Houserules for my upcoming Swords & Wizardry Game

This is just going to be a list for the convenience of my players, and I will update as new things occur to me.  The previous gaming posts were me thinking out loud, what's in this post will be the rules changes I actually use.

1. No XP percentage bonuses for high stats.  Most of the time it's a hassle, but I'm also doing it because:

2. There will be no level limits for demi-human characters, but humans get a 10% XP bonus to compensate for the advantages the demi-humans enjoy.  Infravision, ability to detect secret doors, etc.

3. Since there are no level limits for demi-humans, I'm also allowing human PCs to multiclass if they do desire.  This will be pretty much by the book, as that system seems well put together.

4. Alignment, as mentioned here, will be Law, Chaos, Neutral/Balance and unaligned.  Casters like clerics and mages will have to pick an alignment, and their casting ability comes from their affiliation.  Non-casters default to unaligned.  They can choose to pledge their fealty to one of the cosmic forces, this will grant them the ability to call upon such forces for aid from time to time, but there's a quid pro quo, sometimes the PC will be required to do things that serve their alignment's wants and needs.

5. No Vancian magic, spell slots turn into mana, and a spell costs as much mana to cast as its level.  For instance, a 4th level mage can traditionally cast three 1st level spells and two 2nd level spells.  Under my rules, that mage gets 7 mana points.  Each slot multiplies by the level of the spell.  So the three 1st level spells  equal 3 mana, and the two 2nd level spells equal 4 mana.  No one can cast a spell of a level higher than they would have had access to before, so even if one has enough mana, they're not skilled enough to punch above their level.  Yes, there will be a chart for this.

6. Mages only get to add their level to their mana pool, at a 1 for 1 rate (as if they were 1st level spell slots).

7. Any 1HD or less intelligent "monster" is available as a PC, provided I get advanced notice that someone wants to play one, so I can slap together a conversion.  So kobolds, goblins, not a problem.  No, you can't play as Orcus (in this game, anyway).

8. Classes not listed in S&W Complete or the SRD are also available if I'm given advance notice to prep it for this game, as with the monster thing.  I'm already porting over some as mentioned here, so if you can't find it in the SRD or the books, just let me know, and I'll deal with it.  Hell, you don't even have to want to play it in particular, but if you want me to get it ready to play, drop me a line, within reason.  I'm not going to come up with 30 or so alternate classes that no one's going to use.

9. I've changed my mind on saving throws, so unless I hear otherwise, I will be using the default single saving throw, rather than the traditional 5 category ones.  I'm easy on this, though, it's trivial to switch, as the book gives both (and even includes both on the GM screen).

10.  Descending AC.  (Not really a houserule, but since S&W provides both, I'm marking my preference.)  Players just tell me what AC they hit with the handy one-line table at the bottom of the character sheet, I'll do the rest.  Players don't necessarily need to know the AC of the thing they're fighting, and descending works well that way.

11. There will be no specific skills (aside from thief abilities), instead, there will be ability checks, where you simply roll under or equal to your stat.  If people do want skills, I can port over the system from Dark Dungeons which works fine.  It'd be the same, roll under the stat, and skills would be a specialization.  For example, if your Dexterity is 15 and you have two points in the Acrobatics skill, you'd roll under 17, rather than 15 when using it.  Personally I think ability checks are sufficient, but I'm easy.

That's it for now, will update further if I need to.  I'm also open to suggestions, just comment here on the blog, so I can keep everything together.

More Gaming Thoughts

Character Classes

All the basics, of course, Cleric, Fighter, Mage, Thief.  But I don't mind some variety.  In the DD game, I also had available Monks, Rangers, Assassins (although I don't see myself allowing these much) and Fighter-Mages (since I got rid of the racial classes, this is the same as the Basic D&D Elf).  I just got the pdf of Joseph Bloch's Adventures Dark & Deep, his alternate AD&D2E, and I particularly like his version of Gygax's Jester class, a Bard sub-class.  So I'll probably port at least both of those over, as well as the Thief-Acrobat and Mountebank, and a few others.  The Jester is an acrobatic melee and hand to hand fighter that fits much better into the Western European milieu that most settings assume than the Monk, which I've never been particular fond of.  It's not identical, but they seem to me to share a similar niche.  (If I was to run a more Eastern setting, Monks obviously wouldn't be a problem, and Fighters and Rangers would be replaced with Samurai and Ninjas, etc.)  They get some access to spells, as Bards do, as well as a series of abilities separate from but similar to the way Thief abilities work, juggling, knife throwing, that kind of thing.  So initially, the list of available classes would be:

Barbarian
Cleric
Fighter
Mage
Illusionist
Thief
Thief-Acrobat
Assassin
Ranger
Bard
Jester
Barbarian
Mountebank

Druids and Cavaliers/Paladins are an odd thing to me, I really dig the way DD does them, being alternate classes the Cleric and Fighter can choose later on as they progress in level.  I also dig the old Rules Cyclopedia division of Avenger/Knight/Paladin depending on alignment, but there's also something to be said for making them classes unto themselves, the way they already are in S&W.  I'll figure out what's easiest and do that.

Races

Along with the standard human, dwarf, elf, halfling, I'm down with gnomes, half-elves, half-orcs, whatever.  In fact, a houserule I came up with for the DD game was that any 1HD or less monster race could also be a player character, provided that any special abilities they had weren't much more fancy than that of the standard demi-humans.  As I recall, we had a kobold Ranger who was pretty fun.  I see no reason to not continue this trend, with GM approval, of course.  Since I'm not a fan of level limits for demihumans, I got around the balance issue by giving humans a blanket 5% XP bonus to compensate for their lack of fun stuff like Infravision and such.  Since it stacks with the class-based XP bonus for high stats, it seems to work pretty well.  I think I stole that trick from Basic Fantasy.

I also had a schtick where all of the characters were members of an adventurer's guild called the IWW - Itinerant Warriors of the World, which had strict non-discrimination policies towards race and alignment, so "monster" races with union cards could remain unmolested in polite society, at least as long as there was a guild house in town.  The IWW was there mostly to amuse myself as a non-current member of the actual IWW (Industrial Workers of the World).  None of my players ran with it and tried to recruit dungeon dwellers into the union rather than fighting, but the option would have been there, if they tried.  In terms of game play, it also gave them discounts on delving equipment and a labor pool of hirelings and henchmen to choose from, and a reason why such would be available.

