Atheism

This is the first in a series of interviews about religion that I will conduct for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, and the author, most recently, of “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.”

Gary Gutting: A recent survey by PhilPapers, the online philosophy index, says that 62 percent of philosophers are atheists (with another 11 percent “inclined” to the view). Do you think the philosophical literature provides critiques of theism strong enough to warrant their views? Or do you think philosophers’ atheism is due to factors other than rational analysis?

Alvin Plantinga: If 62 percent of philosophers are atheists, then the proportion of atheists among philosophers is much greater than (indeed, is nearly twice as great as) the proportion of atheists among academics generally. (I take atheism to be the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions.) Do philosophers know something here that these other academics don’t know? What could it be? Philosophers, as opposed to other academics, are often professionally concerned with the theistic arguments — arguments for the existence of God. My guess is that a considerable majority of philosophers, both believers and unbelievers, reject these arguments as unsound.

Still, that’s not nearly sufficient for atheism. In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.

The failure of arguments for God would be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism.

G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?

A.P.: Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.

I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism. For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some countryhad done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism. So if, à la Russell, theism is like teapotism, the atheist, to be justified, would (like the a-teapotist) have to have powerful evidence against theism.

G.G.: But isn’t there also plenty of evidence against theism — above all, the amount of evil in a world allegedly made by an all-good, all-powerful God?

A.P.: The so-called “problem of evil” would presumably be the strongest (and maybe the only) evidence against theism. It does indeed have some strength; it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given the existence of all the suffering and evil our world contains, is fairly low. But of course there are also arguments for theism. Indeed, there are at least a couple of dozen good theistic arguments. So the atheist would have to try to synthesize and balance the probabilities. This isn’t at all easy to do, but it’s pretty obvious that the result wouldn’t anywhere nearly support straight-out atheism as opposed to agnosticism.

G.G.: But when you say “good theistic arguments,” you don’t mean arguments that are decisive — for example, good enough to convince any rational person who understands them.

A.P.: I should make clear first that I don’t think arguments are needed for rational belief in God. In this regard belief in God is like belief in other minds, or belief in the past. Belief in God is grounded in experience, or in the sensus divinitatis, John Calvin’s term for an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God in a wide variety of circumstances.

Nevertheless, I think there are a large number — maybe a couple of dozen — of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.

G.G.: Could you give an example of such an argument?

You don’t even need arguments to have a rational belief in God. Belief in God is grounded in experience.

AP: One presently rather popular argument: fine-tuning. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. For example, if the force of the Big Bang had been different by one part in 10 to the 60th, life of our sort would not have been possible. The same goes for the ratio of the gravitational force to the force driving the expansion of the universe: If it had been even slightly different, our kind of life would not have been possible. In fact the universe seems to be fine-tuned, not just for life, but for intelligent life. This fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.

G.G.: But even if this fine-tuning argument (or some similar argument) convinces someone that God exists, doesn’t it fall far short of what at least Christian theism asserts, namely the existence of an all-perfect God? Since the world isn’t perfect, why would we need a perfect being to explain the world or any feature of it?

A.P.: I suppose your thinking is that it is suffering and sin that make this world less than perfect. But then your question makes sense only if the best possible worlds contain no sin or suffering. And is that true? Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story.

Think about it: The first being of the universe, perfect in goodness, power and knowledge, creates free creatures. These free creatures turn their backs on him, rebel against him and get involved in sin and evil. Rather than treat them as some ancient potentate might — e.g., having them boiled in oil — God responds by sending his son into the world to suffer and die so that human beings might once more be in a right relationship to God. God himself undergoes the enormous suffering involved in seeing his son mocked, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. And all this for the sake of these sinful creatures.

I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.

G.G.: O.K., but in any case, isn’t the theist on thin ice in suggesting the need for God as an explanation of the universe? There’s always the possibility that we’ll find a scientific account that explains what we claimed only God could explain. After all, that’s what happened when Darwin developed his theory of evolution. In fact, isn’t a major support for atheism the very fact that we no longer need God to explain the world?

A.P.: Some atheists seem to think that a sufficient reason for atheism is the fact (as they say) that we no longer need God to explain natural phenomena — lightning and thunder for example. We now have science.

As a justification of atheism, this is pretty lame. We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified. A-moonism on this ground would be sensible only if the sole ground for belief in the existence of the moon was its explanatory power with respect to lunacy. (And even so, the justified attitude would be agnosticism with respect to the moon, not a-moonism.) The same thing goes with belief in God: Atheism on this sort of basis would be justified only if the explanatory power of theism were the only reason for belief in God. And even then, agnosticism would be the justified attitude, not atheism.

G.G.: So, what are the further grounds for believing in God, the reasons that make atheism unjustified?

A.P.: The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience. Many people of very many different cultures have thought themselves in experiential touch with a being worthy of worship. They believe that there is such a person, but not because of the explanatory prowess of such belief. Or maybe there is something like Calvin’ssensus divinitatis. Indeed, if theism is true, then very likely there is something like the sensus divinitatis. So claiming that the only sensible ground for belief in God is the explanatory quality of such belief is substantially equivalent to assuming atheism.

G.G.: If, then, there isn’t evidence to support atheism, why do you think so many philosophers — presumably highly rational people — are atheists?

Some people simply don’t want there to be a God. It would pose a serious limitation for human autonomy.

AP: I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t have any special knowledge here. Still, there are some possible explanations. Thomas Nagel, a terrific philosopher and an unusually perceptive atheist, says he simply doesn’t want there to be any such person as God. And it isn’t hard to see why. For one thing, there would be what some would think was an intolerable invasion of privacy: God would know my every thought long before I thought it. For another, my actions and even my thoughts would be a constant subject of judgment and evaluation.

Basically, these come down to the serious limitation of human autonomy posed by theism. This desire for autonomy can reach very substantial proportions, as with the German philosopher Heidegger, who, according to Richard Rorty, felt guilty for living in a universe he had not himself created. Now there’s a tender conscience! But even a less monumental desire for autonomy can perhaps also motivate atheism.

GG: Especially among today’s atheists, materialism seems to be a primary motive. They think there’s nothing beyond the material entities open to scientific inquiry, so there there’s no place for immaterial beings such as God.

AP: Well, if there are only material entities, then atheism certainly follows. But there is a really serious problem for materialism: It can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe that humans are the product of evolution.

GG: Why is that?

 AP: I can’t give a complete statement of the argument here — for that see Chapter 10 of “Where the Conflict Really Lies.” But, roughly, here’s why. First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.

But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief thatProust is more subtle than L’Amour.

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GG: So is your suggestion that a neurophysiological structure can’t be a belief? That a belief has to be somehow immaterial?

AP: That may be, but it’s not my point here. I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.

