Religious bias in the media

Letter published in the local newspaper Wednesay August 5th 2009

---

I HAVE to say I am very much angered by my latest copy of the Advertiser newspaper.
There were no less than three sizeable articles dedicated to regional clergy. As a non-believer I’m lucky if I can get a letter like this printed in the near-middle page containing “Your View”. I would happily voluntarily submit a regular counterpoint column to religion for the Advertiser’s free use but I rather suspect that the editor, and his soft spot for the activities and views of the clergy, would see that it wouldn’t get published. I welcome the editor to prove me wrong.
Why should this state of affairs anger me so? Well, despite the apparent jovial do-good nature of our clergy, nonetheless they make a living from telling lies to children and maintaining those lies in adults.
Many people are oblivious to the real damage to society that this does, how it creates needlessly conflicting moral communities, how it affects education and politics that ultimately affect us all.
Anyone who watched the documentary “Deborah 13, Servant of God” will have a slight clue of what I am talking about, though only through the extremity of that case. The activities of clerics are nothing short of child abuse and it is time the media in this country stop promoting these people or allowing them to promote themselves as pillars of society. They are far from it. Paedophiles can help old ladies cross roads or organize fetes but you wouldn’t want them near your children, so why romanticise the clergy who are responsible for, at the very least, the psychological abuse of millions of children?
Our own Anglican Church has an absolutely horrific history and when you see Christian groups campaigning against gays and “blasphemous” films, books or plays, you quickly realise that the goal of Christianity is to return us to this simple-minded barbarity and ignorance, though you won’t find many Christians who would openly admit to it.
I hope I have made sufficient case for the editor to realise that he is a long way from offering balance in this publication.
I will continue to observe with interest, and as people with a vested interest in our community’s societal health, so should you.

ConcernedAbout

Believing and knowing

A couple of comments I have often heard from religious people are "even though there is no evidence for God I believe he exists anyway" and "I just know that my belief is true". For me someone else's claim that they 'know' or believe their religion to be true is pretty unconvincing as an argument for the validity of their belief. But that doesn't matter. What they are professing is their own belief and declaring it unassailable by any form of criticism, so my disbelief is as utterly irrelevant as far as they are concerned within the context of the discussion. That is fine, I don't expect anyone to believe or disbelieve as I do simply for having said it. What matters to me and I think most people is why I, or they, hold the position that I, or they, do. Some people are of course true to their word in preventing reason from trespassing upon their cherished beliefs. This antipathy towards reason was unashamedly espoused by one of the founders of the protestant faith, Martin Luther when he wrote:

Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God.

This kind of philosophy seems to be practiced well by modern apologetics too, and Sam Harris makes a rather salient point on this matter, noting the kind of responses we see from apologetics to the antics of their fellow adherents. See the video here.

So what is wrong with the statement or position 'I just know'? Well from the observers point of view many people make such claims about their beliefs. Many Muslims, Hindus and people of other religions will claim that they know their religion is true. One thing that is patently obviously in light of the fact that these religions make incompatible claims about reality is that they can't all be true. Even if there were only 2 religions, they couldn't both be true. So for the observer the statement 'I just know' is rendered impotent as an argument for the truth of a claim.

What else is wrong here? There are many things that one may believe to be true. If a person can 'know' that something is true as distinguishable from just 'believing' something to be true then surely they have a power of discernment superior to all those that claim to know something but which is not true. I wonder how many times such people have claimed to know something and later discover that they were wrong, yet still claim to 'know' that their religion is true.

What about the things that are true that they just 'believe' are true. Isn't this 'knowing'? They believe it is true, so where is the doubt? Where is the distinction between believing and knowing? I suspect this language of 'believing' and 'knowing' is merely a description of degree of certainty, where 'knowing' is a paraphrasing of absolute certainty as opposed to thinking something to be highly likely when using the word 'believe'. If that is the case then we have people who are claiming that their certainty about certain subjects is infallible. Are these people truly infallible in their certainty?

What kind of track record do people claiming such infallible knowledge have? Well clearly from the vast variety of religions, not a very good one. This of course does not completely refute the claim of the individual but it does cast some considerable doubt on the reliability of their claim.

If there were people in the world who could be relied upon to just know things then there surely would not be a need for science as an investigative discipline. Do we have any empirical data upon which to analyse this possibility? Well we have plenty of pre-science historical information about civilisation and knowledge. What does it tell us? It tells us that humans knew virtually nothing about the world that they lived in when compared to the library of knowledge accumulated under the discipline of science. Even the infamous Christian scientist Francis Collins had to rely upon the scientific method to uncover secrets of the human genome.

