"Britain would be a colder place without Christianity"

In response to this article by Catherine Pepinster, editor of Catholic weekly The Tablet.

I find it astonishing that anyone would try to console themselves with such a not only unsupportable assertion but one that is the inverse of reality.

Christianity has been the basis for the maintenance of patriarchy as the fundamental gender structure of society, through the misogynistic and often ambivalent attitudes towards the fate of women depicted in the Bible. A classic example is the story of Lot, who offers up his daughter to be brutalised in place of the two male strangers at his door, by the supposed rape obsessed mob of his city. This indifferent and misogynistic narrative of the Bible has prevented women from being able to vote, enter certain establishments, teach and all sorts of other things which up and til the last 100 years or so closely resembled in many ways the regime that women have face under the Taliban. Not surprisingly I suppose since Islam is derivation of Christianity. The fundamental difference between modern Islam and modern Christianity being the failure of Christianity to maintain such a tight grip, of the cultures it has pervaded and thus thankfully, has relented to accumulating secular pressures to give up various doctrines and practices that have been dogmatically transferred from generation to generation since the Bronze Age.

Christianity still maintains much of the anti-scientific subculture of Britain, along with anti-gay sentiments, cultural division that locks out immigrants from being able to integrate easily. It still encourages people to legally bind themselves to each other and never divorce under the completely unjustifiable dogma that marriage is the only thing that is good for relationships and families, and creates a social and legal pressure that causes millions of people to remain in incompatible relationships perpetuating not only misery for themselves but also for their children!

I could go on all day about the terrible damage Christianity has done to our culture, how it has held and continues to hold back medical research, women's' rights and social freedoms. Or how it maintains our 'Justice' system that is little more than state administered revenge rather than far more effective and humanitarian approaches that have been long known.

Christians are always quick to cite individual examples of exemplary behaviour in the belief that they somehow represent the overall trend and intent of Christianity, quite contrary to reality and usually far behind secular aspirations.

All of this because generation after generation is taught to regard the Bronze Age ignorance and mythologies of the Middle East as somehow beneficial to our culture. The perpetuation only stops when Christians actually take the time under understand the history of Christianity and of the evolution of 'the' Bible (as though there were ever a single such document rather than the evolving myths of Ancient Greece, Samaria, Mesopotamia and the Middle East that have been manipulated, mistranslated, reinvented, syncretized, merged, repeated and plagiarized from elsewhere all in the name of serving the interests of the successive generations of shamen and tyrant masquerading as the maintainers of morality, civil order and prosperity).

It is often said by Christians that the New Testament does away with all of this Old Testament barbarism and general injustice. That is simply not true. The Biblical Jesus is quite clear that he came to see Old Testament law fulfilled, which includes such grotequeries as mandating that you should kill your insubordinate children, and in no particularly humane manner either!

The greatest act of humanity any Christian will ever perpetrate is to learn why they should not be a Christian.

This is my planet too! #ThisIsMyPlanetToo

Like many I have pondered the concept of ‘rights’. The conclusions of others are varied and many, and no doubt my thoughts here are unoriginal. That does not concern me however, since I think it an under-discussed subject.

What are ‘rights’? What or who gives us ‘rights’. Obviously the religious think that rights are bestowed upon us by their imaginary friends. That is a delusion unworthy of further consideration for the purposes of this discussion. So what about sane rational people, what do they think? I’ll be interested to hear people’s views. My own is very simple; rights are conceptual, they are labels we put on freedoms we have the power to enforce or freedoms that are allowed us by what ever regime we reside within the political reaches of. In other words rights are things we take from or are given by other people.

