Now to the post itself:

***

My name is Steven Zuber and I’m elated to have been brought on as a guest writer here at Atheism and Me. I’ll save more about me for the end.

Most atheists that I’ve met were religious at some point in their lives. They either stopped because it didn’t make sense or an incident caused them to be skeptical and God couldn’t withstand skeptical scrutiny. I’m not sure if I count myself among those that were once religious, but my back story in this part of my life seemed like an appropriate place to start.

I was raised in a religiously moderate household. I don’t know if I ever believed in God in any meaningful way. I accepted His (I usually use sex-neutral language, but the dominant religions is pretty adamant that God has a penis) existence in the same way I accepted the existence of Santa Clause and Mount Fuji. My level of belief in God fell somewhere between the two in my spectrum of confidence to my young, not-quite-bayesian mind. I believed in Him more than Santa, less than Mount Fuji. As an eleven year old, all of these things were unprovable to me and I accepted them more or less on faith. I tested the Santa hypothesis when I was 7, yet the scientific method isn’t quite intuitive to human children.

For the record, I still haven’t been to Mount Fuji. I accept it’s existence on a sort of trust in my senses from what I’ve seen on TV and maps and the testimony of people who have seen it. It could be part of some huge conspiracy to trick me, but it would be impossible to operate in life if I took concerns like that seriously. To a mind that tries to roughly calculate probabilities of it’s beliefs, the possibility of Mount Fuji not existing are tantamount to zero.

In any case, God’s existence was accepted by my child mind in the same way that it accepts basically every piece of information it takes in before I developed reasoning faculties. Humans are programmed this way. We are told that vegetables are good for you and falling from a sufficient height will kill you, and we accept that as children. Skeptical children did not survive long enough to pass on their skeptic genes. If toddlers were programmed to experiment and check to see if that lake was really full of crocodiles or if fire really does burn you, they’d get killed off. This is part of the reason that it took so long for our species to start doing science properly – we aren’t pre-programmed to be good scientists.

Skipping ahead. When I was about 11 or 12, (right around when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened here in the States) I was in some sort of geography or history class and it we were being taught about when the Europeans were first visiting North America (remember, this was the 11-year-old version, so it was the nice version that didn’t include the trading of STDs and slaves) and were “bringing Christianity” to the natives. This confused me, because I was vaguely taught that you had to be a Christian to go to Heaven. I asked my parents if the American Indians went to hell before they learned about Christianity. I don’t remember the answers I got vividly, but I know that I knew that they were less than satisfactory. When I pressed the point, I was told that “that’s where faith comes in.” Maybe by that time I’d already realized how counter intuitive it was that Hitler, as a proper-ish Christian/Catholic, got to go to Heaven while all of the Indians went to hell.

I can’t exactly remember the order in which these thoughts occurred, but the answer was always the same; “That’s where Faith comes in”. Even as a child, this didn’t make sense to me. So what, faith is just believing something that you admit doesn’t make sense? Why does that work on some questions but not others? I was pretty sure that if I put “Faith” as an answer on a test in school, it’d get marked wrong. Why did society hold itself to a lower standard than 6^thgrade classrooms?

I have heard from religious and non-religious people alike that, especially on this issue, the belief (or non belief) comes first and then people just reason backwards/rationalize. I find that this is true in one direction and not the other as this was not the case for me, nor that of any atheist I’ve met. Most (perhaps all, as I’ve never met or heard of anyone who honestly began without religion and, after an honest and rigorous investigation of the evidence, concluded that a certain religion is true) religious people are religious first and rational second. At this stage in my life, I wanted to believe in God because I was convinced that it was the only way for me to not succumb to nihilism. I wasn’t looking for existence of Christianity’s God. Evil really does falsify that idea. I should add that I was never “close to Jesus” or anything at any stage in my life. I understood the idea of the sin redemption thing, but it never made sense to me. If God wanted to forgive us (for acting the way he knew we would because he’s omniscient?) why not just do it instead of incarnating himself in human form and then arranging for his own execution and then proceeding to blame the Jews for doing it even though he intended for it to happen? Richard Dawkins has made this point as well in his book The God Delusion and his TV documentary The Root of All Evil.

I was looking for any sort of “higher meaning” because, at the time, I believed that it was the only thing that could provide meaning in the universe. I was briefly swayed by the argument that God is the basis of all morality, but as soon as I heard of the Euthyphro Dilemma that didn’t work anymore. The Fine-Tuning Argument worked for a bit, but then I realized that the Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit (I didn’t know it by that name at the time, but I understood the point) refuted that one as well.

I teetered for a while on the edge of nihilism. I couldn’t force myself to try and believe something that I didn’t think was true in order to make myself feel better. But this story has a happy ending. I am not exactly sure if it was a specific moment or a gradual realization, but I came to understand that the universe is meaningful because WE, and any other sentient beings out there, make it meaningful. Consciousness and intelligence are what make the universe interesting and important. A universe that contained only rocks wouldn’t be any better than no universe at all. The universe matters because it contains life and we make it matter.

Bottom line: I really did give religion a heartfelt try for years, but I couldn’t bullshit myself into it. In retrospect, God was really just the first of many irrational ideas that were planted into my young mind that I eventually weeded out. I’m probably still weeding waste out, but God went first because it is the most glaring and obviously absurd thought that it stood out, even to my childish mind. Ghosts and the afterlife soon followed. And now I don’t believe in alien visitation or magic crystals or bigfoot either. Letting go of religion was my first step on the path down scientific discovery and skepticism that I am on now and if I could somehow go back in time and change the path I took, the present me would not benefit from it. It has been months since I’ve been unhappy for more than a few minute stretch and I am occasionally moved to tears by the overwhelming meaning my perspective of the universe gives me (some would try to label this a “religious experience” but I prefer the term spiritual, even though that has a lot of baggage too). I have meaning and love and happiness and (at least some) knowledge. What more could I want?

