Why I am opposed to religion
I could post about why I don’t believe in God, but others have gone before me on that count. Maybe I still will eventually, but probably not.
I thought it’d be more interesting to go into why I oppose religion in general. Others have done this as well, but mostly in book form.
(You may argue that there are religions that don’t share the traits I’m about to discuss. For this purpose, I consider religion to be any belief system that at its base has irrationality, often belief in the supernatural, and axioms based on “faith” that people aren’t allowed to question. Anything else is really just philosophy.)
Obviously I care dearly about the truth, so it annoys me when people blind themselves to it to comfort themselves, but this, in itself, wouldn’t be a reason to hate religion, would it?
The problem isn’t that people blind themselves, it’s that religion itself encourages them to do so. Richard Dawkins said (I’ve quoted this numerous times, no doubt):
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
And I agree with him, but there’s more still.
More than just discouraging curiosity and inquiry (except on its own narrow and arbitrary terms—theology), it tends to enforce this by also teaching unquestioning submission to authority.
It may only refer to the authority of God (and, of course, his high priests; the Bible, incidentally, also instructs believers to submit to earthly authorities—render unto Caesar, &c.), but this fosters the sort of mentality opens the general populace to exploitation by ruthless leaders, as was the case in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy (though neither situation can be blamed on religion entirely, obviously, it nevertheless facilitated the whole affair), and as is the case in the US today.
Of course, these leaders need not even be evil. They can be wholly convinced that they’re virtuous and doing the right thing. As Steven Weinberg said:
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.
As evidenced by things like the witch hunts, the crusades, almost all forms of terrorism, and the Middle East. You could argue that none (or almost none) of these things were or are fueled entirely by religion, but they’re certainly greatly aggravated by it, at the very least.
You may say that I’m only talking about a few extremists, but I’m really not. Over 44% of all Americans believe that Jesus Christ is returning to Earth as foretold in the Book of Revelation in the next 50 years, and 55% believe mankind was created in its present form by God some 6,000 years ago. In many Muslim countries, the situation is even worse.
Not only is the “extremist” position much more mainstream than you might think, “moderate” religionists are encouraging it by dissuading people (and themselves) from examining their beliefs critically and by passing these harmful beliefs on to their children.
Because, of course, religion propagates through the indoctrination of children. This is perhaps the most disgusting thing of all.
It’s very hard to see through indoctrination when you’ve been taught blind faith is a virtue, and that “revealed” knowledge has the same (or a higher) truth value as (than) empirical evidence.
The flip-side, that religion reduces crime and encourages moral behavior, also seems to have no basis in reality. The US is easily the most religious Western nation, yet it also has the highest crime rate and a surprisingly low standard of living and education.
Scandinavia, on the other hand, contains some of the least religious nations in the West, and it has some of the lowest crime rates and the highest standard of living in the world.
So yes. This is why I’m against religion, more or less.
Religion, in general, is a mental illness easily on par with paranoid schizophrenia, and it’s time to stop treating it as something that deserves respect. “Faith-sufferers” might not be able to help themselves, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be helped at all.
elliottg said,
January 9th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
More willful ignorance by another anti-theist. Let’s ignore some things like the concept of hospitals – started by religionists. How about universities? religion again. The printed word ? Damn if it wasn’t the Gutenberg BIBLE. Haven’t noticed the godless communists (joke) doing much better in the man’s inhumanity towards man department, but go ahead and be stupid.
Cairnarvon said,
January 9th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Early on, hospitals and religion were linked, yes, for much the same reason thunder was worshipped: disease is hard to explain if you don’t really have a good way of studying the cause, so it was the subject of many superstitions.
Note how nowadays, the religious are holding back advances in medicine, both by opposing stem cell research, and, marginally less directly, by claiming evolution isn’t a fact.
Every dime spent on ID and “creation science” is a dime spent against finding a cure for cancer.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that universities were religious. The earliest ones certainly weren’t. You could argue many European ones were, but really, this was mostly an attempt to put Theology on the same level as the natural sciences, and to have control over what would and would not be taught.
Universities are powerful institutions, so it makes sense the Church would try to get a hold on them.
As for the Gutenberg Bible, yes, Gutenberg printed a few Bibles. So what? It wasn’t the first thing he printed, and it certainly wasn’t the only thing. To say that the invention of the printing press was motivated by religion is ridiculous.
And do you really need me to point out why Russian Communism was so inhumane? Protip: It’s for much the same reasons religion tends to be.
People can still be evil without being religious. I’m not saying atheism would solve all of the world’s problems. Religion just doesn’t make people good, and often has a tendency to make them do evil things without thinking or while thinking they’re doing good, as I said.
Coduuuu said,
January 9th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Religion keeps me from making sweet love to my sister ;.;
Terras said,
January 9th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Never stopped me from doing it. ^.~
Way to have no faith in humanity and more faith in an imaginary friend, Ellie.
Skatje said,
January 9th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
You can make your imaginary friend anything you could possibly want, though. They’re way more fun.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 9th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
“More than just discouraging curiosity and inquiry (except on its own narrow and arbitrary terms—theology), it [religion] tends to enforce this by also teaching unquestioning submission to authority.”
In the Old Testament, we have flawed rulers like David, flawed priests as far back as Aaron, and flawed prophets like Jonah. Nothing says “authority should be unquestioned” like showing flaws in the authorities. In the New Testament, there are early Christians flouting the earthly authorities. Questioning the Scriptures certainly became off-limits, but the case for a wholesale unquestioning submission to authority is dicey.
The tendency to submit to authorities seems to be a very human one. May I remind you that a textbook example of this didn’t involve religion at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.”
I would almost agree to this, but I’d replace “religion” with “ideology.” Religions are ideologies, of course, but not the other way round.
“Religion, in general, is a mental illness easily on par with paranoid schizophrenia, and it’s time to stop treating it as something that deserves respect.”
I’d only agree with the latter part. Saying that religion is on par with paranoid schizophrenia is a gross overstatement, since many religious practices are mostly harmless and at worst a waste of time.
I’d say that the post would be more general and more evidence-based if you simply said that religious beliefs are false, and subscribing to false beliefs may bite one in the butt in one way or another.
Cairnarvon said,
January 9th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Romans 13:1-7:
There are more instances like this. Especially the NT is heavy on them, but even if it weren’t, to say that any given thing absolutely may not be questioned (such as the scriptures) creates a slippery slope.
It’s true that the tendency to submit to authority is very human, but that’s no reason to encourage it by elevating it to a virtue.
You’re mostly right about the ideology thing—unquestioning adherence to anything is never a good thing. It’s possible to hold an ideology and still be open to changing it, though. Religion, on the other hand, is a particular brand of ideologies that actively discourages this.
If you want to nitpick about it, I’ll grant that religion is like a combination of paranoid schizophrenia and OCD. :P
I wouldn’t say that most practices are mostly harmless, though.
Skatje said,
January 9th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Awesome post. I’m quite impressed~
Nerull said,
January 9th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
^^ What she said.
Diogenes said,
January 9th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
So elliot, let me get this straight, believing in invisible sky faries is paramount to all modern technology and by extention all good that happens in the world? That about sum up your point?
elliottg said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Nope. The Crusades happened for geopolitical reasons that had little to do with religion. Atheists have done less for good in the world than any group I know and yet you wear your anti-theism like a badge of honor. The most prominent atheist in the modern world, Richard Dawkins, is famous for his anti-theism and for a popular book. and coining the word meme. I’ll put up the accomplishments of religion and those who are affiliated with religion over your list of its failings any day..
You want to think that humanity is good then go ahead, but we are just animals.
Cairnarvon said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:40 am
The Crusades did happen in part for geopolitical reasons, but would you doubt that almost all of the people actually doing the fighting were doing it because they felt they were doing God’s will?
The problem with claiming atheists have done less for good in the world than any other group is that atheists aren’t a coherent group. Your statement is quite meaningless.
And yes, humans are “just” animals. This doesn’t mean we don’t have things like altruism, though. And, of course, we have culture to a degree other animals don’t, which enables us to transcend our origins in any event.
I think you’ve already outstayed your welcome now~
elliottg said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:40 am
“From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist…. I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.”
Diogenes said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Ellliot, so any time christianity is connected with something good it is soley because of christianity that it happened, but any time it is connected with something bad it was barely an issue?
Cairnarvon said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Elliott, what’s your point? What Einstein may have said has no bearing on this argument whatsoever.
I did not receive much in the way of religious indoctrination in my youth, and my reasons for opposing religion are in that post up there. Feel free to keep grasping at straw men and irrelevant tangents, though.
Terras said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:53 am
I bet you are proud to consider yourself a self-taught intellectual, elliottg. Really, you seem more like those people at bus stops that think if they say things loudly enough, someone might consider what they say to have any worth.
Though, I really do believe that the guy who thinks the government is after his bottle caps has more legitimate information than you do. :3
elliottg said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Einstein had more humility than you. Maybe you’re smarter and more accomplished than he, but I doubt it.
elliottg said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:56 am
him?
elliottg said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:57 am
Nope. him.
elliottg said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:57 am
I meant devinitely “he”.
Cairnarvon said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:58 am
Again, how is that relevant? Since when is humility a virtue in and of itself?
Skatje said,
January 10th, 2007 at 12:58 am
Humility? So what if he has more humility? I wasn’t aware that character had so much bearing on presenting facts and historical evidence. You should probably go away now. >.>
Kagehi said,
January 10th, 2007 at 1:01 am
Hmm. Until very recently there wasn’t a lot of open atheists, and “every” world leader was religious. Claiming that every war ever fought can be explained away as not being “religiously motivated” is nonsense. Sure, the crusaded where motivated by geopolitics, but it was religions and, more to the point, a refusal of some parties to overlook those religio-political arguments caused by it, which became the driving force behind it. Next you are going to pull the bloody stupid, “I don’t care who Hitler paid tithes to as official state policy and how often he mentioned his religious beliefs, he wasn’t Christian!”, card… Its real easy to yank religion out of a situation and say, “See! Of you remove it, there where other stupid reason for people to do things.” And you are right. That’s not the problem. The problem is that if some idiot decides, to use a Shiria Muslem example, that his wife is cheating one him, even if he has not one scrap of evidence, *religion* gives him both the excuse to stone her to death and the *legal justification* to do so.
