So my little-brother-who-is-in-college decided to stop going to the church he had been going to, in large part because they are Not Okay With Homosexuality and he is Not Okay With That. (In other news, I am really quite proud of my little-brother-who-is-in-college.) Anyway so my dad (whom, let's be clear, both my brother and I love and even occasionally admire) emailed my brother saying, hey, you're not going to that church anymore, is it because of their position on homosexuality, and my brother was like, yeah that's definitely a big part of it, and my dad then proceeded to lecture my brother and my brother proceeded to forward that lecture to me. It was...an exceptionally predictable lecture, to me at any rate, and that may not say a whole lot since I grew up with the guy and know how he thinks. I'll spare you the details, but the short version is that my dad is upset because my brother is making his own moral judgments rather than relying on the Bible.
So here's why, from an evangelical Christian perspective, my dad's position and, more importantly, the position of a very large number of evangelical Christians (on homosexuality specifically and moral judgment generally) is both morally reprehensible and logically indefensible. (And I should say that I am not, myself, Christian, but I have endeavored as far as possible to argue from Christian premises, as well as premises derived from general experience. This is not an atheistic argument. It is a Christian one. Also, I've restrained myself from using my typical profane and offensive style, as a courtesy to the intended Christian audience of this post.)
First off, let's talk about what my dad is actually doing when he claims to be relying on the Bible for moral guidance. In a nutshell, he's relying on his own interpretation of the Bible (specifically, the English Standard Version translation, or in the case of the Old Testament, mistranslation, of the Bible.) Now, this isn't some total relativist argument where I wave my hands like a jellyfish and go "it's all interpretation! nothing is true! it means whatever you want it to mean!" No. That's not the level we're operating on here. Rather, what I am saying is that there is no language, and certainly no literature (this, by the way, includes the Bible), without interpretation. Some interpretations definitely seem better than others - they're better supported by the text, better reasoned, and so forth - that's fine. But it's still an interpretation.
And the thing is, I'm not certain my dad would disagree. He (and evangelical Christians generally) behave as though the Bible needs to be interpreted - at least when it suits them. For instance: evangelical Christians do not adhere to the strictures of the Mosaic law. That's all well and good, but it means you need to deal with verses like Ecclesiastes 12:11-12a ("The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these."), or Matthew 5:17-19 ("Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.") Now, it's not stupid to say that, when Jesus says "until all is accomplished", he means "until I fulfill the Law and the Prophets by my life, death and resurrection". It's less easy to deal with "whoever relaxes one of these commandments...will be called least in the kingdom of heaven", but there are workarounds I'm sure (most arguments I've heard follow the lines of, the Law totally still exists and is valid and true but we get to ignore it because Grace - which, there's a term for that sort of thing in programming: cruft. But okay, fine, not the most elegant solution, but a solution nonetheless.)
And of course you can look at other places in the Bible to support the claim that we need no longer keep the Mosaic Law - Peter chowing down on a hallucinated tref picnic from heaven in Acts, where God's all, hey yeah no forget the kosher thing, I get to declare things clean by fiat and you don't get to cling to your outdated codes of ethics (wait, this sounds familiar - did I mention that the point of the story was that Christians should stop treating a hitherto stigmatized and looked-down-upon group of people like garbage? Yeah, wow, that definitely sounds familiar but I just can't place it right now. Oh well.) or else Paul's screeds in multiple letters, most notably Galatians, where he says (Galatians 5:2), "Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law." (Ironically, there are many in the evangelical community who circumcise their children, for who knows what reason. One possible interpretation of this verse is that they have thereby condemned their children either to hell, or to keeping the Mosaic Law - which reduces, in the evangelical mind, to being condemned to hell. Even if you don't interpret it this way, why, given this verse, would you even consider circumcision for your children? Anyway.) But the point is, you're using these verses to interpret the verses which would suggest that you should keep the Mosaic Law (instead of, for instance, the other way round).
Or we could get away from the whole Mosaic Law thing entirely: look at Paul's instructions about women in the church in 1 Timothy 2:11-12 ("Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.") or in his astonishingly incoherent rant in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, in which really the only clear point is that women need to cover their heads in church. (No, go read it, it's total gibberish. Women need to cover their heads "because of the angels". Also, 1 Timothy 2:15 reads "Yet she [the woman] will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control," which might just be the most misogynistic thing I've seen all week, and I read manboobz [TW for misogyny, obviously]. "Saved through childbearing." Seriously.) Anyway, the point is that, though some - indeed, many - evangelical churches do in fact make women remain quiet, many, including most charismatic churches I've been in and the one my parents currently attend, do not. And no church I've ever been in actually made women cover their hair. There's a variety of justifications for this, including, "it's just a cultural thing! it doesn't apply to us anymore!" (which is oddly relativist) or "it's okay, we just don't give women positions of authority, that's what Paul really meant!" (which, I guess I could see that?) or "long hair counts as a covering!" (which I'm pretty sure is just being bad at reading comprehension, but fine).
