Religious Madness

"Britain would be a colder place without Christianity"

2011-03-11T13:13:00.003Z

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

2011-02-14T18:46:00.009Z

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

2011-01-31T11:30:00.005Z

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)

2010-09-22T18:35:00.007+01:00

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

2009-08-11T13:54:00.005+01:00

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

2009-01-03T14:52:00.012Z

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

2008-12-31T13:32:00.006Z

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

2008-12-29T12:06:00.009Z

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?

2008-12-24T07:19:00.027Z

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

2008-12-21T15:08:00.009Z

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

2008-12-16T20:16:00.010Z

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.

The case against religion

2008-12-14T17:05:00.008Z

The body of evidence against religion has never been so large. There are so many levels and facets upon which religion has demonstrated itself as wholly incompatible with a healthy and happy world that I would have hoped that it would be largely marginalised in the 21^st century. Sadly this is not so, though the trend is towards secularism in virtually all developed nations including the US, despite their recent religion filled election campaigns.

Why is it that religious people cannot recognise that the more healthy societies in the world, namely the 1^st world nations, are the more secular ones? Well of course, they are believers. They believe what they want to believe, or so they think, whilst their church leaders and religious peers are happily indoctrinating them with the meme that secularism is damaging society and selling them the counterpart lie that their religion is a beacon for humanity. How do you combat this willful ignorance and blissful bigotry? This is where we can really learn something from religion. There is certainly a wealth of ways in which religion propagates, but what I am really getting at here is PR.

Secular organisations like the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association are very clinical in their delivery of information. Their websites look rather like cancer research information or some other rather dull looking academic outlet. As a consequence these important institutions are appealing to a niche of society rather than the sectors that matter i.e. the religious and in particular the voters of tomorrow. These sites should be adorned with appealing graphics and images, and they need not utter a single word of lie in the process. It is a simple fact that we tend to be attracted to positive and wondrous images. I really wish they would get some PR consultancy on board.

My 2^nd criticism of these institutions is in their lack of a data repository on the effects of religion and religiosity on society. From these sites we should be able to access a collective of research and media reports on the subject, outside of the blog style stories generated by their members. This collection should present the overwhelming case against religion and be eagerly pushed out to politicians and religious leaders. This should provide a push back against the idiotic practices of religion today and start forcing these people to revise their rose tinted views on religion and raise their intellectual and moral standards.

I have a list of links here that could get them started. Enjoy:

[1] Study on the effects of prayer

[2] Gallup poll data on belief in evolution in the US

[3] International survey on religion and societal health

[4] Scientists and religion

[5] Scientists and religion

[6] Intelligence and religiosity

[7] Intelligence and religiosity

[8] Intelligence and religiosity

[9] Intelligence and religiosity

[10] Intelligence and religiosity

Teacher sacked over truth of Santa

2008-12-14T11:25:00.007Z

The UK is supposedly one of the more secular nations in the world today. This notion is supported by reports of high levels of doubt about religious claims and ever shrinking church attendance [1]. However there still seems to be a reluctance to be honest about what is reasonable to believe and what is not. The recent sacking of a teacher [2] for enlightening children about the reality of Santa shows this anti-reason to be in the psyche of many people in the UK and also ingrained in the policies and laws of the nation. How can this be? What are these people thinking? The mother of one of the children involved concluded “I thought it was wrong”. No reason, just a feeling. Someone lost their job for pity’s sake! Sure the child will be upset upon finding out that they have been lied to by their parents, but that child will learn a very valuable lesson about reality and people; people get things wrong and just because you have been told something you should not assume it is true.

This dismissal of a teacher at Blackshaw Lane Primary School in Oldham, Greater Manchester is truly shocking. What have we achieved by this? We have institutionalised bias against being truthful with children, we have reinforced the parent’s belief that it is OK to lie to your children and we have put someone in serious financial difficulty during this time of recession and depression for being truthful. Way to go! Is this really a step forward for society?

What could possibly be wrong about what this teacher did? Is there some rule that all teachers learn that they should allow the lies of parents to go unchallenged? Was it the right of the parent to insist on the persistence of a lie, despite it being the role of schools to educate and make children intellectually capable of dealing with the world they live in? Is the belief that Santa exists fundamental to the intellectual well being of small children? Does the lack of belief in Santa destroy the delight of Christmas for children? In my experience this lack of belief does not impede the Christmas experience at all. I learned quite early on that there is no Santa yet I still got excited and enjoyed all the festivities and the whole ambience of the UK Christmas. We don’t have to believe lies to enjoy life! In fact trying to understand reality has got to be a far more enriching experience by any measure.

I am horrified by this sacking. It is an awful injustice, not only to the teacher involved but to the children and to societal health. Anyone that cares about truth, society and children ought to be as outraged as I am. Please use this letter as a template and forward it to your MP. Let us stand up for truth and justice instead of allowing the unjustified prejudices of small minded individuals to corrode the intellectual development of children and societal health.

[1] A slow but certain demise - Article in the Guardian (Thursday 30 October 2008, by Terry Sanderson)

[2] Teacher sacked over Santa gaffe - Yahoo news article (Thursday, December 11)

Catholics to confess over Obama vote

2008-12-03T19:00:00.009Z

If you are an American Catholic that voted for Barrack Obama you are being urged to confess your sin. Reverend Joseph Illo wrote a letter to his parishioners in Modesto this month in which he says

"If you are one of the 54 percent of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion. Don't risk losing your state of grace by receiving sacrilegiously"

In layman's terms he is simply saying 'you are going to Hell if you don't confess your sin of voting for Obama'. This nonsense is derived from a papal edict banning abortion. There is actually no such commandment in the Bible regarding abortion, this is simply a Vatican issued official dogma.

