Environmental Conservation and Original Sin: A Personal Story

If we wish to change the world, I believe it is important to understand our motivation.

Are we motivated to help people by empathy for their suffering, or anxiety about their “problems”—or by a mixture of both? Does the existence of poverty make us feel bad because we see the humanity—the experiences, fears, and aspirations—of the billions of poor individuals around the world, empathize with them, and wish a better life for them? Or does “poverty” resonate with us because of the moral, intellectual, and emotional poverty of our own culture? If we advocate animal rights, is it really about the animals and their helplessness? Or are they a stand-in for the children we once were—for our own helplessness? Are we afraid of pollution or global warming because we feel true concern for our fellow organisms, or do we fear that our society is contaminated by an evil we cannot explain, as if the very air we breathe is toxic?

I care deeply about environmental conservation, but I must confess that I was not convinced to be an environmentalist by rational arguments. No accumulation of statistics, carefully crafted arguments, or scientific reports was necessary. I wasn’t brought around to conservation by news reports of a devastating oil spill or by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Conservation always just felt right. Even though I believe I have good evidence for my positions now, I didn’t originally accept those positions because of the evidence.

Could environmental conservation merely be a metaphor for an emotional need that I am acting out? If it is, then I am unlikely to be effective in helping to bring about significant, long-lasting change. My fervor will have more to do with me and my own anxiety than with the objective problems of the environment. In the end I will fail to achieve my stated goal because I didn’t know that I was really pursuing an entirely different goal all along. I will have used the environment as a tool for managing my own anxiety, and like any tool it will be the worse for wear—my intellectual abstractions and justifications notwithstanding.

When I was a kid, my dad and I used to visit the scrapyard or go dumpster-diving in search of raw materials for his building projects, with the maxim “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” I guess you could say this was my introduction to recycling. Thrift was a very appealing ideal to me, and I became rather obsessed with recycling and conserving “resources.”

The easiest place to act this obsession out was at school, where I was pretty bored anyway. At school I had access to a flow of resources that I could do my part to economize: school supplies. At the beginning of every school year, parents would eagerly buy their children exorbitant amounts of useless things insisted upon by supply lists issued by the school. Many times only the first few pages of a notebook would be used, and come May that scarcely-used notebook would be thrown away, along with reams of untouched paper, stacks of unused binders, and fistfuls of un-sharpened pencils. Next year the entire ritual would be repeated again.

I did my part to conserve supplies by using my own with extreme frugality. I only sharpened pencils when they really needed it, and I wrote in small print outside the margins on both sides of a sheet of paper. For a couple of years during elementary school I even ran a pencil “hospital,” where I would repair mine and my friends broken pencils and crayons. Conservation was something I could work on every day, but recycling came down to the last few days before summer. Most of the families in my neighborhood were pretty well-off, so it was not uncommon for the children in my classes to throw away just about everything in the bedlam that erupted at the summer jailbreak. I was the only person who ever had more school supplies at the end of the school year than at the beginning, because I collected the unused or reusable cast-offs from everyone else. By middle school my mom didn’t have to take me shopping for school supplies anymore—I had collected plenty of my own.
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As a child, when I thought that something I did might be an interruption to someone, or that it might risk causing damage to something, or that I could be using “inappropriate” amounts of resources (material, financial, or even emotional), I felt a high degree of anxiety. This anxiety had a lot more to do with the behavior of friends and authority figures—the people around me—than it ever did with “the environment.” In psychology, strong feelings about abstractions usually turn out to be based on intensely personal experiences, while the abstraction is merely an ex post facto justification and explanation for the emotion.

Strategies for managing my anxiety manifested themselves in introversion, meekness, thrift, and conservationism, among other behaviors and personality attributes. Throughout much of middle school and high school, I preferred solitary activities to engaging with other people. I would hold myself back from approaching someone I was interested in talking to for fear of “disturbing” them, and I avoided expressing disagreement with teachers or peers for fear of “annoying” them. Not all the time, but enough that it was an important aspect of how I interacted with others. This pattern was even evident in how I handled finances. For most of my life, I have saved much more of my money than I have spent, when given the opportunity; and I have refrained from buying some things I wanted for fear of “wasting money.” I have always been careful to “leave things as I found them,” occasionally to the point of compulsion, and I have felt an extreme degree of conscientious care for mine and others’ property.