Here's my point: when you choose (subconsciously, no doubt) to interpret the Bible so that you have enough wiggle room to eat pork and to not have to wear head coverings, then why, for the love of Jesus, do you not afford the same treatment to human beings? You have lost any claim you ever had to be acting out of Christ-like agape love when your ability to eat bacon supersedes the rights and happiness of your fellow human beings. You might still love specific people of whatever sexual orientation, but when you act to reinforce the legal or social oppression of specific groups of people, you are not and cannot be acting out of love. You are acting out of hatred.
But okay, you think you have pretty ironclad support in the Bible for "Homosexuality is wrong and bad." You know what? I agree. There are very specific verses, in both the Old and New Testaments, that say, essentially, "Dudes macking on dudes? EW EW NO STOP." (I'm pretty sure there's actually no prohibition in the Bible against female homosexuality, incidentally, but I'm going to give your blatantly inconsistent applications of "literalism" a pass because that's not my argument.) There are verses that you could use to argue that we should love and accept homosexual people and homosexuality, but only in the very general "What God has called clean let no man call unclean" sort of way. Honestly, the argument from the Bible that homosexuality is immoral is more airtight than any other argument from the Bible...
...since the pro-slavery arguments of the American South. See, the Bible has actually quite a lot of things to say about slavery, and they are all along the lines of "Slaves, obey your masters." Paul does say that slaves should gain their freedom, if they can, but it is very, very obvious that he means "gain their freedom legally," which was possible, both in the Roman world, and in the antebellum South. If he had instead meant "by any means, legal or illegal," he would emphatically not have sent the runaway slave Onesimus back to his owner, Philemon (see Paul's letter to Philemon). In fact, there is no hint of the idea, anywhere in the Bible, that slavery should or even could ever be abolished. Galatians 3:28 reads "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," but it would be as absurd to try to use this verse as evidence for the Bible's support for the abolition of slavery as it would be to try to use this verse as evidence for the Bible's support of the abolition of gender. It's true, you can use the Bible to support the idea that masters should treat slaves better while still keeping them enslaved, just as you can use the Bible to support the idea that Christians should treat homosexual people better while still keeping them socially oppressed - and you can cite general themes in the Bible of compassion, mercy, and justice to say, "hey, maybe we should not have slaves, that seems wrong," just as you can cite precisely those themes to say, "hey, maybe we should not socially and legally oppress homosexual people, that seems wrong." But the Bible itself isn't against slavery: it's very clearly for it.
And here is precisely my point: the abolitionist position is, Biblically speaking, much less well-supported than the pro-slavery position. It is, however, nearly universally acknowledged to be morally superior. Which means that the Biblical position is sometimes morally inferior. Which means that we need something other than the Bible to guide our moral judgments. For instance, we could try using our reason and moral intuitions, like my brother is doing. My father, and many evangelicals, would say that this is "leaning on our own understanding", which is bad. But I have shown that this is already precisely what they themselves are doing when they interpret the Bible - in fact, they are "leaning on their own understanding" in many ways far more than we are, since they have unconsciously (and, I might add, semi-idolatrously) set up their own personal interpretations of the Bible as the literal Word of God. This prevents them from recognizing that their beliefs might actually be wrong, and thus from ever achieving significant moral growth.
And I just want to emphasize again that what my father and evangelical Christians in general are doing is harming millions and millions of people in this country alone, and that they are just as culpable in this as were the slave-owners of the South, who, like them, took the Bible seriously, and believed they were acting out of Christ-like love towards the people they were actively oppressing (and, by the way, consider the oppressor who literally demands that those he is oppressing recognize that he is acting out of nothing but love for them - there are few things more viscerally repugnant).
So let's consider: you, as an evangelical Christian, have to my knowledge, five main ways of responding to this argument.
First, you could disagree with my premise that interpretation is a necessary part of reading any text. If you actually want to argue this point, I can more than adequately defend it, but it's so fundamental and obvious to me that I will question whether you can properly be called "literate" in any meaningful sense at all.
