Death

[avevale_intelligencer]

So. Watching The Mummy Returns on DVD, having caught the first one on telly, I came to the part where the Rachel Weisz character, Evelyn, gets stabbed and dies. It's a well-known truism that big SFX blockbusters like this don't bother with character moments or drama in between the big effects scenes, but for the record, Brendan Fraser here nailed it perfectly, kneeling over her touching her face and murmuring "Come back...come back..." I felt the grief in him, and it wasn't cheap or melodramatic in the slightest.

And I remembered the surge of anger I felt the other day, when someone, I can't even remember who and don't want to know, offhandedly dismissed the human belief in survival after death as an "obviously illogical assumption." Now I mostly have no problem respecting those atheists among my friends with whom I occasionally lock horns, but an utterance like that, expressing as it does an arid and callous contempt for all ordinary human feeling, makes it damnably difficult. I had not intended to bother posting about it, but watching that underrated actor on telly today brought the emotion of the moment back to me too vividly to ignore.

All logic, I believe, beyond the simple mechanical level of 2 + 2 = 4, is based on emotional first principles, without exception. The decision to embrace reason at the expense of emotion is itself a decision grounded in emotion, whether it's admiration for the perfect, cold, inhuman precision of reason (ha) or a rejection of the icky, squishy, dangerous emotional side of one's being (as it was with me before I grew up a bit), or something utterly else. As the decision gets cemented in place rationalisations crop up and become reasons, but the basis is emotion. Always.

And the most basic, the most complex, and the most natural of emotions is love, the desire to share one's life with another, and when that other is taken by death, the need to believe that something of them goes on to some other place and is not snuffed out is the most logical assumption in the world.

So how dare anyone smugly say that the belief that a loved one is not utterly extinct, but has merely gone into another room, that one might some day see them again, is illogical. The logic is different, because the first principles are different. That is all.

Comments

[catalana.livejournal.com]

I think either reason or emotion without the other one is dangerous. What I strive for is to find the right balance, where they serve each other. I realize that I probably won't perfectly achieve it, but it's my goal.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Balance is the essential, and acceptance is the key to balance.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

but an utterance like that, expressing as it does an arid and callous contempt for all ordinary human feeling,

I don't see any "arid and callous contempt" there.

My mother is dead. Of *course* I understand what it is to desperately wish that something just isn't so.

I loved her very much and she's never coming back and it would be nice to think she's still alive somewhere but there is absolutely no evidence for that. And some things are just too important to pretend about.

I want my mother back. Being realistic about the fact that it's never going to happen is painful enough without people calling me callous and contemptuous over it.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Quite.

And this plea for 'balance' is assumes that all points of view are equal in strength, which is plain wrong. It is simply not true that "the earth is flat" has the same evidential strength as "the Earth is an oblate spheroid" however much you might want the former to be true.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

If this was referencing my comment above, I'd note that I didn't say all beliefs were equal; I said that both reason and emotion have their place. Speaking as a professional logician, I am well aware that some arguments are either invalid or unsound and hence not something one should accept.

Emotion, however, can be the drive that gets many people to bother seeking arguments on a position. Although I am simply curious about, well, pretty much everything, not everyone is. They thus will be driven by an emotional reaction to a position. I think it is a mistake to downplay the power of the emotion, just as it is a mistake to discard rational evidence in favor of the emotion. I see more students doing the second than the first, but both extremes are problematic.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

What has the most important place is evidence. For my money, evidence trumps emotion, and, particularly, wishful thinking, every time.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Yep, but people often don't bother to look for evidence unless they actually care about the debate to begin with.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course.

There's a picture on my lj of a statue where a man is restraining a rearing horse. Its alternative title is, apparently, passion restrained by reason. One of the main difference between people is how much their passion (read emotion) is restrained by reason. I'm inclined to believe that most of the trouble between humans is when the emotion slips that control.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

That explains why we may never reach a meeting of minds. You (and the sculptor, apparently) seem to see the man as reason and the horse as passion, one always inferior and subservient to the other. I think of passion and reason as two horses yoked together, both serving equally.

First principles.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

The other reason we will never agree is that I think no view should pass unchallenged (Hell, mine get challenged often enough!) and that the most dangerous things in this world are humans acting from unrestrained passion.

And that I am no hypocrite, and will not moderated my arguments unless there is some particular reason. (For instance, I would not offer sympathy to someone by saying I would pray for them or that a dead relative had gone to heaven or that animals were waiting for them "beyond the rainbow bridge" [gaaawk] but I would be extremely, though silently, cross, if anyone offered such lines of sympathy to me. However, neither, in those circumstances would I argue that those views were stupid. However, I do think those views are stupid and will continue to say so in the course of honest argument.)

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

And I will continue to regard that as less of a challenge and more of an insult, and one that demeans your beliefs as much as creationists' rabid vapourings about their fake "science" demeans the beliefs of honest, intelligent Christians. (I have no problem insulting that alleged "belief" at all.)

