Web security firm McAfee released a report warning of a “cyber space race,” with countries like U.S., Israel, Russia, China, and France gearing up for cyber offensives.

The McAfee report was prepared by cybersecurity expert Paul Kurtz, a former White House adviser. It said cyberattacks were on the rise and “cyberwarfare is a reality.”

“Over the past year, the increase in politically motivated cyberattacks has raised alarm and caution, with targets including the White House, Department of Homeland Security, US Secret Service and Department of Defense in the US alone.

“Nation-states are actively developing cyberwarfare capabilities and involved in the cyber arms race, targeting government networks and critical infrastructures,” the report said.

The Web security company said critical infrastructure such as power grids, transportation, telecommunication, finance and water supplies was particularly vulnerable.

“In most developed countries, critical infrastructure is connected to the Internet and lacks proper security functions, leaving these installations vulnerable to attacks,” McAfee said.

Web security firm McAfee released a report warning of a “cyber space race,” with countries like U.S., Israel, Russia, China, and France gearing up for cyber offensives.

The McAfee report was prepared by cybersecurity expert Paul Kurtz, a former White House adviser. It said cyberattacks were on the rise and “cyberwarfare is a reality.”

“Over the past year, the increase in politically motivated cyberattacks has raised alarm and caution, with targets including the White House, Department of Homeland Security, US Secret Service and Department of Defense in the US alone.

“Nation-states are actively developing cyberwarfare capabilities and involved in the cyber arms race, targeting government networks and critical infrastructures,” the report said.

The Web security company said critical infrastructure such as power grids, transportation, telecommunication, finance and water supplies was particularly vulnerable.

“In most developed countries, critical infrastructure is connected to the Internet and lacks proper security functions, leaving these installations vulnerable to attacks,” McAfee said.

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/

CFI Cruise
Nov 11

We arrive in FL, and have dinner with a friend I have not seen for 41 years.  We then set off the next day on a cruise, a CFI Travel Club adventure in the Caribbean.

Nov 12

We board ship in Ft. Lauderdale – my first impression, walking into an atrium area, is that the decor in the Carnival “Miracle”  is gaudy.  Shall we say 1890’s bawdy house revival?

Depart  with a private cocktail party.   Met old friends such as Toni Van Pelt & new – Paul Kurtz.
At supper, we sat with Lawrence Krauss, who shared with me that he was going to use some information I had sent him in an email for one or two articles in Scientific American.

Nov 13

Paul Kurtz – publisher of Promethus Books, discusses the publishing industry: old and new.
Patricia Schroeder on books – what is the future.
In the evening, we had a group photo, and then a formal dinner.  We sat with Pat and her husband at supper, and learned a lot!

Nov. 14

Ruth Frazier spoke on her experiences consulting work in Afghanistan, Tanzania, and with Native Americans and the progress as women learn to read and learn to lead.
Toni Van Pelt on ‘charitable choice’, ‘faith based initiatives’, and the religious freedom restoration act.  Well done, and I took good notes.
Emily Kingsley – a writer for 39 of the 40 years of Sesame Street – presented the history, philosophy and impact of the show: a fabulous experience.
Ken Frazier – editor of the Skeptical Inquirer – presented “Reading, Magazines, the New Media, and the New Skepticism: what’s going on?”  (It’s always refreshing to hear a senior citizen who is not stuck in the past!
Derek Araujo presented “The Establishment clause in Exile: Church and State in the 21st Century”, which was the best Church/State presentation I have yet heard.

Nov. 15

Sharon and I went to a natural habitat rain forest in Costa Rica.  Back on board, I receive a phone call that a friend of 42 years has died. (See my post on Anne Marie at www.charlog.wordpress.com)

Nov. 16

We went on the Panama Canal.  In Costa Rica, we saw the results of evolution; on the Canal, of intelligent design.

Nov 17

Toni Van Pelt spoke on the CFI office of Public Policy’s legislative efforts, including CARD (Coalition Against Religious Discrimination), STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), our Credidibility project (global warming), science as an aspect in international diplomacy.  Civic days in 2010 are April 24-7.

Paul Kurtz on the turbulent Universe: controversy is essential in science.  Our (secular) philosophy  of the world includes:  naturalism ; individualization; order; and chance.  We don’t believe, we test hypothesis.  Turbulence is ubiquitious.

Ruth Frazier spoke on using the Socratic method to teach critical thinking and change lives: a very informative and educational presentation, reinforced with a real life example.

Lawrence Krauss on Science vs. Politics: while science should form the basis of a sound public policy, but it has not and does not.  While we emerging in eight dark years of attacks on science and science integrity in D.C., we are not yet out of the pits.  Science works by demonstrating what is wrong, and it does not appear on the political pages.  Scientific issues should be the basis of many important political issues in the next ten years.

Nov 18

Sharon and I went to Mayan Ruins in Belize, where civilization fell victim to Spanish Catholicism.

Nov 19

We got an update from Toni Van Pelt on legislative matters.

Pat Schroeder talked to us about publishing and politics.  Edited and published books versus the freeforall on the Internet: the differences. School textbooks in Texas and elsewhere.

Ken Frazier also spoke on publishing vs writing.

Derek Araujo on CFI at the UN.  Anti-blasphemy laws, etc.  How can religions be true when many are mutually exclusive

Lawrence Krauss spoke on the impact of the latest cosmological data, which show our universe expanding at an increasing rate.  The anthropic principle is an example that what we take from the data depends on our values.  The geometry of space time is flat, which allows for zero total energy, which means it could have come from Nothing…

Nov 20 we left the ship, drove to Palm Beach to have lunch with a financial planner, and on to Orange City, where we took a 90 plus year old couple (friends of Sharon’s late Mom) to dinner.

On the 21st, we flew back.

There is a post over at the Center for Inquiry site, or what is left of it, to the effect it has not been taken over by “atheist fundamentalists.”

Phew.

I have just seen Zombieland, so I feel pretty knowledgeable about what a takeover would mean.

Please, sit down.

Teams of craven secular atheists would come to your home demanding you turn over your Bibles, your rosaries, your virgin daughters.

I know, I know. Much easier to vouch for the Bibles.

Your only protection would be holy water, and they would break your cruets, laughing hysterically, and dribble it into your petunias

If you have stored communion crackers, whatever the reason, be ready to cough them up. These types are bloodless, hungry, merciless.

(But they have not taken over CFI. They are being held at bay south of Depew.)

Next they would march on Walmart, demanding that Halloween displays be taken down.

They will impale a store clerk on a flagpole if he resists. Force people to eat Kandykorn and Peeps. It’s hideous.

After all, Halloween is the Eve of all Saints Day on November 1st (“all hallows evening”), a religious holiday of the Catholic Church. The celebration of this holiday–trick-or-treating, gorging on sweets, lighting of jack o’ lanterns on front porches–must be discouraged: it violates the First Amendment.

But with atheists, it’s a matter of degree. It’s not whether you believe in God anymore. It’s what you’re willing to do about it.

The moderate secularists I know simply resort to pumpkin smashing. Or rounding up trick or treaters, reasoning with them, trying to make them understand that they are guilty of extortion.

“Listen, Jonquil: what you are doing is stealing in the name of religion,” I heard an atheist say to a little girl about to buy a fairy princess costume at Target last week.

“If you did the same thing on November 10th, we’d have to call the cops and throw you in jail.” The little girl, to her credit, understood perfectly and, fighting back a tear, asked her mother to buy her a 120 GB Ipod Touch instead.

The New Atheists, if they come to power, will ban the sale of straw brooms. You will not be able to buy a sack of caramels and a sack of apples in the same cart. Fairy costumes, forget it. You will only be able to dress up like Charles Darwin on his birthday and ask politely for
arthropods door to door.

CFI will not do this. They are decent types. Not into trickery, cheap shots or slurs.

They need offices and outreach to do what they do, and the suggestion that they are just a blog with an office–slanderous.

Blasphemy Day sort of symbolizes that, doesn’t it? The high ground. The intellectual cutting edge.

We can rest easy that the marauding atheist hordes will not invade our classrooms and take Johnnie’s hand off his chest just before he utters the dread words “Under God.”

Or (coming right up) storm the courthouse square to demolish a nativity scene and send the wise men packing back to Babylon.

We need to know that CFI stands up for the rights of the committed secularist, the little John Q. Public Unbeliever who thinks big thoughts, no matter what he or she believes. It’s secular America at its best.

Be on the right side of history: join CFI in its fight to send the atheist zombies back to hell.

On my way to drop my two boys off at school this morning I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR.  The story entitled, “A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists“, gave me a profound sense of frustration, pity, and dark amusement.  I want to be clear from the outset that Atheism does not bother me.  I will fight just as hard for someone’s right *not* to believe as much as I would fight for someones right to worship a plate of spaghetti.  What I disagree with is intolerance and bigotry, the source or target of that bigotry and intolerance really is not relevant to me.  Hence, my great frustration with what has come to be known as “New Atheism“.  Give the show a listen if you have a few minutes, here.

