumping straight on the God-button, but this is actually a very apt example of an interesting phenomenon in argument. Often when we assign meaning to a measurement, we could also have plausibly assigned the contrary meaning very easily. The two statements above are perfectly symmetrical in that, on their own, they are both opposite in meaining as well as being equally plausible. As far as I can tell, Gorgias liked to point out this feature of argument for kicks.

So reading a few snatches of text from Gorgias where he pulled this kind of trick got me to thinking… An interesting method for deconstructing an argument could be to try and mirror any given sentence (or paragraph) and see if I could make a symmetrical argument to the original. When I started doing this, I found I couldn’t do this with every argument. Perhaps it can’t actually be done all the time – or maybe I’m just not as skilled in this art as Gorgias was. Either way, there is usually some parts of any given argument that I can invert, and other parts that I cannot.

Looked at in this light, the parts that cannot be inverted become very interesting – they are the points around which the argument in question is formed, like a pearl around a fleck of grit. Often they won’t even be the pieces that the author thinks their argument rests on – usually they highlight some basic and implied assumption that hasn’t been explicitly stated in the argument itself. They become the entry points to the argument in question. They’re the points of interest if you’re doing a rhetorical reading, and the points that need to be attacked if you are constructing a rebuttal.

The text below is my first attempt at doing this in full. I did it some time ago on a different blog of mine, so it’s a year old now. It was a brilliant learning exercise. My idea kind-of worked and kind-of didn’t. I had to shuffle some sections around a little bit, and take a bit of license with some of the words. But on the whole, I think I came up with an interesting result when I stumbled on the bits that I just couldn’t invert.

The intent here is for you to play the video and, as you listen to JesusFreak’s speech you should read the text I inverted from that speech at the same time as you hear him speaking. A few pieces are a little confusing where I had to shuffle the sentence structures around a bit to get them to work, so you may need to pause and rewind a few times. But the thing I found really interesting was stumbling on the parts that I just couldn’t fit in. I had to cut them out to make the inversion work. The clippings are referenced in the text and assembled as a footer.

I think that’s enough theory for now. If you’re still interested, click the play button and follow the text through. Keep in mind that what I’ve written below isn’t a rebuttal, it’s a deconstruction. If I were setting out to rebut this video, I would do this kind of deconstruction on the side before writing up my rebuttal so as to get a feel for JesusFreak’s main points (the clippings). These points would then be my main areas of attack when constructing the rebuttal itself.

So once again – it’s a little clumsy as its my first go, so please be generous in your reading!

Original Message

Deconstruction

Hey YouTube, I want to talk to you about atheist morality.

Now, a lot of people say athiests can’t be moral. I argue that: Moral by who’s standards? I say athiests can be moral.

You see, I believe that human beings derive our morality from multiple sources. One being family, the second being society, the third being personal experience. [cut] Well, I believe that the morality that human beings subscribe to usually concerning family, society and personal experience are actually quite flexible.

If you study the term ‘moral relativisim’ you’ll see that society can often dictate what is or isn’t moral. So there is a flex there, within that morality. However, within Christianity they have direct teaching as to what is moral and that morality never flexes, it’s very rigid. They fail to understand that our own human nature supercedes morality. So I do believe athiests can be moral within any context they’re presented with. [cut]

That’s why I use the term Moral Anarchy. Anarchy – we all know the defnition of – basically it’s an opposition to a governing body. And I believe that when we rebel against our Heavenly Father, and argue that our morality supercedes even that of God’s morality, or our morality is equivalent to God’s morality, that is tantamount to Moral Anarchisim.

You see, this book trys to tell us what is right and what is wrong. But do the same laws and the same rules that applied to us two thousand years ago still apply to us today?

But if you were to look at the secular moral arguments, we would see that morality has flexed, and has changed, and has evolved. What was taboo a hundred years ago is now more socially acceptable. So we can see that whenever God Almighty dictates what is morality it remains consistent. But when humans dictate what is morality there is no consistency, and that is true morality.

It’s very popular nowadays for people to say, “Well, you’re not Christian! You don’t deserve heaven!” even though they’re talking to someone who doesn’t believe in God. And they act as though their morality is equal to that of their audience. Well if we look at the prologue to Thus Spake Zarathustra, Section 3, Line 9:

I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not.

You see, the law only claims that it helps us to understand how far we are from God. [cut]

Now I would like to speak on Atheism being the greatest threat to humanity. I would offer you this: Some would say, “Well, JesusFreak, what about famine, war, terrorism; aren’t those greater threats to humanity?” From a physical point of view, yes, I would concede that war has probably taken more physical life than atheism ever has.

But I’m not speaking of the threat to humanity from just a mere physical point of view. I’m speaking of an internal, spiritual point of view.

You see, we’re all going to die one way or the other. If you die from famine, that doesn’t mean you’re going to hell. If you die from war or from terrorisim, once again, you’re not condemned to hell because of those reasons.