So you can imagine how much environmental conservation resonates with me emotionally.
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There are many ways in which having a conservation-oriented lifestyle may be good. But the question for myself is the extent to which I have internalized conservation, not as something I do, but as who I am. I do not want this “conservationist” mentality to keep me from living. Nor do I want it to inhibit me from achieving my goals. When a behavior pattern becomes dysfunctional or neurotic (as conservation seemed to have become for me), the problem lies not necessarily with the behavior itself, but with the fact that I don’t have a choice over it. I want to be able to choose conservation, and to do it for reasons that take the relevant facts about human action and the environment into account. There is no pride or virtue in having conservation be an automatic reaction to something in my past.

I am not responsible for the way the world is. I did not cause the pollution, the waste, the war, the inefficiencies, or any other of the litany of social and environmental problems we face today. To take full responsibility for the destructive acts of those who came before me is to accept a kind of Original Sin. I did not make the world. I did not break it. And I am not responsible for fixing it. I want to help fix these problems, but there is no reason that the solutions must come at the expense of my own happiness. These faults are not my burden to bear.

If I am more aware of how I am affected by my history with conservationism, and of how I act in my day-to-day activities on the premise that resources are scarce, then I will have more of a choice in the extent to which I act on that premise now and in the future. Just being aware that it is a choice is a powerful first step. As a child dozens of examples of conservation (thrift in finances, protection of the environment, and meekness and submission in relationships) were modeled for me by the adults in my life. But I do not have to follow their example forever. As an adult, I can choose.

For me, “the environment” turned out to be a metaphor for my social environment and my relationship to it. I suspect this is the case for a lot of other people as well. But as I alluded to at the beginning, we do a profound disservice if we act on the pretense that we are talking about the environment, when we are really managing our own anxiety about something that is completely unrelated to the well-being of “the planet.” Now that I understand the root of my strong feelings, I can analyze the facts about the environment more objectively. I can work to make sure that when I advocate solutions to environmental problems, I am basing my solution in objective reality, that the problem I am solving is really in the environment’s present, and not in my personal past.

The Truth Does Not Need Us

In observing myself and my friends talk to others about philosophy, I notice a common pattern: We raise a controversial political or religious topic -> the other person disagrees with us -> we attempt to convince them with reason and evidence -> the other person gets defensive -> we feel anxious and escalate our attempts to change their mind -> the conversation ends up going exactly nowhere.

I have seen this pattern repeated countless times. Although it is easy to blame the other person’s defensiveness, I believe we philosophers share a good portion of the blame. After all, this is our area of interest and expertise. If our methodology—to say nothing of our conclusions—did not put us at odds with most people, the sorry state of the world would be incomprehensible. There is no reason for us to be surprised when other people disagree with our conclusions and resist our methodology. In fact, we should almost expect to come across psychological defenses. To behave otherwise would be like a surgeon checking into a hospital for work and expressing surprise about the number of sick and injured people he bumps into.

If we feel anxiety about the fact that other people disagree with us or get defensive around certain topics, those feelings are ours to deal with. As philosophers we don’t have the right to insist that other people change their minds or behavior because we have a feeling. If we believe we are representing the truth, we have a responsibility to treat other people with respect and appeal to their self-interest. When someone feels defensive, that is actually the perfect time to act without defensiveness ourselves. We can show them that a better way as possible.

The fate of the world does not rest on whether one more person accepts rational principles or believes in a free society. The truth is not threatened by the fact that some people don’t believe it. If we are secure in our knowledge and reason, then we will not feel that the truth is threatened by someone else’s rejection of it. We may feel threatened when someone else rejects the truth, but it does not follow that we have to convince them.