I find this neo-atheist approach to be historically ignorant and capable of inciting just as much hatred and intolerance as the fundamentalist religions they so vehemently oppose.  It is a sad but oft repeated human characteristic that those who crusade against a belief system end up becoming exactly what they hate.  And, unfortunately, New Atheism is well on it’s way to becoming exactly what they claim to fight against.  How ironic.  And how sad.  A quote that really struck me from the story was from Christopher Hitchens who said:

I think it should be religion, treated with ridicule and hatred, and contempt, and I claim that right!

What is so sadly ironic about this is how easily this kind of language lends itself to violence against religious people, and hatred.  How is this different from the same sentence written thus:

I think it should be Muslims, treated with ridicule and hatred, and contempt, and I claim that right!

Quite simply it is not in any way different.  What is being defended in these statements is not reason and science in the former, and not holiness and charity in the latter.   But instead both positions advocate for greater fear and hatred of those who dare to disagree with you.  What a person of fundamentalist mentality (believer and non-believer alike) fails to realize is that the methods they use for change are directly represented in the changes they end up manifesting.  Want to use hate to get rid of hate?  You will create more hate.  It is a very clear and predictable outcome to anyone who is able to put their heated emotions aside and use reason, tolerance, and love.

To be fair many Atheists find this new approach reprehensible.  Paul Kurtz, the founder of the Center for Inquiry made a sensible and clear case against the approach of New Atheism by saying:

They are anti-religious, they are mean spirited unfortunately, and I think that does more damage than good.  I consider them ‘Atheist Fundamentalists’.  Merely to critically attack religious beliefs is not sufficient.  What are you for?  We know what you are against, but what are you going to defend?

As a polytheist I know that many people in this country ridicule and make fun of my belief system.  I simply believe what I believe and relish the challenge of being in a minority faith as it forces me to give real thought and feeling to my beliefs and values.  I will never preach for others to believe what I do.  Why stand up for the intolerance that drove me away from established religion in the first place?  Would that not be the height of hypocrisy?  For all of my atheist brothers and sisters out there I declare my public support for your right *not* to believe.  In fact, I think many aspects of Atheism can be helpful to questions of morality and social justice.  But when individual atheists call for religious people to be treated with ridicule and hatred, you can expect my vociferous opposition.  What if Hitchens has said this?

I think it should be blacks, treated with ridicule and hatred, and contempt, and I claim that right!

Rightfully, his career would be over.  Intolerance, bigotry, and hatred, these are the real problems we have as a society.  Democrats, Republicans, Atheists, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Agnostics, and Pagans, are all capable of violence and hatred.  Can’t we all be honest and acknowledge that?  Only when we stop advocating simply for our pet cause, in a juvenile need to “win”, will we really stand up for tolerance and respect for *all*.  But until that time, crusaders of all types walk the same road to Hell hand in hand.

What do you get when you cross a new atheist with a Jehovah’s Witness?
Someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all.

This will be brief. Blasphemy Day, God love it, has come and gone. Soon the giggling will stop. Dogs, horses and Episcopalians will be left wondering what the point was. The few Pentecostals who can read a newspaper will say, “See, told you so,” and head for the basement before the anti-Christ rides through town.

I was musing yesterday why, as a pretty fervent Roman Catholic in the 1960’s, I fell on the floor in paroxysms of laughter when a friend (also Catholic) played Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag” for me for the first time. I still laugh when I hear it, even though most twenty-first century Catholics don’t know what a kyrie eleison is or bother to stand in line for confession. In college, a little less fervent, I knew priests (many of whom aren’t any more) who knew the song from front to back. We used to break it out on cue at Charlie’s Beef and Beer (RIP) at Harvard.

So if irreverence can be funny (and I love irreverence as much as I love Mahler) why do I think Blasphemy Day was such a fuckwitted idea?

Well for one thing, as I said in my two posts on the topic, bad art, bad jokes, and behavior designed to be stupid and offensive are seldom funny except to insiders.

A competition to see who can come up with the worst art, the worst joke, and the most self-referentially stupid behavior will have to be judged by how funny the insiders think it is.

I’m guessing the atheist insiders peed their pants. As for those standing outside the circle (those dogs, horses and Episcopalians), let the cattle judge.

An NPR story on the subject tried to link the Center for Inquiry-sponsored event to a growing rift between old school and new atheism.

If I bought the distinction, I would be expected to say that the “old atheism” as represented by ardent secularists like Paul Kurtz was warm and cuddly whereas the newer form, usually thought to be incarnate in Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris (et al.) is tactically less subtle, more aggressive, unkinder.

But I don’t buy it. The old atheism was full of cranks and angry old men, but some of them were clever. Many of them (as my grandmother used to say) knew a thing or two. The big distinction between the old and the new is that the old atheism depended on a narrative, based in philosophy, and linked itself to a long tradition of rational decision-making. Not choosing to believe in God was an act of deliberation, not a foregone conclusion. At its best, it was studious and reflective. At its worst, it was purely negative, abrasive and sometimes nihilistic.

The best form of the old atheism had a lot in common with certain theological trends, ranging from nominalism to religious realism and minimalism–the sort of stance you get from Don Cupitt’s best writings. The worst, rejectionist stream of atheism, was marked (or marred) by intolerance and a lack of table manners. It was an atheism for the unsophisticated young and the dispirited old. Wedged between were Philistines of all ages, one big unhappy family.

What’s now being called “new atheism” or atheist fundamentalism is really nothing more than the triumph of the jerks. Unsubtle, unlearned (but pretentious), unreflective (but persistent). They have heroes in super-jerks like PZ Myers (yes, the one who drives spikes through communion “crackers” as he calls them, and Korans) because

Edgy is what young people like….They want to cut through the nonsense right away and want to get to the point. They want to hear the story fast, they want it to be exciting, and they want it to be fun. And I’m sorry, the old school of atheism is really, really boring.

Did you get that: really? Presumably Mr Myers has tenure, but I for one would love to see his teaching philosophy unpacked when it comes out in book form. Students may also like it raunchy, naked, and loud. And that’s why we used to think a university was a good place to lead people out of the tribe and toward civilization. Not PZ. Give him a hammer and he’ll follow you anywhere.

Almost as bad is the point made by CFI executive Ron Lindsay who says that his “research” organization will “take the high road, the low road, country roads, interstates, highways, byways, — whatever it takes to reach people.” Sounds strangely like Jesus, except the bit about the low road.

To the extent this highways and hedges approach works, imagine the good news: “Rejoice greatly: for unto you this day is born in the City of Right Reason…absolutely Nothing.”

Here is my prophecy. The raw atheism of the raw atheists who have given us Blasphemy Day and probably have other delights in store for us is loud because they already know no one is listening, at least no one who matters.

The shrill tones of the movement have to be amplified for the same reason cinemas now have to pump up the volume to drown out the hundred private conversations that are going on during the film, person to person, cell phone to cell phone, tweet to tweet. It is shouting, pure and simple because loud wins. Stupid and loud is even better, and outrageously stupid and loud is best.

But while all this is going on, there are many who style themselves humanists and are not believers in any conventional sense who want to say, “Shut up-I’m watching the movie.” (More precisely, “Shut up, we’re trying to think.,” or maybe read. What we need is an intellectual resource for thoughtful humanists, the thoughtful seekers who don’t think it’s cool to “repent” of your baptism by having a hairdryer pointed at your head.

What I miss about the old atheism–even though I still find its central premises wobbly and unconvincing–is that thinking was permitted. The conversation continued. There was no infallible source of confidence. Skepticism reigned.

The new atheism is a catechism of conclusions reached, positions taken, dogmas pronounced. It is more like the Catholicism I giggled to see parodied, a church too sure of itself and its exclusive ability to save souls and reveal the kingdom.

A Prayer:

Amen.

As God once said, and then repented of saying it (Genesis 6.6), “I don’t do sequels.”

Follow-ups about such trivial strategies as the Center for Inquiry Blasphemy Day are a waste of everyone’s time.

But there has been a bit of action on this front, something just short of a news splash–which seems to be the only reason the press-and-media-starved organization concocted this idiotic venture in the first place.

On its own website, former Center for Inquiry chairman Paul Kurtz sensibly distanced himself from the Animal House antics, writing that Blasphemy Day is the active promotion of insult and ridicule, not a defense of free speech but a deliberate attempt to promote indignation through ridicule.

It is one thing to examine the claims of religion in a responsible way… it is quite another to violate the key humanistic principle of tolerance. One may disagree with contending religious beliefs, but to denigrate them by rude caricatures borders on hate speech. What would humanists and skeptics say if religious believers insulted them in the same way? We would protest the lack of respect for alternative views in a democratic society. I apologize to my fellow citizens who have suffered these barbs of indignity.”

Smart words from the former leader and philosopher. They call attention to the fact that the promotion of tolerance includes the right to criticize, but not the need to be deliberately offensive.

It’s also troubling that CFI isn’t connecting the dots between vicious caricatures of Jews, Irish and Polish Catholics, African Americans and the social, educational and economic deprivation these groups suffered as a result of ridicule.

Is this category of insult “different” because it is said to be directed (or so we are urged) at belief rather than at the people who hold the beliefs? Or is dumbness of this magnitude excused because it is sponsored by an organization that touts “reason” and “science” as a basis for its irrational acts and incoherent approach to the values it sees as part of its mission.

