“analytic thinking can undermine belief”

by Scientific American

 

People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the strength of their belief, according to a new study in Science.

 

The research, conducted by University of British Columbia psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, does not take sides in the debate between religion and atheism, but aims instead to illuminate one of the origins of belief and disbelief. “To understand religion in humans,” Gervais says, “you need to accommodate for the fact that there are many millions of believers and nonbelievers.”

 

One of their studies correlated measures of religious belief with people’s scores on a popular test of analytic thinking. The test poses three deceptively simple math problems. One asks: “If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The first answer that comes to mind—100 minutes—turns out to be wrong. People who take the time to reason out the correct answer (five minutes) are, by definition, more analytical—and these analytical types tend to score lower on the researchers’ tests of religious belief.

 

But the researchers went beyond this interesting link, running four experiments showing that analytic thinking actually causes disbelief. In one experiment, they randomly assigned participants to either the analytic or control condition. They then showed them photos of either Rodin’s The Thinker or, in the control condition, of the ancient Greek sculpture Discobolus, which depicts an athlete poised to throw a discus. (The Thinker was used because it is such an iconic image of deep reflection that, in a separate test with different participants, seeing the statue improved how well subjects reasoned through logical syllogisms.) After seeing the images, participants took a test measuring their belief in God on a scale of 0 to 100. Their scores on the test varied widely, with a standard deviation of about 35 in the control group. But it is the difference in the averages that tells the real story: In the control group, the average score for belief in God was 61.55, or somewhat above the scale’s midpoint. On the other hand, for the group who had just seen The Thinker, the resulting average was only 41.42. Such a gap is large enough to indicate a mild believer is responding as a mild nonbeliever—all from being visually reminded of the human capacity to think.

 

Another experiment used a different method to show a similar effect. It exploited the tendency, previously identified by psychologists, of people to override their intuition when faced with the demands of reading a text in a hard-to-read typeface. Gervais and Norenzayan did this by giving two groups a test of participants’ belief in supernatural agents like God and angels, varying only the font in which the test was printed. People who took the belief test in the unclear font (a typewriterlike font set in italics) expressed less belief than those who took it in a more common, easy-to-read typeface. “It’s such a subtle manipulation,” Norenzayan says. “Yet something that seemingly trivial can lead to a change that people consider important in their religious belief system.” On a belief scale of 3 to 21, participants in the analytic condition scored an average of almost two points lower than those in the control group.

 

Analytic thinking undermines belief because, as cognitive psychologists have shown, it can override intuition. And we know from past research that religious beliefs—such as the idea that objects and events don’t simply exist but have a purpose—are rooted in intuition. “Analytic processing inhibits these intuitions, which in turn discourages religious belief,” Norenzayan explains.

 

Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene, who last year published a paper on the same subject with colleagues Amitai Shenhav and David Rand, praises this work for its rigorous methodology. “Any one of their experiments can be reinterpreted, but when you’ve got [multiple] different kinds of evidence pointing in the same direction, it’s very impressive.”

 

The study also gets high marks from University of California, Irvine, evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, the only former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to have once been ordained as a Catholic priest, and who continues to assert that science and religion are compatible. Ayala calls the studies ingenious, and is surprised only that the effects are not even stronger. “You would expect that the people who challenge the general assumptions of their culture—in this case, their culture’s religious beliefs—are obviously the people who are more analytical,” he says.

 

The researchers, for their part, point out that both reason and intuition have their place. “Our intuitions can be phenomenally useful,” Gervais says, “and analytic thinking isn’t some oracle of the truth.”

 

Greene concurs, while also raising a provocative question implicit in the findings: “Obviously, there are millions of very smart and generally rational people who believe in God,” he says. “Obviously, this study doesn’t prove the nonexistence of God. But it poses a challenge to believers: If God exists, and if believing in God is perfectly rational, then why does increasing rational thinking tend to decrease belief in God?”

(source)

 

*******

bible study? come on…

 

Last afternoon’s ninety-odd minutes of amateurish opining on a haphazardly collected thousand-plus pages of a premodern near-eastern text, did not went well. While studying the classical literary texts require participants to involve their cerebral cortexes to think critically about issues like interpretation and exegesis, as well as redaction or form criticisms, yesterday’s attempt seemed to assume a Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes for the text in question.

 

It is tedious work to interpret a text which is, among other things, a few thousand years old, anonymously authored and in a language other than the current lingua franca, English. Serious students of say, The Analects of Confucius, know that it is a waste of time to dabble in an English translation of the work without engaging the original Chinese text. There are many issues which will get muddled, let alone lost, in translation.

 

Besides, what’s the use of talking cock to one another about “how one feels” about a text when we should be talking sense about “what the text actually says”. Worst of all, despite what the facilitator may claim to the rest of us, he is already a dogmatist on what he thinks the text should mean. Not unlike modern totalitarian states like North Korea and Iran, participants are apparently butchered, via herd instinct, to bleat out only nice things about our Kim Il Sung in the sky – as well as ask only The Idiot’s Guide to-type of questions.

 

It seems to me that penetrating questions are not allowed – questions that should, by all counts of intellectual honesty, be asked.

 

All right, perhaps I should get to the point. We were “studying” a piece of ancient scribble called The Epistle (or letter) to the Ephesians. It is part of the twenty-seven-book koine greek corpus called the Christian New Testament. It is bound alongside the usually thirty-nine-book ancient hebrew cum aramaic corpus called the Hebrew Scriptures, which are often christened, albeit dishonestly, as the Christian Old Testament. It takes only an ignoramus to assume a “christian” provenance for the ancient near-eastern work.

 

While no serious New Testament scholar in modern times will thumb print certify that Paul of Tarsus wrote the letter, evangelical christians often prefer to ignore this difficulty and just assume pauline authorship. Many choose to do so to protect their cherished but very mistaken view that the bible was fingered by the cananite-hebrew deity – Yahweh – himself. Common sense suggests that just by the very haphazard way in which the bible was compiled through history erases the silly notion of a perfect deity writing or dictating a perfect and inerrant work.

 

Many evangelical christians choose to believe in this premodern idea because they have invested too much, their entire lives, in this god racket. They will not and cannot endure the existential pain if their cherished book turns out to be only a fairy tale, an Arthurian myth of the ancient Jewish people and the early christian community which has no historical validity and thus no eternal truth.

 

Poor me. I do not care about subscribing to a falsehood because it makes me feel good or happy. I only care about knowing the truth, even if that means a purpose-less and meaning-less universe that is impartial to biological life, let alone human life. An atheistic humanism is thus about living courageously, meaningfully and with dignity in the face of a possible annihilation of all that we know to be dear to us.

 

*******

escape chapel party

 

Singapore continues to anally rape its nonreligious citizens with its syphillic brand of multireligious “tolerance”, one that strangles our civil freedom to opinion and expression. Singaporeans are brain freezed into glazing only at the Disney channel when it comes to religion (and politics) while nonreligion is open market and can be AXNed by anyone at any time.

 

Many of us are now frostbited to be self-censoring and hypocritically respectful, tickling the scrotums of religious “sensibilities” even if some of us would rather be fingering the heathen. It is just not right. It is immoral.

 

Advertiser Creative Insurgence has for more than a week red-carpeted its campaign for the coming Escape Chapel Party to be held at the Chijmes Chapel this Saturday at 9pm onwards. The party is a spur to promote UK-based “Escape” nightclub brand to the region.

 

(source)

 

 

Even this one is as benign as my cheeky daughter playing peekaboo under the bed covers. It is as holy as stupid sheep. But many Singaporeans seem to disagree, most of them, I reckon, bleeting among the local roman catholic community. They claim these visuals of beautiful nuns are “offensive” and “in bad taste”. Many even filed reports to the police (!!??) and the various local ministries.

 

Creative Insurgence is perhaps trying to give a tongue-in-cheeky humour to the party, since it is held in a former religious convent and that coincidentally, this week is the fucking holy week. The organisers originally wanted the party to be held over the Spring Festival weekend in January but due to circumstances postponed to the next public holiday, namely the coming Bloody Friday cum Walking Dead weekend.