More musings to follow.

Old School Gaming Stuff

I'm gearing up to run another campaign in a few months, or sooner.  I've been reading so many of the various retroclones and other "nostalgia" games out there that I'm having a hard time deciding on which one, or if I may just put my own set together, stealing the best elements from all of them.  I still dig Dark Dungeons (DD), the one I was running Keep on the Borderlands with, but even with switching to the alternate version, Darker Dungeons, it's just a little unwieldy, and I feel like switching it up (even if I kept with it, I'll be discarding the weapon mastery next time.  It's not bad, I just don't feel like messing with it anymore).  This post is mostly for my own benefit, while I think out loud about the elements to put into my next game.

Alignment:

I've been ambivalent about alignment throughout most of my gaming career, and while the memes are amusing, I've never had much use for the two axis alignment system where you get things like Lawful Evil or Chaotic Neutral.  To me, if you're going to codify a character's morality, that's way too simplistic a way of doing it.

On the other hand, being a fan of Michael Moorcock and The Eternal Champion mythos, I do really like the 3 element system of Law, Chaos, and Neutral/Balance.  But I keep these separate from notions of morality, to me they are all cosmic forces that one chooses to align oneself with, full of potential plot hooks at later levels (and at low, depending on what happens).

So for me, I'm going to continue doing what I started with my DD game, and use 4 alignments:

Unaligned
Law
Chaos
The Balance

If you're a Cleric, Mage, or any other kind of magic-user, you have to choose an alignment, as the source of your power.  My preference is that Mages and Clerics can both choose The Balance, but that Mages can only otherwise pick Chaos, and Clerics only Law, but I might be able to be argued out of that.  I like the notion of having the different kinds of magic be aligned that way, but there's also something to be said for having priests of Arioch and the like.

This does mean that Fighters, Thieves, Rangers, Assassins, etc. default to Unaligned at chargen.  They are perfectly free to pledge their loyalty to cosmic forces if they want to, but they won't need to, and they are free to do so later on in the game.  I'll probably come up with a mechanic that makes it meaningful (or more likely, steal one from another game), something along the lines of the way Clerics can call upon their gods for favor in Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) in exchange for some service further down the line.  I can definitely see this as a way for unaligned characters to end up serving forces greater than themselves:

Ragnar gazed around himself nervously.  If Fingers had done his job correctly, he never would have fallen down that sliding chute, only to right himself in the dark, surrounded by glowing eyes, more than he could count.  He still had strength in his arms, and his blade was sharp, but he couldn't tell what lay just beyond the shadows, and their numbers were great.  If he was going to get out of this, desperate measures were required.  He drew his sword, and readied his shield.

"Loki!  I pledge my fealty to you!  Aid my steel!"

He thought he heard faint laughter somewhere in the distance, and suddenly there was a sharp pain on his shield arm, as an eight-pointed star branded itself onto his bicep from some unknown source.  The star remained glowing red, and he could see that his sword blade was wreathed with flame.  His nervousness fell away, and he felt like shouting, laughing, and screaming all at once.

"Oh, I know I'm going to regret this eventually," he said to himself with a wry grin.  He then saluted the shadows with his sword and got to work.

Magic

I've always hated the fire and forget "Vancian" magic system of D&D, but the quick and dirty mana conversion I did for my DD game would be very problematic at high levels.  Another thing I'll steal is the alternate system I've seen in DCC and Spellcraft and Swordplay (S&S), apparently based on Chainmail, where instead of spells going off automatically and then going away, you roll to successfully cast, gaining either an immediate or delayed effect, or a failure, and the failure does make you lose that spell for the day (and botches get nasty).  I like this a lot better.  A character will still be limited as to how many spells per level he can prep, or what levels of spell are available, but fire and forget is gone.  I haven't decided yet whether to use the Mercurial Magic stuff from DCC yet.  While it's fun, I don't know if I want that much randomness.  Most likely I'll show it to players and let them decide if they want to use it or not.

Race and Class

I will most likely keep them separated, Swords & Wizardry (S&W) style, albeit without level limits, and without too many restrictions.  This was trivial to do with DD, and I don't see it being a problem.  Most likely I'm going to use S&W Complete as my baseline, and tear things out and bolt things on as needed.

Saving Throws and AC

I'll definitely be using the more traditional 5 separate saving throws option within, rather than S&W's single one, just because I prefer it that way.  I also prefer descending AC, but since the book provides it and ascending, as does the excellent Monstrosities book, this is trivial.

That's it for now, when more ideas along these lines occur, I'll post them.  There's a vague notion of actually putting this all together into my own game and throwing it up on Lulu, but that's way down the line.  First priority is to put it together for my own use and run it for people.

Martyrdom

martyrdom

Living for others,
so they say,
is one of the highest of goods.

Dying, even more.

But while it may be asserted noble to suffer for others,
I'm not buying it.

We can't avoid all forms of shared misery,
c'est la vie.

But if you're hanging on the cross for someone else,
it's time to come down, and walk away.

If you're lucky, someone may come along
take the hammer from you,
and twist it around to show you that the hammer you use to nail yourself up
can also be used to pry out the nails.

I was so lucky.

You still have to stop actively hammering yourself into place.
You still have to pry out the nails.
You still have to make your way down
and walk free.

I know it's hard.

Pulling them out hurts.
It hurts so much that you want to stop prying,
and just let them be
and settle back against the cross.

But once they're out,
the pain really does go away.

Once the pain is gone
it's hard to understand what kept you up there for so long,
and walking away becomes easy.

I wish I could do this for you,
but all I can do is try to twist the hammer.

I hope you join me soon.

Debating accomodationism and confrontationalism.

This is a reply to a thread on a Facebook discussion board, posted here to not clutter it up further.  The Stedman article in question is this:
The Problem with "Atheist Activism"


An article I linked to in reply is this:
The Alternatives to Confrontationalism


On to the discussion:


Me:
"I happily confront homophobia, racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, etc. Racism is a personal bugbear to me. My wife and I get dirty looks from whites and blacks, she being black, me being a honky. 

