The Tuloriad Afterword: Not Exactly Scholarly

As I said in my last post, I'm planning a little rant about Tom Kratman's collection of work. While researching it, I found another of his afterwords online, this time from his most recent collaboration with John Ringo, 'The Tuloriad' (Read it here). Like all of his afterwords, Kratman attempts to extend the elements of his novels into the real world, with various degrees of believability.

Any way, the afterword 'Where Was Secular Humanism at Lepanto?' is Kratman's attempt to, I think, make the argument that religion (specifically Christianity) is better for the world than atheism or secular humanism. After reading through it, I couldn't help beginning to pick it apart. With a few minutes' research, I was quickly poking holes in it.

So for fun, I thought I'd take you through it and just note where reality and Kratman diverge. Prepare for a dive into the mind of Tom Kratman (I'm sorry for the scars you're about to collect). Kratman is in italics, I'm in normal.

Where Was Secular Humanism at Lepanto?

The moral of this story, this afterword, is "Never bring a knife to a gunfight." Keep that in mind as you read.

In any case, religious fanatics? Us? We don't think so.

We're not going to sit here and lecture you on the value and validity of atheism versus faith. We'll leave that to Hitchens and Dawkins or D'Souza or the Pope or anyone else who cares to make the leap. One way or the other. Hearty shrugs, all around. A defense of the existence of God was never the purpose of the book, anyway, though we would be unsurprised to see any number of claims, after publication, that it is such a defense.

Um, no. This entire essay is supposed prove that faith is better than atheism. Later on, he'll go on to mock an atheist's arguments against God. So yeah, he opens with a lie.

Sorry, it ain't, either in defense of Revelations or in defense of Hitchen's revelation that there was no God when Hitchens was nine years old. (Besides, Dinesh D'Souza does a much better job of thrashing Hitchens in public than we could, even if we cared to.)

Moreover, nope, we don't think it's unethical to be an atheist. We don't think it's impossible, or really any more difficult or unlikely, to be an atheist and still be a highly ethical human being.

Let's just take a moment to mention Dinesh D'Souza. Who is he? Well he's a conservative intellectual famed for believing it's Roosevelt's fault for the Soviet Union taking over Eastern Europe and thus it's his fault that the Taliban took over Afghanistan. He also believes that church-state separation is an effort to make all religious people second-class citizens.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for governments. Thus, consider, say, the retail horrors of the Spanish Inquisition which, from 1481 to 1834 killed—shudder—not more than five thousand people, few or none of them atheists, and possibly closer to two thousand. Compare that to expressly atheistic regimes—the Soviet Union, for example, in which a thousand people a day, twenty-five hundred a day by Robert Conquest's tally—were put to death in 1937 and 38. And that's not even counting starved Ukrainians by the millions. The death toll in Maoist China is said to have been much, much greater. Twenty million? Thirty million? A hundred million? Who knows?

Hmm. So let me get this straight. The activities of a non-governmental organisation, using 15-18th century technology, with official blessing, but not much support, is a comparable example to mass-murder with full state support and 20th century tech? Hmm, yes, of course the Spanish Inquisition is completely comparable to Mao and Stalin.

Personally, we'd take our chances with the Inquisition before we would take them with a militantly communist, which is to say, atheist regime. The Inquisition, after all, was a complete stranger neither to humanity nor to the concept of mercy.

Umm, what? Firstly, the second sentence is a weirdly pointless double negative. It'd be simpler to say 'The Inquistion, after all, wasn't a complete stranger to humanity or the concept of mercy'. Also, I'm not much taken by the conflation of communism and atheism here. Sure, communist states have always been atheistic (elevating the state over all others), but Kratman makes the mistake of conflating cause and effect here. Basically, communisms aren't atheistic because of an ideology, but because loyalty to God is an added loyalty that distracts their citizens from their work for the state. To ascribe the sins of communisms to atheism is to ignore all of the other reasons for those crimes.

Now we're onto the main thrust of the arguement: the Battle of Lepanto.

But that's still not the point of this book or this afterword. Go back to the afterword's title. Ever heard of Lepanto? Everyone knows about the Three Hundred Spartans now, at least in some form or another, from the movies. Not enough people know about the battle of Lepanto.