 

As expected, the organisers promptly apologised to the phallus-crowned supremo of the catholic diocese in Singapore, a Mr Nicholas Chia, whose office is devilishly located a few nun-jiggle steps away at the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd. They also recycle-binned the nuns from their main website.

 

This is Singapore, and this is how the pasteurised version of the blasphemy law is enforced in this peaceful and loving multireligious country. The absence of criminalisation does not make it any less vile. What if vice versa? Can freethinkers and atheists file reports to the police if we find posters about evangelistic meetings and christian outreach programme to the non-christians offensive? We have a right to be offended, don’t we? Can the LGBTQ community squeal their offence over schools that promote anti-gay agendas in their sex education programmes?

 

The above pictures are already so mild. I think I shall leave you with these:

 

(source)

 

(source)

 

There are more fucking nuns, literally, out there, but I shall have the christian virtue of self-control and just stop here.

 

*******

did god shrivel the tumour?

 

In mid-December 2010, after a series of tests, I received a diagnosis of lung cancer, stage 4. There were lesions in my brain, nodules on my adrenal glands and my lymph nodes were also swollen. The bones of my right shoulder and arm were also infected. The cancer-marker reading was 422 (normal = 0-5). The prognosis was that I had a few months left, without medical intervention or if I did not respond well to it.

In desperation I cried out to the Lord, declaring “Lord, I have faith that You will heal me; honour my faith. But first, increase my measure of faith!!!”….

…During the January Touch Jesus, He Heals! service, Rev Francis commanded the tumour to melt and leave and I rested in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Others also witnessed to me (later) that he had pronounced “I see cancer no more!!”

Hallelujah! After about 7 weeks of oral chemo, my CT scan on 17 February 2011 showed that the tumour in my lung had shrunk from a formidable 4.6 x 4.1 cm to 2.1 x 1.6 cm.

- source

 

The last statement says it all. Thank Jupiter, Zeus and Santa Claus for modern science! God did not do anything to this woman – it was the seven weeks of chemotherapy that shrinks the tumour!

 

Why are the religious so blind??

 

*******

 

“from faith to facts: theology to atheism”

by Catherine Dunphy

 

When I was a practicing Catholic, I often stretched my imagination by visioning my church not as a global oppressor of women but as a segmented community, “a church with in a church”, that derived its mandate not from the pulpit in Rome but from the roots of liberation theology. I spent many years at the altar of feminist theologians, honoring their articulation of the liberated experience.

 

Yet despite the appeal of feminist theology I now identify as a secular humanist. So what happened? To put it shortly and succinctly; I could no longer reconcile myself to belief. Instead I embraced the sentiment that I was not losing faith, but gaining reason. Since that time, I have spent many an unfettered hour thinking about religion, its function as a building block of society and how and when it will be retired as product of a bygone era.

 

Which brings me to this article. Despite religion’s best efforts, things are changing, particularly in the West; with the influence of science a new world of possibilities, free from religion have come into focus. But there is also, in my opinion, another unknowing contributor – theology.

 

The study and development of theology has become one of the main architects of internal schisms in the Roman Church. Most people in this day and age don’t take notice of who the Vatican is excommunicating or whose book has been banned. In most instances, the person in question is a theologian. Recent examples of theological thinking that has gotten the Church in a tither include the splinter group “Roman Catholic Womanpriest”, an international union of women priests ordained in the apostolic tradition. Also, since the 1970‘s the church has spoken against liberation theologies that it feels focus too much on the emancipate communities of disenfranchised persons seeking justice in areas of political, social, economic and ecological oppression. One of the most vocal of these groups include feminists.

 

Rosemary Radford Ruether is one of the most influential feminist liberation theologians. Dr. Ruether has written numerous books on women and the church, including Sexism and God Talk: Towards a Feminist Theology. She currently teaches at Claremount School of Theology. She agreed to speak with me in preparation for this article.

 

The recognition of sexism as wrong, evil and sinful brings about the total collapse of the myths of female evil… more than that, women have to suspect that the entire symbolic universe that surrounds them, which has socialized them to their roles, is deeply tainted by hostility to their humanity.

 

Before I spoke with Dr. Ruether I knew that she would have a perspective that was contrary to official church teaching. In a very frank discussion she said that catholicism is not about the papacy, and “if you identify the hierarchy as the church, then you might as well forget about it (church).”

 

When I asked Dr. Ruether to provide more information about what she meant by “church” she explained that her experience of it, “has some relationship to Christ, specifically as an inspiration for justice, but that church is mostly a community committed to an ecumenical and interfaith dialogue about liberation and social justice”, of which feminism is part of that tradition.

 

When it comes to Ruether’s theology, the idea of church does seem “out of focus” with the general consensus of what it is to be a Christian and Catholic.

 

Many would be surprised that most reputable theological schools are places where a convergence of similar ideas occurs; everything from the feminist perspectives of Ruether and Daly to biblical scholarship that includes the detailed study of pseudepigraphic texts as well as metaphorical concepts of god as mother or as the manifestation of love in the universe.

 

Yet despite these differing views at the academic level, very little transcends to the pew.

 

Rome continues to dictate the rules and obligations for millions of Catholics as it is the recognized church on the world stage. I have given a lot of thought to this conundrum, therefore it should not be surprising that theological students like myself, would find themselves trapped by doctrine when working in parishes, schools and hospitals.

 

Concerning this topic, Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola authored a recent study in Evolutionary Psychology, Preachers Who Are Not Believers, that clearly outlines what appears to be an emerging phenomenon.

 

The loneliness of non-believing pastors is extreme. They have no trusted confidantes to reassure them, to reflect their own musings back to them, to provide reality checks. As their profiles reveal, even their spouses are often unaware of their turmoil. They are caught in a trap, cunningly designed to harness both their best intentions and their basest fears to the task of immobilizing them in their predicament.

 

Inspired by this research, I spoke with a friend and former student of theology. She was aware that I had left the church but this was the first time that we had discussed it.

 

Ever since John Stuart Mill, the liberal tradition has been wary of democracy and its potential for the tyranny of the majority and the oppression of individuals or minorities. As I have argued at length, what is disturbing about Strauss is that his cures for the ills of democracy exacerbate its fascistic hazards. Encouraging a secretive elite to justify all manner of dirty tricks, lies, deceptions, and an assortment of unethical and illegal tactics cannot “save” the world from the dangers of democracy. Equally misguided is the promotion of a religious and nationalist militancy.

 

Though our meeting was conversational and at ease, I was struck by her relief at speaking with someone else about her evolving beliefs. Most notably she spoke in detail about the lack of solace or spiritual nourishment she found from her position as a school chaplain and her continued attendance at church. In fact, she indicated that she most often found it to undermine her happiness, resulting in frustration. She did say these frustrations contributed to her decision to leave her job as a chaplain and to pursue other career options.

 

When I asked her about her beliefs now, she identified “god as the manifestation of love in the universe”, not a particularly canonical view, especially since she admitted to feeling like a heretic since she stopped believing in the virgin birth and the divinity of Jesus.

 

I left our meeting feeling like I was on the tip of an iceberg. It seems to me now that the process of completing a degree in theology is directly related to changes in belief and for at least a percentage of people, loss of faith.

 

So where do we go from here? Without a doubt, religion has played an important part in the human story. It once provided answers to questions about the world we live in and purported to reveal the meaning of life. As science ebbs ever closer to answering the crucial facts of existence, believers will continue to be challenged to let go of the ramblings of a bygone era.

(source)

 

*******

 

 

types of extremists

 

 

 

(source)

 

 

 

 

despots and cheerleaders

 

Christians sometimes betray their cheer-leadered beliefs in a prayer-answering, illness-healing and New York Knicks-supporting grandfather in the sky when they offer revival meetings and church camps as solutions to the shriveling faith of a thomasian believer.

