June Public Forum

The June Public Forum will be from 1 to 2 PM, at the Southdale Regional Library, 70th & York Ave. S., Edina. Dr. Goparaju Vijayam (left) will speak on social reform and the common good, noting the work of Atheist Centre. It took some doing but we finally got Dr. Vijayam set up to visit atheist groups from Washington D.C. to Minneapolis, to Sacramento, through California's Central Valley, to Los Angeles, to Philadelphia and back to Washington D.C. from where he returns to India and the Atheist Centre. Those of you who live near one of those places and want to attend their events, please call 1-866-ATHEIST or email Communications Director and we will put you in contact with the organizers.

This is an opportunity to hear the executive director of Atheist Centre talk about atheism in India and how Atheist Centre, unlike any atheist community in the United States or the world, has managed to become a major contributor to the social and scientific advancement of that country.

Dr. Vijayam will stay in the Hub of Atheism's guest apartment while he is here. Between scheduled events, we will make videos with him and take him to things that might interest him. We will also try to arrange radio interviews and other public appearances.

About that economic stimulus

It is impossible for an atheist organization to do public outreach without it costing a lot. Religions get endless, laudatory, free media publicity, but atheist groups get ignored. In fact, the more newsworthy our activities in terms of contributing to the common good, the more deliberately we are ignored. Apparently it will not do to have the public see atheism as having a moral or civic-minded dimension. Those are assumed to be solely the domain of religion. We are trying harder than any other atheist group to change this situation.

But nothing happens if we can't afford it. So if you don't need all of your Economic Stimulus check to help you and your family survive this recession, please consider donating part of it to help us move atheism into the social mainstream. Our common sense, human-centered views are more worth reporting by the media than, say, the recent blatherings of the pope on how "God" might relate to aliens in outer space. As always, we are grateful for the generous help we get from many of you, and we thank you sincerely. Whatever any of you can do, we appreciate it and will keep trying to justify your confidence in us. You can donate on our web site through PayPal. Thank you!

Below is the ad (costing about $1,000) we will run in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It seemed to be effective for the March public forum so we are trying it again.

Below is the Air America ad (costing about $1,200) we will run 67 times (recorded by Scott Muir and read by Nancy Ruhland):

The struggle to achieve human rights for the entire human family requires a global effort.

On Sunday, June 15, Atheists For Human Rights will sponsor a public forum that highlights the inspiring and innovative work of India's Atheist Centre, honored by the Indian government for its extensive social reform projects that have made a better life for entire communities.

Our speaker is Dr. Goparaju Vijayam, the executive director of Atheist Centre. He will speak on "Internationalizing the Common Good: Becoming Universal Humans."

Join us on SUNDAY, JUNE 15, at the Southdale Regional Library, 70th & York, in Edina, to participate in this discussion. It's from 1 to 2 PM.

With over 20 years of activist history, we are proud to stand for our Constitution and Bill of Rights, with liberty and justice for all.

For more information, and to learn about our unique moral high ground project, visit us at atheistsforhumanrights.org or call 612-529-1200. We walk the talk.

Something wrong, not quite right

The hypothesists of Evolutionary Psychology believe human behavior is "hardwired", which means it is genetically programmed instead of culturally programmed. I've read several things by them and haven't been persuaded.

Genetic programming produces what HOEPs like to call hardwired instincts. Instinctive behavior is abundantly found in species. Migratory species, monogamous species (either for a breeding season or for the partners' lifespans), hunting species, and so on all exhibit instinctive behavior. It's called instinctive because no kind of education is necessary to learn it, and because it happens automatically without any thinking about it and also there is no collateral problems associated with it. For example, no member of a migratory species ever thinks maybe just this once it'll blow off the migration and all the toil and trouble associated with it, and no member of a monogamous species fantasizes about or actually engages in adultery. They do what comes naturally like clouds and ocean currents do what comes naturally. The HOEPs believe humans also do what is genetically programmed to be natural behavior for them.

