It is an honest to God fact that the first, and only, time that I actually heard someone say-and I do not mean a holier than thou “attitude” or anything that one perceives and may be mistaken about-I mean actually stated with all seriousness, belligerence, self-aggrandizing, “I’m more moral than you,” it proceeded forth from the mouth of an atheist.
What does this fact say about atheism as a whole? Perhaps nothing at all although, as I pointed out in section “5) Atheism has no connection to science” of the essay Sam Harris-Myth Buster or Myth Maker?, there seems to be a self-aggrandizing side effects that atheism has on individuals.
Elsewhere, I have quoted the following observations by Stephen Jay Gould (more complete quote here):
“The myth of a separate mode based on rigorous objectivity and arcane, largely mathematical knowledge, vouchsafed only to the initiated, may provide some immediate benefits in bamboozling a public to regard us as a new priesthood…the myth of an arcane and enlightened priesthood of scientists.”1
Hannes Alfven wrote of the difficulty of presenting a scientific view that is opposed to the modern day norm (more complete quote here):
“When I describe the phenomena [of astrophysicists] according to this formalism [laboratory work rather than pure academia] most referees do not understand what I say and turn down my papers. With the referee system which rules US science today, this means that my papers rarely are accepted by the leading US journals. Europe, including the Soviet Union, and Japan are more tolerant of dissidents.”2
The editors of American Scientist made the following comments about Alfven’s “Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist”:
“Alfven’s anecdotes remind us how personalities influence ideas, and his irreverent comments about peer review are as relevant today as they ever were.”
But what was Alfven’s crime against science? Was he one of those creation scientists? Was he one of those intelligent design proponents? No, the issue was cosmic rays and whether they were a galactic phenomenon or subject to heliospheric confinement.
Richard Lewontin has also pointed out that the following regarding authoritative claims (more complete quote here and/or here):
“it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority in science…when scientists transgress the bounds of their own specialty they have no choice but to accept the claims of authority, even though they do not know how solid the grounds of those claims may be.”
Richard Dawkins has written:
“I am a biologist not a chemist, and I must rely on chemists to get their sums right. Different chemists prefer different pet theories, and there is no shortage of theories.”3
Also elsewhere, I discussed whether atheism is a religion, and have pointed out (here and here) that, for example, atheist activist Michael Newdow, who wants to remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, claims that it is a religion. However, in that case, we should perhaps ask, what gives him the right to remove “under God” and replace it with nothing, the god of atheism.
In this essay we merely wish to present atheism’s esteem of their own beliefs as the ultimate premise upon which to build the one true faith. While statements such as those that follow could be quoted ad infinitum we now present quotes from several secularists/atheists.
Of course, the New Atheists are merely following in the footsteps of those who laid the foundation before them:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) conceived of a civil religion according to which, “If anyone, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: He has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.”
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) conceived of a new “Christianity” which would be founded upon Humanism and scientific socialism. The secular priesthood would consist of scientists, philosophers and engineers.
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) conceived of a religion of humanity.
Little may these men have known that their civil, humanistic, scientific, secular religion would usher in the bloodiest century in human history: in the name of reason, secularism and science.
In his debate with John Rankin entitled Evolution and Intelligent Design: What are the issues?, Dan Barker, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, declared, “Darwin has bequeathed what is good.” In the debate he spends some time explaining that morals can be had without God and that his third generation atheists wife and fourth generation atheist daughter life morally upright lives without God. This may very well be, although I would imagine that it is because they borrow their morals from theistic systems. The interesting point here is that Dan Barker gives us an insight into just what these morals are:
“I support a woman’s right to choose an abortion. I think it’s a good thing. I think abortion is actually a good thing for society. If I can borrow a religious word, a word that my mother-in-law uses, I think abortion is a blessing for many, many, many women.”
There you have it: the brutal and painful murder of an innocent and defenseless human being, is moral! Keep in mind that his entire moral law consists of causing the least amount of harm. Apparently, in Dan Barker’s scales of harm an innocent and defenseless human being looses.
No wonder that in his debate with Paul Manata, Barker stated, “There is no moral interpreter in the cosmos, nothing cares and nobody cares.” He refers to Jesus as “a moral monster” and makes a point to the effect that what happens to us or a vegetable ultimately does not matter, then the audio is clear and he states, “…what happens to me or a piece of broccoli, it won’t the Sun is going to explode, we’re all gonna be gone. No one’s gonna care.”