90% of the laws in the US have to be bent into a pretzel to *fit* literal interpretations of any sort of Biblical law, and some, not the least of which being *allowing* people to have other Gods, goes 100% against it. It works, not because the nation was founded by Christians, which means dozens of contradictory nuts that where in some cases as directly opposed to each other as Prodestants and Catholics in Ireland, but because people found common human ideals they all more or less agreed made sense and codified “those” into laws. We have spent the last 200+ years arguing over minutae of just which set of, what is now like 100,000+ different interpretations of moral behaviour, just among the “Christian” denominations, strict “rules” those laws where *meant* to codify. And we have in recent years developed a nasty split between those that reject rules handed down from on high and those with obsessive and insane fixations on making sure every T is crossed and I is dotted, even if they have to reword the Bible to provide more of them to check, while denying they do any such thing…, which if both sides where as prone to owning and using guns as one of them is, would have broken out in Ireland style civil war.
Sure, show me your list. Then watch as people take it apart with a crow bar and expose all the underlying false assumptions and errors you made about just what the motivation and goals really where, and more to the point, just how often *any* progress has come about in this manner:
1. Movement calls for change.
2. Church apposes it.
3. Movement succeeds.
4. Church backpeddles and tries to pretend they where all for it all along.
instead of:
1. Religion motivates someone to do good.
2. Church unanomously approves.
3. Historians record the glorious progress that religion provided.
People do the right thing “in spite” of organized religion, and often in opposition to its leaders, who don’t want things to change. That *they* where motivated by personal religious belief is no more relavant than saying, “They where all wearing shoes, so shoes played a major role in all the good works in the world.”
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 10th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Cairnarvon, quoting Romans 13:1-7: ” Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. 4For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. 5Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. 6This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. 7Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.”
First, this passage this is counterbalanced by depictions of the apostles, including Paul, as not so submissive. Second, the passage doesn’t even deal with whether authorities should be *questioned*, but about being law-abiding to those in charge and not giving them guff. Bear in mind that Christians believed that Caesar was not really the boss of them; Jesus (and God, of course) took that position. Now Paul is stuck with providing justification for why Christians should act largely as if Caesar were the boss, so he says that Caesar and the guys under him are servants of the Christians’ real boss. That’s not to defend the passage, only to say what it’s about.
Cairnarvon: “to say that any given thing absolutely may not be questioned (such as the scriptures) creates a slippery slope.”
“Slippery slope” isn’t the right phrase. It’s not as if having one given thing that absolutely may not be questioned never leads to other given things that absolutely may not be questioned. Roadblock, sticking point, obstacle to progress, etc., would be better descriptors.
Cairnarvon: “If you want to nitpick about it, I’ll grant that religion is like a combination of paranoid schizophrenia and OCD. :)”
Pfft! Very funny. :p
Cairnarvon: “I wouldn’t say that most practices are mostly harmless, though.”
Depends. The everyday practice of going to church, singing, listening to a sermon, and so on, isn’t too harmful, usually, though it may depend on what’s sung and preached. Comparing it to paranoid schizophrenia is rather like comparing a grumpy gym teacher to Hitler.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 10th, 2007 at 1:39 am
Sorry for the double post, but I couldn’t let this stand:
elliotg: “Nope. The Crusades happened for geopolitical reasons that had little to do with religion.”
Actually, the Crusades *were* largely about religion. An interesting bit from a biblioblogger:
“A popular myth is that crusaders were mostly land-hungry younger sons who saw an opportunity to carve out territories in Palestine. Aside from exceptions who prove the rule (like Bohemund of Taranto), we know this wasn’t the case. Many crusaders were eldest sons, and many of them already enjoyed wealthy lordships — which they obviously jeopardized by going on crusade.
“Generally speaking, greed wasn’t a motive. Most crusaders expected to return home, and indeed most who survived did. The cost of embarking on a crusade was lethally expensive: knights had to shell out anywhere between 2-5 times their annual income to afford equipment, supplies, horses, and servants. (Buying a horse back then was as fiscally intimidating as buying a house is for us today.) Most of the crusaders, who had never been more than 100 miles from home, let alone 2000 (the distance to Jerusalem), were terrified about the journey to Palestine. Simply put: those who were looking to improve their lot in life did not go on crusade.”
http://lorenrosson.blogspot.com/2006/11/from-just-war-to-holy-war-godsend-to.html
Cairnarvon said,
January 10th, 2007 at 1:47 am
The thing is, the Church then went on to essentially become the worldly power as well for many centuries. Out of the obey-but-not-really message and the just-obey message, guess which one got passed on the most?
(Irrelevant nitpick: letter-writing Paul wasn’t one of the Apostles. Your wording makes it sound like he was.)
And I do think it’s a slippery slope, as well as a roadblock. You can be on two roads at once and slide down one while being stopped at the other, in this metaphor~
The everyday practices of praying and wasting time instead of actually doing something about what you’re praying for, or having false hope, or pulling your kids out of school because they’re being taught about evolution, or a thousand other things, those are things I would consider to be actively harmful. Mostly to the believer himself, but by no means exclusively so.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 10th, 2007 at 2:33 am
Cairnarvon: “The thing is, the Church then went on to essentially become the worldly power as well for many centuries. Out of the obey-but-not-really message and the just-obey message, guess which one got passed on the most?”
Of course. But that had more to do with the Church having worldly power.
Cairnarvon: “Irrelevant nitpick: letter-writing Paul wasn’t one of the Apostles. Your wording makes it sound like he was.”
Irrelevant nitpick to irrelevant nitpick. :) Paul definitely was not one of the Twelve, but he certainly considered himself an apostle, and he is generally regarded as such.
Cairnarvon: “The everyday practices of praying and wasting time instead of actually doing something about what you’re praying for, or having false hope, or pulling your kids out of school because they’re being taught about evolution, or a thousand other things, those are things I would consider to be actively harmful”
Fair enough. The question is, are all of those things bad enough to compare to a psychosis like schizophrenia, as you did above? I’m not sure I’d go that far even with something as pernicious as creationism. Obviously, even if you don’t exaggerate, you are going to offend people by being blunt about the faults of religion. There’s no helping that. I don’t see exaggeration, however, as anything but a hindrance, at least not if you expect to send the message out to the religious. The truth is a tough sell as it is.
elliottg said,
January 10th, 2007 at 3:39 am
Bt sktj, dn’t y wnt t spnd mr tm cnvncng m f m rrr?
Cairnarvon said,
January 10th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
J. J., if you want to compare the worst of paranoid schizophrenia with what’s typically considered to be the “average” believer, then I’ll grant, paranoid schizophrenia is worse.
On the other hand, though, there are a lot of milder cases of paranoid schizophrenia which aren’t even that hard to live with, and you have the more extreme forms of religiosity, which motivates suicide bombers, abortion clinic bombers, religious persecution, &c.
I’d say they’re definitely in the same league, and there’s a lot more religiosity around than schizophrenia.
Damien said,
January 10th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
On the first hospitals allegedly being founded by religionists, I turn to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital#History
The Sinhalese (Sri Lankans) are perhaps responsible for introducing the concept of dedicated hospitals to the world. According to the Mahavamsa, the ancient chronicle of Sinhalese royalty written in the 6th century A.D., King Pandukabhaya (4th century BC) had lying-in-homes and hospitals (Sivikasotthi-Sala) built in various parts of the country. This is the earliest documentary evidence we have of institutions specifically dedicated to the care of the sick anywhere in the world.
Also talks about state-supportedhospitals in India and and China and Persia, and Roman valetudinaria for slaves, gladiators, and soldiers.
So, some healing done in temples yes, but a very early role for state-supported hospitals. Not founded by atheists, but then atheists were pretty rare, in part due to lack of knowledge and in part due to intolerance from religionists…
elliottg said,
January 10th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Sktj, s mch s y try t gnr th bx trtl nxt dr wh blvs n Gd, t’s stll thr csng ll srts f prblms.
[Note: Feel free to troll me, if you have nothing better to do, but don't use my blog to troll other people.]
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 11th, 2007 at 1:47 am
Cairnarvon: “J. J., if you want to compare the worst of paranoid schizophrenia with what’s typically considered to be the “average” believer, then I’ll grant, paranoid schizophrenia is worse.
On the other hand, though, there are a lot of milder cases of paranoid schizophrenia which aren’t even that hard to live with, and you have the more extreme forms of religiosity, which motivates suicide bombers, abortion clinic bombers, religious persecution, &c.”
The catch is that if you go around comparing religion to schizophrenia, people are likely to think of the worst schizophrenics, not the ones who are on their meds and under control. Sure, you can explain what you mean after the fact, but that’s like trying to unring the bell.
Transcendent Mediocrity » Blog Archive » On the G-O-Doube D~ said,
January 11th, 2007 at 2:18 am
[...] As Skatje and Koen did, I’ll tell you why I’m against religion and don’t believe in gods. [...]
Kagehi said,
January 11th, 2007 at 3:54 am
To extend and reword my metaphor:
Two people are talking in a bar. One says, “Armies can’t fight without shoes.” The other one says, “Yes, but you can use shoes for a lot of other things.”
The problem with this is, a) there isn’t much evidence that things wouldn’t get done at all without religion, unlike shoes and b) no one is trying to insist that everyone that doesn’t where the ultra white, winged, cross embossed, blessed and dipped in holy water shoes, if they don’t want to, and only an idiot would suggest that they make good work shoes of replace boots in places where steel toes are needed. Religion insists that a) nothing would get done without it, except all those annoying cases where it does, which don’t count for some reason and b) the only way to get it done *right* is the be wearing the right pair of shoes, easilly purchased in almost as many contradictory and mutually exclusive colors, styles, emblems, sizes, shapes, materials, contents, blessing methods, etc., as there are fracking people on the planet.