But the only way you can believe in and fear hell is from faith in a religion.

Atheism promotes this lack of faith in religion, so it actually encourages the spiritual, ever-changing growth of untold number of people.

So out of the gate we see that I believe that atheism promotes Moral Anarchisim. And that is why I believe that atheism is the greatest boon to humanity. Now note I’m not saying athiests are the greatest boon, because not all atheists are. There are a lot of petty, arrogant athiests that simply don’t believe in doing the right thing. That’s fine! Every athiest must deal with the consequences of their actions at some point in their life. We’re all born atheists, and only if we develop a relationship with an organized religion do we become religious.

So I’m not saying that athiests are the threat, but the teachings of religion. I equate religion with eternal death. It’s kind of like dying of starvation when you have food around you and you just refuse to eat.

The world is all around you, the answers are there.

Ask yourself, think for yourself, read books of philosophy, ask people, send me messages, talk to a philosopher, go to a University.

The answers are there, all you have to do is look for them. And they’re pretty plain to see, it’s pretty easy to find these answers.

So, I just would just like to extend that invitation. If you have any questions, if you would like to investigate the joys of a life without religion, let me know and I would love to show you how to do so.

I hope your thought is provoked by this message, and I hope that each and every one of you learns to become more than you ever thought possible. I’m certain you will.

Cutting Floor

• … but there is a fourth source of morality that humans look to, and that is: God, through theism… [back]
• … that we have a litmus test – that is, God – to judge what is moral or isn’t moral against… [back]
• … and Christ purifies us and atones for us and then we are just because of Jesus Christ… [back]

And there you have it.

This technique is imperfect, but it was definitely interesting to see how JesusFreak’s entire argument boiled down to these three points. The rest of his argument was essentially padding around these points. Particularly interesting was the feel of the thing when I swapped out JF’s Bible quotation for a Nietzsche reference. Quotes of this sort are kind of like cranes (the construction kind of crane, not the bird). You pick up a chunk from some other argument and then drop it into your own.

So my ‘inversion’ of JF’s bible reference was just to quote-mine something exactly opposite to the original. It felt like I was cheating when I did it, but the first time I played through the video as I read the deconstruction it really seemed to work – and it also made me realize that just dropping in a pithy quote from someone clever may not be the best way of advancing an argument.

A witty saying proves nothing.

- Voltaire

… Although if selected appropriately they can still be relevant and useful. ^_^

So that’s it for now – mull this one over for a while. I’ve got another post brewing in my mind that’s itching to get itself out. Y’see, I’ve been using this technique of deconstruction for almost a year now (I don’t write out the entire thing in full every time – I just scan through the argument looking for something that I can’t invert). And I’m starting to see a connection between this method of deconstruction and the need for evidence in argument. If used properly, hard evidence is a great symmetry breaker.

But that’s just a forshadowing. More on that topic later.

Another link to one of cdk007’s many excellent videos. This one is the sequel to the Abiogenesis video I linked to earlier in this blog.

The reason I went sniffing around in cdk007’s archives again was down to a post I read over at Apologia: Abiogenesis: The Atheist Creation Story.

Eric Kemp’s piece was far better written than Pastoral Musing’s latest piece. However, Pastoral Musing managed to do more with less. Despite his superior grasp of argument and prose, Eric managed to do less with more.

First and foremost, his blog is Aplogia: Standing in defense of the Christian Worldview. It seems odd to me that under the umbrella of that theme, Eric is choosing to attack abiogenesis. Simply put, abiogenesis and the Christian Worldview are entirely compatible. I think it would be really nice if abiogenesis disproved God. But unfortunately, it doesn’t. So that’s the first problem. His attack on abiogenesis is simply misguided – it was never a threat to the Christian Worldview in the first place.

Secondly, Eric’s very comprehensive and well-written post basically boiled down to a giant straw-man. The term ’straw-man’ gets bandied about a lot these days, so I’ll take some time out to back that up.

The Current State of Abiogenesis

Obviously, much has happened in the fields of molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry since Huxley reinvented spontaneous generation. [emphasis not in context] For the past 150 years, scientists have been attempting to experimentally create life from non-living matter. Also, several theories that could explain the possibility of abiogenesis have been postulated. Let’s discuss the most popular theories and experiments and how current molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry show the impossiblity of each.

But to quote from cdk007’s Abiogenesis video:

Spontaneous generation was actually scientifically tested and proven false in 1668 by Francesco Redi, in 1765 by Lazzaro Spallanzani, and in 1859 by Louis Pasteur – and has never been claimed by scientists since…

Way to be current.

- The Origin of Life – Abiogenesis, 1:25 – 1:50, cdk007

Eric is trying to present the modern theory of abiogenesis as if it were identical to the older, falsified theory of spontaneous generation. The modern theory of abiogenesis is very, very different to spontaneous generation. In actual fact, the two theories are entirely distinct. Eric is presenting them as if they are not.