 

This all-powerful monarch who supposedly created the singularity that exploded into the universe about 14 billion years ago, although current cosmology suggests the possibility of either an infinite or multiple universe; and who sends tsunamis to muslims and earthquakes to homosexuals and pagans; appears impotent to revitalise a sceptical and doubting believer without resorting to the hysterical antics of crackpot “revivalists” and televangelists.

 

Yahweh, as this capricious sugar daddy is called, does not, or maybe cannot, do home visits. He appears to “heal” people of colds, backaches and sometimes even cancer and AIDS (often without official documentation) only at special events like miracle services, revival meetings and healing rallies. He rarely plies his trade in private.

 

Even if he does, he tortures the believer by dishing his power ever so incrementally that by the time the naif manages to praise his or her maker for his “healing”, one is surprised that the medical treatments and bodily rest do not work. 

 

One does well by watching british mentalist Derren Brown as he uses psychological tricks to deceive unsuspecting audiences into believing he is a real psychic, christian faith healer, and what-have-you. In one particular programme, he even recruits a stranger from the London streets and trains him to pretend to be an itinerant preacher and faith healer. The team then travels to the US and that was where the fun starts.

 

There is a lot of crowd psychology at work and what the professionals call mass hypnosis in mass gatherings of like-minded people like revival meetings, miracle services and church camps. It also helps that there is lots of congregational singing and repetitive choruses, spurred by the preacher’s cheerleading rants and slogans. All of that helps to psyche the followers and creates an atmosphere suitable for influencing the subconscious mind through group and auto-suggestion.

 

Church camps are the same. Like the mate who complains recently of fellow parishioners trying to hard-sell a forthcoming church camp to him, it takes only a God to fan the charcoaled flames of faith without human interference.

 

*******

 

horror show

 

She is light chocolate-tanned, has a raisin complexion, and demonstrates the demeanor of a fiftyish tai tai. She is Lela*, a church acquaintance and new friend in our cosy Sunday small group gatherings contemplating our christian Illiad, the bible.

 

Her rainbowed shadow grows large during the proceedings, as she “shares” about how much she fears God now, after more than two decades of, in her own words, “leading a colourful life”. Isn’t it fun to have a flavoured existence? It seems she believes now that a christian life should be one binary black-and-white affair. Technicolour, plasmic and HD visuals are not the pious christian thing.

 

This mildly megalomaniac loves a confession, and does so augustinianly. She is into real estate, and is working hard to make money for her twenty-somethinger who is heading to university after his mandatory military stint. She had him at twenty two, which means she is fortyish. She blooms into this fiftyish amorphophallus titanium through chain-smoking, binge-drinking and maybe a one-night-stand or two although she makes no admission of any such fleshly pleasure.

 

But – yes, one always expect a conditional conjunction from a pious christian who starts ranting about worldly pleasures –  she no longer smokes, at all. She no longer drinks, not a teardrop.

 

She cannot stomach primetime telly, except the news, and like a hormonal pregnant lass who pisses at certain smells and scents, forbids her son from enjoying his latest fix of contemporary pop noise.

 

She empathises with her son, she says, but she fears God now. I didn’t know this god of hers is petty about people’s tastes in addictions, film and music. She even experiences devilish epiphanies of sweet tobacco at bus stops even though she claims there is no cigarette butt in sight. A “work of the devil”, definitely. One should actually suggest to her that vestigial tobacco scents do linger in the air for a significant amount of time, especially in places like bus stops where smokers enjoy the quickie before their next bus. There appears to be no fag in the proximity because cleaners have done a wonderful job! Unfortunately for them, there will come a time when smokers will be discriminated against, in totalitarian Singapore. Or at least that’s the wish of some ministers in the regime. One can also explain to her that for someone who was a tobacco-addict, there is nothing supernatural about the human brain feeding hallucinations and delusions into the self-conscious mind about past sensory addictions.

 

She fears God now. He gets cross and will bitch if she sits passively by while her colleagues offer joss sticks and suckling pig to some taoist pantheon after a successful transaction. Oh dear, she has become a bigot. A fundamentalist christian bigot who is hormonal against other religions. Oh my fucking Zeus.

 

Several nods of approval from my fellow christian automatons later, it starts to feel creepy. At least for me, the lone sceptic. I don’t wish to be her friend, not now, not later. Never. But she is more than welcomed to divulge her exciting explorations into carnal decadence. I fantasize sometimes, about my embracing the writer’s wretched life with urns of tobacco and caffeine, and waterboarded sips of alcohol. Think of the late Christopher Hitchens. And his oxford mate, Martin Amis. Or Albert Camus, Frank o’Hara, Jack Spicer, Michel Foucault. Damn it, or any human being for chrissake.

 

Anyhow, people like me are just hell money for the bonfire, in her eyes.

 

(*not her real name)

 

*******

 

 

the real use of prayer

 

(source)

 

 

“was i wrong about the afterlife?”

by Christopher Hitchens (as told to Art Levine)

 

At the end, the manner of my “passing,” as the pious so delicately refer to death, was as much a disappointment to the dewy-eyed acolytes of god-worship as it was to me, although for rather different reasons. For more than a year after I publicly announced in June 2010 that I would begin chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, the stupidest of the faithful either gloated on their subliterate Web sites that my illness was a sign of “God’s revenge” for having blasphemed their Lord and Master, or prayed that I would abandon my contempt for their nonsensical beliefs by undergoing a deathbed conversion. The vulgarity of the idea that a vengeful deity would somehow stoop to inflicting a cancer on me still boggles the mind, especially in the face of the ready explanation supplied for my illness by my long, happy, and prodigious career as a smoker of cigarettes and drinker of spirits.

 

As for that longed-for conversion, it never came, despite the fervent wishes of such clerical mountebanks as the Reverend Rick Warren. Said reverend, who portrayed himself as my “friend” while consigning homosexuals and nonbelievers to one of Dante’s outer circles of Hell, proclaimed with the arrogant surety of the devout: “I loved & prayed for him constantly & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now.” Indeed I do, and much better than he. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, for his part, did not fail to use my death as an opportunity to stoke the fear of damnation among the credulous. Having somehow managed to evolve the thumbs needed to “tweet” his followers on his BlackBerry, he declared that my end—as if death were not a natural process common to all mammals—was “an excruciating reminder of the consequences of unbelief,” while observing with the religionist’s usual condescension that my “brilliance & eloquence” will not matter “in the world to come.”

 

How would he know?

 

What was clear enough before my death was that visions of an afterlife were no more verifiable than any other bedtime tales designed to offer false hope to toddlers frightened of the dark. They are the ultimate embodiment of the solipsism at the heart of all religions. This infantilizing fiction comes in various guises, from orthodox religions with their fabricated consolations of fairytale heavens—whether it is the Islamic fanatic’s seventy-two celestial virgins or the Christian fantasia of winged angels—to the modern pseudoscientific “research” into so-called near-death experiences (known with ridiculous technicality as NDEs). These hallucinatory claims, originally popularized by a Dr. Raymond Moody for Me Generation readers of the 1970s, rest on numerous banal and repetitive testimonials about floating above one’s body, hurtling through a tunnel toward a bright light, vividly reviewing episodes from one’s past as if watching a holiday slide show, and encountering various beings lit up with an unearthly glow. These latter apparitions can range from one’s surprisingly youthful-looking relatives to an omniscient spiritual guide, including the ubiquitous Jesus if you’re a Christian, not-so-coincidentally matching your own faith or lack thereof.

 

There’s nothing in these visionary tall tales that can’t be either simply explained through an understanding of basic science or discounted as the unprovable “revelations” of individuals with no legitimate claim on our belief. That was my position before I experienced my own peculiar hallucinations after death, and I have seen no evidence since then requiring me to recant my position. Was I wrong on the afterlife, as so many among the bien-pensant brayed for me to admit that I was wrong on Iraq? Plainly, no.