Dan Barker also stated the following (an audio clip of which was played on an interview with William Lane Craig entitled, Thoughts on Sam Harris’ Claims):
“Atheism and Freethought and true humanistic morality are, are so much more clear, so much more useful, so much more reasonable so, you know, without all the negative baggage of theology and judgment and hell and, and you know, and the supernatural. My goodness, you know, I used to believe in the supernatural and, and now to realize I don’t have to try to prop up this phony supernatural system in, in reality it’s very freeing, very relaxing I’m not afraid of being judged and going to hell anymore I’m responsible for my own actions, the consequences are natural and I live with them and, and it actually turns out that most atheists and agnostics are more accountable they are more moral they, they have more responsibility in their lives because they realize that it, it’s a wh-what matters is this world not an imaginary supernatural world…true humanistic morality which is much superior to Christian morality.”
Incidentally, in an essay entitled To Lie, or Not To Lie: That is the Question we note that Dan Barker proposed an alleged refutation of absolute morals that turns out to be the logically fallacious false dichotomy. Please see my many essays about Dan Barker.
And why not support abortion? Just consider the words of Richard Dawkins:
“nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”4
But what about free will, the moral between the ability to condemn someone’s action or excusing them as predestined chemical reactions in the brain? In his debate with David Quinn, Richard Dawkins stated:
“I’m not interested in free will…I’m just not interested in free will, it’s not a big question for me.”
In his debate with Phil Fernandes (“Does God Exist?”-1997), Michael Martin stated, “I’m nicer than God.” He also boasted:
“Atheism is so special. So life affirming. So, so superior morally to the Christian system. So more respectful of human dignity and, and human intelligence. That it’s like a wonderful light was turned on in my life. Much more than with any born again experience. Much more than talking to Jesus, talking to God_Joint the human race let’s be brothers.”
Michael Shermer, editor of “Skeptic” magazine, stated that his study of evolution was “far more enlightening and transcendent, spiritual, than anything I had experienced in seven years of being a born again Christian.”5
In his debate with Jonathan Wells-“Why Darwin Matters,” CATO Institute 2006 (video and audio of the debate), Michael Shermer made reference to, “the spiritual side of science” which he referred to “sciensuality”:
“If religion and spirituality are supposed to generate awe and humility in the fact of the creator, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists? Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. And Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.”
In fact, Shermer stated:
“Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.”
For this particular, and perhaps peculiar, sort of evolutionary atheist, science is the greatest story ever told and a practical guide to human affairs-the answer to all of mankind’s ultimate questions.
Is it any wonder then, that Michael Denton has written:
“Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. Like the Genesis based cosmology which it replaced, and like the creation myths of ancient man, it satisfies the same deep psychological need for an all embracing explanation for the origin of the world which has-motivated all the cosmogenic myth makers of the past, from the shamans of primitive peoples to the ideologues of the medieval church.”6
Will Provine made the following statement during a debate with Philip Johnson entitled “Evolution: Science or Dogma”:
“Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us, loud and clear, and I must say that these are basically Darwin’s views: there are no gods, no purposive forces of any kind, no life after death (when I die I am absolutely certain that I’m gonna be completely dead, that’s just all, that’s gonna be the end of me), there is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans either…The question is, ‘Can atheistic humanism offer us very much?’ Well sure, it can give you intellectual satisfaction, and I’m a heck of a lot more intellectually satisfied now that I don’t have to cling to the fairytales that I believed when I was a kid. So life may have no ultimate meaning but I sure think it can have lots of proximate meaning.”