But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.

GG: Why do you say that?

AP: Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.

GG: That does seem to be a hard conclusion to accept. But won’t evolution get the materialist out of this difficulty? For our species to have survived, presumably many, if not most, of our beliefs must be true — otherwise, we wouldn’t be functional in a dangerous world.

Materialism can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe in evolution.

AP: Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine.

Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.

GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.

AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.

This interview was conducted by email and edited.

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Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.

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Buddhism's Requirements by Gary Gutting

This is the fifth in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Jay L. Garfield, who has taught philosophy at several universities and is currently the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor of Humanities, Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He is at work on a book called “Engaging Buddhism: Why Buddhism Matters to Contemporary Philosophy.”

Gary Gutting: Philosophy of religion typically focuses on questions and disputes about the ideas and doctrines of monotheistic religions, with Christianity the primary model. How does the discussion change if we add Buddhism, which is neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, as a primary model of a religion?

Jay Garfield: What gets called “philosophy of religion” in most philosophy departments and journals is really the philosophy of Abrahamic religion: basically, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Most of the questions addressed in those discussions are simply irrelevant to most of the world’s other religious traditions. Philosophers look at other religious traditions with the presumption that they are more or less the same, at least in outline, as the Abrahamic religions, and even fight about whether other traditions count as religions at all based upon their sharing certain features of the Abrahamic religions. That is a serious ethnocentrism that can really blind us to important phenomena.

For instance, I recently moderated a discussion in Singapore with the philosopher A.C. Grayling, who claimed that Buddhism is not a religion because Buddhists don’t believe in a supreme being. This simply ignores the fact that many religions are not theistic in this sense. Chess is a game, despite the fact that it is not played with a ball, after all.

Now, when we address Buddhism, we must be very careful. The Buddhist world is vast, and Buddhism has been around in various forms for two and a half millennia. There are many forms of Buddhist practice and culture, many Buddhist communities of belief and practice and significant doctrinal differences among Buddhist schools. So generalization can be dangerous. Just as we need to be careful about lumping Unitarians and Catholics together when we ask whether Christians accept the transubstantiation of the host, we must be careful about lumping together, for instance, Theravada monks in Sri Lanka with lay Zen practitioners in San Francisco. And there is no central doctrinal authority or organization that covers all of the Buddhist world.

Still, there are some widely shared features of Buddhism that would make a philosophy of religion that took it seriously look quite different. First, since Buddhism is an atheistic religion, it doesn’t raise questions about the existence of God that so dominate the philosophy of Abrahamic religions, let alone questions about the attributes of the deity. Buddhists do worry about awakening (Buddhahood). How hard is it to achieve? What is it like? Is a Buddha aware of her surroundings, or do they disappear as illusory?

Buddhists also worry about the relation between ordinary reality, or conventional truth, and ultimate reality. Are they the same or different? Is the world fundamentally illusory, or is it real? They worry about hermeneutical questions concerning the intent of apparently conflicting canonical scriptures, and how to resolve them. They ask about the nature of the person, and its relationship to more fundamental psychophysical processes. Stuff like that. The philosophy of religion looks different if these are taken to be some of its fundamental questions.

G.G.: Given these widely shared features, would you venture to say what, over all, it is to be a Buddhist?

J.G.: To be a Buddhist is to take refuge in the three Buddhist refuge objects (often called “the three jewels”): the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. To take refuge is to see human existence as fundamentally unsatisfactory and to see the three jewels as the only solution to this predicament.

The first refuge object is the Buddha: the fact that at least one person — the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama — has achieved awakening and release from suffering. This provides hope in one’s own future awakening, hope that through practice one can achieve a satisfactory existence. The second refuge is Dharma, or Buddhist doctrine. The third is the Sangha, or spiritual community, conceived sometimes as the community of other practitioners, sometimes as the community of monks and nuns, sometimes as the community of awakened beings. The project of full awakening is a collective, not an individual, venture.

G.G.: The first and the third refuges seem to correspond to a way of life, justified simply by its results in relieving sufferings. What’s involved in the second refuge, the doctrines?

J.G.: The foundation of doctrine in all Buddhist schools is the so-called four noble truths, explained by Siddhartha in his first talk after gaining awakening. The first is that life is fundamentally unsatisfactory, permeated by suffering of various types, including pain, aging and death and the inability to control one’s own destiny. The second is that this suffering is caused by attraction and aversion — attraction to things one can’t have, and aversion to things one can’t avoid, and that this attraction and aversion is in turn caused by primal confusion about the fundamental nature of reality and a consequent egocentric orientation to the world. The third is that if one extirpates these causes by eliminating attraction and aversion through metaphysical insight, one can eliminate suffering. The fourth is the specification of a set of domains and concerns — the eightfold path — attention to which can accomplish that.

G.G.: It seems then that the Buddhist way of life is based on, first, the plausible claim that suffering makes life unsatisfactory and, second, on a psychological account — again plausible — of the causes of suffering. But what’s the “metaphysical insight,” the truth about reality, that shows the way to eliminating suffering?

J.G.: Buddhist doctrine regarding the nature of reality generally focuses on three principal characteristics of things. The first idea is that all phenomena are impermanent and constantly changing, despite the fact that we engage with them as though they are permanent; the second is that they are interdependent, although we engage with them as though they are independent; the third is that they are without any intrinsic identity, although we treat ourselves and other objects as though they have intrinsic identities.

Now, many Buddhists and Buddhist schools are committed to much more extensive and detailed metaphysical doctrines, including doctrines about the fundamental constituents of reality, or dharmas, often conceived as momentary property instantiations, or about the nature of consciousness, or about cosmology. Buddhist schools and traditions vary widely in these respects. And of course there are vast differences between what lay Buddhists and what scholars understand about Buddhist doctrine. In Buddhism, as in Christianity, for many lay people the religion is about daily rituals and practices, and doctrine is left to scholars and clerics. And ideas that are complex metaphors to the erudite are literal for the laity.

G.G.: You haven’t mentioned what, to many outsiders, might seem the most striking Buddhist doctrine: reincarnation.

J.G.: I would, first, drop the term “reincarnation,” which has a more natural home in a Hindu context, in favor of “rebirth,” which makes more sense in a Buddhist context. That is because we must understand this doctrine in relation to the central doctrine in all Buddhist schools: that there is no self or soul. So there is nothing that takes on new bodies as does the soul in the Hindu traditions from which Buddhism arose and against which it reacted.

Indeed, given the radical Buddhist notion of momentary impermanence, we can say without exaggeration that one is reborn every moment. Buddhism is an Indian tradition, and rebirth across biological lives is taken for granted in most classical Indian philosophical and religious traditions. Buddhism takes that over, and it is taken for granted in many Buddhist traditions that the same kinds of causal continuity that obtain among subsequent stages within a life obtain between stages of our current biological lives and those of past and future biological lives. Many Buddhists would even take this to be an essential commitment of the religious tradition. But in some Buddhist traditions, especially those of East Asia, this view plays no role at all, and many Western Buddhists reject it altogether.