Lepanto (7 October, 1571, 17 October, by our calendar), near the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth and the site of several battles from Naupactus on, was a naval battle, the last really great battle of oar-powered ships, between the fleet of the Moslem Ottoman Empire and the combined, individually much inferior, fleets of the Papacy, Christian Venice, Spain, plus tiny contingents from various places like Malta and Genoa. The combined Christian fleet was outnumbered, both in terms of ships and in terms of soldiers—"Marines," we would say today—who made those ships effective. Yes, they had half a dozen "super-weapons" in the form of what were called "galleasses"—bigger galleys (but much slower, they had to be towed into line by others, and one third of those could not even be towed into position), mounting more and larger guns, and carrying more Marines—but still the odds lay fairly heavily with the Ottomans.

Those odds ran about two hundred and eighty-six warships, some of them smaller (Turk), to two hundred and twelve (Christian), six of them larger. In soldiery the odds were similar. The Christians had a better than two to one advantage in artillery, yet this means less than we would think today, since the bulk of artillery on a galley was intended to be fired once, generally without careful aim, and then promptly forgotten as the ship-borne infantry took over the fight.

Worse for the Christians, the Ottomans had a much greater degree of unity of command. Indeed, for most of the larger individual sections of the Christian fleet, there were long-term, serious advantages to letting the other sections be crushed. It wasn't, after all, as if Spain and Venice were great friends.

Nor were the stakes notably small. The last jewel of the Byzantine Empire, its capital, Constantinople, had fallen the century prior (after, be it noted, having been badly weakened by being sacked by "Christians" two and a half centuries before that). Since then, the Ottomans had exploded across the known world. The Levant was theirs, as were Egypt and Mesopotamia, along with most of North Africa. The Balkans, too, had fallen to the crescent. Thousands in Italy had been killed or enslaved by Ottoman sea raiders. An almanac of Venice, for the year 1545, showed half a dozen Ottoman galleys, raiders, close offshore.

Times looked bleak, indeed, for Western Christendom. And yet, when the smoke cleared, the Ottoman fleet, despite exemplary bravery on the part of the men, was crushed, never really fully to recover. Christian losses in men had been severe, yet were only about equal to the number of Christian slaves liberated from Ottoman galleys.

It was a victory even an atheist might be inclined to call miraculous, with the Ottomans losing about fifteen ships for each Christian loss; over one hundred and eighty Moslem galleys to twelve.

I'm going to start this with a little note: this is the first moment of this afterword I'm going to ascribe to poor research. Either that or some very deliberate interpretations in one direction. Let's take a look at the battle's Wiki page. Let's start with being out-numbered. The Holy League fleet actually had 284 ships (202 Galleys, 6 heavier Gallease and 76 'other', presumably privateers, armed merchantmen and the like), while the Ottomans had 287 ships (208 Galleys, 46 galliots, a smaller class of galley, and 23 fuste, an even smaller class of galley). So the Ottomans had a 3 ship advantage, just a 1% size advantage, with most of their 'larger' fleet being smaller ships. The Holy League had approximately 41,000 soldiers and sailors, while the Ottoman fleet had 47,000 soldiers and sailors (a 15% advantage). In addition, while much of the Holy League soldiers were of high quality, the Ottoman had few of their Finally, the Holy League had approximately 1815 guns on their ships in total, while the Ottoman fleet had approximately 750, which is slightly over a third of their opponent's.

So it's not like the odds were as bad as Kratman makes out. Even worse, reading the account of the battle sinks his opinion of the Gallease (the 'super-galley'). Almost the first thing that happens is that the Ottoman fleet takes two of the Gallease for merchant ships and attacks. The ensuing skirmish ends with 30 sunk Ottoman galleys. That's the Ottoman numerical advantage gone, along with approximately 5,000 men (almost 11% of the fleet's total military complement).

This isn't to say that the battle wasn't a considerable victory for the Holy League. The casualty count reflects a titanic disaster for the Ottoman fleet, that isn't in dispute, but I have a lot of reservations attributing the success solely to divine intervention and not a mix of superior technology and training.

Now let's suppose, just for the moment and just arguendo, that God doesn't exist, that He's a pure figment of the imagination. What then won the battle of Lepanto? No, back off. What got the Christian fleet together even to fight the battle, for without getting together to fight it it could never have been won?

First question? Umm, superior weapons and training? Second question? Pure self-interest? I'm not saying that the main reason the Holy League came together is that they were Christian and the Ottoman Empire was Muslim, but there's no mention of simple self-interest or the Christian nations' desire to control Mediterranean trade.

The answer is, of course, faith, the faith of the Pope, Pius V, who did the political maneuvering and much of the financing, and also the faith of the kings, doges, nobles and perhaps especially the common folk who manned the fleet. And that answer does not depend on the validity of faith, only upon its sincere existence. Faith is, in short, a weapon, the gun you bring to a certain kind of gunfight.