Heck. Someone recently mentioned that in the South, the town he used to live in had *one* church for every **twelve** people, with a population of like 20,000 or more…. That’s an awful lot of people that can’t decide what the frack they are following, never mind why they have to be right and the reast are wrong. And its just one bloody city. Normal people could build a dozen *good* schools, half a dozen stores, a recreations center for the entire city for the youth in it *and* probably give away free food to everyone below minimum wage at a mega-soup kitchen, for the amount of money probably wasted weekly, if not daily, on supporting that nonsense, most of which is probably going to fund campaigns to stop things from happening they disaprove of, not towards things they complain no one is willing to fix, like the schools, poor people, gangs, etc.
I would be willing to bet that “on average”, since there are bound to be exceptions, probably less than a penny from every dollar a church takes in *actually* goes to improving “society”, instead of just making its members feel good, attacks on things they don’t approve of, funding of people like the Discovery Institute that don’t spend a dime on making actual discoveries, or just buying new gold leaf for the pulpet, because some of the prior stuff peeled off. Then, I am a major cynic about it. It might be, being charitable, 30 cents from every dollar…. lol
Cairnarvon said,
January 11th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
J. J., so what? That doesn’t change the fact that religion is, for all intents and purposes, a mental illness, and a contageous one, at that. It’s time for people to realise this.
Kagehi, well said. You’re right, of course~
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 12th, 2007 at 2:59 am
Cairnarvon: “J. J., so what? That doesn’t change the fact that religion is, for all intents and purposes, a mental illness, and a contageous one, at that.”
False belief, yes. Mental illness is far more questionable. As for the “So what?”, I’d say that if you don’t diagnose the problem right, you can’t do a good job of treating it.
Kagehi said,
January 12th, 2007 at 3:58 am
True J.J. But what else do you call a system of belief that is instilled in people, which drastically effects their behaviour, warps their capacity to think rationally and results in gaps in logic that a cruise ship could sail through with miles to spare?
To use an example, there are two ways to become a sociopath. You can suffer brain damage (which can be a result of genetic flaws or just malformations during early development) that *prevent* you from functioning normally, or you can be constantly borraged with negative input, which over time has the effect of permanently damaging your capacity to think in a way we consider socially rational. We don’t abitrarilly make a distinction between *functional* sociopaths and *environmental* ones. Both are treated as equal, since both are, at this point, basically incurable and exhibit the same behaviour.
There is also some evidence that certain people have much greater difficulty thinking for themselves. One recent study also determined that (don’t quote me on this number, it may be right, it may just be fairly close) *1* in *5* people hear voices, but only about 1% of them are “bothered” by them (Note, bothered doesn’t necessarilly cover, “The voice in my head is a spirit guide/ghost/deceased relative/angel/god.”, just “bothered”). Other studies indicate that some people have serious deficits in the capacity to make distinctions about cause and effect. Nearly everyone is unbelievably incompetent, unless they study it a lot, in dealing with large numbers or statistical probabilities. What does that mean?
1. Most people have moments where its easier to be “told” what to do than make choices.
2. A lot of people hear voices.
3. Most people have moments where they misunderstand cause and effect relationships.
4. Most people can’t *feel* the difference between 5,000,000 and 5,000,000,000 when not expressed in text, but words.
5. Most people don’t comprehend what the odds of things “actually” happening are.
It also means that “some” people can’t think much for themselves, think the voices are telling them profound things, can barely tell the difference between the wind blowing open a curtain or *ghosts* doing it and can’t instinctually understand the difference between something happening at an odds of 1:100 and 1:1 billion, never mind why its more likely that they found $20 on the street than, “God gave me $20 because I really needed it today.”
So…, most people are predisposed, when they have no other information or grounds to reject such things, to “assume” that the supernatural is possible and all the associated nonsense makes some vague instinctual sense, and there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of people with at least 3 of the four above major defects, as well as a small core of people with all of them, and can’t even imagine a world in which what they expect to happen doesn’t make any sense at all logically. There is also, in the case of the core followers, those that can’t think for themselves well enough to ever question what the core priesthood is telling them about how the world works (a priesthood of people made up of those with one or all of the flaws, including in some cases perhaps a limited form of inabiltity to make choices without someone else telling them what to do (or imagining that someone has done so).
Please, explain to me J. J. how this *isn’t* as much a case of mental illness as scitzophrenia, sociopathy, or any other disorder, which radically disables ones capacity to deal with the world on either a rational, or just normalized (normalized meaning average over the species) basis? At *best* we might need a new word to describe the actual disorder, but that only invalidates the categorization within the mental health lexicon, *not* the diagnosis of it being mental illness.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 12th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Kagehi: “But what else do you call a system of belief that is instilled in people, which drastically effects their behaviour, warps their capacity to think rationally and results in gaps in logic that a cruise ship could sail through with miles to spare?”
I’d describe it as something very unfamiliar to the average pew sitter. Most people would go about their workaday lives with or without religion and are very nominal believers. Unless you are talking about a cult that goes out of its way to mess with people’s minds, religion mostly piggybacks on people’s preexisting irrationality rather than actively warping it.
More Kagehi:
1. Most people have moments where its easier to be “told” what to do than make choices.
2. A lot of people hear voices.
3. Most people have moments where they misunderstand cause and effect relationships.
4. Most people can’t *feel* the difference between 5,000,000 and 5,000,000,000 when not expressed in text, but words.
5. Most people don’t comprehend what the odds of things “actually” happening are.
End quote of Kagehi.
What does any of this have to do with religion? These look like descriptions of human frailties, and not ones caused by a belief system.
Cairnarvon said,
January 13th, 2007 at 2:35 am
That’s the point we’re making, J. J.: the average believer is far more fundie than you seem to think. About half of all Americans seem to believe significant parts of the Bible are literal truth, and people like you are creating an environment that encourages this.
Religion does tend to amplify people’s preexisting irrationalities, mostly. This is not a reason not to discourage it any more than the fact that men like sex is a reason to condone rape.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 13th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Cairnarvon: “the average believer is far more fundie than you seem to think. About half of all Americans seem to believe significant parts of the Bible are literal truth”
Thinking that significant parts of the Bible are literal truth does not make one resemble a paranoid schizophrenic, not even the controlled kind.
Cairnarvon: “Religion does tend to amplify people’s preexisting irrationalities, mostly. This is not a reason not to discourage it …”
No one said it was a reason not to discourage it. I see a black-or-white fallacy here: attacking bad arguments against religion is not the same as encouraging it. Pointing out that much of religious practice–though certainly not all of it–is mostly harmless is simply calling a spade a spade. Pointing out that a colorful exaggeration of religion is inaccurate is, again, simply calling a spade a spade. If you want to expose religious belief as the falsehood it is, that is perfectly fine. Piling on falsehoods of your own is not.
Cairnarvon said,
January 13th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Thinking that significant parts of the Bible are literal truth does amount to a mental disorder, though, since it suggests at the very least a willingness to base their own personal reality on wishful thinking rather than anything resembling evidence, and usually indicates that the person regards blind faith to be as valid a thing to base beliefs on as empirical evidence.
You cannot deny that this is not something a sane person would do.
And this is not simply harmless silliness—these people vote, and as long as they do, there will be politicians pandering to them. When these politicians actually share their beliefs, the entire thing just gets worse and worse, and because their beliefs are placed on a pedestal, the dreadful cycle continues until you get situations like the Middle East (which, like it or not, is primarily a religious conflict at this point, including the US involvement in Iraq) and the US, one of the most industrialised countries in the world, with an environmental policy based on the assumption that Jesus will be coming back any day now.
A lot of non-religious and “moderately” religious people seem to be living in a fantasy world where they believe secularism and the current forms of religion can coexist peacefully (and I’m assuming you’re one of these, which is why I said what I did; if you aren’t, I do apologise), but it’s just been shown over and over again that this is not the case.
Anything short of an admission of this fact is, basically, encouraging the religious to go on brainwashing their children, and the Christianists and Islamists (et cetera) of the world to go on subverting their governments.
Kagehi said,
January 13th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Yep. Lets take a close look at some religions when they “try” to deal with reality.
First, Christianity:
Saint Thomas Aquinas stated some time back that the only thing **worse** than a unbeliever attacking a faith they know nothing about is a believer making a fool out of religion by denying reality, in favor of long held, but provably superstitious, nonsense.
Modern Christianity ironically often knows *less* about its own history than unbelievers, thus allowing them to quite happilly pass the day making each other look like fools by denying reality. How did it get that way? Because its easier to listen to a priest, a lot of which are batshit insane, than actually *read* anything. Half of them will insist you are pulling their leg if you quote a *real* passage out of the Bible, because they have literally never read that part, of those that have, probably less than 10% of them have read anything related to the historical context, alternate versions, original texts, explainations of how things got translated, etc. They might buy the latest book from the rising star of the, “I am a nutcase and here is the proof in book form.”, club, but nothing relevant to curing their general ignorance.
Budhism:
No real concept of heaven or hell, a strong approbation that you learn from experience and only what is observed can be considered real. Its got not magic spells, etc, for the most part. It does have some wacky stuff about being one with the universe and things, but its almost as secular as you can get. But wait… Since Buddha’s death *some* branches have done everything from making him some odd second coming of Christ to claiming he was a god of some sort, and they have bolted on a big silly lot of gibberish that is identical to every other religion. Oops!
Well… Maybe the India religion of Hindu? Things going for it:
1. Its highly secular. There is no, “This is the way the universe works, so you should deny anything that contradicts it.”
2. Its “gods” are fallible and imperfect, nor does it ever claim any of them are a) supreme or b) really gods. Basically, if you can point and say, “Heh, that over there is Brahmen!”, then you are not pointing at Brahmen, just someone/thing that contains some “aspect” of that being.
Its silliest contentions are that there is some higher power, for which they have no proof. Most would have, at one time, agreed that its own stories are pure fiction, but represent some “general” truths, so it doesn’t matter that much.