Eric is attacking a caricature of a scientific theory and calling that caricature ‘abiogenesis’. He is not attacking the real theory. This is a straw man argument.

And again:

1. The First Protein Formed from Pure Chance

Among secular academia, this theory has been completely rejected as an explanation for the origin of life. However, it is still popular in normal circles, and as such, deserves some attention.

The section under this heading even acknowledges that it is a straw man in its opening paragraph. No-one who is qualified to comment on the subject of abiogenesis actually thinks that the first protein formed from pure chance. The fact that some people who are not so qualified believe this – which is plausible – says nothing about abiogenesis. So why does Eric waste precious page-space in discussing it?

Eric is attacking a caricature of a scientific theory and calling that caricature ‘abiogenesis’. He is not attacking the real theory. This is a straw man argument.

And again:

2. DNA Formed Itself

Another problem with the “protein first” theory is that it is common knowledge that proteins need DNA and RNA to form their structure and tell them what to do. As such, it has been postulated that DNA formed itself first.

To the best of my knowledge, this hypothesis is not widely regarded as very likely, for most of the reasons that Eric lists. For this reason, it has few proponents.

Eric is attacking a caricature of a scientific theory and calling that caricature ‘abiogenesis’. He is not attacking the real theory. This is a straw man argument.

The problem for the atheist is this; if you can’t explain where this information came from, you haven’t explained life because it’s the information that makes the molecules into something that actually functions.

Here, he’s making claims about biology and information that are totally incorrect. ‘Information’ in the sense Eric is discussing is the kind of information examined in the recent past by Claude Shannon and in the present by people such as Dr. Mark Titchener. However, this kind of ‘information’ can be perfectly well produced by blind evolutionary models. Eric has decided that information means something else – something that ‘makes the molecules into something that actually functions’, which is entirely false. ‘Measurable potential to do work’ is the definition of energy, not information. Eric is using the term ‘information’ to invent a problem that does not exist.

Eric is attacking a caricature of a scientific theory and calling that caricature ‘abiogenesis’. He is not attacking the real theory. This is a straw man argument.

A. Natural Selection Acted Upon DNA, Allowing It to Adapt Over Millions of Years

In fact, this was the premise of Richard Dawkins’ 1996 book Climbing Mount Improbable…

Natural Selection requires a self-replicating organism to work. To have reproduction, you must have cell division. Cell division requires DNA and proteins which are the very things they are trying to explain in the first place! You cannot a postulate an explanation presupposing what you are trying to explain.

Abiogenesis is the theory of how very simple, replicating, single-celled organisms came to be. At no point do the modern theories of abiogenesis involve a process that is entirely analoguous to evolution. This is not a position supported by abiogenesis.

Admittedly, all biology is messy, and there is usually a blending of slight gradients between any two points. The processes of abiogenesis would probably have started off looking very different to evolution – but slowly, as additional pieces of the puzzle are slotted into place, the process would start to look more and more like evolution until eventually it becomes evolution. First you get simple cells with highly imperfect ‘replication’ through mechanical intervention with the environment, then you get horizontal transfer of genetic information between cells, and then finally you get something that passes for descent with modification. Then you get evolution. But no-one is suggesting that strict evolution was operating right from the start. Abiogenesis and evolution are intimately related, true. But they cover different circumstances. Evolution would be true even if abiogenesis was false and the original organisms really did come about by magic. And abiogenesis could be true even if evolution didn’t work.

Eric has tried to present abiogenesis as requiring evolution in order to function, and then has quite rightly pointed out that this would be inconsistent. It would be, if his claim was true. But it isn’t. Abiogenesis does not require evolution, and neither does evolution require abiogenesis.

Eric is attacking a caricature of a scientific theory and calling that caricature ‘abiogenesis’. He is not attacking the real theory. This is a straw man argument.

And again:

B. Chemical Affinities Explain How DNA or Protein Formed Itself

Inherent chemical attraction could explain how the four base pairs of DNA or the amino acids of a protein are able to form themselves.

What Eric is describing is part of the way certain kinds of molecules can self-polymerize. He points out that this alone is insufficient for the creation of a single-celled organism that can reproduce. This is the very problem that research into abiogenesis is attempting to solve by presenting plausible mechanisms by which a self-polymerizing ‘organic’ molecule could become the genetic basis for a single-celled organism. Self-polymerizing molecules are a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for abiogenesis, and contrary to the argument Eric presents in this paragraph, no-one is claiming otherwise.

Eric is attacking a caricature of a scientific theory and calling that caricature ‘abiogenesis’. He is not attacking the real theory. This is a straw man argument.