And for the record, I think I’m right too. If compelling evidence ever does come up, I’ll reevaluate my position. But I’m not holding my breath.

And You’re and Atheist Too

That’s right, even any of you who say you’re religious. Let me explain with a story.

I was having lunch with my grandmother a few months ago. She knew I was looking for a new job and asked what I said to the interviewer when I was asked about my religion. (Needless to say, she hasn’t been interviewed for a job in a long time.) She’s what I would call an abstract religious person. That is to say, she believes in a god of some sort, probably close to the Judeo-Christian one, but not any organized religion. She has since then expanded on this thought and explained to me that she sees god in her garden and its a quiet and personal part of her.

Anyway – for reasons that escape to me since I’ve never been in-your-face with anyone in my family with about views on religion – she inexplicably says to me that she simply can’t understand atheism; agnosticism sure, but not atheism.

I thought for a moment before answering. The first thing I said was, “Grandma, I don’t think you want to have this conversation with me.” I knew that she was as benign of a believer as is possible and I didn’t want to devastate the Nicest Old Lady in the World’s comforting beliefs.

But I couldn’t leave it there, because I at least wanted to explain that she could indeed understand atheism, since she was an atheist too. I explained to her, very politely, the usual rebuttal to this line of thought. “Everyone is an atheist about most gods, some of us just go one god further.” This is another argument from Richard Dawkins and it’s a shorter way of phrasing an argument made by Stephen F. Roberts who said, “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

As it turns out, my grandma didn’t know about Thor or Ba’al or Zeus (she was educated in a small town in Nebraska several decades ago. I doubt they covered these dead gods, but even this they did, it’s easy enough to see why she forgot about them.) So if someone hits you with the claim that atheism requires faith or they can’t understand it, try pointing out some of the dead gods that everyone is an atheist about. If that doesn’t work, point out the many parallels that today’s popular god has with Santa Claus; rewards good behavior, omniscient, punishes bad people, super powers, et cetera. The only thing that separates God from Santa is that almost everyone outgrows Santa before puberty. If the religious don’t stay up at night wondering if they should change religions or try to appease Santa, then they implicitly understand what it feels like to be an atheist.

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Thanks for making it this far! I love feedback so if you like what you read, please leave a comment. If you hated what you read, please leave a (polite and constructive) comment. If you want to check out some of my older work, check out thinkthathrough.wordpress.com. I’m looking forward to continuing being a part of Atheism and Me.

Also, find me on twitter! Search my name or TheStevenator01.

The reason I am moving is mainly because his site has tens of thousands of viewers rather than just a couple hundred like this one. Also, I’ve been experiencing a bit of writer’s block the past few months and having some more encouragement to write, as well as rough deadlines, works as a cure.

I’ll reblog everything I write over there on this website so you can still get updates on it without having to subscribe to atheism and me, though I encourage you to. I should mention that, though the name might suggest it, it isn’t simply a religion bashing site.

Thanks for staying tuned to this site even though I’ve been rather apathetic lately. I plan to be more active in the coming months.

I mentioned in a previous post that Sam Harris had a new e-book coming out. Unfortunately, it premiered on Kindle and I didn’t get around to reading it until a few days weeks ago when it came out in PDF format. It only took about an hour to read, but it was still more than worth the three bucks I spent on it. Check out the quick blurb on Harris’ website.

In Lying, bestselling author and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that we can radically simplify our lives and improve society by merely telling the truth in situations where others often lie. He focuses on “white” lies—those lies we tell for the purpose of sparing people discomfort—for these are the lies that most often tempt us. And they tend to be the only lies that good people tell while imagining that they are being good in the process.

I don’t want to get too much into the details of the book because I want people to read it themselves. What I will do is discuss a few of specific things that are brought up in it. For one, I was pleased that, for the most part, I was already doing most of what Harris argues everyone should do. I avoid lying, even white lies, for a simple reason: I don’t want to be lied to. For me, knowing is always better than not knowing and I believe that, deep down, everyone else would prefer the same.

Pinning down exactly what a lie is can be a little difficult. However, we need no needlessly convolute ourselves by quibbling over a definition. To lie is simply to intentionally mislead others when they are expecting you to be honest. This leaves people who lie in a strait forward kind of way, like stage magicians (or at least the good ones), or someone who is just kidding about something, and people who are simply mistaken. It isn’t a lie unless you mislead someone about reality on purpose.

Harris is not a deontologist. That is, with regards to ethics, he doesn’t not believe in absolute rules that must be followed no matter what. For more on deontology, wiki-search it along with it’s biggest name, Immanuel Kant. He addresses the point of what one ought to do when, in the form of the old and useful hypthetical: what do you do when an ax murderer (or in my preference, Nazis) come knocking and you’ve got the person their looking for hiding in your attic. No joke, in almost every interpretation, Kant would say to tell them the truth and have you, the people you’re hiding, and you’re family, die. Harris’ argument here is two-fold and both points are contained in the following excerpt:

In those circumstances where we deem it obviously necessary to lie, we have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. In other words, we have judged the prospects of establishing a real relationship with this person to be nonexistent. For most of us, such circumstances arise very rarely in life, if ever. And even when they seem to, it is often possible to worry that lying was the easy (and less than truly ethical) way out.

