I have been reading a few atheist blogs recently, as evidenced by the blogroll to the right there. I have always been a big fan of reason and the pursuit of truth, and as I lack the patience to think anything through to it's logical conclusion myself it is great to find that other people have done it all for me and presented their findings in a concise, readable and even entertaining fashion.
It is not solely the conclusions themselves or even the structured rationale that leads to them that interest me, as a child I presumed that nobody else believed any of this god'n'cheebus carry on either and that there must be some other reason why we all went to mass, so the arguments in favour of what I always found to be self evident (or more accurately self not-evident) are necessarily a bit predictable.
No, its the arguments from the theist apologists, and the dismantling of these arguments by science and logic, that interest me most. And not for the obvious us-versus-them cheerleading tribalism either, although I can knock a bit of craic out of that too for a while before it gets old.
To be a good thesist apologist requires an ability to understand and use rational thought and also the ability to willingly and consciously abandon it when it leads in the "wrong" direction, replacing it with emotionally derived and fanciful anti-rational thought. In short, a good theist apologist practices a very obvious form of self-deception. And self deception is my new hobby subject, not least because I have certainly been guilty of it in the past and possibly in the present. Which brings me to another field which can parallel this one in almost disturbing fashion; the martial arts.
Where the theological discussions dance around "Is there a God?" and one side bases much of it's argument about an ancient book that states that there is a God and also backs up this statement by claiming that the book is in fact the word of God and so cannot be wrong, the martial arts dance around various themes of "does this technique or training system work?" and some of the many sides base much of their training about ancient traditions of movement that have little obvious relevance to defending oneself or fighting in general, and then try to rationalise how these movements are useful.
While I sit smugly on the side of the rational in the former discussion, I flounder on the side of the traditional apologist in the latter. The similarity between the theist apologist and the traditional martial art apologist is that we are both using rational argument to justify positions that we did not arrive at through reason. If you assume the answer and then proceed to steer the question so that it leads to that answer then the whole exercise spontaneously morphs into a stinking pile of dishonest horseshit.
I now need to dig myself out of this position, because if I am going to deceive myself about something, I'd prefer not to know about it.
There is light at the end of the sewer however, the traditional arts may yet prove to be valid and useful training tools.
The most obvious honest direction for martial arts is very close to the MMA approach; take all your techniques from proven combat sports like boxing, Muay Thai and wrestling, and dump everything else. The reality-based approach is another honest martial route, this is the direction taken by Krav Maga and numerous other "street" martial arts and consists of a very reductionist philosophy, essentially trying to keep to a minimal set of simple techniques that can be adapted to many situations, the simple approach ensures that a technique is easy to learn, execute and, theoretically, its effectiveness is more predictable.
But to outright abandon the traditional arts raises the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Somewhere back in time what are now the mysterious dance-like moves of the traditional arts were almost certainly a form of shadow boxing or shadow wrestling. That is, the person throwing the moves knew exactly what they were and had learned the techniques by doing them on another person, the shadow stuff was just solo practice. That we no longer know what the original intention for most of those moves shouldn't stop us from trying to either reverse engineer them or experiment with the application of traditional moves in a realistic setting to see what might be learned. This is the direction I am now pursuing and it is proving to be full of surprises, not least of all that it seems to be leading to a style of self defense that may well be more practical than the reality-based systems, particularly when combined with those systems.
One of the best sources of inspiration in this regard that I have found is Dan Djurdjevic over on The Way of Least Resistance. Dan's blog has had a big influence on the direction I am taking my own training in, and in general he is very rational and healthily skeptical in his approach to martial arts. One exception sticks out however, he refers to hydrostatic shock in a couple of places in relation to empty handed combat. Hydrostatic shock is a phenomenon related to high velocity bullet impacts, and not to relatively low velocity punches. This is more a misapplication of scientific theory than flat out pseudo-science, but it trips along the ledge (where can be seen the worth of poorly supported conjecture, or something), and that gives me comfort in an odd way, like the inverse of Morriseys "we hate it when our friends become successful", it's good to know that none of us are unique in our internal quests for truth.
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