Anyone who has heard about the case of two daughters in the UK in the last month, who were raped regularly by their father over a period of 27 years, will know that these women had a number of children by their father. They were also made pregnant many other times but had abortions. The offspring produced are also suffering from a variety of incest related illnesses. Had these women not been able to have abortions by law their lives would have been even more intolerable. They would have essentially become slave like baby factories. This is the kind of suffering that the Catholic faith wants to inflict on such unfortunate women.

Why must religions inflict these intolerable conditions upon people? It arises from the simple minded thinking that is rooted in all religions and their adherents. There is a fundamental cynicism that religions have towards people essentially regarding them as incapable of rationalising ethical decisions for themselves. Religions generally take the view that people are not to be trusted and that they are simple minded and require ruthless simple minded rules regardless of the consequences of the rules.

It should also be of concern to American Catholics that they are being manipulated by their Catholic priesthood for the priesthood's own personal prejudices. I hope that American Catholics wake up to the fact that their own ability to think and operate as individuals is being eroded here along with the democracy of the United States.

Reverend attacks buses

2008-11-27T13:11:00.011Z

In a recent letter to the local rag (published 12th November 2008) the [ReverendX] complained about irreligious messages on the backs of buses, and proposed that they be hidden from view by the absurd means of paying for other buses to follow them. I was compelled to once again respond to what I consider to be the backward thinking of this man. I sent the following letter in response, though it was not published ultimately:

Wasn’t it revealing to read [ReverendX] complaining about anti-theistic notices on the backs of buses? A man who is very happy to peddle his Iron Age mythology in any forum possible wants to see other points of view eliminated from the public domain. We should not be surprised by this, since it is the goal of every religion to dominate not only the lives of its willing serfs but utterly dominate every aspect of everyone else’s life also. Thankfully this country still has freedom of speech and is not dominated by the totalitarian desires of medieval literature any longer.

The statistics must make grim reading for [ReverendX] as each year they report increasing affiliation with secular views and falling subscription to mythological nonsense. And it is a good thing too. If we look at the statistics across the globe, such as are published in the peer reviewed Journal for Religion and Society [1], of religiosity versus a range of issues like violent crime, teenage pregnancy, suicide, health, educational standards and gender equality we see that the more religious a nation the worse it performs in these issues and conversely the less religious a country the better it performs. Even within the US, its most religious states are amongst the worst. Japan, the most atheistic nation on the planet is the best performer by far. So, not only are the claims of religions utterly untrue, they are also notably damaging to societal health.

I issue forth the challenge by journalist Christopher Hitchens:
Can you name a moral action or thing said by a believer that could not have been done or said by a non-believer? I doubt you can.
Can you think of an awful thing said or done that could have only been in the service of religion? I doubt you can’t.
Anyone with an answer is welcome to comment on my blog: http://religiousmadness.blogspot.com/

If the Reverend were really in the business of caring about the welfare of his fellow citizens then the least he could to is abandon his campaign of religious intolerance and devote his efforts to more secular causes. I’m not going to hold my breath.

[1] Journal of Religion and Society - Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies

Pascal's view

2008-11-27T12:03:00.012Z

The following letter (published 26th November 2008) is my response to the the letter from [GentlemanX] titled 'Glance back'. In this letter I discuss the merits or lack thereof in Pascal's Wager which [GentlemanX] had advocated:

Regarding [GentlemanX]'s letter last week titled 'Glance back'.

He purports that we should all believe in God implying that there could be dire consequences if we don't. This is an alternate phrasing of a suggestion from the mathematician Blaise Pascal known famously as Pascal's Wager.

So what are the consequences of not believing in a god if it turned out that there is? What kind of god punishes a person that has lived a good, considerate and honest life?

Well you would have to look at the vast array of religions to find such gods, and what you will find is that you must follow the rules of each such religion to avoid the awful fates they describe.

So which one do you choose? It seems to me that if you grant credence to the notion of a god that is interested in the actions and thoughts of individual humans you ought to be very worried, since given the number of religions the chances are that you have picked the wrong one.

I submit that this is all nonsense. Are we really to believe that if Christianity is correct that decent hardworking Jews murdered by the Nazis are now in hell, whilst their vile persecutors, many of whom were confessing Christians, are now in heaven? What an absurd notion.

The reality is, those peddling Pascal's Wager are guilty of cheap religious hucksterism of the form 'Come and join my religion. What have you got to lose?"

As I say to men in shiny suits at my door trying to sell me their snake oil "thanks but no thanks".

Glance back

2008-11-27T11:16:00.012Z

In a debate going on in the local newspaper involving [ReverendX] and other members of the public, where the good reverend was complaining about irreligious notices on the backs of buses, one gentleman decided to invoke Pascal's Wager. Here is the letter he wrote (published 19th November 2008):

WITH reference to the "Behind You" letter from [ReverendX] of last week.
Perhaps the British Humanist Association might like to ponder the following slogan...
'It is far better to lead your life believing that there is a God and then finding out that there isn't, than it is to lead your life believing that there isn't and then finding out that there is.'

[GentlemanX]

My response to this was published also and is detailed in the next post.