I don't single out Christianity, but since it is among the various sources of such intolerances, it goes on the list of things I have no truck with. The difference is that homophobia and the various other forms of hatred and intolerable (and intolerant) behavior needs to be confronted on their own only when they exist independent of other things."

Daryl:
"Religion is NOT the sourse of intolerances. Specifically racism is caused by oxytoxin (Carsten de Dreu et al) Religion plays the role of providing the justification forthe intolerance, but the intolerance is in the culture. If not religion condoning, then we would use some other mechanism, like a philosophy. "


Reply:
That's an oversimplification.  Oxytocin merely increases biased feelings already present in the subject.  "The intolerance is in the culture" is obvious.  Religion is a cultural phenomenon, one that has been and can be changed to modify the prevailing cultural values present in the world.  Of course there's always going to be some cultural institutions that have a certain degree of intolerance in the value structure they create, but when those crop up, we fight them, too.

Me:
"Confronting religion itself, when said religion is a source of multiple flavors of intolerance, is not only justified, it is more efficient tactically. Within Christianity specifically, for instance, there are scriptural justifications for a wide variety of different flavors of hate and oppression. Homophobia, yes, but also misogyny, racial hatred, justifications for slavery, intolerance for other faiths, etc."

Daryl:
"Paragraph 3, efficient tactically: Not true, Attacking the religion, not the intolerance, then the intolerance never gets dealt with. Attacking the intolerance you can have allies from within the religion, attack the religion, and all you get is enemies."

Reply:
I fight both.  I already said above that I target intolerance.  But I favor a systematic approach where you target intolerance, both direct acts of it and the systematic structures that justify it, religion being one of those.  Intolerance isn't the only problem with religion, if it were, then you might have a point.  But religion engenders other problems like relying on faith rather than reason, encouraging people to ask for intercessory aid from on high rather than enabling them to deal with their problems directly, etc.  

Me:
"All of the above are in scripture itself. If you want to add behaviors by religious institutions like the Catholic church, we can add a systematic and well documented conspiracy to conceal, cover up, and ENABLE child rapists to continue to perpetuate their crimes, internationally, and over the course of decades. So as to not single out the Catholics, we can include genital mutilation, practiced primarily on women by Muslim groups, and on males by Jewish groups."


Daryl:
"What do the scriptures have to do with christianity? The next time i see some family stoning their drunken son on the outskirts of town, a wife living in the shed during her period, Joel Osteen condeming rich men, or Pator Bill Tvelt renounce his endorsement of Bachman because of the book of Timothy, I will concern myself with what is in the bible. Christians don't, why should we? "


Reply:

The scriptures are cherry picked, but still believed in.  I just gave a few real world examples of harms done with scriptural justification.  Stoning still happens in parts of the world.  As does the previously mentioned genital mutilation.  Things like slavery are gone (or at least not globally accepted institutions) because society has already gone against the things justified by scripture and made them unacceptable.  I want to see that process continue.

Me:
"Islam does seem to me to be the worse offender, however, as there exist Muslim states where rape isn't a crime, but a punishment that women can be sentenced to. This is pathological at best, and even right this second I have to damn near physically restrain myself from following such a mention by a long stream of expletives. Even with that said, Islam is an immediate bad instance of what religious ideology leads to, all religious nonsense has to potential to go just as bad, it just needs the right circumstances."

Daryl:
"So do all muslims condone the actions in the most extreme islamic states? Do you see those kinds of activities in the muslim churches here in america? If we run around painting the whole of a religion with the most extreme actions of the most extreme faction, We end up sounding like the nut jobs."


Reply:
We don't paint the whole of a religion with the most extreme actions of the the most extreme faction, and neither do the bloggers that Stedman cherry-picked quotes from.  Stedman continuously makes the error that an attack on the religious doctrine itself is an accusation against every single member of it.  I am talking about a harmful set of ideas, not a war against a group of people.  It doesn't matter if not every member strictly adheres to the most pathological dictates of their doctrine, their subscription to it is a tacit endorsement of it.  The majority of citizens in fascist and Nazi countries in WWII weren't actively rounding up the Jews.  Some of them were ignorant of what was happening, and others suspected but took no action.  Others did take action.  By attacking the doctrines themselves, and pointing out the psychotic content contained within, we are undertaking the job of educating the ignorant about the stuff they should be aware of.  This can also encourage them into taking action against those who adhere to the same doctrine in name, but do decide to act on the more harmful aspects of it.  That is not just an Islam problem, it's a problem with any ideology, metaphysical, political or otherwise.

Me:
"I put the question to you: Should we atheists, and anyone else who object to such behaviors, waste our time targeting each of those crimes, these particular types of hate and intolerance individually? Even when we know that the authority for the existence of the institutions that justify such things are based on logical fallacies that are so obvious that even children can embarrass adult adherents of such faiths with innocent questions that the adults are unable to answer? I say no."


Daryl:
"Answer to your question, Yes we should. Because you can actually accomplish something that way."


Reply:
I agree.  I just don't agree that it's impossible to accomplish something the other way, either.  People can change when they come to realize that a philosophy they've adhered to is based on nonsense.  It's how many people become atheists, or evolve politically from more extreme positions.  It happens all the time, I simply encourage open dialogue about said problems.  I'm not advocating violent suppression of thoughtcrime, just unfettered and open conversation.


Me:
"You present me a religion that does not rely on unsupportable appeals to faith, presents a coherent ethical framework, and doesn't have a record of harmful behavior, but does provide a sense of community and collective ritual to honor particular social customs, and I will happily leave that religion alone, although I will probably question why it's called a religion in the first place."


Daryl:
"You can question why it's called a religion all you want. You will be wrong. Shit is shit, even when it doesn't stink."


Reply:
If a religion or any other ideology is shit, I feel it is so because of the attributes I just described.  If it doesn't have those, why is it still shit?  I think I gave a fair summation of the parts that are problematic.  


Me:
"Unfortunately, even the more benign religions in the real world like Buddhism and Jainism exhibit some of the more harmful behaviors I have previously enumerated, and they have to be at least reformed, if not abolished."