If we feel threatened by someone else’s defenses, then that is something for us to deal with by searching our own souls and examining our own pasts. As children we may have been forced to interact with irrational people—teachers, bullies, preachers, or family members—but as adults we are free to disengage from such people. We no longer have to debate with irrational people as a form of self-protection. In fact, debating with irrational people is itself irrational. If we fail to recognize someone’s rejection of the truth as a fact, then we are denying evidence about them, just as surely as they are denying evidence about the world.

Remember: every interaction is a choice. We don’t have to engage with difficult people to “prove” anything.

The Lie of Religion

Many a strong atheist contends that parents who teach their children to believe in religion are lying to them. This may be true in many or even all situations of parental indoctrination, but knowing that a parent is telling their child about God is not by itself enough evidence to convict them of lying. It is entirely possible that they are spreading falsehoods by accident, all the while believing wholeheartedly that their superstition is “the gospel truth.” The difference between lying and simply being wrong is the knowledge that one’s statement is incorrect, or the intention to mislead. How then can we tell whether religious parents are lying to their children or are merely mistaken?

I believe the following questions help form a useful framework for determining the degree to which someone is being honest or dishonest:

1. Is the person following their own advice?

2. Does the person claim to be an expert on the topic? If so, are their explanations clear? Are they aware of the weak spots in their understanding? Can they explain the source of their expertise—books read, research performed, etc.?

3. How does the person respond to questions and challenges? Are they respectful and curious, or are they hostile and arrogant?

4. Does their story change depending on who is asking the questions?

5. Do they disclose relevant biases? Are they willing to discuss their path to enlightenment, and can they present sources for their information?

6. Does the effort the person has made to verify their knowledge correspond to their understanding of the importance the topic in question, or to their professed desire for truth generally?

After discussing religion with a number of both secular and religious people, I have concluded that religion is dishonest—not because of what religious people say, but because of how they say it. Religious adults tell credulous and dependent children that a Jewish zombie can make them live forever if they symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that they accept him as their master, so he can remove an evil force from their soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. It is possible for the story to be silly without the person who is telling it being dishonest, but in my experience this is unlikely.

What happens when those storytellers are confronted by a philosophically-oriented adult? What happens when the children who so easily believed at age five get a little older and start to have doubts? When a skeptic brings rational criticisms of and counter-evidence against their superstition, do they show their gratitude for the new information by re-examining their beliefs, or do they retreat into the foggy abyss of “metaphor,” “mysteries,” “interpretation,” and “other dimensions”? I have only ever seen the latter.

Religious adults are very certain when they are indoctrinating impressionable children. They assert all manner of religious “truths” as if they are literal and non-controversial. However, when challenged by rational skepticism, all their certainty and confidence turns into fog and belligerence. When religious adults make bolder statements about God to their dependent children than they would make to a skeptical adult, they are misleading their children about their degree of certainty. Such parents or teachers may be protecting themselves from the emotional discomfort of facing difficult questions, but it is wrong to do so at the expense of their children’s minds.

The false content is not necessarily dishonest. False certainty is. False certainty is the Lie of Religion.

Rig Veda Creation Myth

The following is a creation myth from the Rig Veda (c. 1200-900 BCE):

Before being, before even nonbeing, there was no air, no firmament. So what breathed? And where? And by whose order? And was there water endlessly deep?

This was before death or immortality. There was no division between night and day, yet instinctively there was breathing, windless breathing and nothing else.

It was so dark that darkness was hidden in the dark. There was nothing to show water was everywhere. And the void was a cloak about the Being who sprang from heat.

Desire pierced the Being, the mind’s first seed, and wise poet saints detected in their hearts the knot of being within nonbeing,

and this rope they stretched over…what? Was there up? down? There were seed spillers and fertile powers, impulse above and energy below,

but who can really know and say it here? Where did this creation come from? The gods came later, so who can know the source?

No one knows creation’s source. It was born of itself. Or it was not. He who looks down from the ultimate heaven knows. Or maybe not.

