End of 2013 Links and Comments

Posted on Saturday 4 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

It’s been busy over the holidays, with family events and whatnot, so here is a belated list of links and comments from the past couple weeks.

Salon: 10 signs that religious fundamentalism is going down

One could hope. Religious fundamentalism isn’t doing the world any good. Some of the 10:

3. Biblical sexuality is getting binned. Finally.
7. The Religious Right is licking wounds.
8. Texas is evolving!

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HuffPo: Word of the Year — Science: Fact vs. Fiction

This says that Merriam Webster announced its selection of “science” as its word of the year for 2013. It has to do with lookups online for the word “science”, not so much for interest in science as

by the pushback and intensifying struggle for supremacy between the forces for empiricism and evidence versus those for beliefs and opinions — a fight between good and evil if you will, or evil and good — depending on where one stands or sits on the issue.

With references to books by Daniel Kahneman and Thomas Gilovich.

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The recent discussion of cognitive biases isn’t totally new; here’s a Boing Boing link to a 1995 speech by Charlie Munger, a respected investor and partner to Warren Buffet:

Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement

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Slate: The “Known World” from 2348 B.C. to A.D. 1828, in the Form of a Single GIF

A fascinating animated graphic that shows how the ‘known world’ — according to Greeks, Romans, and Europeans, of course — has expanded over the past 4500 years. It makes plausible the Biblical view that Jewish sheepherder tribes of the Old Testament era might have thought themselves the center of creation. But since 1828, our understanding of the universe has expanded enormously.

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Prominent author Ian Barbour died this past week; Science on Religion has a remembrance.

As Kurt Vonnegut put it in his novel Breakfast of Champions:

Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

This simple dynamic explains much of why belief in evolution is declining among Republicans (from 54% in 2009 to 43% today, only four years later) while it’s increasing among Democrats (from 64% to 67% in the same period). The evidence for evolution is beyond overwhelming, so the problem isn’t that the scientific case hasn’t been made. The problem is that our culture is becoming increasingly polarized along James Hunter’s “orthodox” and “progressive” lines, and  people are more and more signing up wholesale for the cluster of beliefs they associate with their preferred worldview – and against the groups they don’t want to belong to.

[bold emphasis mine]

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Your Brain on Religion

Posted on Saturday 4 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Interesting article today on Salon, an excerpt from a book by D.F. Swaab, about to be published.

This is your brain on religion: Uncovering the science of belief

I especially agree with this, the first paragraph:

As far as I’m concerned, the most interesting question about religion isn’t whether God exists but why so many people are religious. There are around 10,000 different religions, each of which is convinced that there’s only one Truth and that they alone possess it. Hating people with a different faith seems to be part of belief.

But it’s not difficult to understand why religion exists.

The religious programming of a child’s brain starts after birth. The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is rightly incensed when reference is made to “Christian, Muslim, or Jewish children,” because young children don’t have any kind of faith of their own; faith is imprinted in them at a very impressionable stage by their Christian, Muslim, or Jewish parents. Dawkins rightly points out that society wouldn’t tolerate the notion of atheist, humanist, or agnostic four-year-olds and that you shouldn’t teach children what to think but how to think. Dawkins sees programmed belief as a byproduct of evolution. Children accept warnings and instructions issued by their parents and other authorities instantly and without argument, which protects them from danger. As a result, young children are credulous and therefore easy to indoctrinate. This might explain the universal tendency to retain the parental faith.

It goes on with a fascinating exploration:

The evolution of modern man has given rise to five behavioral characteristics common to all cultures: language, toolmaking, music, art, and religion. Precursors of all these characteristics, with the exception of religion, can be found in the animal kingdom. However, the evolutionary advantage of religion to humankind is clear.

And he goes on to explain those reasons — nothing that would be new to anyone who’s read Daniel Dennett, and others.

Needless to say, religion isn’t about accurate perception of what is true about the real world.

