Tell me what you think about your motivation

The secret of effective motivation? Steer away from instrumental (external) consequences and incentives. Focus on cultivating the internal drive. Sounds good and all...but how easy / practical is that?

On happiness

From Simon Critchley:

Happiness is not a quantitative matter. It is rather a matter of the quality of one’s life and in what that quality consists. The most painful, but also the most joyous response came from Robert F., who is faced with terminal brain cancer. He writes, in an echo of Epicurus, with which I’d like to end:

If you’re religious, what’s beyond the act of dying is a better place; if you’re not religious, there is nothing. In either case there’s no need to worry. What matters is the journey between right now and that event.

Germane to the book I'm still wading through.

Purpose-driven life

An article:

Intelligence has large benefits, but it also incurs costs. Out of the pressure to develop social intelligence, humans have grown in self-awareness, so that we can imagine ourselves as others see us in competitive and cooperative scenarios. That ability offers real benefits in anticipating others’ actions and reactions, but among its costs is the fact that we can also envisage our own death and absence from the ongoing world. For humans this has raised the question of our purpose in the face of our ultimate lifelessness, one we have answered most frequently by concluding that we continue in some form after death. To judge by grave rituals dating back at least 70,000 years, and the evidence of the fear of death and the hope of immortality in the records of early civilizations, preoccupation with death has loomed large ever since the appearance of a distinctly human culture.
...
New evolutionary solutions themselves often spawn new problems. When our brains allowed us to become superpredators, to dominate our environments and earn the food we needed in much less time than our waking hours, we did not solve the “problem” of spare time, as did other top predators, such as lions, tigers, or bears, by sleeping the extra hours away to conserve energy. Even at rest our large brains consume a high proportion of our energy, and since they offer us most of our advantages against other species and other individuals, we benefit not from resting them as much as possible but from developing them in times of security and leisure. Art as cognitive play, appealing to our appetite for potentially meaningful patterned information, engages our attention in a self-rewarding way and therefore encourages us to strengthen the processing power of our minds in the kinds of information that matter most to us.
...
Art could evolve as an adaptation because it appealed to our deep-grained species preferences. Science could not. It appeals to one strong species preference, our curiosity, but it otherwise goes against the grain of our intuitive understanding. Until Galileo, people assumed, with Aristotle, that a heavier object fell more rapidly than a lighter one. Information gathering, invaluable for all kinds of animals and even for plants, has mattered especially for humans, but the knowledge gained has mostly been in the form of heuristics, partly right, but not necessarily so, like our hunches about falling objects or the sun’s motion around the earth. And although accurate information is invaluable, indecision is fatal, and no organism can afford the time to search for correct information at a moment when immediate responses are required. It was not possible to devote effort to a time-consuming, difficult-to-imagine, and increasingly resource-expensive process of testing ideas until in Renaissance Italy the right conditions happened to converge: a considerable buffer of security and overproduction; opportunities for intense specialization; and the availability of information and conflicting explanations that the printing press made possible.

Science still calls for qualities that are unnatural. Children are information sponges and soak up what they need to understand, like the basics of their world or their language. They need not be taught how to speak or to play. But they do need slow formal instruction to read, write, or calculate, and they need even more training and the help of externalized information (books, diagrams, models) to master the knowledge on which science builds. If they undergo the intensive training scientists require, they will still need imagination to find new ways of testing or re-explaining received knowledge. Even for those with training, looking for potential refutations of cherished ideas is both emotionally difficult and imaginatively draining. And whereas art appeals to human preferences, science has to account for a world not built to suit human tastes or talents.
...
Religious stories could also allay the unease that arose in us because of our awareness of false belief. The social intelligence out of which our grasp of false belief arose allowed us to imagine being dead and to foresee the world without us. It brought with it a new anxiety about the possible purposelessness of our lives, although this could be allayed to some extent by stories of spirits without bodies as a guarantor of purpose prior to human life or as a promise of continued existence afterward.
...
Only when science began to offer alternative, naturalistic explanations of the world did religion and art start to diverge widely again. When science offered a detailed explanation of natural design without the need for a designer—the theory of evolution by natural selection—that, more than any other single idea, stripped us of a world made comfortable by a sense of purpose, apparently guaranteed by beings greater than ourselves.