If you read the above creation myth as a failed attempt at recording the history of the creation of the world, go back and read it again. This time think of it as a figurative description of the creation of an individual human life. Think of the process of intercourse, conception, and embryonic development.

Like so many myths, this one is about ourselves, not about the “world.”
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(Translation by Tony Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999.)

The End of the Ends-Means Dichotomy

Much ado has been made about ends and means. From university-level philosophy and political science classes to the mainstream media, the question is often asked: “Do the ends justify the means?” Historically, this question has been answered in one of two ways. Utilitarians and Consequentialists such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Niccolò Machiavelli have tended to justify or condemn human action based on its consequences. If the expected outcome is considered to be “good,” then the actions necessary to achieve it are good. On the other hand, deontological theorists such as Immanuel Kant have argued that some actions are right or wrong in principle, no matter the consequences.

Instead of constructing morality from the predicted consequences of human action, or attempting to derive principles of preferred behavior rationally or empirically, many religions try to base morality on assertions. The absolute “moral principles” of religion are not the kind of principles that tell doctors how to cure diseases, or that provide ecologists with a methodology for preserving threatened species. They are merely arguments from authority based on the supposed will of an alleged deity, in whose existence we are expected to believe because someone else says so.

Other philosophers have attempted to deal with the ends-means dichotomy without the teeth-gritting willpower of the argument from authority. Ayn Rand contends that the ends do not justify the means. In Rand’s view, the ends determine the means—human action is a “process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it” (“Causality Versus Duty,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 98). Rand recognized the contradiction inherent in Consequentialism: just because the goal is virtuous, it in no way follows that any means which are believed to help achieve it will also be virtuous. The ends and the means must be consistent. Rand writes, “The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others” (“The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 256).

In the words of modern-day philosopher Stefan Molyneux, Consequentialism is an “argument from effect.” The problem with arguments from effect is that they require perfect knowledge of the results before any action can be taken. We could accomplish very little if we always had to base our actions on philosophically-derived, certain knowledge of the outcome. According to Molyneux, arguments from morality are much more powerful. We may not be able to perfectly predict the outcome of any action, but principles can guide our behavior even when we do not know the future.

An example may be helpful. If we are trying to decide whether a given government program—say welfare—is “good” or not, the argument from effect requires that we predict not only whether welfare programs will help particular individuals (which is very difficult, since some of welfare’s effects do not appear for years or even decades), but also whether welfare is a net benefit to all of society (compounding the initial problem millions of times over). Even if such a computation were possible, it would take lifetimes to complete.

By contrast, the argument from morality allows us to apply a principle (such as, “the initiation of violence is immoral”) to the question of whether welfare is “good.” Now all we have to do is determine whether the welfare programs in question involve the initiation of violence. In our analysis, we will eventually discover that government-run welfare programs are funded by the collection of taxes. Since taxes are taken from citizens against their will (coercively), and since government welfare programs require the collection of taxes, such welfare programs are only possible because of the coercion inherent in taxation. Government welfare programs are tainted by the violence of the taxes upon which they are based, and are therefore bad—even if their “expected outcome” is good.

Because of the complexities inherent in any system (but particularly in systems of human interaction), it is very difficult to predict the outcome of an action with certainty. The same forces that make weather patterns and economic trends so unpredictable are also at work in many other areas of our lives. We do not know whether treating a stranger with respect will result in a “good” outcome or a “bad” one, because we do not intimately know the details of his or her personality and history. We do not have any control over those things, but we do have control over how we behave in the interaction. Instead of guessing, we can choose to follow a principle.

If we wish to be positive change makers in the world, we have to understand that change is only made by pursuing actions consistent with our desired goals. Gandhi’s much-cited but rarely followed aphorism “Be the change you want to see in the world” captures this truth perfectly. We cannot achieve our goals by pursuing their opposites. Peace cannot be achieved through war. If we wish to see more virtue in the world, no amount of complaining, voting, or violence will get us there. We bring virtue to the world by making ourselves more virtuous—by bringing honesty and respect to our relationships with our children, parents, and friends first. As these virtues radiate through our social networks, we will find that we see the change in the world which we have committed to be.

