In the foreword to the second edition of The God Delusion you stated that you were addressing a specific kind of religion which quite common, and that "the melancholy truth is that decent, understated religion is numerically negligible", notably without giving any numbers.
Comparison of census data and attendance data strongly suggests that largest, and fastest-growing, religious group in the English-speaking world is those who self-identify as some variety of Christian, but do not regularly attend a place of worship. The title "spiritual but not religious" is also increasingly popular. This strongly suggests that while organised religion is on the decline, disorganised religion is even more popular than ever.
Much like music, art, or sex, however much you try to limit or ban an apparent human "need" (even if no one person strictly speaking "needs" any of it), religion is not going away. So should we be trying to encourage people to do it in a way that's more benign than the political organised religions of old? What is the most appropriate way for mystics, even atheist mystics like Eric S. Raymond, to indulge it? Is Alain de Botton on to something?
And here's the main point you continue to miss: the average person who is religious DO NOT have a degree in philosophy. They don't know what epistemology is, or what ontology is. They are convinced by arguments from design, morality, beauty, etc. Dawkins is writing for those people.
That's a fair point. It is true that, for example, the design argument does have no legs thanks to 150-year-old science. It is also true that some people (mostly in certain areas of the US) "are convinced" by such arguments.
There's a few videos on Youtube of an open discussion between Dawkins and Krauss in front of a crowd in a theatre. There are other videos out there of Krauss, none of which indicates his embarrassment of Dawkins' views, let alone his introduction.
Let me first correct a mistake that I made. Dawkins wrote the afterword, not the introduction.
You use the phrase "Dawkins' views" as if they are one monolithic entity, which they clearly are not. I'm sure that you don't agree 100% with every single opinion that Dawkins had. If you did, I'd be worried. I'd be even more worried if Krauss did.
As a populariser and champion of modern biology, Dawkins is second to none. Krauss of course agrees with that. Who, apart from a religious fundamentalist or an ignoramus, wouldn't? Krauss is, like Darwin, an atheist, and sees no use for religion, and even sees where it could cause problems in modern society. Join the club there, too.
For the record, the specific claim which embarrassed Krauss was "This could potentially be the most important scientific book with implications for supernaturalism since Darwin." That is an embarrassing statement to make.
Sorry, but that's what you philosophers tell each other to make yourselves seem more important than you actually are.
I'm no philosopher. I'm a scientist, working in bioinformatics. As far as philosophy goes, I only know just enough to overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Once the "other fields of human endeavour are born", the philosophy that gave birth to them becomes useless and provides no other useful input. That's simply just what happens.
Around the time of the last ice age, "culture", "science", "storytelling", "music", "religion" and "medicine" were not distinct fields of human endeavour. They were all the same thing.
Over time, they split off into distinct fields. But nobody could possibly say with a straight face that just because music is distinct from medicine that music has nothing to offer the world today. That's beyond ludicrous.
Philosophy is still giving rise to new areas of study today. As with biological evolution, it's often hard to see because the process is invariably slower than we may hope, and you have to look in some detail to see it happening.
It's disgusting that you're basically arguing a genetic fallacy, or worse, a master-slave analogy. Philosophy gave birth to new sciences, therefore philosophy is still the master.
I did not say that, nor did I imply it. I can only suggest you go back and read what I wrote.
Why don't you understand what YOU'RE saying here? You're saying that whatever science supercedes and replaced is not useless. Uh, yes it is.
On the contrary, I'm saying that science has not superceded or replaced the humanities.
One of the key advantages of science, in fact probably the key advantage, is that it knows its own limitations. It only deals with that which is objectively testable. This is why it's so successful. This is why it's so reliable. This is why it only ever adds to our knowledge, and never takes away from it: science knows where it, even in principle, can't go.
Don't get me wrong. Science can inform just about every interesting area of our lives. But it would be a mistake to think that every interesting area of our lives is science.
This has been an interesting discussion, thanks. You can have the last word if you want.
Yes, he does. When he takes on, for example, the classical arguments for the existence of a deity, he is arguing philosophy. When he argues that to be "God" implies special creation, he's making a philosophical claim. Moreover, he's doing it far worse than most theistic critics of those arguments did, let alone the milennia of secular philosophers who tackled the same issues.
(And, by the way, I didn't even mention Dawkins' introduction to Lawrence Krauss' latest book, which even embarrassed Krauss.)