Second, you could disagree with my analogy of anti-homosexuality to slave-owning, in a variety of ways. You could claim that the Biblical argument of slave-owners wasn't as strong as I've made it out to be, perhaps pointing to the significant differences between the system of slavery as practiced in the Bible, and chattel slavery as it existed in the United States. The most you could claim with this position with any legitimacy, however, is that slavery in the US, though it should have continued to exist, should not have been quite as bad for the slaves as it in fact was. But the problem with slavery is not that slaves are treated poorly, the problem with slavery is that slaves are slaves.
Or you could question certain historical claims - did slave-owners really make these Biblical arguments? (Yes, they did, and this is easily ascertainable, so if this is a legitimate objection, I expect you to research it and reach a conclusion based on the evidence you find, not to use it as a stalling tactic so that there's always enough doubt that you don't have to make up your mind.)
Or, most likely, you could attempt to argue for your own exceptionalism - that while, yes, slave-owners made these arguments, and yes, they were wrong, you by contrast are making very very similar arguments but magically happen to be right. This I find unconvincing for a variety of reasons, which I really shouldn't have to spell out, but will if it is necessary. Suffice it to say that any argument you could make for the exceptionalism of your position, slave-owners could equally well have made. (This includes appeals to tradition, as well as arguments from pseudoscience.)
Third, I suppose you could accept that the stance against homosexuality you have adopted is the product of your own prejudice and the societal and cultural milieu in which you exist, and continue to hold that stance. This is at least honest - you display your fear and hatred of that which you consider Other, which is pretty repulsive, but again, at least it's honest.
Fourth, you could accept that, like the slave-owners in the antebellum South, you are wrong. You could get over your personal prejudices. You could learn to love and accept who people are. You could join the fight for equal treatment for everyone, and attempt to guarantee all people the "certain inalienable rights" of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, as well as, in the end, being a far better witness for Christ and Christ-like love than you could ever have been otherwise.
Or, fifth, you could ignore all of this, pretend I never said anything so that you won't have to confront certain ugly truths about yourself and your beliefs. Which, let's be clear, is cowardice.
Remember that I'm not even requiring you to give up your doctrine of Biblical infallibility. I'm merely requiring you to give up your doctrine of your own infallibility. That seems like a pretty Christian thing to do, all told. Good luck.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Axioms
I decided to try to pin down and write out the axioms that I use in my daily life. Obviously, as I am no more than an almost-twenty-one-year old historically-middle-class American, and not by any stretch a great philosopher or an omniscient being, I'm not making any claims to absolute truth here. That said, they're by far the best axioms I've come across. Also there's ten of them, and I have Commentary, so be warned.
Axiom of Uncertainty: Nothing can be known to be true with real and total certainty.
In other words, there's always room for epistemic doubt. Nothing is exempt from this: certainly not "cogito, ergo sum" - for instance, try making that argument in a language with no first-person singular, or without the assumption that logic is valid, Descartes. No, faith isn't exempt either - you may well be absolutely certain that, say, God exists, but this is subjective and not real certainty. Kierkegaard's "movement of faith" or similar concepts do not let you cheat this - in fact, the "movement of faith" is valuable precisely because it is the antithesis of this nonexistent epistemological "magic bullet". (Also, I really, really doubt, hypothetical theist, that you are as certain of God's existence as you claim to be.) And yes, the axiom of uncertainty is subject to itself, and no, that doesn't invalidate it, and no, you're not clever for pointing that out, you twit.
If this all seems a bit freshman philosophy, well, yes, it's incredibly fundamental, but I've been astonished at how often people try to beg exceptions for, say, math or religion. And of course, I'm not the first person to point this out - previous formulations include (arguably) "Nothing is ever absolutely so," or the Assassin's creed "Nothing is true; everything is permitted" - speaking of which, Ubisoft, among the many problems I have with your misogynistic antihistorical shitstain of a game (AC II, specifically): when the mantra of your protagonist's organization is "nothing is true, everything is permitted", why then do you feel the need to frame your hero's journey in literally the most conventionally moral plot ever? "Avenge your unjustly slain family and save the world" - and why in the name of Zarathustra are you not permitted to kill civilians if everything is permitted? Ugh. Sorry, yes, axioms.
Axiom of Complexity: Reality is always more complex than you are capable of believing it to be.
That is to say, infinitely complex, and models of how any part of the world works are only that. Models and categories, while useful and essential, falsify by their very nature. It's no surprise whatever that perhaps the two most successful physical models for how the universe works are fundamentally incompatible (or at least appear so to current scientific understanding). Read Borges' story about the cartographers: the only conceivable accurate models are on a 1:1 scale, which severely limits their utility. This of course applies not just to physics, but also to sociology and economics and biology and any area of human understanding.