Thus in practice, no distinction can be made between ends and means. We cannot be violent and expect the world to become peaceful. We cannot be uncaring and expect the world to become empathetic. The ends do not “justify” the means. The ends are the means. The ends which we envision today will be the means by which we seek to achieve new ends tomorrow. We achieve our goals by implementing strategies consistent with those goals. But each day, those strategies are also goals, and the steps for achieving them must be consistent as well. “Ends” and “means” are divided arbitrarily by a distinction without a difference. There are no “ends” or “means.” There is only human action, and we would do well to make the most of it.

Where Idealism Goes to Die

Attempting to use the government as a vehicle for social change is the ultimate form of cynicism. It is to believe either that people are inherently evil or stupid and so must be forced to do the right thing (attack of others), or that your vision of the future is not appealing to people without the additional “incentive” of coercion (attack of self).

Joining the government—through election, appointment, or employment—is the siren call of the idealist who wants to give up. Of course this desire is not conscious, but it helps to explain why, sooner or later, that is exactly what every idealist who joins the government does. In modern democracies where the draft has been banned, everyone who works for the state does so voluntarily and it is well-known that working for the state destroys idealism. When one becomes part of the institution most responsible for human misery, then the emotional damage caused by such a cynical self-attack cripples every remaining value for which the idealist once stood. Governments give idealists positions of influence in order to incapacitate them from making fundamental change, turning their anxiety about the uncertain future of the world into dead certainty. And in return the idealists give the state a shroud of legitimacy, while filling the general population with a sense of false hope.

Accepting or pursuing a government post or position is the kiss of death for a change maker.

The state is where idealism goes to die.

I Remember You

I remember you
The way you giggled in the tire swing
As I pushed you
I remember

I remember you
The way your skirts fluttered in the breeze
As I chased you
I remember

I remember you
The way you hesitated on the balcony
As I kissed you
I remember

I remember you
The way your breath came softly in sleep
As I held you
I remember

I remember you
The way you promised
To love me always
I remember

March 17, 2009

The REAL Ten Commandments

Not that it matters, but…

Despite the fact that over 1 billion people supposedly base their morality on them, very few people seem to have noticed that the traditional “Ten Commandments” in Exodus 20 are identified in the Bible by chapter headings (which were added hundreds if not thousands of years later) rather than in the text. As identified by the actual text of the Bible, the following are the real Ten Commandments (Exodus 34):

1. Do not make treaties with pagan nations. (v. 12, 15)

2. Do not worship any other god. (v. 14)

3. Do not make cast idols. (v. 17)

4. Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread. (v. 18)

5. Sacrifice the firstborn livestock to the Lord; Redeem the firstborn
donkey or son with a sacrifice. (v. 19, 20)

6. Six days you shall labor, but rest on the seventh day. (v. 21)

7. Celebrate the Feast of Weeks. (v. 22-24)

8. Do not contaminate the blood of a sacrifice with yeast. (v. 25)

9. Sacrifice the first fruits of the soil to the Lord. (v. 26)

10. Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk. (v. 26)
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Exodus 25:16 – “Then put in the ark the Testimony, which I will give you.”

Exodus 31:18 – “When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, He gave him the two tablets of the Testimony, the Tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God.”

Exodus 32:19 – “When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain.”

Exodus 34:1 – The Lord said to Moses, “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.”

Exodus 34:27, 28 – “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.’ Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant – the Ten Commandments.”

Deuteronomy 4:13 – “He (God) declared to you his covenant, the Ten Commandments, which he commanded you to follow and then wrote them on two stone tablets.”

Deuteronomy 10:4-5 – “The LORD wrote on these tablets what he had written before, the Ten Commandments he had proclaimed to you on the mountain, out of the fire, on the day of the assembly. And the LORD gave them to me. Then I came back down the mountain and put the tablets in the ark I had made, as the LORD commanded me, and they are there now.”