Enter the concept of ‘power’. Power in relation to rights is a degree of control or influence over others, and conversely, that they have over us. It is probably easiest to understand by hypothetical example: Suppose I come across a plot of land that I wish to farm and prevent others from stealing from it or trying to use it for themselves. If I have sufficient resources, I can defend that piece of land from anyone, including the regional government. That is effective control over the land. That is power over the land. I can decide who to allow onto that land and what they may do whilst there. So I have established power over the land, giving me total freedom, rights in effect, in respect to the land and anyone on it. Furthermore, I have the power to give and take away the rights of those that are on that land. This is effectively what it is to be a sovereign state.

Most of us understand that there needs to be cooperation between people, agreements, to prevent a society to from descending into chaos and anarchic civil war. So, we are for the most part comfortable with living within the confines of a sovereign state provided that we are allowed certain freedoms. We are also trained to be comfortable with the concept of ownership. The idea that someone else may posses a part of the world and that we may not. This seems quite sensible when we see that our friends and family work hard to earn and posses things. It would seem completely unfair to take away something from someone else that we have not ‘earned’. This would seem, notwithstanding a few other essential clauses, the basis for a fair civil society. But this is only a very simplistic assessment of the situation. So let’s consider some of the problems herein.

‘Greed’

We all have unique brains, that are a function and result of our environmental, genetic and experiential history. Essentially, no two people have the same concept of what is ‘fair’. Even with carefully written laws it is still subject to interpretation. Furthermore different people have different degrees of empathy and sympathy with others. Those lacking either are what we would call ruthless. They are unconcerned with what is ‘fair’, and for the most part are concerned only with their own gratification, in whatever form that may take. Highly empathetic people tend to care a great deal about others and about what is fair, to the point of denying themselves freedoms in order to grant freedoms to others. This sets up a rather unbalanced equation in terms of fairness.

In a capitalist society, the ruthless are rewarded for their ruthlessness through their ability to accumulate power, and avoid justice. It is nothing less than a race to total dominance. By contrast caring people are generally subservient, whether directly or indirectly, to the ruthless, despite, from a caring person’s point of view, offering far more human value. Such people have been largely impotent in impacting upon the ruthless. However from time to time, unique individuals come along who inherit their power and are caring people, and affect the world for good, heartily cheered on by their fellow, but oppressed, carers.

The battle between conflicting empires of capitalist wealth, eager to damage the other to their benefit, rally for the support of the impotent masses, as such people can easily be made into an army of one sort or another. Thus a sort of battle for popularity begins, which in principle is subject to the demands of the impotent masses. There is one major problem with this optimistic view, and that is, that these empires are also able to influence what people value, lie about what is important, lie about what they will do and what they have done. Thus we have an information war. He who controls the media controls most. This is nothing short of a meta-dictatorship. Do we see any candidates in the real word for this illustrious title? I sure do.

Born into slavery

Another problem with fairness and ownership is that we are all born into the world with nothing but the small bubble of protection offered by our parents or guardians. If we are lucky we may inherit some wealth that buys us a back row ticket in this race to dominance and/or autonomy. To make our way towards the front of the field we have to use a combination of intelligence, deceit and force. This is why the ruthless are so favoured by the system.

For the most part we have nothing. Is that fair? Well, fairness doesn’t really come into it. That is just the way that it is. Others were here before us and have already established their domains. We can only trade in some of our life to increase the power of the dominant in return for a small piece of freedom and autonomy, or we can take it from them. The latter being something that most of us are trained well to abhor or at least be reluctant to do. After all we tend to be surrounded by friends, family and likeminded people who we perceive as being contributors to our very own ‘cause’, for the most part. It is therefore hard for us, and not just for the reasons just mentioned, to take down ruthless emperors and take for ourselves or share amongst the deserving, or for that matter merely to prevent harm to others and the planet from continuing. Again, this is another sense in which by being good we render ourselves impotent against the ruthless.

Taking the power back

Having realised these things I have adopted a somewhat tangential philosophy, though probably not uniquely. I am a citizen of the world. This IS my planet too! I am free to go wherever I wish, do whatever I want, notwithstanding some moral constraints which I derive from my empathy for others and my desire to see the beautiful planet live on as undamaged by the ruthless empires as my own powers will allow. We all need to take a step back and think about the world in these terms, get some perspective, work out what really does matter.