Daryl:
"So you are sympathetic to Buddism? Following your model, we should oppose buddism because in the 50's in tibet, the Dali Lama endorsed serfdom."


Reply:
I'm sympathetic to some of the philosophy contained in Buddhism, especially early Buddhism, before it had really developed the authoritarian structure of religion that various forms of it developed later.  Tibetan Buddhism, and in particular, the Dalai Lama's position as a theocratic head of state is opposed by me.  He has endorsed various positions that have led to violence between different schools and factions of Vajrayana Buddhism, murders have occurred, etc.  Buddhism as a religious institution has many of the same problems in other countries that I previously identified in relation to Christianity and Islam.  Even here in the states there have been Buddhist teachers that used their authority as "enlightened" teachers to take advantage of their students, in sexual and non-sexual ways.

None of that kind of behavior should be tolerated.  As I mentioned in paragraph 9 (included below for completeness), I'm sympathetic to modern, secular redactions of Buddhist thought, with all of the metaphysical nonsense stripped out.  I am not at all sympathetic to those parts of Buddhism that exhibit ANY of the behaviors I mentioned above.


Me:
"I myself am highly sympathetic to Buddhist thought, being rather fond of Sam Harris's thoughts on the subject, and a fan of Stephen and Martine Batchelor, amongst others in the burgeoning "secular" Buddhist movement, and I do my best to keep up a regular meditative practice and engage in serious contemplation of Buddhism's "Eight Noble Truths" as at least decent philosophical offerings, although I don't cheapen such conjectures with notions of metaphysical holiness."

Me:
"Since it will probably be brought up, when I do target Christianity, or any religion, my targets are the bad ideas contained within such ideologies. The rank and file members of Christianity, or any other religion, are generally good and decent people when one takes the time to get to know them. What needs to be confronted is the irrationality of faith itself, which holds members of religion in varying degrees of mental thrall.

Religious indoctrination is a willful manipulation, somewhere in the continuum between the parishioner in the pew and the pastoral heads of particular religions (I'm sure that there are some ministers who are true believers, hence why I paint it as a continuum), and boils down to mind control and totalitarian thinking."


The members of Christianity, or any other religion, are victims of the authoritarian structure they are enmeshed within, and the whole reason that religious institutions and clerics of said institutions piss me off is that they are parasites on those people. The whole reason to confront religion is to liberate the good people enslaved by false ideologies from the glorified con-artists somewhere in the authoritarian structure of their churches, if not their direct priests, ministers, and imams."


Daryl:
"Umm, no dude, that is so wrong. There is no master puppet master, pulling the strings, willfully manipulating people to follow his will. The menbers are not slaves. The leaders of the religion actually believe the stuff they are teaching (watch the HBO documentary, A question of miracles). "


Reply:
They're not slaves, but they are being manipulated.  I did say that there are ministers who believe, and that it was a continuum. It's not a conspiracy theory.  If a preacher gets up in church and preaches against gay marriage, for instance, he's going to influence the opinion of a certain proportion of his congregation, and they are going to adjust their behavior towards that issue politically when it comes time to vote.  Some ministers are going to do so because they honestly believe in the doctrines in the Bible that they are basing that view on, others are going to be in collusion with political figures to cynically encourage that their parishioners vote a certain way.  It doesn't matter whether they believe or not, or to what degree of control is involved, the manipulation occurs because the minister is an authority figure that the congregation is going to accept as delivering received wisdom to various degrees.  His authority and the authority of the text are based on demonstrably false information, and I see nothing wrong with pointing that out.  The texts contain lies.  Point out the lies, and at least some people who hear that will start to question the truthfulness of those doctrines, and they may be on their way out of religion.


Me:
"I disagree completely with your assessment of Zahn's reply. Zahn heard Stedman's anemic complaint quite clearly, she simply rejected it, as she should have."


Daryl:
"Then go back and read it again. Eventually it will sink in."


Reply:
I recommend you do the same.  I have.  


Me:
"Confront religion itself, because if you attack the foundations of unthinking faith that support all the injustices done in the name of various religions, you don't need to attack each particular injustice. Any behaviors that do turn out to be beneficial, and therefore worthy of preservation don't deserve to be sullied with the label of religion, because they are frankly superior."


Daryl:
"And finally, paragraph 13, attack the foundations, and you bang your head against a wall. You move nothing, and get a headache."


Reply:
This is demonstrably false.  Questioning the foundation of my own former belief structure is what led me to discard it.  There are plenty of others who have done likewise.  It's not going to happen quickly or in huge swathes of people, but it does happen everyday.  It's a long struggle, but one worth participating in, in my view.

The Memetics of Religion: Fundamentalism as a Parasitic Adaptation

Recently on Google+, I posted some Bible quotes with the caption, “Jesus, on Family Values”:
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” — Luke 14:26

“And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.”— Matthew 19:29

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” — Matthew 10: 34 – 37"

One of the replies I got was:
"You can't even read these passages allegorically. How can these believers BS themselves into believing this crap?"

As I was replying, it got longer and longer, so I turned it into this essay.  While I was quoting from Christianity in my original post, I think that it applies to all religions.

I think part of the problem is that most don't believe this crap.  What we have are a bunch of different memes contending with each other for replication opportunities.

The first meme of importance is the moral meme.  The bearers of this meme are primarily focused on living a moral life according to standards that are designed to maximize well-being, treating others with kindness and charity, avoiding conflict, enjoying family time, etc.  We can shorthand this group of behaviors as “being moral”.  All of these behaviors have sound evolutionary reasons for existing, and many of the predecessors are readily observed in our fellow primates.  But the moral meme doesn’t usually exist on its own, it often combines with a doctrinal memeplex (large collection of memes) called religion.

The first branch retains much of the motivation of the ethical meme itself, and only partially adopts the religious memeplex.  These meme-bearers have vague notions of the myths and stories of their doctrine, but they haven't bothered to sit down and actually examine the doctrines that they purportedly believe in.  Being moral, from an outside observer's perspective, is what they actually care about and how they define themselves.  The problem is that even though it's apparent that their real focus is on being moral, they call that "being religious", and due to various other factors involved in the structure of the religion memeplex itself, they get "being moral" and "being religious" tied up in their heads so much that the two terms become inextricably intertwined.  For the purposes of this essay, we'll call this type of confusion the moderate meme.