Is there really any behavior humans engage in that is not contaminated with thinking about it, either to avoid the toil and trouble or to find a way to do it with less toil and trouble or to justify not doing it or doing the exact opposite behavior? Consider monogamy: humans as a whole suck at monogamy. Fantasies about adultery are very nearly universal among spouses, and the numbers for those who engage in actual adultery have exploded in the First World since the sexual revolution that kicked off in the 1960s. First-World wives born after 1970 engage in adultery as often as husbands do. Open marriages are no longer rare. An open marriage, in case there are some who don't know it, is one where the husband and wife engage in adultery with each other's consent and knowledge. This is a fair question for the HOEPs: where's the hardwiring?

One of my problems with the HOEPs is this: whenever they proclaim some behavior to be hardwired instinct, it is so ludicrously wrong that I find it hard to believe PhDs are the ones putting out the nonsense. Their examples of EP in action continuously fail to describe the reality of daily human behavior. They fail because it is blatantly obvious that humans are not driven by instinct.

The HOEPs cannot name one human behavior that is immune to a sufficiently motivated human who wants to engage in a completely opposite behavior. When the motivation is revealed, it is never produced by a genetic mutation that has altered the person's instincts. The motivation in every case, and there are billions of such cases happening every day, is cultural. Spouses, for example, choose to commit adultery because their marriage sucks; or they're happy with their marriage, but they're serving a tour of duty overseas and are horny and prostitutes are so easy to find; or they're happy with their marriage, but nevertheless just want to look down or up and see a different face during a sexual event; or they're happy with their marriage and have discovered they can love and sexually desire more than one person at the same time, so why not pursue polyamorous happiness? Here's that question again: where's the hardwiring?

If humans are not hardwired to be instinctive about sexual relationships, which billions of people daily prove they are not, why would humans be hardwired for some less important behavior? Sexual relationships, because they have been directly linked to reproduction until reliable birth control was discovered in Western culture's 20th century, should have been the first genetically programmed human behavior. Why? Natural selection works entirely through disproportionate reproductive success. A physical or behavioral change confers advantage to the individual or individuals who have it. That advantage increases the success of their reproduction in their ecological niche. Because of greater success in contributing to the next generation, eventually the change ceases to be a mutation and becomes part of what defines the entire species. That's the only way natural selection works, which is why HOEPs always try to show how the human behaviors they believe are hardwired instincts contribute to reproductive success.

Unfortunately for the HOEPs, change caused by natural selection takes enormous amounts of time and generations. Humans have never had that kind of patience, which is why humans always seek quick cultural solutions to the problems they face, whether those problems are adapting to a new ecological niche or dealing with human problems disturbing the tribe. When humans invaded the Artic Circle and settled down to live there, they did not patiently wait for hundreds or thousands of generations to become physically and behaviorally adapted to that harsh ecological niche. They used cultural innovation that negated any serious physical changes, which is why the Eskimos did not become a new human-like species or even a distinct subspecies. The new behaviors they needed to survive in the Artic Circle were discovered by entirely cultural means (that is, by analyzing what behaviors worked and did not work in the ecological niche), which is why each new generation of Eskimos has to be culturally programmed to live successfully in the Artic Circle -- and why any motivated human from any other ecological niche can go to the Artic Circle and, after learning the Eskimo way of life, immediately begin living as successfully in that harsh ecological niche as the people whose ancestors have lived there for thousands of years (and also engage in successful reproduction with them as easily as intromission). Once again: where's the hardwiring?

The latest example of EP nonsense I've encountered is "Atheists Aren't A Bad Lot" by Dan Gardner (Free Inquiry, February/March 2008, p. 26-27). First he quotes HOEP Steven Pinker: "People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize the convictions after the fact." Is there anything sillier than hypothesizing a universal moral code? There isn't one. The most primitive hunter-gatherer tribes that survived to be scientifically studied do not show any evidence of having instinctive morals. The more advanced primitive tribes that have been scientifically studied do not show any evidence of having instinctive morals. And the daily behavior of civilized humans definitely does not show any evidence that we engage in moral behavior in the same automatic way migratory species engage in migratory behavior and monogamous species engage in monogamous behavior.