Michael Ruse; philosophy professor (University of Guelph), ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian who has argued for the ACLU against the “balanced treatment” bill, has written:
“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion – a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality..This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today…As a social reformer therefore, Huxley, known in the papers as ‘Pope Huxley’, was determined to find a substitute for Christianity. Evolution, with its stress on unbroken law – which could be used to reflect messages of social progress – was the perfect candidate. Life is on an upwardly moving escalator…Indeed, recognizing that a good religion needs a moral message as well as a history and promise of future reward, Huxley increasingly turned from Darwin (who was not very good at providing these things) toward another English evolutionist. Herbert Spencer – prolific writer and immensely popular philosopher to the masses – shared Huxley’s vision of evolution as a kind of metaphysics rather than a straight science…Evolution now has its mystical visionary, its Saint John of the Cross. Harvard entomologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson tells us that we now have an ‘alternative mythology’ to defeat traditional religion…If people want to make a religion of evolution, that is their business…The important point is that we should recognize when people are going beyond the strict science, moving into moral and social claims, thinking of their theory as an all-embracing world picture.”7
Stephen Jay Gould wrote:
“Denigration and disrespect will never win the minds (not to mention the hearts) of these people. But the right combination of education and humility might extend a hand of fellowship and eventually end the embarrassing paradox of a technological nation entering a new millennium with nearly half its people actively denying the greatest biological discovery ever made.”
By “these people” he was making reference to “controversy” and even “widespread disbelief” in America of “organic evolution-the central operating concept of an entire discipline and one of the firmest facts ever validated by science.” To a discussion of such statements we always recommend defining your terms such as how to answer the question “Do you believe in evolution?“
Gould continues thusly:
“Three principles might guide our pastoral efforts: (i) Evolution is true-and the truth can only make us free. (ii) Evolution liberates the human spirit. Factual nature cannot, in principle, answer the deep questions about ethics and meaning that all people of substance and valor must resolve for themselves. When we stop demanding more than nature can logically provide (thereby freeing ourselves for genuine dialogue with the outside world, rather than clothing nature with false projections of our needs), we liberate ourselves to look within. Science can then forge true partnerships with philosophy, religion, and the arts and humanities, for each must supply a patch in that ultimate coat of many colors, the garment called wisdom. (iii) For sheer excitement, evolution, as an empirical reality, beats any myth of human origins by light-years…as Darwin stated in closing his great book, ‘there is grandeur in this view of life.’ Let us praise this evolutionary nexus-a far more stately mansion for the human soul than any pretty or parochial comfort ever conjured by our swollen neurology to obscure the source of our physical being, or to deny the natural substrate for our separate and complementary spiritual quest.”8
Darwin’s actual statement is as follows:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
As to whether he referred to “the Creator” out of personal conviction or societal pressure is a debated issue-our point is to provide the greater context to his statement.
Richard Bozarth makes the endgame for his atheistic manipulation of evolution very clear:
“Atheism is science’s natural ally. Atheism is the philosophy, both moral and ethical, most perfectly suited for a scientific civilization…Atheism will be ready to fill the void of Christianity’s demise when science and evolution triumph. Without a doubt humans and civilization are in sore need of the intellectual cleanness and mental health of atheism…Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing!”9
Responding to fellow atheist, Jonathan Miller, Prof. Richard Dawkins stated:
“you and I probably do have…feelings that may very well be akin to a kind of mystical wonder when we contemplate the stars, when we contemplate the galaxies, when we contemplate life, the sheer expanse of geological time. I experience, and I expect you experience, internal feelings which sound pretty much like um, what mystics feel, and they call it God. If – and I’ve been called a very religious person for that reason – if I am called a religious person, then my retort to that is, ‘Well, you’re playing with words.’, because what the vast majority of people mean by religious is something utterly different from this sort of transcendent, mystical experience […] The transcendent sense…the transcendent, mystic sense, that people who are both religious and non-religious in my usage of the term, is something very very different. In that sense, I probably am a religious person. You probably are a religious person. But that doesn’t mean we think that there is a supernatural being that interferes with the world, that does anything, that manipulates anything, or by the way, that it’s worth praying to or asking forgiveness of sins from, etc. […] I prefer to use words like religion, like God, in the way that the vast majority of people in the world would understand them, and to reserve a different kind of language for the feeling that we share with possibly your clergyman […] the sense of wonder that one gets as a scientist contemplating the cosmos, or contemplating mitochondria is actually much grander than anything that you will get by contemplating the traditional objects of religious mysticism.”10
[the un-bracketed ellipses appear in the original transcript denoting Dawkins’ halting way of speaking, the bracketed ones we have added in order to make the statements more succinct]
Richard Dawkins, Is Science a Religion?:
“science does have some of religion’s virtues…All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it’s exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe – almost worship – this flooding of the chest with ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide. And it does so beyond the wildest dreams of saints and mystics…Science can offer a vision of life and the universe which, as I’ve already remarked, for humbling poetic inspiration far outclasses any of the mutually contradictory faiths and disappointingly recent traditions of the world’s religions…The universe at large couldn’t possibly be anything other than indifferent to Christ, his birth, his passion, and his death…I want to return now to the charge that science is just a faith. The more extreme version of that charge – and one that I often encounter as both a scientist and a rationalist – is an accusation of zealotry and bigotry in scientists themselves as great as that found in religious people. Sometimes there may be a little bit of justice in this accusation; but as zealous bigots, we scientists are mere amateurs at the game. We’re content to argue with those who disagree with us. We don’t kill them.”
