Category: Atheism

Over at HuffPo, Mark Kleiman has a piece entitled Mushrooms and mysticism in which he reports on a remarkably thorough study into the effects of the “magic mushroom” hallucinogen psilocybin. The team at Johns Hopkins confirmed what most people would expect: psilocybin reliably (over 60% of the time) triggers a “full” mystical experience.
The author then starts in on the public policy issues: the fact that the National Institute on Drug Abuse wants to drop the whole thing, and the question of what happens when freedom of religious expression collides with drug policy:

If taking a dose of psilocybin under controlled conditions has a better-than-even chance of occasioning a full-blown mystical experience, it seems fairly hard to argue that forbidding such use doesn’t interfere with the free exercise of religion…. [The[ treaty banning psilocybin… seems to run squarely into the internationally recognized human right to religious practice, belief, and expression.

OK, I’m sure that those are important topics. But to me this study is just another nail in the coffin of religious experience as “evidence” for the supernatural. Four hundred years ago most people from Europe (including those taking over the Americas) were hard-core dualists: souls and other spirit-beings not only inhabited bodies, but could even invade them. Today, most intelligent people accept that a neuro-chemical brain malfunction (with genetic predisposition) is a better explanation than demonic possession for what we now call schizophrenia. Perhaps the overwhelming evidence for the natural, non-mystical origin of religious experience, coupled with facing up to non-issues like this will eventually banish “soulism” too. It’s about time.

I caught the No. 16 bus up to Wallingford this afternoon, to go to see the movie “Venus”. Peter O’Toole was wonderful; highly recommended. I got there 20 minutes early, so I prowled around a bit, and found that the Kabul, Seattle’s (?only) Afghan restaurant, was just two blocks from the cinema. Chris took us there a few years ago, but we’d come by a different route, at night, so I didn’t recognize the neighbourhood. I couldn’t resist the opportunity, so when the film was over I hung out at the local Starbucks until the Kabul opened, and then had a great dinner.
While I was travelling in both directions, I was listening to an old favourite album on my iPod. When I got home, I checked NetNewsWire for new blog items and was surprised to find this over at Andrew Sullivan:

Sully was using it to illustrate this piece by Norm Geras. Good stuff, up to a point, but then he has to go and take a dig at Richard Dawkins. Perhaps he should read Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza (which I’m in the middle of), and pay attention to the subject of the Inquisition. Racism and torture in the name of divine love. Nauseating. Dawkins has it exactly right, in my opinion.

Here’s a thoughtful piece by Father Jake on the unravelling of the Episcopal Church. Obviously it doesn’t involve me directly, but it’s sad to watch people I care for in pain over the thinly-disguised bigotry that’s being peddled. He quotes Ruth Gledhill:

…Tell anyone outside the Church that you’re a Christian these days, and they make one assumption about you. It is not that you are spiritual, or ascetically-minded, or dedicated to helping others, or opposed to the culture of consumerism. It is that you are a homophobe…

And as someone who still has a naive belief that tolerance is a British character-trait (yes, I know…), it’s dispiriting to see the Archbishop of Canterbury pandering to the bigots in Africa and Texas.

R. J. Eskow has generated some attention with his “15 questions” challenge to the group that he describes as “militant atheists”. P.Z. and others have pointed out that this is a fairly blatant strawman argument; for example:

Apparently, we’ve been blaming every problem in the universe on religion and religion alone, and we need to eradicate faith in order to inaugurate our new world order of peace, prosperity, and reason.

Obviously Eskow can’t actually point at any atheist who makes such a wild claim, but he’s not going to let that get in the way of a good blogfight. Anyway, let’s run through his questions (abbreviated for space):