The oldest Bible

2008-10-06T12:59:00.009+01:00

I have to confess my ignorance concerning the Bible. I am not a Biblical scholar and probably never will be. I, like probably most Christians, assumed that that the Bible, including the one I own, was a straight translation, not withstanding translation errors, of a single ancient book. I was however surprised to discover today that our ‘Holy Bible’ is a highly interpreted mosaic of various ancient manuscripts from different places and ages and that the modern versions that are available are not consistent with earliest known manuscript known as the Codex Sinaiticus (shown in the picture).

The Codex Sinaiticus is dated to around the middle of the 4^th century and has been kept in the Monastery of St Catherine, Mount Sinai, for many centuries. The Roman emperor Constantine is known to have taken parts of the manuscript for publication. This document is much older than the manuscripts from which our modern Bibles are derived.

I have had many discussions with fundamentalist Christians who insist that the Bible is the perfect word of God. This is quite a claim since our modern Bibles are loaded with contradictions and bizarre ideas that indicate very strongly that the Bible is the work of imperfect and biased men [1][2]. The Codex really puts claims like this to bed since it has a great many visible corrections and annotations made by its own scribes (click on the image shown above to see some). However most reasonable people including most Christians, even though they believe some of it to be true, accept that the Bible is the imperfect work of men.

There really isn’t much reason to believe any of the Bible’s fantastic claims to be true, especially when the Bible demonstrates itself to be unreliable by containing not insignificant errors and contradictions. Additionally it asks us to believe on the basis of no evidence that the incredible things it describes actually happened. Thomas Paine beautifully expressed this challenge to reasonable thinking when he said “is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?”. [3]. This from a man who also said “I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life”. Clearly the Bible is a troublesome book for even a God believing man.

The most striking thing in the Codex for me is its depiction of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. According to the Codex Jesus’ followers arrived at his tomb following his burial to be told by the attendant that he had risen and gone, and there the gospel ends. So not one of Jesus’ followers were witness to his resurrection or ascension and we are now expected to believe it happened on the scant account of a sole tomb attendant. I would like to just remind you of the words of Thomas pain; “is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?”. It seems we have a choice, we can either submit to reason or to wishful thinking.

For anyone interested in the Codex Sinaiticus there is now a project to bring the Codex to the web in digital form for all to see in full detail. The project website can be found at http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/.

[1] Talk Origins

[2] Skeptics Annotated Bible

[3] “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine, 1794

Blasphemy!

2008-10-05T15:49:00.005+01:00

Forgive me folks, for I have not sinned. It has been months since I last posted. Well actually I have sinned quite a lot in that time, questioning the word of the Bible mostly, punctuated by a few glasses of wine and bacon sandwiches.

Blasphemy! It’s quite an ambiguous term in reality. The way in which it is used by the religious seems to vary quite a bit from the dictionary definition. Declaring oneself to have powers of God seems to be the central meaning of the term but theists seem to use it to describe any kind of denial of their individual dogmas. Thomas Paine used it to describe Christianity in his infamous work “The Age of Reason”.

I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘God’. Why not? I simply have no reason to and the reasoning presented to me by theists of all creeds is pretty awful. However I don’t think too lowly of people that think that there is such a thing, I just see them as not having understood the value of the basic concept of preferring evidence over assumption. Unfortunately a great many theists also subscribe to some cluster of dogma which we all know as religions. This I take a very dim view of for various reasons largely because of the various forms of needless oppression arising from religions, and the fact that they generally actively encourage people to abandon reason or evidence in their pursuit, leading to all sorts of issues. For instance, denial of climate change or opposition to research of potentially life transforming therapies involving stem cells. These examples are biggies of course but there are thousands of other examples of absurd religion inspired behaviours that are wasteful or detrimental to humanity in some way whether small or large. All of that said I am going to grant the notion of ‘God’ credence for a moment in order to make the central points of this post:

If God is a reality, as is proclaimed by many, then that reality must interact with our reality in some detectable way otherwise God could have no influence on our world. If this is true then the natural world is either affected by God or is God, and by better understanding it we should better understand God. Do we have any process by which the study of nature is conducted? Yes, of course we do, we all know it as science. Yet millions of people reject this study of God and preferring to insist that the writings of Iron Age men, from long before the earnest beginnings of science, are far more likely to be true. The irony and hypocrisy of this is none more obvious than when devout theists start typing at their computers or visit the hospital to reap the benefits of science and carry on insisting that it is a lie. For any reasonable person the revolution in human understanding in the age of science is extraordinary and undeniable. However in the thousands upon thousands of scientific papers have we been given even the remotest glimpse of God? Well, you could read them all and think them through to have a good answer for that question. That seems a prohibitively arduous task so perhaps we might get some clue by looking at the numbers of scientists subscribing to the notion of God. According to an article in the scientific journal Nature leading scientists still reject God [1]. In 1998 the statistics showed that 72% did not believe in God and a further 21% doubted the existence of God, leaving us with only 7% that do believe there is a God. That is extraordinary! The majority of the smartest people on our planet do not subscribe to the notion of God.

let’s persist with the notion that there is a God for a moment. Science has yielded humanity enormous increases in our understanding of the universe we live in, from the expanses of the cosmos to the unimaginably tiny particles that make every part of the cosmos. The very fundamental tenets of science are geared towards intellectual honesty and rigor, because we really do want to know how this world works and how to continue our survival in it. Science is without doubt the most honest and fundamental study of God known to man. Surely to deny honesty and rigor of this quality is to deny God. If God is omniscient and omnipotent then the claims of the Bible and Koran are surely the most grotesque blasphemies against God in all of human writing. How can a Christian believe God is all loving and at the same time accuse him of the most vile atrocities conceivable by claiming the Bible to be true?