The problem? The Postmodernism invention of the West has been snatched up by the advocates of this religion in India, who have decided to save their “cultural identity” by rejecting anything Westernish. I will let you revel in the stupidity involved with that ironic decision…
Ok, now that you have thought it over, here is the real punch line. They have in recent years rejected Western sciences on the basis of this BS, concluding that if “all points of views are valid”, then Vedic science must be a valid way to do science (never mind that its no more science than anything the Discovery Institute does) and you can now find them removing books on modern biology, but *opening* institutes dedicated to Astrology. They even have, or so I have been told, a special government funded project dedicated to reinventing weapons with magic powers, just like the ones in all the stories from their mythology….
Just incase you missed what I am getting at here, the only difference between “old world” Hinduism and secular atheism was -> Some belief in an unbelievable vague and fairly unassuming higher power that didn’t do a whole hell of a lot. Now, “modern” Hinduism has recast itself in the mold of Western religions, by completely denying reality, on the basis that “salvation of their cultural identity” demands rejecting the reality their own faith says they should be paying the most attention to, in favor of idiocy and gibberish, like literal interpretation of ancient texts. Its gone from, “When reality turns out to contradict religion, reality must win, because your religions was obviously false”, to, “If reality appears to contradict religion, it must be because the people claiming it contradicts your faith are working within a, wait for it…. ‘mental reference and paradigm in which it does work that way, but that doesn’t matter, because all ways of knowing are *equal*, so it should be possible to do the same things using a *different* frame of reference and paradigm.”
In other words, if you can get enough people believing in the tooth fairy, the tooth fairy will magically appear and be seen flying from house to house collecting teeth, because everyone knows its not *fiction* that must give way to *fact*, but *reality* that must give way to *belief*.
How the hell many people have to either a) tell them this shit doesn’t work, including members of their own fracking religions or b) prove it doesn’t ever work, before people realize it will never work? Apparently…. the number needed approaches infinity or something. Why? Its simple, people either don’t have the time to learn what reality says is true, don’t have decent, and un-fettered, education that makes “sure” they learn that instead of bullshit at an early age, and worse, for a long time in places like the Middle East, and more often now in the last 10+ years in places like India *and* the US, being an *intellectual* has become the same things as being an infidel and Satanist, since religious institutions have come to the harsh conclusion that the more you learn, the less likely you are to believe the idiotic nonsense peddled by the religions.
Some people like Dumbski find this incomprehensible. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/01/accept_the_implications.php Then again, given his stance on evolution and numerology (oh sorry, got confused by what “he” uses there. I meant mathematics.), this isn’t a big suprise. He finds thinking incomprehensible. lol
The point I am making J.J. is that in no instance has religion, no matter how secular in form or how accepting it is of general reality, ever remained so, once someone found it useful to reject that acceptance, enough people could be convinced that the cause of their problems was that they where not being insane and superstitious enough and even the slightly and most vague indication of initial progress could be seen from diving head first down the rabbit hole, even if the landing at the bottem is inevitably far more hostile and injurous to the fools doing it than Alice ever had to face. Sure, in the short term, only attacking the true nuts sounds good, but its often damn hard to do that without attacking what they are “basing” their idiocy on or stepping on the toes of all the “moderates” who too often treat these people like their crazy old Uncle, who they don’t want to send to an institution, but tends to wet himself and scream about elves trying to steal his food when ever they make the mistake of sitting him at the table with the rest of the family. As long as they think they can keep him in the back room, let him yell at the TV about the elves, instead of everyone else, they can pretend its not a problem. Then there is the Holidays when they can’t avoid it…. But… Its only one day, they you can go back to ignoring the problem.
Yeah, sounds great. Only the insane Uncle in most cases has his own TV show, millions of people that are convinced the elves steal food from them too, and connections to people in Government that also believe some of his ravings, and might starts passing legislation demanding that everyone stop wearing sox and underwear, because everyone knows those things *attract* elves.
I think you get my point. Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away, but trying to do something about it *eventually* forces you into conflict with the fools that support it intentionally, support it by accident, or just try to pretend it isn’t as big of a problem as it really is, since *they* are not effected as much by the ravings and don’t have to deal with most of the consequences. Eventually, doing nothing gets you ass bitten, at which point its probably too fracking late to do anything about it.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 13th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Cairnarvon: “Thinking that significant parts of the Bible are literal truth does amount to a mental disorder, though, since it suggests at the very least a willingness to base their own personal reality on wishful thinking rather than anything resembling evidence,”
Or it suggests that people mistakenly believe that the Bible is reliable. I would hesitate to call belief in the Bible “wishful thinking,” since there is a bunch of stuff that many Christians wish weren’t in there, such as passages against divorce, or those that would favor pacifism. Even the Old Testament genocides make some Christians squirm, as they should.
“and usually indicates that the person regards blind faith to be as valid a thing to base beliefs on as empirical evidence.”
The people who say “You’ve got evidence, but I’ve got faith” seem to say this as a last-ditch fallback position. If empirical evidence didn’t really matter to them, creationism wouldn’t be the monster that it is. The whole point of so-called “scientific creationism” or intelligent design is that it appears to provide a rational reason to believe in God. If evidence really didn’t matter, then the whole controversy of creationism vs. evolution would just be a shouting match, with those on the evolution side pointing to homologous features, endogenous retroviruses, etc., and the creationists screaming “La, la, la! Bible, Bible, Bible!” in reply. Unfortunately, the creationists don’t do this, and instead go through the trouble of trying to make it look like the evidence supports them, which is why the “Index of Creationist Claims” at TalkOrigins.org is so big.
“the dreadful cycle continues until you get situations like the Middle East (which, like it or not, is primarily a religious conflict at this point, including the US involvement in Iraq)”
The current sectarian violence certainly has a religious component, insofar as religion made it possible for people to be divided into Sunni and Shia in the first place. However, the politicians who did the pandering in the U.S. justified the war in Iraq on secular grounds, and the real reasons for the invasion, namely to plant a democracy friendly to U.S. interests in the center of the Middle East (a.k.a. Project for a New American Century), were also secular.
“and the US, one of the most industrialised countries in the world, with an environmental policy based on the assumption that Jesus will be coming back any day now.”
There are plenty of rationalizations for the U.S.’s sorry environmental policy, and the belief that Jesus will be coming back in a relatively short span of time from now, which isn’t even biblical, is a relatively weak one.
This is not to say that some religious beliefs aren’t harmful, but your examples aren’t that good. Probably the best examples of harmful religious beliefs are creationism and discrimination against homosexuals. (It is interesting to note that the Christianists seem to be on the losing side in both these conflicts. They are still winning too many skirmishes, but their front is retreating.)
“A lot of non-religious and ‘moderately’ religious people seem to be living in a fantasy world where they believe secularism and the current forms of religion can coexist peacefully”
*Rational* atheism cannot coexist with the current reality-denying elements of religion. But this is one case where you cannot fight fire with fire. Saying that religion is a mental illness is as much a denial of reality as saying that atheists are arrogant dogmatists. Both are superficially plausible but are nonetheless appeals to gross stereotypes, and neither matches the facts on the ground.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 13th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Kagehi: “Because its easier to listen to a priest, a lot of which are batshit insane,”
Where is your evidence of this? The problem I’m seeing is that the portrayals of the religious as gibbering nutsos is a half-truth. There are enough religious nutsos in the press that make comparisons to mental illness look plausible, but I have known enough religious people to know that your rant is a parody and a denial of reality. The religious people I’ve met may be mistaken about their beliefs, but nutsos? Batshit insane? Not a match to the facts.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 13th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Sorry for the triple post, but I should add that the religious people I’ve met evangelical Christians, at least nominally, and not the quasi-Unitarian moderates and liberals.
Cairnarvon said,
January 13th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
The only reason people would think the Bible could be reliable is because they’re ignorant of science and reality in general. Guess what the main driving force keeping them ignorant is?
I’m not sure where you’ve found creationists who haven’t been doing essentially this.
Occasionally creationists do use scientific-sounding “arguments”, but this isn’t because they’re looking for a rationalisation of their beliefs—they’re trying to fool people who are on the whole ignorant of science, but who have problems accepting stuff that seems to be based entirely on blind faith—that is to say, “moderate” religionists, which are susceptible to this strategy in great part due to the religion they already possess.
They aren’t trying to justifiy their beliefs to themselves, they’re trying to propagate the memes of their particular religion, and the ones actually coming up with these claims (as opposed to the hordes just parrotting them) are perfectly aware of this.
I’m not sure where you get the idea that PNAC is motivated by secular ideals, but even given that the original reasons for going into Iraq weren’t religious, a lot of people in the Bush administration, including, apparently, Bush himself, now regard it as a religious war. Most of them are careful to keep it out of speeches, but Dominionism is alive and well in the Bush administration, and in the Pentagon.
Greed and corporate pressures are important reasons as well, of course, but over the years, a frightening number of people have used the Second Coming as a reason as well, most famously James Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, who is quoted as literally saying “We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand.”
And I repeat again, religion fits the description of a mental illness perfectly. The only reason it isn’t treated as delusion is because the definition had to specifically make an exception for it:
That’s from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Sounds pretty accurate to me.
I’d guess that the main reason you don’t agree is because you grew up in an environment where religious beliefs were the rule rather than the exception. Am I right?
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 13th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Cairnarvon: “[Creationists are] trying to fool people who are on the whole ignorant of science, but who have problems accepting stuff that seems to be based entirely on blind faith”
This is my point.
Cairnarvon: “that is to say, ‘moderate’ religionists”
Actually, evangelicals are more the targets, and they tend to be more conservative. These are the words of an undoubtedly *conservative* Christian apologist, who you may have (unfortunately?) seen before: “Your faith does not have to be, and was never intended to be, a blind trust — not in God, and not as something you hold even in opposition.” These are not the words of a watered-down liberal. Heck, this guy’s even a YEC. (Yuck!) Yet here he is, blasting what you would consider a core tenet of fundies. Bear in mind that if evangelicals weren’t interested in attempting to support their beliefs with evidence, Lee Strobel wouldn’t have an audience. His book, _The Case for Christ_, is targeted at the average Joe or Jane conservative believer. N.T. Wright, also an evangelical, has insisted that the Gospels provide adequate support for the resurrection. The point is not that these guys are right in saying that there is adequate evidence for their beliefs; in fact, I quite disagree on this point. The point is that they are evangelicals repudiating the idea of blind faith.