1. Where [sic] the wars so often cited by militants (the Crusades, etc.) primarily religious in nature, or did their root causes stem from other factors such as economics, nationalism, and territorial expansion?
   All wars are complicated, multicausal phenomena. However if we flip the question around, and ask (e.g.) “Would the Crusades have occurred without the presence of religious forces?”, the answer is almost certainly “no”. Consider the role of the papacy (and the basis of its political power), or the role of religion in motivating the enthusiastic participation of the hoi polloi. It seems clear that in many wars religion has been a necessary – if not sufficient – cause.
2. Historically, has terrorism been driven primarily by religion – or by other forces?
   Historically, terrorism has simply represented an extreme form of asymmetric conflict, and has occurred in many settings not all of which are defined by religion. It is clear, however, that in many such conflicts religious beliefs have been invoked as a way of dehumanizing the victims of terrorism, or to justify actions which clearly conflict with widespread notions of just action. (One can also see various examples of religiously-inspired “terrorism” in which the “religion card” was first played by the established power against which terrorism is directed.)
3. Does the historical experience of nontheistic countries challenge the notion that religion is a major factor in causing internal oppression or external military conflict?
   I don’t believe that we have enough experience of “nontheistic countries” (whatever is meant by this) to provide a useful sample. Are we talking about established religions, the religiosity of the populace, the invocation of religious arguments by political elites, or what?
4. What is the extent of religion’s role in creating individual discontent and unhappiness through ostracism, sexual repression, prejudice, etc. in various world cultures?
   A lot depends on how such issues are viewed – and debated, if at all – within different cultures. Are the dominant arguments based on institutional authority and tradition, or on individual rights and reason?
5. Is Islam the origin for genital mutiliation, stoning of adulterous wives, and other abusive practices?
   See my previous comment. Religion is the force which elevates institutional (usually patriarchal) authority over individual freedom. When religious leaders are not given privileged roles, arguments from tradition are greatly weakened.
6. Would the elimination of religion alone eliminate these harmful practices, or would additional actions need to take place?
   It is necessary but not sufficient. There are, unfortunately, several examples of non-religious societies that do not respect human rights. However I don’t believe that there are any examples of strongly religious societies which truly respect human rights. (And to forestall the obvious response, I am using religion here to refer only to belief systems dominated by supernatural elements – gods, souls, rebirth, life after death, and so forth.)
7. If so, how can such practices be stopped most quickly and effectively – by campaigning to eliminate all religion, or by using moderate religion as a countermeasure against extremism?
   It’s unclear how effective “moderate religion” can be in this respect. Take an institution that many would regard as an obvious example: the Church of England. In spite of their mild-mannered approach, and their support of various progressive causes, the Archbishop of Canterbury is unwilling to condemn the virulent homophobia and hate-speech of African bishops. Apparently unity is more important than principle. And moderate Christian groups still publically revere the entire text of the Bible, including the language which glorifies rape, genocide, and bigotry, and which forms the basis of much of the fundamentalist Christian agenda. Until moderate Christians are willing to follow Thomas Jefferson and rip out of their Bibles those texts which are an affront to the presumed Christian ideals of peace, charity, love and mercy, I don’t believe that they will be much help.
8. Can the positive influence of religion – in reducing conflict, bringing personal fulfillment, building communities, etc. – be quantified and measured against the negatives?
   I don’t think any of this can be quantified. It’s interesting to see if one could identify incidents of such “positive influences” which are uniquely derived from religion, rather than a natural humanistic empathy for our fellows. I think it’s too soon to attempt a broader statistically-based analysis, though. Secular humanism is too recent a broad social phenomenon to disentagle the various motivations, both personal and institutional.
9. Do the social problems caused by religion stem from personal religious belief, from organized religious activity, or both?
   Both.
10. Is all religious activity harmful, or just the fundamentalist variety (which one research project estimates involves roughly one-fifth of all religious populations)?
    Counting noses is less important than counting active noses. The trouble with non-fundamentalist religious activity is that is is functionally indistinguishable from secularism in many ways – except one: it generally refuses to differentiate itself from the fundamentalist variety. Dennett is exactly right here: for many people, “belief in belief” is the most important thing. So while fundamentalist religion is more obviously harmful, it is sustained and supported by non-fundamentalists.
11. Is it true, as some atheists argue that Buddhism’s more peaceful doctrine propagates less violence and war than monotheistic religions with violent sacred texts?
    I don’t know. Not enough samples.
12. Does ‘moderate religion’ enable fundamentalism to continue? (That’s another core militant assumption – also unproven.) Or, does it draw adherents away from fundamentalism and thereby weaken its negative effects?
    What kind of proof do you want? (Always mistrust people who drag the notion of proof into this kind of argument.) I think that the best evidence comes from the studies of the various fundamentalist religious groups, whether authored by members or (more often) ex-members. I certainly think that the evidence is fairly clear. (And no, it’s not an assumption – what a stupid smear.)
13. What’s the best way to advocate for needed changes – through aggressive attacks on religion or milder persuasion?
    Eskow makes it sound as if some vast atheistic conspiracy is trying to put together the most effective program for change – an Atheist Party Manifesto. That’s nonsense. When I read the various writers on this topic, what I see are individuals expressing their personal views. The approaches range from the angry and frustrated (Dawkins’ The God Delusion) to the academically quizzical (Dennett’s Breaking The Spell) to the quietly insistent (Robert Price’s excellent The Reason Driven Life) to a fully worked-out worldview (Carrier’s Sense and Goodness Without God).
    There’s no “one way” (or even a “best way” of changing the world, except for this: for people to simply share what they think with others, and explain why. The remarkable sales of Dawkins’ and Sam Harris’s books clearly show that people are interested in this subject. That’s the best we can hope for – to get people thinking. (And even if you disagre with Dawkins, you’ve got to admit that he’s got a lot of people talking.)
14. Do the internal dynamics of religious communities suggest that extremism and fundamentalism are the primary source of religion’s negative effects – or do these effects come from something fundamental about religious belief itself?
    I’m not sure I understand the question, but it seems to repeat earlier points. Skipped.
15. Would the eradication of religion lead to increased trauma, and/or decreased mental and physical health? If so, how should we prepare to address that problem as we work to eradicate religion?
    As in, “what are we going to use to replace people’s comforting delusions?” I think there are plenty of alternative sources of delusion….

