Four Layers Of Tax And Money Management And We Still Worry About Politicians Cruising Gay Bars

Well, I'd say that my state senator's bid for a seat on the Board of Equalization just got a whole lot easier. Not even this sort of damage control is going to help in a place like Bakersfield -- as one comedian put it: "In Bakersfield, you you can find two kinds of voters: conservative people, and very conservative people."  So, Senator Runner is pretty much a shoo-in for the BoE because seat 2 is gerrymandered for the Republicans and Runner's only real opponent for it was Ashburn, who is now radioactive at the ballot box, at least in BoE District 2.

And that gets me to wondering -- am I happy that George Runner will sit on the BoE?  I guess to answer that question, I need to ask, why do we have a BoE in the first place?  Let's go take a look and see what they do:

The Board of Equalization collects California state sales and use tax, as well as fuel, alcohol, and tobacco taxes and fees that provide revenue for state government and essential funding for counties, cities, and special districts. 

Oh. I thought getting the money was the Treasurer's job.  So, what does the Treasurer do?  (Aside from panic, these days?)  Well, according to the Treasurer's website:

The office of California State Treasurer has broad responsibilities and authority in the areas of investment and finance.  The Treasurer is elected statewide every four years. In addition to being the State's lead asset manager, banker and financier, the Treasurer serves as chairperson or a member of numerous State authorities, boards and commissions.

I see.  Well, then, what about the Comptroller?  Ah, yes, he eliminates fraud, graft and waste:

The State Controller is the Chief Fiscal Officer of California, the eighth largest economy in the world. As the state’s independent fiscal watchdog, the Controller provides sound fiscal control over more than $100 billion in annual receipts and disbursements of public funds. He uses his audit authority to uncover fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars and provides fiscal guidance to our local governments. The Controller helps administer two of the largest public pension funds in the nation. 

And, of course, the bulk of the money received by the state comes through the Franchise Tax Board, which is jointly run by the Controller, the chairman of the BoE, and a gubernatorial appointee, the head of the Department of Finance.

Wow, with this many people in charge of our money, how'd we ever come up short?  I've been accused of being "radical" recently on this blog.  Well, I've got a radical idea, and if Californians pass Propositions 1 and 2 in November, and I get appointed to the Constitutional Convention as a delegate (which I would dearly love to do and for which I am both eligible and very qualified), one thing I'm going to suggest is that we abolish the separate constitutional offices of all these different sources of revenue and consolidate them into a single agency, to be called the California Department of Revenue, and which would be headed by five commissioners appointed to staggered five-year terms by the Governor.

Indeed, I've played with the idea that nearly everything the state government does should be done under the auspices of the Governor's office -- with the exception of law enforcement and criminal prosecution, because an independent judiciary and prosecution office would keep the governor honest.  So I could get really radical and suggest that there be only two statewide elected officers at all, the Governor and the Attorney General, and if the Governor's office is ever vacant for any reason, the Attorney General becomes Governor for the rest of the term and there is an immediate special election to replace the AG.  How's that for making the government efficient?

Anyway, it's curtains for Roy Ashburn, an apparently pleasant sinecure for George Runner, and a lot of different organs of government in similar but not quite overlapping areas of jurisdiction for the rest of us to pay for with $26 billion we don't have.

Testing the Droid

Writing this blog post entirely from the droid. Just a test, really. 1234. Seems to work better to edit HTML directly and keep all links out. But it can be done.

Talking To Believers, Recap

Five big tips for skeptics aiming at talking to believers.

First, know your own objective for the conversation, and make an effort to ascertain your interlocutor's.

Second, take stock of your interlocutor, particularly how intelligent and how emotional she is.

Third, stay civil.  End it if things get something-other-than-civil.

Fourth, stay aware of, and make explicit if need be, the frame, structure, and rules of the exchange.

Fifth, be prepared for probable arguments and responses; and particularly with discussions of interest to skeptics talking with believers, there are ample resources available to help you with this.

Good luck!

This Is The Droid I Was Looking For

My cell phone has been crapping out on me too often recently -- the battery drains in two days or less whether I make calls on the phone or not.  So it was time to say goodbye and get a new one.  Costco had a great deal that The Wife and I decided to take advantage of -- buy one Droid phone, get one free.  We've had the Droids for about a day now and neither of us can put them down.

The Droid looks and feels similar to our friends' iPhones.  The screen works the same way and the resolution is visibly better.  The 5 megapixel camera is powerful and comes with a very bright flash.  The software works the same way, too -- it comes with a pre-packaged suite of software and you download the rest of the software you want from the Droid Market, which is like the iPhone Store.  The software and support behind Droid is a partnership between Verizon and Google, and fortunately, I have a google account.  As soon as I gave my phone my e-mail address and password, it had all my contacts from Google Mail imported and it was a short project to transfer my old phone's data to the new phone.

"Phone" isn't really the right noun.  It's a mini-computer.  It only plays simple games and doesn't have a full-functioning word processor, but it is fully linkable to and compatible with other networks and computer units.  I can plug it in to my laptop at home and transfer music and photographs for use as ringtones and wallpaper.  It did take a little bit of detective work on the net to figure out how to do that -- the trick is, once the data cable for the phone is plugged in to your computer's USB jack, you need to activate the phone and then pull the menu down from the top to "dock" the phone's chip with the computer, where it shows up as a removable flash memory drive.

With a little bit of exploration, I found how to remotely integrate the phone's calendar with my computer at work's calendar, so now I have my schedule with me wirelessly updating wherever I go.  Handy for court.  I've also found a copy of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure application, so I can have that with me when I go to court too.  If I can figure out how to get the California Code of Civil Procedure and Rules of Court, that would be an even hotter setup.

Pros:

• Intuitive, easy controls.
• Integrates with existing exchanges, on either Microsoft Office suites or open-source Google suites.
• Reasonably high-quality speaker.
• Wide selection of free downloadable applications.
• Memory management is great; can switch from application to application seamlessly. 
• Web interface fast and fluid.
• Silencing the phone is quick and easy.

Cons:

• Weighs about eight ounces, a little bit heavier than most cell phones.
• Battery seems to drop through the 90% to 80% range fairly quickly with wireless network use.
• Setup from scratch is a little more time-consuming than I preferred.
• Answering incoming calls takes two steps (unlocking phone and answering). 
• Touchscreen smudges easily and requires frequent cleaning.  Or maybe I need less oily fingers.
• Google is now watching everything I do.  I get a lot of utility in exchange for my privacy, but I do lose my privacy.

The Wife likes that she can play Pandora on the Droid wherever we go.  I like the Google Maps navigation.  When we travel, we will now only need our Droids and Kindles and can leave all the bigger, bulkier electronics at home.

Talking To Believers, Part 5: Preparation

To conclude my series of unsolicited advice about how to navigate a wide universe of conversational disagreements, thinking specifically about skeptics engaged in dialogue with believers, I'm getting more practical and less theoretical, and more specific to my chosen target audience.  This post will cross a bright line with that trend, although I hope the many believers who are enjoying the series and finding value in what I'm offering will stick with it and consider cognates to the more directly-aimed sorts of things that I'm addressing here.

The reason I say that is that in order to have a good dialogue with a believer, whatever the objective of that dialogue might be, a skeptic will do much much better if some preparation has taken place before the conversation.  In particular, a skeptic's close allies and ready appeals have to be driven by logic, reason, and evidence.  You can't just make crap up on the fly, and it has to hold together under critical analysis.  The religionist, by the very nature of her side of the discussion, ultimately gets to rely on at least one irrational thing -- faith -- which you as a skeptic do not get.  To be sure, the religionist will want to and likely will try to offer logic, evidence, and good reasoning to support her claims within the discussion and hopefully she will do a good job with that.  But at the end of the day, the religionist ultimately gets to say, "This is my faith," and you don't have that.

So my first point for your consideration today is that in one way or another, at some point you will ultimately have to aim at whittling a believer's arguments down to its foundation of faith.  When you do this, you have in a very meaningful sense won the exchange.

I can hear my faithful Readers hackles' raising even as I type this in first draft.  "There's plenty of evidence to support the Bible," they'll say.  "What's wrong with basing something on faith?" they'll demand searchingly.  Well, maybe yes and maybe no, but that's not really my point.  The point is that faith is not objectively verifiable.

Faith is an entirely personal, internal process.  A group of people might share the same faith, but it's something that resides within each of them individually.  And if you don't share that faith, there is no outward difference between you and them.  That faith is not based on material evidence.  It is not based on logic or even experience.  It is, quite simply, faith:  the world view that a given proposition is true regardless of whether there is evidence to support that proposition.

For the skeptic, reducing a religious contention to faith means that the religious contention is irrational, it means that it is personal and not universal, it means that your religious interlocutor must ultimately make a critical concession.  That concession that you are looking for is that unless one personally has a faith experience of some kind, the religion will ultimately not make sense.  One might continue outwardly observing the religion despite the lack of this faith experience, but one would do so as a result of social pressure rather than the true belief that the religion espouses as an inherent virtue.

My second piece of advice is to learn formal logic.  You can learn it online.  You're better off learning it in a class of some kind, hopefully taught at a community college or something like that.  Symbolic logic was easily, far and away, hands-down, the most important and valuable class I ever took at any phase of my education.  I took it in my very first semester of college, while I was also learning that UCSB stands for "U Can Study Buzzed."  Well, in fact you can't study symbolic logic while you're half in the bag on cheap tequila, and this was the only class I took that quarter which I stayed sober for and didn't allow myself to skip a single session because it was hard and intellectually rigorous.  Even though the instructor was obviously bored and appeared to lack any personality, it was quite evident to me that fallacies I was learning in the 10:00 lecture for symbolic logic would be violated in the 11:00 lecture in sociology.  It was the first example I had access to of how to take dispensed wisdom from authority figures with a grain of salt.