I agree that Hitchens wasn't arguing philosophy. For the record, I didn't claim that he was. Hitchens was trying to make a case using history and current affairs, or at least an overly cherry-picked version of it.
Philosophers are mostly useless these days and attack non-philosophical works as if they were intended as philosophical works to stay relevant. There has been no more useful philosophical development since the advent of relativity and quantum physics.
I don't think you actually understand what philosophers actually do, and I'm not sure that explaining it in any detail would actually help. So here's the bumper-sticker version: Philosophy is the field of human endeavour from which other fields of human endeavour are born.
Every department at a university, from mathematics to the study of drama, is an activity which was once considered to be under the umbrella of "philosophy". Every academic discipline is a child of philosophy, and those disciplines are still being born today. Without philosophy, there would be no new fields of human endeavour.
I'll give just one example: Semantics, the study of word meanings, was developed by philosophers, and graduated from the philosophy department to the linguistics department, with help from the computer science department. All of this happened after "the advent of relativity and quantum physics".
If it helps, consider the role that science fiction plays in the ecosystem of science. Science fiction is the main way that science-minded people use to consider the social and ethical implications of technology, by means of elaborate thought experiments. If you think about it, science wouldn't progress (or at least wouldn't progress anywhere near as fast as it does) without literature.
The best cure for this misconception would be to go and study some philosophy at a modern university. But the easiest would be to read some stuff by modern atheist philosophers.
But more to the point, step back and try to understand what you're actually implying here. What you're indicating is that everything that isn't science (and in particular, everything that is humanities) is useless, because it has been superceded and replaced by science. And you wonder why why people charge "new atheism" with being anti-intellectual?
Lack of belief, or disbelief, in deities is fine, good, rational, and probably accurate. But once you claim that most of the academic mainstream is bunk and all the answers are to be found in your pet field, that's when you slip into a space currently occupied by pseudo-intellectuals and cranks. And you're insulting the majority of academic atheists by telling them that their chosen fields of endeavour are a waste of time.
I'm reminded of Les Murray's famous haiku: Brutal policy, / like inferior art, knows / whose fault it all is.
1) Committing suicide. 2) Helping someone complete a task.
Now you could argue that (say) assisting the terminally ill to die shouldn't be illegal. Fair enough. Even then, there are some boundaries between what is "okay" and what is "not okay", some of which are clear and some of which are not clear.
Except Daniel Dennett himself has more and more come down on the side of Dawkins' and Hitchens' view.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that Dennett knows what he's talking about, and Dawkins doesn't, and so it made for a far better, and far more compelling, book than the other two.
Dawkins and Hitchens may not now anything about religious apologetics, but why should they?
Did you even read the books? Dawkins knows nothing about philosophy, but still spent a lot of his book writing about it. (To be fair, Sam "profile teh Muslims!" Harris has far outdone him with his attempt at moral philosophy.)
Hitchens did know a thing or two about history, which makes it even more disturbing how much he cherry picked the facts beyond all reality. But Hitchens was always a bit gonzo in his journalism, which is one of the reasons he was so likeable.
Books like The God Delusion and God is Not Great brings much needed honesty and plain speaking.
Honest, plain-spoken ignorance is still ignorance. Go read some actual atheist thinking like Bertand Russell or Robert Ingersoll.
Definitely! It's the second-greatest lesson you'll ever get on why you should only write non-fiction books on topics you know know something about. (The best, of course, being God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens.)
If this stuff interests you, you're far better off reading Breaking the Spell by Dan Dennett. It's a far better book in every respect. Or anything by Robert Ingersoll.
Maybe, but I've never seen that show, and came up with that particular rhyme independently. Anyone who has ever overdosed on Ogden Nash can usually think up rhymes like that fairly readily.
Look, there's a bunch of stuff in this interview that I disagree with. That's okay; it takes all sorts.
But here's the thing: Linus has earned the right to be a douche.
We are long past the point of hagiography when it comes to Linus. In the early 90s, we all though it was cool that a young, rebellious upstart took on (in retrospect, argued cross-purposes with) the likes of Andrew Tanenbaum. Today, he's middle aged and getting crotchety, and now we just smile, shake our heads and remind ourselves that Linus is Linus. We love him dearly, even if we have to take him with a grain of salt.