Gardner illustrates Pinker with an example of moral behavior that he believes is instinctive and explains how natural selection hardwired it into our species: "Say you covet your neighbor's cave. You could just smash his skull and move in. But you need your neighbor's help in the mammoth hunt. And besides, if you smash his skull and take his cave, someone else might get the same idea. So in the long run, both your neighbor and you will be better off if everybody agrees it is wrong to smash thy neighbor's skull. Humans who learned to restrain themselves prospered. Those who didn't vanished. Over time, the internalized rules we call morality became hardwired instinct." Are you laughing? You should be.

If any reader thinks I'm wrong, here's my challenge: commit to thoroughly reading a newspaper serving a city 250,000 big or bigger and watching the national and local TV news every day for one year. Every time a news story about a person inflicting violence on one or more of his or her neighbors is reported, save the print news story or make an entry in a notebook of the electronic news story. After the end of the year, ask yourself this question: if humans have a hardwired instinct for not inflicting violence on their neighbors, how come I have so many horrible, depressing news stories about people inflicting violence on their neighbors? Then go to the first HOEP you can find and demand, "Show me the hardwiring!"

And here's another question: since sexual relationships have always been more important than neighborly relationships (because, in terms of natural selection, no behavior is more important than behaviors that promote successful reproduction), how come the first behavior concerning violence to be turned into hardwired instinct was not one that would make domestic violence against spouses and children as impossible for humans as refusing to migrate is impossible for migratory species? Could there be any HOEP so thoroughly lost in the shrogs of EP that he or she would hypothesize that humans have a hardwired instinct that prevents domestic violence? Every primitive tribe, from the most primitive to those that were very close to crossing over into civilization, has had to deal with problems caused by domestic violence, and their usually imperfect solutions were all cultural. And the level of domestic violence accepted as moral by many tribes would be condemned as abhorrently immoral by most people in the First World today.

Domestic violence in civilized cultures today is recognized to be cultural cancer that so far has resisted every cultural cure from harsh laws to psychological counseling. In several Muslim countries the kind of domestic violence known as honor killing has a body count in the thousands each year, year after year, and very little is being done about it for entirely cultural reasons unique to those deplorable nations. In the U.S. millions of Fundamentalist Christians practice every day of the year the kind of domestic violence known as physical child abuse for entirely cultural reasons (they believe what Proverbs teaches about parenting) and nothing is done about it unless they kill one or more of their children or they make a mistake that enables the general public to see what is going on in their wretched churches and homes. There is nothing rare about civilized spouses battering each other severely enough to put one of them in a hospital or a grave. It is completely ridiculous to hypothesize that natural selection protected neighbors from violence when it obviously left spouses and children totally unprotected.

Gardner and Pinker and all the other HOEPs are producing hypotheses that are not worth the ink used to print their university degrees because none of them can survive the slightest rational investigation by a person who is not awed by the authority of those degrees. Freethinkers ought to be the least likely people to be persuaded by these often extremely ludicrous hypotheses. Aren't we supposed to be the skeptics who do not truckle to any authority, and have intellectual standards higher than the average religionist, who always first truckles to authority? Just because the HOEPs stand before us as members of the scientific community does not automatically exempt them from skepticism or being at least obligated to make presentations that are sophisticated enough to avoid being prima facie preposterous.

Morality is supreme cultural behavior, which is why the moral codes of all the various cultures that existed yesterday and exist today are confusingly contradictory. This is true in the United States, which is full of conflict about morality. How could that be happening if our morals are genetically programmed? Only culturally programmed morality explains the culture war in the U.S.

Evolutionary Psychology is a dead-end street, and only HOEPs ought to be living on it. The rest of us need to live where we can work on morality problems with cultural tools, because they are the only ones that will work, and there's too much work to do to waste time with scientists whose ultimate message about morality is that we have to patiently wait for the thousands of generations it will take natural selection to hardwire the solution to today's morality problems -- assuming natural selection is still able to do work on our species! If Freethinkers think freely about EP long enough, the HOEPs will have to find some other audience for their ridiculous hypotheses. I'll be glad when that day arrives.