Then we have the second group.  These meme-bearers aren't dedicated to “being moral”, they are actually dedicated to accepting the content of their doctrine as "truth".  That is how they define themselves.  This “truth” includes the actual moral content of the doctrine, the bits of the doctrine that correspond to a maximization of well-being, but also the assertions about how the universe functions, the petty prejudices of ages past (misogyny, racism, bigotry towards the sexually adventurous), as well as the literature content, et al.  This tendency to accept doctrine as “truth” we can shorthand as "being religious".  They also conflate "being moral" and "being religious", but for them, the prime concern is the acceptance, not the maximization of well-being.  We can call this type of confusion the fundamentalist meme.  

So we have two groups of meme-bearers, moderates and fundamentalists, both running around calling their memes by the same terms.  Worse, both the moderates and the fundamentalists consider that “being religious” and “being moral” define who they are as people, and they use both terms interchangeably and to refer to different behaviors.  But because they are using the same terms, they fool themselves into thinking that they are both working towards the same goals, and there ends up being memetic drift between the two groups.  The moderates, who are generally decent people, end up picking up on some of the doctrinal memes (the assertions about reality and petty prejudices) of the fundamentalists and feel obligated to believe in them too, because subscription to doctrine is a part of their "being religious" meme, even though it has a lower priority to them than "being moral".  You also get some fundamentalists with a certain amount of tendency towards maximizing well-being, because being moral in actuality is also part of the doctrine, even though it’s of lower priority.  Both of these crossover situations can cause cognitive dissonance when the underlying conflicts are pointed out.  As a defense against dissonance, there is often a strong reaction in the meme-bearer of either sort against processes that draw attention to the dissonance, like critical thinking procedures or investigative methodologies like scientific empiricism or historical analysis.

Scientific empiricism and historical analysis are memes too, of course, but the difference is that they are investigative memes, not religious memes.  Religious memes are about certainty, about knowing “truth”, whether it’s a moral truth or a truth about the way the universe is put together.  Investigative memes are about discovery.  Some of the products of those discoveries can be elevated to truths, and even turned into doctrines for religions (especially in the past), but the emphasis in the meme-bearer is on discovery, not truth, so as long as they can keep discovering, they don’t mind overturning yesterday’s truths, as long as the new discovery can do so via application of strict standards.  These meme-bearers define themselves as investigators, not as truth-possessors.  The source of conflict between the different classes of meme-bearers becomes obvious once one identifies the identity issues at stake.  The religious meme-bearers have their identities locked into a static “truth” position, and the investigation meme-bearers have their identities locked into a process of challenging static “truths”.

Keep in mind, this isn’t actual different tribes of people who possess only one meme or the other.  These memes are in everyone’s minds, influencing our behavior.  What does seem likely is that in any given person, certain memes are going to be more dominant in influence at any given time.  People in the real world are going to have multiple points of commitment to these memes and others with varying levels of intensity.  I’m necessarily simplifying to be illustrative.

Fundamentalist memes arise, I suspect, when investigative memes and moral memes combine and replicate.  The religions that exist in the world today seem to be a result of this type of interaction.  Investigative meme-bearers are today constantly producing models of the world which are then picked up and adopted as doctrines.  In the past when technology memes hadn’t progressed to the current level that they exist at today, it took a long time for investigative meme-bearers to produce new models.  This exerted a selection pressure that naturally favored fundamentalist memes, as the models had a seeming eternal “truth” aspect, since most meme-bearers of any type didn’t get the opportunity to observe the emergence of a new model.  Potential moderate meme-bearers would be fairly invisible in the general population, since there was no pressure to differentiate from fundamentalist meme-bearers.  So for centuries, fundamentalism was a decent survival strategy, as it could parasitize the investigative memes, and change happened slowly enough that fundamentalism, which is highly resistant to change, could adapt when necessary.

This all changed with the acceleration of technological know-how, and the gradual process of improvement and refinement that the investigative meme-bearers were always pursuing.  Even the old obsolete models were useful data, because it gave them a base to build on and improve.  As time goes by, new discoveries are made, and old discoveries that proved valid end up stronger.  So the foundations get more and more certain (although never 100%), and provide a wider and wider base to use as a launchpad for new discoveries.  The more time goes by, the more information is accumulated, the more the discovery methods improve and the faster new discoveries come in.  Unlike with biological genes, memetic evolution is Lamarckian as well as Darwinian, and enjoys an accelerated learning curve.

This is a problem for the survival of the fundamentalism meme, because it can no longer get nourishment from the relative stability of the “truths” thrown off by the investigative memes as they go about their work.  The selection pressure now favors memes that aren’t tied as strongly to doctrinal issues, since truths change so rapidly.  This is what has been allowing the moderate meme to assert its own identity, that of a religious meme focused on “being moral” in practice.

Now that we actually have moderates, things are improving, but it’s not all roses.  The problem is that the moderate meme-bearers still conflate “being religious” and “being moral”.  This keeps them believing in things that are demonstrably false, even if that belief is shallower than that of the fundamentalists.  It also leads them to make excuses for the hateful doctrinal material of the fundamentalists, which can cause dissonance on its own. 

Finally, this conflation often leads to prejudice amongst moderates against those who have untangled the semantic confusion of “being moral” and “being religious” by getting rid of the religion meme and retaining the moral meme.  This isn’t any one particular group, but a whole category of groups that generally err on the side of secular humanism.  It’s like the semantic confusion of “being religious" and "being moral" is an adaptation that the religious memes developed because the confusion does actually help the religious memes hold on longer in people's heads by inculcating the notion that without the doctrinal content of “being religious”, they would descend into immoral chaos.  The meme-bearers don't want to be immoral, and the meme fights against the realization that moral and religious can be separated.