David Farley has a piece in Slate entitled Who stole Jesus’ foreskin?. OK, we can all enjoy a chuckle about medieval superstition, and holy relics, and stuff like that. But the sophisticated types in the Catholic hierarchy would never take such things seriously, would they? But in 1900…

Facing increasing criticism after the “rediscovery” of a holy foreskin in France, the Vatican decreed that anyone who wrote about or spoke the name of the holy foreskin would face excommunication. And 54 years later, when a monk wanted to include Calcata in a pilgrimage tour guide, Vatican officials didn’t just reject the proposal (after much debate). They upped the punishment: Now, anyone uttering its name would face the harshest form of excommunication—”infamous and to be avoided”—even as they concluded that Calcata’s holy foreskin was more legit than other claimants’.

It’s pure Monty Python, isn’t it? (And for the record, Farley believes that the Pope arranged for the “holy foreskin” to be stolen. It makes as much sense as the rest of this stuff.)

Via Charles and the WNMTC* list comes this forthright piece by Steven Pinker on the subject of Harvard’s Report of the Committee on General Education. First, he objects to the way in which the Science and Technology Requirement is justified:

The report goes on to emphasize the relevance of science to current concerns like global warming and stem-cell research. It even mandates that courses which fulfill the Science and Technology requirement “frame this material in the context of social issues” (a stipulation that is absent from other requirements). But surely there is more to being knowledgeable in science than being able to follow the news. And surely our general science courses should aim to be more than semester-long versions of “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Pinker argues that the importance of science is intrinsic, in language that expresses more eloquently the position that I expressed in my last blog piece (my emphasis):

Also, the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.
I believe that a person for whom this understanding is not second-nature cannot be said to be educated. And I think that some acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge should be a goal of the general education requirement and a stated value of a university.

Pinker then rips into the Reason and Faith Requirement:

First, the word “faith” in this and many other contexts, is a euphemism for “religion”…. A university should not try to hide what it is studying in warm-and-fuzzy code words.
Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing[…]. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for “Astronomy and Astrology”… [I]t may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry….
Third, if this is meant to educate students about the role of religion in history and current affairs, why isn’t it just a part of the “U.S. and the World” requirement? Religion is an important force, to be sure, but so are nationalism, ethnicity, socialism, markets, nepotism, class, and globalization. Why single religion out among all the major forces in history?

He concludes:

For us to magnify the significance of religion as a topic equivalent in scope to all of science, all of culture, or all of world history and current affairs, is to give it far too much prominence. It is an American anachronism, I think, in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it.

Exactly.
—
* Whining-no-make-that-commentary.