Know your fallacies.  You will find them all over the place in religionists' claims.  When you point them out, you will eventually get your interlocutor to agree that seeming paradoxes cannot be resolved with reason alone, that at some point, one must make a "leap of faith" and leave logic and reason behind.  Thus, you will demonstrate that religion is irrational.  That doesn't mean it's bad, by the way.  It just means that there is no objective reason to think it is any better than any other religion, or the absence of religion.

The great thing about logic is that when you do it right, there is simply no further arguing with it.  "A is A," the basic proposition goes, and that is the end of that discussion.  A thing is itself, and this is an uncontradictable truth.  You don't have to get all Ayn Randy here, because once we introduce more variables into the equation, things start to get interesting.  A is A, but maybe A is also B, in which case it is A and B.  Is C A?  If C is A, then is C also B?  Make some Venn Diagrams if this isn't making sense to you.  See?  You're learning symbolic logic!  This is actually quite fun stuff, a game that skeptics and believers alike can play and enjoy.  And that's the real point.  Logic is universal.  A is A, whether you're an atheist, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Wiccan, or whatever.  We all use it, all the time, although most of the time we do it intuitively and informally.  Disciplining your mind to do it formally is the best mental training anyone can have.

Also, as you structure and prepare what you're going to say, you can test your own statements to see if they too make logical sense.  Do not spare yourself the withering and merciless scrutiny that you intend to deliver later to a religious interlocutor's arguments.  You, too, must bear the burden of offering a logical justification for what you contend to be true.  Just because you're a skeptic does not mean that you are immune from making mistakes in your logic.

No less an atheist celebrity than Sam Harris has been righteously accused of committing the "No True Scotsman" fallacy in his book The End of Faith by claiming therein that an atheist would never commit an act of violence motivated by religious faith.  Yes, it is certainly true that suicide bombers and a great many other subspecies of terrorists are motivated to their acts of violence by the assurance that they are somehow advancing their religions, that they will be rewarded for their deeds in the afterlife, and that no atheist believes that he will be rewarded in the afterlife because by definition the atheist does not believe in an afterlife at all.  But at the same time, it is certainly possible to imagine an atheist committing an act of violence on a religious institution if the atheist adopts a not just non-theistic but anti-theistic point of view, by imputing evil motives to a religious institution and seeking to stop it from doing further harm.  If the atheist thought he could save thousands of innocent lives at the cost of only a few dozen (possibly including his own) then it's not a huge stretch to imagine someone willing to make that ghoulish ethical bargain.  I don't know of any such incident actually having taken place anywhere, but it is not a huge stretch to imagine such a thing happening.

So learn logic, and use it, both on yourself and on your interlocutor.

Third, learn apologetic tropes.  After a relatively short time of trying to expound your own world view to those who disagree with it, you will find that you start encountering the same arguments again and again and again.  The Kalam Cosmological Argument, for instance, seems particularly common, in large part because of the work of a believer philosopher named William Lane Craig.  Craig offers some sophisticated arguments that are the subject of a lot of deep thought, and has been called one of the finest theological apologetics alive.  Now, chances are pretty good you won't be dealing with William Lane Craig, but even if your interlocutor is only half as smart as he is, you're going to need some kind of a response to the Kalam argument because it's only a matter of time until you're going to be confronted with it.

Kalam isn't the only argument you'll encounter, although it's one of the more interesting ones.  You're very likely to get a reasonable number of the following:

• If you reject the Bible, why would you be ethical?  What's to stop you from killing and raping and stealing all the time?
• Don't you want some purpose to your life?
• You're not really an atheist; you can't be because there is no such thing as a true atheist.  [Related: "There are no atheists in foxholes."  Also related:  "It takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to be a believer."]
• I'm sad for you that you are blinding yourself to the joys of a spiritual life.
• A creator must exist because life is irreducibly complex.
• Have you ever considered [insert purported objective archeological or historiographical data] which clearly proves that the Bible is true?
• If there is no God, then life has no meaning, so why don't you just kill yourself?
• Atheism (or evolution, as if those were the same thing) is a religion just like Christianity.
• Religion is good because it inspires people to do good things.
• What if you're wrong?

What are you going to say when your faithful interlocutor confronts you with these things?  Speed in response is important, because the faster you respond to the point, the stronger and more convincing you're going to seem in giving it.  But even more important than a quick comeback is a confident one.  A confident response comes from having some knowledge of the subject matter of the discussion, it comes from having thought through your own position, it comes from the heart, and it makes logical sense.  Which it will, if you've given it the right level of thought first.

Rest assured, your interlocutor has resources available to prepare her for the kinds of arguments and issues and evidence that you are likely to be bringing up.  And it's not just a question of memorizing and selecting the appropriate tropes to throw back and forth.  That's been done already.  Hopefully, you're trying for something a little more meaningful than sloganeering, and hopefully your interlocutor is, too.  Here's one good source for some common, short questions that believers often ask of atheists.  I won't tell you here how to answer them, what I'm telling you is that they're coming and you need to have answers for them.

Fourth, insist on getting answers to your questions, not answers to questions you didn't ask.  By the same token, answer the questions you are asked, not questions that you wish you had been asked.  A conversation cannot move forward without actual answers to questions.  If you don't think you have an answer to your question, go back and clarify.  Use a tactic like this:  "I'm sorry, I don't think I understood you.  I asked [X], and it seems to me that you said [Y].  I get what you're saying with [Y], but that doesn't really respond to [X].  So, [X]?"

One of the easy hallmarks of not giving a real answer is to "answer a question with a question."  In one of the links above, I refer to a now-famous exchange between Richard Dawkins and (I presume) a faithful questioner, who just listened to a forty-five minute reading from The God Delusion about why there is almost certainly no such thing as God, and she asks "Well, what if you're wrong?"  Dawkins' response is, "Well, what if you're wrong about the Great Juju in the Sea?"  As a technical matter, he didn't answer the question.  We've got to unpack the question in order to understand why that is the case -- the questioner is a believer, and what's she's really asking is not "What if you're wrong, Dr. Dawkins," it's "What if I am right?  What if it turns out that Jesus really is the Son of God and God is really a trinity of entities, and He really will judge your immortal soul one day to determine whether you go to Heaven or Hell and he will judge you not on your deeds alone but on your faith?"

In response, Dawkins pointed out that everyone is at risk of being subscribed to the wrong faith, and that doesn't really answer her actual question.  Nor would have been a response of, "Well, I'm not worried about that because the chances are so infinitesimally small that I am wrong that it's not worth thinking about."  Dawkins didn't answer the question about what he really would do if he found himself confronted with the Judgment Day as literally described in Christian mythology.  I've got my answer to that question prepared.  You can borrow it from me if you like -- I don't mind.

Now, not everyone is trained like a lawyer to really think about questions and answers, especially when doing it on the fly.  But on the other hand, it's not too big a leap to do the unpacking of the original question, and it's not too hard to see how the question isn't really answered.  So don't accept an answer to your question that is itself a question.  That's a rhetorical device, your interlocutor is shifting the burden of the conversation back on you rather than addressing the point that you have raised.

Like I warned you when I started, this is last post in the series is pretty specific for skeptics talking to believers.  But I suspect that if you are not a skeptic preparing for a talk with a believer, you can still extract some abstract ideas from here and apply them to your own situation.  The basic rule here is "Be prepared."  Understand where your interlocutor is going to come from.  Anticipate the likely arguments.  Use good logic and point out where your interlocutor does not.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, a Democrat or a Republican, a saver or a spender, I hope I've managed to give you some ideas about how to express yourself in a polite and personable way, while not sacrificing your ability to be direct and convincing.  Good luck.

Talking To Believers, Part 4: The Meta Conversation

Next, I want to consider a few things that I'll address in ways that a lawyer would.  These are "issues about issues," and they are often not explicitly discussed in a conversation (at least, not in an interesting one) but they are powerful.

First of all, not every discussion has an explicit focus. If you're just having a meandering back-and-forth with a friend while you're hanging out, for instance, it need not be the case that one of you has to prove or disprove anything in particular or that one or the other of you "wins the day."  It's perfectly okay, especially in an informal setting, for you both to simply talk through the issues at hand and air your respective perspectives.

But that does not mean you shouldn't watch for a focus forming, or that you should fail to understand that there are discrete issues that arise in your exchange.  "We talked about religion" is a very broad way of summarizing a conversation, but when you're actually talking about religion, you're going to have to talk about some facet or dimension of it.  It will always profit you to respond to the subject at hand rather than to respond to a point raised by your interlocutor with a non sequitur. 

If your counterpart says something like, "Christianity is the best way to get people to behave morally," then a response like "Christianity is just a way for a church to suck money out of people in exchange for nothing," you haven't addressed your counterpart's choice in any meaningful way.  There's all sorts of things a skeptic can say or question in response to claim that Christianity promotes moral behavior better than any other kind of world view.  You could point out examples of immoral behavior by Christians.  You could point out examples of highly moral behavior by non-Christians.  You could inquire about what it is about Christianity that encourages moral behavior.  You could point to Christian or Bible teachings you find morally questionable.  You could suggest that Christianity might encourage moral behavior but no more or no less than any other kind of world view.  The point is to understand the intellectual content of your counterpart's contention, and to articulate a response to it that meets the contention on its merits.