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Two Interesting Articles

Posted on Friday 27 December 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Adam Lee looks at the current political climate and what may be coming next.

The Rising of the Sun

The cause of these convulsions is privileged distress on a massive scale, as white Christian conservatives realize they’re losing their power to unilaterally dictate the direction of the country. Taking their place is a coalition of younger, more multiracial, less religious voters – and the old guard is obsessed with the idea that these upstarts are immoral, undeserving, and will bring America to ruin. It’s shocking how willing they are to say this openly, as in the recent Wall Street Journal editorial that, no joke, laments the end of WASP rule.

Barack Obama, a black man with a mixed ethnic heritage and a funny name, is like a composite of everything they fear. (The exception to this is that he was Christian and not, say, Muslim – but they were happy to fix that detail.) And as disheartening as his election was for them, his re-election made it even worse, confirming that his first win was no aberration but the sign of a demographic change that may be permanent. Their wailing and rending of garments over Mitt Romney’s loss can be understood in this light.

…
The religious right believes it’s losing the culture war, and they’re acting accordingly, lashing out in fury with all the tools they still possess, trying to build walls to hold off the future as long as possible. And when your opponents think they’re losing, you should believe them. For true-blue American liberals, this may be the darkest hour of the night. But that just means the sun will be rising all the sooner.

Over at Science On Religion: Is religion anthropomorphism?

The verdict is in: we are our brains, roughly speaking. That is, according to modern neuroscience and cognitive science, our personalities, dreams, and experiences are all products of intensely complex interactions of the neurons in our craniums. You can disagree or agree with this claim, but nearly all experts who study the brain and mind are convinced of it. When it comes to things spiritual, the cognitive science of religion (CSR) is a field that tries to understand religious beliefs from within this naturalistic framework. And recently, one of the founding thinkers in CSR outlined a central claim in the field: religion is essentially about anthropomorphism, or the tendency for our brains to see persons in the world around us.

The sketch of Guthrie’s seven-step model of how our evolved minds generate religion is similar to, roughly, the thesis of Jesse Bering’s recent book The Belief Instinct, which in turn develops the consequences of the numerous psychological biases explored by David McRaney and others.

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Sin against mankind

Posted on Monday 23 December 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Back to reading that A.C. Grayling book, and can’t resist documenting for the record this passage that Grayling quotes by one W.K. Clifford:

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in him mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it — the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

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Links and Quotes about that Duck guy

Posted on Monday 23 December 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

I’d never heard of him or his show, until this past week. The controversy exposes a deep rift in American culture… which has always been there, I realize. Those of use who are forward looking, progressive, like to think the reactionaries are a dwindling minority, but perhaps not.

I already Facebooked this:

There Are Two Americas, and One Is Better Than the Other

In one America, it’s OK to say this of gays and lesbians: “They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil.” In the other America, you’re not supposed to say that.

Have the “love the sinner, hate the sin” folks noticed this quote?

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Here is Andrew Sullivan [again, a nominally conservative, Catholic, blogger].

In that last round-up of sins, Robertson puts homosexuality first, then adultery, then lying. The last two are actually in the Ten Commandments – and yet “homosexuality” is on their level, along with the view that somehow homosexual orientation can be prayed away (something that the largest Christian denomination on earth, the Catholic Church, denies). And this fundamentalist psychology then deepens:

If you break one sin you may as well break them all. If we lose our morality, we will lose our country. It will happen.

Again, as Christian doctrine, this is bonkers. There are obvious levels of sinfulness; the smallest white lie is not the same as a rape, and committing one does not mean committing them all. But you can hear the rhythms of the terrified fundamentalist psyche behind all these words. It is not enough for sins to occur (because that would make our time no different than any other); it is always the case that we are confronting a crisis of sinfulness, and that crisis is always spinning out of control into apocalyptic scenarios. So you give in to the gays, you give in to everything evil, because “if you break one sin you may as well break them all.” And if you break them all, America ceases to exist.