Absolute certainty appears to have no track record as a measure of what is actually true. It does however have a track record of motivating the most awful atrocities against humanity and nature. How many Islamic suicide bombers have lacked certainty about the promise of a blissful afterlife? How certain was Hitler about the purity of German blood when he prosecuted his extermination of Jews? How about the crusaders, the inquisition or the Conquistadors? I find it hard to believe that these people had many doubts about their actions.

The words of Bertrand Russell seem to ring true here:

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

I think there is something to be said for doubt.

Survival of the fittest, philosophy vs religion

There have been many philosophers across the ages some of whose names we are familiar with today. Examples include; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and more recently Bertrand Russell, Anthony Grayling and Sam Harris. I specifically did not mention Jesus Christ, Buddha or Confucius as there are many doubts among scholars regarding the existence of these people as real individuals. It seems more likely that they are mythical characters to whom wisdoms of the day were attributed.

Few people have read the works of these people. Few Christians have actually read the Bible. Instead, we as a populous accept, on the authority of those we respect, various aspects of the teachings of these people. Christians receive their information from the pulpit and from each other, and in many ways non-Christians receive information in a similar fashion if we replace ‘pulpit’ with some other medium e.g. the newspapers, television and so on. For the most part we are receiving this philosophical information as interpreted by those we are receiving it from. If you look at the texts from which they are drawing upon and compare them to what is actually being said it is easy to see how distorted and filtered this nth-hand information is.

Sadly few people are interested in philosophy. It is a difficult subject requiring reading, analysis, thought and reflection. Most of us are concerned with putting food on the table and looking after the kids for much of our adult waking lives and seek some form of relaxing escapism in the remaining time like watching a film, following football and so on. The good news is that if you are reading this you probably are interested in philosophy but perhaps didn’t realise it. You are interested in the opinions and reasoning of others. As such you are a philosopher. You hopefully operate an intellectual policy of absorbing arguments and weighing up which you think are the best arguments.

If you have an interest in the subject of religion, and you probably have since you have arrived at a blog called ‘Religious Madness’, then I would recommend you read ‘Why I’m not a Christian’ or ‘The History of Western Philosophy’ by Bertrand Russell. If you prefer video, there are many interesting videos of the philosopher Sam Harris on YouTube. Russell and Harris both explain very clearly their objections to various aspects of religion and propose their own philosophies as alternatives. It is up to you as an individual to hear their arguments and determine for yourself whether you agree with them on an argument by argument basis. I recommend these people as they are very accessible, gently introducing deeper philosophical concepts that even the smartest of people struggle with.

Issues of developing better philosophy amongst the populous at large lie within the realms of intelligence, accessibility and the distractions of people’s daily lives. Better philosophy takes time to reach the masses as they struggle for ‘air time’ amongst the deafening roar of work, news, entertainment, children, DIY and religion. It is up to the philosophers amongst us to read and experience the world in a philosophical and reflective manner, and elevate the voices of superior reasoning as we find them. We have to progress moral and intellectual philosophy ourselves through thoughtfully worded and non threatening conversation with others, but always be mindful that tomorrow we may find a new a superior argument to that which we have previously espoused.

This evolution of our own philosophies is natural and necessary, after all even the greatest philosopher of all time surely did not wake up one morning with a fully formed supreme philosophy bursting to get out of his or her head. Sadly we have a mighty adversary to philosophical evolution in religion. Within the most well known religions are well practiced ideas of shunning ideas that are contrary their dogma. ‘Moral relativism’ is the favourite term of the religious, with respect to philosophical evolution, that you will encounter as it is expelled from the utterer’s mouth as though they had just chewed something truly repulsive. However few of them now practice the more barbaric ideals of their forbears such as stoning to death insolent children as mandated in Deuteronomy. So it is easy to see that they are moral relativists, just slow to realise their own hypocrisy, but nonetheless, moral progress.

I hope you do take the time to examine some of the work of great philosophers. It is addictive and rewarding. It will also arm you with a wealth of ideas that enable you to challenge conventional ‘wisdom’ and the tools to develop your own philosophical concepts.

---

Editorial note: I should have entered Socrates along with Jesus etc. since scholars are also in doubt regarding Socrates' existance as an individual. Current thinking is that he is the creation of Plato.

Religion in the US public square

Peter Watson of the Jackson Sun media outlet recently discussed the role religion in the US in the public square. I found his remarks more congenial to healthy discussion than many commentators in the US but nevertheless felt he was missing the point. In his article he talks of stopping the intertwining of religion and state but also suggests we leave the parts of religion have permeated the state in place. Here is my letter to Mr. Watson.