What's going on in that process is framing.  In some cases, you can set yourself up for victory or defeat by framing an issue properly.  But let me suggest that if you have properly prepared for your discusion (which is something I'll address tomorrow in the last of this series of posts) the way an issue is framed won't matter all that much.  You'll be able to assert your position in pretty much any fair frame.  And framing is a process that ought not to be done unilaterally if it's going to be done fairly.

The best way to frame a discussion is the method of proposition and response.  This makes explicit what is being discussed, what issue is in dispute.  In my example above, the proposition is made by the believer:  "Christianity is the best way to get people to behave morally."  This sets up the base of the frame.  The skeptic's response creates the structure of the frame, but to do so, the skeptic needs to be more clear about the response than "No, it isn't."  The believer's retort to "No, it isn't," ought to be "What do you mean?"  This is a request to clarify the response.  As I suggested, the response could be any number of things, but an on-the-merits response pretty much boils down to either a question about the moral merits within Christianity (an internal analysis) or a comparison of Christianity to other faith or world view systems (an external analysis).

If you can't make clear at the beginning what the proposition and response is, then at some point you'll notice the subject matter of the conversation meandering.  Maybe you're okay with that -- but my advice is to at minimum be conscious of the meander and made a decision about whether or not you want to let the subject matter drift.  If you do not, then make the proposition and response explicit.  Briefly.  "Okay, wait a minute.  I thought we were talking about whether Christianity is the best way to get people to behave morally, and I said it's just as likely that Hindus or atheists will be moral as Christians.  Whether or not we teach evolution or creationism in the schools really doesn't have anything to do with whether atheists or Christians are good people."  Chances are that your interlocutor will respond positively to a reminder like this to get the conversation back on track.  Maybe she'll say, "Yeah, but we're done with that.  What you've got to understand about evolution is..." and then you're wrestling over subject matter -- but the point is, you need to know what you are talking about (on a level that lawyers would call "procedural"), in order to be able to know what you are talking about (on a level that lawyers would call "substantive").
In an ideal world, you and your interlocutor will have an established burden of proof which fits within the frame of the issues under discussion. For instance, if the question is, "Does God exist?" There are several possibilities for the way the burden could be distributed, along a sliding scale, with these being some notable points of gravity along that sliding scale:

• The believer must prove conclusively that God exists by offering strong, convincing evidence and argument; if she fails to do this, the skeptic "wins."
• The believer must prove that it is more likely than not that God exists; if she fails to do this, the skeptic "wins."
• The skeptic must prove that it is more likely than not that God does not exist; if he fails to do this, the believer "wins."
• The skeptic must prove conclusively that Goes does not exist by offering strong, convincing evidence and argument; if he fails to do this, or if the believer raises even a small reasonable possibility that God might exist, the believer "wins."

As in litigation, you want to have as little burden as possible, and you want the other person to be the one with the heaviest possible burden of proof.  In many ways, the allocation of a burden of proof pre-determines the outcome of a debate.  Particularly in a formal debate, whoever it is who gets to write the proposition under discussion has a huge advantage in being able to frame the issue.  Note also that the burden of proof is always operative at the level that I have called "substantive" -- it goes to the merits of the discussion rather than to its framing or its focus.

The real problem is that most of the discussions I'm thinking about here will not be formal; they will be very informal.  A bull session at a pub, for instance, lacks a formal set of rules, it lacks a moderator, it lacks third-party judges, and almost by its very nature, it will involve multiple participants in an unstructured, free-flowing discussion.  Somehow in this process, some kind of consensus about who has the job of proving what needs to emerge.  It can often profit the clarity of your discussion to spend a moment or two dealing with presumptions and burdens.  But it won't profit you to spend twenty or thirty minutes to deal with that.  If you can't agree about who fairly bears the burden of proving or disproving a particular proposition, then the discussion will not go anywhere and it's probably best to talk about something else.

Similarly, don't let your conversation get bogged down in semantics.  It's an "easy out" for some discussions to say that both parties really agree on the substance of what they're discussing, it's just a matter of semantics that aren't settled yet.  But the thing is, that's only very rarely true.  I'm assuming here that there is a real disagreement.  Your interlocutor thinks there is a God and you do not.  Your interlocutor thinks that evolution cannot be true, you think that there is no scientific evidence to the contrary.

Well, there's all sorts of ways you can argue about definitions here.  The most common place I have found definitions becoming slippery is in the term "God."  If you are discussing, for instance, the Cosmological Argument (a variant of which I'll refer to tomorrow), "God" means "Creator of the Universe."  But "God" for most believers in most Western nations means "Jehovah," who in the Judaic and Christian mythologies does a good deal more than create the universe.  "God" may or may not be omnibenevolent, may or may not be omniscient or omnipotent, may or may not future-project in existence, may or may not be a unique entity, may or may not be a natural or a supernatural force.  The phrase "God" means a lot of things and while it may be interesting to probe how exact or inexact this concept is in your interlocutor's mind (or your own) it takes a rather specialized and refined sort of discussion for that exploration to be fruitful.  If you're in that sort of discussion, chances are you are already sophisticated enough to not really need my advice about how to hold your own in it.

But for most common discussions between regular folks (things like bull sessions, parties, talking over coffee, aguments that might be "friendly" or might not be, exchanges with missionaries or would-be evangelists, even formal debates), I will suggest that parsing out definitions too finely and too elaborately within the discussion itself will eventually become something of an intellectual rabbit hole.  Once you go down that rabbit hole, it's very hard to come back out into the daylight and recapture the momentum and direction that you had going before, and this will handicap the fludity of your discussion.  You're not really winning a disagreement if you define the disagreement away. The definitions of a discussion are not its merits.  And after a very short time it becomes deadly boring.

The point of clarifying definitions in an honest discussion is to make sure everyone is talking about the same thing.  It is not to try and "define your way to victory."  Now, sometimes you can't help but explain what something is if it's misunderstood.  Evolution, for instance, is not well-understood (sometimes, I think, it's deliberately misunderstood) by its deniers.

One option is to agree on some third-party, objective source for definitions like a dictionary.  In fact, this is usually a bad idea for both skeptics and believers.  Dictionaries frequently use language left over fom when they were first written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even more recent entries are written by lexographers whose job is to capture the popular understanding of a word rather than its precise meaning in disciplines of science or philosophy.  This is especially true for words like "God," "atheist," and "evolution."  I've seen dictionaries that defined "atheism" as "immoral behavior."  If you've agreed that a dictionary is the ultimate source of definition of a term, then you as the skeptic are now put in the position of defending behavior that is by definition immoral but in reality is not.  You don't want to be in that position.

A better option, I submit, is to keep the definitional clarification short and intended only to clarify.  "When you are talking about 'God,' are you defending the 'God' who is described in the Christian Bible, or are you only defending the idea of a supernatural creator of the universe?"  Your interlocutor will answer that question with one or another option, or possibly suggesting a third, but once you've got that out, move back to the original question as quickly as possible.

Lastly, in terms of meta-conversation, you've got to develop situational awareness.  Understand the ebb and flow of momentum, the power of points and counterpoints, and the effect of tone and emotion as well as that of substance and intellectual accomplishment.  If your conversational partner scores a point, you need to know that a point has been scored -- particularly if you are having a discussion in the context of attempting to persuade or impress third parties who are observing the exchange.  Maybe you want to score a point to even it out, or more points to get ahead; maybe you want to neutralize that point, maybe you want to shift to focus to territory where it will be relatively easier for you to score more points.  But if you are oblivious to the the fact that you just got scored on, you aren't going to be able to respond appropriately.

Similarly, if you just got scored on, it may profit you to understand how that happened.  Perhaps your interlocutor set you up and you walked in to her "kill zone."  You'll say later to yourself, "I should have seen that coming."  Yes, you should have.  Afterwards, ask yourself, "What were the clues that I missed the first time?"  Chances are, you won't walk in to a "kill zone" if you are adequately prepared (again, that's tomorrow's post) because you'll see it coming.  If you do walk in to a kill zone and take fire, you need to be aware of that, too.

Some of you are asking, "Are people really this oblivious to what's going on in a conversation?"  Yes, they are.  Or at least, they very frequently behave as though they are.  I see it with my mock trial kids -- they are so focused on what they have to say that they seem to simply ignore what the other team is saying and doing.  I see it in court, especially when I do eviction cases.  "Your Honor, this is a case predicated upon a thirty-day notice, which means that all the issues of whether the property was inhabitable or not are irrelevant."  "Yeah, Your Honor, but what about all the cockroaches?"  I want to turn to them and ask, "Did you understand what I just said?  I just said the cockroaches don't matter!"  But I don't, because their obliviousness only benefits my client. 

Take a lesson from their mistake -- listen to and understand what is being said.  Otherwise, you're at risk of not only being put in a hole, but digging yourself deeper in it than you really needed to be.  It shouldn't be hard for you to imagine countless scenarios in which either a skeptic or a believer discusing an issue of faith could get so wound up in their own point that they render themselves blind and deaf to their counterpart's point and therefore disregard the conversation entirely, descending instead into preaching.  This is inappropriate, distracting, and most importantly, it becomes a conversation-stopper.

What this all really comes down to is to have a conscious understanding of what you are talking about, what the terms of the discussion are, and paying attention to what your interlocutor says.

A Love Note To My Wife

Thank you.  Thank you thank you thank you thank you.

For not wanting to have children.

Oh, and for the cleaning and work you do around the house and taking care of the animals and supporting me in my many endeavors and being affectionate and friendly and a good companion and a good friend.

But tonight, I'm especially grateful that you share my lack of desire to have children around.

Thank you, my darling.  I love you and I'm very very happy that we get to spend our child-free lives together.