Incidentally, in his The Case Against Science, Vox Day makes some interesting points about how science has produced the weaponry, etc., that has enabled human to murder each other in more efficient and horrendous manners.
Stephen S. Hall, Darwin’s Rottweiler – Sir Richard Dawkins: Evolution’s Fiercest Champion, Far Too Fierce
“‘Einsteinian religion is a kind of spirituality which is nonsupernatural…And that doesn’t mean that it’s somehow less than supernatural religion. Quite the contrary…Einstein was adamant in rejecting all ideas of a personal god. It is something bigger, something grander, something that I believe any scientist can subscribe to, including those scientists whom I would call atheists. Einstein, in my terms, was an atheist, although Einstein of course was very fond of using the word God. When Einstein would use the word God, he was using it as a kind of figure of speech. When he said things like ‘God is subtle but he’s not malicious,’ or ‘He does not play dice,’ or ‘Did God have a choice in creating the universe?’ what he meant was things like randomness do not lie at the heart of all things. Could the universe have been any other way than the way it is? Einstein chose to use the word God to phrase such profound, deep questions. That, it seems to me, is the good part of religion which we can all subscribe to…What I can’t understand is why we are expected to show respect for good scientists, even great scientists, who at the same time believe in a god who does things like listen to our prayers, forgive our sins, perform cheap miracles…which go against, presumably, everything that the god of the physicist, the divine cosmologist, set up when he set up his great laws of nature. So I don’t understand a scientist who says, ‘I am a Roman Catholic’ or ‘I am a Baptist’…I suppose my hope would be that science-the best kind of science, the sort of science which approaches the best sort of religion, the Einsteinian spirituality that I was talking about-is so inspiring, so exciting that it should be sellable to everybody…We have something far better to offer…Why are we freethinking secular scientists not getting into that same marketplace…and selling what we’ve got to sell? Because it’s a far better product, and all we’ve got to do is hone our salesmanship to the level that they are already doing it.”
Richard Dawkins has stated, “I’m quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism.”11 He is so convinced that his world-view is the one true one that he appears ready to force his world-view right into the homes of perfect strangers:
“‘How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?’ Dawkins asks. ‘It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?'”12
How he conceives of enforcing such Gestapo-like tactics appears to remain unsaid, for now. And yes, he would outlaw the beliefs of others and raise children to be atheists (this may be part of the atheistic logical fallacy which claims that we are all natural born atheists).