In a wayward and hormonal reply to Kurtz, lawyer-turned CFI-CEO Ron Lindsay argued that “Blasphemy cannot be equated with ridicule of religion.”

Of course it can. Blasphemy is just the name given to ridicule, insult, or disparagement when it’s forbidden by religious canons or other laws protecting particular doctrines and practices. The only difference is that what the CFI crowd are doing isn’t blasphemy because there are no laws against their doing it. That’s what makes it ridicule. Moreover (obviously) why then do it?

To try to turn this circus into a temple of reason or a crusade for free speech rather than an exhibition of contempt simply cheapens an organization fast becoming known for taking the low road. Far better if the unfunny architects of Blasphemy Day would simply confess that they decided to sponsor this instead of a “Biggest Atheist Penis Day.”

The Catholic League noted that the “blasphemy contests” were being directed toward Christians rather than Muslims. Why? “Because even the atheists know that Christians can be counted on to react to their antics like good Christians.” More likely, they will ignore it, the same way you cross the street to avoid eye contact with odd-looking people. People like P Z Myers, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota at Morris, known for intentionally desecrating a consecrated communion host. (Ah! Achilles, What Bravery is Here!) He says the day was established to “mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal.” and is quoted as saying he wants every day to be Blasphemy Day.

But the sharpest commentary comes from a particularly folksy, commonsense article in the Indianapolis Star by Robert King: It may be true, he writes, that this “test of wits” designed to see who can come up with the most offensive (sorry, “blasphemous”) image, poem, or tie-dyed T-shirt is protected speech. “But this blasphemy contest strikes me as beneath a crowd of folks who pride themselves on relying on reason and science to find their way through the world. They even offer silly suggested blasphemies, such as ‘God is the Santa Claus You Never Stopped Believing in’. The whole thing strikes me as a bit juvenile — like something a group of teenage boys would come up with around the lunchroom table.”

Oh, come on. Teenage boys have better things to do. Like throwing food.

God’s a delusion (Dawkins). Religion poisons everything (Hitchens). So let’s have the end of faith (Harris)!

Okay. You’ve got your wish. Let’s imagine that the New Atheists have won. The world is our big and collective secular oyster to do whatever we want with. John Lennon’s Imagine  is on everybody’s iPod playlist.

Now what?

Well, let’s talk about eugenics, shall we? Yeah, you know, eugenics. That Social Darwinian thing that has, since the late 19th century, been taboo within the major religious traditions. Eugenics. Setting human reproduction on more rational grounds. Tinkering with the human genome to make better, smarter, faster people. Think Lee Majors and the Six Million Dollar Man:

Based on reason or not, religious taboos tend to keep people away from certain behaviors, and to make them fear those behaviors on visceral grounds, and the fact is that the New Atheism seeks to unloose humanity from all its religious taboos, and to ground our taboos in pragmatic and rational justifications (as opposed to simple religious sanctions).

But this makes it much more likely that serious eugenic projects will be coming in the very near future, doesn’t it? I mean, what’s going to stop them if not religious taboos? Paul Kurtz-style appeals to ethical humanism? Please. And in a sense, the New Atheists have already got their secular wish. There’s lots and lots of places in the world (and with lots and lots of people) where religion is so marginalized that it plays little or no role in policy making. China, for example. You know, the most populous country in the world! China is an atheist nation with top flight geneticists, and there appears to be nothing publicly functioning within that atheist culture that would make tinkering with the human genome taboo. And if you think that, as we speak, there are no “black sites” in China or elsewhere in the world where funky human genetic experiments are going on in secret, you’re kidding yourself. For good or ill, a broad religious taboo is in the process of being breached, and will continue to be breached, and if it goes horrendously wrong religion will not be to blame.

I would like to offer an analogy: Hinduism has long held a taboo against the eating of cows. It may be irrational (from an atheist perspective) to have such a taboo, but it effectively prevents the widespread popularity of McDonald’s in India. There may be a few McDonald’s restaurants in the big cities, and around the airports that Westerners frequent, but an atheist country like China is going to be much more fertile ground for McDonald’s (for good and for ill) than India is. If McDonald’s spreads throughout India someday, whatever good or ill might be brought upon the country by this fact cannot be placed at the door of orthodox Hindus.

Likewise with Darwinian eugenics. The world of the future will be, for better or worse, different from today not because of currently functioning religious taboos against eugenics, but because those taboos will be absent from the equation. The New Atheists will have their wish soon. The world will function much more rationally and non-religiously in the future. The elite atheist, agnostic, and secular scientists of today (and those in the near future) are about to take over the genetic destiny of humankind (against the taboos of religion), and if they make something wonderful of it, they’ll own it. Religion will get no credit for what the world will have become. But as Colin Powell also told President Bush about invading Iraq: “If you break it, you own it.” That will be true of secular eugenics projects too.

In short, if you are an atheist devoted to breaking down irrational religious taboos, and you want to live in a world based strictly on materialist assumptions—and on pragmatism, reason, and science—you might still want to be careful what you wish for, and worry about what such a religion-free and rational future will look like. As Dr. Zaius said to Taylor in Planet of the Apes, “You may not like what you find.”

Without skepticism we might never have invented the umbrella, or the compass.  After all, commonsense observations about storm-clouds and your best friend’s sense of direction make the tools of precaution and measurement possible.

The spirit of curiosity and doubt probably explains many inventions that have made human life more bearable, the world more manageable—at least more intelligible—ranging from telescopes that tell us about the far flung corners of the uncornered universe and microscopes that tell us there are biological realities we can’t see at all without assistance.

There is a common misunderstanding that “skepticism” is something new, a turn of mind that took shape during the Enlightenment after the long dark sleep of religion and superstition.  Even well-educated women and men sometimes think this way, usually pointing to the religious texts and creation stories of our literary infancy as proof that doubt is a skill that evolved over time.   These same people know that while human discovery is a recent story, human intelligence has been around for a long time and that we would not have got very far in the world without doubt.  Just as something in the primal slime saw its future on dry land, someone in a cave must have imagined a happy life in a semi-detached in Wantage or a split-level in Teaneck.

But to be fair to our predecessors.   Ancient creation stories weren’t based on stupidity but on early attempts to reconcile the existence of the seen world with known patterns of causation:  if shoes are made and human beings are, in some sense, made, then the world must have come to be in a similar fashion.  It doesn’t really matter whether you call it creation or “generation.”   The important thing is that human beings asked the question “What caused this?” and then invented the stories that answered it.  We still do, only our stories are better because our observations are different and the causes are better understood.  Frightful thought: doubt leads both to Genesis and to Steven Hawking.

The Big Questions are often Why questions: Why something rather than nothing?  Why this universe and not some differently arranged one?  Why intelligent life as opposed to mere bacterial or not-quite-so intelligent animal life?   Some early skeptics doubted the existence of the natural world, a question still considered au courant in Descartes day.  Even the ancients who did not doubt everything, most particularly the reliability of knowledge, could doubt that the world of the senses provided insight into the real world–recall those Eleatic philosophers like Thales and Heraclitus, for example, who seemed to believe that what we get is not what we see.  I am still enthralled by Democritus’ ideas about the nature of the unseen atom, of stoic ideas about creation and conflagration, and Lucretius’ willingness to turn some of it into—of all things—a poem.

Some questions are Why not questions.  Why not a thousand inhabited planets in this galaxy?  Why, since we can imagine a better universe, a more efficient planet, even a better designed species, are we not living in it, on it, not,  in fact, It?  But both why and why not questions have something in common: they want to know why things are the way they are and not some other way.  The ability to figure out the way things are gives us science.  The ability to create models of existence that differ from the way things are experienced gives us art and technology.  The two capacities are not so much two sides of a coin as two strands in a rather tightly woven rope of human reason and imagination.  Remember Donne’s poem, “I am a little world made cunningly.”  Well, take out the bit about sin and salvation and you’ll see that he just about has it right.

The idea that a household warmed by skepticism and science are the best models for leading a good and fulfilling life is not just untrue for people who see life as more than the “exercise” of reason.  It should also be true for people who value skepticism.

That is why I am troubled by the recently issued Affirmations of  the New Skepticism authored by the founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Paul Kurtz.

I suppose the place to start with these “affirmations” is that they read like the creeds they are intended to supplant.  The Apostle’s and the Nicene Creed begin with the phrase “Credo,” “I believe,” and then go on to posit such events as the creation of the world by God, the eternal generation of Jesus as the only son of the God, the salvation of the world through a crucifixion, and the eternal “progression” of the Holy Spirit through some undefined process, stuck on to the end.  I am pretty sure most Christians who say these words don’t begin to understand them, because if they did they would not say them.

But the Affirmations of the New Skepticism are gobbledygook of an equally pedantic nature, worse perhaps because while the Nicene Creed says preposterous things eloquently, the Affirmations say nothing in particular rather badly.

