Does God exist?

I don't like translating my own writings, so I won't subject you to a translation of my review of ¿Dios existe?, whose core is a public debate between then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the atheist Italian philosopher Paolo Flores d’Arcais (which, as far as I know, hasn't been published in English). The book in fact doesn't deal a lot with that ancient, ever-present topic, but has more to do with the mode of the affirmation of God by the believers and how it relates to the grounding of moral principles and the law.

Deep stuff, especially for one (like me) who has never studied philosophy. I'm missing most of the references that the author takes for granted... But I think I'm getting it, mostly. This guy Flores d’Arcais has some very clear ideas and he knows how to convey them. This unlike Michel Onfray, who's fascinating but excessively florid and elliptical (I just finished a book by him about the Cynics, by the way), and very, very unlike the one contemporary atheist philosopher I've read within the Anglo-Saxon materialist tradition, Daniel Dennett. Popular English-language atheistic thought is, understandably, almost completely devoted to refuting Protestant fundamentalism and creationism, on one hand, and denouncing the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism on the other — and it all seems a bit shallow and pointless after a while. I've been overexposed to that lately (I'm still trying to finish Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which has very engaging ideas on the origin of design). So for me Onfray and Flores d’Arcais are a door into a different world of thought.

I'll leave you with something to get an idea of what Flores d’Arcais thinks about religion in the public sphere, his Eleven Theses Against Habermas. The condition he sets for a pluralistic democracy are echoed in the arguments he presents in the book — namely, that all of us, believers of all faiths and nonbelievers alike, must renounce to claim that we have reasonable, unassailably objective grounds for our principles, because such a thing does not and cannot exist.

Weekend miscellanea

Picture, web and blog updates...

After I posted a couple of portraits using a simulation of the film technique known as split toning, I was asked to write a tutorial, an idea I'd had for some time. So I went back to my website (which I'd neglected) and wrote this split toning tutorial for the GIMP (in Spanish). I need to expand it to cover other uses of split toning... and I need another tutorial for cross processing.

Last Saturday I went with the Rosarigasinos to the Flag Memorial. We took the elevator and went up to the top of the tower to take pictures of the city. It was just a while before sunset, and there was a noticeable amount of smoke from the island fires in the air, so I got interesting results.

I joined a couple of atheist groups on Flickr, which somehow I had overlooked all this time. How do you picture atheism? Well, while some groups emphasize criticism of religion (or blasphemy), there's one called "Atheists who love photographing churches" (exactly my niche!), and another one called "The Happy Atheist" where you're supposed to show positive, cheerful images — nothing offensive, especially to religion, and no proselytizing; just a celebration of (godless) life.

We had an interesting conversation/debate among several of the Rosarigasinos after the Flag Memorial session. When DrGEN comes we always end up talking about atheism and religion, and that day we'd had some harmless photo fun at the foot of the Memorial, which has a stone cross on a wall and the usual dedications to God and Mary and so on by some archbishop or general. That was in part why I looked for atheist groups on Flickr. Well, the discussion went along the lines of denouncing religion in the public sphere vs. tolerating the need for people to cling to their unsubstantiated beliefs, and it got rather heated, but Marisa and I had to leave early. We had a friend of mine's birthday party at his house in Funes.

Alerta Religión (my blog about the evils of religion and faith) is taking off slowly, with peaks every now and then. I'm at 10 daily visits on average today, which isn't much, but I've been found by the search engine spiders already, and I'm writing mostly for myself anyway.

On Sunday it rained like crazy, so most of the fires on the islands were finally extinguished and the smoke went away. It made for good photos, but it also caused traffic accidents. I started a group on Flickr to collect smoky pictures of the city, and some of the results were impressive. Check it out at Humo sobre Rosario ("Smoke over Rosario").

And that's it for today.

In support of Nick Ginsburne

Now that was a truly unexpected title! No, Nick Ginsburne is not some crazy guy trying to cross the North Sea on foot to raise money for a vaccine against the jock itch or something. In fact he's completely unrelated to me or to any of the usual topics of this blog.