1st Axiom of Ethics: People are the most important thing.
This is intentionally left vague - much of ethics has to do with defining exactly what "people" means, and more of it what "important" means. I choose merely to affirm the underlying intuition.
2nd Axiom of Ethics: People are small.
Okay this, by contrast, is going to take quite a lot of explanation. Bear with me. So here's the fundamental difference, from your perspective, between you and everyone else: you see the gaps and the contradictions and the disjoints between how you think and how you act. You know that sometimes, maybe all the time if you stop and think about it, you are on some level acting (in the theatrical sense) to line up with expectations - maybe someone else's, maybe your own. Perhaps you claim to like a band when you've only heard one song, or perhaps you argue about the views of a philosopher you haven't actually read, or perhaps you laugh at a joke just because everyone else is. These are three obvious examples, and maybe you're subtler about it, but the point is that you are aware that your behavior is always somewhat inauthentic. (Maybe you know and love a band, say, really and truly, but at the very least how you express or do not express this fact to others is shaped and colored by your social context.) Other people, though - other people are genuine, they really believe and feel and think what they believe and feel and think, not like you (you poser). And of course all of these people look just as inauthentic to themselves as you do to yourself - you just don't see their internal monologues, but you're not the only one who has one, you know. And the process of growing up - speaking as someone who's still doing it - seems to include as an essential part the demythologizing of adulthood from a magical position of knowledge, authority, and wisdom, to just having lived long enough that society decides that you should know what you're doing by now, and you for the most part having to fake it. Put another way: you know how you have no goddamn clue what's going on? Neither does anyone else.
This is related to a phenomenon called the "fundamental attribution error" - which, I am informed, isn't even remotely fundamental as it requires a particularly Western milieu of concepts of individuality to exist - but, assuming you do live in a Western society, you attribute your own behavior to all kinds of things - the weather, being stressed at work, being drunk, being horny - while everyone else's behavior you attribute to fundamental aspects of their personality. Also, you know how people are surprisingly pleasant and interesting and maybe even rational and intelligent when you talk to them one-on-one but you put them all together in a group and suddenly they're all assholes? Yeah no that's a real thing. There's a lot of different names for different parts of this phenomenon: groupthink, the bystander effect, herd or mob mentality, and so forth, but the point is that people in groups behave very differently from people not in groups. Often this change is for the worse - people can be very stupid and mean when mob mentality is in effect - but certainly not always, perhaps not even most of the time. (We are social animals, after all, and do actually tend to think with other people's brains.) Also, this effect used to convince me, back in my Charismatic Christian days, that actual physical miracles were occurring right in front of me when they manifestly weren't. So yeah, it's a powerful thing.
You know the maxim, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity? Well, throw in miscommunication and your average person's limitless capacity for self-deception, and you've got a pretty good explanation for even the most apparently evil behavior - Enron, the current Republican Party, the goddamned Third Reich - no one is intentionally evil. Lex Luthor and Victor von Doom are fiction - in real life, people are small.
(Granted, this is based largely in my own experiences and my layman's understanding of several landmark psychology and sociology cases. It is entirely possible that there are people who are intentionally evil, or who see no shadow between the thought and the action, but I see no convincing evidence of this, and cannot make it square with my understanding of human nature.)
3rd Axiom of Ethics: People don't go in boxes.
This is more or less just a corollary to the axiom of complexity, but it's important enough to stand alone. People are incredibly complicated and are very different from each other, and since categories falsify, and since people are the most important thing, they take priority over your categories of convenience.
To take an extreme example: I have known many people who view humanity as sortable into two boxes: male and female. If you go in the male box (heh, malebox), it means you have to adhere to actually quite a long list of characteristics and behaviors (attracted to women only, strong, chivalrous, primary breadwinner, head of the household, and so forth), and likewise with the female box, or else you're doing it wrong. This is obviously total bullshit if you know literally the first thing about, for instance, human sexuality. So lots of rational people have subdivided these boxes into smaller boxes: straight male, gay male, straight female, gay female. Probably you add a couple of boxes for bisexual people as well. But what about trans people? What about asexual people? What about people with genders that just straight up are not either male or female? Do you want a box for every combination of the above? Because we're not even close to done - you can, for instance, separate sexual orientation into multiple distinct axes. I happen to identify as "pansexual not-yet-identifying as a trans female" - do you really have a box for me? And this is just sexuality and gender; we haven't even begun to touch on kink, for instance, or race, or philosophy, or allism v. autism, or class, or religion. And because you can only have so many boxes, people who don't fit into any of the boxes you happen to like get dumped into the big box called THEM, which you regard with smug superiority from your box labeled US.