Everything he says is a mix of hard-won experience with just the right amount of over-opinionated patent nonsense. But even the over-opinionated patent nonsense is interesting, and I don't mean in the apocryphal Chinese curse sense. It serves our purpose that Linus speaks his mind without restraint, because his signal-to-noise ratio is high enough that getting through the crap to obtain the good stuff is a tractable and even enjoyable endeavour.
Yeah, he can get self-important and myopic at times. So can you, and so can I. You and I haven't won the right by conquest to blurt it to the world.
Actually, playing armchair psychologist for a moment (hey, this is Slashdot), maybe this is actually jealousy. Maybe you're calling Linus a douche because you wish you could be a douche and people would still listen to you.
If it helps, consider that today, marine scientists are just starting to get access to manned submarines. This technology was at first only available to governments, then to rich people. It was only thanks to said governments and said rich people that enough submarines were made that the costs can now be reduced to the budget of a university. Science is better off because of it.
Forget the "profit motive" nonsense. Part of the role that the rich play in society is that they take one for the team, when it comes to expensive new technology. They are the ones who bought way-too-expensive and planned-obsolete video tape recorders in the early 70s. Thanks to them, the rest of us could afford VCRs by the early 80s.
Only the rich get access to the first generation of any new technology. That's a feature, not a bug. They can iron out the bugs and bring the price down for the rest of us.
Whoever marked this "Troll" clearly doesn't know about what's been preoccupying Australian news over the last week. (Answer: Navel-gazing, as usual, only this time it involves dirty personal attacks against the PM.) In context, this was a good point.
For the benefit of those who are unaware, here's the brief summary: Julia Gillard's father died a couple of weeks ago, and right-wing radio-shock-mouthpiece Alan Jones (for the non-Australians, or even non-Sydneyites, he's roughly the Australian equivalent of Rush Limbaugh: moderate-sized but dedicated following, and self-parody to everyone who doesn't listen to his show) decided to use that in a very insensitive cheap shot at the PM. The remarks were made at a private function, but of course, nothing is private in the Internet era. Alan Jones has since issued a sincere, rambling semi-notpology.
The point being that the PM's PR people are currently enjoying a grace period where personal attacks are Not Cool. The PM herself is, of course, probably not enjoying the fact that her father just died.
On the other hand, Underground screened last night. From that perspective, this is the best of all times to go on the offensive. It's unfortunate that the two events coincided, but there's not a lot you can do about that.
Average commuting trip length is about 14 miles in rural environments and about 10.3 in urban environments. Now that's short.
With such distances air transport is totally ridiculous, and rail transport is not viable. With one exception: when there are large numbers of trips that run parallel for the main part of the journey.
Which is also, of course, the problem that a highway is supposed to solve. The tradeoff under consideration here is rail versus highway, not rail versus minor arterial road.
Having said that, I'm not convinced that the "average" is a useful measure in this case. What you really need to see is the shape of the distribution. The average length of a piece of communications cabling is probably quite short, taken over all lengths of communications cable in the world. The median is probably one metre. That doesn't really help you decide whether or not you want to lay new optic fibre between two cities.
Finally, looking at where people do go doesn't measure where people would go if they could. And those journeys are the ones which may actually need new infrastructure.
Actually, I much prefer the internet's brutal honesty. It's the bullshit faux politeness IRL that I have a problem with. For example, I can't just say "This code sucks" at work.
On the other hand, to paraphrase a famous line: Opinions are like arseholes. Everyone has one, and most of them are full of shit.
Corporate bureaucracy tends to be deranged in worse ways than state bureaucracy.
My experience, having worked in both, is that this is 100% correct.
State bureaucracy tends to be incompetent, and its principal failure mode is failing to do anything and coming up with excuses why it never does anything. Corporate bureaucracy, by contrast, tends to be nefarious, and its principal failure mode is committing pure distilled evil and covering up for said evil.
I'm the first in four generations not to be a mason. And with the advent of the internet there are really no masonic secrets anymore.
Yeah, me too. And my assessment of the "secrets" aspect is pretty much the same as yours.
The notion is based on the secrets of the old trade guilds. You know, the ones that the free/open source movement loathes. Unlike the trade guilds, however, the "secrets" here aren't really anything that you couldn't tell the world, but they choose not to partly out of habit, and partly because if you gave them to the world, the world wouldn't be kind. Beyond that, the secrecy is actually fairly pointless.