The main thing to take away is that, when the temptation arises to consider whether or not the situation you are in is one of those few where lying is the only option you have, it’s probably not. And if it is, it is done so at the cost of ever treating the other person as an equal to yourself.

It says something unfortunate about human psychology that most people need a rigorous argument to persuade them not to lie to those close to them. “Of course”, one protests, “we don’t usually tell harmful lies to our loved ones. We only shade the truth to spare their feelings or to encourage them.” While the temptation to lie for the sake of our loved one’s feelings can seem overwhelming, are we really treating people with respect when we assume we know what is better for them than they do? Another excerpt says this better than I can:

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world. This is an extraordinary stance to adopt toward other human beings, and it requires justification. Unless someone is suicidal or otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he can know about himself seems the quintessence of arrogance. What attitude could be more disrespectful of those we care about?

I for one never ask a question unless I want an honest answer. As it turns out, there is a rationality enhancing technique called Crocker’s Rule which applies very well to this type of situation. From the LessWrong wiki (linked above)

“By declaring commitment to Crocker’s rules, one authorizes other debaters to optimize their messages for information, even when this entails that emotional feelings will be disregarded. The underlying assumption is that rudeness is sometimes necessary for effective conveyance of information, if only to signal a lack of patience or tolerance: after all, knowing whether the speaker is becoming angry or despondent is useful rational evidence.”

This is complimentary to, but not quite the same as, Harris’ thesis. Someone who has adopted a commitment to Crocker’s rule hasn’t done the same thing as endorsing Harris’ proposal of radical honesty. Rather, they are saying they wont be offended if someone is radically honest with them because their aim in a discussion isn’t to have their feelings coddled but rather to effectively debate. I argue in favor of both. I think it is nigh impossible to endorse a policy of open honesty with everyone and yet still wish they would lie to you.

***

There are a few more things to cover in my discussion of this book. Specifically, I want to focus on a couple of things I think Harris wasn’t overly thorough on and then explore my own thoughts on them. Harris does briefly cover the topic of secret-keeping, but he doesn’t really explain his thoughts on what he thinks one should do when being forced to keep a secret. In his example, he discusses a couple that he knew in which the male was cheating on his spouse and several of their friends knew. He describes how sickening this situation was and how it ruined several friendships, but he doesn’t explore what is, to me, one of the most pressing questions in this situation: should you, as the friend who knows, tell the spouse who is being cheated on?

This opens several cans of worms. On the one hand, if you’re friends with the cheater and not that close with the spouse, it will almost certainly ruin your friendship. However, you need to ask yourself, do you really want friends like that? Either A, you’re friend is a philandering jerk who is perfectly ok disregarding the feelings of his spouse or B, he’s a person who isn’t dedicated to bettering himself and thus wont thank you for ruining his net of lies. I distantly know one or two couples who have an unfaithful partner. Since I’m not close enough to any of them to even have any of their phone numbers, or even Facebook friends, I don’t feel like I need to step in. But what would I do if I was in a situation where one of my very close friends told me he or she was cheating on their loved one and had ever intention of leaving them in the dark? I have given this a lot of thought and, baring a few parameters, I would first do my utmost to persuade my friend to come clean to their partner about the infidelity. If that failed, I would try to force their hand by threatening to tell the partner myself. If that failed, I would follow through with my threat.

Am I a bad person for deciding that I would rather have people recognize and deal with reality rather than persist in delusion? On the one hand, I have failed to keep the (either explicitly requested or strongly implied) secret of my friend. But my policy on secret keeping is apparently rather unusual. Unless it is for something cheerful, like surprise birthday party, or personal, like someone telling me a private story about themselves, I don’t let people believe that I will keep harmful secrets. By that, I mean that I will never reveal anything in the spirit of gossip, but I won’t help you conceal something blatantly unethical without some very good reasons. This makes things a tad complicated for me when someone tells me something compromising and uncomfortable and then says, “Oh! But you can’t tell anyone, especially the person that this most concerns!”

Imagine this situation (it’s completely hypothetical): Assume you’ve been practicing semi-radical honesty for quite a while. You’re in your late teens and your father says to you, “I’m divorcing your mother next month. Oh, but don’t tell her.” What do you do? You see your mom every day and you know that she will be blindsided by this. Worse, you’ve been contracted to keep a bad secret on an est post facto basis without your consent. In this situation, the answer is probably obvious. I play similar situations case-by-case, but it almost never comes up in my life anymore. Most people in my life know that I am not the guy to go to when they feel the urge to brag about their misdoings. It’s not that I’m a snitch who will automatically run off to turn them in, but I’m just not impressed with that sort of behavior.

The idea of an entire community that doesn’t lie currently only exists in fiction. Two of my favorite examples are from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance series. In the Wheel of Time, about 1-2% of the population can use magic, and they are severely distrusted. In order to try and remedy this, and also for personal discipline (that way it isn’t as cheap as just trying to foster good PR) they swear an oath with a magic instrument that will bind them to it. However, this doesn’t do too much to help with their public image of trustworthiness because, like Asimov’s 3 Laws for Robots, it leaves enough wiggle room to get away with what you want. To “speak no word that isn’t true” isn’t the same thing as always being openly honest. Harris covers this kind of deception with a short hypothetical that involves someone standing on a public access area of the White House and placing a call saying, “Hello, I am calling from the White House and . . .” Harris is right to characterize this as a type of lying as well, since, while technically true, it is carefully calculated to deceive. There is no reason to split hairs here; if you’re deliberately trying to conceal the truth, whether by outright lying or careful misdirection, it’s lying.