I submit to you that if there is a God then our religions are the most awful denials of him. Blasphemy by any standard.

[1] Nature, Vol. 394, No. 6691, p. 313 (1998) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Fred's freedom to speak

2008-06-05T14:22:00.011+01:00

Few, I suspect, involved in theological debate will not have heard of the Westboro Baptist Church lead by Pastor Fred Phelps [i]. This is a church of family members numbering around 75 that regularly protest at soldiers funerals holding banners with slogans such as ‘Thank God for dead soldiers’ and ‘God hates fags’.

The church has outraged many Americans and obviously caused great distress to the bereaved families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to the bereaved families of dead gay men including Matthew Shepherd and Heath Ledger. This outrage has driven legislators to take action against the church, limiting its activities by law and also fining the church for damages to the families for the distress they cause:

Hate group targeted by lawmakers – BBC

Huge fine for anti-gay US church - BBC

A natural reaction is to feel glad that these hateful people are being dealt heavy blows for the distress that they cause. I can’t however help worrying about the consequences of these legal actions, since they have ramifications for all Americans. On the face of it these actions seem to be quite carefully limited to the activities of the Westboro church, but the fact that the church’s name is not specifically mentioned in new laws seeking to restrain them means that those laws apply to all within the geographical domain of those laws. In other words, these new laws limiting freedom of speech in certain circumstances are chipping away at the fundamental principle of freedom of speech as a matter of human and constitutional rights. How many more instances of offensive speech will it take to for the lawmakers to knee-jerk legislate freedom of speech into being an ideological relic known only in US history books?

Yes their views are abhorrent to most of us and cause distress to those directly affected that see differently. However there are two major problems with legislating in any way against freedom of speech no matter how abhorrent:

Democracy fundamentally depends on freedom of speech to be democracy.
When hasn’t a point of view offended someone somewhere?

There are of course those that argue against democracy, but here is their problem; anyone who publicly disagrees with democracy in principle is fundamentally arguing against their own right to partake in any democratic campaign against democracy. This is clearly a philosophically bankrupt position. Any Christian that disagrees with freedom of speech or democracy would soon find themselves eating their own words should they find themselves in an Islamic caliphate devoid of the right to air their views. If we look carefully at those that oppose democracy we soon discover that they are people campaigning for the world to be run according to their own views. Sound familiar? isn’t that what democracy is all about? Should I be even bothering to defend democracy here? Sadly, it would seem that I should since the pillars of democracy are being steadily eroded by the short sighted reactions of people offended by different points of view.

Einstein’s theory of relativity was offensive to both Stalin and Hitler. Stalin’s response to his scientists claim to need Einstein’s theory to make a nuclear bomb was to say that they should use it but then said “we can always shoot them later” [ii]. The Nazis rejected relativity at first as ‘Jewish Science’. Did any of that make Einstein wrong? Perhaps using two of the most hated figures in history is not a politically wise, but surely the point is made. We have to allow ourselves to assimilate different ideas, even if they are offensive, in order to really discover whether they are right.

Lastly I would like to point out that having such an austere and bold example of a particular point of view, as the Westboro Baptist Church does, gives people something to contrast their own views against. It should certainly make people think, the very antithesis of the underlying Westboro Baptist Church message. People who wish to argue effectively against the views of the Westboro church soon realise that they have to have better reasons than ‘it’s just wrong’. The Westboro church does not want people to think, it wants them to blindly follow their literal interpretation of the Bible, yet their very message has the opposite effect to that which they seek to achieve. I say let them speak, as they are doing the US a great service. If you don’t then the US constitution becomes a farce and the enemies of Democracy shall eventually win. I may not like what the the Westboro Baptist Church has to say, but I think they should be allowed to say it, and this is my part in the fight to allow them to do what we should all be free to do.

[i] Westboro Baptist Church Wesbite http://www.godhatesfags.com/

[ii] Ethan Pollock ‘Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars’, chapter 4

Matters of faith

2008-05-28T14:03:00.012+01:00

For a while I have wanted to do a discussion of the term faith but had never gotten around to it for various reasons. The reason I wanted to do this was really to give some clarity to the term and the consequences of it with respect to what we believe. To any non-believer it easy to see that faith is a problematic mechanism for acquiring ideas that one holds to be true in their own mind and I suspect most believers see the problem also. So let’s start with a dictionary definition:

“belief that is not based on proof” – Dictionary.com.

This is at the time of writing the 2^nd entry in the list of definitions, however the other entries are really just variations of this or specific uses of it with respect to religious belief. I chose this definition because it is clear and concise.

It should be easy to see why this is an unreliable mechanism with respect to acquiring beliefs that map well onto reality, but in explicit terms it is so because it means that the user of this mechanism is bound by it not to filter out mistakes or lies from information. In other words excepting a proposition on faith is to leave one’s self open to believing not just truth but mistakes and lies. If you try to filter these things then it is no longer faith that is the mechanism at work.

That would really seem to be the end of discussion would it not?. Good enough reason to reject faith as a means to acquire truth on the basis of being wholly unable to distinguish truth from non-truth. This is however just the beginning.