Talking To Believers, Part 3: Civility

Just because you're an atheist doesn't give you the right to be arrogant, condescending, nasty, insulting, or mean.  Indeed, I would far prefer that you were not those things if you represent a skeptical point of view.  I would rather that you were polite, respectful, and pleasant to converse with because whether I like it or not, if you're going to be a skeptic talking to a believer, you're an ambassador for a group of people to which I belong and I want to be well-represented.

Skeptics, when a religious missionary comes to your door, how does that person act?  Quite likely the missionaries are conservatively dressed, well-groomed, and smiling.  They have a friendly demeanor and are polite.  That's not by accident.  Maybe they're all really jerks in their private lives, but they are aware that they are representing their religious community and they want to make a good impression.  That's the same attitude I want you to have when you represent me and our fellow skeptics.

More to the point, very often when you're talking to a believer, the person you're talking to is someone with whom you will either want or need to have some kind of a relationship when the exchange is done.  Perhaps if you're exchanging blog posts, you care less about what the other person thinks of you, but don't forget that nothing posted on the Intertubes ever really goes away.  And it's not all that hard to track down someone's identity.  So don't be a jerk on the net, either.  Take this discussion, for example -- almost no one in it looks good, whether they are believers or skeptics.

So don't ever lose sight of the need to be civil. I don't mean be a weak conversationalist; it is entirely possible to strongly articulate your point of view, and not back down, while still not being a jerk. My advice today is don't be a jerk. On the very first day I was sworn in to practice law, on law and motion day, the judge heard a discovery dispute and announced his rule for resolving such matters: "Jerks lose." This rule holds true outside the context of litigation, too.  Now, I'm sure you want to feel like you've "won" whatever exchange your in, so let me give you a few tips for how to argue forcefully but civilly for your position.

1.  Moderate your aggression, at least in tone.  If you take too aggressive or confrontational a tone, your interlocutor will a) get defensive in your conversation, and b) resent you for doing it later.  Maybe you want an adversary in a debate to assume a defensive posture in certain situations, but I'll suggest that whatever short-term gains you have by getting someone to become defensive will be outweighed by the long-term diminishment of your reputation that will result from that choice of tactics.  If the person you force on the defensive is your friend, you will weaken your friendship.

2.  Control your body language and facial gestures.  There are some easy traps to fall into while expressing your disagreement that can be interpreted as a lack of civility.  Most of them have to do with not what you say, but how you say it.  Scoffing, rolling your eyes, snorting, chuckling when your interlocutor is being sincere, name-calling, or most of all, acting angry or offended at something that a reasonable person would not get angry at are all things that will tell everybody that you need to put on the "Big Ol' A-hole" T-shirt.

3.  Limit your use of profanity.  If you find yourself dropping the f-bomb every fifth or sixth word, chances are pretty good that the substance of your communication is going to be obscured behind your entry for the Andrew Dice Clay Award For Most Profane Monologue.  In fact, unless the word itself is germane to the topic under discussion, perhaps you want to avoid profanity altogether.  For some of you this might be a challenge but if it is, I'm all but ready to guarantee that those around you will appreciate your rising to it.  If you do indulge in profanity, but it's rare, I can guarantee you that the profanity will be much more effective and deliver a greater emotional punch.  And when you do use it, try not to use it in a way to add emphasis to something that could be seen as an insult to religion itself, because that magnifies the emotional impact of the insult without adding any substance to the point you're making: A tone of incredulity at being asked to believe the literal truth of the Jonah-in-the-big-fish story may be appropriate, but saying "You're telling me that you really believe that a man lived for three days in the stomach of a giant fish?  That's just f-in' stupid, dude," doesn't really add anything substantive to the rather obvious impossibility of the tale.  I personally think it's more powerful if you just leave this granddaddy-of-all-fish-stories right there where it lies.

4.  Don't assume the worst.  If you go in to a discussion with a believer with the idea that the believer has some kind of malicious intent, amazingly, you'll find evidence of that in what they say and suddenly what started out as a polite discussion becomes Deathmatch 2010: Good Versus Evil.  The worst you should assume about your interlocutor is that she is misguided or has reached a bad conclusion and the likely reason she has done that is because of bad education.  This is not her fault and she is not evil.  Even if a believer has really done something evil to you in the past -- let's say you're one of the miniscule numbers of people who really were molested by one of the miniscule numbers of priests who were also pederasts -- the believer you're talking to is not that person, is not an apologist for that person, and is not a surrogate for that person.  She does not deserve the anger and wrath that you might appropriate direct at such a person.

5.  Don't lose your own temper.  If you find yourself giving vent to catharsis in your discussion, stop, take a deep breath, and change your focus.  Yes, it may be the case that you wasted years of your life and huge gobs of money believing a lie, the same lie that your religionist conversation partner is trying to defend.  And maybe you want to stop that from happening to someone else.  Great.  But your interlocutor is not responsible for your wasted time, lost money, misdirected emotional investment.  You are, for not coming to your senses earlier in life than you did, or for giving in to peer pressure or a desire to please authority figures by acting contrary to what you knew all along to be true.  Don't put that on someone else.

6.  Understand the limits of what you can accomplish.  This is one reason why I think it's so important for you to understand your interlocutor's purpose in the conversation, and to understand their emotional stakes, which are points I raised in parts 1 and 2 of this series.  You're not going to persuade someone to abandon their faith all at once.  The most you can do is plant a seed and let them figure things out for themselves with the ideas you disseminate.  And if you're an a-hole about it, that's going to kill an otherwise viable seed.

7.  Remember that you're supposed to still be friends later.  If you find yourself in such a disagreeing discussion with a friend, try to adopt the "quest for mutual understanding" objective, and encourage your friend to do the same.  It's entirely appropriate for friends who have different sets of beliefs to explain to one another where they're coming from.  It's entirely inappropriate for friends to try and convert one another.  That goes for skeptics as much as for atheists.  The point of being friends with someone is that you enjoy being with them and doing things with them just the way they are.  Maybe you think your friend has some flaws, but you accept them and are friends with him despite his flaws.  That's what being a friend is.  And what's more, it's not necessarily a "flaw" if your friend has a different outlook on the world as to matters of spirituality and the supernatural, anyway.  If you're a Republican and your friend is a Democrat, or vice versa, you hopefully understand what I'm talking about here.*

Now, with a friend, and in the context of certain kinds of friendship, a lighthearted tone of teasing or joshing around is entirely okay.  That's when you're both confident enough in your friendship to tease one another and know that the other party is going to understand that the teasing is just that and nothing more.  "How can you Republicans think [X], are you just all stupid?" you might say with a sneer in your voice.  Your Republican friend will respond either with a serious explanation and ignoring the tease, or better yet by teasing you right back, hopefully giving as good as she got from you.  But I hope you'd never do that with a stranger.  If you're very, very good friends with someone you might do that with religion.  But again, unless you're acting within a very good friendship and everyone participating in the conversation understands that the teasing is not intended to be taken seriously, don't go down this road.

8.  Don't Contradict Personal Testimony.  You may also get a personal story.  You can't invalidate a personal experience.  You can't tell someone that they didn't do something they clearly remember having done.  You can't tell them they didn't see and hear and feel and smell something that they know they did see and hear and feel and smell.  There is no choice but to accept that this person really thinks something like that.  When you get the story about how your Christian friend "Saw Jesus and He spoke to me," well, chances are good that your friend really and sincerely does think he really saw Jesus and Jesus really did speak to him.  You might find it interesting to probe that with questions about what Jesus looked like and so on, but at the end of the day, that's a real experience your friend had and if you tell your friend that he was just hallucinating, that's something he will too easily take as an insult and now look what you've done, you've just insulted your friend.  Or I should say, your former friend.

How do you deal with that?  You do what I heard my friend do the other day at a gathering of folks that included believers and nonbelievers.  My friend and his interlocutor were talking -- quietly, civilly, and with friendship and mutual respect -- about the other guy's Christian faith.  I'm paraphrasing it, of course, because it was Sunday and I'd had a beer before sitting down at that couch, and I don't remember the exchange quite verbatim.  But it went something like this:

Believer:  "Well, you know that I've had the experience of meeting Jesus and accepting Him as my Lord."

Skeptic:  "Sure, we've talked about that before.  That's your experience, something that is within you.  I can't and wouldn't tell you it didn't happen.  All I can say to that is that this isn't something that I've experienced.  But, what can you tell me or someone like me like my other friend here [he indicated me] who hasn't had that experience?  If we haven't been through that, what is it about Christianity that we can look at and say, yeah, that's the way to go?"

Believer:  "Well, one thing is the incredible tradition and history that you find in the Bible.  You see a real moral transformation and progression in the way of thinking as you move through the Bible, and you can see how our modern understanding of what's right and wrong was created through all that history, from the Garden of Eden up to now."

Now, you know what?  The believer's answer to that last question was a pretty good one.  And my skeptic friend kept eye contact, nodded his head to indicate that he understood the point the believer was making, and acknowledged that he liked the answer, too.  It's not a game-changing answer; neither my skeptic friend nor I were moved by the answer to suddenly start believing in Jesus.  But at the same time, it was a smart, responsive, and interesting point to make.  Which leads me to my penultimate point about civility:

9.  Don't be afraid to concede a well-made point to a civil interlocutor.  I'm not saying concede the ultimate argument or the key to the argument.  But recognize and acknowledge when your counterpart has made a good point.  This tells anyone who is paying attention that you are paying attention, and therefore that you are intellectually engaged in the conversation rather than just preaching.  (Yes, skeptics preach too; we do it all the time, and it's just as annoying and boring as when believers do it.)  It also makes your interlocutor happy because it strokes her ego.