This book really is worth your time. It’s only 54 pages long and you can read it in one sitting. Everyone already knows lying is wrong, but people do it anyway. Maybe all people need is a light kick to the mind in order to make a commitment to better themselves. Honesty begets happiness through many avenues, particularly through the forming of strong, healthy relationships and human interactions. Seriously, buy this book and read it. It costs less than a cup of coffee and can change your life.

***

Sorry I’ve been so long (months?!) between posts. It has been another period of personal growth and reflection for me. Not only have I been trying to pin down my life plans, but I’ve had some other things going on too. My job that I got a couple of months ago pretty much pins me down for my most productive hours, and I’ve been looking for some fresh and better work. I am still trying to figure out what I can do with my life that will make things better for everyone. I don’t think I can single-handedly change the world, but I can’t live with myself if I don’t do something. Most people I know, and anyone who honestly examines the world, can’t help but conclude that a lot of things are really screwed up. Oddly, this is where most people stop their train of thought. I have one friend who doesn’t want to sign up for cryonics because he’s convinced that the future will suck even worse. Why doesn’t it occur to him to do something about it? Granted, most of the problems that are worth solving aren’t going to be easy to fix. But the things that are worth doing aren’t always easy.

Anyway, I hope it wont be so long until my next post. Thanks for hanging tight during my hiatuses!

My decision to change the format of this blog turned into a convenient excuse to be lazy with regards to this blog. But then that turned into a good excuse to take another introspective period of time so I can try to grow as a person/get my life together. It wasn’t as vigorous as it was this summer, but I’ve made some progress. I also had some real-world things to do: figure out if I need to look for new place, decide to find one at the last-minute, figure our the technicalities, and so on to a bunch of other boring stuff you don’t want to hear about. Also, I found and am temporarily housing a kitty!

I have been working on a few blog posts on the back burner during this time though! I intend to finish/start-and-finish a few of them soon. Quick preview of the ideas I’m working on; a review and discussion of Sam Harris’ new book Lying, my reasons for my resolution to be cryogenically frozen, a discussion of Pascal’s Wager, and more! Of course, I’ll need to write something in commemoration of the life and personal impact of the late Christopher Hitchens as well.

Anyway, thanks for hanging with me for this long! But then again, not reading posts probably doesn’t require too much effort. This post was just intended as a notice that I haven’t completely abounded this thing and to let you know that I’ll be making a come-back sometime in the near(ish) future. Cheers, all!

The only changes that you, the readers, are going to notice are 1) Better quality! I have been dragging myself to produce B or C quality posts just so I can meet a self-imposed deadline. Instead of that, I am going to take my time and make sure that I never have to put a note at the end that says “I had more to cover, but I don’t have time.” This will lead to the second change; Less frequent posts. Instead of doing 6.5 posts per week, I will be doing maybe 10 a month, max. I want to write long and detailed and fully thought out posts instead of throwing stuff together in a few minutes. Right now I am partially through about a dozen that I couldn’t bring myself to publish in their current, unfinished state. I want to do the topics I cover justice and make sure I cover everything I can in them.

This should make my subscriber’s inboxes a little lighter. If there is anyone out there who is disappointed by the fact that I will no longer be publishing daily, I promise to make up for it by radically improving the quality of my posts. I think that’s all for today! As always, I give a very sincere thank you to all of my readers and subscribers. Cheers, All!

Courtesy of somewhere on Facebook. This is a screen cap of a form to be submitted to abovetheinfluence.com

Make sure you read the entirety of the above screen capture.

This made me laugh like crazy. (No, I wasn’t high.) The best kind of hilarious stuff is the kind that makes you think. Are drugs as bad as its detractors seem to believe? Some probably are. I am not defending drugs as a personal user. I tried a couple of things in high school like most people, but I prefer lucidity and haven’t used in years. Maybe it’s the libertarian in me (I oscillate between extreme totalitarianism and libertarianism) but I generally think that people should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. Following that reason, I support all kinds of consensual sex and marriages, (most?) drug use, and the free pursuit of hobbies and interests – even if it’s crappy music and TV.

I’ve got quite a bit to say on the issue of drug use, but I’ll be brief here. Who is the victim of drug use? Well, in the case of parents with young children, possibly their children. This still strikes me as a case-by-case issue though. If you sent the parents off to Disneyland with their grandparents and you want to have a party with some weed and booze, you shouldn’t go to prison for smoking in what is possibly the most considerate way. If you’re using meth and hiding it in Junior’s diaper then, yeah, you should probably do some time.

Anyway, I thought this was funny enough to share. My bottom line on drugs; If you aren’t hurting anyone, go for it. And to people who say, “Well, it makes them withdrawn/mean/stupid” I say this, “Until they make being mean or stupid illegal, they shouldn’t make substances that MIGHT make people mean or stupid illegal just for that reason.”

And by the way, I had a great weekend break. It passed in a haze of Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3, the TV show Dexter, and hanging out with my girlfriend. Very relaxing and awesome.

Carl Sagan Day is, like is sounds, a celebration of Carl Sagan’s contributions to society, as well as the Cosmos that he talked about. In the words of the Center for Inquiry:

No other scientist has been able to reach and teach so many nonscientists in such a meaningful way, and that is why we celebrate Dr. Sagan, remember his work, and revel in the cosmos he helped us understand.