C. RNA Formed First

The idea is that since RNA is much less complex than DNA, it’s more likely that RNA formed itself first. In order to subscribe to this theory, you must ignore that none of the above described problems have been solved just because the required lenghth of an RNA sequence is shorter than a DNA’s sequence.

In fact, you’ve added two problems. The first one being that RNA needs DNA to know in which order to form, so you’re back to square one, the second being that in order for single strand of RNA to replicate, there must be an identical RNA strand (that also formed itself exactly like the first) right next to it. So you’ve doubled your problem.

Here Eric has actually inched a little bit closer to actual theories of abiogenesis by refering to the hypothesis that RNA came before DNA (but not necessarily first – Szostak’s work suggests that stable vesicles could have formed first when hydrophilic/hydrophobic lipids were suspended in the pre-biotic oceans under the correct range of PH levels that were permeable to the building blocks of self-polymerizing molecules, but not the larger molecules themselves… but I digress). However, he throws in a fallacy while he’s doing it. In most mainstream, complex, modern eukaryotic cells, he’s right – the RNA is taken out of the DNA. But no-one is saying that the original replicating cells looked and behaved in the same way that modern cells do. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Eric is attacking a caricature of a scientific theory and calling that caricature ‘abiogenesis’. He is not attacking the real theory. This is a straw man argument.

Conclusion

Every belief system has their creation story. The supernatural event that started it all. Atheism is no different with abiogenesis.

And this is just incorrect. The entire point of abiogenesis is that it provides a naturalistic explanation for the origins of life. Yes, it is an emerging field of study. Yes, any such research is highly provisional. Yes, there is still a long way to go before abiogenesis can be considered a mature theory the way that the Theory of Electromagnetism, Germ Theory, or the Theory of Evolution are mature theories. But the actual science being done is far stronger than Eric is presenting it to be in his article.

Eric is attacking a caricature of a scientific theory and calling that caricature ‘abiogenesis’. He is not attacking the real theory. This is a straw man argument.

Once you remove all the straw-men from Eric’s article, we’re left with a string of probing and interesting ‘how could such-and-such happen’ kinds of questions. One of the more interesting ones is ‘How could RNA come about first, when in modern cells RNA usually requires the equipment used by DNA in order to replicate itself?’ Most of Eric’s questions along these lines are answered in the video referenced above.

Just a wee notice: I’ve created a new page on the site. It’s over on the left, but I’ll repeat it here.

about the rhetor

Originally it was ‘about the author’ but authorship doesn’t exactly fit with what I’m doing here. I’ll explain what I mean by that under the Why rhetoric? section when I get around to filling it in.

Last one today. I promise.

Okay, so it’s looking to be a YouTube-heavy day today. So sue me.

The last two posts have been pretty heady and intellectual and serious. I stumbled on this video the other day and it made me smile. Thought it might be good to take a step back from all the seriousness to something a bit more light-spirited.

Although be warned – when Tim warns you at the start to not listen if you’re easily offended, heed his his words. Lyrics are probably NSFW, if your employers care about strong language and blasphemy.

The original purpose of this blog was not actually to promote atheism – the original purpose of this blog was to give myself a wee sandbox to play around in and try to improve my writing. The atheism thing came later, because it’s something I feel strongly about and enjoy writing about. But I’m going to take a step back to my original purpose, roll up my sleeves, and get back to the subject of persuasive writing. I’ve hidden the post under the cut, because this is the kind of thing that makes most people yawn, and it pays to spare you the details.

So now that you’ve decided you might be interested, I’m going to dissect a piece of writing over at Pastoral Musings, and show what was done well and what was done poorly. Then I’ll try to construct a new argument for the thesis of that blog post that avoids these pitfalls.

I’m actually unsure of what the name of the author is, so I’ll be referring to the author as PM (Pastoral Musings).

The article in question is More on Proposition 8 Protestors. Give it a read, then come back for a rhetorical overview of the piece.

Read it? Right? Good. Let’s get cracking.

Let’s see now, they say that they’re for freedom, but it’s only freedom for themselves.

Here’s the thesis of the piece. It’s a good stance. It sets up what PM is doing. Firstly, he’s (I presume it’s a he) arguing a negative case against someone he disagrees with. Secondly, he’s doing that by turning his opponents’ primary argument against them.

This is all good stuff: it’s much easier to pull off a negative argument against an opponent than it is to forward a positive argument for your own cause. Because of that, it can be a little underwhelming, but if you can make it look like your opponent is a hypocrite in their primary argument, you’ve got a good chance of making them look beat and winning over the allegiance of your audience.

So that’s our stance, and it’s a good rhetorical stance to be taking. However, PM buggers things up a bit.

You see, they don’t care whether the other fellow who needed to drive through the city was free to do so or not. They simply blocked traffic without a care for anyone who was not free to travel to work, etc. No, it’s not about freedom.