Gary Wolf’s interview with Daniel Dennett:
“Dennett tells me that he takes very seriously the risk of over reliance on thought…It interests me that, though Dennett is an atheist, he does not see faith merely as a useless vestige of our primitive nature, something we can, with effort, intellectualize away. No rational creature, he says, would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things…This sounds to me a little like the religion of reason that Harris foresees. ‘Yes, there could be a rational religion,’ Dennett says. ‘We could have a rational policy not even to think about certain things.’ He understands that this would create constant tension between prohibition and curiosity. But the borders of our sacred beliefs could be well guarded simply by acknowledging that it is pragmatic to refuse to change them. I ask Dennett if there might not be a contradiction in his scheme. On the one hand, he aggressively confronts the faithful, attacking their sacred beliefs. On the other hand, he proposes that our inherited defaults be put outside the limits of dispute. But this would make our defaults into a religion, unimpeachable and implacable gods. And besides, are we not atheists? Sacred prohibitions are anathema to us. Dennett replies that exceptions can be made. ‘Philosophers are the ones who refuse to accept the sacred values,’ he says. For instance, Socrates. I find this answer supremely odd. The image of an atheist religion whose sacred objects, called defaults, are taboo for all except philosophers – this is the material of the cruelest parody. But that’s not what Dennett means. In his scenario, the philosophers are not revered authorities but mental risk-takers and scouts. Their adventures invite ridicule, or worse. ‘Philosophers should expect to be hooted at and reviled,’ Dennett says.”13
Gary Wolf’s interview with Sam Harris:
“We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. ‘There would be a religion of reason,’ Harris says. ‘We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it’s in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bull****…At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God.'”14 [italics in original]
Sam Harris, Selfless Consciousness Without Faith:
“As I sat and gazed upon the surrounding hills gently sloping to an inland sea, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self-an ‘I’ or a ‘me’-vanished. Everything was as it had been-the cloudless sky, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water-but I no longer felt like I was separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained. As someone who is simply making his best effort to be a rational human being, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort…There is no question that people have ‘spiritual’ experiences (I use words like ‘spiritual’ and ‘mystical’ in scare quotes, because they come to us trailing a long tail of metaphysical debris)_While most of us go through life feeling like we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a false view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or stream of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging ‘center of narrative gravity’…As a critic of religious faith, I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer is: many things and nothing…But what about ethics and spiritual experience? For many, religion still appears the only vehicle for what is most important in life-love, compassion, morality, and self-transcendence. To change this, we need a way of talking about human well-being that is as unconstrained by religious dogma as science is…I believe that most people are interested in spiritual life, whether they realize it or not. Every one of us has been born to seek happiness in a condition that is fundamentally unreliable…On the question of how to be most happy, the contemplative life has some important insights to offer.”
Sam Harris, A Contemplative Science:
“I recently spent a week with one hundred fellow scientists at a retreat center in rural Massachusetts. The meeting attracted a diverse group: physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists, clinicians, and a philosopher or two; all devoted to the study of the human mind._We were on a silent meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society, engaged in a Buddhist practice known as vipassana (the Pali word for ‘seeing clearly’)…Of critical importance for the purposes of science: there are no unjustified beliefs or metaphysics that need be adopted at all…Research on the functional effects of meditation is still in its infancy, but there seems to be little question that the practice changes the brain.”
ABC Radio National, Stephen Crittenden interviews Sam Harris:
“mysticism is a real psychological phenomenon, that I have no doubt it genuinely transforms people. But it seems to me that we can promulgate that knowledge and pursue those experiences very much in a spirit of science, without presupposing anything on insufficient evidence.”
Sam Harris, Science Must Destroy Religion:
“Faith is nothing more than the license that religious people give one another to believe such propositions when reasons fail….scientists and other rational people will need to find new ways of talking about ethics and spiritual experience. The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis. We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous. We must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity – birth, marriage, death, etc. – without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. I am hopeful that the necessary transformation in our thinking will come about as our scientific understanding of ourselves matures. When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths.”
Sam Harris, Rational Mysticism:
In The End of Faith “I used the words spirituality and mysticism affirmatively, in an attempt to put the range of human experience signified by these terms on a rational footing…this enterprise is not a problem with my book, or merely with Flynn, but a larger problem with secularism itself…secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice….Our conventional sense of ‘self’ is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation…The only ‘faith’ required to get such a project off the ground is the faith of scientific hypothesis. The hypothesis is this: if I use my attention in the prescribed way, it may have a specific, reproducible effect. Needless to say, what happens (or fails to happen) along any path of ‘spiritual’ practice has to be interpreted in light of some conceptual scheme, and everything must remain open to rational discussion. How this discussion proceeds will ultimately be decided by contemplative scientists…[who will] develop a mature science of the mind…The problem, however, is that there is a kernel of truth in the grandiosity and otherworldly language of religion…Most atheists appear to be certain that consciousness is entirely dependent upon (and reducible to) the workings of the brain. In the last chapter of the book, I briefly argue that this certainty is unwarranted…the truth is that scientists still do not know what the relationship between consciousness and matter is. I am not in the least suggesting that we make a religion out of this uncertainty, or do anything else with it.”
From a neo-priesthood, practicing exclusivism, wielding authority, comes the formation of a new world secular religion. Certainly, atheism generally denies the label of religion. However, certain sects of atheism are very zealous to not only discredit theism but to establish a neo-religion based on atheism with its time, chance, matter, faith and imagination. Their religion is not a mere other, it is the one true way.
