the evolving mind

The question in the title to this post is bogus. Can you spot why?

Yes, it’s that word — or. The question begs black or white answers. It very likely simplifies the issue to the point of gross distortion.

Valerie Tarico made the point in a recent HuffPost: Ugandan Atrocity: Perversion of Religion or the Real Deal?

She begin with this disturbing information:

Last week, the Seattle Times featured an editorial, finally, about the horrendous anti-gay movement that has been spawned in Uganda by American Evangelicals. Unable to make sufficient homophobic headway at home, evangelists have been heading to Africa, with their literally perfect Bibles as proof that God hates gays. Ugandan leaders found God – the god of the evangelists — and submitted a law condemning gays to death.

So religion is bad, right? Well, totally bad? Of course, religious folk keep touting the positive. Religion is good; religion is necessary. So, for balance, I guess, others attempt to rebut the claim.

But the good and bad are two sides of the religion coin. Religion isn’t “or,” rather it is “and.” As Tarico aptly puts it –

I find it ironic that anything evil done in the name of religion is a “perversion” or blasphemy — and anything good, that’s the real deal. It’s an argument I hear over and over in response to my articles on the Daily Kos and Huffington Post.

The falsehood is patently obvious. It’s like saying that selfishness and greed are a perversion of our humanity, and altruism is what humans really are all about. Get real. Ask any biologist whether dogs are affectionate or predatory and they will laugh at you: Do bees make honey or do they have stingers?

My selfishness is every bit as real as my generosity. My tenderness and bitchiness, compassion and aggression all are ME. Religion’s track record of power-brokering and atrocity is every bit as integral as its history of giving voice to our moral instincts and sense of wonder.

Actually, if religion were a coin, that coin would be one very complex, multi-sided thing.

One of the problems I have with any claims about religion being good or bad is that the examples cited assume that, religion aside, all other things/variables are equal. In other words, there is no control group in these discussions. Maybe religion is like a flag people march beneath, with little real causal power, good or bad. Mind you, I suspect that isn’t the case much of the time, but how are we to know that the good or bad wouldn’t get done without religion? That is one very important question.

It does seem to me, however, that religion includes two potent risks. First, the social structure it provides can be readily hijacked for bad. Oh, and for good. Can’t forget that. Are there other social structures out there that have a lesser propensity for being hijacked for bad but still retain the potential to do good?

Second risk: religious doctrine/dogma is generally moralistic. And people feel strongly about morals. Armed with emotional concepts, people will tend to use them, even where they don’t belong.

Consider this title and line of text I read this morning in a news release by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“Americans United Condemns TV Preacher’s Callous Statement on Haitian Earthquake”

On his Christian Broadcasting Network’s “700 Club” today, [Pat] Robertson said the Haitians “swore a pact to the devil” in order to become free of French domination.

And thus hell was unleashed on them.

If you ask me, Pat Robertson is insane. Delusional. One of the biggest “bads” religion seems to provide is a safe haven for delusions. Perhaps it even promotes their spread.

Is religion fully bad? No. Is it fully good? No. Can religion be refined to save the good while excising the bad? Maybe. But I suspect that once freed from all the dangerous and outdated content, what remained couldn’t be called religion. You’d have a secular interest group. Then why continue to call it religion? Because the term is attractive. And because we lack an equally attractive alternative.

Technorati Links: freethought, religion

“The war on Christmas” spilled no blood. So please quit tooting that bogus horn. Please.

[cartoon thanks to http://www.jesusandmo.net/]

Technorati Links: freethought

(Recycled material: I’m in holiday/travel mode. This material first posted on Jan 30, 2009)

The Campus Crusade for Christian Assumptions

It is fully reasonable for skeptics to question the existence of the Loch Ness Deity. Or of a god, however clearly or poorly defined. I would argue that for a skeptic to take a hands-off approach to religion would be to fail to be consistent in their thinking and worldview.

Yesterday, after teaching a developmental psychology class, I passed by the door of the host professor (if that’s what you call them) for the Campus Crusade for Christ. Right there on my campus. On the professor’s door hung a display holding a bunch of brand-new pamphlets for students and staff to take. So I took one. What was I supposed to do, put blinders on and walk past it as if it didn’t exist?

As an exercise in critical thinking I’m going to go through the pamphlet, line-by-line. This will be the first post in a series.

Front cover (title):

“Where will you spend eternity?”

How many assumptions are inherent in that question? I find three. Let’s spell them out.