G.G.: How do Buddhists think of other religions? On the one hand, there seems to be a tolerance and even an appreciation for a diversity of views. On the other hand, there is a strong history of missionary activity, aimed at conversion.

J.G.: Exactly right. And again, we must be careful about taking the Abrahamic traditions as a default framework in which to pose this question. The Abrahamic religions all prohibit syncretism, or the melding of beliefs from different creeds, but this is not a common feature of world religious traditions. Many Buddhists are syncretic to some degree. In Japan it is common to practice both Buddhism and Shinto; in Nepal many adopt Buddhist and Hindu practices; in China, Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism blend happily. And Thomas Merton was a Catholic priest and a Buddhist practitioner.

But Buddhism has always been missionary. Buddhists have always thought that their doctrine and practices can help to alleviate suffering and so have urged others to accept them. Sometimes acceptance of Buddhist practices requires one to rethink other religious commitments; sometimes the two can be integrated. Sometimes there is creative tension.

G.G.: I can see Buddhist missionaries making an attractive case for their practices of meditation and their ethics of compassion. But the doctrine of rebirth — which, if true, would make a huge difference in how we view human existence — seems very implausible. How do Buddhists defend this doctrine?

J.G.: Once again, there is diversity here. Some Buddhists don’t defend the doctrine at all, either because they take it to be the obvious default position, as it is in some cultures, particularly in South Asia, or because it is not important or taken seriously, as in some East Asian or Western traditions. But others do defend it. One popular approach is an empirical argument, to wit, that some people have clear memories of past lives or make clear and accurate predictions about their next lives. One sees this primarily in the Tibetan tradition in which there is a widespread practice of identifying rebirths and of rebirth lineages for high lamas, such as the Dalai Lama.

G.G.: I suspect that people not already culturally disposed to accept rebirth aren’t likely to find such evidence convincing.

J.G.: Another approach is that of the Indian philosopher Dharmakirti, who argues for the necessity of believing in rebirth, though not directly for its reality. Dharmakirti argues that given the stupendous difficulty of achieving full awakening, the cultivation of a genuine aspiration to achieve awakening, which is essential to Mahayana Buddhist practice, requires one to believe in future lives; otherwise, one could not have the confidence in the possibility of success necessary to genuine resolution.

This is worth comparing to Kant’s argument that one must believe in free will in order to act and in order to treat oneself and others as moral agents, which nonetheless is not a direct argument for the freedom of the will, only for the necessity of the belief for moral life.

G.G.: Kant’s argument has received a lot of criticism from philosophers. Do you think Dharmakirti’s works?

J.G.: No, I have argued elsewhere that this is a bad argument for its intended conclusion. It confuses a commitment to the existence of future lives with a commitment to the existence of one’s own future life, and a commitment to the attainment of awakening with a commitment to one’s own awakening.

But I do think it’s a good argument for an important conclusion in the neighborhood. For the aspiration for awakening — for a complete, liberative understanding of the nature of reality and of human life — need not, and should not, for a Mahayana Buddhist, be personalized. Just as a stonemason building the ground floor of a medieval cathedral might aspire to its completion even if he knows that he will not personally be around to be involved in its completion, a practitioner who aspires that awakening will be achieved need not believe that she will be around to see it, but only hope that her own conduct and practice will facilitate that.

So, this suggests one way for a Buddhist not taken with the idea of personal rebirth across biological lives to take that doctrine as a useful metaphor: Treat the past reflectively and with gratitude and responsibility, and with an awareness that much of our present life is conditioned by our collective past; take the future seriously as something we have the responsibility to construct, just as much as if we would be there personally. This makes sense of the ideas, for instance, of intergenerational justice, or of collective contemporary responsibility for harms inflicted in the past, as well as our current personal responsibility to future generations.

As Buddhism takes root in the West and as Asian Buddhist traditions engage with modernity, we will see how doctrines such as this persist, fade, or are adapted. One thing we can see from the long and multicultural history of Buddhism is that it has always deeply affected the cultures into which it has moved, and has always been transformed in important ways by those cultures.

G.G.: Won’t the fundamental denial of a self be hard to maintain in the face of the modern emphasis on individuality?

J.G.: I don’t think so. For one thing, note that the view that there is no substantial self has a history in the West as well, in the thought of Hume, and of Nietzsche. For another, note that many contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers have either rejected the view that there is such a self, or have defended some variety of a minimalist conception of the self. So the doctrine isn’t as secure in the non-Buddhist world as one might think.

And this may be a good thing, not only for metaphysical reasons. A strong sense of self — of one’s own substantial reality, uniqueness and independence of others — may not be psychologically or morally healthy. It can lead to egoism, to narcissism and to a lack of care for others. So the modern emphasis on individuality you mention might not be such a good thing. We might all be better off if we each took ourselves less seriously as selves. That may be one of the most important Buddhist critiques of modernity and contributions to post-modernity.

More positively, the Buddhist tradition encourages us to see ourselves as impermanent, interdependent individuals, linked to one another and to our world through shared commitments to achieving an understanding of our lives and a reduction of suffering. It encourages us to rethink egoism and to consider an orientation to the world characterized by care and joint responsibility. That can’t be a bad thing.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series were with Alvin Plantinga, Louise Antony, John D. Caputo, and Howard Wettstein.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.

Out

"Out" is the name of a prize-winning literary Japanese crime fiction thriller written by a woman. "Out" is also the aptly chosen title for the following "literary" exercise. 

Out as in "out of here, out of my fucking life and back to your stinking outhouse where you've been dwelling all your life, you, ugly, Quasimodo, short, ignorant, stingy, and stinky stupid bitch!". Out as in "out of sight, out of mind". 

The long-running farce has run its course and the ugly, ignorant and stupid Quasimodo bitch finally made me laugh bitterly. I should have kicked the bitch out of my life a long, long time ago. I knew all along there was something really sick about the bitch, but I was full of the milk of human kindness. I was hoping against hope the bitch had some salvageable quality. Little did I know until today that once you were born a bitch, and a stupid and ugly bitch at that, you are beyond any hope or redemption. You are damned and doomed forever and ever in the land of miserable loneliness and sexual unfulfilment. Nobody wants you. You can't bear looking at yourself in the mirror of the outhouse you call home. 

But the bitch is not the only one douche bag asshole in my events-filled life. I have met so many out-of-this-world self-righteous, lying, ignorant, stupid, and repulsively ugly scumbags like her. They must come from the same group of degenerate and regressive breeders. Where is Hitler when we need him the most? We cannot tolerate this kind of contamination of the human gene pool. 

