Who Would Be The Best Cabinet Appointments For The Secular Community?

By now it's apparent that president-elect Trump's cabinet picks are horrendous.

Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development secretary? He's the guy who just admitted he has no experience for any cabinet position. Rick Perry for Energy Secretary? He's the guy who wants to get rid of the Department of Energy, but famously couldn't remember it in debate that eventually sunk his presidential hopes. CEO Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State? The guy who's worked his entire adult life for Exxon, and who stands to make the company billions by lifting the sanctions imposed on Russia for invading the Ukraine. Betsy Devos for Secretary of Education? She's the billionaire conservative who isn't a fan of public schools. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General? He's the guy who never voted in favor LGBTQ rights, voted against the reauthorization of Violence Against Women's Act, had trouble acknowledging that secular people can make rational decisions, and opposes the Justice Department's involvement with local police shootings, the very department he would head.

Opps.

I can only hope that many of them don't get passed Congress's scrutiny and get voted down.

But that opens up another question. If the ideal president in my view were elected and could appoint anyone, who would the ideal cabinet picks be for the various positions? Who would the best HUD secretary be? The best Energy Secretary? The best Secretary of State? The best Secretary of Education? Or the best Attorney General? And all the other positions?

I'm not sure, but just about anybody would be better than the picks we have now under Trump. This nation could be going to shits if they were all to pass their nominations. I want true progressive policies that will bring the US into the 21st century. I want marijuana legalized in all 50 states. I want to end all incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. I want prison reform*, education reform, and energy reform to pivot away from fossil fuels towards the eventual goal of total renewable energy. We're definitely not getting that under Trump. I want single payer healthcare to fix our current problematic system which is a giveaway to corporations that still leaves millions uninsured. Let's hope Trump really does replace Obamacare with something "terrific," but I highly doubt it.

*I do like some of Greg Caruso's views on justice reform. He'd be on my short list for appointees to the Department of Justice.

Atheism Rises Faster Under Obama

So the conservasphere was ablaze recently on recent data from PEW that atheism grew faster under outgoing president Obama than during previous presidents. Some conservatives are attributing this fact to Obama's "hostility towards religious believers."

But that's nonsense. The rapid rise in atheism over Obama's presidency is part of a larger trend towards secularization in the Western world that, in the US, began rising in the early 1990s and began rapidly increasing during the Bush administration during the mid 2000s, coinciding the the birth of "New Atheism."

In fact, it could be plausibly argued that the rise in atheism, agnosticism, and secularism are in large part backlashes against the Religious Right's encroachment into politics and social issues beginning in the 1980s. So don't blame Obama or his policies for turning our country godless. Blame the backlash against the Religious Right, the reaction to the Catholic Priest pedophile scandal, the events of September 11th, 2001, and perhaps the internet, where the free flow criticism of religion is nearly ubiquitous.

Blame the fact that religious people consistently make utter fools of themselves on TV and on the internet which helps make religions like Christianity look like a den of stupidity.

The Importance Of Understanding Weak Emergence In Moral Ontology

I've been somewhat obsessed recently over the idea of weak emergence in understanding how all the layers of ontology fit into one another. This is an area that I think trips up so many people, both atheist and theist alike.

One reason why is that many people will think that naturalism entails that only the most fundamental layer of ontology has an sort of real status of existence. This view is known as eliminative materialism. Alex Rosenberg, a prominent atheist philosopher, told me back in 2015 that he thinks eliminative materialism is the logical and inevitable outcome of a naturalistic ontology. On this view only the most fundamental constituents that science tells us exist are real. Everything else is an illusion. That means people don't exist, color doesn't exist, solidity doesn't exist, and consciousness doesn't exist. In other words, all higher level phenomena has no ontological status whatsoever. If it isn't fundamental, it's an illusion.

Contrast that with the view that physicist Sean Carroll proposes, which he calls poetic naturalism. It's poetic because there are "many ways of talking about the world." We can talk about the universe in terms of fermions and bosons or we can talk about it in terms of people and societies. In other words, the emergent world of people, plants, animals, color, solidity, consciousness, countries, and economies—all the higher level phenomena—exist, at least in a certain sense. They don't "exist" in exactly in the same way that fermions and bosons exist. They exist as higher level emergent phenomena. However, some things really are illusions. Free will, souls, and the flow of time really are illusions, because they require certain things to exist fundamentally that don't; they can't truly be said to have any kind of real ontological status. Compatibilistic free will, which acknowledges that there isn't any real libertarian free will, is another matter. Bottom line, one has to understand how and why some emergent phenomena are or aren't illusions.