Read the Bible

For many people, the best antidote to believing that the Bible is the “Word of God” may be to actually read it. There are already dozens of lists like this out there on the Internet, but I thought it might be worthwhile to add one of my own to the cacophony. When I was working my way out of Christianity, I found lists like this helpful.

If you would like to download a printable version of this document to keep in your back pocket or hand out to friends, click here: Read the Bible (Topical)

Below is a short list of some of the more abominable acts and commandments from the Christian Bible:

Rape (Sex slaves)
• Numbers 31:17-18
• Judges 21:10-24
• Exodus 22:16
• Deuteronomy 21:10-14

Murder (Heretics/Blasphemers)
• Numbers 16
• Leviticus 24:10-16

Murder (Unbelievers)
• Deuteronomy 13:13-19
• Deuteronomy 17:12
• Exodus 22:20
• 2 Chronicles 15:12-13
• Zechariah 13:3
• Deuteronomy 13:6-11
• Deuteronomy 17:2-5
• Deuteronomy 13:1-5
• Numbers 25:3-5

Murder (Children)
• Deuteronomy 21:18-21
• Numbers 31:17-18
• 2 Kings 2:23-24
• 1 Samuel 15:2-3
• Hosea 9:11-16

Murder (Babies)
• Psalm 137:8-9
• 1 Samuel 15:2-3

Murder (The Unborn)
• Hosea 13:15-16

Murder (Innocents)
• Numbers 31:17-18
• Job 1:12-18
• Judges 21:10-24
• 1 Samuel 15:2-3

Murder (Rape victims)
• Deuteronomy 22:23-29

Murder (Homosexuals)
• Leviticus 20:13

Slavery
• Leviticus 25:45-46
• Colossians 3:22
• Deuteronomy 20:10-11
• Exodus 21:20-21
• Ephesians 6:5

Human Sacrifice
• Judges 11:30-39
• Genesis 22:2
• 1 Kings 13:1-2

Cannibalism
• Ezekiel 5:8-10

Graphic Pornography
• Ezekiel 23

Lying
• 1 Kings 22:23

Gender Discrimination
• Leviticus 27:1-7
• Leviticus 12:1-8
• Leviticus 15:29-30
• Exodus 21:7
• 1 Corinthians 14:34-35
• Colossians 3:18
• 1 Timothy 2:11-14

…and finally, in case anyone tries to tell you that it’s all about the New Testament now…

Jesus endorses the Old Testament
• Matthew 5:17

Knock-Out Arguments

Political and religious debates can often get bogged down in minutiae or go in circles. To combat this tendency, I have developed a logical template for each kind of debate, shown below.

Please note that these templates do not take into account the psychological defenses underlying many political and religious opinions. They are merely the logical steps to use in a debate. If you are discussing these topics with friends and family and would like to preserve or improve your relationship with them, I recommend using a more empathetic approach.

In fact, it is possible that you may not explicitly use these templates in a debate at all. They may be most powerful in their role as an assurance to you that the other person’s argument lacks valid content. You can then spend the interaction expressing curiosity about and sympathy for whatever caused the person to need the intellectual defenses against which you are fighting, instead of trying to defend yourself against their intellectual arguments. Rather than getting bogged down in abstract intellectual “debate,” which will probably not go anywhere anyway, you can work to uncover the emotional trauma that is at the root of so many falsehoods.

In debating these topics, it can be helpful to let the other person define all the terms, standards, and definitions in the debate, preferably at the beginning. This reveals inconsistencies in their position as the debate goes on. Instead of pointing out that they have violated your standards for debate (which they may dispute, especially when cornered), show where they have violated their own standards.

RELIGION

Because people tend to associate religion with morality, they will respond best to arguments from truth.

The religious person will often use “objective” standards and “evidence” when on the offensive, only to fall back on subjectivism (“but it brings me comfort”) when challenged. The best way to counter this strategy is to make them choose a side up-front: objective or subjective.

(STEP 1): “Are you making a truth claim, or are you reporting a subjective, internal state?”
(1b): Said another way: “Are you saying that X is true, or are you saying that you believe X is true?”