With climate change catastrophe already licking at our shores and imminent global energy wars resulting from the run down of the Terra Firma oil batteries, time really is upon us. We have already seen invasions by the US, UK and Russia, sold to the capitalist empire-owned-media misled masses as justice, liberty and security. It has in fact already started. Our children are going to grow up in a world of large scale failing crops, collapsing food chains including fish stocks, mass exoduses, war torn continents, collapsing economies, martial law, disintegration of the rule of law and civil unrest, armies turning on civilians, failing electrical, gas and water infrastructures, failing emergency services and hospitals, and a collapse of education. A potential further development is the religious fundamentalists of the world uniting by their various apocalyptic ideologies and assuming power, taking in large slices of the often religiously indoctrinated military forces, and consolidating their dominance by force and enforcing their medieval ideologies by tyranny.

Are we doomed? Well not necessarily. We have human ingenuity to solve the energy crisis and adapt to a changing climate. However this effort is being heavily suppressed by the emperors of capitalism. New inventions and technologies are drowned in the sea of capitalist marketing and political lies and patents bought up by those eager to hide them. Some people are however fighting back. We have WikiLeaks and other whilstle-blowing organizations fighting back against the lords of propaganda. Revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have emerged as a result of the deceit and corruption of their corresponding regimes being made publically available. Iranian revolution is also very much on the cards. The internet is a hub of communication and is an animal in its own right, resistant in many senses to attempts to control the kind of data flowing though it’s veins, and we have social networking providing the platforms for the voices of dissent to organize and unite.

There is no moral dilemma about taking from the 'Emporiate', or more specifically taking the power back from it. It is absolutely essential for the welfare of this and the generations to come that we take action, if we are to avoid the almost certain gloomy scenario described previously. We probably should be ashamed of not having done it sooner. But what are we to do? We all feel so powerless against ‘The Machine’. We have jobs, mortgages, children in school, mouths to feed. We need to relax after our hard day at work in order to prepare for another day in the yoke. Well actually, none of that is a hindrance to taking action when your realise how simple and easy action can be. We all yield a piece of influence, not just a vote, but a voice. So here is a short list of easy ways to take action:

• Look up the email address of your local politician. They pretty much all have them, and they are easy to find. Voice your concerns on democracy, human rights, wars, the energy crisis and the climate.
• Use your vote to support the political party best positioned to address your concerns
• Tweet #ThisIsMyPlanetToo, and link back to this article using the TinyUrl: http://tinyurl.com/6kbokv8
• Periodically check Twitter to see how the #ThisIsMyPlanetToo revolution has grown.
• Post this article on your Facebook page and share it with others
• Learn more about what governments having been up to through WikiLeaks and it’s imitators, and be very aware that your television set is nothing more than a propaganda outlet. Not news. Propaganda and other forms of marketing.

If you do just one of these things, the one easiest for you, you will have made a real contribution to liberty, the survival of humanity, for next generations including your own offspring.

Surviving humanity

To be a philosopher is to care about why things happen, to want to understand the logical consequences of a thing, to desire to bring about better outcomes. Anyone can be a philosopher from a floor sweeper to a pop star.

Philosophy, in my opinion is the key to our survival as a species. If you understand why things happen, you have the power to choose for the better.

I realised yesterday that the philosophy we read is dead, that is not to say that it is useless, but it is nonetheless merely the documentation of philosophical history. This is because philosophy is a living act, a process, the evolution of thought. Philosophy is not a qualification, a PhD ,a book or an award, it is a process. It is a science contrary to the belief of most scientists. You can hypothesize and make testable predictions.

The single most important thing any philosopher can do is to make more philosophers.