(To be continued) 

Knowledge of Oneself and Others

Knowledge of Oneself and Others

Honesty and Intelligence are two prime ingredients in the search for knowledge about oneself and others. Denial of facts is a hallmark of ignoramuses and cowards. Accusing others of myopia, narrow-mindedness, and the like does not improve or cure oneself of ignorance and cowardice.

1. Why do I have to believe in a fiction? Why do I need somebody to hold my hands? Am I too fucking weak to go through life unaided so I must invent a fiction to help me? Why do I need to play a game of make-believe? 

2. If I am a Quasimodo midget, but I persist in fancying that I am an attractive, good-looking person, that does not change my appearance in people's eyes. If I am stupid and ignorant, but I imagine that I am knowledgeable and smart, that does not make me one. Instead, that makes me more ridiculous and laughable. Facts, ma'm, just the facts.

3. Just because I just heard about Joseph Campbell, that does not mean nobody else has not heard of him. Just because I bought wholesale everything Campbell had to offer, that does not make Campbell was right. In fact, that made me look stupid and unthinking. Just because others eat shit (believing in myths) and thinking that eating shit is good for one's health, that does not mean eating shit is indeed a healthy practice. Critical thinking is an element that differentiates smart humans from dumb asses and idiots. Don't come near me and sell Campbell to me. I am different from the likes of you, from the stupid and ignorant and weak-minded masses. I don't need myths to survive. I don't believe in myths. 

God is not Love

God is not Love

Idiots and similarly defective humans listened to the cliché and trite Christian expression "God is Love" and took it as the gospel.

God was a myth invented by humans when they dwelled in caves. Nowadays those who still believe in such a myth have a knowledge and a mindset of cavemen. 

Love is heightened empathy. Love is altruistic impulse. Love is sharing and giving of oneself. Selfish people don't tknow love. 

Idiots cannot understand those above them in intelligence and knowledge. They take comfort in relativities and fancy that everyone is entitled to their opinions, no matter how dumb and unfounded and illogical the opinions are. The fact of the matter is that there is sense and there is also nonsense. The opinions and beliefs embraced by idiots are full of nonsense. 

Idiots cannot think for themselves They repeat worn-out, trite expressions and embrace myths. Myths were cavemen's ways to communicate the unknowable (for them). 

We know who the idiots are by the way they express their beliefs and the very nature of their beliefs. As I said, if you were born stupid and grew  up without realizing you were stupid, it's very likely you will remain stupid till the day you die.

I was an idiot once. I worked very hard to attain mental and thus spiritual emancipation because luckily for me I was driven to acquire knowledge, especially self-knowledge. Those who are really smart would admit that I am no longer idiotic. The die-hard idiots still think I am deluded. It takes one to know one. Most our knowledge of and about others comes from self-projection.

I once loved three women, not at the same time, of course not. I am a serial lover. I thought the three women loved me, too. I was wrong in thinking so. I was an idiot, I am telling you. After them, there were sixteen others who told me they loved me, but I didn't believe their profession of affection for me, except that of Henrietta. What made me believe in Henrietta's sincerity? She fucking refused to take money from me. She didn't accept any gifts from me either. She told me, "Roberto, you worked so damned hard for your money. You literally risked your life for it. Save it for yourself. I have enough money of my own. I am not like the other bitches. I am not a hypocrite. I am not condemning your way of making money and then turn around asking and accepting money from you. I have dignity. I respect myself. But don't you ever give your money to any bitch anymore. I will kill you if you do." A few months after she delivered that pronouncement, she died of a heart attack at dinner time in my arms. She was too hot-tempered for her own good. Besides, she never watched her diet. She stupidly thought she would live until her 80's. Anyway, she was the most moral and caring woman I ever knew.  She cured me of loneliness. I finally met a woman who really loved me and showed me what love really was. Other women showed me that they were nothing but greedy and lying bitches. 

An idiotic bitch told me that I was narrow-minded and deficient of imagination, and that was why I didn't understand and thus didn't accept the Christian message that God is love. I rolled my eyes after hearing that regurgitation from her. She just discovered Joseph Campbell, and typically enough of her, took everything in without exercising any critical thinking because she didn't have any to begin with. I knew about Campbell more than 30 years ago, just like I had known about the Bible, fairy tales, and similar bullshit years before that. I refused to believe in a notion of divinity and divine love. Only infantile and stupid humans believe in that shit. They are the ones lacking imagination and intelligence. I am tired of hearing from creatures who are stupid and devoid of objective self-assessment. This is the same bitch who blithely and brazenly asserted to me that she was good-looking whereas she looked like a Quasimodo midget. This is the same bitch who grandly pronounced that she knew she would be okay because she "knew" that "God" "would take care" of her.  Yeah, the bitch had the "imagination", all right. What really bugs and irks me sometimes is to see ignorant idiots and dumb asses talk glowingly about their "intelligence" (sic!) and "knowledge" (another sick sic!). 

Mind you, I'm not saying that I've the sharpest mind in town. I realize and recognize that there are many guys and gals out there much more intelligent than me. And I have met several of them and been able to learn much from them. Fuck, right now there was a young man, young enough to be my grandson, who floored me for his "wisdom" and intelligence and poker knowledge. There were only two thing I didn't care about him: 

1. Arrogance (he loved to say "I am going to teach you...." instead of using the more nuanced and diplomatic expression, "I'd like to share the following with you...". Youth is too eager to prove itself. 

2. Deplorable ethics. But at least he is aware of this shortcoming and working on it, unlike other assholes I know. I am giving him some slack on this because frankly I didn't finally achieve a high level of ethics until about six years ago when I turned 59  years of age. I realized then I must live a life of high morals and eschew all easy streets. I must have empathy and adopt the golden rule. I'm not saying I had been morally dissolute before 2009. I was simply too weak not to give in to temptations. Now I am a much stronger person morally, physically, intellectually, and financially than I was before. I am at peace with myself, but not with dumb asses and idiots and assholes who are telling me that I am narrow-minded and lacking imagination. 

Knowledge of Bible by most Americans

Article written by Nicholas Kristoff of NYT

WITH Easter and Passover freshly behind us, let’s test your knowledge of the Bible. How many mistakes can you find:

Noah of Arc and his wife, Joan, build a boat to survive a great flood. Moses climbs Mount Cyanide and receives 10 enumerated commandments; for all the differences among religious denominations, the Ten Commandments are a common bedrock that Jews, Catholics and Protestants agree on.

Sodom and his wild girlfriend, Gomorrah, soon set the standard for what not to do. They are turned to pillars of salt.