Both houses would look a lot better if they were put in order. I might even be able to decide which one I'd want to live in.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Which is in itself an irrational statement.

By the way, who are you to decide to react to what you perceive to be insults to others? Aren't they capable of it themselves? That is, even if they perceive it as an insult?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Who am I?

I'm the same person I've always been. I'm not defending Christians, for goodness sake, they don't need me for that. And you may feel you don't need me either, that someday the Christians will just stop and say "why yes, now you come to mention it, our beliefs are stupid and infantile, please tell us what we should be believing instead."

I want to see a civilised and mutually respectful dialogue between Christians and atheists in my lifetime, rather than this--yes--stupid, infantile, pointless sniping at each other. Am I wrong to think the side of enlightenment and reason should be the one to make the first move in that direction? Am I wrong to think that cool, calm, scientific thinkers are more likely to be willing to govern their feelings than passionate believers? Am I wrong to think that actually talking to people is better than trying to piss them off?

They may not perceive these things your side says as insults, but they certainly aren't listening. I'd like to think that someday someone on the atheist side might feel like trying to get them to listen; might want to start taking down the walls, rather than shoring them up; might start to recognise that this thing you hate is not going to go away, but might some day become something less hateful.

Or maybe the Christians will do it first. Maybe, one day, the churches will unite to quell the fundies and creationists and clean out the morally abhorrent remnants of the past, and open up a dialogue themselves. In which case, what would the atheists do?

Anyway, that's who I am, and probably who I'm going to be for a while yet. I'm truly sorry that part of me bothers you.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid the accommodationist viewpoint has been tried for over a hundred years and, in my opinion, found wanting.

There's a big debate about this on the science blogs I read. It is very noticeable that the accommodationist/framers often disable comments to their blogs or moderate them extensively, so the real debate takes place on the anti-accommodationist blogs, such as Jerry Coyne's, Jason Rosenhouse's, and PZ Myers's. It has also been noticeable recently how many people who are 'moderate' in these debates, have changed their minds to a more militant stance, usually because a paper or a blog article or a book that advocates careful framing or an accommodationist position is grabbed with great joy by the fundies and used in their cause.

[howeird]

What Cat said, for the most part. In honor of my first Mother's Day without my mother, I have been playing "For Good" from Wicked, because, though I will never meet her again, she left her handprint on my heart, and I have been changed for good.

[melodyclark.livejournal.com]

I've known people of equal intellectual power who could argue for and against survival. My problem is it's my brain being the one to decide between them. I've been stupid too often to trust my "right choice" about something so vast. I can't determine which one is "correct" (if any), since it would be my biased brain making the decision. I've also seen a box of cushions fly off a hearth (by themselves). I don't know how or why. Probably, it had a physical cause, but it makes me wonder.

In other words, I don't have sufficient information about anything to make an absolute conclusion about anything. I think we should advance based upon what we know. What we know is that we seem to be temporary creatures with a short life on a fragile planet. It would be idiotic to truly believe otherwise, imo.

That said, whenever we start telling people what to conjecture about or consider, then I draw the line. We just don't know enough yet -- about anything. We are only seeing the inside of our minds. I suggest we let people believe what they need to believe, so long as they act on fact and not on theory. Not everyone is meant to be a scientist.

I've lost my best friend, my son, my mother, my father, and my grandparents all before I was 28. I lost my best friend just last year, and many other people I care about. I have a friend encased in a body that can't move, that will never move. I'm not about to tell her I think her need to believe in angels is silly. It's all she has.

I also want to mention that I really hated the Mummy movies.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Yes, that exactly. Any absolute statement is wrong because it is absolute and no one living can ever know something absolutely unless they have proved it for themself. You can never prove something to someone else, you can only convince them by authority (ooh, he's a 'scientist' (or the Pope) so therefore he must be right), and that is based on belief.

Any statement which says that "your belief is illogical" or "you only believe that because you don't think" is rude, insensitive, and bigoted. It is saying "I have a direct line to The Truth(tm) and Reason(tm) and you don't" (and guess what, religious Fundies say much the same as Richard Dawkins in almost exactly the same words, "I know The Truth and you are mistaken or intentionally denying it").

In actuality it is only a matter of who you believe. I generally trust scientists when they talk about things in their area of competence, when they speak outside that area (for instance in 'religious' matters) I give them the same credence as I give the fabled Man on the Clapham Omnibus. In matters where I believe no one has any competence (like life after death) I choose to believe whatever makes most sense to me - and so does everyone else. Those who don't want to believe it, fine, I'm not going to try to convert them. I expect the same courtesy in return (but don't get it from some people, obviously), just as I expect it from those who are deeply religious (and sometimes don't get it there either).

(It's probably a tautology to say that my friends who are deeply religious don't try to convert me, because if they did then they wouldn't be my friends. The same is true about evangelising atheists...)