Halloween

In some ways, Halloween is a lot like Christmas and Easter. They were all Pagan holidays relating to the changing seasons that were later co-opted by Christianity, and now don't have much to do with either. We still tend to practice the Pagan rituals, but without thinking about where they came from or what they have to do with nominally Christian holidays.

But one important way that Halloween is that no one takes the mythology of Halloween seriously at all.

During other holidays, children are taught to believe in things that don't exist, whether it's Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, or Jesus. But on Halloween, children are taught that all those ghosts and goblins wandering the streets are actually just other kids dressed up.

That's why Halloween is the skeptics' holiday. The lesson of other holidays is to have faith in things unseen. The lesson of Halloween is to investigate what looks mysterious and find the truth behind it.

Cargo Cults Get a Bad Rap

Cargo cults are religions that formed in pacific island cultures when they came into contact with Europeans. They sought to replicate the Europeans' material wealth and technology by imitating it. They didn't know how those things were made, so they thought they were gifts from the gods. They built imitation airstrips and control towers thinking those were rituals to summon planes.

The term cargo cult has also been applied in other contexts, such as cargo cult science or cargo cult programming, to mean imitating techniques and procedures without what they're for or why they're used. I don't object to that usage, because it seems pretty accurate, but it does give a poor representation of cargo cults.

As far as I can see, cargo cults are the most rational religion in existence. They're still wrong and irrational of course. But compared to more mainstream religions like Christianity and Islam, they're downright sane. Cargo cults have real evident miracles.

Airplanes and radios and all sorts of magical things. You don't need to have faith in those things. Their explanation for those things was wrong, but that's not necessarily irrational. The irrational part of cargo cults is refusing to give up that explanation when it fails to work. Compare that to Christianity which is entirely based on irrationality and faith.

Belief

The English language (and all natural languages) are sloppy, ambiguous and vague. But they still tend to work surprisingly well. It doesn't work very well when a specific, technical meaning needs to be discussed. That's why scientific, engineering and medical fields have all sorts of specialized words that mean something different from the way they're frequently used in everyday speech.

This also applies to philosophy. It's hard to have a deep philosophical discussion when you use a word to mean one thing and someone else uses the same word to mean something different. So, here's my small contribution. My take on what the word "belief" should mean in a philosophical context.

A belief is something that is held to be true.

Not something that is held to be true without evidence. That's faith. It's common in ordinary speech to use the two interchangeably. But I feel when precision matters, these definitions are the best readily available.

The biggest reason for that is that frequently, it doesn't matter why something is believed, only that it is believed. In such a situation, a more general definition is better. As far as I know, there's no better word for "something held to be true" than belief. Faith, trust, knowledge, etc. are similar but all more specific. Belief is good for it's generality.

Another reason is that it's not always so cut and dried if a belief is faith, trust, etc. What if the belief is held for a reason, but a bad one? What if there is evidence supporting the belief, but more evidence against it? Is it faith, is it trust? Well, either way, it's still a belief.

Blasphemy Day: Bad Faith

Today is Blasphemy Day. In honor of that, here's some blasphemy: There is no god. Jesus was just a man. Mohammed was not a prophet. A cracker cannot turn into flesh. Thunder and lightning are not caused by Thor or Zeus. Heaven and hell do not exist. Sex is a good thing. The presents under your tree weren't left there by Santa Claus.

Doubtlessly, you believe at least one of these things. Which is why I support Blasphemy Day. Because something you believe is blasphemy to someone. The price you pay for being able to express it is that others can express something that you may disagree with or find personally offensive. To oppose that is to oppose the very concept of free speech.

And so here's another piece of blasphemy: Faith is a bad thing.

In this context, by faith, I mean belief without reason. The word is sometimes used to mean something more like trust. A common arguing technique by some believers is to deliberately confuse the two separate meanings. ("You have faith that your brakes will work, which is the same as my faith in god.") Let me be clear, I am talking about belief without reason. If you have a reason for believing something, it's not faith.

Why is faith a bad thing? Because it's fundamentally irrational. You can't draw a map without first looking at the territory. Something you believe by faith might be, by pure chance, correct. But given all the different mutually exclusive things you could believe by faith, that chance isn't very good. If you're actually interested in having your beliefs be correct, faith is a very bad approach to take.

Now, evidence can be misleading. People believe things that are incorrect, but with backing evidence all the time. For example, scientists at the end of the nineteenth century believed in luminiferous aether and with good reason. Light's a wave, it has to travel through something, right? But by always evaluating new evidence, you can correct your mistakes and make your beliefs closer to the truth. With faith, there is no such recourse.

Faith is a bad thing, but what's even worse than faith is the belief that faith is a good thing. Human irrationality is a bad thing, but it's an inevitable thing. We are not rational beings by nature, and a certain amount of irrationality is to be expected. But it is not to be desired. We must strive to be as rational as possible, because that is the only way we can progress. It is the only way to correct our mistakes and fix them.

Promoting faith as a paramount good is perhaps one of the most evil things religion has ever done (well, ok, crusades, pogroms, fatwas, etc. are pretty bad too).