Very often we do not have the time to investigate certain matters to really understand what is true on the basis of evidence. We have to make decisions quickly in some circumstances, based on the information available at the time. For instance, someone comes running into your office or place of work and says ‘quick, you have to get out, the roof is collapsing in’. What will be the decision making process here? It is a ‘no brainer’. The consequences if the proposition is true could be really serious. The consequences of acting on the proposition if the proposition is false are in most cases non-existent, that is to say leaving the building and then discovering that it was a hoax really only results in annoyance. Interestingly this scenario is closely related to Pascal’s Wager. An argument that says in so many words ‘believe in God because you have nothing to lose’. There is however a significant difference; you have your whole life to figure out whether the god proposition is reasonable or not. There is no emergency requiring you to make a snap decision. You do have time to consider what is true and what is not. The point here is that ‘faith’ can be mitigated by the circumstances and consequences.

So what of the ‘faith’ of the faithful, the religious? I shall not discuss those that claim to have had certain experiences that justify their belief, as this is not faith, it is possibly genuine lucid experience, poor analysis of experience or an indication of mental illness, but it is certainly not faith. The faith in the religious is in the propositions of religious texts and of fellow believers. This really comes down to a rather simplistic philosophy or reasoning that goes along the lines of ‘x is a good person, they have always been truthful with me, why would they lie about this?’. What ought to be blatantly obvious here is that the person that we are relying on for our information is in no better position than we are to reliably provide such information. There is just a never ending network of people asserting things as true, yet they actually have no reliable basis upon which to do so. This network does not just exist in the current generation it extends back through time, with the faithful parents and clerics telling the each new generation what is ‘true’ whist having no evidence for it. I make no distinction here between the spoken word and the written word (e.g. the Bible), since they amount to the same thing except in one respect. The Bible for instance makes specific claims that are either true or false, whereas the individual may make claims about the Bible. Ultimately everyone is making decisions for themselves as to whether to give credence to such claims, whether Biblical, social or parental. The decision still comes down to whether to have faith in the claim or the claimant, and I have already shown how inherently unreliable this method of knowledge acquisition really is. This whole point was made very eloquently by Thomas Paine in ‘The Age of Reason’:

“When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so”

It matters what people believe, it matters a lot. Beliefs guide our actions and very often motivate us to act. Is it not ethically imperative that we make best efforts to understand what is true rather than just accepting propositions on faith? After all we have our whole lives to consider these things and many important decisions we make will be made based on what we consider to be true. Shouldn’t we do better than accepting the claims of others on faith as the basis upon which to fly planes into buildings? Shouldn’t we do better than this when deciding what to teach our children? Our beliefs and decisions affect every aspect of our lives and the lives of others, both directly and indirectly. Faith must surely be one of the most irresponsible derelictions of reason, and everyone reaps the consequences of the lies and mistakes that we allow into our beliefs through the indiscriminate door of faith. I for one think that we can easily do better and so think that it is ethically imperative that we do.

Human Fertilization and Embryology

2008-05-22T20:05:00.008+01:00

In the last week the UK has seen 3 major debates in with votes on the Human Fertilization and Embryology bill in Parliament. The results of the votes were to reject a ban hybrid DNA, allow the creation of ‘saviour siblings’ and keep the abortion time limit at 24 weeks.

The whole subject attracted a lot of interest from the Catholic Church and its adherents. The question is why?

Well let me first point out where the Catholics sat on these issues. They wanted abortion banned, ‘saviour siblings’ banned, and hybrid embryos banned. The scientific and medical community on the other hand wanted pretty much the opposite, and they got what they wanted.

So let’s think about what happened here. I am going to have to speculate here since our neighbours in the Catholic church seem to have been unable to give us their reasons with much more articulation than the use of words like ‘monstrous’ and ‘wrong’. We can take a look at the issues, consider some ethical scenarios and see where the Catholic objectors fit in.

Abortion

The Catholics tabled 2 amendments to the bill; the 1^st was an outright ban on abortion and the 2^nd was for a reduction in the abortion time limit should the 1^st amendment fail. Both were rejected.

This whole objection is a bit of a mystery to me, but I suspect it has something to do with the Biblical commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’. This is somewhat of a contradiction in the Bible since the Biblical god seems to do little else and even the Biblical Jesus advocates genocide in Luke 19:27. Additionally, since the Pope has now declared purgatory a bit of theological mistake, are these foetuses not going straight to paradise for the rest of eternity? Anyhow I digress, the objection to abortion seems to be little more than ‘my religion teaches me that it is wrong’.

Now let’s consider a scenario where abortion might come in to play that specifically addresses the outright ban notion. Suppose there is a woman who has been brutally raped. She is mentally and physically scarred from the attack, she is even so traumatized that she is now terrified to be in the company of men. Is it right that this woman be forced to carry the baby of her attacker, through months of discomfort, visits to the gynaecologist for internal examinations, go through the tremendous pain and often life threatening physical trauma of giving birth, unable to work for months and lumbered with the financial burden of managing this situation, all against her will? How does this equate in ethical terms with the Catholic ethical stance of ‘my religion teaches me that it is wrong’. It is clear that the Catholic position is not really considering ethics at all. How can you say that the interests of a mindless clump of tissue must overrule the interests of this poor woman without ignoring her suffering in the equation? Isn’t that grotesquely unethical? And we are expected to respect their beliefs?