PM’s opening line was strong. Unfortunately, he followed it up with this – a whinge about protesters blocking up traffic. This is a move in the wrong direction. The thesis statement sets up an argument on idealistic, lofty principles. The correct thing to do is to push that message up and take the high road. Instead, PM moved immediately from the high-road to the low-road by having a whine about minor civil disruption resulting from political protesters. That’s the whole point of an act of political protest. It’s a cheap shot, and if PM is going to argue from the position of the high-ground, he can’t afford to be caught out taking cheap shots. It doesn’t strengthen his position at all. To the contrary, it undermines him considerably.

They speak of equality, but homosexuals are already equal. They have equal rights and equal protections. This is not about equality. It is about what marriage is. Marriage is always heterosexual in nature. Thus, by definition, homosexuals cannot marry. The state did not invent marriage, and the state cannot redefine marriage. This is not about equality. That already exists. This is about re-writing the dictionary.

We’ve already set up the thesis: My opponents claim to be promoting freedom and equality. This paragraph is the first in a two-hit combo based on this thesis in an attempt to destroy the position of those opponents. The first hit is ‘My opponents are free, and are not suffering from the inequality they claim’. The second hit is ‘it is actually my position that is being deprived of freedom and equality by my opponents!’

This is much better, and partially makes up for PM’s mis-step in the previous paragraph. Here, he’s moving back up to his original stance and making this about ideals. Note throughout the piece are statements such as ‘homosexuals are already equal’. The thing to remember here is that a statement like this is a value-judgment, not an empirical measurement. Value judgments are about assigning meaning to a measurement. If you know what you’re doing, you can make a case for assigning any meaning you want to any given measurement, even if the meanings are totally contradictory. When you step back from objective truth and into how we assign values to things, you can never be proven wrong. All that matters then is having a good pace to your speaking or writing, which PM does well in this paragraph. This is a rhetorically solid paragraph.

Oh, and what about equality for the Christians and others who supported Proposition 8? Why are they lesser than homosexuals? They must be considered so, because their voice is not seen as important. The people have spoken, but their voice must be over ruled and silenced… after all, what do these ignorant, extremists know? Is that not the opinion? This is not about equality. It is about silencing those who oppose “homosexual marriage.”

Here’s the follow-up punch from the last paragraph. It’s as rhetorically sound as the last one.

PM did a really nice move with injecting the ‘voice of the people’ thing in there. His opponents are trying to set themselves up to argue from the position of an oppressed minority. The perfect counter to this is to argue form the perspective of the ‘voice of the people’, because an oppressed minority will always be outnumbered by the majority of ‘the people’. That’s what being an oppressed minority means. However, when you say it in terms of the ‘voice of the people’, it makes the reader inclined to number themselves as one of ‘the people’. It pulls the reader into in-group/out-group thinking, where PM’s position is the reader’s ‘in-group’ and PM’s opponents are the reader’s ‘out-group’. This is a good move, because it makes the reader less open to the emotional appeal of the underdog as being pushed by PM’s opposition.

Neither is this about love. If it were, they would show love to those who oppose them, too.

This is… adequate. It sets a nice beat to the flow of the piece. But what he should be doing here is clinching his two-hit combo, but instead he’s raised a new point. If this point was important, PM should have either used it in his second paragraph, or left it until after his clinching statement. As it is, this line is out of place. It’s sloppy, but he hasn’t actually shot himself in the foot. Yet.

This is all about trying to silence those who oppose deviance. It is about normalizing that which is unnatural.

This short paragraph is utterly tragic on PM’s part. He’s doing the right thing – he’s making a clinching conclusion to his two-hit combo that’ll set it into the reader’s mind. He’s got the right idea. Unfortunately, his execution of that idea has turned out to be an epic failure on his part.

PM should not have used the words ‘deviant’ or ‘unnatural’. The entire point of his argument is that his opponents are unjustly claiming to be discriminated against. Words like ‘deviant’ and ‘unnatural’ carry very strong emotional connections with discrimination. In using these words PM is actually committing the very discrimination against his opponents that he says they aren’t receiving. This is such a catastrophically bad thing to do in PM’s position. It makes his opponent look fully justified in their position, and it makes him look like a two-faced hypocrite. It completely undoes all the good work he did in his first, second, and third paragraphs. And it could have been so easily avoided by just sticking to his thesis and not bringing up the subjects of ‘deviant’ or ‘unnatural’.

How sad that we have come to this point.

It’s basically all over after the colossal screw up of the last paragraph. That said, this kind of sentence is a good pace-setter. Had the last paragraph been a good one, this beat would be well justified. It places a nice beat in the flow of the text, it has no real content, and it’s worded in a way that is inclined to make the reader emotionally sympathetic to the argument. This line is justified.

God does not hate these folks. God hates their lifestyle, however. If they persist in this lifestyle and do not accept God’s heart-changing, life-changing love, He will turn against them in hatred and wrath.