To recap: fundamentalism is not the same as Christianity. It has certain psychological tropes. The first is to see sexual sin as far the worst of them and the root of all of them. The second is to see gays – whose very being represents sexual sin – as an enemy class within a society bringing about its destruction if they are not stopped or converted (see: Jews, Europe, circa 1300 – 1945). The third is to see these gays as opening the door to every other sin and evil. The fourth is to “lose our country.”

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Meanwhile, Slate wonders Does the Bible Say What Phil Robertson Thinks It Says About Homosexuality?

Only sorta, the author writes. The Sodom story is widely misinterpreted, not just by the Duck guy. The author makes this point:

Sin is an offense against God. It has no meaning and no relevance if you don’t believe in God—except when religious believers impose their worldview on others by writing into civil law prohibitions or obligations rooted in their religious faith, the most basic violation of religious freedom. This is one reason it’s so preposterous when conservative Christians complain that not being allowed to impose their religious faith on others violates their religious freedom.

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And one more, at Business Insider: When You Defend Phil Robertson, Here’s What You’re Really Defending.

3. Robertson hates gay people. Robertson in 2010: “Women with women, men with men, they committed indecent acts with one another, and they received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions. They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil.”

This last one is key. My inbox is full of “love the sinner, hate the sin” defenses of Robertson’s 2013 remarks. But Robertson doesn’t love gay people. He thinks they’re, well, “full of murder.” His views on gays are hateful, inasmuch as they are full of hate.

My own position, of course, is that whatever the Bible says is irrelevant to any modern society; it is a relic of primitive cultures whose standards are no longer applicable.

Posted in Culture, Lunacy, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Quotes about that Duck guy

Yesterday’s Favorite Song

Posted on Monday 23 December 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Didn’t have a chance to post until today. Another track from the new Moby album.

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New Ten Commandments

Posted on Friday 20 December 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Came across this recently,

The New Ten Commandments

which strikes me as eminently sensible and admirable.

This is from a blogger named Adam Lee, who posts at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism and who’s published a book by the same name. He makes a common observation about the Biblical ten:

…the first four of them are purely religious in nature and intent, serving no purpose other than to show how a primitive tribal culture felt their deity should be worshiped, and the remaining six are simply general moral principles, some of which our society abides by, some of which it does not, and most of which are obvious, common-sense ethical directives that every society in history that did not ultimately destroy itself figured out. It certainly took no special insight or wisdom to produce them.

Lee’s list is below, but his entire post is well worth reading for its essays explicating each ‘commandment’. The first part of his post concerns Lee’s reaction to some fundamentalist’s site promoting the Biblical Ten,

which is a disturbing mix of fire-and-brimstone nightmares, dark hate-filled fantasies, and rants from the depths of a clearly ill mind, claims to advocate a “rebirth” of America upon biblical law, and envisions a theocratic state where all religions other than the author’s extreme fundamentalist Christianity would be outlawed and where atheists and homosexuals, among others, would be executed.

You could skip this, and scroll down about four pages to get to his proposed Decalogue. Which are:

  1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. [The Golden Rule]
  2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.
  3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
  4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
  5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
  6. Always seek to be learning something new.
  7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
  8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
  9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
  10. Question everything.

The more I read the essays that accompany each commandment, the more I want to quote. I’ll settle for just one, for now — about the 6th:

Of all the threats to morality and incentives to evil, perhaps the greatest is dogmatism, the invincible certainty that you are right and that the opinion of anyone who disagrees with you is worthless and can be rejected out of hand. The greatest crimes in history have been committed by those who possessed such certainty, whether it appears in the context of religious belief or not. From the belief that a person’s opinion is worthless, it is only a small leap to the conclusion that the person themself is as well.

Likewise, the belief that any one person is fallible and the weight of the evidence must always be the ultimate arbiter of what is true – something known in its institutionalized form as the scientific method – has driven the greatest and most rapid progress humanity has ever known. Therefore, the second five of the new ten commandments are designed to counter the threat of dogmatism and encourage continued human progress by training people to use their intellect in the best way and to the fullest extent.