In the first place, they are statements of a position toward reality, hence “postulates.”  What does it mean to say (Article 1) “We believe in the possibility of discovering reliable human knowledge.”  Except that it doesn’t work as a postulate either: “Human knowledge is possible” is as insightful as saying “Water is wet,” and to say “We believe water is wet….” is—well you get the idea.  Beyond this, one has to question whether the sentence means anything at all: would the headline “Reliable Human Knowledge Discovered” be more significant than the headline “Human Knowledge Discovered.”  The point of course is that knowledge, unless we are speaking of metaphysics, which is not, I think, the agenda here, is of particular things and processes.  Unless this sentence is directed against Sextus Empiricus, it doesn’t mean much to claim to be able to discover “knowledge.”

The Affirmations are a quilt of equally badly thought out triticisms.  With apologies to the Tampa Tribune columnist who once japed a political writer with the following parody (badly paraphrased),  on Gilbert and Sullivan,

“It’s obvious, it’s obvious, he’s positing the obvious: He tells us what we always knew in terms so flat, it’s all review–in glaring generalities and uninspired banalities.”

So banal that it is hard to imagine the audience for this creed.

The worst bit of the Affirmations is not the sense but the syntax:  they ask for skepticism to be “extended to all areas of human endeavor—science, everyday life, law, religion, and the paranormal.”   Mercifully, lawn-mowing has not been included.

Syntactical short-cutting asks us to imagine these “areas of endeavor” as of one sort, when (a) they are a laundry list of uncategorized nouns, into which science has crept as an area recommended for scientific inquiry; (b) might not be susceptible to “scientific inquiry” to the same degree, in the same way, or at all, and (c) are not really what the author wants to say.  What he wants to say is that smart people need to make smart choices about certain activities and that skepticism is a useful tool to achieve smartness.  Despite the cloudy phrasing, the Affirmations “believe in clarity rather than obfuscation, lucidity in the place of confusion and linguistic definitions to overcome vagueness or ambiguity.”  Personally, I prefer Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia to mud, but call me picky.

The remainder of the Affirmations is an effusion of treacle, if treacle can be inconsistent.  “We do not reject any claim to knowledge prior to inquiry.”  It has, as a professor of mine once said, “an air of philosophy about it,” textbook possibilism.   But surely a coherent skepticism rejects all sorts of things out of hand, including claims about patchwork elephants and Guanilo’s perfect island.

Unsurprising, then, that only a few affirmations down the list, the author rejects out of hand “mythologies of salvation whether based on ancient fears or current messianic illusions unsubstantiated by corroborative empirical grounds.”   Not sure how one can reject a messianic illusion on the basis of investigation before the empirical, corroborative ground one is standing on is trembling at the Rapture, but I look forward to the experience.  Again syntax is the enemy, as salvation becomes not a matter –a doctrine–to which doubt can be applied but a system springing from “ancient fears” and “messianic illusions.”  That is a tough characterization to overcome through dispassionate investigation.

My last criticism actually extends to the whole thought-process behind the Affirmations. The solipsisms and phrasal potholes reveal a mind already narrowed to believe that instead of the two woven  strands of why and why not science is really a whip to be used to beat the past:  “We believe in inquiry rather than authority, reason in the place of tradition.”  The euphony of chiasmus has always been the enemy of sound reason: How for instance would we create a legal or constitutional system on inquiry rather than tradition?  If the methods of science do not possess authority beyond the heuristic value of inquiry, on what grounds do we defend the method?   Or do the Affirmations mean to say authority and tradition only when speaking of religion, which is an important source of legal tradition and even legal reasoning? Is the author distinguishing between the authority of dogma, as distinct from the soundness of a proposition and a conclusion based on experiment?

“Clarity rather than obfuscation?”  Before trusting too much in these proposals, readers should at least insist that the Affirmations reflect the clarity of thought they extol.

This narrow vision at its narrowest sees human happiness, essentially, as a celebration of the world technology can erect “to alleviate suffering, reduce pain, and ameliorate and enhance human happiness.”  Skepticism, in other words, does not extend to the evil that science can perpetrate, the questionable benefits technology has achieved by injuring the planet for short term gain, the ethical irresolution science and skepticism wreak when the humane is equated with the merely human.   Even following the logic of the sixth affirmation (”We ask for facts, not supposition, experimental evidence, not anecdotal hearsay or conjecture,  logical inference and deduction, not faith or intuition”) there would be plenty of reason to reject the idea that science is the source  “of all worthwhile inquiry about the world and that it can be enlisted to solve problems, neutralize animosities, compromise [sic] hatred and negotiate differences” (article 3).  Frankly, faith, intuition and good intentions have done at least as much to ameliorate hatred as science. Technology has killed more of the naked than it has ever clothed.

There is no profound sense in this bombastic paean to the skeptical muse, in other words, that the mere affirmation of science and skepticism falls dismally short of a coherent humanist vision of the past and its connectedness to the future.  The author seems to have some sense of the limits of these proposals in the last affirmation, where he writes, “We are not negative skeptics, naysayers, debunkers, cynics, or nihilists.”

There is nothing “new” about this New Skepticism.  It is more of the same old debunking and ghost-busting that sees Jesus, Bigfoot, Muhammad and the Amityville Haunt as stars of the same carnival sideshow.  And that is the affirmation that deserves the most skeptical review possible.

Now that Paul Kurtz has put the record straight about the nature of his ouster from the Center for Inquiry Board chairmanship (reprinted below),  let me chime in for what, I promise, is a last time on this sad state of affairs.

Those of you who know me–perhaps not many of those who read the blog on this matter–will know that it is not my style to engage in ad hominem attacks–though I have often wondered what other kind there are.  (Presumably an attack on a cow is an ad vaccam attack but would only be sensible if somebody is desperate for milk.)   The brief observations I made on this page were a different genre–and I thank those of you who wrote acknowledging this fact.  The “biographia literaria” is often trenchantly critical, sometimes severe, but tries to be fair to its subject.  It is not, as someone suggested, a “living obituary” (eh?).

The purpose of my comments was to put into context the events that transpired at CFI in the first week of June.  I was slightly amused that the conversation quickly turned from a discussion of the article to a conversation about whether my report had been factual–inasmuch as I was not in the room.  My distance from the boardroom highlights three related theological dilemmas: (a) the empty tomb problem (no one saw it who’s now reporting it), (b) reports of those who were there and whose report differs from the events, and (c)  the event itself , which is probably best left to the eventuee to describe, as he has now done.  When in doubt, invoke Schlomo’s Razor.  Schlomo is the famous Jewish robber who, caught in the act with a stash of jewels dripping from his pockets, said:  “Who are you going to believe–me or your own eyes.”

I have opportunistically raised the question of Jesus because he illustrates a pattern in the history of corporate group-think, one that can be applied here.  We all know that Jesus somehow managed to get his name associated with a movement called Christianity even though he never founded a church and seems to have been a pretty poor judge of followers.  As far as we know, his disciples didn’t found churches either and came to sundry martyrish ends.  On the other hand, St Paul was so good at it that it became necessary to make him an honorary apostle  and supply him with a graduate degree in revelation experience, just to account for  his success in bringing off what Jesus never could.  The first order of business was to vote the historical Jesus out of existence and hand power over to a new class of bureaucrats, the bishops.  Once his words were slapped between covers in the canon, they could conveniently be set aside and the real work of corporate development could begin.

Jump ahead:  In 2005 the “inventor” of Rational Emotive Therapy, the sexologist and outspoken atheist Albert Ellis was dismissed from his role as CEO of his Institute in Manhattan by his own board.  The reason given for his sacking was sadly predictable:  He did not like the way things were being run–especially the innovations of some of the younger therapists he had trained himself–and the board could no longer tolerate the way he ran them.  Interference was called, removal from the game was just a vote away. Ellis died in 2007, his legacy in question, and also the disposition of his property at 45 East 65th Street.

The preservation of an ideology is where the founder has to take a stand. It is (as he sees it) his moral obligation.  Nothing is more important.  But the change that is necessary for growth characterizes every management crisis from early Christianity down to Ellis–and CFI.  These two imperatives–the founder’s vision and the game of success–don’t often mix well.  Jesus had the good sense to be crucified at 33  before the change to his mission and message could be implemented, but there is tantalizing evidence that the changes were happening all around him.  Ellis chose to fight until the age of 93, through lawyers and his partner, Debbie Joffe, over property and presentation, and died before the empire crumbled like the statue of Ozymandias.  (And we all know that lawyers are at least as good as the Taliban at abasing statues and organizations).

Paul Kurtz, no friend of Jesus (for which he is to be commended perhaps) and a good friend of the late Albert Ellis now stares history in the face.  But it will not be his fiat that determines the course of his Center or the fate of secular humanism.  Founders do not seem to have the luxury of deciding how their legacies will be judged, or even whether a future generation will buy their product.  The economic shock from which the world is recovering had something to do with the terribly odd notion that certain companies like Lehman Brothers and General Motors had a different corporate DNA than lesser companies.  Henry Lehman and William Durant on the other hand were merely human and long dead when the troubles arose.

So let’s see where CFI goes from here, but let’s be clear about the non-equation between what a founder wants and what he creates.  The  “founders” of important organizations are obviously motivated by the finish line.  The nature of history however, is to keep moving the line.