---

Dear Peter,

I think you have a healthy attitude but for a few points.

Removing religion from public property and conduct is fair for all and not terribly difficult to do if the notion has support. The 'under God' part of the Pledge was added not so long ago, in defiance of the constitution. It should be removed just as it was put in. It actually forces atheists and polytheists to lie in their pledge! and thus is utterly wrong.

What the founding fathers intended is not necessarily important. What matters is what is best. This appeal to a sacred authority in the founding fathers intentions is quite without merit. It is as dogmatic as the texts of religions themselves. The western world is a better place than the 3rd world precisely because it has allowed itself to evolve away from the dogmatic edicts of our forebears.

Moral and humanitarian progress has always been opposed by religion, but fortunately improvements in education have left many of these oppositions in the dark ages where they belong. We do however have a long way to go.

Religions create a culture of stunted philosophy, yet it is the great philosophers of the ages that have laid the foundations for most moral progress. How many of your readers have bothered to explore the work of philosophers like Confucius, Aristotle, Socrates, Buddha, Spinoza or more recently, Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Anthony Grayling or Sam Harris? I'll venture a guess and say virtually none, yet these men offer far more to human betterment than the terrifying Iron Age prejudices and superstitions offered by the authors of the Bible.

Is the US really the leading nation? The leaders of the 'free world'. Not even close. Where are the ambassadors for these superior philosophies in the US public forum? Nowhere. This is why the US as an entity has the intellectual disposition of a angry spoilt child carrying an AK-47.

Let's promote more reading in the public square. The enlightenment has yet to come to the US.

Who deserves the credit?

I recently came across an article at usnews.com in which ex-cancer sufferer Carrol Duggins-Diggs talks about her care [1]. I suppose I wasn't really surprised by her remarks but they are nonetheless shocking.

Clearly cancer is a terrifying disease for the sufferer and their loved ones. Positive thinking is regarded is an important part of staying on top of the problem. I can't say if it really has an intrinsic health benefit but such people have to carry on with their lives regardless of the problem otherwise they would spiral into an inconsolable state of misery that is worthy of treatment in its own right.

The article states:

she trusted her doctors to choose the best treatment. But she credits her survival to another source. "I believe God heard my prayers and that he healed me," says the retired human resource specialist from Accokeek, Md., who is now cancer free." ... "It's about time doctors realized that God is the true healer here."

Dawkins notes:

[Pope John Paul II] suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: 'A maternal hand guided the bullet'. One cannot help but wonder why she didn't guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit. But perhaps their hands too were maternally guided. The relevant point is that it wasn't just Our Lady, who in the Pope's opinion guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady of Fatima. Presumably Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadeloupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal, and Our Lady of Knock, were busy on other errands at the time. [2].

In countries where medical help is virtually unavailable, even highly devout Christian communities suffer terrible diseases, illnesses and death. Perhaps God is punishing them for not having medical care?

Quite frankly Ms Duggins-Diggs is undeserving of the care she received. The arrogance, stupidity and dire lack of respect for medical science religious people afford themselves is truly shocking. Furthermore this attitude undermines support for medical research which can only lead to poorer health care and thus people suffer.

Philosopher Sam Harris notes the highly religious attitudes that are sympathetic with the view of Ms Duggins-Diggs and that "not only do these people elect our congressment and presidents, they get elected as congressmen and presidents!" [3]. During the 2008 US election campaigns the overtly religious Alaskan governess Sara Palin gave her support to cancelling government funding for research using fruit flies, research that has been the basis for finding treatments for many illnesses. Mrs Palin's reasons were not explicitly religious ones, but were certainly viewed sympathetically by the religious right. So it is easy to see how such attitudes do affect medical care to the detriment of society.

Our faithful brothers and sisters seem quite happy with making statements of certainty about how God answers their prayers in times of need. If God really does answer the prayers of the devout then we ought to see some difference in the rates of recovery from serious illnesses between the religious and the irreligious. I am certainly not aware of any such disparity and suspect if one existed the God fearing would be readily gloating about it with data to hand. The fact is that prayer does nothing for medical conditions as demonstrated in the infamous study on the effects of prayer [4].

By contrast we do hear about the fates of those who choose not to seek medical help, or who are prevented from seeking medical help on religious grounds, such as the tragic 11 year old Madeline Neumann. Madeline's parents refused medical treatment for the unfortunate young diabetes sufferer, instead opting for prayer [5]. This religiously inspired criminal stupidity and neglect needs prosecuting to the full extent of the law.