Nevertheless, if we develop Darwin’s insight, we can see the emergence of purpose, as of life itself, by small degrees, not from above, but by small increments, from below. The first purpose was the organization of matter in ways complex enough to sustain and replicate itself—the establishment, in other words, of life, or in still other terms, of problems and solutions. With life emerged the first purpose, the first problem, to preserve at least the improbable complexity already reached, and to find new ways of resisting damage and loss.

As life proliferated, variety offered new hedges against loss in the face of unpredictable circumstances, and even new ways of evolving variety, like sex. Still richer purposes emerged with emotions, intelligence, and cooperation, and most recently with creativity itself, pursued naturally, and unnaturally, through human invention, in art, and pursued unnaturally, through challenging what we have inherited, in science.

Art at its best offers us the durability that became life’s first purpose, the variety that became its second, the appeal to the intelligence and the cooperative emotions that took so much longer to evolve, and the creativity that keeps adding new possibilities, including religion and science. We do not know a purpose guaranteed from outside life, but we can add as much as we can to the creativity of life. We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them.

Given what I'm reading now, this seems an interesting thing to contemplate.

God Loves the Hell out of Little Children

From Zenoferox

Let's read a recent AiG fundraising letter for their "Creation Museum":

We see the Lord's hand of blessing every day at AiG, including how so many young people are being impacted. Here is a recent, wonderful testimony about a young girl and her mother that we received through our website:

“The AiG conference [near Knoxville] was wonderful. Ken [mentioned] one book in particular, A is for Adam, had more children come to know Jesus than any other [AiG book]. My ears perked up and I bought the book.

“My 4 1/2 year daughter and I read the book every day for a week. One day she looked up at me with tears in her eyes and said she didn't want to go to hell. She said she wanted to be where Jesus—and where her mommy and daddy—was going to be.

“My little girl bowed her head and prayed to ask Jesus into her heart that day. It was glorious. thank God for how you have touched our lives.”—G. D., Knoxville, TN

Compare this to:

...the atheistic/humanistic FIG organization that opposed us was out to get kids themselves—to train them in a philosophy of hopelessness and purposelessness … and end up separated from God for eternity...

PS: Can you believe that atheists are deliberately targeting young people with a message of hopelessness … with eternal consequences for the “good” of our children?

What Ken Ham is referring to here at the last is Camp Quest. He brags that his organization brings a 4.5 year old to tears with the fear of hell and eternal separation from mommy and daddy, then denigrates a camp where children are taught science and the value of critical thinking. What kind of sick people take a "testimony" that a book containing lies and obvious scare tactics can "convert" a 4.5-year-old child and promote it on their fundraising letter? What kind of sick people are these?

Your average, every day fundies.

And these same stupid fuckers will turn around and watch Faux News when it shows the children in Jordan and Syria in school being taught to hate Israel and call it "brainwashing" without batting an eye. Irony so thick it isn't even funny. It would be sad if it was just an isolated incident, rather than a culture of ignorance and fear. But because it is, it's more than sad -- it's physically sickening, and inspires in me a righteous indignation.

Little Johnny, if you don't kiss God's ass enough, you'll go to an awful place where mommy and daddy won't be, and be tortured forever. You better tell God you're sorry, over and over and over, until God decides that's good enough and doesn't throw your worthless ass into the Pit. Doesn't God love you? Don't you love GAWD?

These are our "cultural competitors": this is what freethinkers are up against in the public square, to move our country in one direction or another, via politicians and public relations campaigns. They have massive organizations, fundraising drives, and the fear of hell to motivate them forward. This is the sort of thing they propagate -- fear and ignorance in little children. We need a kick in the pants sometimes to remind us that we are fighting a good fight against these sorts of people. We need to remember how immoral, how intellectually bankrupt, these kinds of people are. It will keep us motivated.

My "purpose" and "meaning" don't involve brainwashing my children to obey a magical invisible Sky Daddy out of fear. They involve teaching my children the value of goodness for goodness' sake, and how to think rationally and critically, and how to live in reality and make a change here, now.

Keep this "testimony" in mind the next time they shamelessly call themselves "pro-family" and "pro-values". The next time you see their slick suits and smiles, think of the tears in her eyes. Don't forget that.
________________
Technorati tags: fundamentalism