Sadly our world leaders are only vaguely philosophical, and their audiences largely philosophically comatose. The world is sleepwalking into disaster because of lack of thought, lack of philosophy. Worse still there is an enemy out there that conspires to turn every unsuspecting potential philosopher into a sleepwalker. That enemy is dogmatism, and it's most grotesque offspring, religion.

Religion is an obsession with dead philosophy and a commitment to the cessation of thought. Do not, like I have done, draw attention to yourself by attacking religion head on, it just lets the enemy know you are coming. Make more philosophers that want to make more philosophers. Ensure the survival of humanity by keeping thought alive.

If you understood that then I am a very happy man.

Nice People by Bertrand Russell (1931)

I intent to write an article in praise of nice people. But the reader may wish to know first who are the people that I consider nice. To get at their essential quality may perhaps be a little difficult, so I will begin by enumerating certain types who come under the heading. Maiden aunts are invariably nice, especially, of course, when they are rich; ministers of religion are nice, except those rare cases in which they elope to South Africa with a member of the choir after pretending to commit suicide. Young girls, I regret to say, are seldom nice nowadays. When I was young most of them were quite nice -- that is to say, they shared their mother's opinions, not only about topics, but what is more remarkable, about individuals, even young men; they said, "Yes, Mamma," and, "No, Mamma" at the appropriate moments; they loved their father because it was their duty to do so, and their mother because she preserved them from the slightest hint of wrongdoing. When they became engaged to be married they fell in love with decorous moderation; being married, they recognized it as a duty to love their husbands but gave other women to understand that it was a duty they performed with great difficulty. They behaved nicely to their parents-in-law, while making it clear that any less dutiful person would not have done so; they did not speak spitefully about other women but pursed up their lips in such a way as to let it be seen what they might have said but for their angelic charitableness. This type is what is called a pure and noble woman. The type, alas, now hardly exists except among the old.

Mercifully the survivors still have great power: they control education, where they endeavor, not without success, to preserve a Victorian standard of hypocrisy; they control legislation on what are called "moral issues", and have thereby created and endowed the great profession of bootlegging; they ensure that the young men who write for the newspapers shall express the opinions of the nice old ladies rather than their own, thereby enlarging the scope of the young men's style and the variety of their psychological imagination. They keep alive innumerable pleasures which otherwise would be quickly ended by a surfeit; for example, the pleasure of hearing bad language on a stage, or of seeing there a slightly larger amount of bare skin than is customary. Above all, they keep alive the pleasures of the hunt. In a homogeneous country population, such as that of the English shire, people are condemmed to hunt foxes; this is expensive and sometimes even dangerous. Moreover, the fox cannot explain very clearly how much he dislikes being hunted. In all these respects the hunting of human beings is better sport, but, if it were not for the nice people, it would be difficult to hunt human beings with a good conscience. Those whom the nice people condemn are fair game; at their call of "Tallyho" the hunt assembles, and the victim is pursued to prison or death. It is especially good sport when the victim is a woman, since it gratifies the jealousy of the women and the sadism of the men. I know at this moment a foreign woman living in England, in happy though extra-legal union with a man whom she loves and who loves her; unfortunately, her political opinions are not so conservative as could be wished, though they are merely opinions, about which she does nothing. The nice people, however, have used this excuse to set Scotland Yard upon their scent, and she is to be sent back to her native country to strave. In England, as in America, the foreigner is a morally degrading influence, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to the police for the care which they take to see that only exceptionally virtuous foreigners are allowed to reside among us.

It must not be supposed that all nice people are women, though, of course, it is much commoner for a woman to be nice than for a man. Apart from ministers of religion, there are many other nice men. For example: those who have made large fortunes and have now retired from business to spend their fortunes on charity; magistrates are also almost invariably nice men. It cannot, however, be said that all supporters of law and order are nice men. When I was young, I remember hearing it advanced by a nice woman, as an argument against capital punishment, that the hangman could hardly be a nice man. I have never known any hangmen personally, so I have not been able to test this argument empirically. I knew a lady, however, who met the hangman in the train without knowing who he was, and when she offered him a rug, the weather being cold, he said, "Ah, Madam, you wouldn't do that if you knew who I am," which seems to show that he was a nice man after all. This, however, must have been exceptional. The hangman in Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, who is emphatically not a nice man, is probably more typical.