…Carl Sagan was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He was a consultant and adviser to NASA since the 1950′s, briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon, and was an experimenter on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to the planets.

In addition to many other awards, Dr. Sagan was a recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences, for “distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare…Carl Sagan has been enormously successful in communicating the wonder and importance of science. His ability to capture the imagination of millions and to explain difficult concepts in understandable terms is a magnificent achievement.”

A Pulitzer Prize winner for the book The Dragons of Eden: Speculations of the Evolution of Human Intelligence, Dr. Sagan was the author of many bestsellers, including Demon-Haunted World and Cosmos, which became the bestselling science book ever published in English. He received twenty-two honorary degrees from American colleges and universities for his contributions to science, literature, education, and the preservation of the environment, and many awards for his work on the long-term consequences of nuclear war and reversing the nuclear arms race.

In their posthumous award to Dr. Sagan of their highest honor, the National Science Foundation declared that his “research transformed planetary science… his gifts to mankind were infinite.”

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(Photo by Julie Mcinnes, Getty Images)

As a teenager, I once had an opportunity to fly in a police helicopter over a major American city. Naively, I thought the experience might be uneventful. Perhaps there would be no crime between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night. However, from the moment we were airborne, there was a fresh emergency every fifteen seconds: Shots fired… rape in progress… victim stabbed…It was a deluge. Of course, the impression this left on me was, in part, the result of a sampling bias: I was hearing nothing but incident reports from a city of 4 million people, most of whom would never encounter violence directly. (No one calls the police to say “Everything is still okay!”) Yet it was uncanny to discover the chaos that lurked at the margins of my daily routine. A few minutes from where I might otherwise have been eating dinner, rapes, robberies, and murders were in progress.

Just as it is prudent to wear your seat belt while driving, it makes sense to know how best to respond to violence. In fact, it is overwhelmingly likely that some of you will become the targets of violence in the future. The purpose of this essay is to help you prepare for it. While I do not consider myself an expert on personal security, I know enough to have strong opinions. In my youth, I practiced martial arts for many years and eventually taught self-defense classes in college.^[1] My education included work with firearms and a variety of other weapons.⁠ I eventually stopped training and moved on to other things, but my interest in self-defense has resurfaced. It’s hard to say why. No doubt receiving occasional death threats and other strange communications has been a factor. But I think that having a family has played a much larger role. I now feel acutely responsible for the safety of those closest to me.

In my experience, most people do not want to think about the reality of human violence. I have friends who sleep with their front doors unlocked and who would never consider receiving instruction in self-defense. For them, gun ownership seems like an ugly and uncivilized flirtation with paranoia. Happily, most of these people will never encounter violence in any form. And good luck will make their unconcern seem perfectly justified.

But here are the numbers: In 2010, there were 403.6 violent crimes per 100,000 persons in the United States. (The good news: This is an overall decrease of 13.4 percent from the level in 2001.) Thus, the average American has a 1 in 250 chance of being robbed, assaulted, raped, or murdered each year. Actually, the chance is probably greater than this, because we know that certain crimes, such as assault and rape, are underreported.

Of course, your risks vary depending on who you are and where you live. In Compton, one of the more dangerous parts of Los Angeles, your chances of experiencing violent crime in 2010 were 1 in 71; if you lived in Beverly Hills they were 1 in 458. Still, even in good neighborhoods, the likelihood of being attacked is hardly remote.  In the comparative safety of Beverly Hills, assuming the crime rate stays constant, the probability that you will be robbed, assaulted, raped or murdered at some point over the next 30 years is 1 in 16. (The average risk in the U.S. is 1 in 9; in Compton it’s better than 1 in 3.) Again, these statistics surely paint too rosy a picture, because many crimes go unreported.

It may seem onerous to prepare yourself and your family to respond to violence, but not doing so is also a form of preparation. Failing to prepare is to be well prepared to do the wrong thing. Although most of us are good at recognizing danger, our instincts often lead us to behave in ways that increase our chances of being injured or killed once a threat emerges.

Why can’t civilized people like ourselves simply rely on the police? Well, look around you: Do you see a cop? Unless you happen to be a police officer yourself, or are married to one, you are very unlikely to be attacked in the presence of law enforcement. The role of the police is to respond in the aftermath of a crime and, with a little luck, to catch the person who committed it. If you are ever targeted by a violent predator, whether you and your family are injured or killed will depend on what you do in the first moments of the encounter.⁠ When it comes to survival, therefore, you are entirely on your own. Once you escape and are in a safe place, by all means call the police. But dialing 911 when an intruder has broken into your home is not a strategy for self-defense.^[2]

However, instruction in self-defense need not consume your life. The most important preparations are mental. While I certainly recommend that you receive some physical training, merely understanding the dynamics of violence can make you much safer than you might otherwise be. 

Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places.

The primary goal of self-defense is to avoid becoming the victim of violence. The best way to do this is to not be where violence is likely to occur. Of course, that’s not always possible—but without question, it is your first and best line of defense. If you visit dangerous neighborhoods at night, or hike alone and unarmed on trails near a big city, or frequent places where drunken young men gather, you are running some obvious risks.

I once knew an experienced martial artist who decided to walk across Central Park late at night. He was aware of the danger, but he thought “I have a black belt in karate. Why shouldn’t I be able to walk wherever I want?” As it happened, this rhetorical question was answered almost immediately: My friend hadn’t ventured more than a hundred yards into the darkness of the park before he was confronted by three men, one of whom plunged a hypodermic needle into his thigh without a word. Our hero bolted and escaped, otherwise unharmed, but he spent the next three months wondering whether he had been infected with HIV, hepatitis, or some other blood-borne disease. (He was fine.) The lesson: Whatever your training, you needn’t be foolish.

