{"id":85924,"date":"2020-06-16T11:18:18","date_gmt":"2020-06-16T17:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=85924"},"modified":"2020-06-16T20:01:05","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T02:01:05","slug":"humans-as-cockroaches-one-way-of-reading-scientific-naturalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2020\/06\/humans-as-cockroaches-one-way-of-reading-scientific-naturalism.html","title":{"rendered":"Humans as “cockroaches”? One Way of Reading Scientific Naturalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Gedenkstein<\/a>
The memorial stone in front of Adolf Hitler\u2019s birthplace in Braun-am-Inn, Austria
(Wikimedia Commons public domain). It says nothing about the F\u00fchrer. It doesn\u2019t so much as mention his name. Instead, and wisely, the inscription reads: \u201cFor peace, freedom, and democracy. Never again fascism. Millions of dead admonish [us].\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There exists an obscure, mostly-ex-LDS-turned-atheist message board where my buffoonish and dishonest but angrily hateful depravity has been chronicled and lamented virtually every day \u2014 literally and without exaggeration, virtually every day \u2014 for the past fifteen years or so.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

For no very good reason, I decided last Friday morning to visit the board and to count the Peterson-related threads on its first page. \u00a0(There is one permanent general thread always pinned at the top, and then 49 others complete the total of 50.) \u00a0At that time, perhaps about 8:30 AM, every single one of the first eight threads was about me, and fully nineteen of the 49 threads on the first page were either directly or indirectly about me or my horrific works or, in three cases, about someone very closely associated with me. \u00a0I find this inexpressibly weird.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the current themes is deliciously appalled horror at my fanatical eagerness to dehumanize those who disagree with me. \u00a0For example, with one or two others, I\u2019ve recently addressed this blog\u2019s resident dogmatic anti-theistic commentator as a \u201ccockroach.\u201d \u00a0This has driven several of those who monitor my actions here and elsewhere every day and who faithfully report over there to their smelling salts.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve wondered for years about how much of the continual shock and astonishment over at that board results from genuine (hostility-fueled) incomprehension and how much of it is just flatly disingenuous posing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Take the matter of cockroaches, for example:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sic et Non<\/em>\u2018s good-natured house atheist occasionally likes to refer to himself and other humans as \u201cmeat wads,\u201d \u201cadvanced simians,\u201d and the like, which seems (to a simple soul like me, anyway) fairly \u201creductionist.\u201d \u00a0Once, specifically replying to my\u00a0summation of the ideological baggage that too often accompanies some expositions of evolutionary thought \u2014 \u201cthat life is pointless, that there is no God, that the cosmos is ultimately mindless, that humans and other organisms are essentially gene-replicating machines, and so forth\u201d \u2014 he happily chirped that \u201cYou might be surprised to discover that everything you mentioned in your litany of soulless existence is exactly right.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t<\/em> surprised.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

For a brief while, I playfully addressed our anti-theistic friend as \u201cMeat Wad,\u201d using the term that he himself had introduced as a description of all<\/em> of humankind. \u00a0Predictably, the Peterson Obsession Board, as I sometimes call it, erupted in indignation at the mean-spirited epithet that I was cruelly hurling at the poor, harmless fellow. \u00a0They seemed unaware that the term was his<\/em>. \u00a0But, since they scour every line that I post and everything that I write and say in an ever-hopeful search for outrageous offenses, it seems unlikely that they could have missed that. \u00a0And it seems improbable that they could have failed to notice that, in referring to him as a \u201cmeat wad,\u201d I was only applying a descriptor to him<\/em> that he had previously applied to everybody<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The same thing is now playing out with the term cockroach<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yesterday, our village atheist announced in a comment here that \u201cThere\u2019s nothing about humans that puts them in a different category than monkeys or cockroaches.\u201d \u00a0He also pronounced humans no more than \u201ca pile of sentient goo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

So I and at least one other person responded by referring to him (along with his main fellow-traveler here) as \u201cCockroach.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Outraged at that, one of the participants at the Peterson Obsession Board has pointed to an example of what my vicious hatred can lead to:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Rwanda, We Know All About Dehumanizing Language:\u00a0Years of cultivated hatred led to death on a horrifying scale.\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the term cockroach<\/em>\u00a0was introduced and applied to people by our resident atheist, not by\u00a0me<\/em>. \u00a0The reductionist dehumanizing is his<\/em>, not mine<\/em>. \u00a0I\u2019m the person who is gently mocking and protesting it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m quite aware<\/em> of the impact that dehumanizing language can have on our behavior toward others. \u00a0There is, for example,\u00a0the justification given by a certain William Reynolds of the murder of the ten-year-old Latter-day Saint boy Sardius Smith at Haun\u2019s Mill, Missouri, on 30 October 1838: \u201cNits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have become a Mormon.\u201d \u00a0And there is the time that one of my students in Jerusalem saw an Israeli soldier beating a little Palestinian boy with the butt of a rifle. \u00a0\u201cHow can you treat people like this?\u201d my student asked. \u00a0\u201cThese aren\u2019t people,\u201d the soldier replied. \u00a0\u201cThese are animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Adolf Hitler, who was, pretty clearly, a \u201csocial Darwinist.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 The leader of the Third Reich\u00a0described human beings as nothing more than \u201ca ridiculous \u2018cosmic bacterium\u2019\u201d (eine l\u00e4cherliche \u2018Weltraumbakterie\u2019<\/em>).\u00a0 Not surprisingly, therefore, as his biographer Ian Kershaw observes,<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Human life and suffering was . . . of no consequence to him.\u00a0 He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids.\u00a0\u00a0 He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving prisoners-of-war.\u00a0 His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out.\u00a0 But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people.\u00a0 Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made . . . without consideration for any human plight. \u00a0[Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis<\/em> (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000), 500-501.]<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is a distasteful but not entirely unreasonable consequence of viewing humans as \u201cmeat wads\u201d on a par with monkeys, cockroaches, and \u201cpiles of sentient goo\u201d \u2014 a view that is emphatically not mine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 There exists an obscure, mostly-ex-LDS-turned-atheist message board where my buffoonish and dishonest but angrily hateful depravity has been chronicled and lamented virtually every day \u2014 literally and without exaggeration, virtually every day \u2014 for the past fifteen years or so. \u00a0 For no very good reason, I decided last Friday morning to visit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nHumans as "cockroaches"? 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