So of course, it follows that the Ottoman Empire didn't bring any faith to Lepanto. Am I allowed to laugh now? Kratman's got a massive Islamaphobic streak to his writing (baring State of Disobedience, every single one of his solo novels has involved villainous Islam as the central enemy), so it's not a surprise that he makes no reference to the strength of faith inherent in the Ottoman fleet. Evidently, to Kratman, sincere faith in Allah does not help in a fight.

They've taken to calling themselves "brights," of late, those who disparage and attack faith. At least, some of them have. One can't help but note the prior but parallel usurpation of the word "gay" by homosexuals. And, just as gays do not appear notably happier than anyone else, one may well doubt whether "brights" are any smarter . . . or even as smart.

Perhaps sensing that he's flogged his first dead horse a little too much, Kratman switches to a head-snapping alternate argument. It only takes him three sentences to spectacularly hash it up, which may have to be a new record in this sort of thing.

This is research fail number two: Brights. As anyone who spends the time to stick 'brights' into Google then look at the Wikipedia entry (here) will tell you, he's very wrong. 'Brights' was originally coined by the movement's founder (Paul Geisert) to be a positive umbrella phrase for anyone who considered themselves 'godless'. The idea was inspired by the homosexual co-option of the word 'gay', which has helped give them a positive sound. In other words, Kratman's belief that 'Brights' think themselves better than the religious based on their own self-coined name is simply wrong.

To make things worse, guess what the Bright term is for the religious? Super, as in someone who believes in the supernatural. I'm pretty sure no one outside of a comic has ever used 'super' as a perjorative.

Example: The religious impulse is as near to universal a human phenomenon as one might imagine. Not that every human being has it, of course, but it has been present, and almost invariably prevalent, in every human society which did not actively suppress it (and some that did).

Yep, well done, religion has been around as long as humanity. I'd have loved to seen some mention of the 'God gene' in here, but I doubt Kratman accepts its existence.

Now imagine you're a human being of broadly liberal sentiment, much opposed to religion and also much opposed to the oppression of women and gays, equally much against sexual repression, which, by you, and not without some reason on your part, religion is generally held responsible for. You are, in other words, a "bright." Let's say, moreover, that you're a European "bright."

Kratman decides, once again, to ascribe his own image to a liberal group. Having had a quick glance at the Bright philosophy, it's quite clear that every member disagrees on their exact opinion on religion. Some are at best indifferent and others are clearly opposed solely to religion iself, not the existence of God.

What has been the effect of your, the collective "your," attacks on and disparagement of Christianity? Did you get rid of religion? Yes . . . ummm . . . well, no. You got rid of Christianity for the most part. And left a spiritual vacuum for Islam. So, in lieu of one religion, a religion, be it noted, that has become a fairly live and let live phenomenon, you've managed to set things up nicely for a religion which is by no means live and let live. You've arranged to replace a religion that hasn't really done much to oppress women and gays in, oh, a very long time, with one firmly dedicated to the oppression on the one and the extinction of the other.

Oh God, it's all my fault! Because I don't like religion, Good, Kind Christianity has been displaced by Evil, Intolerant Islam!

Sorry, Sarcasm-Mode Off. This may have to be the stupidest part of Kratman's argument yet. Kratman makes no reference to Christianity's own failings, like the huge hammering the Catholic Church has taken for its hypocrisy over child-abuse or the loss of relevance to most in the West. Of course, he then sprays his Islamaphobia all over the place.

Finally, I'm going to have to stop here and go: Christianity 'hasn't really done much to oppress women and gays in, oh, a very long time'? Then what the FUCK was the Mormon church doing funding Prop 8? What the hell is with the huge church opposition to abortions? Why the hell do so many American churches bar homosexuality and treat it as though it was a disease? Even if it's not as bad as Islam in many places, oppression is still oppression.

And you'll insist on calling this "bright," wont you? Because it so cleverly advances your long term goals, right?

No, not really. Firstly because Kratman's got this so wrong that this actually makes no sense.

Christopher Hitchens even subtitled his recent book on the subject, "How Religion Poisons Everything." Odd, isn't it, that the subtitle fails to note that with poison toxicity is in the dose? Or that some doses are worse than others. Or that, given that near universal religious impulse, to get rid of the non-poisonous dose sets things up for a poisonous one? Yet this is "bright."