The major problems with this arise from our innate inability at understanding emergence; it's not at all intuitive and it's also extremely complex, generally requiring exceptional knowledge in both science and philosophy, which, let's be honest, most people don't have. And that's why so many people, both atheists and theists, even those reasonably knowledgeable in either science or philosophy, come to the conclusion that naturalism entails eliminative materialism.

Richard Dawkins echos this sentiment in one famous quote from his 1995 book River Out of Eden, saying, "In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” (p. 133)

We Desperately Need More Secular Representation In Washington

So the newly elected 115th Congress is 90% Christian, according to recent data from PEW. Despite the fact that the US as a whole is only 70% Christian, and the unaffiliated now make up a whopping 25% of the US population. There is only one member of Congress who is openly unaffiliated, Democrat Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, from Arizona.

That means that of the 430 members of the House a whopping 0.2% are religiously unaffiliated. About 7 more we either do not know their religious affiliation or they refused to answer. They could be closeted secularists. But I have no idea. In the Senate there are no openly unaffiliated members. If the Congress was accurately represented by the population, there would be 107 members of the House who are openly unaffiliated and 25 members of the Senate. And about half of them would be openly atheist or agnostic. That would be about 66 members of Congress openly atheist or agnostic to represent the tens of millions of Americans who either question or reject a belief in god.

Quote Of The Day: Mohammad Owned Black Slaves

I could never understand why any black person could be a Christian, given how the religion was forced onto their African ancestors by their white slave masters. I can certainly see how they would want to leave Christianity, but some black people think Islam is the answer. I've never understood that either, given how Islam had its own African slave trade for centuries. In fact the prophet of Islam himself owned black slaves. It says so right in the Islamic scriptures in the Hadith. Sahih Muslim Book 010, Hadith Number 3901:

Jabir (Allah be pleased with him) reported: There came a slave and pledged allegiance to Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) on migration; he (the Holy Prophet) did not know that he was a slave. Then there came his master and demanded him back, whereupon Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: Sell him to me. And he bought him for two black slaves, and he did not afterwards take allegiance from anyone until he had asked him whether he was a slave (or a free man).

Are black Muslims aware of this? Does those who left Christianity to convert to Islam because they felt Christianity was too much of a white man's religion know that they now swear allegiance to a religion whose founder owned black slaves? Say what you want about Jesus, but he never owned any slaves, certainly not any black ones.

My Blog Posts On Special Relativity

Here a quick link page to all my posts on special relativity. Some are educational, some are used in arguments, but all can be used to help you understand the theory better.

• Does Special Relativity Entail Eternalism?

• Does Special Relativity Entail Eternalism? Part 2

• Does Special Relativity Entail Eternalism? Part 3 - The Logical Argument

• A Very Stupid Argument Against Eternalism

• Quote Of The Day: The Flow Of Time And Illusion

• Quote Of The Day: William Lane Craig Is Wrong On Cosmic Time

• A Short Look At William Lane Craig's "Refutations" Of The B-Theory Of Time

• The EPR Paradox and Special Relativity

• Special Relativity Lesson 1: Time Dilation Is Symmetric

• Here's What You Have To Believe In Order To Deny Eternalism

• Quote Of The Day: Why Denying Eternalism Forces You To Accept Brute Facts

Lesson 2 I forgot about but will be done relatively soon!

How Would A Soul Interact With Regular Matter?

Given the argument from Core Theory that I just wrote, those who wish to deny its conclusion will have to consider answering the following questions that are honestly aimed at understanding how a world with souls makes sense with what we already know to be true.

• There needs to be a way that "soul stuff" interacts with the fields of which we are made-with elections, or photons, or something. Do those interactions satisfy conservation of energy, momentum, and electric charge?
• Does matter interact back on the soul, or is the principle of action and reaction violated?
• Is there "virtual soul stuff" as well as "real soul stuff," and do quantum fluctuations of soul stuff affect the measurable properties of ordinary particles?
• Or does the soul stuff not interact directly with particles, and merely affect the quantum probabilities associated with measurement outcomes?
• Is the soul a kind of "hidden variable" playing an important role in quantum ontology?

This are all the questions asked by Sean Carroll in chapter 27 his book The Big Picture. This is in addition to my previous post If You Believe In A Soul That Gives You Free Will, I Have Some Questions For You.