Similarly, all men should learn to recognize and shun status-seeking displays of aggression. This is one problem that women generally don’t have to worry about. It is, for instance, very rare for a woman to find herself party to an exchange like this:

“What are you looking at, asshole?”

“Who are you calling an asshole?”

“You, bitch. What are you going to do about it?”

Nevertheless, young men are easily lured into social dominance games from which neither party can find a face-saving exit. The violence that erupts at such moments is as unnecessary as it is predictable. If you want to preserve your health and stay out of prison, you must learn to avoid or defuse conflict of this kind.

When a conflict turns physical, there is always a risk that someone will be severely injured or killed. Imagine spending a year or more in prison because you couldn’t resist punching some bully who dearly deserved it, but who then hit his head on a fire hydrant and died from a brain injury. As a matter of law, the moment you engage in avoidable violence of this kind—rising to a challenge and escalating the conflict—you lose any legal claim to self-defense. Rather, you were fighting—which is illegal—and in this case you accidentally killed your opponent. You are now likely to get more practice fighting in prison. (Meanwhile, the costs of your criminal defense, and perhaps a subsequent civil lawsuit, could easily bankrupt you.) Take this maxim to heart: Self-defense is not about winning fights with aggressive men who probably have less to lose than you do.⁠^[3]

Another principle is lurking here that should be made explicit: Never threaten your opponent. The purpose of his verbal challenge was to get you to respond in such a way as to make him feel justified in attacking you. You shouldn’t collaborate in this process or advertise your readiness to defend yourself. Even if violence seems unavoidable, and you decide to strike preemptively, you should do so from a seemingly unaggressive posture, retaining the element of surprise. (This requires training.) Putting up your dukes and agreeing to fight has no place in a self-defense repertoire.⁠^[4]

Thus, whatever ego problems or impulse-control issues you have should be worked out ahead of time. You should forget about saving face while recognizing that if you ever find yourself in a social-dominance contest you will probably feel a deep urge to say or do the wrong thing.⁠^[5]Deciding on an appropriate course of action in advance is your best protection against being dangerously stupid in the heat of the moment. The challenge for every man is to decline to play an ancient game whose rules and imperatives have been inscribed in his very cells. If you want to avoid unnecessary violence, you must keep your inner ape on a very short leash.

“What are you looking at, asshole?”

“Sorry, man. I was just spacing out. It’s been a long day.”

De-escalate and move on.

You should also learn to trust your feelings of apprehension about other people—revising them only slowly and with good reason. This may seem like a very depressing piece of advice. It is. Most of us don’t want to see the world this way, and we take great pains to avoid being rude or appearing racist, suspicious, etc. But violent predators invariably play upon this commitment to civility. The truth is that most of us are very good at detecting ulterior motives and malevolence in others. We must learn to trust these intuitions. To read the reports of rapes, murders, kidnappings and other violent crimes is to continually discover how easily good people can be manipulated by bad ones.

You are under no obligation, for instance, to give a stranger who has rung your doorbell, or decided to stand unusually close to you on the street, the benefit of the doubt. If a man who makes you uncomfortable steps onto an elevator with you, step off. If a man approaches you while you are sitting in your car and something about him doesn’t seem right, you don’t need to roll down your window and have a conversation. Victims of crime often sense that something is wrong in the first moments of encountering their attackers but feel too socially inhibited to create the necessary distance and escape.

Principle #2: Do not defend your property.

Whatever your training, you should view any invitation to violence as an opportunity to die—or to be sent to prison for killing another human being. Violence must truly be the last resort. Thus, if someone sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, you should hand it over without hesitation—and run. 

If you look out your kitchen window and see a group of youths destroying your car, you should remain inside and call the police. It doesn’t matter if you happen to be a Navy Seal who keeps a loaded shotgun by the front door. You don’t want to kill a teenager for vandalism, and you don’t want to get shot by one for hesitating to pull the trigger. Unless you or another person is being physically harmed, or an attack seems imminent, avoiding violence should be your only concern.

Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.

If you have principles 1 and 2 firmly installed in your brain, any violence that finds you is, by definition, unavoidable. There is a tremendous power in knowing this: When you find yourself without other options, you are free to respond with full commitment.

This is the core principle of self-defense: Do whatever you can to avoid a physical confrontation, but the moment avoidance fails, attack explosively for the purposes of escape—not to mete out justice, or to teach a bully a lesson, or to apprehend a criminal. Your goal is to get away with minimum trauma (to you), while harming your attacker in any way that seems necessary to ensure your escape.⁠^[6]

If you find yourself in such a situation, you should assume that your opponent is a career criminal who has victimized many others before you.⁠^[7] Do not waste an instant imagining that you can reason with him. Most victims of violence are so terrified of being injured or killed that they will believe any promise a predator makes. It is not difficult to see why.

Imagine: You are loading groceries into your car and man appears at your side with a gun.

“Get in the car, and you won’t get hurt.”

Your instincts are probably bad here: Getting in the car is the last thing you should do.

“Get in the car, or I’ll blow your head off.”