Hmm. 'How Religion Weakens A Few Things and Kills Some Others'. Yeah, that sounds catchy. Gods, has this man ever heard of the word metaphor? Not very 'super', Mr Kratman.

If you look up 'poison' in a dictionary, you'll find that it doesn't just mean 'to give someone a substance in hope of killing them'. It can also mean 'to ruin, vitate or corrupt' or 'something harmful or pernicious'. Which is what Hitchens was obviously looking for.

Oh, and by the way, Mr Hitchens doesn't actually like the label 'bright'. Just an FYI.

Ahem.

Did religion poison those Christian sailors, rowers, and Marines at Lepanto? No; it was not poison to them, but the elixir of strength that gathered them and enabled them to prevail against a religion that was poisonous to them and their way of life. And isn't that odd, too? That such a bright man as Hitchens should claim religion poisons "everything," when the plain historical record, just limiting ourselves for the moment to Lepanto—something a bright man ought to know about—shows that this is not the case?

As it's pretty clear that because Kratman hasn't bothered to actually read Mr Hitchen's book, his criticisms aren't really valid. Worse though, he seems to conflate the words 'religion' and 'faith'. Brights have issue with religion, not personal faith. Yes, many brights disagree with religion and the concept of faith, but many also have faith in their own personal convictions.

This is the real problem with the whole essay. Kratman is basically saying 'faith makes warriors stronger', but his every example is Christian and his opposition is atheism. There's no other samples of faith, just Christianity or none at all. There's no examples of faith in other people (ie 'The General is coming and we need to hold out') or ideals ('my belief in X gives me strength'), just Christianity. There's no examples of other religions (like Judaism or Buddhism) having a similar effect.

Hmmm. Perhaps "bright" doesn't mean, after all, what "brights" want it to mean.

No, 'bright' doesn't mean what you want it to mean.

Theft of the word "bright," while it doesn't quite rise to the level of linguistic matricide (the malicious murder of one's mother tongue), so common in PC circles, is still an exercise in intellectual dishonesty. It's hardly the only one. For example, it is often claimed that there's not a shred of evidence for the existence of God. This is simple nonsense; there's lots of evidence, some of it weaker and some of it stronger. Some of it is highly questionable and other portions very hard to explain away. (And one of our favorite bits revolves around just when and how Pius V knew that the battle of Lepanto had been won, at the time it had been won, and in the absence of long range communications. Look it up. Really.)

Again, Kratman repeats his mistake about 'brights' (This actually seems to be his favourite complaint about them).

His linking here is a bit suspect. Basically, he extends his miscomprehension of 'Brights' and then adds their belief that there isn't any proof that God exists to claim that they are intellectually dishonest. Firstly, again, Kratman has the meaning of Bright wrong, so that's not dishonest. Secondly, the existence of God is one of the oldest arguments in existence, so claiming that the Brights are intellectually dishonest for not accepting Kratman's side is a little iffy. He pays no interest in any evidence for the non-existence of God, which is even more intellectually dishonest.

Evidence, in any case, there is. What there isn't is absolute, irrefutable proof. To use the word "evidence," when what you mean is "irrefutable proof," is intellectual dishonesty of quite a high order, much worse, much more vile, than simple theft of a word. It's even worse, in its way, than the intellectual dishonesty of failure to note, when discussing poisons, that toxicity is in the dose.

The problem here is that there also isn't irrefutable proof of the existence of God. While the Catholic Church has documented hundreds of miracles and the Bible is full of many more, there is little provable evidence, But no-one has ever found Noah's Ark or anything similar. Every miracle is apocryphal in its extent, often reveal solely after the saint's death, when there isn't any chance to truly document it.

But then if "brights" are not required to be "bright," if a disliked religion must give way even if it opens up the world to a loathed one, how can we expect "evidence" not to mean "proof" or dosage to matter to toxicity?

So let's just stop here for a moment. Brights don't actually think they're brighter than Supers, the actual idea of brights is to have nothing to do with any religion, not destroy them, there's no real proof either way on God and Kratman still doesn't understand metaphor.

We clear on all that?

And some would insist, still, that the contradictions claimed to be in the New Testiment render it invalid.

Ahem.

Note, at this point, that we have still not claimed that, in fact, there is a God. We may, and do, believe that there is, and believe that there is evidence that there is. But there is no absolute proof, a point we've already readily conceded, and we see no point in arguing for what cannot be proven.

But you'll happily claim that there's no evidence against the existence of God. Right, that's a completely different thing.