In all of the recent brouhaha over theism, atheism, and science (especially evolution), there’s one question which I haven’t seen much discussed. Since I can’t see an obvious answer, I thought I’d blog about it.
This question is specifically addressed to those people who accept the current state of brain science, and who also themselves as Christians (or Muslims, I guess). What kind of “brain science” am I talking about? Well, check out Wikipedia on neuropsychology, specifically cognitive neuropsychology. Read about the ground-breaking Phineas Gage and HM cases. Do you find these accounts convincing? Are they consistent with the relationship between the brain – its physical structures and electrochemical operation – and human behaviour, personality, cognition, and so forth? Of course we don’t understand all of the mechanisms and relationships today, but if you believe that science is broadly “on the right track” in these areas, then I’m talking to you.
I have no idea how many people meet these two criteria, but I assume it’s quite a large number. My question for them is not about belief in god. I’ve heard so many different definitions of the term “god” from so many people that, frankly, I’m not sure that it’s particularly useful. Instead, I want to know if you believe in life after death, and if so how you imagine it. Do you believe that you continue to exist after your physical body is dead, and if so in what form? Pehaps more important, in what sense is that which survives you? Does it have your memories, your personality, your beliefs and desires?
It seems to me that this question ought to be more productive than one about god. After all, we have a rich culture of stories revolving around notions of identity, “possession”, and so forth, from Greek mythology to Kafka to Star Trek. We may disagree on the plausibility of certain stories, but we don’t have much difficulty understanding and discussing them. So even if you can’t explain what it might be that survives you, you probably have an intuitive and accessible sense of what it means for it to be you that survives.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this question, but let me elaborate a bit, assuming that you believe in life after death. (If you don’t, I’m curious as to how you square this with your professed religious affiliation.)
First, how do you conceive of this something that lives on? (You probably use some term like “spirit” or “soul”, but those are ambiguous and suggestive; let’s just call it WPAYPD, for what persists after your physical death). You’ll have to educate me, because I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about here. Even if you can’t explain what it is, can you at least explain in what way it is you? What characteristics does it possess? How are these characteristics of your WPAYPD related to the stuff your brain does?
[A short digression. When I say that I don’t have any idea about this, I’m talking about the explanatory step, not the intuitive one. I’m pretty sure that you and I experience first-person consciousness in very much the same way. However when I think about “what’s really going on”, I understand it purely as “natural processes happening in my physical brain”, with no supernatural stuff involved. I’m pretty sure that people who believe in life after death have a different explanation, but I have no idea what it is.]
However you conceive of the relationship between brain and WPAYPD, I assume (correct me if I’m wrong!) that you believe that this relationship ends at the moment your brain ceases to function. Does that mean that the enduring properties of WPAYPD are determined by the state of your brain at the moment of death? If so, I wonder if you could comment on this thought experiment.
Let’s consider three plausible scenarios. In one, you live a happy life and die suddenly from a massive coronary on your 40th birthday. WPAYPD continues to exist. It has certain characteristics. In the second scenario, you suffer a Gage-like acident on your 40th birthday. You live for 10 years, during which time your personality and beliefs are observed to change dramatically. You become morose and belligerent. Then you die, survived by your WPAYPD. Are these two WPAYPDs the same, or different? Why – and how? If it makes sense for your WPAYPD to have a “personality”, is it happy or morose?
In the third senario, you contract a wasting neurological condition which leads to an inexorable loss of brain function. By the time you actually die, your brain has shrivelled to almost nothing, and you are effectively a vegetable. What of your WPAYPD now?
(When I mentioned this to a friend, he said, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s the real you” But this means that the “real” you is necessarily a-temporal and non-contingent, which seems deeply impoverishing, not to mention incompatible with the variety of free will that most religions espouse.)
Most believers think of life after death, souls, spirits, etc. as stuff which is intrinsically supernatural; they’d argue that it doesn’t make sense to ask for a natural explanation of a supernatural phenomenon. That’s why discussions of god between theists and atheists are often so unproductive. However, in this case the believer in life after death is talking about supernatural concepts that are intimately related to our intuitive notion of “self”, as well as our scientific understanding of mind, brain, and behaviour. So how do you think (or feel) about the relationship between the natural and supernatural, as it applies to the idea of life after death? Compartmentalization? A “mystery”? Predestination? And do you appreciate why I’m puzzled about how you deal with it?

From polling Report

Theos, a new Christian think tank, heralded their launch by commissioning a poll from Communicate Research. They started by taking one of Richard Dawkins’ more confrontational statements and asking if people agreed with it: “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”…. Obviously people were going to think that “faith” was nicer than “smallpox”.
Rather surprisingly though, 42% of people said they agreed with Dawkins with only 44% disagreeing….

[Hat tip to Alec.]

From Scott Adam’s The Dilbert Blog:

Prior to 9/11, it would have been career suicide for a public figure to come right out and say God is a fairy tale. Now it’s a feature of popular culture…. I think the hidden benefit of Islamic extremism is that it freed the atheists from their closets. The old mindset in the United States was that almost any religion was good, and atheism was bad. But since 9/11… [ask] a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.

And then he goes and spoils it all by supporting Bill Gates for POTUS….

secularsouth expresses rather nicely one of the things that amazes me about anti-evolutionist Christians:

[Even though] many christians support dna evidence to prove identity in trials or to indicate kinship such as paternity, they reject the same techniques, the same types of genetic markers, the same evidence when it proves in the same way that we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees.

(Yes, Chris, I know there are some Christians who “get” science, but you seem to be in a minority in the US.)