There is an exception to this, which is when your partner is not being civil herself.  Such a conversation partner has become an "adversary" and your conversation is at risk of becoming an "argument."  When you're not getting civility back to your own, you need to step away from the subject matter of the disagreement and go back to regulating the emotional tone of the discussion.  Dial it down a notch or two in a direct way:  "Hey, we're just talking here.  You look like you're getting a little steamed.  You say you're not?  Okay, sorry I misunderstood you.  Yes, I know you believe strongly in what you're saying, and so do I, but we're friends so this is a friendly discusion, right?"

10.  If it can't stay civil, end it.  Finally, when a disagreement fails to resolve, it's easy to become frustrated and say things out of that frustration.  Watch that.  It can lead to you saying things you shouldn't, things you might not even really mean.  But it's those words, uttered in anger and frustration, that can cross the line.  Particularly when you're talking with a friend, a co-worker, a member of the family, or someone else that you will want to have a good relationship with, it's better to end a discussion and not revisit the topic than to let things get hot and steamy (in a bad way).

Civility requires listening to acknowledging what your conversation partner says.  It means not saying things that sensitive people will take as attacks, it means keeping control over your own tone and your own emotions.  This isn't always easy to do, and if you're having difficulty with it, or if your conversation partner is having difficulty with it, you really ought to consider withdrawing from the conversation until you've got your own emotions in check.  But if you can stay civil, you can have a meaningful exchange, and your point will be made in a a much more powerful and persuasive way than it would if you had used venom instead.


* It could be that you are such a die-hard partisan that you cannot imagine ever being friends with someone who is of the opposite party.  About ten years ago, I met an attractive, intelligent, funny woman at a bar and we flirted over drinks for about an hour and it was going great.  When I asked for her phone number, she wanted to know if I was a Republican or a Democrat.  I answered truthfully but wrong, and she pretty much sprinted out of the door.  Needless to say, I did not score digits.  Oh, well, it's her loss -- by now, everyone should know that Republican men are better in bed than Democrats.  Now, I'm not still upset about that or anything because I'm very happily married now; my point is, if you're going to let a disagreement about religious world views, or political preferences, or anything else that reasonable people of good intent can and do disagree on, you're limiting your social options unnecessarily and are on the path to becoming an insufferably shallow, bitter, unhappy person who uses warm, overpriced, over-olived martinis and the occasional hit of marijuana to temporarily drown the twin sorrows of a less-than-thoroughly-progressive agenda from Preisdent Obama and a repeated failure to find even a halfway decent guy to date after ten lonely years of ideological rigidity and I hope you're enjoying sleeping in the bed you've made for yourself.

Amazing Intertube Rumor Goodness

Come on.  No one should have believed, even for a second, that 55-year-old Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts was going to resign.  While a Democrat is in the White House.  What a silly rumor.

Even if you had, you would have had to have considered the source of this "scoop" -- radaronline.com, a celebrity gossip website that gossips mainly about semi-celebrities of the level of Jon and Kate Gosselin, Levi Johnston, and "contestants" on the Bachelor.  Radaronline appears to tailor its content at an audience that has little patience for the rarefied intellectual content of People Magazine.

But it turns out that a law professor at Georgetown Law School, Peter Tague, was making a point about how it often turns out that police act on false tips from unreliable informants.  So Prof. Tague began his class this morning at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time, by telling his class that he had it on very good authority that Chief Justice Roberts was having health issues and would step down.  And then by 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, Tague let his students in on the gag -- he'd said something he knew wasn't true because he wanted to see if anyone would believe him.

Well, in the half hour between when Tague created the rumor and when he revealed it to be totally untrue, some of his students immediately began to twitter and blog about it. Radaronline.com picked this up very quickly, and was widely mocked for it even before the news of the falsity of the rumor spread (somewhat more slowly, it seems, than the original rumor itself).

So what we have here is a rather nice example of the power of rumor and news -- it spreads nearly instantly in today's ultra-wired, ultra-communicative environment.  There is functionally no fact-checking going on before somebody republishes a story because the rewards for breaking a story are so high that many are willing to set caution aside in the competitive rush to be The First.  As a result, a substantial part of the electronic media is working with no filters and no critical thinking going on at all.

Such are the perils of free speech and instant media, I suppose -- but it would be nice if people would, you know, think every once in a while.  Props to David Lat at Above the Law for tracing the rumor all the way back to its source.

Microsoft, Microsoft, What Have You Done?

Why is it that over the past seven days or so, my computer has downloaded and automatically installed 1,429 updates?  What are you all doing with the Vista OS?  It's starting to annoy me.

Rogue Waves

This is some scary stuff.  A rogue wave, twenty-six feet in height, struck a cruise ship and killed two people in the Mediterranean Sea.  Long thought to be nothing but fiction and sea tales, it was confirmed in 1995 that rogue waves are real.  And if you're out on the ocean, in a big ship, there is nothing you can do to avoid them:

Scary.

Talking to Believers, Part 2: Sizing Up Your Counterpart

Continuing my series on tips for skeptics talking to faithful people, once you have a sense for why you are in the conversation, and why your counterpart is in the conversation, it's very useful to take stock of your intelocutor.

Here, we need to distinguish between a written exchange and an oral exchange -- and different kinds of oral exchanges.  (Get your minds out of the gutter, I'm trying to be serious here.)  When you're talking to someone face-to-face, that gives you the best ability to size them up.  When you're talking over the phone, you lose some of the visual cues, body language, and other signals that tell you what is going on in your conversational partner's head.  Even if all you've got is a written exchange, there are still subtle clues to look for.

First, you will want to make an assessment of your interlocutor's intelligence.  Let me caution you that the risks of underestimating someone's intelligence far outweigh the risks of overestimating them.  As a relatively new attorney, I once made the mistake of thinking that opposing counsel did not know what he was doing and falling victim to the prejudice that just because the guy had an aw-shucks attitude and used simple words and spoke with a vaguely Southeastern American accent, that he was kind of dim.  Then he socked it to me with a brilliant legal argument and I walked away from the case with nothing but an unhappy client.  Never again, I said, will I judge a book by its cover.  Give your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt as to intelligence unless you are quite sure that you really are talking to a dummy.

Unfortunately, for better or worse we all do exactly this even after we've been burned the way I describe.  Compare two men.  Roughly the same height, same hairstyle, same posture, same race.  One of them is wearing a suit, the other is wearing a T-shirt and jeans.  You are likely to, at least subconsciously, assume that the suit-wearer is smarter than the T-shirt wearer.  This is obviously not necessarily the case.

Another point I cannot stress enough is that the fact that your interlocutor disagrees with you is no indication whatsoever about her intelligence.  This applies with particular force to skeptics talking to believers.  There are lots and lots of very smart people who have religious faith out there, and you should not assume, even for a milisecond, that because you are the skeptic and the guy you're talking to is religious that the guy you're talking to is a dim bulb who is just parroting things his pastor has said without even understand what he's saying.  Never never never think that without multiple and direct instances of proof to that effect.  If you have to, tell yourself that smart people can have "blind spots" in their thinking, but more to the point, remember that a person's religious experiences are based on irrational factors like emotions.  Smart and not-smart people all have emotions, emotional experiences, and psychological stressors that molded their personalities and preferences.  You do too.  You can be very smart and still be under the influence of these irrational and uncontrollable mental factors.  And it's healthy to maintain the intellectual humility to admit that there's always the possibility that you are wrong.

As a general rule, the clues you will use to assess your counterpart's intelligence ought to be the extent of her vocabulary, her poise and confidence (frequently expressed in body language and eye contact), the logical consistency and structure of her arguments, her ability to relate relevant evidence to support her claims, and the degree to which she evidences understanding of the things you say to her.  Also as a general rule, you should prefer a smarter conversational counterpart to a less smart one.  Whatever your purposes to the converation are, a smarter partner will get you there in an easier, faster, and more satisfying way.

On the other hand, if despite a cautious assessment, during the conversation you find yourself continually drawn towards the idea that maybe the person you're talking to isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, then you need to start molding your arguments accordingly.  Particualrly if you are speaking in a forum where you must appeal not only to your interlocutor but also to third parties, you should use simpler, plainer langauge.  Eschew adverbs.  Shorten your sentences.  By all means, don't stop the discussion should you get the impression that you are not speaking to an intellectual equal; instead, make it a point to express yourself in a way that your target audience can easily understand you should it wish to do so.

And for crying out loud, don't ever say out loud to someone that you are assessing her intelligence or worse yet, what that assessment is unless it's "You're really, really smart."  I can't imagine a more effective way to insult someone.  Even if you want to sincerely compliment her intelligence, make sure you do it in an offhand way because in an argument, your interlocutor will frequently respond to a compliment by putting up her defenses, fearing that the compliment is a set-up to a sucker-punch.

Second, how one presents oneself matters.  Consider my example above about two men who are roughy identical in appearance, one wearing a business suit and the other dressed casually.  What we can say is that the suit-wearer has taken the time and trouble to put on formal clothing.  This was an intentional act.  Maybe it was done out of a sense of oblgiation, as in the case of someone who wears a suit because he has to.  But even so, the suit is mandatory because someone wants this person to appear to be authoritative, to appear to be trustworthy, to appear to be respectable.

Context matters when considering your counterpart's dress and demeanor.  If this is a beer-fueled bull session in a collegiate pub, you're going to view a suit and tie as out of the ordinary.  If you find yourself in such a setting wearing such clothing, it can help to do something to your appearance to indicate that you've adopted a more relaxed attitude after being at a more formal event previously -- gents, loosen the tie and unbutton the collar; ladies; maybe you should literally let your hair down.  Maybe even slouch a little bit in the chair.  The point is to engage your conversational partner appropriately in context. 