The memetic warfare, therefore, is geared mainly at liberating the moderates from the religious memes.  There are many tactics in play at any given time.  There’s the frontal assaults on the religious doctrines themselves by the so-called “Four Horsemen,” Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, as well as others that fall under the rubric of the “New Atheists”.  There’s the historians like Jennifer Hecht and Susan Jacoby, doing valuable work illustrating the long history of philosophical skepticism and doubt about doctrinal hegemony, undercutting the religious memes’ efforts to assume a universality that has never existed.  There’s the scientist educators and populizers, Carl Sagan, NeilDeGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, out there explaining the fascinating discoveries of science in a more digestible but NOT dumbed down manner, and illustrating the awesomeness of the natural world.  The legal strike forces like the FFRF, AUSCS, and Eugenie Scott and the NCSE* in the courts fighting the efforts of fundamentalists to undermine science directly. There’s the artillery division of people like Penn & Teller and the Mythbusters making skepticism awesome in the popular imagination, one explosion (or bullet catch) at a time. 

Most important of all, however, is the infantry of the common everyday atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers.  Using the more gentle approach of things like the Atheist Out Campaign, raising consciousness via similar tactics as the gay liberation movement, causing direct cognitive dissonance in the prejudiced by letting the religious meme-bearers know that not only can one be good without god(s), like the billboards and buses say, but that they already know good moral people who happen to be free of the religious memes, they’ve just been concealing their irreligion because of the intolerance.

I think we need all of these combatants in this memetic war.  Some are going to rub people the wrong way, but for others, it’ll be just what they need to hear.  It’s a war on many fronts, and requires many different strategic and tactical approaches, just as the memes we’re combating have their own multifaceted approach.

The good news is that signs seem to indicate that there is real progress being made.  Survey after survey is coming out that shows that the fastest growing “religious” group in the country (adjusted for immigration) are those marking “none” as their preference.  More and more people raised religious are moderating or leaving their faiths, and becoming more tolerant of those without religion, focusing more on just living good, moral lives.  I think that the reason we see so much more craziness from the fundamentalists who are left is that the more morally focused are leaving that kind of religion and leaving behind a precipitate of concentrated doctrinal crazy.  These people still need to be fought against on the memetic battleground, and many of those skirmishes are bloody.  But while it’s not certain, I think that a case can be made that as with the trend Steven Pinker points out about violence decreasing over time**, I think a case can be made for a similar trend with superstition and toxic religious faith.  I think generally those bearing the memes of science, critical thinking, and rationality are winning globally, and we should remember that when things look grim, while also remaining vigilant in the face of victory.

*FFRF – Freedom From ReligionFoundation, AUSCS – Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, NCSE– National Center for Science Education

**The Better Angels of Our Nature,2011.

New Houston Secular Buddhist Group

For anyone in Houston reading my blog and interested in secular buddhism, I just created a networking page on Facebook as my attempt to get something going.  Check it out if you're interested:

Houston Secular Buddhists

The Four Noble Truths and the Three Marks of Existence.

So what, after all, does Buddhism actually entail?  The philosophical tenets of Buddhism can be summed up with what it calls the 4 noble truths and the three marks of existence.  What follows is my own understanding of these “truths”.

1.  Sapient beings experience dissatisfaction.
2.  Dissatisfaction arises from craving, be it things, sensations, etc.
3.  Craving ceases when one realizes that everything is impermanent.
4.  One can realize the impermanence of everything by following the Eightfold Path.

I have used the word dissatisfaction because it seems to be a more accurate translation of the actual word, dukkha, than the more commonly used "suffering."  Suffering has a connotation of pain, and while that is related to dissatisfaction, it's not precise enough.  Dissatisfaction itself is pretty obvious, I think, it's a state of not being content with what one has.  This is seen most often when one contemplates unpleasant experiences, but it also happens with pleasant ones.  It's not that pleasant experiences are an illusion or that they aren’t actually pleasant.  It’s that they contain the seeds of dissatisfaction when one forgets that they, like the unpleasant experiences, are impermanent.  The good, the bad, there is no eternal.  There's nothing actually grim about this, it's just a fact of the universe.  It's part of the reality of everything being in flux, as I mentioned in my last post.  The fact of impermanence (annica) is neutral, but we humans have a habit of forgetting it, of craving (tanha) for the eternal, of expecting things to last forever.  This is what causes our sense of dissatisfaction with the universe we live in, and causes us to seek artificial illusions of permanence in things like religion, politics, superstition, drugs, hedonism, and all kinds of other diversions.  

None of these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves, what’s bad about them is the part of them that feed our self-delusion, the part that tricks us into thinking that they might last forever.  We spend so much time craving an eternity that doesn’t exist, and that keeps us from fully enjoying the pleasant experiences when they are going on and also wallowing in the fear of eternal suffering when we are in the midst of an unpleasant experience that will subside sooner or later.  

Siddhattha Gotama realized this somewhere around 2500 years ago.  “Buddha” is not a name, but a title.  It comes from the word bodhi, which is usually translated “enlightenment”, but really means awakened.  Buddha means “the awakened one”, someone with awareness, who notices and understands things.  He’s not a god, not a wizard, not any kind of supernatural entity, as later traditions portray him.  

Sid was just a guy who did the hedonistic thing and then spent years after doing the ascetic thing, pursuing spiritual fulfillment and attainment.  He finally realized that neither hedonism or asceticism were satisfactory, so he kicked back under a tree for a while until he realized that we humans sure spend a lot of time chasing after bullshit, and we don’t really need to do that.  Once he awoke to this realization, he decided he wanted to help others realize it too.  But what exactly is it that he realized?

Sid realized that we lie to ourselves constantly about the truths of reality, which is made up of the three marks of existence.  I’ve already mentioned two of the marks, impermanence and dissatisfaction.  The third is not-self (anatta).

In the Indian Vedic religion, there is a concept of an unchanging, permanent soul, called atman.  It’s kind of like a form, in the Platonic sense.  The idea is very similar, for things to exist, there needs to be an ideal in some other realm for it to be a reflection of, otherwise there would be nothing.  Sid rejected this notion due to his recognition of impermanence and of applying it to the very concept of self itself, plus the fact that no one can directly observe a form.