If it helps, compare them to the "secrets" of US-style university fraternities/sororities, only they're much less juvenile.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that nobody has made a Tiger Woods joke yet.
That's "mentally challenged slashdot logos", you insensitive clod.
Related question:
In the foreword to the second edition of The God Delusion you stated that you were addressing a specific kind of religion which quite common, and that "the melancholy truth is that decent, understated religion is numerically negligible", notably without giving any numbers.
Comparison of census data and attendance data strongly suggests that largest, and fastest-growing, religious group in the English-speaking world is those who self-identify as some variety of Christian, but do not regularly attend a place of worship. The title "spiritual but not religious" is also increasingly popular. This strongly suggests that while organised religion is on the decline, disorganised religion is even more popular than ever.
Much like music, art, or sex, however much you try to limit or ban an apparent human "need" (even if no one person strictly speaking "needs" any of it), religion is not going away. So should we be trying to encourage people to do it in a way that's more benign than the political organised religions of old? What is the most appropriate way for mystics, even atheist mystics like Eric S. Raymond, to indulge it? Is Alain de Botton on to something?
That's a fair point. It is true that, for example, the design argument does have no legs thanks to 150-year-old science. It is also true that some people (mostly in certain areas of the US) "are convinced" by such arguments.
Let me first correct a mistake that I made. Dawkins wrote the afterword, not the introduction.
You use the phrase "Dawkins' views" as if they are one monolithic entity, which they clearly are not. I'm sure that you don't agree 100% with every single opinion that Dawkins had. If you did, I'd be worried. I'd be even more worried if Krauss did.
As a populariser and champion of modern biology, Dawkins is second to none. Krauss of course agrees with that. Who, apart from a religious fundamentalist or an ignoramus, wouldn't? Krauss is, like Darwin, an atheist, and sees no use for religion, and even sees where it could cause problems in modern society. Join the club there, too.
For the record, the specific claim which embarrassed Krauss was "This could potentially be the most important scientific book with implications for supernaturalism since Darwin." That is an embarrassing statement to make.
I'm no philosopher. I'm a scientist, working in bioinformatics. As far as philosophy goes, I only know just enough to overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Around the time of the last ice age, "culture", "science", "storytelling", "music", "religion" and "medicine" were not distinct fields of human endeavour. They were all the same thing.
Over time, they split off into distinct fields. But nobody could possibly say with a straight face that just because music is distinct from medicine that music has nothing to offer the world today. That's beyond ludicrous.
Philosophy is still giving rise to new areas of study today. As with biological evolution, it's often hard to see because the process is invariably slower than we may hope, and you have to look in some detail to see it happening.
I did not say that, nor did I imply it. I can only suggest you go back and read what I wrote.
On the contrary, I'm saying that science has not superceded or replaced the humanities.
One of the key advantages of science, in fact probably the key advantage, is that it knows its own limitations. It only deals with that which is objectively testable. This is why it's so successful. This is why it's so reliable. This is why it only ever adds to our knowledge, and never takes away from it: science knows where it, even in principle, can't go.
Don't get me wrong. Science can inform just about every interesting area of our lives. But it would be a mistake to think that every interesting area of our lives is science.
This has been an interesting discussion, thanks. You can have the last word if you want.
Yes, he does. When he takes on, for example, the classical arguments for the existence of a deity, he is arguing philosophy. When he argues that to be "God" implies special creation, he's making a philosophical claim. Moreover, he's doing it far worse than most theistic critics of those arguments did, let alone the milennia of secular philosophers who tackled the same issues.
(And, by the way, I didn't even mention Dawkins' introduction to Lawrence Krauss' latest book, which even embarrassed Krauss.)
I agree that Hitchens wasn't arguing philosophy. For the record, I didn't claim that he was. Hitchens was trying to make a case using history and current affairs, or at least an overly cherry-picked version of it.
I don't think you actually understand what philosophers actually do, and I'm not sure that explaining it in any detail would actually help. So here's the bumper-sticker version: Philosophy is the field of human endeavour from which other fields of human endeavour are born.
Every department at a university, from mathematics to the study of drama, is an activity which was once considered to be under the umbrella of "philosophy". Every academic discipline is a child of philosophy, and those disciplines are still being born today. Without philosophy, there would be no new fields of human endeavour.
I'll give just one example: Semantics, the study of word meanings, was developed by philosophers, and graduated from the philosophy department to the linguistics department, with help from the computer science department. All of this happened after "the advent of relativity and quantum physics".