1) That there will be an eternity. It is possible that time began at the birth of our universe. We don’t know one way or the other. Before the big bang there may have been no substance and no time and space as well. To strip eternity of its essential temporal characteristic would be to speak nonsensically.

2) That there will be a “you” to persist for eternity. There is no evidence of a spirit or soul that continues to exist after death.

3) That there are a number of possible destinations for your spirit/soul to go after death. The “where” part of the question would be unnecessary if there was only one location to “spend” eternity at.

Notice that I didn’t say any of the above are untrue, just that they are assumptions: they have been untested and/or lack empirical backing.

Technorati Links: Christianity, critical thinking, education

(Recycled material: I’m in holiday/travel mode. This material first posted on Dec. 24, 2008)

A Supernatural Assumption

A research finding released four days ago bore this headline: God Or Science? A Belief In One Weakens Positive Feelings For The Other.

As you might guess, I have doubts about the wording of the title and the news release itself, which starts like this:

A person’s unconscious attitudes toward science and God may be fundamentally opposed, researchers report, depending on how religion and science are used to answer “ultimate” questions such as how the universe began or the origin of life.

The problem — and its no quibble — consists of not defining which deity they are referring to, for there are and have been hundreds of them, thereby perpetuating the assumption that there is one deity that all people recognize.

C’mon! Study some history and anthropology and world religions. Inject some objectivity into the piece. Using the word “god” both capitalized and without a preceding article not only perpetuates assumptions but it also compromises science. In this case, what god, precisely, does belief in weaken feelings for science?

A much more scientific wording would make explicit that the “belief in” question was not about the god Zeus or Ra or XYZ, but no doubt a generic, monotheistic version of the Abrahamic tradition.

The first sentence of the final paragraph states,

The most obvious implication of the research is that “to be compatible, science and religion need to stick to their own territories, their own explanatory space,” Preston said.

That’s an odd sort of compatibility. Sort of like saying a husband and wife need to stay in their own rooms to be compatible.

Good science precisely defines its variables and tests its claims about the universe. Popular religion does neither. It is a poster-child for bad science.

If we want to best understand the universe we should stick to science even if it means shredding religious claims and assumptions.

One god? By name alone.

Technorati Links: critical thinking, religion, science

Shrimp plants (Justicia brandegeana) are currently blooming in our Florida yard. Or at least they were. I am now in the north country, where I will be spending my holidays. I just returned from a hike through snowy woods where I encountered not a single plant in bloom.

Why don’t flowers blossom in the snow (sure, there are probably a few tundra species that do). I imagine part of it has to do with what inner ice crystals would do to the fragile tissues of flowers. There are likely a number of sensible, biological reasons for the lack of blossoms in winter.

Are there any sensible, theological reasons why flowers don’t unfurl during blizzards and cold snaps? If a priest could find one in a “holy book”, or make one up, should it be taught alongside the biological reasons for things in school science classrooms?

Of course not.

Keep religion out of science. Because science it isn’t.

Technorati Links: biology, creationism, education

The news release of the recent discovery of a new supernova could have — perhaps should have — worldview altering implications. At least for those with worldviews lagging behind the times.

The very big.

First, the size of the thing. The star that exploded was 100 times the size of our sun. Yowza. Not only is our sun not the center of the universe, it isn’t even the biggest. Not by a long shot. This finding isn’t relevant just to sun-worshippers of the literal kind. Any believer in Biblical cosmology, Genesis, should, in the least, wonder on what day their god created this greater sun.

The very little.

Second, the news release on ScienceDaily contains this info about some of the unique super-supernova dynamics -

The balance in a super-giant star is different. Here, the photons (light particles) are so hot and energetic, they interact to produce pairs of particles: electrons and their opposites, positrons. In the process, particles with mass are created from the mass-less photons, and this consumes the star’s energy. [bold added]

Massless particles combine to produce particles with mass…. Findings at the quantum level highlight the degree to which some of our primary philosophical concepts may be problematic and lead our thinking astray.

Religious believers, when doubting evolution and arguing for the necessity of a god, will often argue, “How can something come from nothing?” While this is a legitimate question, I wonder about the continued legitimacy of the concept “something.”

Does the universe consist of stuff (objects/matter)? Stuff in motion? How can stuff come from non-stuff?

But wait, energy is as fundamental/essential as is mass and matter. Maybe energy is the other side of the same coin of mass, which we tend to identify as “stuff.”