On the subject of the time limit, the existing time limit of 24 weeks was set based on the viability of the baby. That is to say after 24 weeks a baby is considered to have a reasonable chance of survival outside the womb. This limit does seem to be little more than arbitrary. My best effort to understand this is best summed up as the baby is now intravenously independent and thus is considered an individual and thus must be given an individual's human rights. I suppose that human rights must apply from some point otherwise we are all in trouble. I would however argue that realistically if labour has not started the baby is not ready to be born and is thus still highly likely to be dependent on the mother. It is really only advances in medical technology that mitigate this circumstance i.e. artificial independence. Still we find the Catholics and their allies scratching around for anything, literally anything, regardless of ethics, to support their desire to stop abortion, thus they settle for alleged improvements in medical technology that may support the baby outside of the womb before 24 weeks. Their concerns seem at best insincere in this context.

Hybrids and ‘saviour siblings’

These two issues are linked because they both relate to the great potential for the development of medical therapies for many conditions. These issues are however divided in theological terms because the ‘saviour siblings’ concept sits partially within the domain of abortion. The kinds of illnesses and injuries that could be alleviated or cured by therapies derived from research involving hybrids and saviour siblings are generally the things that leave people horribly scarred, sick for life or cause them to die a terrible and undignified death. So on what ethical basis are the Catholics objecting? I think we have to look at the Bible once again to consider a possible source. This objection to hybrids must surely be derived from Leviticus 20:15 ‘And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast’. Beyond this I cannot see what their objections to saving lives and relief of suffering would be. So what are they saying? ‘it’s in the Bible, so I don’t want you to do it’. If that is their justification then this should be a warning shot to us all, since there are plenty of other things in the Bible like stoning children to death for disobedience, for instance. Is this really where Catholics would like us to go, or are they prepared to reject nonsense from the Bible? Who knows?

Isn’t it about time that Catholics started considering ethics in real terms, by considering the relative suffering and interests of all parties involved, instead of blindly referring to the thoughts of Bronze Age novelists?

I must however say that I am delighted that ethical reasoning triumphed in our Parliament this week and has demonstrated that the UK is not suffering from the kind of Iron Age philosophy tainted politics of the US.

End of debate

2008-04-16T20:37:00.007+01:00

Unfortunately my debate with [ReverendX] was curtailed by the editor of the local newspaper. The reverend's letter was published 16th April 2008 but my response (below) will not be.

The reverend [X], appears yet again to have misunderstood what I have said in previous posts. He boasts that his parents were atheists in the belief that this somehow shows my points to be wrong. Undoubtedly atheists have had religious children and religious people have had atheist children. Likewise with all religions and permutations therein. Nonetheless one’s ‘choice’ of religion is determined virtually solely by their parent’s religion or of the society they live in. The reverend, I understand, comes from a Christian society.

In the reverend’s dismissal of my points he fails to recognise, acknowledge or answer the point that if he had been born in Saudi Arabia for instance he would almost certainly have become a Muslim.

Beliefs matter. They matter a lot. Beliefs motivate people to speak and act in various ways. People murder because of their beliefs, they hold up important medical research, they persecute others, they affect the world that we live in. Does the reverend not recognise that it is important to make our best efforts to know what is true about the world when forming our beliefs? Is the Bible even close to our best efforts? We have millions of books and research institutions devoted to better understanding the world. Does the reverend really believe that a book documenting Iron Age mythology trumps them all?

It's a case of what you believe in

2008-04-16T20:03:00.007+01:00

The following letter is the latest installment in the ongoing exchange between myself and the [ReverendX] in the local newspaper. Anyone interested in following this exchange can follow the 'ReverendX' label to see all related posts. The following letter by the ReverendX was published today.

In response to the letter last week on 'Matter of faith' and whether it matters what we believe, and in response to [ConcernedAbout]'s dismissive letter may I make the following points.

Firstly, if you believe as I do, that Jesus died for our sins and that no one else did, then that makes him unique and we need to tell others about him as a matter of urgency.

If Jesus is the saviour of the world and a person can only know God and find forgiveness and eternal life through him, then this is not an insignificant argument.

Secondly, the essence of Christianity is a relationship with God.

Religion is man made, full of rules and regulations, and terrible things have been and are being done because of people's religion.

I did not become a Christian because of where I live or because of what my parents believed. In fact they were atheists!

I became a Christian because somebody cared enough to share the Gospel with me and I looked into it and finally asked Jesus to be my Saviour. That was nearly forty years ago. I have grown in my relationship with him ever since.

What's in a name?

2008-04-13T17:10:00.007+01:00

Anyone that has concerns about religion and has spent any time on the net either discussing or researching the subject will have come across at least one of the ‘four horsemen’. If you are not familiar with the name, it refers to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet and Christopher Hitchens. I am not sure of the etymology of the name, but I guess it means different things to different people. For the religious fundamentalists the ‘four horsemen’ no doubt spell some kind of impending doom or threat to humanity. For those that are as alarmed by religion as I am these guys hopefully spell impending doom for religion and offer a glimmer of hope of a better future for us all.

It is interesting to see how the religious demonize people and concepts at the drop of a hat. It seems to be quite a successful strategy for immunizing themselves against criticism and new ideas simultaneously. Anything uttered by one of ‘them there demons’ can be casually discarded without consideration. It is what we call 'throwing the baby out with the bath water'.