Now, if you're going to be in a formal debate, in front of an audience, it makes sense to go the other direction.  Take the time to put on a suit, or at least more formal-than-usual clothing, to indicate that you are taking the proceedings seriously, and to assume an aura of gravity and intelligence.  Ultimately, yes, you will be judged by what you say and not how you dress -- but the same statement delivered from someone wearing a suit gains credibility faster.  And if you stumble, you will lose less credibility than you would if you look like a slob.  If your adversary in a debate shows up dressed inappropriately, you will be in a better position to make attacks on his credibility.

Third, you must always understand the emotional stakes for your conversation partner.  I'm aiming this advice specifically at skeptics talking to believers.  Remember that for a lot of believers, the stakes in a conversation about their belief systems could not possibly be higher.  For them, nothing less than the eternal fate of immortal souls are at issue -- something that, within the context of their world views, is more important even than life and death.

Don't assume that because you think there is no such thing as a soul or heaven or hell that your conversation partner is going to feel the same way.  If you find their efforts at converting you annoying, at least understand that they in their minds, they are trying to save you from a terrible fate.  It might seem ludicrously improbable to you that a meteor is about to crash down on your house at ultrasonic velocities and kill you.  You would be right to be annoyed at someone running in to your house urging you to get out right now.  But if that person sincerely and truly believed that the meteor was coming, doesn't that person have a moral imperative to warn you, to try and save your life?  These are the emotional stakes for the theists who engage you in conversations attempting to convert you to their world views.

Similarly, when you advance a skeptical, non-theistic world view, you need to understand that your interlocutor has very likely tied up a great deal of her own identity, her own ego, her own way of looking at the world, in the very theism that you are calling in to question.  So what to you may seem like an interesting and amusing discussion of an academic or philosophic issue, to your counterpart it may reach to the very core of their psychological being.  When presented with claims like "There is no God," "There is no evidence that Jesus ever existed," or "The Bible is not a very good guide for moral conduct," you are shaking the very foundations of their existence.  They will take these things personally because so much of their personality has melded with the concepts that you are rhetorically demolishing.  I'm not saying don't make those contentions -- I'm saying that you need to find some way to cushion their landing. 

Example:  "Christians are generally very good people morally, but the reason for that is not the Bible but rather their innate desire to be morally good.  Christians are good despite, and not because of, the teachings of the Bible."  Now, you've assured your interlocutor that you aren't making a personal attack, that you do not dispute that he and people like him are good people, and you've framed the issue in such a way that Christian doctrine, and not Christians as individual people, are what you are discussing.  To the devoted Christian, especially one who has never before even considered the possibility that the Bible might have parts in it that are bad, this is a disturbing enough image.  That's why you need to go out of your way to not allow your interlocutor to even guess at the possibility of your remarks being a personal attack.

Now, you might have an interlocutor who has a strong enough psyche to not perceive your existence or your arguments as existential threats.  Which is good, and healthier than what I've just described.  Nevertheless, such a person may still feel that their interests in demonstrating the validity of a particular religious belief are vested somehow.

A person with heightened emotions about the subject matter of your discussion is going to present you with a greater likelihood of saying something really silly when his emotions get the better of him, but at the same time you run the risk of getting into a situation where fallacies are endorsed and volume and invective are enlisted to supplement evidence and argument.  Emotions are the enemy of rationality and you will generally want to defuse your interlocutor's emotions whenever possible -- unless your tactic is to drive your interloctuor into an emotional frenzy as a means of displaying their irrationality.

With these three things in mind, you will be able to assess the quality of your conversational counterpart, and thus anticipate the kinds of tactics and rhetorical devices that your interlocutor will employ to advance her objective.  You will be able to devise responses that better advance your own agenda.  Also, you will be able to tailor your own statements so that they achieve maximum impact.

RIP Jon Swift

The blogger known as Jon Swift has passed away.  His blog was quite possibly the funniest on the entire interent.  All you had to know was the tagline: "I am a reasonable conservative who likes to write about politics and culture. Since the media is biased I get all my news from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Jay Leno monologues."

The author's real name was Al Weisel, and he deserves recognition for having started in late 2005 with the vanity of adopting a conservative persona to satirize conservative politics in a deadpan voice.  I'm not clear on whether Jon Swift or the Colbert Report did it first, but he pulled it off and it was consistently the funniest blog and some of the smartest commentary on the internet.  Requiescat in pace, Al Weisel/Jon Swift; you will be missed.

Hat tip to Patrick.

Joshua Trees

Chris Clarke is a photographer and nature conservationist who runs a very nice blog featuring some of his photographs and some of his thoughts about the Mojave Desert.  Since I'm always amazed that people can find beauty in what all too often seems a wasteland to me, I get a great deal of enjoyment out of his Coyote Crossing blog, and it serves as a reminder to me to look for beauty even here in the land of tumbleweeds and sandstorms.

So Clarke took on a challenge to find early photographs of a particular stretch of desert called Centennial Flat.  Unless I miss my guess, this is somewhere in the northwestern portion of Death Valley National Park.  Clarke found some old photographs taken in 1926 at Centennial Flat, and then found a rather more famous one in a surprising place, at coordinates 36.331 North, 117.745 East.  Enjoy.

Another Half Right For A Half Wrong Reason

Dale Haferty teaches shop class in the small town of Guthrie Center, Iowa.  He self-identifies as a Christian, likely as his father also was.  One of his students is a practicing Wiccan, as his father also is.  (Thus we see how religious identification of all stripes passes through family influence regardless of the religion's local popularity.)  The student wanted to build a Wiccan altar in shop class, and Mr. Haferty said, "No." More accurately, he said the student could build a table that might later be used as a part of the altar, but could not build the entire altar with its religious symbols.

Looked at through one lens, this looks a little bit like a Christian teacher discriminating against a non-Christian student.  "This kid was practicing his religion during class time, and I don't agree," Haferty is quoted as saying, and he also gave this to the Des Moines Register:  "This witchcraft stuff - it's terrible for our kids. It takes kids away from what they know, and leads them to a dark and violent life. We spend millions of tax dollars trying to save kids from that."

But not so fast.  Haferty also says that his policy was "I don't want any religious symbols in the shop," he said.  He thinks he was enforcing, not attacking, the separation of church and state.  He says that he would not allow a Christian student to build a cross in the shop class, either.  That, in his mind, was being even-handed and an appropriate sort of policy.  We can't outright dismiss him as thoughtless, bigoted, or unprincipled.  Certainly not unprincipled.  He tried, in good faith, to do what he thought was the right thing.

Haferty's problem is that he focuses only on the Establishment Clause.  If I'm reading between the lines correctly, Haferty is not only a Christian but very much a Christian, someone who thinks that as a public school teacher he ought to be able to lead his students in sectarian Christian prayer, someone who thinks that the laws are trampling on his rights to be a Christian by prohibiting him from evangelizing in the classroom and that the Constitution is being grossly mishandled by liberal judges with wild-eyed and savage intent to drive God out of the public square.

Now, I'm willing to give Haferty a pass on thinking Wicca is violent -- it isn't, any more than Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion.  (We can discuss Santeria some other time.)  Haferty may well be simply ignorant about Wicca and due to his own religious outlook on life may not care to educate himself about this other religion that he probably really thinks is more weird than dangerous.  But I lose some sympathy for the guy when he justifies his technically-incorrect but good-faith-seeming policy with this:  "We as Christians don't get to have our say during school time, so why should he [the Wiccan student]?"  So while I do think he tried to do what he thought was the right thing, this reveals a degree of bias undercutting what are otherwise at least good intentions.  (The reporter may have tried to goad him a little bit, too.)

Problem is, there is also a Free Exercise Clause, which applies to Christians and Wiccans equally.  Which means that there can be a Bible study club or a "flagpole group" or a Christian Students Society.  They have to have access to school facilities on the same terms and conditions as other student groups like the chess club, football team, or the student government.  The school can't require the students to engage in prayer, but at the same time the school can't stop a student from praying, either.  The school can stop a teacher from praying (during class time or in view of the students) because the teacher is an authority figure and that is an Establishment.  But the school can allow a teacher to lead the class in the theist-friendly Modified Pledge Of Allegiance.

So Christians do get to use school facilities and school time.  A student can discuss religious experiences in a classroom assignment and should not be graded down for it.  For instance, if a student participates in an activity with her church, there is nothing wrong with her writing about it in an appropriate essay assignment.  She should neither be given a boost to her grade nor a penalty to her grade based on her choice of subject matter, assuming the essay meets other criteria for the assignment. Her subject matter can be disregarded in place of an analysis of her grammar and spelling skills.

Similarly, Haferty can allow students to make crosses, crucifixes (the difference is a crucifix has an image of the tortured-to-death Jesus on it), and other objets d'art which are overtly religious.  He cannot assign those things as projects, but if a student independently wants to do them, he can permit them. The cross has to meet the criteria for the assigned project -- for instance, a cross is an ideal sort of project for teaching students how to make and join miter-cuts, and he can grade the project based on the skill with which the miter cuts are made and joined; are there gaps between the elements, do the pieces fit together as per the project plan?  Those are non-religious grading criteria analogous to the essay about a church activity being graded on its sentence structure, spelling, and grammar.

I can't condemn Haferty.  The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause can seem to be at loggerheads sometimes.  An easy, bright-line rule like "no religion in schools, period" is something people hope for but which the Constitution does not provide.  The law is more subtle than that.  It's easy to get lost in those subtleties and nuances, particularly when you haven't been trained in them and the study of those nuances is not your own academic discipline.  Haferty has probably been consuming too much Christian agitprop, railing against the Establishment Clause, and has got a skewed view of the way things are.