Now let’s take a look at the definition of delusion:
“A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g. it is not an article of religious faith).”
First, the false belief is sustained in spite of “incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.” Now there is certainly evidence against religion, but to say that it is obvious is at best questionable. If schoolchildren were taught Hume’s argument against miracles, you might have a point about obviousness. Second, you misread the definition when you wrote that it specifically made an exception for religion. What it wrote was, “The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.” In other words, if about everyone in someone’s circle of friends has a false belief, then the blame for the false belief is more of a social problem, not a problem necessarily because of that someone’s personal mental state. Religion here is merely an example of a culture or subculture.
“I’d guess that the main reason you don’t agree is because you grew up in an environment where religious beliefs were the rule rather than the exception. Am I right?”
I grew up in the U.S., which is probably the most religious first-world country, so you are right. On the other hand, my parents had been very nominal believers when I was young, and they didn’t go back to church until I was in my late teens. Even then, they tended to be far more liberal in their beliefs than the people they went to church with. I got into evangelical Christianity in my teens and started deconverting in my late twenties. I’ve probably seen a broader range of evangelicals than you. Throughout my experience, the fundies were objects of scorn by other evangelicals. I’ve seen some very bright believers, and some not-so-bright ones. I’ve been a birthday party for one of the senior, smarter ones, and it ended up a goofball roast, with gag gifts in a mock coffin and the music minister coming in, dressed as the Grim Reaper, hugging the guest of honor. (The running joke was that he was getting old and presumably had one foot in the grave.) I’ve seen believers act like loons on television or in the magazine _The Wittenburg Door_, but with the exception of a few street preachers in the college quad, the ones I’ve seen in person act like normal human beings.
Cairnarvon said,
January 13th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Your point was that fundamentalists recruit from the ranks of the moderate religionists, who in turn are more vulnerable to fundamentalism because of their preexisting religious beliefs, fundamentalist or not? Because that was mine.
The point is that they aren’t trying to apply reason to their beliefs, they’re filtering the world through their faith in a way that lets them pretend their beliefs are based in reason, while still being purely blind faith.
I’m not (necessarily) talking about the existence of God in se. I’m talking about things like evolution and creation, among many other things. They blind themselves (and their children) to the evidence because “it’s against their religion”.
Religion is also the most important type of subculture that actively encourages holding false beliefs by claiming faith is as valid a way of approaching the world as empirical evidence is. Whether it’s a societal problem or a personal one is generally nitpicking.
With the exception that they all believe in the supernatural, most of them having no problem with essentially unexamined, internally contradictory beliefs.
This is not something sane human beings do.
I also don’t have to remind you that even if all of the people you’ve met are Einsteinian pantheists, anecdotal evidence isn’t particularly relevant. It doesn’t change the fact that 55% of all Americans are out-right creationists and 27% more believe that God guided the process of evolution, and people who insist that magical thinking can be perfectly rational are part of the reason for this.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 14th, 2007 at 12:45 am
Cairnarvon: “Your point was that fundamentalists recruit from the ranks of the moderate religionists”
No, my point was that fundies do not see themselves as acting in blind faith.
Cairnarvon: “they’re filtering the world through their faith in a way that lets them pretend their beliefs are based in reason, while still being purely blind faith.”
This is contradictory. By definition, those with blind faith don’t even *try* to pretend their beliefs are based in reason.
Cairnarvon: “Religion [claims] faith is as valid a way of approaching the world as empirical evidence”
As I pointed out above, this is often inaccurate.
Cairnarvon: “I’m not (necessarily) talking about the existence of God in se. I’m talking about things like evolution and creation, among many other things. They blind themselves (and their children) to the evidence because ‘it’s against their religion’.”
Some of them blind themselves, and most are victims of others’ blinding. Bear in mind that delusional belief is belief in the face of “incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.” The case for evolution, though strong, is not obvious.
Cairnarvon: “Whether it’s a societal problem or a personal one is generally nitpicking.”
Not if you’re using the DSM’s definition of “delusional”!
Cairnarvon: “With the exception that they all believe in the supernatural, most of them having no problem with essentially unexamined, internally contradictory beliefs. This is not something sane human beings do.”
Actually, *most* sane humans do this. Again, you confuse being mistaken with being insane. I might point out that belief in the supernatural is absurd if certain facts about human beings are in evidence, but not necessarily otherwise.
Cairnarvon: “It doesn’t change the fact that 55% of all Americans are out-right creationists and 27% more believe that God guided the process of evolution”
True, but this is irrelevant to your idea that religion is a mental illness rather than mistaken belief.
Cairnarvon: “people who insist that magical thinking can be perfectly rational are part of the reason for this.”
Are we talking about religion here or magical thinking ? The latter is a technical term for kinds of logic errors that pertain to certain supernatural beliefs, not for systems of belief per se.
Cairnarvon said,
January 14th, 2007 at 1:46 am
Doesn’t matter. Schizophrenics often aren’t aware of their schizophrenia.
Where on earth did you get that idea? It’s true they tend to have rather idiosyncratic definitions of “reason”, though, but that doesn’t stop them from equivocating that with “sound science”.
It is not. What religion on the whole does and what religionists themselves believe it does are two different things.
Well, obviously very few people will convert or indoctrinate themselves.
I very much disagree that the evidence for evolution isn’t obvious, though. Have you ever looked at animals? I’ll grant it can be quite hard to derive the existence of DNA from scratch, but things like common descent and natural selection shouldn’t be that hard to grasp, especially with the folk knowledge of it that’s going around, even if most of it is negative in their circles. Should be enough to at least inspire some curiosity, and almost nobody in the US is completely cut off from libraries, smart people, and/or the internet.
Not really. I point out again that the final clause in the original definition I cited is contrived and only there specifically to cover religion’s ass.
There is no reason a rational person would believe in the supernatural. Whether they’re being kept in the dark by their own doing or by the doing of their community has no bearing on the issue.
“A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.”
Again, the other bit is just contrived ass-covering.
Every religion has magical thinking at its base. It’s what distinguishes it from “mere” philosophy, and that’s the main root of its problems.
Are we going round in circles yet? I rather feel like we are.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 14th, 2007 at 2:58 am
Cairnarvon: “Are we going round in circles yet? I rather feel like we are.”
We’ll see. I get the feeling that you find that saying, “Religion is false belief” lacks rhetorical punch, so you try to find justification for making the less accurate but more provocative statement, “Religion is a mental illness.” I hope that is just my cynicism talking, though.
Me: “By definition, those with blind faith don’t even *try* to pretend their beliefs are based in reason.”
Cairnarvon: “Where on earth did you get that idea?”
Like I said, from the definition. The whole idea of “blind faith” is to put one’s trust in something without regard to empirical evidence of its trustworthiness.
Cairnarvon: “What religion on the whole does and what religionists themselves believe it does are two different things.”
You were talking about what religion *claims*, and that has a lot to do with what religionists *claim* about their religion.
Cairnarvon: “I very much disagree that the evidence for evolution isn’t obvious, though. Have you ever looked at animals?”
Like looking at animals would be enough? Sure, I can get an idea of rough commonalities, but to see homologous features, I would probably need to trap the animal so I could get a closer look, and if I wanted to see homologous features in bone structures, I would need to dissect them. Just looking at animals doesn’t tell me much.
Cairnarvon: “things like common descent and natural selection shouldn’t be that hard to grasp,”
Common descent not hard to grasp! The idea that I and a fruit fly share a distant ancestor is mind-boggling. True, but mind-boggling nonetheless, and very counterintuitive.
I think you underestimate Darwin’s genius by calling evolution obvious.
Cairnarvon: “There is no reason a rational person would believe in the supernatural.”
The only way that statement could be categorically true is if miracles were ruled out a priori. Not even Hume did that. Are you really trying to assert that miracles are logically imposssible, that is, something that could not happen in any possible world?
So your definition of delusion is, “A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.”
Very well, then. Your problem is that what you think is “obvious” isn’t.
Cairnarvon: “Every religion has magical thinking at its base.”
This is magical thinking:
Is this what you were talking about?
Cairnarvon said,
January 14th, 2007 at 11:57 am
I’ve explained why I think religion is a mental illness several times over now.
But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the believer is completely aware of this. Almost all of them would agree that faith is at the very basis of their beliefs, but few realise the full extent of it, in large part because religion also discourages examination of beliefs.
The similarities between dogs and cats and cattle and humans and whatnot are all at least moderately obvious from their general shapes, and at least partial common descent can easily be inferred, particularly when you’re aware of the vast variety within just the dog species.
The point isn’t that a person would need to derive the entire thing for himself, but just be a little bit curious because of what he sees around him.
But of course, religion tends to discourage curiosity as well, because as we all know, “God works in mysterious ways” and we’re supposed to be happy with that.
Pretty much.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 14th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Cairnarvon: “I’ve explained why I think religion is a mental illness several times over now.”
And it still doesn’t work. Delusion, even by your definition, is belief that persists in the face of “incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.” Now the evidence is arguably incontrovertible, at least practically speaking. “Obvious” is a whole other story. While I think Dawkins was a bit sloppy in some places in The God Delusion, he was absolutely right about us being “Middle Worlders,” adapted to a world that is neither that big or that small, and where things don’t move that fast. To this, I would add that as Middle Worlders, we are ill-equipped to imagine things on geologically slow time scales either; such things look to us as if they are static. That affects people’s perceptions of the plausibility of evolution. I suspect that you have become so familiar with the arguments in favor of evolution that you forget just how counterintuitive it is.
Cairnarvon: “But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the believer is completely aware of this [blind faith].”
True, but even if a believer were not conscious of believing blindly, this would still show up as an attitude of not actually caring whether empirical evidence supports their beliefs. Those who are apathetic toward the evidence are blind believers. Those who willfully distort the facts because they already “know” the truth are also blind believers. Those who want reassurance that the facts do not contradict their beliefs are not. They may be too trusting of apologists, but that is a different problem.
I think that you confuse the pathology of True Believers with the less blatant and less irrational problems of the average believer. From the Skeptic’s Dictionary page on self-deception:
Substitute “pew sitter” for “parent” and “religion” for “child”, and I think you’ll get my drift.