Nick is an atheist, which makes him alike me in one respect. (He also has a beard and wears glasses, so that's two more things. And he's a human male. And he speaks English. We're a lot alike each other!) Some time ago Nick, who apparently uses YouTube a lot, uploaded a video consisting of a list of verses of the Qur'an (that is, the holy book of Islam). The video was removed. He uploaded it again, and again it was removed. Supporters of free speech got the video and tried to re-upload it on their own YouTube accounts, but they were deleted as well. Nick's YouTube account was finally suspended. Just to test the idea, Nick uploaded a similar video using verses from the Bible. The video stayed and was OK for a while, and then it was deleted. As of this moment, one copy of the video remains in someone else's account, though I don't know for how long.



Well, YouTube is owned by Google. Google, which is of course known by its search engine, is also the owner of Gmail, the first web-based email service to provide users with mammoth 1GB+ mailboxes, and of the very service that hosts this blog, Blogger. I'm now wondering whether Google will eventually have the time to scan the million of blogs hosted by Blogger and censor them as they did with Nick's video on YouTube. I can only suppose that Nick's video was found because the guys at YouTube are desperately looking for videos that violate copyright, which they used to host (and still host) by at least the hundreds of thousands, after a couple of media companies threatened to sue.

Anyway, I'm not a user of YouTube. I'm writing this to let YouTube and Google know, if possible, that here's another atheist that likes to produce content for the web, and doesn't like the feeling of being watched for political correctness. We're the ones paying your frickin' salaries and giving value to your stocks. You don't want to mess with us.

If you want to fight censorship, and censorship clearly motivated by religious bigotry at that, use whatever space you have to link to articles denouncing YouTube's policies. It would be delicious to enter "YouTube censorship" in Google and see a relevant result up there in the first page of results. Google ranks results higher if the same words are linked to the same web address in many different places. So this is my little grain of sand. Here's another one, linking "YouTube censorship" with another denunciation. And a YouTube censorship protest video!

The Christ in the Picture

I'm not one to engage in criticism of religious beliefs in the personal level (not anymore); I do breach the subject when it comes to religion intruding in my private life or in public policy, for example. I'm sincerely baffled about this, though, so that's why. It's about the story of my co-worker and her lovely granddaughter. My co-worker (let's call her Ms. A) is convinced that her 15-month-old granddaughter (I'll call her Little N) has come to know Jesus instinctively and in spite of her parents' lack of belief. As far as I can tell, her father (Ms. A's son) is not very religious, and her mother is agnostic.

Little N has developed a fixation with a picture of Jesus. During a visit, grandma saw the poor thing's eyes intently fixed on the image, and she told Little N who that man was, and taught her a children's prayer. Little N can barely say "Jesus" but she does stare happily at the picture, and she waves and smiles at it whenever she toddles past it. So far, so good, a little religious indoctrination. Only now Ms. A is convinced that her granddaughter really sees something in the picture, that she recognizes Jesus. My other co-workers, women in their 50s mostly, agree that Little N must be seeing something we spoiled adults cannot see. The girl's parents decided not to baptize her, so this must be Little N's way of "asking for baptism". It's "really incredible, but then children know". One of these women, speaking from a fairly typical, incoherently sincretic view, opines that the baby "doesn't see that picture (of Jesus) as we do, but she sees the energy". They also believe that Little N "might bridge the separation between their parents and God".

They kept on this line of discussion, turning then into the individual stories of their children's loss of religious practice. Most people in Argentina are Catholics that have never practiced; many of us attend church only as long as our parents take us, or when forced for some other reason, until we become teenagers or a bit longer. Then, it's only weddings, First Communions, baptisms, and even more rarely, on Easter Sunday and the like. Will this be the future of Little N? Will she turn into a skeptic at an early age? Will she become a prophet of the Christ in the Picture?

I didn't open my mouth during the discussion and definitely closed my ears to the last part I've just revisited, since time and experience have taught me that nothing good comes from discussing religion. I've been an atheist and a skeptic since 21; I lost years of my life coping with the progressive loss of the hollow faith I was raised in, and revisiting my arguments for people who've never bothered to examine their own beliefs would be a waste of time. I only wish Little N is given the space and the education that she will need to think about it and to reach her own conclussions in time.