If they reply that they only believe X to be true, then they are outside the realm of debate. To debate a person about their subjective opinions is to legitimize those opinions by treating them as objective, debatable facts. It’s nice of them to share their opinion with you, but there is nothing left to debate. [End of debate]

If they are making a truth-claim, then such claim is subject to evidence and logic, which they are obligated to provide. However, rather than imposing an objective standard, ask them to define the standards.

(STEP 2): “What is your standard for differentiating truth from falsehood?”
(2b): Said another way: “How do you know what is true?”

They must use either objective or subjective standards for truth.

If their standard is subjective, then they have contradicted their previous assertion that their statement was objective. This includes both arguments from relativism and arguments from authority. [End of debate]

If their standard is objective, it will rely on logic and evidence–external standards which are independently verifiable. Since they have defined the standards, it will be harder for the other person to avoid following them.

(Knock-Out 1): “The supernatural, by its own definition, is outside of existence; therefore the supernatural does not exist.”

(Knock-Out 2): “If the ’supernatural’ is unobservable and unverifiable, then no one can tell you about it (because they have no way of knowing about it themselves). If the ’supernatural’ is verifiable or knowable, then it can be subjected to the same verification process as anything else. But anything that has been independently verified no longer falls into the realm of the ’supernatural.’ It is called ’scientific,’ or just true.

GOVERNMENT

Because people tend to associate government with practicality, they will respond best to arguments from action.

The statist will present government solutions to problems as if they know what they are talking about. However, in almost all cases they have not deeply researched the problem or any of its proposed solutions, but are merely repeating emotionally appealing assertions they have heard from others. Most would rather believe they are working on the problem than actually work to solve the problem.

(STEP 1): “Do you actually want to solve X (a given problem), or do you prefer to merely believe that you are working on X?”
(1b): Said another way: “Would you prefer to feel good or to solve the problem?”
(1c): Or another way: “Which is more important: your feelings, or X?”

If they reply that they only wish to feel good about “working on” a solution, then debating with them about their own self gratification is pointless. [End of debate]

If they claim to want to solve the problem, then they should have researched the problem, its causes, and potential solutions (both attempted and proposed). Anyone can say that they are interested in solving a problem, but the evidence lies in how deeply they have researched it and how much work they have put into solving it.

(STEP 2): “Have you studied the problem, its causes, and its potential solutions (both attempted and proposed)?”
(2b): Said another way: “How much have you thought about this?”

If they have not studied the problem at all, then they cannot logically claim to be interested in solving it. In fact, proposing solutions from a position of ignorance is very reckless. [End of debate]

If they claim to have studied the problem, then they should be knowledgeable of it. Ask questions:

(STEP 3): “Please explain to me how you see the problem. What do you think is causing it? How do you think it can be solved? Can you think of any other solutions that might work? Are you aware if your proposed solution has already been tried? What were the consequences?”

If they cannot answer the above questions with some degree of clarity, then they have not researched or thought about the problem and were not forthright in their previous statement. [End of debate]

Those who have taken the time to educate themselves about the problem, its causes, and its potential solutions may be said to be interested in solving the problem. However, if they have indeed solved the problem, then they should be able to implement their solution peacefully (since violence is itself a problem that needs to be solved). If it is a good solution, then it is possible to implement without violence. If they are not aware that their proposed solution is violent, then they have not thought deeply enough about the problem.

(Knock-Out 1): “If people are all good, government is not needed. If people are all evil, government is not possible. If people can be good or evil, then government cannot be justified, because the evil people will always seek power over the others.”

(Knock-Out 2):“The problems which government is supposed to solve are problems of violence, or are often caused by violence. Government is, by its own definition, institutionalized violence. To propose the institutionalization of violence in order to reduce or prevent violence is a contradiction.”

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The beauty of these templates is their efficiency. Opinions which are not based in reality can be exposed in minutes. Time can then be spent debating real arguments and real solutions rather than popular opinion or different versions of conventional wisdom. Each person is bound, by their own stated goals, to observe potential flaws in their position, and to present objective arguments based on logic and evidence.