Still, we can't help but note that much of what masquerades as disbelief in God is really just disapproval. Consider the following pair of claims on the subject, voiced, along with some others, by Hitchens during a debate with Dinesh D'Souza:

1) People are badly designed. No god could be so incompetent.

2) Earth is not paradise. Most of humanity has lived in misery for most of mankind's existence, though things are somewhat improved now. No god could be so heartless. No real god could have permitted Auschwitz.

Leave aside that people for whom evolution, biological and social, is an article of faith are therein complaining that a real god could never have permitted evolution, social and biological. That's funny enough, of course, being more reminiscent of some snake-charming cult in the backwoods than a new York salon, but not the point. The point is that, by those measures, a real god would be a eugenicist ala Heinrich Himmler, so that man would not have been or be so biologically imperfect, and, since most of mankind's self inflicted misery arises as a result of freedom to act, no real god would permit man that freedom. Rather, He would be a sort of benevolent Stalin.

These are the criteria by which a god should be measured, his similarity to Himmler, in some particulars, and Stalin, in others?

Hmm, a sardonic compression of several hours' debate followed by the evocation of Godwin's Law. That's not a good sign. Let's take his two arguments separately:

1) People are badly designed. No god could be so incompetent. The evidence that humans evolved rather than be designed is long-running so I'll just grab a simple example: the Appendix. The Appendix serves absolutely no purpose in the human body apart from getting infected and having to be removed. I'd love too see Kratman explain why God put it in.

2) Earth is not paradise. Most of humanity has lived in misery for most of mankind's existence, though things are somewhat improved now. No god could be so heartless. No real god could have permitted Auschwitz. This is the oldest question in religion and weirdly, Kratman seems to think that citing this shows that Hitchens has no real argument. This question is one every religious person struggles with, either from a personal perspective or a pastoral one. It is 'the' question in religion. Strangely, Kratman seems to find it moot, which makes me worry about him.

Kratman then continues by making a few laughable connections. Firstly, Kratman falls for the old 'evolution is a belief' canard. It's actually a scientific theory that Hitchens is convinced is right. There's a world of difference there. More importantly, belief in God implies an acceptance of the story of Creation, rather than evolution. Kratman's complaint is that Hitchens' can't accept the idea of a God who uses evolution as his tool. That may well be right, but technically, any faithful person is also in the same position, as this would deny the story of Creation.

In addition, Kratman assumes that because Hitchens dislikes the idea of a God who does not create a 'perfect' being, he thinks God should be a eugenicist like Heinrich Himmler. This argument falls face first several times, most notably because it seems to be an argument that God isn't omnipotent and omniscient. If God is interested in creating a perfect, disease-free human then he could just do it. He wouldn't have to spend time experimenting and failing, as he is, by definition, fully capable of succeeding first time.

Finally, he assumes that to prevent man's self-inflicted evils, God would have to become a benevolent Stalin. Umm, you what? Basically, Kratman assumes that all our evils and suffering are due to Free Will and that to remove that would create a Godly dictatorship. He seems not to consider any other acts, like for example, taking away the major causes of conflict, like scarce resources and giving a single defined religion to the world in uncontested style. Strangely, there's also no mention of what would happen with natural disasters, one of the biggest creators of the 'Why?' question.

Ahem.

Never mind. Let "brights" be not very bright. Let dosage not matter to toxicity. Twist word meanings. Make Stalin a god, too. Why not; it's been done before and likely will again.

Even so, never go to a gunfight without a gun and, if you intend to win, never go to a religious war without religion. You'll lose.

Right so let's sum up. Kratman doesn't really research his opponents. He also doesn't understand metaphor. He's a master deliberately misunderstanding something to make a point. He uses Godwin's Law when possible. All atheists are bad.

To be frank, Kratman really doesn't understand the argument he's trying to make. He's trying to make a case for faith giving more strength than disbelief, but he hasn't properly researched his central case and then wanders off into his usual, petty attacks on liberals. His arguments aren't well researched and are often little more than alternate definitions of single words. In particular, he never misses an opportunity to misunderstand the title of 'Bright' every time he uses it, despite the insanely simple amount of research he would have needed to know the correct answer.

I'm not a fan of Kratman and after reading an afterword like this, it's not hard to remember why. He's got an over-inflated impression of his own intellect and scholarly skill. He clearly restricts his research to sources which agree with his opinions and doesn't really seem to even consider alternate views as valid. Most unfortunately, he's not much good at holding together an argument. His faith as a force-multiplier argument is unfortunately derailed by his desire to smack-down atheism. This weakens both arguments and eventually cripples the two.