This little parable doesn’t take into account the thousands of organizations that don’t survive beyond the family restaurant model of development.  Where I live in New York,, a famous Italian restaurant shut its underused doors a few years ago because Grandpa Leone would not leave the kitchen, fired his son (who had made changes to the pasta dishes and added wine to the menu) and retaken control.  He was certain that the downward spiral was caused by his son’s mismanagement and taste for new cuisine. He had convinced himself that his homemade pasta was enough to draw the crowds.  They didn’t come.

I don’t suggest for a moment that changing a menu is a recipe for success and corporate growth.  I am just saying that success isn’t possible without it.  Just ask the guy at the Rent-it-All center that stands on the site of Leone’s Family Italian Restaurant.

Meanwhile, we wish Paul Kurtz and the Center for Inquiry, whatever the terms of their future relationship,  every success in bringing vision to action and action to reality.

jh

_________________

This comment from Center for Inquiry founder Paul Kurtz was left on the thread about CFI’s recent changes in leadership.

I didn’t want it to get lost, so I’m reposting it here in full:

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

May I set the historical record straight. I was unceremoniously ousted as Chairman of the Center for Inquiry/Transnational on June 1, 2009. It is totally untruthful to state that I was not. The effort by the CEO to cover up this deed offends any sense of fairness and I do not wish to be party to that deception. It was a palace coup clear and simple by those who wish to seize immediate power.

I founded the various organizations of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), including CSICOP (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry or CSI) and the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH) and I labored tirelessly for years. And I served without any compensation whatsoever for over 33 years, devoting my life blood to these organizations and the high ideals that they represent. The broad goals of CFI are to defend the scientific outlook and critical thinking in the public at large and to develop secular ethical humanist values as alternatives to religion. There are now 40 Centers and Communities world wide. We are the largest secular humanist and scientific rationalist organization of its kind in North America.

The Board of Directors removed me as Chairman (I am “Chairman Emeritus”) and stripped me of any authority or responsibility to see that the Center for Inquiry continues to grow during the current economic crisis. I had agreed to a succession plan, but it was supposed to be a gradual process. I am concerned that the direction CFI will be changed.

I should further state that at one point, the Board majority notified me that if I did not agree with my ouster that they would eject me from my office from our world headquarters in Amherst, New York, a building that I designed and raised the funds to build. It is across the street from the State University of New York at Buffalo campus, where I served for many years as Professor of Philosophy.

I have agreed to remain on the Board for now — though I feel completely demoralized by the power grab — after a degrading Inquisition conducted by the Board a year ago and my final Expulsion from an organization, which I love dearly, and whose future survival I fear is now endangered.

Paul Kurtz

Something is rotten at the Center for Inquiry and inquiring minds want to know what happened why Paul Kurtz was removed from office. The Friendly Atheist has been following this issue closely over the past few days. First, he reported former CFI leader R. Joseph Hoffmann’s account, which Friendly Atheist described thusly:

He has a lot to say about how Kurtz has shaped the movement (he affected you whether you heard of him or not) and how his vision never quite came to fruition. There are also several strong barbs in there. It’s a compelling read, though I still haven’t figured out how much of it is accurate, how much is speculation, and how much is just sheer frustration at how Kurtz operated.

Then Friendly Atheist reported the account by current CEO of CFI, Dr. Ron Lindsay. And then finally Kurtz himself spoke out here and in this open letter to R. Joseph Hoffmann. And it seems, Kurtz ain’t too happy about what went down:

May I set the historical record straight. I was unceremoniously ousted as Chairman of the Center for Inquiry/Transnational on June 1, 2009. It is totally untruthful to state that I was not. The effort by the CEO to cover up this deed offends any sense of fairness and I do not wish to be party to that deception. It was a palace coup clear and simple by those who wish to seize immediate power.

And from the open letter to Hoffmann:

I am dismayed by Raymond Joseph Hoffmann’s uncharitable ad hominem attacks upon me. I had considered Joe a friend, and colleague, and I am deeply wounded by his scathing remarks about my personal integrity, scholarship, and my dedication to humanist ethical values — in theory as well as praxis.

It looks like things have gotten ugly already. We’ll just have to wait and see how this one plays out.

by PAUL KURTZ

Free Inquiry – Volume 29, Number 3

Increasingly, world civilization is becoming secular; that is, it emphasizes worldly rather than religious values. This is especially true of Europe, which is widely considered post-religious and post-Christian (though with a small Islamic minority). Secularist winds are also blowing strong in Asia, notably in Japan and China. The United States has been an anomaly in this regard, for it has suffered a long dark night in which evangelical fundamentalism has overshadowed the public square with its insistence that belief in God is essential for moral virtue. Interestingly, this is now changing, and secularism is gaining ground. Even President Obama recognizes the existence of unbelievers; at least 16 percent of Americans do not belong to a religious denomination. Young people today are more secular, with up to 25 percent nonreligious.

Accordingly, we may ask, what is secular ethics? Although secularists are nonreligious, they may also be good citizens, loving parents, and decent people. Instead of religion, they look to science, the secular arts, and literature for their inspiration. They point out that religious belief is no guarantee of moral probity, that horrendous crimes have been committed in the name of God, and that religionists often disagree vociferously about concrete moral judgments (such as euthanasia, the rights of women, abortion, stem-cell research, homosexuality, war, and peace). As I have pointed out, secular ethics needs to be internalized within the life of a person to be effective.

The ethics of humanism traces its origins back to the beginnings of Western civilization in Greece and Rome, through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the scientific and democratic revolutions of the modern world. Secular humanists today affirm that every person should be considered equal in dignity and value and that human freedom is precious. The civic virtues of democracy are essentially humanist, for they emphasize tolerance of the wide diversity of beliefs and lifestyles, and they are committed to defending human rights. The conjunction of secular and humanism brings both of these intellectual and moral forces together.

But “How can you be ethical if you do not believe in God?” protests the believer. Perhaps such a person should enroll in an elementary course in ethics, where he or she would discover a rich philosophical literature dealing with this question. The good is usually defined as “happiness,” though there are differences between the eudemonistic (emphasizing enriched self-development) and the hedonistic (particularly American) brand of intemperate consumption. Perhaps a harmonious integration of the two theories can be achieved. I would call it rational exuberance. Philosophers have emphasized the importance of self-restraint, temperance, rational prudence; of a life in which satisfaction, excellence, and the creative fulfillment of a person’s talents is achieved. It does not mean that “anything goes.” Humanist ethics focuses on the good life here and now.

Secularists recognize the importance of self-interest in a person’s life—many of them are libertarians. Every individual needs to be concerned with his or her own health, well-being, and career. But self-interest can be enlightened. This involves recognition that we have responsibilities to others. There are principles of right and wrong that we should live by. No doubt there are differences about many moral issues. Often there may be difficulties in achieving a consensus. Negotiation and compromise are essential in a pluralistic society.

However, there is now substantial evidence drawn from evolutionary biology that humans possess an innate moral sense. Morality has its roots in group survival: the moral practices that evolved enabled tribes or clans to survive and function. This means that human beings are potentially moral. Whether or not this moral sense is realized depends on social and environmental conditions. Some individuals may never fully develop morally—they may be morally handicapped, even sociopathic. That is one reason society needs to enact laws to protect itself.

There is also of course cultural relativity, but there are, I submit, also a set of common moral virtues that cut across cultures—such as being truthful, honest, kind, keeping promises, being dependable and responsible, avoiding cruelty, etc.—and these in time become widely recognized as binding. Herein lie the roots of empathy and caring for other human and sentient beings. Such behavior needs to be nourished in the young by means of moral education (and cultivated throughout life). In any case, human beings are capable of both self-interested and altruistic behavior in varying degrees.

Secular humanists wish to evaluate ethical principles in the light of their consequences, and they advise the use of rational inquiry to frame moral judgments. They also appreciate the fact that some principles are so important that they should not be easily sacrificed to achieve one’s ends.

To say that a person is moral only if he or she obeys God’s commandments—out of fear or love of God or a desire for salvation—is hardly adequate. Ethical principles need to be internalized, rooted in reason and compassion. The ethics of secularism is autonomous in the sense that it need not be derived from theological grounds. Secular humanists are interested in enhancing the good life both for the individual and society.

Today, a new imperative has emerged: an awareness that our ethical concerns should extend to all members of the world community. This points to a new planetary ethics transcending the ancient religious, ethnic, racial, and national enmities of the past. It is an ethic that recognizes our common interests and needs as part of an interdependent world. It is rather urgent in our global world that we develop morality applicable to the twenty-first century and beyond.

Postscript: Secular ethics, in my view, will not be fully effective unless it can be applied to personal morality.

In what could turn out to be a giant leap for cloud computing, a collection of cyber security experts from across the IT spectrum has launched the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The group’s stated mission is to promote best practices that ensure security in the cloud, and founding members include everyone from Jim Reavis, co-founder of Reavis Consulting Group, to David Cullinane, chief information security officer at eBay (s EBAY), and Alan Boehme, senior VP of IT strategy and architecture at ING (s ING).

I spoke with founding member Paul Kurtz, partner at Good Harbor Consulting, to get some details on the news — and I was a little surprised by what he had to say. While questions still remain in areas like data retrieval and identity management, Kurtz believes cloud computing is already secure enough to be used by large enterprises for mission-critical tasks. In fact, he thinks there are many security advantages to cloud computing. These include rapid software updates and upgrades, and, depending on the provider, multifactor authentication. It’s the outsourcing of IT operations to a third party that makes execs “swallow hard,” but he notes that even large banks already have run SAS 70 audits and assured themselves they can get what they need from the cloud.