This isn’t actually that hard to figure out.  As with all things, we change and evolve over time.  We gain new knowledge, we forget things, we change deeply held convictions.  The me that exists today is very different from the me that existed when I was 7 years old.  The me that exists today is different than the me from yesterday in many respects, and the me that exists in 20 years will be more different still.  You can’t step in the same river twice, the ship of Theseus, grandfather’s axe, and other similar philosophical notions are related.  So there is not a permanent self, there is a continuous process of becoming the new self, which goes on to become a new self, etc, from moment to moment (this process is called punabbhava, or just bhava, often incorrectly translated as rebirth).  Now, in the Vedic religion that was dominant in Sid’s time, this was a supernatural notion related to transmigration of souls and reincarnation, and to be fair, Sid didn’t really bother dismissing it as nonsense, he just figured it was unimportant, since the same process goes on within someone’s life, and he was nothing if not focused on trying to help people live better lives.  

The reason not-self is an important concept is that the popular notion of the self is made up of 5 aggregate attributes and those are causes of craving, but I will go into those in another post.  The point is that Sid developed the eightfold path as a way to help people realize the causes of dissatisfaction, realize the impermanent nature of things, and to help them stop grasping at illusions.  

Next post, the eightfold path, and possibly the 5 aggregates.

Atheism, Naturalism, and Buddhism.

ATHEIST


The biggest confusion that always crops up in discussion is that atheists believe there is no god.  People like to call us intellectually dishonest, because you can't disprove the existence of god.  My reply, always, is "Of course you can't disprove god."  We don't try to disprove god because that's impossible; we can and do gleefully destroy the logical fallacies and bad arguments for the existence of god, gods, or the supernatural.  We show that the specific claims about the attributes of some gods are false.  Genesis, for example: science has demonstrated that life emerged through natural processes, as did the universe itself, although we're still working out the finer details.  So for someone who believes in the Christian god because they believe the Genesis account, it can be shown to them that that's a bad reason to believe in the God of Genesis.  The same goes for pagan gods as the source of natural phenomena like lightning, rain, storms, etc. Those gods, as best we can tell, seem to have been developed in order to explain those things, and when we have a better way to explain the phenomena, their necessity drops away.  It doesn't disprove their existence, however.  Anyone can come up with all kinds of theories about why gods might exist.  Here's one:  Gods pop into existence as the result of the collective psychic potential of people believing in them.  Occultism is full of notions like that and similar, and I used to justify my own belief in the supernatural that way.  It's a nonsense proposal, because the notion that belief can cause something to manifest has no evidence for it either, even though it doesn't assume a supernatural cause for the universe.  At best, it's an argument for memetics and their influence on human culture, not for a supernatural realm, and it's still at the mere hypothesis stage, needing confirmation.  But the point is that even if one eliminates the explanatory power that the gods used to hold, that doesn't rule out their existence as a point of fact.


To rule out existence entirely, one would have to search all of time and space, which we can't do.  On the other hand, proving the existence of a deity is relatively easy, a godlike entity can show up and present evidence of its own existence any time it likes if it does in fact exist (and it can avoid Oolon Colluphid and Babel fish).  This is why when people accuse atheists of having faith that there is no god, gods, or the supernatural, I'm always careful to specify myself as an agnostic atheist, and to clarify that when it comes down to it, most atheists are.  I admit to an outside possibility that a god might quit screwing around and present itself at some point.  But until that happens or any other type of evidence is presented, I have no reason to believe in any of them, hence, I'm an atheist, I have no belief in gods.  I have no belief in the existence of other things for which there is no evidence, either, so sometimes I use the word skeptic to be more inclusive, but atheist is usually sufficient.  I come into contact with more people who care about the existence of gods specifically than the other stuff.  


There's so many labels that fit me.  Skeptic.  Atheist.  Humanist.  Agnostic.  Epicurean.  Naturalist.  Shit-stirrer (that's nothing new).  The newest one that seems to fit, Buddhist, is funny given the others, but I'll get to that in a bit.  The problem with atheism is that it's narrow, it focuses only on what I am against, it doesn't say anything about what I'm for.  That's the topic of the rest of this article.


One of my online friends made an offhand comment the other day:  "I don't believe in the supernatural, I think the natural world is super."  That pretty much nails it for me.  Some people like to disparage those who don't believe in the supernatural, calling them materialists.  I am a materialist, but I think people like to conflate that word.  There's the economic materialist who views consumption and acquisition of goods as a good thing.  Then there's the philosophical notion who views everything as being made of matter.  Too many people seem to like to apply the oft-held disdain for the economic materialist to the philosophical materialist.  It's a word game.  To avoid it, I call myself a naturalist, since that's a better fit anyway.  What does a naturalist do?  Well, I'll tell you.


I contemplate the vastness of the universe and the scales involved, from the sub-atomic quark level and how much goes on there.  I think about the vast distances between objects in our own solar system, the distances between our solar system and our nearest neighbors.  I think about the vast amount of systems in our own galaxy and how many galaxies we can see out there, let alone how many exist.  I think about the growing possibility that even the immense totality of our own universe may be a single one in an even huger multiverse with whole universes popping into existence here and there every time we indirectly observe a black hole.


I contemplate the scales of time involved for galaxies and systems and stars and planets to form, the geological time scales involved in taking us from pre-organic molecules to complicated organisms, and the fact that it took billions of years even to get to those basic molecules even before life got going.  I think about how all of the component parts of everything we see on earth were born in the hearts of exploding supernovae.  How millions of years of evolution can take a single species and turn one branch into a T-Rex, and another into a peacock.  How thanks to a massive meteor or asteroid impact in the Yucatan 65 million years ago, we ourselves and all the other mammals were able to develop from small rodent like creatures dodging T-Rex footprints into one of the dominant families of organisms on the planet.  I think about how environment determines form, such as in the way whales and other cetaceans originally evolved from a wolf like looking creature that originally lived much of its life in water, like hippos do today.