Well, fuck that. People can be whatever the fuck they are. Because when you say otherwise, you're really saying that your stupid fucking boxes are more important than people. Hey guess what you're wrong.
(This is also one reason I have become less and less satisfied with the New Atheists: they have very clearly demarcated boxes for "Religious People" and "Accommodationists" and "New Atheists" and it's just not that simple, folks. I appreciate fighting the religious establishment in this country, that's a really fucking important thing to do, but religious belief is way more complex than you think it is. So's science, incidentally, and the prevailingly naive view of what science is and how it works is another reason for my dissatisfaction with them.)
Axiom of Noncoherence: You do not need and probably should not strive for a completely self-consistent rational framework which dictates all of your beliefs.
Also, you do not have a completely self-consistent rational framework which dictates all of your beliefs, no matter what you think. Look at it this way: there are seven billion people on this planet. What are the chances that you, specifically, has managed to start from the One True Set of Correct Premises (assuming such a thing can even be meaningfully supposed to exist)? If you said one in seven billion, I admire your optimism, but of course there's no particular reason to think that anyone has ever had the One True Set of Correct Premises. You may take it as given that at least one of the assumptions you make about the world is radically, substantially wrong. (Realistically, probably a lot more than one are.) If, then, you attempt to derive a complete, self-consistent weltanschauung from those flawed initial assumptions, the error propagates through, likely increasing with each step, until your results are completely out of touch with reality. The good news is, no one actually does this. Rather, we attempt to construct frameworks from specific pre-existing intuitions, which leaves our frameworks looking pretty cobbled together. The bad news is, people often suppress their intuitions in the service of some over-arching framework which is, in fact, attempting to be self-consistent. Then, sometimes, you get biblical literalists defending Old Testament genocide (a move which, ironically, makes them far more moral relativists than many of the secular ethicists they tend to demonize), or soldiers in the Third Reich suppressing their moral intuitions in favor of Kantian deontological ethical systems, or Randian objectivists just shutting down their empathy altogether.
Now, obviously, our intuitions are far from infallible, and I'm certainly not arguing against the use of reason to refine and harmonize one's intuitions. For instance, our intuitions of how physical reality works, even though informed by centuries of scientific discovery, are completely wrong when faced with the edge cases of special relativity and quantum mechanics, which as far as we can tell, are both totally incompatible with each other, and both totally correct. And I might add that if the goddamn Laws of Physics can't be arsed to be self-consistent, why the hell should I be expected to be any more so?
1st Axiom of Reasoned Argumentation: Assume good faith.
This should be a no-brainer: when you're arguing with someone, assume they are sincere in the beliefs they're arguing with you. You may think, correctly even, that they have other, inconsistent beliefs or behaviors, but remember first that people are small and also that inconsistency is not necessarily a bad thing, and proceed under the assumption that they are in fact espousing sincerely-held beliefs. Even if you're arguing against someone like the Westboro Baptist Church, who holds outlandish and horrifying beliefs, and also stands to gain in some way by espousing those beliefs, it's still far more likely that there's simply a lot of selective perception and self-deception going on.
Two particularly striking examples come to mind: when arguing with a pro-lifer, who on the one hand likens abortion to the Holocaust, and on the other hand decries abortion-clinic bombers, you can and should point out that this is probably inconsistent, but do not assume that the pro-lifer doesn't really care about unborn children. From personal experience, they do. Their behavior happens to look like the behavior of someone primarily interested in controlling the reproductive and sexual rights of women, and on an unconscious and societal level that's probably what's going on, but the real person in front of you does legitimately care about saving the babies.
On the flip side: Christians need to stop citing Romans 1:20 to try to prove that atheists don't really disbelieve in god. You are more than welcome to try to show that certain of my beliefs or behaviors logically imply belief in god - you might even to some extent succeed - but do not simply say, "The Bible says you believe in God, therefore you believe in God and are willfully choosing to reject Him," and then move straightaway to psychoanalyzing me to determine why I am in such willful denial. That's idiotic. (Also? If your belief system is so fragile that it literally cannot handle the mere existence of anyone who disagrees with it, then you can either get a better belief system, or you can continue to be the biggest intellectual cowards on record.)
2nd Axiom of Reasoned Argumentation: Don't be lazy.