 

As the psychologist Susan Blackmore has persuasively shown, the near-death experience is a product of the dying brain and shaped by the individual’s cultural expectations. The temporal lobe is especially prone to inducing hallucinations, memory flashbacks, and other visions after death when undergoing anoxia, or oxygen deprivation. In concordance with this understanding, virtually every one of the phenomena I experienced after my own death has a clear-cut neurological or biological cause or an obvious cultural antecedent. As Blackmore wrote recently in the Guardian, “If human consciousness can really leave the body and operate without a brain, then everything we know in neuroscience has to be questioned.”

 

Yes, in the final moments of my mortal denouement I did feel “myself” floating above my body. But that was just the first of a commonplace series of interrelated hallucinations that bore a notable resemblance to the visual effects of the LSD I tried one summer evening in 1968 at Oxford—except that these recent hallucinations were, if anything, rather less life-altering. Of course, by this time in my hospital room, there was no “life” to alter, but I have never wavered in holding on to core truths in the absence of contravening evidence.

 

There was no “tunnel,” and no vividly bright light that I moved toward, and whatever euphoria I experienced was as transient as the buzz from polishing off a few bottles of wine with dear Martin in the cafés of Monmartre. Yes, there appeared to be a passageway leading to something a bit brighter than the total darkness that I expected, but I experienced this for what it was: a well-known epiphenomenon of oxygen depletion in the dying retina.

 

If the scenes from my past that subsequently paraded before my view were especially vivid and, indeed, somewhat affecting, it cannot have been coincidental that I had only recently spent time finalizing the paperback edition of my memoir, Hitch-22, with a new foreword reflecting on my then-imminent death. And as one would expect, given my intellectual predilections, there was no angelic being or robed dime-store Jesus to greet me as my near-death experience quickly progressed into what might be termed my death experience (DE). Instead, as my hallucinatory journey continued, I was greeted warmly by the predictable neural holograms of Tom Paine, Voltaire, and George Orwell, who all bore a striking resemblance to their paintings, or, in Orwell’s case, to the penetrating photo of him on the cover of my book Why Orwell Matters. Not for a moment did I believe they were “real.” Even so, Orwell, never one to tolerate cant of any kind, furthered my resolve: “This is all a delusion, my dear boy, but enjoy it while you can.”

 

And so I have. I have discovered little that I had not expected from even a casual reading of the scientific literature, although as the months have passed, I have sometimes wondered at the apparent duration and persistence of these hallucinations. I take some comfort in the knowledge that the execrable evangelists and their ilk will have to wait for all eternity before I will betray my principles by proclaiming a newfound, servile belief in God or the afterlife. I suspect, however, that it is only a matter of time before some New Age or Christian publishing huckster sees the lucre to be made by publishing the spurious recantations of dead atheists and freethinkers. Expect him to conscript bogus mediums to fabricate tract after tract of Hume, Voltaire, Paine, Orwell, Mencken, and me, among others, confessing the errors of our godless ways. Expect learned introductions by Harold Bloom—or his spirit, after he dies—to give the entire Dead Repentant Writers Library of America series a patina of respectability.

 

Don’t believe a word of it.

(source)

 

*******

 

beauty of god’s creation

 

(source)

 

 

atheism is about facing up to a grim reality

by Julian Baggini

 

The problem with the “atheist” moniker has been recognised for decades. It’s too negative, too associated with amoral nihilism. It’s understandable then that many would agree with Richard Dawkins that we need a word like “gay” which “should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright”. So why not “bright”?

 

One reason, which I mentioned right at the start of this series, is that it sounds too smug. But there’s an even more important reason why we should not choose a word that is “positive, warm, cheerful”: although many atheists are all those things, atheism itself is none of them.

 

Atheists have seemed rather keen in recent years to stress their jolly side. As well as the whole “brights” movement, there’s the “happy human” logo used by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, the British Humanist Association and several other humanist groups. Then there were the atheist bus posters telling us that we should stop worrying and enjoy life.

 

Given how the atheist stereotype has been one of the dark, brooding existentialist gripped by the angst of a purposeless universe, this is understandable. But frankly, I think we’ve massively overcompensated, and in doing so we’ve blurred an important distinction. Atheists should point out that life without God can be meaningful, moral and happy. But that’s “can” not “is” or even “should usually be”. And that means it can just as easily be meaningless, nihilistic and miserable.

 

Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right. Can you really tell the parents who lost their child to a suicide after years of depression that they should stop worrying and enjoy life? Doesn’t the appropriate response to 4,000 children dying everyday as a direct result of poor sanitation involve despair at the relentless misery of the world as well as some effort to improve things? Sometimes life is shit and that’s all there is to it. Not much bright about that fact.

 

Stressing the jolly side of atheism not only glosses over its harsher truths, it also disguises its unique selling point. The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy. The more brutal facts of life are harsher for us than they are for those who have a story to tell in which it all works out right in the end and even the most horrible suffering is part of a mystifying divine plan. If we don’t freely admit this, then we’ve betrayed the commitment to the naked truth that atheism has traditionally embraced.

 

Of course there are some atheist worldviews that do claim to provide a bulwark against the worst that life can throw at you. In particular, there is the stoicism that teaches us to take mortality and the impermanence of all things as cues to detach ourselves from the ups and downs of life and embrace an accepting tranquility. But first of all, it’s not clear this really does make sense in a completely naturalistic framework. For the ancient stoics at least, this only made sense in the context of a metaphysics where reason was part of the divine. More importantly still, this is only one view, and most atheistic outlooks contain no such consolations.

 

Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the threat of moral nihilism. Atheists are quite rightly keen to counter the accusation that life without God cannot be moral. The British Humanist Association, for instance, claims that “Right and wrong can be explained by human nature alone and do not require religious teaching”. But, just as with happiness, there is a need to distinguish the possibility of atheist morality from its inevitable actuality. Anyone who thinks it’s easy to ground ethics either hasn’t done much moral philosophy or wasn’t concentrating when they did. Although morality is arguably just as murky for the religious, at least there is some bedrock belief that gives a reason to believe that morality is real and will prevail. In an atheist universe, morality can be rejected without external sanction at any point, and without a clear, compelling reason to believe in its reality, that’s exactly what will sometimes happen.

 

So I think it’s time we atheists ‘fessed up and admitted that life without God can sometimes be pretty grim. Appropriating the label “heathen” is part of this. Heathens are unredeemed outcasts from heaven who roam the planet without hope of surviving the deaths of their bodies. They may have values but they are not secured by any divine source. Yet we embrace this because we think it represents the truth. And so we don’t just get on and enjoy life, we embark on our own intellectual pilgrimages, trying to make some progress in a universe on which no meaning has been writ. The journey can be wonderful but it can also be arduous and it may end horribly. But there is no other way, and anyone who urges you to follow a path that they promise leads to a bright future is either gravely mistaken or a charlatan.

(source)

 

*******

 

read the bible

 

(source)

 

 

the stars, not jesus, died for us

 

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics:

You are all stardust.

You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements — the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution — weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

- Lawrence Krauss

 

*******

 

christian bigotry in the US

 

It seems that there are christians, especially those in the intellectually-challenged US south, who use LGBT people for target practice. And they are not pig or crocodile farmers, mind you.

 

Senior Pastor Steve Riggle of a 15,000-member Grace Community Church in Houston, Texas recently played prophet by asking for the head of the city’s mayor. He accused the lesbian leader for not upholding the city’s constitution in regards to marriage.

 

Megachurch Pastor asks Texas Mayor to quit over Gay Activism

 

Yet this prick-poking preacher does not realise he is also bashing his bible on a lectern he does not own. Politics.

 

It is not surprising that the director of the Houston Area Pastor Council supports the fool. Thank Zeus I am not Texan.

 

Another christian, this time a school principal – WHAT IN THE NAME OF ZEUS AND HERCULES – yes, a school principal (how did she become principal, one wonder), of a high school in Tennesse, commented in a public assembly that gay students are “not on god’s path” and will be going to hell anyway. This woman wanker also threaten expulsion for these students.