If it helps, consider the role that science fiction plays in the ecosystem of science. Science fiction is the main way that science-minded people use to consider the social and ethical implications of technology, by means of elaborate thought experiments. If you think about it, science wouldn't progress (or at least wouldn't progress anywhere near as fast as it does) without literature.
The best cure for this misconception would be to go and study some philosophy at a modern university. But the easiest would be to read some stuff by modern atheist philosophers.
But more to the point, step back and try to understand what you're actually implying here. What you're indicating is that everything that isn't science (and in particular, everything that is humanities) is useless, because it has been superceded and replaced by science. And you wonder why why people charge "new atheism" with being anti-intellectual?
Lack of belief, or disbelief, in deities is fine, good, rational, and probably accurate. But once you claim that most of the academic mainstream is bunk and all the answers are to be found in your pet field, that's when you slip into a space currently occupied by pseudo-intellectuals and cranks. And you're insulting the majority of academic atheists by telling them that their chosen fields of endeavour are a waste of time.
I'm reminded of Les Murray's famous haiku: Brutal policy, / like inferior art, knows / whose fault it all is.
Here's a less flippant combination:
1) Committing suicide.
2) Helping someone complete a task.
Now you could argue that (say) assisting the terminally ill to die shouldn't be illegal. Fair enough. Even then, there are some boundaries between what is "okay" and what is "not okay", some of which are clear and some of which are not clear.
Winning a contest is legal. Selling is legal. Selling winning a contest is not legal.
Having said that, he has a point. It's going to happen, so we might as well regulate it, so that it happens safely.
I do believe it's more likely that the father is religious than not.
Of course it is. It's more likely that any given person in the United States is religious than not. What I don't get is the post hoc.
(Before you answer, it might help to know that I live in a country whose leader is atheist, and also against same-sex marriage.)
Nonetheless, the fact remains that Dennett knows what he's talking about, and Dawkins doesn't, and so it made for a far better, and far more compelling, book than the other two.
Did you even read the books? Dawkins knows nothing about philosophy, but still spent a lot of his book writing about it. (To be fair, Sam "profile teh Muslims!" Harris has far outdone him with his attempt at moral philosophy.)
Hitchens did know a thing or two about history, which makes it even more disturbing how much he cherry picked the facts beyond all reality. But Hitchens was always a bit gonzo in his journalism, which is one of the reasons he was so likeable.
Honest, plain-spoken ignorance is still ignorance. Go read some actual atheist thinking like Bertand Russell or Robert Ingersoll.
Definitely! It's the second-greatest lesson you'll ever get on why you should only write non-fiction books on topics you know know something about. (The best, of course, being God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens.)
If this stuff interests you, you're far better off reading Breaking the Spell by Dan Dennett. It's a far better book in every respect. Or anything by Robert Ingersoll.
Goedel Escher Bach is the reason I picked this handle. That was 25 years ago; has it really been that long?
I didn't know that! But in retrospect, it makes sense; Al Gore does, after all, have a 4-digit uid.
Maybe, but I've never seen that show, and came up with that particular rhyme independently. Anyone who has ever overdosed on Ogden Nash can usually think up rhymes like that fairly readily.
Look, there's a bunch of stuff in this interview that I disagree with. That's okay; it takes all sorts.
But here's the thing: Linus has earned the right to be a douche.
We are long past the point of hagiography when it comes to Linus. In the early 90s, we all though it was cool that a young, rebellious upstart took on (in retrospect, argued cross-purposes with) the likes of Andrew Tanenbaum. Today, he's middle aged and getting crotchety, and now we just smile, shake our heads and remind ourselves that Linus is Linus. We love him dearly, even if we have to take him with a grain of salt.
Everything he says is a mix of hard-won experience with just the right amount of over-opinionated patent nonsense. But even the over-opinionated patent nonsense is interesting, and I don't mean in the apocryphal Chinese curse sense. It serves our purpose that Linus speaks his mind without restraint, because his signal-to-noise ratio is high enough that getting through the crap to obtain the good stuff is a tractable and even enjoyable endeavour.
Yeah, he can get self-important and myopic at times. So can you, and so can I. You and I haven't won the right by conquest to blurt it to the world.
Actually, playing armchair psychologist for a moment (hey, this is Slashdot), maybe this is actually jealousy. Maybe you're calling Linus a douche because you wish you could be a douche and people would still listen to you.