This just puts the nail in the coffin for PM. First and foremost, he was originally arguing about ideals. Now he’s raising the subject of God. It’s a contradictory message, and it makes PM look like a two-faced speaker. It implies that all his talk of lofty ideals was really just a smokescreen for him to push a religious agenda. Don’t get me wrong – rhetorically speaking, he could very well have pushed an argument form a religious perspective. That’s fine. But if that was what he was going to do, he should have opened with God and finished on ideals and values, or left God out of this particular argument altogether.

Second of all, he raised the subject of God, hatred, and wrath. This makes his opponents look sympathetic again. The line about ‘God does not hate these folks’ is good. The problem is that when you follow a statement up with another statement that has the word ‘but’ or ‘however’ in it, it totally negates the previous sentence in the mind of the reader. It just sets the beat to make the hatred and wrath thing that much more prominent. You can’t preach a doctrine of God’s hatred and wrath against a group of people at the same time that you’re arguing that that group of people are not being discriminated against. It’s utterly inconsistent, and in this case lethal to PM’s original thesis.

Today is the day of grace.

Tomorrow may be the day of judgment.

Repent and believe the good news of Jesus Christ!

It’s already over, but PM goes that extra mile and somehow manages to make things even worse. It moves the argument even further towards the position of fundamentalist religious bigotry, which PM utterly cannot afford given his original thesis.

So that’s the rhetorical deconstruction out of the way. Now I’m going to take the liberty of piecing this argument back together, fixing the holes and showing what a good argument of this form would have looked like.

Let’s see now, they say that they’re for freedom, but it’s only freedom for themselves. You see, they’re trying to set themselves up as an oppressed and victimised minority, but their actions betray them. They are only adopting such a position such that they can use it to overrule the voice of the people. They are attempting to disenfranchise the right of the people to voice their opinion in civil affairs, and they are doing it through despicably hypocritical means.

They speak of equality, but homosexuals are already equal. They have equal rights and equal protections. This is not about equality. It is about what marriage is. Marriage is always heterosexual in nature. Thus, by definition, homosexuals cannot marry. The state did not invent marriage, and the state cannot redefine marriage. This is not about equality. That already exists. This is about re-writing the dictionary.

Oh, and what about equality for the Christians and others who supported Proposition 8? Why are they lesser than homosexuals? They must be considered so, because their voice is not seen as important. The people have spoken, but their voice must be over ruled and silenced…after all, what do these ignorant, extremists know? Is that not the opinion? This is not about equality. It is about silencing those who oppose “homosexual marriage.”

This is all about trying to silence the voice of the people when they speak out in dissent against the politically correct climate imposed on society by homosexuals. It is about the few attempting to manipulate the system to impose their will upon the many.

How sad that we have come to this point.

It’s no secret that I’m a Christian, and that I look to the teachings of Christ for guidance in my life and opinions. [edit: remember, this argument has been written in the voice of PM, not the voice of Ubiquitous Che] These people will try and make my position out to be based on a closed-minded, literalist interpretation of the Bible. They’ll do this, because it’s an easy way to dismiss what I have to say: “Oh, don’t listen to him, he’s just another religious crackpot.”

No, they don’t want you to listen to me. Because I am not arguing here from a position of God’s will. I don’t have to. Those protesting against Proposition 8 are doing so on the grounds of freedom and equality, and I have met them on the ground of their choosing. I have shown their position to be a hypocritical attempt to force their views on the rest of society.

That is why they cynically use emotionally laden buzzwords to try and make their case. It is because they don’t have a case, and they don’t want us to think about it long enough to work that out for ourselves.

That’s a much better argument. There’s still some room for improvement – if I were making this argument for myself, I’d sit on it for a day or two and see if there’s anything more I could do to give it some added punch. But it fixes up the gaping wounds in PM’s original article, and drives home his thesis by making a hollow emotional appeal to people’s innate distrust of hollow emotional appeals. That’s a rhetorical ploy that just makes me all kinds of happy.

Oh, and on the side – I wrote my corrected version of PM’s article from a rhetorical perspective divorced of my own personal opinions. Essentially, PM is wrong twice. Firstly, homosexuality is a natural part of the human condition. It shows up in the animal kingdom all the time, and there’s a reliable statistical basis for what genetic and embryonic variables contributes to a person being born with same sex attraction. I’ll say it again: Homosexuality isn’t a form of sexual deviancy. Homosexuality is not ‘unnatural’. To the contrary. The science shows us that homosexuality is a naturally occurring part of the human condition. So that’s the first part where PM is wrong.

The second part where he goes wrong is that, even if homosexuality was ‘unnatural’, this would in no way imply that it should be discouraged. That’s the naturalistic fallacy at play. My glasses are unnatural, but I would barely be able to see without them. Almost everything we humans do is ‘unnatural’ in some way. Merely something as ‘unnatural’ is no argument at all.