 

Haywood Principal quits over anti-gay remarks

 

All praise to Zeus and Oscar Wilde, once again, for guiding the hands of the poor students in complaining their plight to the authorities. The fool resigned from her post as a result.

 

Good riddance.

 

And these loonies still want to claim that their religion is a force for good in the world?

 

Bizarre. Really.

 

*******

 

religious blind spot

by Julian Baggini

 

The humanist philosopher Simon Blackburn recounts a wonderful anecdote told to him by a colleague about a high-powered interfaith panel discussion. Each speaker took turns to explain some key ideas of their faith – Buddhist, Hindu and so on – and the response from other panel members was always along the lines of: “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.” The same response greeted the Catholic priest who talked of Christ and salvation, but instead of being pleased with their enthusiasm “he thumped the table and shouted: ‘No! It’s not a question of if it works for me! It’s the true word of the living God, and if you don’t believe it you’re all damned to hell!’”

 

“And they all said, ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.’”

 

The puzzle for many of us is why this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often. The simple fact is that almost everyone who is serious about their religion believes that others have got it badly wrong. If they’re not going to hell, then they are at least missing out on life’s most important truths. So why the silence about the errors of other faiths?

 

The most obvious explanation is simple civility and a respect for different opinions. It would be rude and arrogant for a member of one religion to criticise another, so if they can’t say anything nice, they don’t say anything at all. But this doesn’t add up. Rowan Williams, for example, does not seem to think he’s being rude or arrogant when he criticises the government (especially since he frames it as “encouraging the present government to clarify what it is aiming for”). The Dalai Lama is not considered rude or arrogant for criticising capitalism for being “concerned only with gain and profitability“.

 

The Association of British Muslims was not rude or arrogant when it quite rightly criticised the UN general assembly for removing a clause abut the sexual orientation of the victims from its resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. It seems religious leaders have no problem finding civil ways of being critical of everyone apart from each other.

 

So there’s got to be something else going on here and it doesn’t seem uncharitable to suggest that it’s a kind of sticking together for self-interest, a version of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. A religion’s direct competitors are not the biggest threat. People rarely switch between them and because the traffic tends to be two-way, the net affect is usually negligible anyway. The real danger comes from people giving up on religion altogether. So religions have an interest in “sector building”, seeing promotion of the profile of their kind existential product as being more important than their particular brand.

 

It’s another symptom of what Daniel Dennett calls “belief in belief”. Sure, people do sincerely believe the specific tenets of their faith, albeit with varying degrees of intensity and selectivity. But whereas the exact contents of the creed are up for negotiation, that there must be one is not. What matters above all else is to be religious: how exactly you do so is mere detail.

 

Of course, this isn’t how people explicitly or consciously see it. But if we judge people according to what they do rather than what they say, this explanation makes most sense to me. And I think there could be some benefits if religious people were to acknowledge this.

 

First of all, it would provide an opportunity to question whether the tactical alliance is really the right one. If “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” then I think many people are confused about who their friends and enemies are. There are plenty of moderate Christians, for example, who have much more in common with sympathetic atheists than they do evangelicals. Gay Christians should be more critical of their homophobic co-religionists than of atheist materialists. Such people should leave the opportunistic coalition of faith and join a principled coalition of the reasonable.

 

Second, recognising that belief in belief matters more than belief is a way of moving religion more in the direction of practice and form of life, away from discredited supernatural creeds. As I’ve said more than once in this series, I’m all in favour of religion being more about practice than belief, but it is just wishful thinking to believe it already is.

 

However, I am not holding my breath waiting for either development to happen. The more depressing truth seems to be that for all their aspirations for transcendent truth and higher purpose, religions behave like any other worldly individual or organisation and end up doing what protects their secular interests, not what most aligns with their values. And I’d be a liar if I said: “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.”

(source)

 

*******

 

no need to “thank god”

 

For the first time in what appears to be for ever, I wake up to the cozy rainbows of dawn greeting my eyelids with tickles instead of thorns. Yes! My right peeper does not sting anymore, and I silently thank the evolutionary marvels of the human body to heal and recuperate with the help of modern medicine and the passage of time.

 

Although it is one of the most painful ordeals of conjunctivitis I ever experienced, it is one which I faced with moral courage, without the usual incessant pleas to an imaginary Santa Claus to quicken the healing process. It is very common for free thinkers, especially those who are recovering from a religious disorder, to revert to prayer more as a psychological crutch than a return to faith.

 

If there is any one to thank, I should thank my wife for admonishing me to apply the eyedrops regularly and for the children’s grandparents who lent their help whenever they could. It is our fellow human beings whom we should often and persistently thank and be grateful to as we will NEVER come this way again.

 

Contrary to any wishful thinking on my part, I will never be able to see my maternal grandmother, whom I called Ah Ma, ever again and especially so when I die. Death erases everything. And when the time comes, I will also have to say goodbye, a truly final farewell, to my own parents. I will not see them in heaven, nor will they be there, despite what they believe now. All consciousness will just end. Period.

 

There is so much at stake in the here and now. It is a miracle we even begin to exist as tiny creatures of stardust in this vast space of empty nothingness and it would be a miracle if we can come this way again if the clock is rewound. So we need to cherish our time with our loved ones and learn to appreciate them.

 

Stop thanking an imaginary bloke whom there is no evidence to account for and start thanking and appreciating the people whom and the things which we can feel, touch and hold!

 

*******

 

missing church

 

I feel straight-jacket awkward now, to sit in front of my laptop, at nine a.m on a sunday, telling myself how I am so missing going to church, the fourth consecutive time. My eyes sting and my breath yet to be perfumed with toothpaste. What the heck, Solomon, my two-year-old, is still sleeping in the bedroom and my five-year-old Sarah is pretending to be teacher to her dolls in the sitting room.

 

My eldest, a legolas-skinned six-year-old with marbled bespectacled eyes, a button nose and wine-red lips, whom we christened Samuel; is already in church with my missus. She is singing on stage today.

 

We are so different, my missus and I. She is the friendly one, the firecracker at any social gathering whereas I am the excruciatingly introverted chap who broods at the corner who always wishes he is at his desk reading W.H Auden or Rowan Williams. My banker friend, who had tertiary training in psychology, opined my having self-esteem and self-respect issues. I concur and I am often so thankful to the gods I am even married, let alone to a babelicious brunette, not that I would mind a blonde but apparently Singaporean chinese do not come blonde.

 

I remember telling her, when we were dating, how painful my ears and dizzy my cerebral cortex would feel if I ever step into a discotheque, with its rainbow lights and trance-like noise. My darling, however, grooves to the beat like a shaman to marijuana. And she could consume pints of alcohol like a bull. Or a pig. Whatever.

 

I was her third, and final, boyfriend. She is my very first…the first girl I ever held hands with and whose pussy I ever licked or fucked.

 

Speaking of having a bad deal.

 

As expected, she is the one with the many friends, keeping in touch even with those from her primary school days. I have very few friends, prefering the intimate no-holds-barred friendship to the superficial hi-fiving, chest-stomping beer buddy.

 

I suppose that’s it. Why I miss church. It is horrifying to think that I miss the sermons or the congregational singing of christian pop/rock songs. I would prefer the good old hymns, with all the ritual and pomp, just for the spectacle, anyway. I would prefer a Church of England homily, with its polite pussy-footing, just for the rhetorical eloquence, anyway.

 

I miss church because I miss the friends. I miss the confiding and the sharing, minus the prayer. I miss the feeling of being in a community, minus the god-nonsense. I miss carrying all the lovely babies (yes, I am one of those strange men who love babies), minus the sunday school. I miss interacting, profoundly and deeply, as a fellow human being who are primarily social apes descended from the african savannahs.

 

This may explain why there are many atheists, agnostics and freethinkers in the closet of organised religion. Like me, we are just not bold and intrepid enough to do a Dawkins or a Hitchens against the poison of theocracy, anti intellectualism and fundamentalism. In all cowardice, we choose to do a De Botton.