However bad your options may appear in the moment, complying with the demands of a person who is seeking to control your movements is a terrible idea. Yes, there are criminals whose only goal is to steal your property. But anyone who attempts to control you—by moving you to another room, putting you in a car, tying you up—probably intends to kill you (or worse). And you must understand in advance that your natural reaction to this situation—to freeze, to comply with instructions—will be the wrong one.

If someone puts a gun to your head and demands your purse or wallet, hand it over immediately and run. Don’t worry about being shot in the back: If your attacker is going to shoot you for running, he was going to shoot you if you stayed in place, and at point-blank range. By running, you make yourself harder to kill. Any attempt to move you, even by a few feet—backing you off a sidewalk and into an alley, forcing you behind a row of bushes—is unacceptable and should mobilize all your physical and emotional resources.⁠^[8]

If you find yourself in a situation where a predator is trying to control you, the time for listening to instructions and attempting to remain calm has passed. It will get no easier to resist and escape after these first moments. The presence of weapons, the size or number of your attackers—these details are irrelevant. However bad the situation looks, it will only get worse. To hesitate is to put yourself at the mercy of a sociopath. You have no alternative but to explode into action, whatever the risk. Recognizing when this line has been crossed, and committing to escape at any cost, is more important than mastering physical techniques.

Herein lies a crucial distinction between traditional martial arts and realistic self-defense: Most martial artists train for a “fight.” Opponents assume ready stances, just out of each other’s range, and then practice various techniques or spar (engage in controlled fighting). This does not simulate real violence. It doesn’t prepare you to respond effectively to a sudden attack, in which you have been hit before you even knew you were threatened, and it doesn’t teach you to strike preemptively, without telegraphing your moves, once you have determined that an attack is imminent. 

Whatever your physical skills, when you commit to using force against another person, your overriding goal is still to escape. Even if you are at home, in possession of a firearm, and well trained to use it, when confronted by an intruder your best defense is to get out of the house as quickly as possible. In such a circumstance, a gun is a means of ensuring that no one can block your exit.^[9]

Nothing good ever comes to people who allow themselves to be moved to a remote location at the mercy of a violent predator. The police call such places “secondary crime scenes.” They are always better for the attacker and worse for his victim because they are more isolated than the first point of contact. And although your home may be the most familiar place on earth to you, the moment an intruder enters, it becomes the equivalent of a secondary crime scene. You should also expect that any criminal who breaks into your home when you’re inside it has come prepared to murder you and your family. To naive readers, this may sound like an extraordinarily paranoid assumption. It isn’t. Mere burglars generally make sure a house is empty before breaking in.⁠

If a window shatters in the middle of the night and someone comes through it, your life is on the line. There is nothing to talk about, no offer of cash or jewelry to muster, no demands worth listening to. You must do whatever it takes to escape.

One of the most common and disturbing features of home invasions is how the victims’ concern for one another and desire to stay together is inevitably used against them. By exploiting these bonds, even a single attacker can immobilize an entire family. By merely holding a knife to the wife’s throat, he can get the husband to submit to being tied up. Again, it is perfectly natural for victims in these circumstances to hope that if they just cooperate, their attacker will show them mercy. If you get nothing else from this article, engrave this iron law on your mind: The moment it is clear that an assailant wants more than your property (which must be assumed in any home invasion), you must escape.

What if your attacker has a knife to your child’s throat and tells you that everything is going to be okay as long as you cooperate by lying face down on the floor? Don’t do it. It would be better to flee the house—because as soon as you leave, he will know that the clock is ticking: Within moments, you will be at a neighbor’s home summoning help. If this intruder is going to murder your child before fleeing himself, he was going to murder your child anyway—either before or after he killed you. And he was going to take his time doing it. Granted, it is almost impossible to imagine leaving one’s child in such a circumstance—but if you can’t leave, you must grab a weapon and press your own attack. Complying in the hope that a sociopath will keep his promise to you is always the wrong move.

Here is how the police look at it:

From a cop’s point of view, citizens seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over, until all cases begin to sound alike…. The objective of a violent criminal is to control you, emotionally and physically. Everything he does—his threats and promises—is intended to terrify and control you. The more control you give to the violent criminal, even if you see it as temporary, the less likely you are to escape. For most crime victims, their temporary cooperation backfired into full control over them. Time works against the victim and for the criminal. The longer you stall, the more you talk, the deeper you sink.

(S. Strong. Strong on Defense. pp. 49-50).

True self-defense is based not on techniques but on principles. Yes, it is good to know how to deliver a palm strike or elbow to a person’s head with real power (technique), but it is far more important to know when to unleash with whatever tools you have for the purpose of immediate escape (principle). You must install a trigger in your mind—to act explosively once a certain line has been crossed—and you must understand that your inclination will most likely be to freeze and acquiesce, in the hope of avoiding injury or death. Mental preparation is a matter of resolving, in advance, to burst past these inhibitions and escape immediately, or fight with everything you’ve got until escape is possible.

Certain scenarios are intrinsically confusing and should be discussed with your family in advance: What if a person dressed as a police officer comes to your door and asks to be let in? Unless you are absolutely certain that he is a cop—e.g. you can see that he arrived in a marked police car—you should explain that you have no way of knowing who he is and then call the police yourself. Thousands of crimes are committed each year by people impersonating cops. (Anyone can buy a uniform and a badge over the Internet.) Similarly, many home invasions begin with a criminal’s acting like a person in distress: A woman or a teenager might come to your door reporting an accident or some other emergency. Again, the safe move is to keep your door locked and call the police.