It’s very revealing when a person falls back on the ‘I object to X because it is unnatural’ position. It shows that they don’t actually have a good reason for their objection – because if they did, they would give it, and not have to fall back on fallacious logic.

Finally, my own two cents: The fact that the people of California voted in favor of Proposition 8 is a tragic condemnation of widespread bigotry of that particular state. Each individual is free to decide for themselves that they do not recognize a marriage between two homosexuals as being valid. That’s fine. However, it is utterly inappropriate for the state to discriminate against a subsection of society based on sexual orientation. There’s a lot more to marriage than religion and reproduction. It’s a civil right to have a long-term relationship between two people recognized by the state. There is absolutely no secular basis for denying that right to homosexuals. None. Whatsoever.

You have the right to your personal belief that homosexual marriage is invalid, but you cannot impose that view on homosexuals, and it is blatant discrimination on the part of the state for them to do it on your behalf.

Pigeon Mountain is a quick drive from my house. It’s not actually a mountain – that’s just the name. It’s a big hill though. I pass it on the way home some sometimes. Sometimes I’ll pass it at night if I’m coming home from a movie or something. And very occasionally – once every six months or so (more if I’m having a rough patch) – I’ll get the urge to go climb it at night.

At a brisk walk, it takes me about five minutes to get to the top – so no, it isn’t all that far, but it’s high enough. I don’t know if I imagine it or not, but it feels like I get less light pollution when I’m that far above the level of the street lights. The stars seem to stand out more. Pigeon Mountain is on a bit of a peninsula, so there’s pretty much constant sea winds. I wander up there in my jacket on a warm-ish night, and the wind fills my ears. I look up, and the night sky fills my vision.

I look up, and my mind fills the universe.

That infinite vacuum wheeling above my head… It grips hold of the edges of my consciousness, expands it out past my skull and up into the sky. Through the back of my skull, all the fascinating things I’ve learned about cosmology whirl behind my eyes, and in a few short instants I’ve gone off, racing across the universe, watching as stars birth, coalesce, burn, and then nova before my eyes. I think about the majestic interplay of all that energy in all its forms… all the light moving about in all directions, not just the directions I’m looking from, a sea of electromagnetic ripples overlapping one another in all ways and passing through a three-dimensional ocean.

This is all just in my head, of course. But even without knowledge of what they are, just looking up to watch the stars still pulls at the mind. My sense of self expands out, and it feels like it’s encompassing everything.

At this point, the wind has been stealing away all the warmth I built up walking up the hill. The chill sets in, and I’m suddenly aware that the universe, whilst beautiful and majestic, is nonetheless cold. Not cruel, exactly. Just impersonal. Indifferent. Moving, but unmoved by the softness or warmth of human life.

At that point, I cast my eyes down. I usually see a car going along the main road I follow on the way home. Looking down, that car could easily be me, driving along, my mind wrapped up snug in its little bubble of warm human foolishness. From the cold and alien place my mind is currently occupying, that little sliver of warmth seems so precious. Not only does it give the universe a little sliver of the warmth it lacks, but it is also precious because it is so fragile.

And it occurs to me that, whenever I’m driving, there will always exist some perspective of my car similar to the one I am taking now, atop this hill – even if it is just the perspective from the empty air above me. That preciousness will always be there, even when I’m not aware of it, and I can always let my mind expand out to take the long view so I can remind myself about it, should I need to.

Then I look about at the houses. Pigeon Mountain rises up above a comfortably middle-class suburban area. Each house is a little light, each light is a little bubble where a group of people have carved out a little life for themselves where their bubbles overlap, becoming bigger and stronger and warmer. Each home is a tiny little bubble among many – a frothing foam of warmth and softness and light, a sea of laughter and sorrows and life.

It’s all so precious, because it is so rare. And because it didn’t have to be. The universe dancing above my head stands as a mute sentinel over the fact that our world never had to be this way. The universe doesn’t care. It isn’t malevolent, just indifferent. It has nothing to care with.

The only things I know about in this universe that are capable of caring are human beings, with all our foibles and quirks and weaknesses. We are transient on the scale of the universe. In the eyes of the stars we exist but for a flicker. The universe has no purpose for us. How could it? The universe isn’t the kind of thing that can impose a purpose! It has nothing to have a purpose with. Just matter and motion, nothing more.

But from that matter and motion has come something very special – totally unexpected, totally unplanned, and perhaps unique. From the purposeless dust of the universe has come the means for imposing purpose on the universe. This is something that may never be replicated again. It is so precious. It is so fragile. It is so fleeting. And it matters so very, very much.