The Virgin Mary, a young Christian woman, conceives Jesus immaculately and gives birth to him in a Jerusalem manger. Jesus, backed by the Twelve Apostles and their wives, the Epistles, proclaims what we call the Golden Rule: “Do one to others before they do one to you.” The Romans repeatedly crucify Jesus — at Cavalry, Golgotha and other sites — but he resurrects himself each time.

Christianity spreads through the gospels, which differ on details but all provide eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life from birth to death. Finally, Rome tires of throwing Christians to lions and becomes the first country to adopt Christianity as its religion. The Bible is translated from the original English into countless languages.

So how many errors did you spot? There are about 20 mistakes, which I’ve listed at the end of this column, and they reflect the general muddling in our society about religious knowledge.

Secular Americans are largely ignorant about religion, but, in surveys, religious Americans turn out to be scarcely more knowledgeable.

“Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion,” Stephen Prothero noted in his book, “Religious Literacy.” “Atheists may be as rare in America as Jesus-loving politicians are in Europe, but here faith is almost entirely devoid of content. One of the most religious countries on earth is also a nation of religious illiterates.”

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe that the Bible holds the answer to all or most of life’s basic questions. Yet only one-third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and 10 percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.

Many Americans know even less about other faiths, from Islam to Hinduism. Several days after 9/11, a vigilante shot and killed an Indian-American Sikh because of the assumption that a turban must mean a Muslim: Ignorance and murderous bigotry joined in one.

All this goes to the larger question of the relevance of the humanities. Literature, philosophy and the arts have come to be seen as effete and irrelevant, but if we want to understand the world around us and think deeply about it, it helps to have exposure to Shakespeare and Kant, Mozart and Confucius — and, yes, Jesus, Moses and the Prophet Muhammad.

Secularists sometimes believe religious knowledge doesn’t matter because the world is leaving faith behind. Really? Faith is elemental in much of the world, including large swaths of America.

How can one understand Afghanistan without some knowledge of Islam? For that matter, how can one understand America without any intellectual curiosity about Evangelicals? Can one understand the world if one is oblivious to the stunning rise of Pentecostals at home and abroad?

Every high school and college graduate in America should, I think, have some familiarity with statistics, economics and a foreign language such as Spanish. Religion may not be as indispensable, but the humanities should be a part of our repertory. They may not enrich our wallets, but they do enrich our lives. They civilize us. They provide context.

And we don’t want to emulate the long-ago Texas governor who, in one of those stories that may be too good to be true, opposed Spanish instruction because: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”

Errors in the Bible story above: Joan wasn’t Noah’s wife (and Arc wasn’t his name); Moses climbed Mount Sinai, not Cyanide; there were 12 (unnumbered) commandments, and Jews, Protestants and Catholics have different versions depending in part on how they compress them into 10; Sodom wasn’t a person; same for Gomorrah; they weren’t the ones turned into salt; the Virgin Mary was Jewish; the immaculate conception is a Catholic doctrine referring to the conception of Mary; Jesus was said to be born in Bethlehem; epistles are letters; the Golden Rule governs what you do “unto others”; Jesus was crucified once; it’s Calvary, not Cavalry, and it’s the same place as Golgotha; Jesus is said to have been resurrected once; although we don’t know much about the gospel writers, they presumably weren’t eyewitnesses but incorporated eyewitness sources; the Gospels of Mark and John do not refer to the birth of Jesus; Armenia was first to adopt Christianity as state religion; the Bible is translated from Hebrew and Greek, not English.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

Deception and Self-Deception Redux

Deception and Self-Deception

As I enter the twilight of my life, I realize the more despicable and stupid a human animal, the more likely it would accuse me of being despicable and stupid. Human animals are very funny indeed. They are never concerned with Knowledge, Truth, Love, Courage, and Ethics. Instead, they are concerned with stupid values like money, sex, honor, respect, prestige, pride, and similar shit. It has reached the point I don't like to have any conversation with them. Anytime they open their mouths, they reveal their stupidity and ignorance. The problem ( and also the comedy) is that they don't even know they are so fucking stupid and ignorant in the first place. They fancy that just because they managed to finish college they are smart and informed while they don't have an original idea in their fucking heads. They just regurgitate what they "learned" at school and "read" from the newspapers. They don't really read books. They cannot think in a logic, facts-based manner. Instead, they swallow hook, line, and sinker what their religious and political "leaders" have told them. They fucking believe in stupid myths and nonsense. They cannot read books on philosophy and psychology. They are too dumb to read such kind of books. They are practically monolingual. They are too stupid to be multilingual. I of course fucking despise them and consider them as stupid barnyard animals, unfit to be my companions and I have told them so straight to their fucking faces. There have been so many times I wish I had the wherewithal to relieve them of their miserable existence. To me, their lives have no meaning none whatsoever 

Animalistic and Truly Human Pride

Animalistic and Truly Human Pride

Every functioning human---idiots and sundry other defectives don't count---is aware, some more dimly than others, that he is a human and that means he is superior than the rest of the organisms on this planet. Yet most humans live a life no different than that of sub-humans. Their pride is of the animalistic kind: power, money, food, sex, and procreation, and they die just like the way they live: no awareness and no enlightenment. 

A few humans are able to do things that no sub-humans can: they discover/uncover nature's secrets/structures/functions; they create works of ảt. Additionally, they don't believe in the myths and bullshit that the weak-minded, brainwashed and stupid humans do, such as a Personal God, Man is made in God's image, Judgment Day, reincarnation, etc...

Of course, I regard myself as a true, albeit arrogant and "narrow-minded" and "intolerant" human. Any human who cannot be creative and cannot create works of art or who is too brainwashed and stupid to know any better about what it means to be really human, does not deserve my respect. One time I threw up violently after a woman I had met at a bar told me that she knew she would be okay because God "would take care" of her. When I came back from the bathroom, I sarcastically asked her what made her so fucking special that the other 6 million Jews were not. You see, when I hear statements like hers or "That's in God's hands", I look at those making such statements with utter contempt for they really have no respect for themselves. 

Once you are born stupid and don't know you are stupid, you are likely to stay stupid for life, no matter how sarcastically you attack others while trying to hold up a distorted, better image of yourself. The Jewish woman is such a stupid person. I never fucking claim I am perfect, as she alleged. I only claim I am vastly superior to her in intelligence. especially regarding metaphysics. The bitch is too stupid to see the merits of my views. She is busy defending her stupidity. I would respect her a little bit if she would admit that her statement was erroneous and reflected a childish, infantile craving for a parental protection, and that God indeed belongs to a realm of fantasy and make-believe because nobody has demonstrated God exists. Pleassseee, don't tell me that the absence of evidence does not necessarily mean the evidence of nonexistence. 