With this in mind, the CSA exists not to make the cloud ready for the enterprise, but to make sure it remains usable. “The point is to think about security now, not after we’ve had a big event,” he told me; you don’t want to retrofit a fix. And given the “intense gravitational pull” of all things into the cloud, now is a timely moment to convene this consortium of practitioners. Thus far, Kurtz is not aware of any successful attacks on the cloud, but he points out that there’s no harm in being ahead of the game.

Kurtz, who advised President Bush on critical infrastructure protection and looked at information security for the Obama transition team, says the cloud is even ready for the security requirements of the federal government. “The real question,” he noted, “is whether the federal government is ready for cloud computing.” For example, the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) was developed with client-server architectures in mind, and it still requires agency-by-agency accreditation for each individual vendor. This process becomes highly repetitive with the cloud model, though, where each agency would be testing the same system over and over again.

But change could be on the way. Kurtz says Vivek Kundra, administrator for e-government and IT for the Office of Management and Budget (essentially CIO for the federal government), is a big proponent of the cloud. (Check out this video of Obama’s TIGR team, including Kundra in his previous role as CTO for the District of Columbia, touting cloud computing.) Several agencies already are considering how to leverage the cloud, and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) CIO John Garing told me in October that he supports the formation of a single entity to provide computing services to all of the federal government. Such a sweeping change would have to come from the White House and Congress, he said, and that possibility seems a lot more likely with our pro-cloud executive branch.

Even before its official launch at the RSA Conference later this month, the CSA seems more legit than the “vapor tiger” Open Cloud Manifesto. As opposed to over-competitive vendors proposing — and quibbling over — non-binding, non-functional principles, the CSA comprises actual cloud users and security experts, and it already has 15 specific areas in which it plans to issue actual deliverables throughout the year. Such alliances already have borne fruit in web services and grid computing, so there’s reason to have faith in the CSA.

Despite the fact that many Americans distrust the National Security Agency for its role in the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, the agency should be entrusted with securing the nation’s telecommunications networks and other cyber infrastructures, President Obama’s director of national intelligence told Congress on Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair told the House intelligence committee (.pdf) that the NSA, rather than the Department of Homeland Security which currently oversees cybersecurity, has the smarts and the skills to secure cyberspace.

“The National Security Agency has the greatest repository of cyber talent,” Blair said. “[T]here are some wizards out there at Fort Meade who can do stuff.”

Blair added that “because of the offensive mission that they have, they’re the ones who know best about what’s coming back at us and it’s defenses against those sorts of things that we need to be able to build into wider and wider circles.”

He acknowledged that the agency had a trust handicap to overcome due to its role in the Bush Administration’s secret domestic spying program, and therefore asked Congress to help convince the public that it’s the right agency for the task.

“I think there is a great deal of distrust of the National Security Agency and the intelligence community in general playing a role outside of the very narrowly circumscribed role because of some of the history of the FISA issue in years past. . . . So I would like the help of people like you who have studied this closely and served on commissions, the leadership of the committee and finding a way that the American people will have confidence in the supervision, in the oversight of the role of NSA so that it can help protect these wider bodies. So, to me, that’s one of the keys things that we have to work on here in the next few months.”

Blair is not without support for his view. Paul Kurtz, who led the cybersecurity group on Obama’s transition team and was part of Bush’s White House National Security Council, recently told Forbes that he supports the NSA taking a prominent role in cybersecurity.

Continue reading…

The spy shop that brought you the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program wants to expand its power under President Barack Obama, the nation’s top intelligence chief told Congress Wednesday, in a little-noticed intelligence grab.

While acknowledging that many distrust the agency for its role in eavesdropping, Obama Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair said he believed the agency should expand into a permanent role in handling government cyber security efforts.

In essence, his agency’s move is an effort to take the responsibilities away from the Homeland Security Department. The head of Obama’s cyber security transition team, Paul Kurtz, said he supports giving the NSA more power in handling cyber security.

Blair told a House committee: “The National Security Agency has the greatest repository of cyber talent.”

“There are some wizards out there … who can do stuff,” Blair added. “I think that capability should be harnessed and built on.”

Some critics have questioned whether the agency is already involved in surveilling domestic e-mail and other correspondence in searching for foreign intelligence threats.

Blair said that foreign countries increasingly post a threat to the US in the cyber security realm. The agency, in general, is tasked with foreign intelligence.

“A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure,” Blair remarked. “Cyber-defense is not a one-time fix; it requires a continual investment.”

But he said that the NSA had “two strikes out” for its role in appearing to subvert civil liberties. Many critics say that Bush’s wiretapping program was illegal, because taps did not go through proper court channels.

“The NSA is both intelligence and military, two strikes out in terms of the way some Americans think about a body that ought to be protecting their privacy and civil liberties,” Blair said.

“I think there is a great deal of distrust of the National Security Agency and the intelligence community in general playing a role outside of the very narrowly circumscribed role because of some of the history of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] issue in years past,” he continued. “So I would like the help of people like you who have studied this closely and served on commissions, the leadership of the committee and finding a way that the American people will have confidence in the supervision.”

By William Jackson
February 18, 2009
Government Computer News

America has to face up to the realities of cyberwarfare with tactical and strategic planning, Kurtz says

The intelligence community and the military have crucial roles to play in protecting cyber space, former presidential adviser Paul E. Kurtz said Wednesday, and a clear command and control structure is needed to ensure that our information infrastructure can survive and recover from major disruptions.

In his opening address at the Black Hat Federal security conference being held in Arlington, Va., Kurtz, who served on the National and Homeland Security councils under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said the nation has been reluctant to consider the proper role of government in regulating and defending cyberspace. He said it is important that these decisions be made openly after public discussion rather than allowed to happen behind closed doors.

“To those who object to the militarization of cyberspace, I would say, it’s too late: We’re already there,” Kurtz said.

Kurtz, who recently served as cybersecurity adviser on President Barack Obama’s transition team, steered clear of discussing his advice to the new administration. But he praised the 60-day review of federal cybersecurity initiatives announced by the president on Feb. 9 and called Melissa Hathaway, the Bush administration official tapped to conduct it, “exceptionally capable.”

He said the United States should apply some of the lessons learned during the Cold War to cyber conflicts now simmering online. Cyber warfare is not as simple as the bipolar confrontation between the Western democracies and the Soviet bloc, Kurtz said. It is multilateral standoff involving multiple nations, shadowy organizations, and individual hackers and criminals.

“But I do think a number of concepts from the Cold War may apply, and one of these is deterrence,” he added.

A clear policy of deterrence by the United States and its allies helped to avoid the use of nuclear weapons. But no similar policy has been established for battles fought over networks. There is no definition of cyberwarfare, no policy on how and when cyber weapons should be deployed and used, and we do not have a clear idea of who our enemies are.

“We must begin by addressing the question of attribution,” Kurtz said. The ability to collect, share and analyze data in order to tailor responses to a threat is “the beginning of a deterrence policy.”

That ability will require the efforts of the intelligence community, in cooperation with law enforcement and the private sector, he said. Each of these sectors now collects large amounts of data, but the same inability to share and “connect the dots” that led to the 2001 terrorist attacks still plague our cybersecurity, he said.

Continue reading…

In the previous post, we introduced the ethical theory of optimistic humanism.  In this post, we will start to analyze optimistic humanism in order to see whether it can adequately explain morality.

Many of the same objections can be cited for optimistic humanism as were cited for social Darwinism because both base their ethics on evolution and so both suffer from similar deficiencies.  Optimistic humanism, though it tries to escape the logical results of social Darwinism, does not completely succeed. 

First, this theory offers no mechanism to objectively judge heinous crimes such as those of Nazi Germany.  We intuitively know that gassing millions of innocent Jews is morally outrageous, but how would optimistic humanism condemn these activities?  When Nielsen and Kurtz tell us to adopt morality in line with our life plans and in sync with the “throb and excitement of life,” on what grounds can they call the atrocities of Germany wrong?   J. P. Moreland answers:

After all, many of the Nazis found a lot of excitement in killing other humans, and this activity was obviously one to which they attached value.  If an optimistic humanist responds by saying that we ought not to do this, then he is inconsistent.  For now he is using an absolutist sense of ought.  It even seems he uses an absolutist sense of ought if he tells us we have a moral obligation to be optimistic humanists.  So optimistic humanism either fails to provide the rationale for a moral objection to obviously immoral behavior, or if it does provide such a rationale, it becomes inconsistent.

Kai Nielsen would seem to have to agree with this assessment because he states that his theory of ethics “doesn’t give you an absolutism.”   But if there is no absolute wrong, then the Nazis were not absolutely wrong.  Nielsen and Kurtz leave the door open for Nazi atrocities to be justified and any ethical theory which cannot categorically state that Nazi Germany was morally wrong must be in serious error.