Cairnarvon: “But of course, religion tends to discourage curiosity as well”
Now there’s a half-truth! See here, from the old JREF forum thread “Is religion slowing us down?”:
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=1185678#post1185678
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=207202#post207202
The whole thread is worth reading, actually, to show the huge differences between the factoids about the relationship of science and religion and the real–and much more complicated–relationship.
Cairnarvon said,
January 14th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
(Sorry ’bout that, your comment got caught in my spam filter for a bit because it had more than two links. I think I set the limit to two, anyway.)
The line between those last two is incredibly blurred, and I think you greatly overestimate the number of religious people who would be swayed by outright evidence without also being removed from their religious peer groups.
Religion is very dependent on herd mentality, and I would guess part of the reason college-educated people tend to be drastically less likely to be creationists is because they were given the opportunity to examine the case for evolution in an environment that encourages skeptical examination (Bible colleges aside).
I’m sure similar analogies can be drawn for various other specific religious beliefs.
Point is, anyone seriously examining the theory of evolution would come to the conclusion that it is largely true, and the reason so many people don’t is because religion itself inherently discourages critical examination of its central tenets, and peer pressure does the same thing, and religion’s tendency to create very strong us-them divides enhances this.
The True Believer syndrome is much more common than you seem to think, though I will grant that in most people, it has a tendency of evaporating when you remove the peer pressure.
I haven’t read the entire thread yet, but I will grant that in the Dark Ages and much of the early Renaissance, religion often tended to encourage most scientific research. This was because they fully expected science to back them up. Note how quickly they back-pedalled when inconvenient facts started showing up.
At the time, the division between faith and reason was much less distinct because so little was known about natural origins, which is really the main thing religion was there to explain. Many early Western scientists were theologians as well, because they just didn’t expect to find any conflicts between science and religion.
Now that those conflicts have been found, religion is a very powerful anti-science motivator.
It’s worth pointing out, before you say anything, that religious people today don’t live in Medieval times. They have access to much more research than was ever available to any early scientists, and much of it has filtered down through pop culture.
Very few creationists (to return to this) have never heard of evolution, and once you’ve heard at least the basics, still denying it or refusing to learn more about it is essentially a manifestation of the True Believer syndrome.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 14th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Cairnarvon: “The line between those last two is incredibly blurred, and I think you greatly overestimate the number of religious people who would be swayed by outright evidence without also being removed from their religious peer groups.”
I probably do overestimate it, and yes, the line is blurry. However, that smeary line is nonetheless there, and it makes some difference.
I noticed that you mentioned “without also being removed from their religious peer groups.” Look back at the DSM definition that you quoted:
I think you stumbled on the real reason that the part I italicized is there. You said that it was just ass-covering. Yet would you not say that there was a significant difference between someone who clings to a false belief even in the absence of social reinforcement and someone who does not?
Evolution, though, gets really mangled in pop culture, at least in the U.S. Take, for example, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where aliens “evolved” by transforming into energy beings. Or, for a more recent example, the series Heroes, about ordinary people who, by “evolution”, get comic-bookish powers like flight or telepathy. (Sorry for being U.S.-centric. I’m picking on U.S. shows because I’ve seen them. I have no idea if you’ve seen them in Belgium or if Belgian shows have similar gaffes.) Schools don’t do a wonderful job of teaching the basics of evolution, either, and I know that I even had the bad luck of having a teacher who was an old-earth creationist. Whether he was a True Believer or someone who himself had himself been deceived, I don’t know. I do know that I’m not the only one to whom this has happened. Between the popular misunderstandings of evolution, the low quality of teaching on the subject, teachers like the one I had, and active effort on the part of those who really are deluded (like Dembski or Behe), there is a lot of reason for well-meaning, normal people to be mistaken about evolution, even if they aren’t True Believers in the classic sense.
Cairnarvon said,
January 14th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
The fact that religion is so incredibly widespread renders the point moot, and claiming that people are perfectly sane to adhere to religious beliefs (for whatever reason) is the reason it got to this point in the first place.
And yes, as far as evolution is concerned, I know how badly it gets mangled, but the important part is that the concept gets passed on, not the details. It should inspire curiosity, and that’s all.
Whether or not people are mistaken isn’t as important as the fact that they aren’t very interested in doing their own research to correct their mistakes.
I do agree that education is an extremely important factor, and that a better educated audience would in turn reduce the number of ridiculous misrepresentations, creating a sort of feedback loop, but again, the problem isn’t lack of knowledge, it’s lack of intellectual curiosity, and I do believe religion is at the very least an important aggravating factor here.
(Belgium isn’t too heavy on home-grown TV shows, and our comics don’t tend to be of the superhero variety, so not too many problems on that count. We do get a fair bit of American TV, though.)
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 14th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Me: “Yet would you not say that there was a significant difference between someone who clings to a false belief even in the absence of social reinforcement and someone who does not?”
Cairnarvon: “The fact that religion is so incredibly widespread renders the point moot”
That’s almost like saying that the presence of friction renders moot Newton’s First Law of Motion. Someone who can recover from false beliefs by being removed from an environment where they are not reinforced is qualitatively different from someone who would not. For example, the former kind of person may “misbehave” when unwatched by Googling for “atheism” or lurking on IIDB.
Cairnarvon: “claiming that people are perfectly sane to adhere to religious beliefs”
It depends on what you mean by “sane.” “Sane” does not mean “perfect,” and usually it just means something like “in typical working order.” Unfortunately, even a human in typical working order is prone to make elementary errors, like mistaking correlation for causation, seeking and seeing patterns in random events, and so on. Typical children are less than critical of what adults tell them, and as Dawkins points out, this is a common vector of false belief. It’s this very ordinary human irrationality that leads to religious belief. Calling ordinary human irrationality a mental illness is like calling wisdom teeth a dental illness. Both are problematic, but both are, unfortunately, normal.
Cairnarvon: “(for whatever reason) is the reason it got to this point in the first place.”
I’d say that it got to this point because the Enlightenment is only a few hundred years old, and the religious mindset has had thousands of years to entrench itself.
Cairnarvon: “Whether or not people are mistaken isn’t as important as the fact that they aren’t very interested in doing their own research to correct their mistakes.”
But there’s a Catch-22 here, isn’t there? Unless one is simply fascinated with a subject, why research it if one doesn’t think oneself might be mistaken in the first place?
Kagehi said,
January 14th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Stolkholm Syndrome doesn’t happen when you remove people from the influences of people keeping them captive either, but its **still** treated as a mental disorder that requires treatment when it does happen. I think you are harping on the definition too much. There are a lot of things considered mental illnesses, which are *dependent* on cultural characteristics and Cairnarvon is right about religions exclusion being a matter of *protecting* it from examination, rather than any valid removal of it from the category. Its like saying, “All people wielding knives should be arrested, unless the knife is symbolic within their religion.” We get that BS all the time with religion. Since the state is explicitly denied the right to say what is and isn’t valid belief, damn near anything, including life saving surgeries, the mental and physical health of children, as long as its not something that causes “obvious” harm or death, and anything else is “OK”.
Example? I had someone describe to me this:
At the age of seven he and a number of other children where stripped naked and given flimsy robes, then taken in front of parents, relatives and friends to be forcibly pushed under water, after the robes where removed, until they felt like they where going to drown. Crying and in tears, he and the others where dragged into the basement and told to repeat the same phrases over and over again, until they couldn’t speek coherently. Once they started to babble and where on the verge of collapse, they would taken back up to the main room and told to stand their and speak to the watchers.
Now, there is no context in that at all, unless you have been through it, so is this child abuse? Will it leave permanent mental scares? How “safe”, never mind, “sane” is doing it to a child?
Having, one presumes, answered “yes”, “yes” and “no, its fracking nuts”, to the above, this ***is*** *standard* practice in some Baptist churches. Its mental torture, designed to exhibit “speaking in tongues” and create stress and fear. A ready made condition for creating Stolkholm Syndrome symptoms, at bare miminum. Its also 100% protected under the constitution as being not “obviously harmful” under any definition the state is *allowed* to judge such things, and because it is religious.
Also, another, looser, definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Point is, your quibbling over a definition someone made to intentionally exclude things like religions that are either a) too popular to safely dispute or b) protected from analysis as possible disorders.
Oh, and why is it that people that want to defend the side of religion always confuse phrases like, “a lot of priests”, with, “most priests”, or, “all priests”? A lot can be anything from the “visible” ones you see in the press all the time, to a few hundred more that are very real, but not visible, like the idiots that had a book burning rally a few years back where I live, to half or even “most”. Its a loose term. It means, “I don’t have precise numbers, but the numbers I do know about sometimes scare the hell out of me.”
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 14th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Kagehi: “Stolkholm Syndrome doesn’t happen when you remove people from the influences of people keeping them captive either”
So? Cairnarvon was talking about the DSM’s definition of delusion. Stockholm syndrome is not covered by that definition.
Kagehi: “Cairnarvon is right about religions exclusion being a matter of *protecting* it from examination”
Except that the definition was, in fact, more general, differentiating between those who absorb false beliefs from their culture or subculture (which is all too normal) and a false belief that has no such justification.
Kagehi: “At the age of seven he and a number of other children where stripped naked and given flimsy robes, then taken in front of parents, relatives and friends to be forcibly pushed under water, after the robes where removed, until they felt like they where going to drown. Crying and in tears, he and the others where dragged into the basement and told to repeat the same phrases over and over again, until they couldn’t speek coherently. Once they started to babble and where on the verge of collapse, they would taken back up to the main room and told to stand their and speak to the watchers.”
Yes, this would be a good example of mental torture. This is, however, not a good way to argue that religion, in general, is mental illness. If you wanted to argue that it is insane to make kids dress up in formal clothes and sit beside their parents as they sing hymns in church, you would be exaggerating. The latter, however, is far more representative of religious practice than the former. Now if you want to argue that practices as ugly as the one you described are a necessary or likely consequence of religion, then do so. Don’t insinuate. Don’t handwave, Just do it.