Us demons have collected quite an array of labels that allow fundamentalists to ignore us should we be foolish enough to identify ourselves under any such label. Heretic, unbeliever, infidel, atheist, enemy of god. Take your pick. A lot of non-religious folk readily identify themselves as atheist in conversation with religious folk. This is not a wise strategy if you expect your points to be considered. Sam Harris made this point clearly and with great articulation at the AAI meeting in 2007. I would urge anyone that identifies themselves as an atheist to watch the video of Sam Harris’ talk:

We should all be very weary of this demonization tactic as it has had truly horrific consequences in the past. Demonization of Jews is what lead to the awful treatment and slaughter of millions of Jews in WWII. It is also responsible for the twin towers attack and I am sure if you think about it you will start to come up with less high profile examples for yourself. I would therefore recommend that in conversation with religious people, whether on message boards or elsewhere that we all continue to recognise that they are also human beings. If we are able to find common ground with religious people on certain issues they may well be more open to listen to what we have to say on issues for which they disagree with us. The door must swing both ways of course otherwise the conversation will quickly end. That does not mean for a minute that you have to simply accept anyone’s point of view, but at least allow them to express it.

Another lesson that can be learned, from Sam Harris in particular, is composure. Even when confronted with a barrage of ignorance and bigotry Sam stays composed and settled. When he subsequently gets his chance to speak he is incisive and articulate such that his points are heard. Sam does not fall victim to the ‘red mist’ which can render even a great man like Richard Dawkins incapable of responding intelligently.

In conclusion I would suggest that we all adopt a mantra to be recited before going into and during intellectual battle. “stay calm, listen, think, win” works for me. What works for you?

Religious madness on the web

2008-04-11T23:27:00.011+01:00

Since the 9/11 attacks in New York, a day that I remember well as I am sure most do, I have found myself wanting to learn about the psychology and philosophy of not just Islamic extremists that perpetrate violent attacks but of all religious adherents and their actions.

Barely a day goes by now when you cannot find in most major newspapers a story of religious violence, conspiracy, sexual abuse, ethical tragedy, intent on civil rights infringement, ignorance or overt religious bigotry. It would be unfair to say that they are always religiously motivated but in every case religion appears to have had at least a mucky hand in the issue.

The web of course is now ‘the’ market place of ideas. A place where we can find news, exchange views, research whatever and commit a vast variety of crimes that were unthinkable only 15 years ago. However although it is a ‘free market’ the scales are tipped heavily towards the views of financially powerful organisations. They are able to dominate search engine results and put their views in front of much larger audiences than any individual or meagerly funded organisation can. This is an important point when considering how religion influences people.

The US has undoubtedly the most religious population of the developed world. A country where religious institutions are not only free of taxation but are often funded by the US government under the ‘faith based initiative’ for instance, despite being in clear contravention of the US constitution. In addition to this, religious institutions and quite a number of despicable con men are able to raise astonishing amounts of money from the highly religious US public. Needless to say they are pumping large amounts of money into web based promotions.

In contrast to this, the scientific community is relentlessly trying to solve the worlds real ‘technical’ issues and make pioneering discoveries, but is largely at the mercy of governments for funding. Obviously government funded science programs have little money to spare on PR. It is little wonder that science, particularly in the US, does not maintain such a high esteem as it ought to in the US public’s eye. Religious institutions are therefore able to use their powerful marketing machine to steer large swathes of the US public away from well established scientific theories that they feel threaten their religion.

Elsewhere on the web we find online communities in the bellies of corporate monsters like YouTube, Yahoo Message Boards, Yahoo Answers and of course FaceBook. I have not had personal experience of FaceBook so I shall refrain from commenting on it. I have however had a good degree of the former titles. In each case I have discovered tinkering by the staff of these ‘facilities’ that can only be described as unduly interfering with freedom of speech. I am not talking about threatening comments being removed here. I am talking about accounts being revoked and ratings being ‘attenuated’ of those who dare to express worries about or dislike of religion. One can find many comments and posts regarding these ‘tinkerings’ within the sites themselves.

Perhaps I am being a bit of a conspiracist here, and in some sense wish I were. However ladies and gents at this juncture and in summary I suggest that you consider my comments when viewing the web and in making your own views heard (read even).

Freedom to express views

2008-04-11T17:14:00.006+01:00

In response to the letter from [ReverendX], whom it turns out is friendly with my father (though I'm not sure for how much longer), I sent the following letter to the local newspaper. The published sections are highlighted blue.

Dear Your View,

I was delighted to read the response to my previous letter from none other than a reverend of the church, he gives my remarks a credence that I’m pretty sure he wishes he hadn’t. Are we to suppose that the reverend is offering an unbiased opinion, after all to be a reverend he is either a liar (which I readily presume not) or has swallowed biblical mythology hook line and sinker. I am however fairly sure that the reverend’s ‘gratitude at freedom of speech’ does not truly extend to my remarks, only his freedom to proselytize.

Again, and with no surprise since he is a reverend after all, the reverend expresses certainties regarding Christian mythology that are backed up by little or no incontrovertible evidence and lots of faith. Lot’s of similar ancient myths are much less evidence of the truth of their claims than they are evidence of their popularity and of the infancy of human understanding in their age. The reverend must surely take on board the following point if no other; he is a reverend because he was born into a Christian society, otherwise he might have been a Muslim, Jew, Hindu or one of a myriad of other denominations that make equally extraordinary and incompatible claims about the nature of the universe, and he would be so with equal conviction and certainty. One’s religious denomination and, to some extent, degree of conviction are determined almost exclusively by what one’s parents believe. Are we really to accept that truth is determined by where you are born and who your parents are? If so then god has to be far from being omniscient or omnipotent since ‘his’ nature varies from religion to religion. It is probably worth noting Prof. Richard Dawkins remark here “they can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong”.