And it is here that I find myself overcome with the… silliness of most religious thought. It often seems that the whole point of religion is to trick us into thinking that we matter because we will live forever. It’s as if the present moment – the only thing that is ever really real – is meaningless to the religious mind. So in despair, it turns away from the present and towards the eternity of the stars – but there it turns away in horror at the cold indifference it finds in the depths of the void. So the religious mind pretends that the universe has its own bubble of warmth and life and personality, its own reassuring cocoon of personality and purpose. And the religious mind calls this fantasy-bubble ‘God’. But it is not real. It is a comforting illusion only. The real warmth – the warmth that really matters – comes from that which is really alive. Life.

Where such a mind goes wrong is at the very beginning. The transient and impermanent moment isn’t meaningless. Nothing lasts, but it matters while it does. And it matters because it matters to us, because we are. Purpose isn’t something that is granted to us mortals by eternity. No. It’s the other way around. It is eternity that is granted a meaning by us, the transient and fragile mortal minds that breathe life, lust and love into a cold and impersonal universe.

And the entire basis of religious thought just seems so… silly really is the only word that fits. There are more sophisticated arguments against the existence of God than this – clever devices of rhetoric, complex philosophy, simple observation, the fruits of critical thinking, and so forth. But it all pales in comparison when you can grasp how deeply and profoundly silly the root of religious thought really is.

And that’s the emotional impact of my atheism. I can feel in my bones how silly and human the myth of God really is. It’s so… limiting. It makes our brief, special, vibrant lives into nothing more than an entrance examination for an eternity that will never come, and wouldn’t matter even if it did. What matters is here and now. Tomorrow will only matter when it becomes the new here and now – it is the hereness and the nowness that gives a moment its meaning, not its place within eternity. It is kairos that grants meaning, not chronos. And even once we are gone, there will still be meaning and light and life in those we leave behind. Funerals are rites for the living, not the dead.

Religion denies the only thing we have that really matters in favor of a myth that wouldn’t matter even if it was real. It’s just so silly. And so very, very tragic.

Lyrics under the cut:

Hey yo – check it: This is why I’m Extian.

Listen.

You hand me a beat, I’ll abuse it like catholic priests,
Do to children during the holiest of Vatican weeks,
The sack of my beats ain’t phat – they enormous,
They’ll leave your brain gone, off and lost like a pack of Mormons,
You disrespect my clan – you’d better run and hide,
The same way Christians accept ‘Intelligent Design’,
You push the truth aside, and ministers win,
But if you so strong in your beliefs – answer me this:

If the memories of our life’s retained in the brain,
And the brain dies, inside it nothing remains,
Wouldn’t that mean you would have absolutely and positively no recollection or account of previous things,
When you die?

Angels and demons devils and Gods do not await you,
Even if your own condition would not escape you’d,
Sit up in church with fake faith and false hope,
Get up burst out Amen! And praise God!
Jesus, He saves lives!
Molest your daughter and cheat on your wife at the same time,
And claim I’m speakin’ the devil, and that I’m going to hell,
And as far as hell; speak of the devil!

It’s amazing how this God is ubiquitous omnipresent existent in every stitch of existence,
But yet and still it’s this place devoid of his presence of torment and sickness,
You go forever for eighty years of sins you committed?
That’s ridiculous!
And you know what makes it worse is the fact that nobody else seems to have an issue with it,
Just blindly giving in to it – but me,
But maybe I’m the crazy person maybe it’s just me…

I love sayin’ there isn’t a God,
Well at least, that the God in the Bible isn’t God,
You may think it’s odd that I’m black and I don’t swear by a God,
that every body recognizes as God,
I’m tired of sayin’ the word God,
It’s self-defeating an’ meaningless,
Just a title; idle reverence for some lenience,
And lenience for what?
Every single sin that we have in our arsenal He gave us to strut!
And for what?

What kind of sense would it make?
To create a sinful creation you judge from the gate,
And then send your only son to prohibit the fate,
That you ultimately responsible for?

And in why the hell are we sayin’ ‘He’?
’cause if God had a sex than He wouldn’t be,
And maybe if He was God then He couldn’t leave,
His greatest creation alone in it’s time of need,
And this is exactly what I mean.

We ignore the obvious in front of us,
In two thousand years from now people gon’ be makin’ fun of us,
If we last that long -
If the Muslims don’t kill the Christians,
And the Christians don’t kill the non-Christians ’cause they can’t compete with the Muslims,
’cause the Muslims cutting peoples heads off,
Chantin’ in Arabic, claimin’ they love em’,
Declaring jihad on western Muslims,
Takin’ innocent lives for nothing.

But maybe it isn’t, maybe it just seems,
Maybe I’m the crazy person, maybe it’s just me,
Maybe I’ll just leave, and take my crazy belief system and just leave,
Cause really it’s just me…

I’ll say it once and never again – I’ll never go back,
’cause there thinkin for yourself’s a helluva sin,
Us again them? I wonder who’d win?
’cause all we really have to do is spit logic to get under thier skin.

That’s why I’m Extian.