Ironically, while there’s a Wikipedia page about Alternatives to the Ten Commandments, Lee’s list is included as an entry for Richard Dawkins, because Dawkins cited it in his book. (You know which book.) Lee deserves more credit. He should be better known.

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Hitchens and the Speculative End of Religion

Posted on Wednesday 18 December 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

There have been several online articles in recent days about Christopher Hitchens, author of god is not great [lower cases intentional], who died just two years ago.

Jerry Coyne checks in on rival takes on Christopher Hitchens, both on Salon, including this one by an editor for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Tayler, criticizing an earlier essay (which was critical of Hitchens) by Sean McElwee.

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/14/the_real_new_atheism_rejecting_religion_for_a_just_world/”

McElwee calls for a “truce” between believers and nonbelievers. But he stands on the losing side of both public opinion trends and history. According to a Pew poll conducted in 2012, a record number of young Americans – a quarter of those between the ages of 18 and 29 — see themselves as unaffiliated with any religion. Atheists’ ranks are swelling, and believers are finding it increasingly difficult to justify their faith.
…
McElwee then tendentiously defines religion so as to paper over its often decisive role in precipitating conflicts. Though he allows that it might “motivate acts of social justice and injustice,” “[r]eligion is both a personal search for truth as well as a communal attempt to discern where we fit in the order of things.” Religion first and foremost consists of unsubstantiated, dogmatically advanced explanations for the cosmos and our place in it, with resulting universally applicable rules of conduct. A good many of these rules – especially those regarding women’s behavior and their (subservient) status vis-à-vis men, and prescriptions for less-than-merciful treatment of gays – are repugnant, retrograde, and arbitrary, based on “sacred texts” espousing “revealed truths” dating back to what the British atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell justly called the “savage ages.” (Islam by no means has a monopoly on such rules – check Leviticus for its catalogue of “crimes”: working on the Sabbath, cursing one’s parents, being the victim of rape – that merit the death penalty.) Just how such “holy” compendia of ahistorical, often macabre fables are supposed to help anyone in a “personal search for truth” mystifies me.
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“The impulse to destroy religion will ultimately fail,” McElwee claims. Just what he means by this is unclear. Hitchens spoke out tirelessly against religion but never believed it could be eradicated; rather, he likened it to Camus’ plague-infected rats, scurrying about in humanity’s sewer, ever awaiting a chance to reemerge.

Despite the unpleasant allusion to rats, I would endorse Hitchens’ take on the futility of eradicating religion, simply because human psychology is what it is, and ignorance of the world and the universe is the default, requiring constant effort (i.e. education) to overcome. Back to my reset-the-world scenario: humanity would recreate culture and language and religions and science, and while science would be more or less the same — because it’s grounded in reality — cultures and languages would be different, and so would religions, because they result from psychological biases of the human mind in attempting to understand how the natural world works.

An SF writer influential when I was a teenager was Arthur C. Clarke, not just for the scales of space and time he evoked, and humanity’s small place in it, but for his calm assumption that, as humanity matured and moved out into the universe, the old superstitions of religion would fade. You don’t see much in the way of institutionized religion in Star Trek, to take a pop culture example. But I’ve changed my mind over the years about the likelihood of the Clarke assumption, without a species-wide leap toward more comprehensive education. And how would that happen? If anything the past decade or so has shown is that increased access to information – i.e. the internet – only creates self-reinforcing communities clinging to one ideology or another, the very opposite of any possible shared culture or comprehensive education about the real world. It demonstrates that most people can, in fact, ‘get by’ not knowing much of anything, and ‘believing’ lots of things that aren’t real, and still conduct themselves functionally as human beings. And there doesn’t seem to be much reason for thinking how or why that should ever change.