Kagehi: “Oh, and why is it that people that want to defend the side of religion always confuse phrases like, ‘a lot of priests’, with, ‘most priests’, or, ‘all priests’?”
And what was your point of bringing up “a lot of priests” being “batshit insane” if you weren’t trying to suggest that such insanity was a widespread trait of priests?
Kagehi: “Its a loose term. It means, ‘I don’t have precise numbers, but the numbers I do know about sometimes scare the hell out of me.’”
It also means that you are arguing vaguely, which is not helpful.
Kagehi said,
January 15th, 2007 at 3:01 am
Its hard to be precise with the entire ediface of something discorages examination and is more likely to shuffle the ones even they think are potentially problematic to secluded or “safer” places, without ever admitting the problem even exists. Your asking for numbers the entire system for religion is virtually dedicated to both denying and ignoring. And its not just stuff like pedophile priests, its all types of nuts, and even so called faith based advocacy and recovery programs. Penn and Teller did a special a while back on those. They couldn’t find one scrap of information from “any” AA style program on success rates, other than the silly one that claimed they worked because, “nearly all the people that stayed appeared to be helped”, a statistic that was seriously questionable when presented against the only other document they could find, which indicated that 95% of every initial attendee dropped out, for, “Unkown reasons”. **Real** scientific studies try to figure out *why* people drop out, *what* the failure rate actually is and *how* to improve things. Faith based ones don’t bother to check on the first, don’t care about the second, so long as they can claim that the ones that don’t drop out are mostly helped, and their only improvement since the day the system was invented has been replacing, “I am an alcoholic”, with, “I am a .” Nothing else has changed.
People can be religious moderates and **reject** religion based answers for 90% of everything in their lives, in which case they create a thin venier of religion over 100% secular systems that *do* help people. The other side of the coin are things like 12-step programs which do what religion has done since the dark ages, when confronted with evidence that makes it seem unlikely that their methods work, ignore the evidence, make vague hand waving gestures about caring about the people that fail, but never use the word *fail*, unless its to talk about *personal failure to suck up to God*, then insist that the 5% you do keep track of are proof that it works as advertised. Guess what, *real* science says that 5% of everyone that quits on there own also succeed. Religion doesn’t do anything but, for some people, replace addiction to their drug of choice with a religion they wouldn’t have possibly chosen at all, if it didn’t leap on them, drag them to the ground and then pound the idea that, “You are too stupid to solve your own problems, let God (or rather us) think for you!”, into their heads.
As I said. The problem isn’t *if* religion should be a mental illness, its which one you define it as. Or to put it more simply, your argument, if using different terms, its the equivalent of us saying: “Drug abuse is just as dangerous a problem as intentionally spreading diseases.” To which you are babbling, “Diseases and alcoholism are not the same thing, therefor I don’t get how you can possibly call them similarly dangerous. Besides, the definition of ‘disease’ excludes things people find ‘socially acceptable.’” Or in other words, stating that something is *cultural* somehow *should* exclude it from being called, “dangerous”, never mind its abuse being labelled similar to a disease.
Give me a break J.J. Your not arguing *if* or even by *how much* religion can be dangerous, might be undesirable or may contain inherent traits that make it legitimately dangerous. Your entire argument is, “I don’t like what you want to compare it to.” Not a terribly profound defense…
But, when it comes down to it, I believe based on real research on the subject, that there are critical developmental stages, which if skipped, or intentionally disrupted, you can’t necessarilly ever fix it. This can be mild though. For example, its well known that past a certain age its not just hard, but impossible, for someone to learn to “correctly” pronounce some foreign words. The sounds needed and the mechanics to produce them are simply *not* available to the brain to properly speak them, though some people with a wider range of experience can very closely approximate them. But.. How do you approximate “logic”? Logic is a construct that goes beyond basic cause and effect. Its possible to learn basic logic, and still miss the higher order logic that *demands* rejection of emotionally obvious cause and effect, in favor of distinctly reproducible types. Talk to *any* creationist, especially those never exposed to any contrary data until they are well past their teens, and its rapidly becomes obvious that they may be using the same words, but not the same meanings for them. Something is broken in their ability to do linear, careful, thinking, and you can’t ever unbreak it.
So, should we then call it a socially induced learning disability? Would have work better? There are those, like people that never learn to speak, because they are never exposed to social interactions and the needed sounds, etc. Its normally rare in most civilized places, but not completely unheard of. If you miss the window, the window closes, permanently.
Decided to do a google on religeon and mental illness, but something that you can’t legally study as one is kind of hard to find data on. Still, even if its not, I do agree with this guys assessment:
http://exchristian.net/exchristian/2003/04/religion-is-mental-illness.php
In other words, it all depends. Some people it may help, if its the *only* thing stopping them from being dangerous, others it drives over the edge, while *most* people can, and imo, probably do, go through life without it being anything but just another bit of background noise in their lives, like watching Saturday morning cartoons with the kids. The question is, does the few people it helps to control *really* outway the tragedy of the people its gives motive force to the delusions and insanities of? And for most people, how is it anything but a waste of time in the first place, when a nice tupperware party or a neighborhood picnic would do the same job, without the waste of money, resources or mass hallucinations about the effects of prayer?
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 15th, 2007 at 4:01 am
Kagehi: “Give me a break J.J. Your not arguing *if* or even by *how much* religion can be dangerous,”
Actually, I already did it above, and very concisely: religious beliefs are false, and subscribing to false beliefs may bite one in the butt in one way or another.
Kagehi: “Your entire argument is, ‘I don’t like what you want to compare it to.’”
No, my argument is that your comparison doesn’t fit enough of the facts to be a fair description. It matches the eye-grabbing extremes but not the more mundane, even boring aspects of religion.
If you want a good comparison, try comparing it to a game of dice. Basing beliefs on poor or no evidence is a gamble. If one is lucky, those beliefs will be irrelevant to reality and not interfere with day-to-day life. If one is really, really lucky, one will stumble on the truth by accident. If one is not so lucky, beliefs will clash with reality and cause all sorts of maladaptive behavior. That accounts for both the annoying but mostly harmless stuff like church services and the nastier stuff as well.
Kagehi said,
January 15th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Not sure that works either.. With gambling, there is a chance you might win big. With religion, the only way you win is by either inadvertantly being distracted by something else or losing your credit card on the way to the slot machine, so your money stays in the bank, instead of being gambled away into a massive debt of ignorance and stupidity. You play the game, you lose, even if some vague wishy washy version of it *was* true, it can’t be the version 99% of the believers waste effort on, so you still can’t win, even if its possible to win, because the odds of getting the wrong rules and playing the game incorrectly would logically approach infinity, while the odds of getting it right would be so close to 0% as to be indistinguishable.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 15th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Kagehi: “Not sure that works either.. With gambling, there is a chance you might win big. With religion, the only way you win is by either inadvertantly being distracted by something else or losing your credit card on the way to the slot machine, so your money stays in the bank, instead of being gambled away into a massive debt of ignorance and stupidity.”
Not so sure about that. In the JREF forum thread “Is religion slowing us down?” mentioned above, Latin Christianity did win big, stumbling upon the key assumptions that make science possible:
* the universe operates according to consistent regularities, and
* these regularities cannot be determined by pure thought alone, but require observation of the outside world.
So the gamble does occasionally pay off. This does not make Latin Christianity true, or any other religion for that matter, but it shows that the analogy holds up pretty well.
Cairnarvon said,
January 15th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
It may be more apt to compare religion to a particularly deadly kind of smoking, then. Almost 100% chance of lung cancer, but occasionally someone doesn’t get it~
Those truths were arrived at in spite of the religion, not at all thanks to it.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 15th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Cairnarvon: “Those truths were arrived at in spite of the religion, not at all thanks to it.”
Not quite true. You should have followed the JREF thread. The second assumption was definitely due to the Christian idea that God can do what he wants, which implies that he is not constrained, for example, to make the acceleration due to gravity a particular value.
Cairnarvon said,
January 16th, 2007 at 12:42 am
You misunderstand. Possibly I should have used the word “religiosity” instead of “religion”, because I was referring to the general religionness, not the specific religion that was dominant at the time in that place.
I’m sure it did encourage certain kinds of scientific investigation, but this was due to an idiosyncrasy specific to medieval Christianity, not something typical to religion in general. It’s the not-getting-cancer, not the hitting-the-jackpot.
And it only seemed to apply to certain fields of science and not others, which is also interesting to note.
It was a temporary trend, at any rate.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 16th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Cairnarvon: “this was due to an idiosyncrasy specific to medieval Christianity, not something typical to religion in general.”
But this misses the point. Religion in general is throwing the dice. The results of any particular throw of the dice are going to be the idiosyncrasies of one religious belief or another.
Cairnarvon: “It’s the not-getting-cancer, not the hitting-the-jackpot.”
How can breaking the stumbling block that Aristotle laid down not be “hitting the jackpot”? Science wouldn’t have happened without recognizing that one had to examine the world to see how it worked.
Again, not that this makes religion good, but it is a better model of what ends up happening.
Cairnarvon said,
January 16th, 2007 at 1:23 am
It doesn’t change the fact that in general, religion discourages inquiry, except on its own, essentially arbitrary, terms. The fact that sometimes those terms can be reasonable for brief periods of time is entirely irrelevant.
And on a side note, breaking philosophical stumbling blocks is remarkably easy to do if you aren’t aware they’ve been laid down, or don’t care, as I suspect would have been the case with Aristotle in the period before Thomas Aquinas revived interest.
Either way, Aristotle was an empiricist. Did you mean Plato?
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 16th, 2007 at 3:10 am
Cairnarvon: “It doesn’t change the fact that in general, religion discourages inquiry, except on its own, essentially arbitrary, terms. The fact that sometimes those terms can be reasonable for brief periods of time is entirely irrelevant.”
Where is the evidence that religion does this in general? For one thing, the idea that religion implicitly or explicitly has rules on what is and is not acceptable inquiry seems to be an overgeneralizing projection of particular relatively recent conflicts on the very broad and varied history of religion. Also, how brief is brief? If we are talking the medieval period and the Renaissance, this is a period of several hundred years. If we are talking about the Greeks, religion seldom discouraged inquiry, even if the results of it weren’t as productive as they could be. It looks to me like you are basing your views on factoids spread by conventional wisdom.