 

And leave it as that.

 

*******

 

god is republican

 

(source)

 

 

give up for lent

 

(source)

*******

 

because of fantasy

 

“It would be almost unbelievable, if history did not record the tragic fact, that men have gone to war and cut each other’s throats because they could not agree as to what was to become of them after their throats were cut.”

- Walter Stacy (former Chief Justice, North Carolina Supreme Court) 

 

*******

 

but himself

 

The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

- Sir Richard Burton

 

 

*******

 

sam harris interviews ex-pastor

by Sam Harris

 

 

Tim Prowse was a United Methodist pastor for almost 20 years, serving churches in Missouri and Indiana. Tim earned a B.A. from East Texas Baptist University, a Master of Divinity (M.Div) from Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, and a Doctor of Ministry (D.Min) from Chicago Theological Seminary. Acknowledging his unbelief, Tim left his faith and career in 2011. He currently lives in Indiana. He was kind enough to discuss his experience of leaving the ministry with me by email.

 

 

Can you describe the process by which you lost your belief in the teachings of your Church?

An interesting thing happened while I was studying at East Texas Baptist University: I was told not to read Rudolf Bultmann. I asked myself: Why? What were they protecting me from? I picked up Bultmann’s work, and that decision is the catalyst that ultimately paved the road to today. Throughout my educational journey, which culminated in an Ordination from the United Methodist Church where I’ve served for seventeen years, I’ve continued to ask the question “Why?”

Ironically, it was seminary that inaugurated my leap of unfaith.  It was so much easier to believe when living in an uncritical, unquestioning, naïve state.  Seminary training with its demands for rigorous and intentional study and reflection coupled with its values of reason and critical inquiry began to undermine my naïveté.  I discovered theologians, philosophers and authors I never knew existed.  I found their questions stimulating but their answers often unsatisfying. For example, the Bible is rife with vileness evidenced by stories of sexual exploitation, mass murder and arbitrary mayhem.  How do we harmonize this fact with the conception of an all-loving, all-knowing God? While many have undertaken to answer this question even in erudite fashion, I found their answers lacking. Once I concluded that the Bible was a thoroughly human product and the God it purports does not exist, other church teachings, such as communion and baptism, unraveled rather quickly.  To quote Nietzsche, I was seeing through a different “perspective” – a perspective based on critical thinking, reason and deduction.  By honing these skills over time, reason and critical thinking became my primary tools and faith quickly diminished. Ultimately, these tools led to the undoing of my faith rather than the strengthening of it.

 

It sounds like you lost your faith in the process of becoming a minister—or did you go back and forth for some years? How long did you serve as a minister, and how much of this time was spent riven by doubt?

I didn’t lose faith entirely during the ministerial process, although a simmering struggle between faith and doubt was clearly evident.  This simmering would boil occasionally throughout my seventeen-year career, but any vacillations I experienced were easily suppressed, and faith would triumph, albeit, for non-religious reasons.  Besides the money, time, and energy I had invested during the process, familial responsibilities deterred any decisions to alter course.  These faithful triumphs were ephemeral and I found myself living in constant intellectual and emotional turmoil. By not repudiating my career, I could not escape the feeling I was living a lie. I continued to juggle this stressful dichotomy to the point of being totally miserable. Only recently have I succumbed to the doubt that has always undergirded my faith journey.

After I read your book, The End of Faith, I could no longer suppress my unbelief.  Since I’d never felt comfortable in clergy garb and refused to accept a first-century worldview, your book helped me see that religion could no longer be an instrument of meaning in my life. I’m sad to say, Sam, this conclusion did not result in an immediate career change.  I didn’t break from the church immediately, but rather feigned belief for two more years.

 

If you could go back in time and reason with your former self, what could you say that might have broken the spell sooner?

I would tell myself to ask questions, to read the text, to wonder, to explore the nuances, to take seriously my intuition and abilities to debate.  I’d tell myself to listen to what is actually being said with critical and reasoning ears.  I’d tell myself to substitute “Invisible Friend” for “God” every time I encountered the word and notice how ridiculous the rhetoric sounds from grown-ups. I would challenge myself to be more skeptical, to study science.  I’d tell myself to find joy in life – it’s the only one you are going to get – don’t waste a second.

 

Believers often allege that there is a deep connection between faith and morality. For instance, when I debated Rick Warren, he said that if he did not believe in God, he wouldn’t have any reason to behave ethically. You’ve lived on both sides of the faith continuum. I’m wondering if you felt any associated change in your morality, for better or worse.

I’d be interested to know what behaviors or impulses God is deterring Rick Warren from acting upon. I doubt very seriously if “God’s goodness” evaporated tomorrow, Warren would begin robbing banks, raping children, or murdering his neighbors!  These types of statements, while common, are fallacious in my opinion.  When Rick Warren uses God as his reason for being good, he is not using God in a general sense.  He isn’t referring to Thor, Neptune, or Isis, either. 

One can find a few biblical passages that do promote “goodness” to use Rick Warren’s term, but only by cherry picking them and avoiding the numerous passages that are appalling, offensive and destructive.

Since God is nothing more than our creation and projection, any talk of God is our reflection looking back at us.  Hence, our morality begins with us anyway. My morality hasn’t changed for the worse since I left the faith.  If anything, it is much more honest because I am forced to consider what is really going on in ethical decisions.  Family, culture, beliefs and values, genetic tendencies, all play a role in shaping morality, but I’m not arguing an extreme relativism.  While I do give credence to certain cultural influences on determining right and wrong, I believe that some issues are universal.  Which is why, unless Rick Warren is truly demented, he wouldn’t begin doing heinous acts if his faith evaporated tomorrow, and if he did, it would be more the result of mental illness than lack of faith.

 

Did you ever discuss your doubts with your fellow clergy or parishioners? Did you encounter other ministers who shared your predicament (some can be found at http://clergyproject.org/)? And what happened when you finally expressed your unbelief to others?

As an active minister, I did not discuss my atheism with colleagues or parishioners. Facing lost wages, housing and benefits, I chose to remain silent.  However, I did confide in my wife who provided a level of trust, understanding, and support that proved invaluable. Unfortunately, some ministers do not enjoy mature confidants.  Some have lost marriages and partners, friends and family, leaving them with feelings of isolation and abandonment.  Hence, many continue living in estrangement, uncertain where to turn or who to trust, waiting for their lives to be completely upended when the truth finally is discovered.

This is why the Clergy Project is so important.  It provides an invaluable resource of support for current and former clergy who are atheists.  It is a safe and anonymous place to discuss the issues atheist clergy encounter while providing encouragement and support that is genuine and heartfelt. It greatly eases the desperation and uncertainty of where to turn or who to trust!  I’ve been a member of the Clergy Project since July 2011, and it prepared me well for the responses to expect from friends and family during my post-clergy conversations. So far, I have not been surprised by the responses I’ve received nor have I lost any significant relationships due to my professed atheism, but time will tell.

 

It is nice to hear that your exit from the ministry has been comparatively smooth. What will you do next?

Repudiating my ordination and leaving faith behind was much smoother than I had anticipated.  Ironically, something I had worked years to accomplish ended in a matter of minutes.  When I slid my ordination certificates across a Bob Evan’s tabletop to my District Superintendent, I was greatly relieved.  The lie was over.  I was free.  This freedom does not come without consternation, however.

Fortunately, a dear friend helped my family by offering their second home to rent at a very reasonable price.  Another dear friend has procured a sales job for me in her company.  While housing and employment have been provided in the short term, long term my future is much more uncertain.  Ideally, I’d love to write and lecture on my experiences; especially concerning the negative impacts faith and church have on individuals and societies. I’d love to write a novel.