It's unfortunate that what was probably a good-faith misunderstanding on his part, coupled with some stubbornness on his student's part, resulted in a breakdown of a teacher-student relationship and ultimately a well-intentioned teacher being suspended for doing what he thought was the right thing.  And now the ACLU is looking in to taking action against the school, which will only further polarize opinions and feelings and no one will benefit from that.

What ought to happen is the school district and the ACLU should work together.  The ACLU should volunteer one of its attorneys to come out and teach an in-service continuing education class for the teachers, explaining what is the appropriate balance for teachers to strike between not endorsing any religion and allowing students to freely exercise their own world views.  When you "get it," it stops being a balancing act and starts being a source of pleasure to see in action.  And it isn't hostility to religion at all -- it's a dynamic example of Constitutional freedom.

Talking To Believers, Part 1: Purpose-Driven Dialogue

If you're like me, you are a skeptic, who might find yourself embroiled in a conversation with a believer from time to time about matters of religion and faith.  It may happen unexpectedly, intentionally, or through the efforts of your religious interlocutor.  I'd like to offer a few thoughts about how you might handle yourself, prepare yourself for this sort of thing, and how you can do a good job in such a conversation and make yourself, and your fellow skeptics, look good as a result of your efforts.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is why are you having this conversation at all.

Now, that statement could be taken the wrong way, as an implication that your interlocutor by definition has nothing worthwhile to say or that dialogue between skeptics and believers is inevitably not worthwhile.  I do think that at some point the dialogue stops being productive, but it is also useful for a long time up until then.  No, by this, I mean to ask, what is your goal for the conversation?  What do you hope to accomplish in the dialogue?

By the same token, you need to ask yourself why your conversational partner is talking to you.  What does she hope to accomplish in the exchange?

It's very important to understand what goals everyone in the conversation has, because then you can tailor your remarks along the way to better facilitate those goals (or obstruct them, if that is your own purpose).  I'm not here to judge when it is or is not appropriate to have any particular purpose because with one exception, none of the possibilities I'm suggesting here is categorically evil, and I'll suggest that you not engage in that goal.

Although I'm thinking specifically about how skeptics should approach conversations with believers here, in fact these are good things to keep in mind whenever you find yourself disagreeing with someone on pretty much anything.

Affirmation -- Have you ever had the impression that the person you are arguing with is saying what she's saying in order to convince herself that she's right?  That's what affirmation is all about.  The affirmant wants to exercise her belief system by articulating it and attempting to communicate it to someone else.  The affirmant will know all the words to the song but not really have a feel for the melody.  "If it just makes so much sense to you, maybe that means it really does make sense and I am right to think as I do."  If you find yourself trying to work through an idea that you are arguing for, you are seeking affirmance that you are right.  Let me suggest that someone who disagrees with the idea you are trying to articulate may not be an ideal source of that kind of validation.  If you get the sense that your interlocutor is seeking this sort of validation, you may want to shift your own purpose towards conversion because there is uncertainty on the other side, and thus an opportunity for persuasion to take place.

Amusement -- I might be talking to you simply because I find it enjoyable or fun to do so.  Whether I win or lose, whether you are persuaded in any way that there is any validity at all to what I say, that's all irrelevant.  What matters is that going through these conversational motions gives me pleasure.  Should you wish to end a conversation that I am pursuing for its amusement value, you need to start being tedious.  I may not always express my amusement in the form of jokes, smiles, or other overt signals of pleasure; my pleasure may be internal and leave me outwardly looking as though I am in deep, serious thought.  People play chess because it's fun, even if they look like they're anxious about a loved one's pending surgery while they're doing it.  And people sometimes have discussions with those with whom they disagree, for the same reason and with the same result.

Catharsis -- If you find yourself expressing deep and possibly venemous emotions towards religion, you are giving vent to your own resentment and unhappiness, probably left over from your own de-conversion.  Similarly, a religionist who acts as though the mere presence of an atheist is an existential threat to life, the universe, and everything, is also venting a raw and powerful emotion -- fear being at the root of most of these sorts of things.  The point of cathartic conversations is to express and exhaust these deep emotions.  You cannot reason with emotions.  Evidence and logic are useless against them.  Do not waste your time citing evidence, making logical appeals, or even referring to common sense.  The best way to avoid the tedium of an interlocutor's catharsis is to validate their emotions early on, before they can build up a head of steam.

Conversion and/or De-Conversion -- The goal here is to change your interlocutor's mind on a particular issue.  It is my considered opinion that this task is impossible for the skeptic.  A skeptic will not get a believer to stop believing no matter how persuasive or logical the skeptic's statements are.  The best you can hope for is to plant a seed of doubt, and that this seed will germinate and grow into a healthier attitude later in the believer's life.  Even then, that's hoping for a lot.  A decision to abandon one's faith must come from within oneself and cannot be imposed from the outside.  Similarly, having had to listen to a number of people try and convert me throughout my life, I'm pretty sure that unless a skeptic is both weakly skilled in logic and critical thought and in an emotionally vulnerable state, nothing a religious person says will convert the skeptic.  It certainly can't be done by an appeal to logic and evidence.

Education -- Your goal as an educator is to accurately convey an idea to your interlocutor.  This is similar to evangelism (below) and conversion (above) in the sense that you must articulate the idea and get it into your conversation partner's head.  But education occupies a middle ground between the two.  The educator's job ends at the point that understanding is communicated.  The educator is not necessarily asking that the interlocutor agree with the concept being communicated, but it is also not enough simply to say the words correctly and with passion.  What matters here is that you really understand what I'm talking about; my goal is to turn on the light bulb in your head.  You may think about it and decide that I'm wrong, but at least you understand what it is that I'm wrong about.

Evangelism -- I distinguish this goal from the goal of conversion, because the evangelist's purpose is fulfilled by professing the doctrine.  A religious evangelist likely feels some sort of duty to "spread the good word."  While this is often followed up by a pitch for conversion (or de-conversion; skeptics do this too) that is not necessary for the evangelist.  Simply reciting the world view and its tenets is enough.  The evangelist fundamentally wants attention, an audience, an opportunity to be heard.  Patiently listening and promising to think about it later is frequently enough to satisfy an evangelist who does not want to seek converts.
Gratification -- If I speak or write from a gratification objective, it is because I want my ego stroked.  I want you to admire me -- my intelligence, my quick wit and cleverness, the power of my arguments.  My goal here is to "win," for the sake of winning.  I'm talking to hear myself speak, I'm talking to feel important.  You can either burst my bubble or play along, depending on your own conversational objective.  But what will make me feel good is if you say nice things about me that I feel like I've somehow earned through what I've said.

Money -- Maybe your interlocutor is saying these thing because someone is paying him to do so.  Lawyers do this all the time but they're not the only ones.  If your interlocutor's motive is money, his sincerity might be questionable, but it is much more important is to understand the sponsor's motivation in hiring this spokesperson.

Performance -- A performer is not really concerned with the interlocutor's response to the dialogue at all.  The performer wants to appeal to a third party observer.  The interlocutor is a foil for that pitch to third parties to take place.  Typically, any kind of a public or formal debate is aimed at the third-party audience; it is exceedingly uncommon for one debater to actually change another's mind.  If I'm debating you, I'm really speaking to the people who are watching (or reading) us debate.  My purpose is something else on this list, but aimed at the third parties rather than you.

Persuasion -- If you want your interlocutor to decide something in a manner you prefer, you are trying to persuade her.  Generally, this presumes that your interlocutor either has not made up her mind about the issue under discussion, or at least does not have a strong feeling on the issue one way or another.  For instance, you might have a believer on your hands who seems like she is willing to believe that evolution took place, but isn't quite ready to let go of the idea that God was involved somehow.  She can be persuaded to understand that non-divine, naturalistic causes exist that motivate and move evolution.

Practice -- Your interlocutor may be trying to sharpen up her arguments for use later.  You are not her quarry; someone else is, and she's honing her blade, preparing her arguments, testing them in the crucible of a real interchange, so that when the real contest comes, she'll be better prepared.  There may not be a specific event or discussion she has in mind; she just wants to be ready when it eventually happens.  The value she gets out of the conversation is directly proportional to your abilities as a sparring partner.

Proselytizing -- I distinguish proselytizer from both conversion and evangelism in that the goal of the proselytizer is to gain recruits for their group.  A missionary comes to your front door to proselytize.  Sure, the missionary claims to care about what you really believe.  But what he really wants is for you to go to his church (and tithe).  Skeptics proselytize all the time, or at least they should, to get people to join their rationalist, freethinking, skeptic, atheist, or whatever other similar sort of group they might have.  Proselytism is a membership drive and its success is measures in numbers of warm bodies who join and in deltas on balance sheets.

Sadism -- this is the one goal of a conversation that I think is outright evil.  A sadism-driven discussant is one whose goal is to humiliate and emotionally distress her interlocutor.  Note that for some of our other purposes, humiliation or emotional distress might be a side effect of particular tactical decisions, but the difference here is one of intent.  If I make my interlocutor cry, that bothers me.  I don't want her to cry.  I want her to understand where I am coming from, and I regret that reaching that understanding (or not) has caused her to suffer intensely unpleasant emotions.  Nevertheless, even if your goal is not sadistic, you might suspect that your interlocutor's goal is.  Use of direct personal attacks ("Well, you're just stupid for saying that") or sharply aggressive tones of voice are hallmarks of the sadist.  Should you be in a conversation with someone who seems to want to use the disagreement as a platform to inflict emotional injury on you, my first suggestion is to end the conversation, without backing down, but to firmly end it:  "You and I are not ever going to agree on this and we are done talking about this, effective right now."  If you find this difficult or impossible, then directly confronting the sadist with their sadism is a good tactic:  "What are you trying to do here?  Are you trying to make me feel bad?  Are you trying to humiliate me?  Or is there something else that you want?  If there is, why don't we focus on that instead of what you're doing now?"