Ethics, Youth and Growth

Ethics, Youth, and Growth and the article about "The Million Dollar Bet"

I am writing these words extremely fast. I read the eponymous article with total absorption. When I was through, a flurry of thoughts and ideas zipped through my mind at a million miles an hour.

1. The author was wise for so young (24) an age.

2. He was greedy in making the bet.

3. It was good that he lost the bet. I didn't feel sorry for him at all. I hope he learned from the experience.

4. It wasn't actually "The Million Dollar Bet". He was given 3-1 odds and he placed a bet at $300,000 and thought he would easily win $900,000. The misleading title of the article turned me off against the author, although I respected his vast intelligence and precocity. Deep down, he loved to be a teacher while he was not really a honest person. 

5. As a former lousy runner who ran twice for a marathon at 5 hours, the story absorbed my attention for the crazy bettor's flirtations with death or injury. Throughout my life, I have often gone to the extremes and skated close to the edge of the abyss. That's how I know myself and others. That's how I know I am different from most others. 

6. Money is a good test of a person's integrity and love. 

7. I am making a safe bet that I will be down to 155 lbs, able to do 60 push-ups, 200 sit-ups, and 20 pull-ups by October 2014, for $10,000. Want to place a bet against me? I need incentives.

Now the author of the article resigned from high stakes poker, wrote a well-received book about poker, gave away most of his money to fund his parents' retirement and to charity. All of these highly unusual activities occurred after he was involved in two highly publicized scandals which called into question his ethics. As I was reading his book, several thoughts came to me:

1. HQ is a very intelligent young man and an excellent poker player whose ethics, unfortunately, was opaque. He was aware of that. But I must not be too judgmental on him since he is only 24 and evolving. I am 65 and was only definitely averse to unethical activities   when I turned 59.

 2. HQ has been self-aware that he is self-conflicting. I am 65 and in so many ways I am like HQ. He is fond of writing. Writing is to crystallize one's thinking. Reading HQ  is like a taking a trip to facts, truths, and logic, a journey into the nature of epistemology and science of poker. HQ took poker out of the dark ages. Poker after HQ is like economics in the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Before that, economics was just an half-assed exercise of speculations of the nature of economic forces and economic behavior. 

3. High Stakes No Limit Poker is akin to war battle combat or physical fight to the death. It's not for the faint-hearted or the stupid. 

Death Wish, Fear, and Courage

Death Wish, Fear, and Courage

Sometimes faux courage is fed by anger. True courage is motivated by high principles and knowledge of the meaning of life. We only die once and must do what is right for us. A life without pride nor honor is not worth living.

I have seen many scumbags and assholes shamelessly lie, cheat, beg, and steal just in order to live another day. And yet these same creatures are proud of themselves or at least act as if they were. Proud of what? I always wonder about that since they are not uneducated, ugly, poor, fat, ignorant, stupid, and self-deceiving. If I were them, I would do at least two things: hit the gym and hit the books every fucking day. I would use others who are superior to me as models. I would not denigrate them nor deny their superiorities over me because denial is a sign of cowardice. Facts are facts. I cannot deny facts. Unlike the scumbags and assholes, I cannot wish the facts away. 

I could be stupid and narrow-minded in thinking that those who accepted literally what is in the Bible are stupid or weak-minded or both. They couldn't withstand indoctrination and brainwashing. When you accepted the nonsense as truths, then you are not worth much as a human because a true human knows  sense from nonsense, truth from falsehood, no matter how relentless is the propaganda. Only dumb asses and intellectual weaklings give up thinking for themselves. Fuck, I am not one of those, and never will be. I laughed my head off several years ago when a dude told me that he knew he would always be all right because "God" took good care of him. I immediately retorted, "How the fuck do you know that? What makes you think you're so fucking special. and those who perished in the Nazi concentration camps during World War Two and in Cambodia's Killing Fields during 1975-1979, were not? Get the fuck out of my face, imbecile."

Most humans reveal themselves that they are first and foremost scumbags animals who would do anything to survive: they would lie, cheat, steel, rob, murder, etc...They have no basic dignity and pride. They are thieves and beggars. They are not hunters and warriors. That's why they cannot play poker. Poker is a game of life, a form of financial mortal combat, especially if you play for high stakes. Your opponents are both at once your preys and predators. The game is deadly, and not for cowards and weaklings. 

All human animals fall into one or the other of the following categories: -leaders or followers

-masters or slaves

-smart or stupid

-believers in a bullshit called God or atheists (agnostics are cowards who love straddling the fence)

-liars who want to impress the gullible or speakers of facts and truths

The more I contemplate about the human animals, the more estranged from them I feel. Of course, I have met some very nice human beings whose morality and intelligence are definitely superior to mine, but those angels are very rare while every fucking day I have to put up with human trash and garbage, who have no business to live at all. They weaken the gene pool. Recently, a pompous, self-impressed, and self-important senile Christian female physician made an ass of herself by thinking I didn't know how to write Vietnamese. Here's my reply to her in Vietnamese:

Nầy con mụ Thanh, mi già, lú lẫn, ngu và dốt và bị tẩy não mà cứ chổng mông trên mạng khoe khoang và tiếm danh tiền nhân, thì trạng thái đó không khác chi là của một con thú vật. 

Ta chép lại đây bài ta đã viết ngắn mà gọn để hy vọng rằng mi chịu khó nghiên cứu để đầu óc nhỏ bé của mi mở ra một chút. Ở Canada, chắc mi đọc được tiếng Anh.

Nếu viết về đạo Ki Tô, nên trình bày những giáo điều phản khoa học, trái luận ly', đầy mê tín và hoang đường. Một con người có học và một tí thông minh và nhiều tự trọng không bao giờ có thể tin vào những giáo điều quái đản như thế. Chỉ có những ai có tinh thần nô lệ và thiếu khả năng độc lập,  tra vấn và suy tư thì mới có thể "tin" một cách mù quáng như thế. Nô lệ tư tưởng là một hình thức thảm thương nhất vì kẻ nô lệ không biết mình là nô lệ, và suốt đời phục vụ kẻ thống trị tư tưởng mình. Đâu phải có chút bằng cấp đại học là có khả năng chống lại cái thảm kịch tẩy não đâu. 

Xin tìm đọc Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, và  sách vở lòng về Triết Học và Tâm Lý.

GGM

Gabriel García Márquez 

GGM died today at the age of 87. The news got on the wire this morning and soon the whole world knew about the death of the writer. A few years before I took up Spanish somewhat earnestly (and that was almost thirty years ago) I had come across his most famous book in an English translation. I took it home and read it. I was confused and bewildered by the narrative, even though I had no problem none whatsoever with the language into which the novel was translated.