I do not have visions of grandeur, however.  If the rest of my life is spent just being a regular “Joe” that will be fine by me.  I have a wonderful family and a few good friends.  My heart and mind are at ease.  I’m healthier now than I’ve been in years and tomorrow looks bright.  For the first time in my life, I’m living. Truly living, Sam. (source)

 

*******

 

better lovers

 

(source)

 

 

 

a banal argument

by Terry Eagleton

 

The novels of Graham Greene are full of reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of God but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction. There are, however, reluctant atheists as well, people who long to dunk themselves in the baptismal font but can’t quite bring themselves to believe. George Steiner and Roger Scruton have both been among this company at various stages of their careers. The agnostic philosopher Simon Critchley, who currently has a book in the press entitled The Faith of the Faithless, is one of a whole set of leftist thinkers today (Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben) whose work draws deeply on Christian theology. In this respect, the only thing that distinguishes them from the Pope is that they don’t believe in God. It is rather like coming across a banker who doesn’t believe in profit.

 

Such reluctant non-belief goes back a long way. Machiavelli thought religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful way of terrorising the mob. Voltaire rejected the God of Christianity, but was anxious not to infect his servants with his own scepticism. Atheism was fine for the elite, but might breed dissent among the masses. The 18th-century Irish philosopher John Toland, who was rumoured to be the bastard son of a prostitute and a spoilt priest, clung to a “rational” religion himself, but thought the rabble should stick with their superstitions. There was one God for the rich and another for the poor. Edward Gibbon, one of the most notorious sceptics of all time, held that the religious doctrines he despised could still be socially useful. So does the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas today.

 

Diderot, a doyen of the French Enlightenment, wrote that the Christian gospel might have been a less gloomy affair if Jesus had fondled the breasts of the bridesmaids at Cana and caressed the buttocks of St John. Yet he, too, believed that religion was essential for social unity. Matthew Arnold feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, an out-and-out materialist, designed an ideal society complete with secular versions of God, priests, sacraments, prayer and feast days.

 

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. “I don’t believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should” is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

 

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton‘s Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn’t be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion “sporadically useful, interesting and consoling”, which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one’s life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

 

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion “teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober”, as well as instructing us in “the charms of community”. It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton’s well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to “promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community”. It is really a version of the Big Society.

 

Like Comte, De Botton believes in the need for a host of “consoling, subtle or just charming rituals” to restore a sense of community in a fractured society. He even envisages a new kind of restaurant in which strangers would be forced to sit together and open up their hearts to one another. There would be a Book of Agape on hand, which would instruct diners to speak to each other for prescribed lengths of time on prescribed topics. Quite how this will prevent looting and rioting is not entirely clear.

 

In Comtist style, De Botton also advocates secular versions of such sacred events as the Jewish Day of Atonement, the Catholic Mass and the Zen Buddhist tea ceremony. It is surprising he does not add Celtic versus Rangers. He is also keen on erecting billboards that carry moral or spiritual rather than commercial messages, perhaps (one speculates) in the style of “Leave Young Ladies Alone” or “Tortoises Have Feelings As Well”. It is an oddly Orwellian vision for a self-proclaimed libertarian. Religious faith is reduced to a set of banal moral tags. We are invited to contemplate St Joseph in order to learn “how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and uncomplaining temper”. Not even the Walmart management have thought of that one. As a role model for resplendent virtue, we are offered not St Francis of Assisi but Warren Buffett.

 

What the book does, in short, is hijack other people’s beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise. It is also strikingly unoriginal. Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer. The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there’s something believers can get their teeth into …

(source)

 

*******

 

god’s design

 

(source)

 

 

the one life we have

 

(source)

 

Yes – utterly true – what more can we give unless it dawns on us that this is the one and only life we are privileged to have, in an unlikely and unstable planet in a tiny solar system among many other solar systems in a certain galaxy among millions if not billions or trillions of galaxies in a universe that might possibly be a singular universe among multiverses.

 

Yes – separated by eternity – we should be proud to have this sacred opportunity to have this one life, against all cosmological and terrestrial odds, and make our only world a better place to live in.

 

While it still lasts.

 

*******

 

“christianity: where emotions rule”

by John Loftus

 

I think it can be demonstrated that when people are emotionally engaged they do not think or argue well at all. That’s why it is said that “love is blind.” Romantically involved couples do not see the faults in their lovers that others see. Likewise, when people are angry with someone there is literally nothing good that person can do. Emotions get in the way of sound reasoning. This can be seen everywhere we look. When people are experiencing a great amount of stress they are told not to make any important decisions. The reason is clear. Because they probably won’t make good ones. When people have an emotional commitment to some sort of project they will continue pursuing it even after it has been shown to be a failure. That’s why successful businesses need “new blood” with “new ideas” every so often.

I have argued that defending Christianity makes otherwise intelligent people look stupid. This is why. Christianity is where emotions rule and “all the rules of logic don’t apply” (a reference to Bob Seger’s song Chances Are). Believers think they have a personal relationship with Jesus. They are emotionally engaged in the same way as the examples above illustrate of the human condition. They cannot think or reason well at all.

Christians just cannot see this, I know. They will continue arguing despite what I’ve just pointed out. That’s what we would expect. They will pull out an obviously fallacious argument in response. They will say atheists cannot reason well because we are emotionally engaged too. We hate God, ya see. We prefer to sin. Yada yada yada.

This “you too” kind of argument fails miserably but believers can’t see it because they are emotionally engaged. The reason it fails is that there are too many “you’s” to “too.” Believers would have to say this about anyone who disagrees with them, not just atheists. If they are evangelicals (my target audience) this “you tooing” has to apply to moderates and liberals within their own faith. If they oppose Catholicism, this has to apply to Catholics too, and vice versa. And it applies to all other “hell-bound” sects and religions. Again for emphasis, there are too many “you’s” to “too.”

Believers in these other “hell-bound” religions argue the same way against Christians. That’s the amazing thing; the predictable thing. Muslims will claim Christians hate Allah, that they love to sin rather than follow the Koran. Yada yada yada.

Atheists, however, do not single evangelical Christianity out for rejection. Therefore it cannot be said we hate the evangelical God or that we don’t want to obey the evangelical God’s commands. Nor do we single out for rejection any other God, god, or goddesses for rejection. We merely think none of these religions with their various gods and commands have any more warrant for them than others, since they are all based upon faith. When faith rules it follows that all the rules of logic don’t apply. Faith does to logic the same thing that romantic love or anger does to people. It makes emotions rule.

(source)

 

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neil tyson on god

 

(source)

 

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“how do atheists find meaning in life?”

by Paula Kirby

 

The correspondent was blunt: “Why don’t you atheists just go out and kill yourselves right now?”

 

True, most Christians phrase it rather more delicately, but atheists are regularly informed by a certain kind of believer that our lives can have no value if we do not believe in their God. What is the point, they ask, of being kind or loving, caring about suffering or doing anything at all, if one day we just die?

 

It is true that in the absence of a divine plan our lives have no externally determined purpose: an individual is not born for the purpose of becoming a physician or creating a spectacular work of art or digging a well in an arid corner of Africa. But are the sick less cured, the pleasure to the art-lover less intense, or the thirst of parched villagers less slaked, simply because a man sought his own purpose rather than following a diktat from on high? Do we really need a deity to tell us that a life spent curing cancer is more worthwhile than one spent drinking in the gutter?

 

Why should we not find satisfaction in alleviating suffering or injustice, just because we’re all going to die one day? The very fact that this life is all we have makes it even more important to do everything possible to reduce the suffering caused by poverty, disease, injustice and ignorance. To describe such attempts as meaningless is to say that avoidable suffering does not matter, hardly a moral stance.

 

Many Christians claim we have no reason to care about others if there is no God. But this is itself a religious claim, arising from the theological concept of Original Sin, which declares humankind fallen and corrupt. We can safely ignore it, for in reality we do not need childish stories of eternal reward or damnation to coerce us into being good: research shows that the least religious societies have the lowest incidence of social ills, including crime and violence. Healthy humans have empathy built in, and the explanations for this lie in psychology and evolutionary biology: no gods required.