Keving Eckstrom of the Salt Lake Tribune, in his suming up of the religion themed 2008 US election campaign and year in general, notes "In Oregon and Wisconsin, three sets of parents were charged in the faith-healing deaths of children who were denied routine medical treatment." [6].

If American Christians want to put their faith in the terrifying prejudices and superstitions of Iron Age men they are welcome to do so, but perhaps they ought to have the courage of their convictions and eschew medical science altogether. We'll soon see who is the 'true healer here'.

Ms Duggins-Diggs should take a trip to Africa sometime and take a look at what God does for Christians without medical insurance.

References

[1] 'Should religion and faith have roles in medicine?'. By Christine Larson -- US News.

[2] 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins

[3] Sam Harris lecture on religion at Ideas City 2005

[4] 'What the latest prayer study tells us about God'. William Saletan of Slate.

[5] 'Girl Dies After Parents Pray for Healing Instead of Seeking Medical Help'. Fox News.

[6] 'Religion Shaped 2008 in big, dramatic ways'. By Keven Eckstrom -- Salt Lake Tribune

An experiment on the evolution of scripture

Over the coming weeks I will be running an experiment on the evolution of oral/textual traditions. The purpose of the experiment is to try to understand what happens when a piece of fairly complex information is memorized and passed on. The idea is for a short story to be sent to a participant, the participant absorb the story and rewrite the story from memory. The story will be resent in its new form to the next participant. There are a number of ‘facts’ and ideas in the story to be conveyed, and it will be interesting to see how these facts and ideas are transferred. We should be able to see after a number of generations if the story retains its integrity i.e. its, facts, ideas and the time line.

The idea for the experiment is of course based on the oral/textual traditions of ancient stories, like the stories of the Bible and other religious texts. Until relatively recently the population at large of even the most developed of nations were mostly illiterate i.e. they could neither read or write. They could however listen to each other and pass on this information at some unspecified later time. Without the aid and fidelity of modern communication systems or even the most rudimentary literary skills the information had to be heard, memorized and later repeated. This experiment deviates from that model on one crucial point in that the recipient will read the information rather than hear it. As a consequence I will try to find some data that quantifies the difference in fidelity of receiving information in textual form rather than spoken form. It is certainly not detrimental to the experiment but if there is degradation in the fidelity of information in the experiment it may work at a different rate due to the textual nature. Also information transfers in real world traditions probably have had oral-to-text-to-oral elements to them.

I will publish the resulting stories produced in the course of the experiment on this blog. You will be free to perform your own analysis on that data. Additionally I will produce some analysis and statistics of my own for the blog based on the experimental data, for all to see.

If you want to take part in the experiment please send me a note through my YouTube account:

http://uk.youtube.com/user/artyfarty2

(You will have to have or create a YouTube account, though this only takes a minute)

If you want to keep track of this experiment click here and bookmark. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed by clicking on the feedcat icon on the top right of this blog or by clicking on the Atom link here.

Evangelical rationalism

In my last post I talked a little bit about learning something from religion. What I was interested in is how religion manages to be so popular. There are a quite a range of mechanisms at work that enable religions to propagate well. I could discuss a few here today but for this post I am interested in a couple mechanisms that are probably at the heart of the success of most religions i.e. heredity and evangelism.

Even within the subject of heredity there are some interesting topics to ponder, for instance the Catholic propagation method of banning condom use. However the issue I want to talk about is the passing on of ideas from parents to offspring. It is a simple fact that a child is most likely to grow up with the ideals of their parents e.g. Christians tend to make Christians. A notable part of the Christian upbringing is the idea of being evangelical with your beliefs. Go out into the world and persuade more people!

Non-theistic parents tend to adopt a more politically correct approach to their child upbringing, namely insisting that their child be given the scope to make their own intellectual judgements. I whole heartedly agree with this sentiment, but it does put the rational populous at rather a disadvantage from a strategic point of view. Is there any reason why we should not bring our children up to be evangelical about being rational? I think not. It seems to me to be an excellent proposition. Let us raise our children to be critical thinking but at the same time point out that there are many people in the world that don’t. Surely as rational people that care about the future of our children and the world at large we should be evangelical about rationalism.

There is absolutely no need to be dogmatic in pursuit of this ideal, but I do think we need to apply our intelligence to the proliferation of good ideas and head off the evolution of poor ideas. We need to learn from the evolved strategies of religion, discard their intellectually dishonest methods or remould them as intellectually honest strategies. Let's give rationality a fighting chance. It is a sad fact that people don’t tend to change, they die and are replaced by new generations. This is central to the success of religion and should be recognised, countered and defeated by reasonableness and ethics.