new post about hitchens; spelling corrections in other posts

content/post/philosopher-kings-and-smartphones.md

@@ -55,4 +55,3 @@ And this is where I come back to Derek. It’s not impossible for a scientist to
 But if you’re going to make this kind of professional leap, you really need to do it from a position of humility and curiosity — that is, if you’re not simply trying to get what you want at others’ expense. And, really, when was the last time you exhibited a politician behaving with the humility and curiosity of a scientist? Yet, this is precisely what Derek is expecting, in his demands for “better training” of politicians. Which, it seems to me, marks Derek as a pretty typical politician, himself: naive, untrained, and driven by egotistical fantasies about philosopher kings and smartphone apps.
 
 ```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
-

content/post/philosophy-and-hindsight.md

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+---
+title: "Philosophy and Hindsight"
+date: 2022-03-26T14:46:40Z
+tags: ["atheism", "christopher hitchens", "theism", "john haldane", "secularism", "theocracy"]
+topics: ["philosophy", "theology",]
+image: img/hitchens-and-haldane.jpg
+description: Seeing this debate 11 years later is humbling and a little sad.
+draft: false
+---
+
+{{< youtube pflU-nnY4MA >}}
+
+Eleven years ago, I didn't understand the Haldane position, because I was ignorant. Eleven years ago, I thought I understood the Hitchens position, because he made me feel good when he spoke. Working my way through a masters in philosophy eleven years later, I can say that I (mostly) understand them both. And frankly, in the light of that wisdom (such as it is), Hitchens is embarrassing.
+
+Take, for example, the first question Haldane presented to Hitchens: "what grounds the secular belief in human dignity?" Or, to put it more clearly: what justification is there, to think that humans are more valuable than anything else on earth? How does Hitchens respond to this? In a nutshell: "It just is, and we just do. Deal with it." That's not an explanation at all. In fact, it's exactly the kind of thing that Dawkins mocked the religious for, in his documentary: "I DO believe! I DO! I DO!"
+
+Hitchens is hostile, inquisitive, uncharitable, and very often hypocritically contradictory. Haldane, on the other hand, is actually well argued, and open to correction. At least three times in this debate he tries to adjust his assertions based on Hitchens' objections. Hitchens, on the other hand, is the one thumping his chest, insisting that he's the one in the right, and nobody has a right to tell him otherwise.
+
+It is interesting to think back to my late 20s and early 30s, and recall how seductive and powerful atheist rhetoric was. Not just on myself, but also on many of the people I knew around me. In hindsight, I think there's something much bigger going on there than which of these two won the debate, or even which of the two is correct in the final analysis.
+
+I think people like Dawkins and Hitchens actually function as receptacles and broadcast towers of a kind of misdirected righteous indignation.
+
+I grew up in a lower-middle class household in a suburb of Chicago, in the 70s and 80s. Granted, books were difficult to come by at the time (you really had to be motivated to go to the library, and you really had to be aware of where to find things that would answer your questions well). But, I was also brought up in a Catholic home. A religious tradition with an absolute *treasure trove* of collected wisdom on some of the deepest questions in philosophy and science. Yet, I had never heard of *anyone* from this tradition until I was well into my late twenties. Not even the community college I attended had classes on ancient or medieval philosophy at the time.
+
+The point I'm driving at, is that the righteous indignation my generation felt, was not that of being lied to about God, but rather, it was about having had the resources needed to answer these questions sufficiently, hidden from us with the excuse that we were intellectually incapable of, or constitutionally unwilling to, understand them. Turning to atheism was just a way of expressing that indignation, and there is no more grotesque or self-destructive an example of this projected indignation, in my view, than Christopher Hitchens.

content/post/the-world-in-1967.md

@@ -13,6 +13,7 @@ I was born in a tiny southwestern suburb of Chicago, in August of 1967. Lots of
 However, 1967 itself is a pretty fascinating year. Quite a bit of upheaval and change took place that year. Some of it will appear shockingly familiar to the present day. It's a bit depressing, actually. The old saw, "the more things change, the more they stay the same", comes to mind.
 
 #### Detroit Riots
+
 For example, did you know that a massive race-riot occurred in Detroit, in mid-July of 1967? Here's a photo of the Michigan National Guard, patrolling a street in which all the shops are on fire. Loook familiar?