I do not think, however, that we ought to agree with the nice woman I quoted a moment ago in condemming capital punishment merely because the hangman is not likely to be nice. To be a nice person, it is necessary to be protected from crude contact with reality, and those who do the protecting cannot be expected to share the niceness that they preserve. Imagine, for example, a wreck on a liner which is transporting a number of colored laborers; the first-class female passengeres, all of whom are presumably nice women, will be saved first; but in order that this may happen, there must be men who keep the colored laborers from swamping the boat, and it is unlikely that these men will be able to succeed by nice methods. The women who have been saved, as soon as they are safe, will begin to feel sorry for the poor laborers who were drowned, but their tender hearts are rendered possible only by the rough men who defended them.
In general, nice people leave the policing of the world to hirelings because they feel the work to be not such as a person who is nice would wish to undertake. There is, however, one department which they do not delegate -- namely, the department of backbiting and scandal. People can be placed in a hierarchy of niceness by the power of their tongues. If A talks against B, and B talks against A, it will generally be agreed by the society in which they live that one of them is exercising a public duty, while the other is actuated by spite; the one who is exercising the public duty is the one who is the nicer of the two. Thus, for example, a headmistress in a school is nicer than an assistant mistress, but a lady who is on the school board is nicer than either. Well-directed tittle-tattle may easily cause its victim to lose his or her livelihood, and even when this extreme result is not achieved, it may turn a person into a pariah. It is, therefore, a great force for good, and we ought to be thankful that it is the nice people who wield it.

The chief characteristics of nice people is the laudable practice of improvement upon reality. God made the world, but nice people feel that they could have done the job better. There are many things in the Divine handiwork which, while it would be blasphemous to wish them otherwise, it would be by no means nice to mention. Divines have held that if our first parents had not eaten the apple the human race would have been replenished by some innocent mode of vegetation, as Gibbon calls it. The Divine plan in this respect is certainly mysterious. It is all very well to regard it, as the aforesaid divines do, in the light of a punishment of sin, but the trouble with this view is that while it may be a punishment for the nice people, the others, alas, find it quite pleasant. It would seem, therefore, as if the punishment had been made to fall in the wrong quarter. One of the main purposes of the nice people is to redress no doubt this unintended injustice. They endeavor to secure that the biologically ordained mode of vegetation shall be practiced either furtively or frigidly, and that those who practice it furtively shall, when found out, be in the power of the nice people, owing to the damage that may be done to them by scandal. They endeavor to ensure also that as little as possible shall be known on the subjectin a decent way; they try to get the censor to forbid books and plays which represent the matter otherwise than as an occasion for sniggering nastiness; in this they are successful wherever and in so far as they control the laws and the police. It is not known why the Lord made the human body as he did, since one must suppose that omnipotence could have made it such as would not have shocked the nice people. Perhaps, however, there was a good reason. There has been in England, ever since the rise of the textile industry in Lancashire, a close alliance between missionaries and the cotton trade, for missionaries teach the savages to cover up the human body and thereby increase the demand for cotton goods. If there had been nothing shameful about the human body, the textile trade would have lost this source of profit. This instance shows that we need never be afraid lest the spread of virtue should diminish our profits.