Understanding -- The understanding-driven conversationalist really does not understand something, and solicits the interlocutor's explanation.  If you are seeking understanding from your interlocutor, you will be doing more listening than talking, more thinking than questioning.  This is a fact-finding mission because your goal is to learn something about someone else.  To do it right requires an open mind as well as critical thinking skills.

When you know what it is that you're trying to accomplish, and you know what it is that the person you're talking to is trying to accomplish, you can consciously tailor what you say to help you achieve those results.

Geopolitical Strategy of the Byzantine Empire

One of the most fascinating, if not the most fascinating, books I have ever read about the ancient world was a rehash of Edward N. Luttwak's Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire.  Most military historians find the ancient world of only limited utility -- the bravery of the Spartans at Thermopylae remains remarkable and it is interesting to demonstrate the utility of restricting the enemy's ability to maneuver, but the world of modern combat will have few cognates to that tactical situation.  Strategically, there are a few interesting lessons that are studied with interest -- Scipio's gamble to end the Second Punic War has many interesting parallels with the Inchon Landing of 1950, for interest.

But when we think about large-scale strategy and the intersection of military activities and politics, it is easy to act like the world began when the Seven Years War ended, because that war and the earlier conflicts of the European Reformation were dominated by religion rather than what we think of today as geopolitics or economics.  Which is complete nonsense.

So Professor Luttwak rightly points out that it is insufficient to admire Rome's military might -- Rome lasted as long as she did, and was as dominant as she was, not because she had the strongest or the bravest soldiers or because the legions had the best armor, weapons, and training.  To be sure, legionnaires were strong and brave, but so were their opponents -- and a study of Roman history can tempt one to flippantly note that for much of the history of Rome, the legions fought other Roman legions rather than foreign enemies of the empire.  (This would be an exaggeration, but perhaps not all that great of one.)  And certainly the two-javelin, gladius, large shield, and the solid curiass cuirass makes for a good balance between deadliness, mobility, and defensibility for the individual infantryman in a pre-gunpowder set-piece battle.  But it wasn't the only good balance; the Greek phalanxer and the Persian cataphract also rightly survive as examples of powerful and feared ways for ancients to have fought.  Legionnaires were never invulnerable and after about the year 250, both Roman military technology and tactics were well-known to Rome's adversaries from the Atlantic to the Euphrates.

Rome was as powerful and durable as she was not because her soldiers were necessarily better than anyone else's (although for a time, they were) or because Rome had enough money to field huge armies (although that didn't hurt, either); Luttwak argues that Rome won for as long as she did because she was smart about deploying her resources.  He makes the case that Rome went through three large-scale methods of arraying her military to address challenges from outside the empire.

First, during the Julio-Claudian era, she took a forward-aggressive posture -- taking war to the lands of potential enemies and conquering them either before or during the time that they could coalesce into regional powers strong enough to resist Rome.  In the one case of an enemy far enough away that Roman logistics could not support such efforts -- against the Parthians in what is today Iraq and Iran -- a form of detente sufficed to keep conflicts minimized.

About a century later, under the Antonines (think Marcus Aurelius), the empire turned in to Fortress Rome, with a lengthy and well-supported network of fortress cities near easily-defensible features like the Rhine, the Danube, and the Zabros mountain range.  Where such defense-assisting geography was absent, the Romans built what they needed from stone and concrete -- Hadrian's Wall at the northern frontier of Roman Britain being perhaps the most dramatic example of this.  The point was to concentrate the firepower at all available points of entry and make breaching the borders of the empire as expensive and bloody as possible, which did a remarkably good job of deterring and, when necessary, defeating those groups that would have taken land from the Caesars.

The final phase of Roman defense strategy is easy to condemn but in fact made a great deal of sense at the time -- as Roman infantry tactics and technology became disseminated throughout Europe and Asia, forcing a major battle to defend against invasion proved gradually more difficult and eventually impossible.  The crisis year of 271 precipitated the decision to reform the way Rome defended herself.  Internal threats of the two breakaway empires required wider dispersal of the troops through what had been the unarmed interior of the empire, and thus, the hardened shell around the empire had to change -- now the borderlands would be easier to initially enter, but the deeper one tried to penetrate towards the heartlands of Greece, Italy, and Gaul, the more resistance one would find.  Attrition of the enemy through strategic-level swarming of multiple smaller defensive units along the way.  This worked pretty well, until eventually it didn't -- not because the strategic doctrine was bad, but because the individual units eventually became underpowered and gave their loyalties to their immediate commanders and not the central government.

The point is, the Romans found a way to adapt their strategic assets to survive a lot of crises and dispose of a lot of existential threats.  They were smart and they had a relatively continuous and intelligent doctrine.  While it's difficult to find any individual writer, imperial or otherwise, who would have described contemporary events like Luttwak does today, the archeological and documentary evidence demonstrates that these three phases of Imperial strategy were pretty consistent regardless of the identity or capability of the Emperor theoretically in charge of it all.  This suggests that while Rome didn't have an equivalent of West Point or the War College, the various generals and high-tier ministers in charge of the nuts and bolts of defense and diplomacy got their heads together, took a realistic assessment of the threats they had to deal with, came up with good answers to the challenges they faced, and most importantly, trained their successors in how they went about doing it.

Anyway, by way of previewing his long-awaited follow-up to Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, Professor Luttwak offers in Foreign Policy:  Take Me Back To Constantinople, in which he analyzes the military and diplomatic strategies of the Byzantine Empire.

Let's set one thing aside right here.  The Byzantine Empire was not the "successor" to the Roman Empire.  It was the Roman Empire.  We think of Rome as "falling" in 476 when the Emperor's "Master of the Horse," meaning the guy who ran the military for the child-Emperor of the West Romulus Augustulus, decided that things would pretty much work better if he were simply in charge and made lil' Romulus an offer he couldn't refuse -- either abdicate and accept a retirement in a luxurious country estate, or get a sword through his liver after watching the rest of his family get the same treatment.  So the "fall" of Rome was really a transition from the Roman system of government to a model more closely resembling an early medieval monarchy.  And in fact, the Kingdom of Odoacer was really not all that different than the Empire it displaced.

But Romulus was the Emperor of the West.  What about the East?  In fact, the cultural, economic, military, and political heart of the Roman Empire had been relocated to Byzantium, renamed and rebuilt as Constantinople, for over a hundred years, by the time of Odoacer's coup d'etat.  Constantinople, not Rome, had become caput mundi and the loss of Italy from direct Roman political command was, for the still-existing Roman Empire, actually more of an inconvenience than anything else.  The citizens of this Empire called themselves Rhomani, taught their children to quote Virgil (even if Greek was their first language), and were ruled by a line of emperors who traced their line of succession back to Julius Caesar.  Even in 1453, as the walls were falling to the cannon bombards of the Ottoman Turks, the Emperor himself plunged in to battle to lead his troops shouting lines from the Aeneid to inspire the soldiers to fight as hard as they could and, if the odds were overwhelming, to at least make a claim for glory.  (Chilling.)  And where the unified and later Western Empire cleverly deployed its military and political resources to survive through four centuries of daunting challenges, the Byzantines used their military and political resources to last ten centuries longer than their counterparts in the West -- resources which over time became relatively more limited as compared with what the larger empire could have supported.

The immediacy of the example should be obvious.  As challenges and circumstances change, so should a dominant power's manner of dealing with them.  Luttwak identifies seven principles to Byzantine geopolitical and military strategy, and suggests that the US could learn a few lessons from what they did.  Like the Byzantines, our military is very expensive relative to those of our adversaries; like the Byzantines, we hold technological mastery over our adversaries but we hold our blood and treasure much more dearly than they.  So the Byzantines adopted a pragmatic, play-them-against-one-another strategy, placing great value in maneuvers in both the diplomatic and military spheres to corner the enemy and only unleashed the full strength of its army (or navy) when the advantage could be certain.  Espionage and political subversion of rival states were primary weapons, and questions of "honor" about using tactics like these were not allowed to reach a point that they were allowed to keep the Empire from doing what it needed to do to survive.

Of course, in the end, it was exactly this reaching for a new ally to play off against yesterday's-ally-turned-today's-rival that planted the seeds of the blow which ended the Empire as a geopolitical power, which was inviting the Franks and the Holy Romans into a religiously-based alliance against the Seljuk Turks to recapture Byzantine holdings in Syria and Palestine, using the ostensible goal of recapturing lost Jerusalem as the goal to trigger the religious fervor of the Europeans.  Strategically and economically, Jerusalem itself was nearly irrelevant to the Byzantines, but its cultural cachet was useful.  Unfortunately, the Europeans didn't play along with the Byzantines and kept the reconquered lands for themselves, and eventually turned on their former allies in a highly questionable military, diplomatic, and ethical decision to sack Constantinople in 1204.  While eventually Byzantium recovered and recaptured the urban jewel in its crown, it was never the same after that and by 1453, Rome ended for real.

But that does not mean that we could not learn from the examples set by the Byzantines.  There is wisdom in the past, the lessons of history are there for all who have eyes with which to read and minds with which to think.  I'll look forward to Luttwak's follow-up book very much.