There are additional problems with optimistic humanism.  As there is no ultimate rational source for its moral dictates, there can be no prescriptive element or “oughtness” to it.  Morality is experienced as a communication between two minds and it carries an incumbency.  With evolution as the source of optimistic humanism, where is the transmitting mind?  A communication that comes from a random process can and should be ignored.  There can be no rational obligation to follow any of the ethics of optimistic humanism.  According to J.P. Moreland, Paul Kurtz “admits that the ultimate values of humanism are incapable of rational justification.”

Much more analysis of optimistic humanism is to come, so please come back.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

In previous posts, we have built an understanding of seven aspects of morality that seem to be true.  Following those posts, we examined a popular ethical system in the early 20th century known as social Darwinism, and we found that it utterly fails to explain what we know of moral norms.  But social Darwinism is an easy target which most people disavow these days.  Ethicists who base their systems on Darwinian evolution dismiss social Darwinism as an unfortunate mistake that later evolutionary ethical systems have corrected.

So in this post and the following series of posts, we will examine two modern ethical systems that are both derived from Darwinian evolution.  These systems are more sophisticated than social Darwinism and attempt to avoid that system’s mistakes.

First up for analysis is optimistic humanism.  This system uses Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the source of morality, but it does not use evolution for the justification of adopting the moral life.  Optimistic humanism recognizes that just because the natural and unguided process of evolution produced moral feelings or instincts in mankind, it does not follow that human beings should therefore adopt the moral lifestyle, which would entail obeying all of the moral impulses that evolution “created.”  This view recognizes the “is/ought” fallacy and seeks to avoid it.  Just because moral feelings or impulses exist does not mean that we ought to obey them.

Optimistic humanists believe, according to philosopher J. P. Moreland, that “there is no reason why something rather than nothing exists, there is no purpose toward which the cosmos or human history is moving, humans are modified monkeys which have resulted from a blind process of chance mutations, and real, irreducible moral values do not exist.”

Why should a person be moral?  According to optimistic humanism, it is because leading a moral life will give you personal satisfaction.  Proponents of this view offer several ways of defining personal satisfaction.  Atheistic philosopher Kai Nielsen says that “there can be purposes in life even if there is no purpose to life.”   He speaks of each individual developing a life plan that may include career goals and social goals.  Meaning can be found in “things like love, friendship, caring, knowledge, self-respect, pleasure in life.”  

Humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz explains, “The humanist maintains as his first principle that life is worth living, at least that it can be found to have worth. . . . The universe is neutral, indifferent to man’s existential yearnings.  But we instinctively discover life, experience its throb, its excitement, its attraction.”

Nielsen seems to believe that there is a subjective choice to be made to live the moral life and that there is no rational reason that can be given for making this choice; it is simply a personal choice and that is all there is to it.   Once a person is in the moral framework, then the way that person determines right and wrong is to reflect on the world’s morality and build a coherent system.  In his words, you “start with considered judgments and then you try to get them into a coherent pattern with everything else you know, with the best theories of the function of morality in society, with the best theories we have about human nature.”

To summarize, optimistic humanism asserts that human beings can create or adopt their own values within their lives and adapt these values to their life plans and goals.  Moral values are not objectively real and are indeed only tools to be used by men as they see fit within a moral framework.  According to optimistic humanists, even though evolution is the source for our moral instincts, it does not provide the rational ground for why someone should act morally; but this does not mean that mankind cannot subjectively choose to live the moral life.  They agree that no reason can be given for why someone ought to choose the moral life, but all other ethical systems suffer from the same problem.

In the next post, we will analyze optimistic humanism and see whether it adequately explains our seven characteristics of morality.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

By John Andrew Prime
January 10, 2009
Shreveport Times | The Times

The head of the Cyber Innovation Center met Friday with the man many believe will be the nation’s chief technology officer, dubbed the cyber czar, under the Obama administration.

CIC Executive Director Craig Spohn met in Washington with Paul Kurtz, whom insiders say is on a short list of technology experts vying to be President-elect Obama’s leading adviser on national cyber security issues. He has appeared on platforms with Obama on several occasions in past weeks and months.

“Paul Kurtz is a very helpful young man with excellent credentials for the position of Cyber Czar,” said Spohn, who is heading development of the center City and its associated National Cyber Research Park on 64 acres north of Barksdale Air Force Base and east of Bossier Parish Community College in Bossier City.

“His knowledge and understanding of the national cyber assets and critical infrastructure combined various agencies that have the responsibility of protecting them make him one of few people that pass the down-select process.”

Spohn said his talk with Kurtz focused on “additional agencies in the national cyber construct that would serve to complement the Air Force, among other groups, that would make good candidates for inclusion in the National Cyber Research Park.”

While Spohn has not listed them for the record, the candidates are those agencies with three, four and even five initials familiar to the public, including but not limited to the CIA, FBI and NSA.

Continue reading…

Today’s Friday – usually a big news day in Washington, whether by design (bury bad news late in a deep weekend news hole) or by human error (bureaucrats tried all week to get something done and slipped it in at the deadline).  There should be Obama cabinet announcements today, and meanwhile tech luminaries across the country are sitting by their phones, drumming their fingers and hoping for a call offering them the position of the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer. Norm Lorentz, who was OMB’s first-ever CTO, told C-SPAN this week that “If I were asked, I would serve in a heartbeat.”

But now, just this morning, there’s fresh speculation in a Forbes piece “Seeking Obama’s Cyber Czar” that the CTO post could be overshadowed in influence and presidential access by a less-flashy but more influential nation’s first cybersecurity chief. Andy Greenberg writing this morning reminds us of how that particular post was introduced:

“As president, I’ll make cyber security the top priority that it should be in the 21st century,” Obama said in a rare mention of the issue in a speech at Purdue University last July. “I’ll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset and appoint a National Cyber Adviser who will report directly to me.”

Greenberg even reports that “the likeliest candidate for the cyber czar job may have been seated on stage a few feet away from the presidential frontrunner at his Purdue speech. Paul Kurtz, currently a security consultant with Arlington, Va.-based Good Harbor Consulting, may have already been informally offered the post, according to several sources within Washington’s cybersecurity community, although he has privately told colleagues that he is reluctant to accept it.”

After what happened to John Brennan and the CIA position last month, I’m not sure how reliable it is to be “informally offered the post” … Don’t quit the day job.

Meanwhile, regarding the CTO position, I noticed the interesting tidbit buried in an updated Washington Post story last night about President-elect Obama’s likely choice for FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, whom I’ve met at various DC-area tech activities over the past few years – he’s a super-active former FCC official and now venture capitalist.

Sources close to transition officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Genachowski had been recently meeting with key Democratic lawmakers to see if the role of CTO would have policy-making authority and decided against taking the job when he realized the definition of CTO would not include a strong regulatory role. Instead, Genachowski expressed interest in the FCC post. He previously served as chief counsel to former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt.

I’m not a huge fan of government regulation, so I took that as a good sign.  But one can also take it as a n indicator that key Washington players may know what the the CTO position shouldn’t be – but they still don’t know exactly what it should be. And inside the Beltway, that’s usually a formula for inaction.

Congressional Quarterly reported this week that the reason the CTO post hasn’t been filled yet is because the Obama team hasn’t yet decided exactly what the job will do: “Because the nation has never had a CTO, Obama either has to work out a job description before he can attract a candidate, or he has to select a candidate and then negotiate the CTO’s duties with his new hire… Washington communications insiders tuned into the CTO show say the extra decision-making appears to be slowing things down.”

 The good news is that outside the Beltway, government CTO’s continue their work without the hoopla. I’ve been following the State of Utah’s CTO, David Fletcher, as he writes a good blog which describes his innovative uses of live web services and tech practices to deliver better information to the citizens of his state about their government’s activities.  Bigtime user of RSS for delivery of government news!  For a good quick summary of his work, check out last week’s blogpost on the past year’s “top-10 e-government / technology accomplishments for the state of Utah.” 

Dave’s also an active twitterer and as you read his microblogging there, you’ll pick up non-obtrusive mentions of his fluent use of technologies like iPhone, Flickr, Windows Live, Twitter, GoogleTranslate, CrunchBase, youTube, and, this week, Microsoft’s Live Mesh.

Bottom line: The cynic in me wonders whether all the backroom politicking going on over the federal post is a harbinger of something very different from Utah’s CTO and those in other cities and states: a position instead mired in congressional reports, Hill testimony, and bureaucratic torpor. Not the kind of role that will attract, or certainly keep, a top-notch visionary.

Whoever the new federal CTO is, one immediate sign will be if she or he follows in Dave Fletcher’s path of openly and frequently communicating with the citizenry and the tech community, by blogging (and microblogging!) about the promise, importance, and fun of new technology. 