Finally, you do not need to learn hundreds of techniques to become proficient in the physical aspects of self-defense. Rather, you should train a small number of skills nearly to the point of reflex. Although you cannot do this by simply reading books or watching videos, I have recommended a few resources below that will help you start thinking along practical lines.

It is unpleasant to study the details of crime and violence—and for this reason many of us never do. I am convinced, however, that some planning and preparation can greatly reduce a person’s risk. And though there are exceptions to every rule, I don’t believe that there are important exceptions to the advice I have given here. May you never have occasion to find it useful.
Recommended Reading

G. de Becker, The Gift of Fear.

R. Miller, Meditations on Violence.

R. Miller, Facing Violence.

S. Strong, Strong on Defense.

G. Thompson, The Fence.

People who appear to know what they are talking about:

Tony Blauer:  http://www.tonyblauer.com/

Marc MacYoung:  http://nononsenseselfdefense.com/

Rory Miller:  http://chirontraining.com/Site/Home.html

Lee Morrison:  http://www.urbancombatives.com/

Geoff Thompson: http://www.geoffthompson.com

1. There are important differences between effective self-defense training and most martial arts. Training to fight for sport or to master a traditional fighting system, no matter how impressive its techniques, is not the same as training to survive real-world violence. For instance, most students and fans of mixed martial arts (MMA) know that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is the gold standard for fighting on the ground. However, a preference for fighting on the ground is a major liability in the real world. An approach that often works brilliantly in MMA makes no sense when one’s goal is to end an encounter quickly and escape, when there are no rules to prevent an attacker from gouging your eyes or using a weapon, or when a second assailant arrives and begins kicking you in the head. Of course, it is essential to know what to do on the ground if you ever find yourself there—and for this, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a perfect tool. But from the perspective of self-defense, you want to remain standing and mobile if given the chance.

   There are also important distinctions between how men and women need to think about the threat of violence. Women are almost never the targets of social-dominance games of the sort I describe here. Rather, they must worry about rapists and other true predators. (For the purposes of this article, I ignore the subject of domestic violence.) And women’s attackers often outweigh them by fifty or a hundred pounds. These facts make their security concerns both more pressing and less ambiguous. ↩

2. The only exception to this rule is if you happen to have a “safe room”—a fortified room in your house equipped with a phone line that cannot be cut. Of course, very few people have one. ↩
3. It is also worth remembering that you can’t assess another person’s fighting skills just by looking at him. I’ve trained with some very scary looking guys who didn’t know much of anything and hit with very little power. And I have known men who were small and seemingly out of shape but were absolute killers. A word to the macho: You do not know who you are talking to—and you don’t know if he is armed.↩
4. Other principles follow from this. If you carry a weapon, you should never draw it to threaten your assailant in the hope that he will back down. As Rory Miller points out, if such a threat display fails, it almost guarantees that you will have to use the weapon, or it will be used against you. (And if you threaten with a weapon, the other person can claim to be acting in self-defense.) Therefore, reach for a weapon only if you are prepared to use it and believe you would be justified in doing so.↩
5. Strangely, carrying a weapon can make it much easier to ignore provocations of this kind. If you are armed, you cannot afford to be lured into casual altercations, no matter how obnoxious your opponent. The impulse to save face easily yields to a deeper form of self-interest: With a weapon, you simply must avoid conflict unless you are given no choice.↩
6. Admittedly, there are some gray areas here. If you are very experienced and attacked by a much smaller man who appears to be unarmed, you might decide to modulate your initial response and give him a chance to realize that he has picked the wrong target. But even here, if you have followed principles 1 and 2, the onus is on your attacker, and it is only prudent to assume that he is armed, or that he may have friends in the vicinity.↩
7. The only data I could find on prisoner release and recidivism in the United States are out of date, but they are nonetheless shocking. As of 1992, violent offenders in the U.S. served an average of 43 months in jail and prison before being returned to the streets. For murderers the average was 71 months; for rapists it was 65 months. Why genuine murderers and rapists are ever released is a mystery to me—and if we didn’t have to make room in our prisons for graduate students caught selling MDMA, perhaps we could keep true predators off our streets. To make matters worse, a Canadian study found that psychopaths are 2.5 times as likely as ordinary criminals to be released from prison—because they successfully con parole boards. And the re-arrest rate for violent offenders is over 60 percent within three years. This paints a rather terrifying picture of our collective masochism: We do not keep dangerous criminals off our streets; rather, we have turned our prisons into graduate schools for predatory violence, and we release their graduates back into society, knowing that most will continue harming innocent people. ↩
8. If you are present while a place of business is being robbed and you cannot immediately escape, it makes sense to obey orders—to freeze, to get down on the floor—because the focus is not on you. Most robbers just want to get the money from the register and run. However, if they begin taking hostages or shooting people, you should immediately do whatever it takes to escape. Better to dive through a plate-glass window than to allow yourself to be herded to the back of the store. Many scenarios of this kind are discussed in the books I recommend here. ↩
9. Again, this is provided you don’t have a “safe room.” Gun tactics are beyond the scope of this essay, but here are a few points to know: You should never attempt to clear your house of intruders yourself. That is a job for the police, and they will probably use five officers with body armor and other specialized equipment to do it. You should also be aware that the interior walls of a home do not stop bullets (and criminals know this). Unless you can get to a fortified position that allows for continuous phone communication with the police, defending in place can entail more risk than attempting to exit the building.↩

For more on his Our Origins Made Easy series, click his youtube channel.

I really encourage everyone to watch this one. It spells out the basic concept behind evolution and natural selection more succinctly and clearly than any school lecture I ever had.