A few years later, I had to read the novel in the original and then write a term paper about it. That was when I had to read up critical essays written in both English and Spanish about the novel. Then I slowly appreciated the beauty of imagination and the art of lying in such a way that there are truths in lying. Lying is truly an art that most humans try to do, but only a few excel. 

Anyway the news of GGM's death brought back some beautiful memories of my struggle with the Spanish language. I learned to recognize the genius of some Spanish language writers whose writings would shame most, if not all contemporary Vietnamese prose writers. Besides, GGM, read Ernesto Sabato, Cortázar, Rulfo, Asturias, Fuentes, and Agustín Yáñez, just to name a few novelists not familar to the uninitiated. 

I am going to resume my journey with Spanish and French languages before it's too late. I need to stop wasting my time with fools and ignoramuses.

April 17, 2014

Wissai

Superiority, Inferiority, and Silence

Superiority and Inferiority and Silence 

My favorite dictum, "one must know who one is and where one stands in relation to others", rings true when examined within the context of the unending, acrimonious, and insults-laden "debates" among the Vietnamese on the Net about the "roles" and "responsibilities" of the Catholics or Buddhists for the collapse of South Vietnam in the Second Indochina War.

Anybody can and is indeed "qualified" to state his views about religion and politics. All he needs to do is to run his mouth. However, his very views about religion and politics sharply show his intelligence, evolutionary development as a human, and knowledge. In general, the below can never fully understand the above. So a debate is productive only when it takes place among peers. There is no point to hold a conversation with uneducated, uninformed, fanatical, brainwashed, insulting, foul-mouthed and stubborn dumb asses who have no respect for facts, truths, and logic. Silence is a better alternative. If one must speak, one must do so with unadorned facts. 

Since most human chimps and monkeys on this planet don't really know who the fuck they are and where they stand in relation to other organisms and sentient beings, I have devised a very simple but highly efficacious test to ascertain their true nature and level of  evolutionary development. I would subject them yo the following rapid-fired questions. They must answer the questions on the top of their heads, no hemming and hawing allowed. They are, however, allowed to say as much as they want. I would only cut them off if they go off the tangent and recite the ready-made responses spoon-fed to them by their religious and political "leaders" or their own misguided, stupid, uninformed, unschooled parents:

1. Who and what are you?

2. Why are you on this planet?

3. What will happen to you after you die?

3. Who and what is God?

5. Who made/created God?

6. Now tell me frankly, do you believe in God or not? Why or Why not?

7. What do you think about religion and politics?

8. What about power? Do you like power? 

9. Which do you prefer: power or love? sex or food?

10. Finally, what do you think of the following categories:

-Onanism

-Bestiality

-Homosexuality

-Sexual perversions in general

-Murder, homicide, genocide

-Jews

-Chinese

-Russians

-Arabs

-Blacks

-Asians

-Racism

-Xenophobia

-Human race

-Anti-Semitism

-Nazism

-Hitler. Was he evil or a misunderstood genius?

 

Thank you for answering the questions. I will let you know who and what you are and where you stand in the scheme of things, if you so desire. Now I need to take a repose. See you. 

Wissai

P.S.

I wrote the above and got some cathartic relief. Then by chance I read a story about a legendary poker player who is universally considered one of the best, if not very best poker player on this planet, and a fearless gambler on craps and baccarat. The story had nothing to do with his gambling, but his being cool after being slapped in the face by his scrawny poker friend. Reading the story calmed me down. I felt like I just had a session with a caring friend who was also a shrink. Cool is my motto now. I am going to be cool and graceful under pressure. Hemingway wrote a lot about being graceful under pressure: being a bullfighter, boxer, frontline war reporter, or contemplating taking one's own life calmly and gracefully, like the cherry blossoms falling off the branches in one breezy, sun-drenched, Spring morning. To live is to wait for Death to come at anytime while hopefully finding out that one is loved and cared for by some steadfast lover, without nary a complaint nor sound and fury. 

Hit Men

Hit Men

STORNOWAY, Scotland — Everyone starts as a novice, whatever your job. You bumble around, make mistakes, learn by doing. It applies in any walk of life, and the criminal industry isn’t any different. A team from Birmingham City University’s Center for Applied Criminology has carried out the first typological study of British hit men, and it starts, of course, with the novice.

Santre Sanchez Gayle — a novice seeking to impress the senior members of his gang, according to a case detective — was just 15 when he was paid the pitiful sum of 200 pounds (about $330) to kill a young woman. He was caught only because he bragged about the murder: the greatest sin of the professional killer.

The novice can be easy to study. He’ll make mistakes, like leaving just enough forensic evidence behind or using an easily traceable weapon. He goes to jail. And it will, almost always, be a he. Of the 36 convicted hit men studied, only one was a woman, Te Rangimaria Ngarimu. She turned herself in after a hit in 1992. Failure is the cost of experience, but this is a job where failure, even a minor one, costs you everything.

I write crime novels, with a focus on organized crime. A lead character who’s supposed to be a skilled hit man becomes a tricky construction when there’s so little by way of facts to base him on. 

For the criminologists, the dearth of knowledge was a motivator for the study, published in a recent issue of The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice. It was an attempt to examine the methodologies of the British hit man with the hope of helping law-enforcement officers to better understand the kind of people they’re chasing. 

The dilettante, the journeyman and the master are the other categories. The dilettante is typically a desperate man and, though older than the typical novice, is often no more experienced. Driven by a need for money, he accepts a role he isn’t fit to play. The study’s most notable dilettante is Orville Wright, a former legal clerk. He was offered 5,000 pounds to murder Theresa Pitkin in 1996, and broke into her apartment with a knife. Then, rather than kill her, he started talking to her. He decided he couldn’t go through with it. This wasn’t a coldblooded killer.

The journeyman is an old pro, experienced and far removed from his novice days. He represents a significant change from the first two categories. He probably has organized-crime connections. Roger Vincent and David Smith worked together in 2003 in the execution of David King, who was an underworld figure, suspected by his killers of having become a police informant. They waited for him outside his local gym in a stolen van and, when he emerged, fired more than 25 rounds from an AK-47, killing him instantly. They fled the scene, burned the van and switched to another vehicle. But a glove found at the scene of the vehicle switch gave the police Mr. Smith’s palm print. One small mistake in an otherwise carefully planned and executed hit gave the police the clue they needed.

Where Mr. Wright planned to use a knife, Mr. Vincent and Mr. Smith had the contacts necessary to source a gun, no easy task in Britain. But where the previous categories carried out a killing in desperation for money, or to impress someone, for the journeyman it’s just a job. There’s no guesswork. 

The master is an evocative term for a suitably mysterious group. As the authors say, their study is necessarily based on failure: They can study only those who are caught. A master doesn’t find himself in court. While that ghostliness is a lure for fiction writers like me, it’s a frustration for researchers.