Cairnarvon: “Aristotle was an empiricist.”
IIRC, this is half-true. He did make observations, but he also thought that he could infer truths about the world by rational speculation. I think I may be (mis?)remembering something from this JREF post: “The scientifically valuable (that is, quantitatively correct) achievements in Greek science seem to have been worked out mostly in isolation from broader views of nature.” From what I can tell, the Greeks were still hampered by the idea that truths about the physical world could be determined by philosophical speculation.
Cairnarvon said,
January 16th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
I’m not even talking about most of the Renaissance.
And you’re forgetting that during that time period, nobody concerned themselves with the questions of origins of the world or of mankind, because the Bible answered all of those questions. The science done at the time really had a very narrow scope.
I also hope I don’t have to remind you the Ancient Greek philosophers were mostly of the opinion that the gods were too distant to influence the world. For all intents and purposes, they were atheists.
Right. In that sense he was a modern scientist. That’s how quantum physics tends to work. Hypotheses get formulated based on pure mathematics, not directly on empirical observations, and then if parts of them are testable, they will be tested when this is possible, which is often not until decades later.
Plato and whatnot did go on about innate truths, which was popular with some theologians and confused philosophers, but never much in the actual science department.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 16th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Cairnarvon: “And you’re forgetting that during that time period, nobody concerned themselves with the questions of origins of the world or of mankind, because the Bible answered all of those questions.”
People don’t usually start questioning until the current answers appear unsatisfactory, whatever the source of the current answers is. There was no reason at the time to suspect that the Bible had it wrong. Once paleontology and archeology got underway, then there was reason to start questioning at least the current interpretations of the Bible, since what was found couldn’t readily fit within the 6-10,000 year timeframe of a literal reading of it. That did eventually pave the way for questions about origins.
Me: “he also thought that he could infer truths about the world by rational speculation.”
Cairnarvon: “In that sense he [Aristotle] was a modern scientist.”
No. Modern scientists do not presume that they can infer truths about the world just by rational speculation. Rational speculation may generate hypotheses, but testing has to come at some point. What Aristotle, IIRC, didn’t do was test his theories against the available data, which is what is done in modern science. He could have easily observed that his ideas about projectile motion were very wrong just by watching people play catch.
Cairnarvon said,
January 17th, 2007 at 1:26 am
That’s my point. A random shot in the dark, given authority by religion. Saying “goddidit” was no less intellectually void then than it is now.
(And I know, about the Aristotle thing. I think I was just taking a jab at string theory. Tons of research being done, no falsifiable hypotheses coming out of it, AFAIK.)
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 17th, 2007 at 2:18 am
Cairnarvon: “That’s my point. A random shot in the dark, given authority by religion. Saying ‘goddidit’ was no less intellectually void then than it is now.”
If you are suggesting that religion somewhat weakly discourages curiosity by providing answers that might otherwise be probed, you have a point. However, you seemed to be implying that religion more actively discouraged curiosity, in the sense of saying “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” as in The Wizard of Oz, and that this was a universal trait of religion, not a happenstance of particular religious beliefs. Yet if we look at the Middle Ages and later, there were a bunch of people curious about how God supposedly did it, so the idea that religion in general suppresses curiosity doesn’t quite wash.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 17th, 2007 at 2:34 am
To address an older point of yours …
Cairnarvon: “The similarities between dogs and cats and cattle and humans and whatnot are all at least moderately obvious from their general shapes, and at least partial common descent can easily be inferred, particularly when you’re aware of the vast variety within just the dog species.”
There’s an interesting post over at the Mixing Memory blog as to the cognitive factors that make even partial common descent less than obvious: http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/01/thinking_about_evolution_cogni.php
Cairnarvon said,
January 17th, 2007 at 2:50 am
Not only that, it claims its way of reaching those answers is as valid as empiricism and rationality, and it tends to react rather badly to people who would suggest otherwise. If you live in the US, you should know this.
People being curious about how God did it doesn’t change the fact that God himself (and other dogma associated with the religion) is a taboo and must remain immune to rational examination.
Aristotle was pretty big on essentialism as well, but it doesn’t matter. A pop culture knowledge of evolution and a realisation that your dog has a bone structure that is very similar to your own, and to other mammals’ you may know, should be enough to inspire enough curiosity for people to go figure it out.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 17th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Cairnarvon: “Not only that, it claims its way of reaching those answers is as valid as empiricism and rationality, and it tends to react rather badly to people who would suggest otherwise. If you live in the US, you should know this.”
As someone who lives in the U.S., what I’ve seen is people claiming that the empirical evidence supports the religious claims.
Cairnarvon: “God himself … is a taboo and must remain immune to rational examination.”
Funny, the medieval Scholastics seemed to have broken this supposed taboo on a fairly regular basis. They had plenty of musings on the nature of God, not just his creation.
Cairnarvon said,
January 17th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Now you’re just being dense.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 18th, 2007 at 2:32 am
Cairnarvon: “Now you’re just being dense.”
Well, I have seen people claiming that the empirical evidence supports the religious claims. I might add that speaking of what religion claims as its “way of reaching those answers” is uselessly vague. You seem to have gotten in your head that religion really does try to say “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” I’m reminded of this from Scott Atran:
Now I do not have the breadth of experience that Atran has. However, I try to at least make my models fit the data that I do have, and it just doesn’t fit cleanly with a “mental illness” model of religion. Nor does it fit with the thesis that religion by its nature actively deters curiosity, though some forms of religion do just this, and other forms satisfy curiosity by providing answers that are wrong but plausible in their context. So far, what I see you doing is what Atran accuses his fellow atheists of doing.
Cairnarvon said,
January 18th, 2007 at 5:51 am
I know you’ve seen people claiming the empirical evidence supports religious beliefs. We were talking about this earlier in these comments. Remember, the filtering evidence through faith, ignoring rules of parsimony, &c.?
Just skimming over that link, Scott Atran seems to miss even the most basic points people like Dawkins and I are making.
As far as the particular point you’re quoting goes: it sounds like a neat thing to say, but it’s really just a rephrasing of the old “you’re so mean, you must be wrong!”.
We have history and current events as our guide, and we can keep going back and forth about tiny details, but the fact remains that religion has been and continues to be a vastly destructive force on humanity.
Refusing to realise this because you don’t like the conclusions is just making matters worse.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 19th, 2007 at 12:42 am
Cairnarvon: “Scott Atran seems to miss even the most basic points people like Dawkins and I are making.”
I think that says more about you and Dawkins than it does Atran. Dawkins and you are essentially laymen when it comes to studying the impact of religion. Atran is not.
Cairnarvon said,
January 19th, 2007 at 1:44 am
It says more about Atran’s reading comprehension skills than it does about his areas of expertise. That column is littered with straw men and irrelevant tangents.
Even the stuff that’s on topic seems to display a shocking lack of insight into his own field.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 19th, 2007 at 2:13 am
From Sam Harris:
From Scott Atran in response:
And earlier:
Stereotype and half-truth versus facts on the ground.
Cairnarvon said,
January 20th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
More like anecdotal evidence on both sides. I’ll grant that Sam Harris is often a bit too enthusiastic about his claims, from what I’ve seen, but I haven’t read too much of his work.
I suppose it’s possible that Atran is just attacking Harris’ more egregious abuses, then, but if it’s intended to refute Dawkins (or me), it’s just going after straw men.
J. J. Ramsey said,
January 20th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Cairnarvon: “More like anecdotal evidence on both sides.”
As Atran noted, “Although the plural of anecdote is not data, the preceding is illustrative of a wider pattern.”
BTW, an interesting blog post, though from a layman: http://uncrediblehallq.blogspot.com/2007/01/mind-disease.html
Skatje said,
March 27th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Something I noticed while re-reading:
You exaggerate it with the 44% and 55% statistics. As you said, that’s Americans. It’s not a very accurate to say just from that that it’s mainstream. Europe, Asia, and Canadu as well brings those numbers down quite a bit.
I’ll concede that America is bothering other places, and so are probably a greater concern, but still.
I forgot what I was saying.
Cairnarvon said,
March 28th, 2007 at 1:25 am
44% of 300 million is not a negligible amount in any case, and it’s even worse in many of the Islamic countries.
judah said,
May 31st, 2010 at 11:33 pm
i hate the snobby attitude of atheists who look down on anyone who believes in a spiritual being. i believe in empirical evidence and i believe in science. it’s a method to determine constants in the universe. but lack of evidence and lack of constants doesn’t rule out the existence. it just lowers the probability. so you believe in evolution. think about this, what if spiritual beings evolved just like everything else?
we haven’t discovered every creature on this planet. we don’t understand everything there is out there. for someone to say that they know for sure that something doesn’t exist, whether a spirit like being or some sort of life form that is vastly alternative than us, is presumption.
if someone told you that there’s an immortal being on the earth now would you believe it? http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_bloggers/26/the-world-s-only-immortal-animal.html
or an organism like the face huggers in “aliens”? http://raedatoui.com/blog/buzzzzzz/cordyceps-fungus/
let me make it clear. i’m not disagreeing. religion is a slippery slope. i think it can be an excuse for violence and a way to control people. and the concept of god can be considered to some parents as a cheap babysitter. but for someone to say that they know of the existence of every kind of being out there, do you think that’s a bit arrogant?
Cairnarvon said,
June 1st, 2010 at 12:12 am
Hello, three-year-old discussion.
No, I don’t think there’s anything arrogant about dismissing the notion of the supernatural when there’s been zero credible evidence for it and we have a good explanation for why so many people are inclined to believe in it. For the supernatural to exist would require vast swathes of scientific knowledge from many, many different fields to be completely wrong, and would call into question whether it’s possible to know anything at all. Keeping an “open mind” about the supernatural, be it gods or angels or ghosts or unicorns, is utterly ridiculous. There is such a thing as being so open-minded your brain falls out.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but conversely, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Until there is any evidence at all, the only reasonable position is that the mystics are full of shit.