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Recently I have read a article at the following site. I decided to write a review of the following section that quite disturbed me, extremely! The article was written by Paul Kurtz on, A Secular Humanist Declaration, namely section 4, Ethics Based On Critical Intelligence. You can read below;

(written by Paul Kurtz)

“The moral views of secular humanism have been subjected to criticism by religious fundamentalist theists. The secular humanist recognizes the central role of morality in human life; indeed, ethics was developed as a branch of human knowledge long before religionists proclaimed their moral systems based upon divine authority. The field of ethics has had a distinguished list of thinkers contributing to its development: from Socrates, Democritus, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Epictetus, to Spinoza, Erasmus, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, Bentham, Mill, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and others. There is an influential philosophical tradition that maintains that ethics is an autonomous field of inquiry, that ethical judgments can be formulated independently of revealed religion, and that human beings can cultivate practical reason and wisdom and, by its application, achieve lives of virtue and excellence. Moreover, philosophers have emphasized the need to cultivate an appreciation for the requirements of social justice and for an individual’s obligations and responsibilities toward others. Thus, secularists deny that morality needs to be deduced from religious belief or that those who do not espouse a religious doctrine are immoral. For secular humanists, ethical conduct is, or should be, judged by critical reason, and their goal is to develop autonomous and responsible individuals, capable of making their own choices in life based upon an understanding of human behavior. Morality that is not God-based need not be antisocial, subjective, or promiscuous, nor need it lead to the breakdown of moral standards. Although we believe in tolerating diverse lifestyles and social manners, we do not think they are immune to criticism. Nor do we believe that any one church should impose its views of moral virtue and sin, sexual conduct, marriage, divorce, birth control, or abortion, or legislate them for the rest of society. As secular humanists we believe in the central importance of the value of human happiness here and now. We are opposed to absolutist morality, yet we maintain that objective standards emerge, and ethical values and principles may be discovered, in the course of ethical deliberation. Secular humanist ethics maintains that it is possible for human beings to lead meaningful and wholesome lives for themselves and in service to their fellow human beings without the need of religious commandments or the benefit of clergy. There have been any number of distinguished secularists and humanists who have demonstrated moral principles in their personal lives and works: Protagoras, Lucretius, Epicurus, Spinoza, Hume, Thomas Paine, Diderot, Mark Twain, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Renan, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Clarence Darrow, Robert Ingersoll, Gilbert Murray, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, Max Born, Margaret Sanger, and Bertrand Russell, among others.”

Here is my personal response on this section, please be sure to read his article fully…

In the section entitled Ethics Based On Critical Intelligence, Paul Kurtz’s theological errors begin from the very first sentence. Regardless of whether or not Kurtz is a believer, one day he (and the entire human race) will indisputably be held accountable for the entirety of everything in his life, including his beliefs; no matter if an individual believes in a higher power or not, they will be judged (Rev. 20:11-15). Therefore, notwithstanding if Mr. Kurtz is a Christian or if he believes in any absolute truth, he still ought to be – and will be – held accountable for the theology he presents. However, there is much difficulty in revealing theological error to one’s writing and views on life when they have no personal knowledge of Christ, absolute truth, or the gospel. With this said, it is Kurtz’s first sentence in section four that stands out in a way that immediately places him on the defensive side. Kurtz says, “The moral views of secular humanism have been subjected to criticism by religious fundamentalist theists.” This may be the case at times in history – that is true – however, historically/theologically speaking, Christianity has been attacked from the beginning when man thought that they had a better plan of intelligence by partaking from the tree of knowledge (Gen. 3:1-7). Here is the first time that man thought for themselves alone and not for the glory of God. Historically, this is the first time that man went out on his own, so-to-speak, and with the intelligence obtained, began a fatality that all of humanity would be consumed by: the power of pride. This pride is that which critical intelligence is based and founded upon – it is man trying to find happiness in himself and not enjoying God completely. Adam’s intent was nothing less than trying to find intelligence in himself, and not the One who made him.

Next, Kurtz’s second sentence states, “The secular humanist recognizes the central role of morality in human life; indeed, ethics was developed as a branch of human knowledge long before religionists proclaimed their moral systems based upon divine authority.” If secular humanists recognize the central role of morality, then their systems such as detention centers, jails, prisons, and mental health hospitals would be able to fix the problem of humanity’s sin. But this is not the case, is it? No – they need men of God that live by a moral standard of absolute truth from the Word of God to come in and preach, pray, and teach biblical morals, because even the secular systems and men see something different about the Christian faith and Christian ministry. As a matter of fact, in a recent political forum moderated by Rick Warren between Senators Obama and McCain, Warren brought up the issue of faith-based ministries. The astounding result was that well over 70% of individuals would rather be in a ministry that deals with biblical morals and ethics than what the State, the nation, and mankind – such as secular humanists – have to offer. Theologically, Kurtz’s crucial problem is that he sees it as important to place the created above its Creator. This particular outlook is always at the very root of sin and is the cause of man’s failure in glorifying God to the utmost. The theological error in it is that man sees his own morals as his commandments rather than seeing and obeying what God has given to man to live by. Once again, this can be linked back to the fall with Adam, when he placed his moral values before that which God had ordained.

Further on in Kurtz’s fourth section he states another theological inaccuracy that is quite upsetting. When a person does not know the Lord, errors like this are in every way understandable due to a lack of basing ethics upon something that reasons as it ought to, but rather bases ethics upon something that reasons to get what is wanted, when it is wanted. This is seen when Kurtz says,  “For secular humanists, ethical conduct is, or should be, judged by critical reason, and their goal is to develop autonomous and responsible individuals, capable of making their own choices in life based upon an understanding of human behavior.” Here Kurtz makes another theological error as he suggests that the correct way of reasoning is for individuals to make their own choices based on the understanding of human behavior. However, the real truth is that man was not created for the sake of his own name or for his own glorification; he did not have a will that made him aim to lift his name above the Lord’s; he was not made so that he may reason at any time to get his personal desires and wants. When the Lord created mankind He did not ask man what he thought about it; He did not ask man his opinion when He created them. Rather, in perfect wisdom and will, He made man to glorify Himself first and foremost above all else.

Lastly, there was one more sentence that stood out most of all in the later part of A Secular Humanist Declaration when Kurtz says, “As secular humanists we believe in the central importance of the value of human happiness here and now. We are opposed to absolutist morality, yet we maintain that objective standards emerge, and ethical values and principles may be discovered, in the course of ethical deliberation.” How can anyone find happiness in change? How does mankind find joy in what they do not know? This may give a temporary high or a season of getting a boost or taste of happiness, but only truth that never changes brings an everlasting happiness that results in morals that humans live by and that are joys to the human heart. Although ethical values may be found or may emerge, as Kurtz says, they only derive from the evil and sin of mankind. Therefore, this is why man must not look at his own fallen state to see what morals and ethical values to stand on, but rather he must look upon the perfect, blameless, and spotless Christ. This is the answer to every fallen need, every fallen want, and every fallen man that may think his mind is greater or thinks he has all the answers, and yet inevitably falls short in his needs. Christ is the answer to the secular humanist; He alone (and through the gospel) has a way of piercing the heart and humbling man before Himself.

In all, theological errors come as men try to be their own saviors – a mind savior, a moral savior, an ethical savior, a humanist savior – but in the end not one of these will save man from hell. There are even those who may know theology and the gospel, and yet rely on their own morals and ethics instead of acknowledging their need for the source of morality – Jesus Christ Himself.  Why look for things that will fade away or fall in time? Why try to find answers in the mind that can change at any time? The answer is simple: because man wants to be their own savior and their own personal religion, and they do not want to give themselves up to a personal Christ – a Christ who has never changed, who perfectly lived by His own law, who was morally and ethically spotless, and who continues to be entirely perfect today as He rules from His throne until His return.

Even though my review may be barely read, thanks for reading if you have done so.

Yesterday, I made a sort of mad rush after college to attend a talk by Professor Paul Kurtz of the New York State University. He was speaking on the Planetary Ethics of Global Humanism, and given that he was addressing an all-Indian audience, he started by quoting the Indian Constitution. Kurtz even mentioned that the Indian Constitution is the only constitution in the world which makes mention of the need to “develop scientific temper and humanism and the spirit of inquiry” as a fundamental duty of every citizen.

And then along the way, he spoke so much about John Dewey in the context of democratic humanism.

So, after his speech was over (he was being close-to-perfect, the right degree of balance, not really offending the believers), I went and spoke to him about the fact that the chief architect of the Indian Constitution was Dr. Ambedkar, who was John Dewey’s student, so there’s a connection that way too.

: )

I like it when everything falls together, though I was a bit taken aback that the people who organized his visit to India, failed to tell him about Dr.Ambedkar in spite of his interest to know more about caste  (now, what do we call that?).

And then, there was a discussion about secularism in general and the Indian version of secularism. Turns out that while secularism means separation of the church/temple/mosque and state, in India, secularism means promoting all religions equally. So far so good. But then the Dravidar Kazhagam president Veeramani quoted Periyar on Indian secularism. The analogy might have been apt, but it sort of left a very bitter aftertaste.

Periyar is supposed to have said that the interpretation of secularism in India can be better understood in the following example. If virginity means “no contact with any man”, in the Indian interpretation of virginity means equal access to all men.

What else? Yesterday was teacher’s day. Though it is not as special as it is in school, I managed to stun a whole group of children. I was asked to substitute for someother batch becasue their teacher wasn’t coming, and then the children for a while had disbelief that I was a real teacher (despite the sari, and the older-woman hairdo). And since it was teacher’s day, I had to tell them that I was not a student teacher but a real, authorized, qualified teacher… There are about 15 batches, and not so much connectivity among the students, so this being surprised at me is understandable.