The problem with the best hit men is that the only thing we know about them is that they exist. We see their victims, and the victims’ cause of death, but that’s all. Unlike a researcher, tied to facts, a crime writer’s greatest thrill is perhaps mystery: Our hit man’s a blank canvas, to be decorated with the contents of our imagination. Maybe he starts as a novice, young and desperate. He develops and improves, and a degree of mastery slithers in and takes over. 

The study points out that the single greatest tactic for avoiding detection is to never work in the area where you live. Move around, every job in a different place where you have no roots to trip over. The outsider. Perhaps a man of military background, working with military precision, but an outsider.

All of which is why our fictional hit men are a suitable distance from reality. Whatever type they fit, even the nonmasters, they have to stay masterfully free for at least 80,000 words. 

The study describes the locations and manner of the hits as often “not unusual and extraordinary, but rather commonplace and ordinary.” It describes the reasons for many hits being ordered as “mundane.” Not descriptions creators of fiction want to carry with them.

So we read mountains of books about hit men, watch countless hours of them on screen. We play video games where we’re dropped into the role of the killer. Something draws us to these people in fiction. It’s the fact that, in reality, we would never do that job. There’s a line in the sand that a normal person won’t cross, no matter how desperate we are or how high the price. 

That idea, of doing something so inhuman, makes the hit man intriguing. Getting close to the unknowable, creating a character who occupies the corners so dark no normal person can see into them. We don’t want to be hit men. We don’t find them glamorous; we’re repulsed by them. But we want to understand. As soon as we recognize something as being beyond our sensibilities, we have a need to learn why this isn’t the case for others. It isn’t a desire to see them succeed that leads us to crime fiction but bear rather the chance to stand close and watch how they fail. A need to understand that motivates researcher, writer and reader alike. 

Malcolm Mackay  is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Sudden Arrival of Violence.” 

Wissai's Sidebar:

Anyone who has bothered to read my posts knows that I have created a hit man character, Omar Sabat. Two female readers (all my rabid fans are females. Males historically have shown distaste and disgust and displeasure at my assertions of superiority and contempt for the human race. They typically try to take me down via lies and insults instead of cogent arguments based on facts and logic. My reaction to these enfeebled and pathetic endeavors is to continue viewing these intellectually dishonest, ignorant, and stupid scumbag detractors with unadulterated and unalloyed contempt for these creatures are not fit and qualified to kiss my ass and lick my boots) have confessed to me that they like the character very much and wonder if Omar is real and based on my exploits! Their inquiries of course pleased me tremendously. I don't care for science fiction or far-out fantasies like zombies and all that crap. I prefer hard-boiled realism with an edge. Violence is part and parcel of life. There are moments we are called upon to kill, and we must be ready for them. We must execute our actions decisively and with finesse, if at all possible. There's art in everything humans do. 

Breakthrough and "Residence " versus Place of "Residence" and all that Jazz

Breakthrough

There are two things I learned from the Corsican Midget (Napoleon Bonaparte)

1. The word "impossible" is not in my vocabulary, by which I mean my first reaction to any challenge is hope and potentiality. However, I do not equate hope with wishful thinking. To me, Personal God and Heaven are myths designed for fools and cowards and weaklings. 

2. Opportunities only come to those who are prepared.

Last night I had a good luck sitting next to a thirty-something Armenian dude who told me about his father who overcame late-stage prostrate cancer by following to the letter the Gerson therapy. You may think I am gullible, but the chance encounter with the Armenian and his disclosure about his Dad hit me with a blinding clarity about my good luck and breakthrough. I immediately went on Groupon and ordered a deluxe juicer.  Then I went to the gym, with visions of longevity dancing in my head while homicidal impulses being washed out to the sea. In the sauna, I did Yoga stretching exercises with composure and serenity that had recently been absent. Perspiration poured out of me and I felt purged and cleansed of toxins, both physical and  mental (okay, ultimately speaking, there's no demarcation line between the physical and the mental. And you have to be highly evolved to be aware of that "fact"). I then soaked myself in the whirlpool for 20 minutes, experiencing peace.

After I got back to my place of "residence" (I think there's a difference between "residence" and "place of residence", but I am not very sure about that), I took out from the bookshelf a paper back edition of the French translation of a young female Italian author's debut novel. The book enjoyed huge success. By the way, she was a philosophy major in college. As I was reading the novel and struggling with the language, a joyful pride permeated my being. I told myself that I needed to replicate the experience more often. 

I then went to bed at reasonable hours and proceeded to have all kinds of weird dreams that called for some interpretations. But I think I understand the gist of these dreams. They are the calls and sirens of emotional independence and freedom. Attachment is a form of slavery. In essence, you have only yourself to love and take care of. We were born alone and will die alone. Life is a series of adjustments to our aloneness. Love is an undying fiction. The more I interact with humans, the more I detest most of them and wish them ill because they are liars and scumbags. Just when I thought I could trust somebody, their true nature shows in full splendor. 

Postcriptum:

Every time I pontificate about language usage, I am conscious of the possibility of making an ass of myself as Wilson did when he dared question Nabokov's proficiency in Russian. Anyway, a reader of mine said that the difference between "residence" and "place of residence" is similar to the difference between "house" and "home". I disagreed. The closest to "place of residence" is "dwelling". We use "place of residence" when we don't want to specify or don't know what kind of shelter in which the individual in question stays: a house, a rented room in a house, a condo, a mansion, a prefab house trailer, or a tepee. "Residence" implies a stately, settled, prosperous-looking house. It is very difficult to use "residence" properly. 

Yesterday evening a barely educated native speaker of English brought up the issue of ungrammaticality of my statement: "He played the piano real good." I replied, "Son, you had a point, but maybe you didn't realize I was just speaking colloquial English. In modern spoken American English, there's a tendency for the speakers to use adjectives in place of adverbs. Maybe that's the recursion to the Germanic roots of English or maybe Americans are just getting lazy and don't bother to add the suffix "-ly". I am no linguist. So I don't know." By that time, a pretentious eavesdropper chimed in,  "Well, in Spanish and French, adjectives and adverbs are used interchangeably, as in German." I replied, "I don't know French and Spanish well, but I don't believe that's the case. Would you give me an illustration?" The dude then cited the case of "bueno" and "bien" in Spanish. I pointed out to him that "bien" is often used as an adverb, and only as an adjective when indicating state of well-being, as is the case of "well" in English. "By the way," I added, "don't use 'no problemo' when pretending to speak Spanish, as it's strictly not grammatical, unless you deliberately use the expression as an American slang."

 

The point of this diatribe is that to really know a language, it takes a lifetime of immersion and devotion. I only know one language well enough to express myself in writing in it. And I make mistakes everyday.