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Awe

Posted on Wednesday 18 December 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a story that’s gotten some attention this past week — reports that when people look at awesome scenery, like the Grand Canyon, they are more inclined to attribute them to God (whatever that means).

www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hutson/awe-increases-religious-belief_b_4423247.html

The emotion of awe has been described by psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt as a combination of two elements: a sense of vastness — in terms of size or power or prestige — and a “need for accommodation,” a desire to somehow accommodate the experience into one’s worldview. When you look at the Grand Canyon, the scale of the thing overwhelms you, and its magnificence challenges you to find some explanation for its existence. In other words: Wow! How?

This disorientation sets the stage for magical thinking. Humans tend to flee from uncertainty, and they respond to it by looking for patterns in the world. They sometimes see patterns where none exists, and those patterns sometimes involve supernatural phenomena. Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky have reported that making subjects feel out of control leads them to see shapes in random noise, to see false correlations in financial reports, to see coincidences as conspiracies, and to rely on superstitious actions.

So here I have a chance to to set down what seems to me a rather obvious observation, to those not blinkered by religious awe. To wit: why would it be that *certain* experiences in the world evoke this god-feeling? Seeing the Grand Canyon, or the immensities of space; or, to those more easily impressed, a simple rainbow, or the glow of sun from behind clouds.

Now think about this: if there is a god who made the universe, then this god is responsible for every part of it. The Grand Canyon, the dirt beneath your feet, the rainbow, the dead squirrel lying in the road — and even more repulsive circumstances I will refrain from suggesting. Everything you find impressive or disgusting and anything in between. So: if you find some of these experiences evocative of God and not others, then something is going on in your head that is not about experience of the world evoking God. Here is where we can cue the psychological biases discussed in this article. Perception of God is not about experience of reality; it’s about something going on inside your head.

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Aggressive Atheist Steps Down

Posted on Wednesday 18 December 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Interesting article by Martin S. Pribble, whose blog I’ve noticed from time to time, which post has been repurposed by Slate.come

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/12/why_i_m_quitting_the_online_atheism_community.html

Faith overrides knowledge and truth in any situation, so arguing with a theist is akin to banging your head against a brick wall: You will injure yourself and achieve little.

…
I have decided to define myself by what I stand for in life rather than what I don’t believe in. I call this “methodological humanism.” In essence, methodological humanism is a standpoint by which everyone, theist, agnostic, and atheist alike, can agree on as a platform from which we can all benefit: the need for food, water, and sanitation; the protection of our natural environment; and the preservation of the world as a whole. Without these things, we, as a species, cease to exist.

So much of Internet discourse is based upon the disagreements we have with one another, and sometimes it feels like sport, about scoring points and relishing your opponent’s missteps. But if we can first find a space where we agree, a bottom-line for the well-being of all people, then the arguments about belief begin to look like petty squabbling over childhood toys.

It helps to understand that for many people, faith and religion are more important than having an accurate understanding of reality, even if faith and religion entail obvious practical absurdities, as they always tend to do. (Otherwise it would not be ‘faith’.) This dovetails with the ‘getting by’ comments in previous posts. In strictly terms of human survival, even prosperity, the myths (and psychological biases) can be more useful than a firm grip on reality. Letting go of the myths and pursuing reality is a dangerous, brave, scary thing to do.

In general, there comes a point when you have come to terms with what you ‘believe’ in – with the way in which you understand your own apprehension of the world – and cease needing to defend that to everyone or anyone. Instead you move on; you accomplish something; you show by example. This is why to some degree it doesn’t matter whether people ‘believe’ looney, unreal things, because the crazy contents of their minds don’t actually have much of an effect on anyone or anything.

As some bloggers frequently ask, what has faith accomplished lately? Has the religious understanding of God changed in the past century? No, because there’s nothing in the real world to affect that understanding.

Whereas the real world changes daily as science and technology continue to develop. Based on understanding and interaction with the real world. Faith doesn’t build 747s, or the internet.

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