Language is tricky. What one person means by it is different from what another means. This is true even when two people from the same region in the same country during the same time period are talking. It's much truer when you're reading the works of a person long dead writing in a different language. So do some mental lifting yourself: before you disagree with someone, make very certain that you understand them. Reword, reinterpret, reframe their argument as strongly and intelligibly to yourself as you can. Chances are, if the argument of someone whose work has been preserved as that of a "great thinker" looks stupid to you at first glance, you haven't understood it yet. Maybe an argument is stupid given modern understandings of the world. Well, recontextualize it in the culture in which it was written - see how it made sense then. See if you can make it make sense now. As a rule of thumb, if you don't look at an argument and think, "Oh yeah, that's totally reasonable given their assumptions," then you don't understand it well enough to argue against it. (I should certainly say that I need as much work in this regard as anyone.)
3rd Axiom of Reasoned Argumentation: Don't change the subject unless 1) the first subject is resolved to the satisfaction of all involved parties; 2) all parties agree that the subject cannot currently be satisfactorily resolved; or 3) you are moving to an underlying, more fundamental subject.
This is both basic courtesy and the most practical way to actually get anything worthwhile out of an argument.
Axiom of Hitler Wasn't an Atheist: Hitler wasn't an atheist.
He wasn't.
Axiom of Uncertainty: Nothing can be known to be true with real and total certainty.
In other words, there's always room for epistemic doubt. Nothing is exempt from this: certainly not "cogito, ergo sum" - for instance, try making that argument in a language with no first-person singular, or without the assumption that logic is valid, Descartes. No, faith isn't exempt either - you may well be absolutely certain that, say, God exists, but this is subjective and not real certainty. Kierkegaard's "movement of faith" or similar concepts do not let you cheat this - in fact, the "movement of faith" is valuable precisely because it is the antithesis of this nonexistent epistemological "magic bullet". (Also, I really, really doubt, hypothetical theist, that you are as certain of God's existence as you claim to be.) And yes, the axiom of uncertainty is subject to itself, and no, that doesn't invalidate it, and no, you're not clever for pointing that out, you twit.
If this all seems a bit freshman philosophy, well, yes, it's incredibly fundamental, but I've been astonished at how often people try to beg exceptions for, say, math or religion. And of course, I'm not the first person to point this out - previous formulations include (arguably) "Nothing is ever absolutely so," or the Assassin's creed "Nothing is true; everything is permitted" - speaking of which, Ubisoft, among the many problems I have with your misogynistic antihistorical shitstain of a game (AC II, specifically): when the mantra of your protagonist's organization is "nothing is true, everything is permitted", why then do you feel the need to frame your hero's journey in literally the most conventionally moral plot ever? "Avenge your unjustly slain family and save the world" - and why in the name of Zarathustra are you not permitted to kill civilians if everything is permitted? Ugh. Sorry, yes, axioms.
Axiom of Complexity: Reality is always more complex than you are capable of believing it to be.
That is to say, infinitely complex, and models of how any part of the world works are only that. Models and categories, while useful and essential, falsify by their very nature. It's no surprise whatever that perhaps the two most successful physical models for how the universe works are fundamentally incompatible (or at least appear so to current scientific understanding). Read Borges' story about the cartographers: the only conceivable accurate models are on a 1:1 scale, which severely limits their utility. This of course applies not just to physics, but also to sociology and economics and biology and any area of human understanding.
1st Axiom of Ethics: People are the most important thing.
This is intentionally left vague - much of ethics has to do with defining exactly what "people" means, and more of it what "important" means. I choose merely to affirm the underlying intuition.
2nd Axiom of Ethics: People are small.
Okay this, by contrast, is going to take quite a lot of explanation. Bear with me. So here's the fundamental difference, from your perspective, between you and everyone else: you see the gaps and the contradictions and the disjoints between how you think and how you act. You know that sometimes, maybe all the time if you stop and think about it, you are on some level acting (in the theatrical sense) to line up with expectations - maybe someone else's, maybe your own. Perhaps you claim to like a band when you've only heard one song, or perhaps you argue about the views of a philosopher you haven't actually read, or perhaps you laugh at a joke just because everyone else is. These are three obvious examples, and maybe you're subtler about it, but the point is that you are aware that your behavior is always somewhat inauthentic. (Maybe you know and love a band, say, really and truly, but at the very least how you express or do not express this fact to others is shaped and colored by your social context.) Other people, though - other people are genuine, they really believe and feel and think what they believe and feel and think, not like you (you poser). And of course all of these people look just as inauthentic to themselves as you do to yourself - you just don't see their internal monologues, but you're not the only one who has one, you know. And the process of growing up - speaking as someone who's still doing it - seems to include as an essential part the demythologizing of adulthood from a magical position of knowledge, authority, and wisdom, to just having lived long enough that society decides that you should know what you're doing by now, and you for the most part having to fake it. Put another way: you know how you have no goddamn clue what's going on? Neither does anyone else.