I have no doubt that the reverend is a truly good man and his intentions are very decent and heartfelt, but he could do a lot better than Christianity from a philosophical stand point. Need I point out that all of Jesus’ words of peace, wisdom and compassion are undone, and then some, by his demand for genocide in Luke 19:27? Of course this act is completely eclipsed by god himself in the story of Noah, though god does deserve some credit for providing ‘equal opportunity’ genocide as opposed to Jesus’ discrimination against anyone that wants him to rule them. The point is that one has to determine what is good within the bible with a philosophy and morality determined outside of the bible otherwise we would all still be smashing open the skulls of insolent juveniles as demanded by god in Deuteronomy. This is incontrovertible evidence of the fallibility of the bible as a moral guide and I could probably fill many books with the factual failings of the bible.

Western society has come along way since the Bible was authored and compiled, in both understanding and compassion. We now have the benefit of science to aid our understanding in almost every respect, an intellectual luxury not enjoyed by the Bible’s authors. The reverend credits Christianity with the personal freedoms that we now enjoy, however this is nothing more than the exploitation of the loop holes Christianity failed to close. Ultimately we are gradually emancipating ourselves from the barbarism and intellectual chains of ancient religion. We should hardly be thanking Christianity for treating us so badly in the past simply because we have escaped its most pernicious aspects.

Kind regards
[ConcernedAbout]

Gratitude at freedom of speech

2008-04-11T16:52:00.007+01:00

The following letter was published in the local newpaper on April 2nd 2008 in response to my own 'urban myths' letter. It was from a reverend of a local church.

In response to Mr [ConcernedAbout]'s letter last week where he belittles Scripture, rubbishes Jesus and presumes to tell us that early Christians were a bunch of dimwitted storytellers, may I point out that whether he likes it or not we still live in this country under a Christian constitution which - for hundreds of years - has given us democracy and freedom of speech.

This is why people can write what they like about Jesus and the Bible without fear of reprisal.

It is interesting though that it is always Jesus and the Bible that is attacked.

If it is all such a myth why bother?

The truth is that Christianity is based on solid facts, rooted in history, which anyone with an open mind can explore.

They will find out that there are over twenty four thousand copies of New Testament manuscripts about Jesus' life, death and teachings going back to within thirty to foutry years of the writer's death, backed up by secular historians of the day.

By contrast we only have a very few manuscripts of the life of Julius Ceasar, the earliest of which is from nine hundred years after his death, but we all believe he existed!

The French philosopher Voltair boasted that within one hundred years of his death in 1728 the Bible would disappear completely. In 1778 the Geneva Bible society took over his house and used his printing presses to print thousands of Bibles! It is still the worlds best seller.

The cross and the Empty Tomb stand in history as facts. The only important issue is how we will respond to Jesus.

Rev [X]

Scriptures are 'urban myths'

2008-04-11T16:03:00.005+01:00

Last month whilst browsing the local news paper I came across a letter in the 'Your View' section which itself was a reply to an earlier letter. The letter was complaining about the previous correspondent's lack of knowledge of Biblical scripture and went on to assert extraordinary certainties regarding the story of Jesus Christ. In response I sent the following letter which was published 26th March 2008.

Dear Your View,

In response to [GentlemanY]’s comments on ‘the relevant scriptures’, I find [GentlemanY] certainties regarding the existence of Jesus let alone the nature of Jesus rather astonishing. We have little more than very ancient urban myths codified in ‘scripture’ that come from early civilization, when education and understanding of much of the nature of the world was virtually non-existent. Telling tales would have almost certainly been a kind of currency in those days. The more amazing and wondrous the tale the more popular the teller, not to mention the power one would have if people accept ones claims as being supernaturally ordained. We should not be surprised that there are myths of supernatural events emanating from early civilisation, that does not mean for a moment that we should simply accept them as being true or accurate records of history.

[GentlemanY] referred to CS Lewis with ‘Jesus was either insane, a liar or he was who he claimed to be’. Let us assume that there is a thread of reality in the Jesus myths and acknowledge that he existed just for a moment. Was he insane, a liar or the son of a supernatural being? What is the least probable answer? It seems to me that it requires a significant degree of credulity to assume the supernatural given what we know from science and the dire lack of evidence for the supernatural claims of the Bible.

[GentlemanY] ought to look into the Persian myths of Mithras. These myths predate Christianity, were adopted by Romans and bear some rather astonishing similarities to Christianity, for instance Mithras was born of a virgin 25th December, had 12 disciples, referred to as the messiah and saviour, was buried in a tomb and rose 3 days later. They also had a festival where we now call Easter. Constantine ordered the council of Nicea to unify the competing religions through scripture to make Rome powerful again. We now have the Bible and Christianity as a result. At this point one should note the quotation from the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful”.

I would like to point out that there have been many studies carried out on the relationship between religiosity and intellect, and they all show a negative correlation between religiosity and intellect. One can simply Google on the terms ‘religiosity vs intelligence’ for some examples. Additionally moral standards as measured by such metrics as; teenage pregnancy, gender equality, violent crime, per capta income and educational standards all improve as you compare the most religious nations through to the most secular nations. I am glad to be in one of the more secular nations of the world for such reasons. But even today we are still battling with religious bigotry. The churches regularly threaten the government with withdrawal of support over such issues as when we can or cannot work or shop, medical science, and gay issues. We should be thankful that these religious ideologists aren’t getting their way as we would still be witnessing the torture, burning and stoning of homosexuals, fornicators and unbelievers.

[ConcernedAbout]