 
 {{< fluid_imgs "detroit-riots|img/michigan-national-guardsman.jpg|Detroit Riots 1967" >}}
@@ -31,13 +32,13 @@ Human nature being as it is, turmoil and conflict are nearly ubiquitous and cont
 
 #### Israel
 
-Taking Israel first, I'm talking about the famous Six Day War. This is a war that should never even have happened. A clown show car crash of paraonoid Soviet meddling and the megalomaniacal ambitions of Abdul Nassir, exploded in an orgy of Arab self-immolation at the hands of the barely twenty-year-old Israeli Defense Forces. I don't know enough about geopolitics to comment competently on the event. However, the documentary I've embedded here seems to offer an even-handed analysis of the situation. Of keen interest to my sensibilities: the difference between the international attitude toward Israel in 1967, and it's atittude toward Israel in 2021 during the Palestinian bombing raid. I think we've taken a much darker turn for the the worse, since 1967.
+Taking Israel first, I'm talking about the famous Six Day War. This is a war that should never even have happened. A clown show car crash of paraonoid Soviet meddling and the megalomaniacal ambitions of Abdul Nassir, exploded in an orgy of Arab self-immolation at the hands of the barely twenty-year-old Israeli Defense Forces. I don't know enough about geopolitics to comment competently on the event. However, the documentary I've embedded here seems to offer an even-handed analysis of the situation. Of keen interest to my sensibilities: the difference between the international attitude toward Israel in 1967, and it's attitude toward Israel in 2021 during the Palestinian bombing raid. I think we've taken a much darker turn for the the worse, since 1967.
 
 {{< youtube pvisd4N3tZI >}}
 
 #### Viet Nam
 
-The second big issue is Viet Nam. It is said that 1967 was a year of "[big battles](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/opinion/1967-the-era-of-big-battles-in-vietnam.html)", "[pivots](https://www.stripes.com/special-reports/vietnam-stories/1967/)", and "[escalations](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/03/the-vietnam-war-part-i-early-years-and-escalation/389054/)". Maybe all of that is true; maybe none of it. There's so much mythology built up around this war, that its hard to say what's real or not about it, anymore. I was six years old when Nixon signed the Paris peace accords, and just shy of 8 years old when Saigon fell to the communists. Since then, the mainstream narrative has been relentless self-flaggelation and self-loathing. But the reality on the ground wasn't as monolithically shame-ridden as the media would like to think. Anti-war protests satisfy the media's own communist sympathies. So, that's what one must digest on a regular basis, if one merely skims the surface. But if you dig deep enough, you can ocassionally find evidence that Americans still thought of themselves and their country as fundamentally good, despite its flaws. Here, for example, is a photo of a pro-troop rally in Wakefield, Mass. in the fall of 1967 (right in the midst of all those anti-War protests going on at Berkely, and in New York, Boston, and Chicago):
+The second big issue is Viet Nam. It is said that 1967 was a year of "[big battles](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/opinion/1967-the-era-of-big-battles-in-vietnam.html)", "[pivots](https://www.stripes.com/special-reports/vietnam-stories/1967/)", and "[escalations](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/03/the-vietnam-war-part-i-early-years-and-escalation/389054/)". Maybe all of that is true; maybe none of it. There's so much mythology built up around this war, that its hard to say what's real or not about it, anymore. I was six years old when Nixon signed the Paris peace accords, and just shy of 8 years old when Saigon fell to the communists. Since then, the mainstream narrative has been relentless self-flagellation and self-loathing. But the reality on the ground wasn't as monolithically shame-ridden as the media would like to think. Anti-war protests satisfy the media's own communist sympathies. So, that's what one must digest on a regular basis, if one merely skims the surface. But if you dig deep enough, you can occasionally find evidence that Americans still thought of themselves and their country as fundamentally good, despite its flaws. Here, for example, is a photo of a pro-troop rally in Wakefield, Mass. in the fall of 1967 (right in the midst of all those anti-War protests going on at Berkely, and in New York, Boston, and Chicago):
 
 {{< fluid_imgs "pro-troop-demo|img/pro-soldier-demo-1967.jpg|Pro-military Demonstration 1967" >}}