This is related to a phenomenon called the "fundamental attribution error" - which, I am informed, isn't even remotely fundamental as it requires a particularly Western milieu of concepts of individuality to exist - but, assuming you do live in a Western society, you attribute your own behavior to all kinds of things - the weather, being stressed at work, being drunk, being horny - while everyone else's behavior you attribute to fundamental aspects of their personality. Also, you know how people are surprisingly pleasant and interesting and maybe even rational and intelligent when you talk to them one-on-one but you put them all together in a group and suddenly they're all assholes? Yeah no that's a real thing. There's a lot of different names for different parts of this phenomenon: groupthink, the bystander effect, herd or mob mentality, and so forth, but the point is that people in groups behave very differently from people not in groups. Often this change is for the worse - people can be very stupid and mean when mob mentality is in effect - but certainly not always, perhaps not even most of the time. (We are social animals, after all, and do actually tend to think with other people's brains.) Also, this effect used to convince me, back in my Charismatic Christian days, that actual physical miracles were occurring right in front of me when they manifestly weren't. So yeah, it's a powerful thing.
You know the maxim, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity? Well, throw in miscommunication and your average person's limitless capacity for self-deception, and you've got a pretty good explanation for even the most apparently evil behavior - Enron, the current Republican Party, the goddamned Third Reich - no one is intentionally evil. Lex Luthor and Victor von Doom are fiction - in real life, people are small.
(Granted, this is based largely in my own experiences and my layman's understanding of several landmark psychology and sociology cases. It is entirely possible that there are people who are intentionally evil, or who see no shadow between the thought and the action, but I see no convincing evidence of this, and cannot make it square with my understanding of human nature.)
3rd Axiom of Ethics: People don't go in boxes.
This is more or less just a corollary to the axiom of complexity, but it's important enough to stand alone. People are incredibly complicated and are very different from each other, and since categories falsify, and since people are the most important thing, they take priority over your categories of convenience.
To take an extreme example: I have known many people who view humanity as sortable into two boxes: male and female. If you go in the male box (heh, malebox), it means you have to adhere to actually quite a long list of characteristics and behaviors (attracted to women only, strong, chivalrous, primary breadwinner, head of the household, and so forth), and likewise with the female box, or else you're doing it wrong. This is obviously total bullshit if you know literally the first thing about, for instance, human sexuality. So lots of rational people have subdivided these boxes into smaller boxes: straight male, gay male, straight female, gay female. Probably you add a couple of boxes for bisexual people as well. But what about trans people? What about asexual people? What about people with genders that just straight up are not either male or female? Do you want a box for every combination of the above? Because we're not even close to done - you can, for instance, separate sexual orientation into multiple distinct axes. I happen to identify as "pansexual not-yet-identifying as a trans female" - do you really have a box for me? And this is just sexuality and gender; we haven't even begun to touch on kink, for instance, or race, or philosophy, or allism v. autism, or class, or religion. And because you can only have so many boxes, people who don't fit into any of the boxes you happen to like get dumped into the big box called THEM, which you regard with smug superiority from your box labeled US.
Well, fuck that. People can be whatever the fuck they are. Because when you say otherwise, you're really saying that your stupid fucking boxes are more important than people. Hey guess what you're wrong.
(This is also one reason I have become less and less satisfied with the New Atheists: they have very clearly demarcated boxes for "Religious People" and "Accommodationists" and "New Atheists" and it's just not that simple, folks. I appreciate fighting the religious establishment in this country, that's a really fucking important thing to do, but religious belief is way more complex than you think it is. So's science, incidentally, and the prevailingly naive view of what science is and how it works is another reason for my dissatisfaction with them.)
Axiom of Noncoherence: You do not need and probably should not strive for a completely self-consistent rational framework which dictates all of your beliefs.