I contemplate all of this and marvel at how it all fits together in so many vast combinations, constantly in flux and impermanent.  Everything is constantly adapting and mutating fractally on different time and distance scales.  Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable, everything flows stochastically from the smallest neutrino to the largest cluster of galaxies and everything else in between.  I see all of this and I elate in the fact that I'm here to see it, along with probably countless other species throughout the multiverse.  It's unlikely that we'll get to share that experience with them any time soon due to the distances in space and time involved, but it's sheer arrogance and ego to assume that in all of that vastness we would be the only ones to be able to enjoy it.  To me, if anything is going to be covered by the notions of "holy" or "sacred", it's this contemplation of reality and all that it entails, and even using that religious language seems insufficient due to the petty and parochial concerns of so much of religion.  In the face of all of that, there's an epiphany about how very cosmically insignificant we really are, and I find that incredibly liberating.


Don't get me wrong.  Some people might get all morose about this kind of thing, but that kind of nihilistic despair just doesn't bother me at all.  There doesn't seem to be anything out there that is disapproving of our ethical decisions, or what kinds of fashion we wear, or people we associate with.  Even if there were something like a god, what are the odds it would even bother to notice us or single us out as more deserving of punishment or reward than anything else?  All of the pressures that religion likes to try to put on us are irrelevant.  We don't need to worry about the external forces, even the natural ones, because they're going to do what they do.  What really matters, when one has a full realization of our actual place in the cosmos, is how we treat ourselves and each other here on this pale blue dot.


And this brings me to my recent exploration of Buddhism.


In Jennifer Michael Hecht's book Doubt, A History, she talks about various systems that are kind of between a religion and a philosophical school as commonly understood. She calls these "graceful life philosophies."  What a GLP is focused on is a philosophical approach to how one should live one's life.  They may or may not include propositional beliefs about the world or universe, but they do seem to share the fact that whether they have them or not, they are much more focused on the process of living one's life, not accepting the propositional belief.  Hecht uses the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans as some of the western examples, and the earliest forms of Buddhism as an eastern one, along with Confucianism and Taoism, Taoism to a somewhat lesser extent.  Over time, the western ones have pretty much died off, and the eastern ones have all pretty much transitioned to full religions, with all the superstition, unfalsifiable beliefs, and authoritarian structures that that implies.


I have no use for religion.  But I like the idea of the graceful life philosophy (GLP).  I think when I went from my initial stage of atheism at an early age to paganism and occultism, what I was really looking for was a GLP.  I have some sympathies with Cynicism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism and have for a while. I'm much more Epicurean lately in comparison to my past flirtations with Cynicism and Stoicism, especially when I account for Epicureanism's history as a synonym for atheism.  Its long association with Democritus' atomism and its opposition of supernaturalism and focus on ending suffering and its conception of pleasure as the greatest good also helps.  Epicureanism is often slandered as hedonism in the materialistic sense, but the early Epicureans focused on moderation in all things, seeking to increase pleasure by increasing their understanding of the natural world and the self, and realized that by limiting the degree to which they allowed their desires to control them, they could maximize the pleasure of existence.  Which is a perfect transition to Buddhism.


How does one get back to Buddhism the graceful life philosophy, rather than what it is in so many places today, Buddhism the religion?  Owen Flanagan, author of The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, has this to say in the introduction of that book:


"Imagine Buddhism without rebirth and without a karmic system that guarantees justice ultimately will be served, without nirvana, without bodhisattvas flying on lotus leaves, without Buddha worlds, without nonphysical states of mind, without any deities, without heaven and hell realms, without oracles, and without lamas who are reincarnations of lamas. What would be left? My answer is that what would remain would be an interesting and defensible philosophical theory with a metaphysics, a theory about how we come to know and what we can know, and an ethics, a theory about virtue and vice and how best to live.  This philosophical theory is worthy of attention by analytical philosophers and scientific naturalists because it is deep. Buddhism naturalized, if there is or can be such a thing, is compatible with the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution and with a committment to scientific materialism. Such a total philosophy, again if there is or could be such a thing that could be credibly called "Buddhist" after subtracting what is psychologically and sociologically understandable, but that is epistemically speaking incredible superstition and magical thinking, would be what I call "Buddhism naturalized," or something in its vicinity. Such a theory might shed light on the human predicament, on how finite material beings such as human animals fit into the larger scheme of material being. Because such a theory would speak honestly, without the mind-numbing and wishful hocus pocus that infects much Mahayana Buddhism, but possibly not so much early Theravada Buddhism, Buddhism naturalized, if there is or can be such a thing, delivers what Buddhism possibly uniquely among the world's live spiritual traditions, promised to offer: no false promises, no postive illusions, no delusions. False self-serving belief, moha, is a sin for Buddhists."


There's several different types of Buddhism in the world today. Theravada, Mahayana, Tibetan (Tantric), as well as multiple variations within those categories, like Zen.  Zen certainly does have less of the mythological accretions that the rest of Mahayana does, though Zen itself is a subset of Mahayana. Zen still does retain a smattering of notions like rebirth and karma, it just doesn't accentuate them nearly as much. 


In addition to Flanagan's book, which I am still in the beginning of, I've been listening to a lot of talks by Stephen Batchelor, and reading some of his books.  I just finished his Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, and have listened to the audiobook version of his Buddhism Without Beliefs, the longer book version of which is next in my reading queue after Flanagan.


Stephen Batchelor's approach is that he takes all of the stuff that pre-existed Buddhism like the supernatural elements and strips them out, keeping only the stuff that Gotama himself taught. Gotama did mention stuff like reincarnation, but it was part of the historical culture that Gotama existed in, and it's not actually necessary to believe in that kind of stuff for the tenets of Buddhist philosophy and practice to make sense or be useful. Basically, it, along with karma and various other things that do exist in the early Buddhist materials are analogous to the few propositional beliefs that Cynicism and Stoicism contain, they're there, but they're not the focus.  The difference between Flanagan and Batchelor is that Batchelor is a former monk of the Tibetan and Zen traditions, whereas Flanagan is a neuroscientist and philosopher.  Both, however, along with various others, seem to be calling for a form of Buddhism that more fits Hecht's terminology of the GLP, and that's what interests me in particular. The result ends up being very much a form of secular humanism with more emphasis on contemplative practice, and that's right up my alley.


This has been long enough, so I'm going to post it now.  I will followup shortly with my understanding of the philosophical tenets of Buddhism.