Whoever invented the phrase "the naked truth" had perceived an important connection. Nakedness is shocking to all right-minded people, and so is truth. It metters little with what department you are connected; you will soon find that rtuth is such as nice people will not admit into their consciousness. Whenever it has been my ill fortune to be present in court during the hearing of a case about which I had some first-hand knowledge, I have been struck by the fact that no crude truth is allowed to penetrate within those august portals. The truth that gets into a law court is not the naked truth but the truth in court dress, with all its less decent portions concealed. I do not say that this applies to the trial of straightforward crimes, such as murder or theft, but it applies to all those into which an element of prejudice enters, such as political trials, or trials for obscenity. I believe that in this respect England is worse than America, for England has brought to perfection the almost invisible and half-conscious control of everything unpleasant by means of feelings of decency. If you wish to mention in a law court any unassimilable fact, you will find that it is contrary to the laws of evidence to do so, and that not only the judge and the opposing counsel but also cousel on your side will prevent the said fact from coming out.

The same sort of reality pervades politics, owing to the feelings of nice people. If you attempt to persuade any nice person that a politician of his own party is an ordinary mortal no better than the mass of mankind, he will indignantly repudiate the suggestion. Consequently it is necessary to politicians to appear immaculate. At most times the politicians of all parties tacitly combine to prevent anything damaging to the profession from getting known, for difference of party usually does less to divide politicians than identity of profession does to unite them. In this way the nice people are able to preserve their fancy picture of the nation's great men, and school children can be made to believe that eminence is to be achieved only by the highest virtue. There are, it is true, exceptional times when politics become really bitter, and at all times there are politicians who are not considered sufficiently respectable to belong to the informal trade-union. Parnell, for example, was first unsuccessfully accused of co-operation with murderers and then successfully convicted of an offense against morality, such as, of course, none of his accusers would have dreamed of committing. In our own day Communists in Europe and extreme Radicals and labor agitators in America are outside the pale; no large body of nice people admires them, and if the offend against the conventional code they can expect no mercy. In this way the immovable moral convictions of nice people become linked with the defense of property, and thus once more prove their inestimable worth.

Nice people very properly suspect pleasure wherever they see it. They know that he who increaseth wisdom increaseth sorrow, and they infer that he that increaseth sorrow increaseth wisdom. They therefore feel that in spreading sorrow they are spreading wisdom; since wisdom is more precious than rubies, they are justified in feeling that they are conferring a great benefit in so doing. They will, for example, make a public playground for children in order to persuade themselves that they are philanthropic and then impose so many regulations upon its use that no child can be as happy there as in the streets. They will do their best to prevent playgrounds, theaters, etc., from being open on a Sunday, because that is the day when they might be enjoyed. Young women in their employment are prevented so far as possible from talking with young men. The nicest people I have known carried this attitude into the bosom of the family and made their children play only instructive games. This degree of niceness, however, I regret to say, is becoming less common than it was. In the old days children were taught that

One stroke of His almighty rod
Can send young sinners quick to Hell,

and it was understood that this was likely to happen if children became boisterous or indulged in any activity such as was not calculated to fit them for the ministry. The education based upon this point of view is set forth in The Fairchild Family, an invaluable work on how to produce nice people. I know few parents, however, in the present day who live up to this standard. It has become sadly common to wish children to enjoy themselves, and it is to be feared that those who have been educated on these lax principles will not display adequate horror of pleasure when they grow up.

The day of nice poeple, I fear, is nearly over; two things are killing it. The first is the belief that there is no harm in being happy, provided no one else is the worse for it; the second is the dislike of humbug, a dislike which is quite as much æsthetic as moral. Both these results were encouraged by the War, when the nice people in all countries were securely in control, and in the name of the highest morality induced the young people to slaughter one another. When it was all over the survivors began to wonder whether lies and misery inspired by hatred constituted the highest virtue. I am afraid it may be some time before they can again be induced to accept this fundamental doctrine of every lofty ethic.

The essence of nice people is that they hate life as manifested in tendencies to co-operation, and in the boisterousness of children, and above all in sex, with the thought of which they are obsessed. In a word, nice people are those who have nasty minds.

Religious bias in the media

Letter published in the local newspaper Wednesay August 5th 2009

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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.

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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.