A reasonable blog on atheism, religion, science and skepticism
“It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.”
Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928), “On the Value of Scepticism”
Question of the Day:
Do you agree? Is it bad to hold a belief for which there is no evidence, even if it harms no one?
by VorJack
This morning I went looking for my keys and couldn’t find them. I was convinced that I’d left them on the desk. I had the memory of tossing them there, it made sense for me to do that and I could almost remember hearing the clatter they made as they hit the surface. But my keys weren’t there. They were on the other side of the room.
We’re all very familiar with this kind of thing. Perhaps I was actually thinking back to a few days ago when I actually had left them on the desk. Maybe last night I had a dream in which the memory was dredged up, and that dream confused my brain. Maybe it was just a stray neuron firing. But still, I was convinced …
This is the kind of thing that I think about whenever I’m dealing with a believer, particularly the liberal persuasion, who wants me to understand why they believe in some higher power or alternate reality that we might call God or spirit. I hear a lot about trusting the inner conviction or listening to that still small voice. Yes, our minds might be wrong about where we left the keys last night, but somehow our instincts are better equipped to tell us about this higher reality.
It may be worse for me, because my family has a propensity to manic depression and related mental illnesses. I’ve dealt with people having odd convictions, compulsions and the rare hallucination. It was brought home to me early that our brains are not perfect instruments, and that we are prone to any number of illusions, fallacies and errors.
One of the reasons I like the scientific enterprise is that we’ve spent generations honing the process to try and weed out as much human error as we can. As Robert Feynman said, “Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.” Everything from the peer review process to the collective and combative nature of the enterprise works to try and cancel out these problems. If it still fails on occasion, well, that gives you some idea of what we’re up against.
Like Sam Harris, I believe one reason religious extremists exist is because of faith — the belief in something without evidence. And the more extreme a sect is, the more faith they usually have.
So I was a bit taken aback when I saw that Stephen Venner, some bishop across the pond, said the Taliban can be admired for their faith and loyalty:
“We’ve been too simplistic in our attitude towards the Taliban,” said Bishop Venner, who was recently commissioned in his new role by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the west could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it’s not honest really.
“The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.”
We must remember that there are a lot of people who are under their influence for a whole range of reasons, and we simply can’t lump all of those together.
“To blanket them all as evil and paint them as black is not helpful in a very complex situation.”
These are people, as the article points out, responsible for attacking the armed forces and “public beatings, amputations and executions and have launched bomb attacks on the civilian population in Afghanistan.”
And we can, ahem, admire them for how faithful they are to their beliefs and loyalty to one another as they kill people? Oh yes, and while we’re at it, let’s talk about how faithful and loyal the Nazi’s were. Putting all those Jews, homosexuals, and blacks in extermination chambers took a lot of dedication, after all.
The Taliban’s faith is irrational and hate-filled. It is deserving of denunciation and derision, not applause and approval.
by VorJack
A new Pew Research Poll has found that significant minorities of American religious believers mix their primary religion with elements of other faiths. For example:
They also found belief in a variety of “New Age” practices, with about one quarter of Americans believing in astrology and “spiritual energy.”
These kinds of results aren’t really surprising to anybody who’s been paying attention. Actually, they seem a little low. But the Pew Forum concludes that:
The religious beliefs and practices of Americans do not fit neatly into conventional categories. [...] large numbers of Americans engage in multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions.
So many Americans continue to practice “cafeteria Christianity,” picking and choosing the spiritual beliefs they accept while resisting some of the traditions and revealed wisdom of their church.
When I read this, I automatically think of the Burned Over District, when Upstate New Yorkers seemed to mix and match their beliefs and folding the result into their existing Christianity. April DeConick over at Forbidden Gospels compares it to 2nd century Christianity:
The argument I have been developing about second century Christians is that they were eclectic, and that gnosticism was an amalgamation of Egyptian astrology and religion, Greek mysteries and Hermetism, middle Platonic philosophy, Judaism and Christianity, with its constituents comfortable attending more than one religious house or being part of a multiple of religious bodies. It is exactly the kind of ‘hybrid’ that we are seeing today, and may have been seeing since the 1800s. I think it has something to do with ‘internationalization’, when a variety of religious traditions become available for consumption within a given culture at a given point in history.
Several branches of Christianity came out of the Burned Over District, including Seventh Day Adventist and the Church of Latter Days Saints. I wonder what the current mix is going to produce. Any ideas?
It’s a miracle!
Wow, you mean given enough time and eggs, you end up getting a soft one with an impression of a chicken foot? Hallelujah! Irrefutable proof of the existence of the Invisible Pink Unicorn!
Then again, maybe it’s Jesus’ way of commanding us to say, “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.”
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