Thanks to science, philosophers today (including the theological sort) are being forced into addressing such seemingly basic questions of the nature of “stuff” before going on to wondering where this stuff comes from. At least the better educated ones.

Technorati Links: beliefs, cosmology

If aliens from a distant world visited ours, would we insist — to their face or behind their backs — that our solar system, our galaxy, was more important than theirs?

Some religious folk claim that were the Earth to be visited by non-religious aliens, this would do nothing to shake their faith. And there you have a good example of how faith can place your intellect in a hermetically-sealed Ziploc of myopic belief.

[Photo thanks to NASA]

Technorati Links: atheism, cosmos

Valerie Talerico is a fairly vocal, non-believing writer who frequently has articles appear on the Huffington Post.

I have read a couple of these recently, and have criticisms about each.

1) When Science Teachers Don’t Believe In Evolution

As an example of positive criticism, I give Valerie an enthusiastic huzzah! for this idea she expresses:

These people, in my mind, worship an idol with clay feet. They don’t worship a Power that is actually great enough to create the intricacies of the natural world, but rather a golden calf called the inerrant Bible or the inerrant Koran. (Call it bibliolatry—text worship. In an age of widespread literacy and printing presses, what better golden calf than a literally perfect book?)

Bibliolatry indeed! Most educated/liberal folk consider this particularly crazy, considering the many versions/translations of the Bible and the many different “holy” books found worldwide. But I wonder: is bibliolatry simply a relatively retrogressive, rigid way of supporting beliefs in a god, and conservative notions of what that god wants?

While god-belief not strictly tethered to the writings in ancient texts may strike some as a “more enlightened” version of religion, this form strikes me as merely better streamlined for acceptance by educated minds. Though the fat has been trimmed away, the rotten meat remains.

2) Like Alcohol, Religion Disinhibits Violence, Doesn’t Cause It

In this article, Tarico argues that religion doesn’t outright “cause” violence, but instead disinhibits it. Like alcohol disinhibits violence.

Here’s the problem: Our thinking about the cause of specific behaviors is tremendously flawed if we persist in attempting to find the cause of some behavior or class of behaviors, verses attempting to identify the causes, plural.

When I taught introductory psychology I would include in my very first lecture this analogy about why seeking simply answers can be problematic and naive:

Think of human behavior as a “spilling of beans.” Akin to the old Milton Bradley game, Don’t Spill the Beans, human psychology spills over into a given behavior not due to a single, causal bean. Instead, there are a number of beans that topple the pot. While we habitually focus on one “bean” as being the most important, or unimportant, this can be deeply misleading.

Consider the reasons, plural, that one person might take the life of another (engage in homicidal behavior): jealously, anger, social stress, fear, self-defense, hormone levels, mental illness, drug use, etc, etc.

Clearly, one reason alone infrequently causes homicidal behavior. Rather, a number of factors are usually involved.

Turning to religion “inspired” violence, it is foolish to insist that religion alone is or is not THE cause. Yet can religion be one of the causal factors? Definitely.

In some circumstances (when combined with other “beans”) religion can be part of the group of factors that result in a person tipping over into violent behavior. To claim otherwise, including arguing that religion merely “disinhibits” a pre-existent tendency, seems to me borderline apologetic folly.

Technorati Links: psychology, religion, violence

PZ Myers, on his blog Pharyngula, recently had a post titled, God is a sockpuppet. His title perfectly fits this very funny comic:

[from http://www.jesusandmo.net/]

Technorati Links: belief, culture

When in high school, and still going through the motions as a Catholic, I once got in a quarrel with the girl I was dating. What was the quarrel about? The Pope.

The girl and I had recently met at a youth bowling outing put on by our church. We hit it off and enjoyed a few weeks of good clean fun together.

One of the things that precipitated our break up was the scheduled visit to our state by the Pope. My girlfriend was very excited and planned to attend come hell or floodwaters. While I was okay with her excitement, she wasn’t okay with my ambivalence. No, I didn’t plan to waste a full day of my precious youth to go see “some guy.” I probably said, He lives in a castle and wears a fancy costume . . . big deal.

Decades later, this current Pope is likewise “just some guy” to me. Oh sure, he’s a politically important figure. But don’t expect me to revere his opinion an anything more than the opinion itself warrants. Ad hominem arguments — whether they reflect uncritical rejection or acceptance — are logically flawed. And I prefer to steer clear of such pitfalls.

[comic thanks to atheistcartoons.com]

Technorati Links: atheism, logic