Mesa same as me,
Please stop confusing non-Americans. I thought this was a Jar Jar Binks reference.
In the rational world, very little. In the world of PR, quite a lot.
If it helps, consider that today, marine scientists are just starting to get access to manned submarines. This technology was at first only available to governments, then to rich people. It was only thanks to said governments and said rich people that enough submarines were made that the costs can now be reduced to the budget of a university. Science is better off because of it.
Forget the "profit motive" nonsense. Part of the role that the rich play in society is that they take one for the team, when it comes to expensive new technology. They are the ones who bought way-too-expensive and planned-obsolete video tape recorders in the early 70s. Thanks to them, the rest of us could afford VCRs by the early 80s.
Only the rich get access to the first generation of any new technology. That's a feature, not a bug. They can iron out the bugs and bring the price down for the rest of us.
Whoever marked this "Troll" clearly doesn't know about what's been preoccupying Australian news over the last week. (Answer: Navel-gazing, as usual, only this time it involves dirty personal attacks against the PM.) In context, this was a good point.
For the benefit of those who are unaware, here's the brief summary: Julia Gillard's father died a couple of weeks ago, and right-wing radio-shock-mouthpiece Alan Jones (for the non-Australians, or even non-Sydneyites, he's roughly the Australian equivalent of Rush Limbaugh: moderate-sized but dedicated following, and self-parody to everyone who doesn't listen to his show) decided to use that in a very insensitive cheap shot at the PM. The remarks were made at a private function, but of course, nothing is private in the Internet era. Alan Jones has since issued a sincere, rambling semi-notpology.
The point being that the PM's PR people are currently enjoying a grace period where personal attacks are Not Cool. The PM herself is, of course, probably not enjoying the fact that her father just died.
On the other hand, Underground screened last night. From that perspective, this is the best of all times to go on the offensive. It's unfortunate that the two events coincided, but there's not a lot you can do about that.
Woah, this must be how Russel Howcroft feels.
Average commuting trip length is about 14 miles in rural environments and about 10.3 in urban environments. Now that's short.
With such distances air transport is totally ridiculous, and rail transport is not viable. With one exception: when there are large numbers of trips that run parallel for the main part of the journey.
Which is also, of course, the problem that a highway is supposed to solve. The tradeoff under consideration here is rail versus highway, not rail versus minor arterial road.
Having said that, I'm not convinced that the "average" is a useful measure in this case. What you really need to see is the shape of the distribution. The average length of a piece of communications cabling is probably quite short, taken over all lengths of communications cable in the world. The median is probably one metre. That doesn't really help you decide whether or not you want to lay new optic fibre between two cities.
Finally, looking at where people do go doesn't measure where people would go if they could. And those journeys are the ones which may actually need new infrastructure.
There's still useful research to be done there. Even binary search trees aren't a solved problem.
At the risk of stating the obvious, an information technology problem is not the same as a computer science problem.
Actually, I much prefer the internet's brutal honesty. It's the bullshit faux politeness IRL that I have a problem with. For example, I can't just say "This code sucks" at work.
On the other hand, to paraphrase a famous line: Opinions are like arseholes. Everyone has one, and most of them are full of shit.
Corporate bureaucracy tends to be deranged in worse ways than state bureaucracy.
My experience, having worked in both, is that this is 100% correct.
State bureaucracy tends to be incompetent, and its principal failure mode is failing to do anything and coming up with excuses why it never does anything. Corporate bureaucracy, by contrast, tends to be nefarious, and its principal failure mode is committing pure distilled evil and covering up for said evil.
If I had to, I know which one I'd pick.
TSA employees typically don't steal from the government who pays them. Steal from anyone who visits the base, on the other hand...
I'm the first in four generations not to be a mason. And with the advent of the internet there are really no masonic secrets anymore.
Yeah, me too. And my assessment of the "secrets" aspect is pretty much the same as yours.
The notion is based on the secrets of the old trade guilds. You know, the ones that the free/open source movement loathes. Unlike the trade guilds, however, the "secrets" here aren't really anything that you couldn't tell the world, but they choose not to partly out of habit, and partly because if you gave them to the world, the world wouldn't be kind. Beyond that, the secrecy is actually fairly pointless.
If it helps, compare them to the "secrets" of US-style university fraternities/sororities, only they're much less juvenile.