Also, you do not have a completely self-consistent rational framework which dictates all of your beliefs, no matter what you think. Look at it this way: there are seven billion people on this planet. What are the chances that you, specifically, has managed to start from the One True Set of Correct Premises (assuming such a thing can even be meaningfully supposed to exist)? If you said one in seven billion, I admire your optimism, but of course there's no particular reason to think that anyone has ever had the One True Set of Correct Premises. You may take it as given that at least one of the assumptions you make about the world is radically, substantially wrong. (Realistically, probably a lot more than one are.) If, then, you attempt to derive a complete, self-consistent weltanschauung from those flawed initial assumptions, the error propagates through, likely increasing with each step, until your results are completely out of touch with reality. The good news is, no one actually does this. Rather, we attempt to construct frameworks from specific pre-existing intuitions, which leaves our frameworks looking pretty cobbled together. The bad news is, people often suppress their intuitions in the service of some over-arching framework which is, in fact, attempting to be self-consistent. Then, sometimes, you get biblical literalists defending Old Testament genocide (a move which, ironically, makes them far more moral relativists than many of the secular ethicists they tend to demonize), or soldiers in the Third Reich suppressing their moral intuitions in favor of Kantian deontological ethical systems, or Randian objectivists just shutting down their empathy altogether.
Now, obviously, our intuitions are far from infallible, and I'm certainly not arguing against the use of reason to refine and harmonize one's intuitions. For instance, our intuitions of how physical reality works, even though informed by centuries of scientific discovery, are completely wrong when faced with the edge cases of special relativity and quantum mechanics, which as far as we can tell, are both totally incompatible with each other, and both totally correct. And I might add that if the goddamn Laws of Physics can't be arsed to be self-consistent, why the hell should I be expected to be any more so?
1st Axiom of Reasoned Argumentation: Assume good faith.
This should be a no-brainer: when you're arguing with someone, assume they are sincere in the beliefs they're arguing with you. You may think, correctly even, that they have other, inconsistent beliefs or behaviors, but remember first that people are small and also that inconsistency is not necessarily a bad thing, and proceed under the assumption that they are in fact espousing sincerely-held beliefs. Even if you're arguing against someone like the Westboro Baptist Church, who holds outlandish and horrifying beliefs, and also stands to gain in some way by espousing those beliefs, it's still far more likely that there's simply a lot of selective perception and self-deception going on.
Two particularly striking examples come to mind: when arguing with a pro-lifer, who on the one hand likens abortion to the Holocaust, and on the other hand decries abortion-clinic bombers, you can and should point out that this is probably inconsistent, but do not assume that the pro-lifer doesn't really care about unborn children. From personal experience, they do. Their behavior happens to look like the behavior of someone primarily interested in controlling the reproductive and sexual rights of women, and on an unconscious and societal level that's probably what's going on, but the real person in front of you does legitimately care about saving the babies.
On the flip side: Christians need to stop citing Romans 1:20 to try to prove that atheists don't really disbelieve in god. You are more than welcome to try to show that certain of my beliefs or behaviors logically imply belief in god - you might even to some extent succeed - but do not simply say, "The Bible says you believe in God, therefore you believe in God and are willfully choosing to reject Him," and then move straightaway to psychoanalyzing me to determine why I am in such willful denial. That's idiotic. (Also? If your belief system is so fragile that it literally cannot handle the mere existence of anyone who disagrees with it, then you can either get a better belief system, or you can continue to be the biggest intellectual cowards on record.)
2nd Axiom of Reasoned Argumentation: Don't be lazy.
Language is tricky. What one person means by it is different from what another means. This is true even when two people from the same region in the same country during the same time period are talking. It's much truer when you're reading the works of a person long dead writing in a different language. So do some mental lifting yourself: before you disagree with someone, make very certain that you understand them. Reword, reinterpret, reframe their argument as strongly and intelligibly to yourself as you can. Chances are, if the argument of someone whose work has been preserved as that of a "great thinker" looks stupid to you at first glance, you haven't understood it yet. Maybe an argument is stupid given modern understandings of the world. Well, recontextualize it in the culture in which it was written - see how it made sense then. See if you can make it make sense now. As a rule of thumb, if you don't look at an argument and think, "Oh yeah, that's totally reasonable given their assumptions," then you don't understand it well enough to argue against it. (I should certainly say that I need as much work in this regard as anyone.)
3rd Axiom of Reasoned Argumentation: Don't change the subject unless 1) the first subject is resolved to the satisfaction of all involved parties; 2) all parties agree that the subject cannot currently be satisfactorily resolved; or 3) you are moving to an underlying, more fundamental subject.
This is both basic courtesy and the most practical way to actually get anything worthwhile out of an argument.
Axiom of Hitler Wasn't an Atheist: Hitler wasn't an atheist.
He wasn't.
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