 

Life cannot be meaningless so long as we have the capacity to affect the well-being of ourselves and others. For true meaninglessness, we would need heaven.

 

In the state of permanent, perfect bliss that is the very definition of heaven, ‘making a difference’ is ruled out. If the difference made an improvement, the previous state could not have been perfect. If it made things worse, the result would not be perfect. In heaven, neither is possible. Even being reunited with loved ones could not add one jot to their bliss or yours, for heaven would be, by definition, a state that could not be improved on.

 

Just consider for a moment the hellish pointlessness of heaven. At least in our real existence our actions have an effect, for better or worse, and it is therefore worth trying to get them right. In an eternal life where we can have no effect whatsoever, we might as well be dead.

 

If you have ever claimed that your life would have no meaning if it weren’t for your faith in God, do you really believe your family and friends have no worth in their own right? Can you really not see the point in striving to protect and nurture your children, even if there is no eternal life? Really?

 

If you do, then it is you, not atheists, who debase humanity, and it is Christianity, not atheism, that diminishes the real value and meaning of life. We atheists find purpose in the world as it is, and in our real lives; we see living beings as valuable in their own right, deserving of our concern and compassion simply because they share our capacity for pain and pleasure. It is hard to imagine a position less moral, less conducive to empathy, than this inherently warped and uncharitable view of humanity proposed by Christianity.

 

This is a perverse view of reality. After all, if the only valuable thing about existence is that God gave it to us, then that must mean the gift is not worth having in its own right. God’s creation would be the equivalent of a shapeless, baggy sweater of dubious color that you would never willingly wear but which you nevertheless can’t bring yourself to throw away because it was a gift from Granny. This approach in effect says you’re grateful for God’s gift, but you don’t actually like it very much; that, were it not for your belief that there’ll be an eternity in heaven to compensate you for having had to endure it, you can see no reason why you’d ever want it.

 

Theistic religion reduces life to something that has no value other than as the creation of an imagined deity. It decrees that purpose and meaning can only be found in being that deity’s puppet, having no purpose but its purpose and no value other than as its handiwork. Theistic religion looks on all that is best and most noble in human impulse and endeavour and dismisses it as meaningless and worthless –or worse: corrupt –unless done in the name of God. It is time to abandon this baseless worldview. It is time to reject theistic religion and start viewing ourselves and others with real dignity, as beings with value in our own right and not just as the distorted shadows of a fictional creator.

(source)

 

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still be true

 

There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

- Penn Jillette

 

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an honest appraisal

 

(source)

 

This should be the reason behind any team’s loss in sports if one erroneously takes the position that every victory over one’s rivals is a result of prayer and the good Lord having taken sides over a trivial ballgame while ignoring the prayers of many who are dying of starvation and disease in impoverished countries in the yet to be developed world.

 

Why thank god for allowing one to win a football match and NOT blaming the same deity for letting one lose the other?

 

Hypocritical and inconsistent logic.

 

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some stupid things christians say to atheists

 

1. “You’re an atheist? But you’re so nice!”

This remark presupposes the popular myth perpetuated by evangelicals that one cannot be morally good without god. The more philosophically nuanced argument would add the point that there could be no foundation or justification for being good if there is no absolute arbiter.

Both forms of the argument are a load of chicken droppings.

Morality is a product of human evolution as demonstrated by our nature as social and highly self-conscious animals. We do good or be nice to others for the sake of humankind – making the world a better place is beneficial and good for our own species. To me, that is a more worthy reason to be and do good than the fear of being punished by a tyrant in the sky.

 

2. “Your life must be bleak and meaningless. Why bother to live at all?”

Although there are atheists who think themselves into despair (more often than not, these folks were products of religious indoctrination as children), there are countless others who find great meaning in their lives through charity, the work that they do, family, relationships, love, etc. Many do not even think that “ultimate” meaning in life is necessary to be happy as ultimate meanings can be non-issues. Proximate meanings suffice.

 

3. “Do you believe in Satan?”

Yes, there are evangelicals who are that stupid. Atheism is simply the denial of an imaginary arbiter in the sky many call god. It doesn’t presuppose anything else. Besides, the majority of atheists deny any form of supernaturalism and that includes the fictional devil. Why would atheists believe in or worship Satan, for goodness’ sake? God, angels, satan and all that crap are the same thing – just crap.

 

4. “Why do you hate God?”

This is a twist on the previous remark and is equally daft. Atheists do not “hate” God because they do not even accept his existence. How do you hate an imaginary figure? Atheists simply reject the idea of a supernatural Supreme Being because they do not find sufficient evidence to do so. Period.

Atheists do not believe in god as much as they do not believe in telemarketing scams, tabloid news, amulets, superstition, folklore, etc. They might “hate” and detest the people propagating such lies as they detest the institutions that promote god – but let me repeat – they do not hate God.

 

5. “You’re just going through a phase.”

What phase? This remark is often made to people who have just seen the light and started to shake off the vestiges of fairy tales that have taken them captive for so long. Atheism is not an emotional downside which people go through – most of the time it is a rational and reasonable conclusion people make after considerable reflection, research and study.

 

6. “Have you ever read the bible?”

One of the most stupid remarks. Ever.

Most atheists know the bible more than any evangelical would ever be – I’ve known many evangelicals who don’t know anything about the history of their own religion, their denominations, their creeds, how and when the bible was written, etc. Some even think that the bible Jesus read was the King James Version!!

The fact that atheists are who they are proves that most of them have undergone periods of study and research into the religions and found them wanting. Many have studied the bible and realised it is just religious fiction.

 

7. “I’ll pray for you.”

Enough said. Please carry on your schizophrenic conversation with your imaginary friend and stop bothering me.

 

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The stupid remarks are taken from Friendly Atheist blog.

 

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why some people don’t believe in god

 

Christian: Why don’t people believe in God??

Atheist: Duh…why don’t people believe in unicorns?

 

Christian: Well, for starters, they’re not real.

Atheist: And on what grounds do you base that statement?

 

Christian: Nobody has ever seen one!!

Atheist: So are you saying that you have to see something to believe in it?

 

Christian: I’m not saying that! And anyway, if you want to go there, how come no one has ever found unicorn bones?

Atheist: Hmm. Now you’re saying you must have physical evidence in order to believe in something. What about faith?

 

Christian: There is nothing about faith when it comes to unicorns!! It’s something from a children’s book, for Christ’s sake!!

Atheist: So you’re implying that we shouldn’t believe in things that only exist in fables or fiction?

 

Christian: YES! And besides that, if unicorns really existed, some biologist would already have published something about them.

Atheist: Hmm. Okay, let me reiterate all of this one more time. You’re saying that, for someone to believe something exists, he/she must have:

• factual evidence
• physical evidence
• scientific evidence
• all the above must come from somewhere other than a book

I suppose now you should understand why some people DON’T believe in God.

 

 

(source)

 

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foolish to use blind old men

 

“In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.”

- Heinrich Heine

 

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a year closer to the grave

 

Each year that passes by, each day that cumulates like a domino into weeks and months, drags me closer to my imminent demise. Not that my existence is worth anything, but the thought that the party will go on while one is not around can be very disturbing.

 

It does not bring any comfort to also realise that there would be no narnian world beyond the grave, no paradise with streets of gold to tread on and rivers of milk and honey to bathe in. All such notions are wishful thinking on the part of a species whose capacity to anticipate and worry about the future is notorious. As such, we are compelled to invent fairy tales about a world hereafter and a fictional character which combines the grandfatherly apparition of Santa Claus with the omnipotence of a Clark Kentian superman. If we were canines, our deity would have been a super dog figure.

 

No surprise there. Discerning individuals have all along known that the imago dei, the all-important homo sapien being made in god’s image, is nothing more than a perverse twist of the truth.

 

We make gods IN OUR OWN image.

 

Apart from the grimmesque fairy tales we concoct to numb ourselves from the inevitable annihilation, we gather in herds call families and communities so that we can tell one another lies in order to make us happy albeit temporarily. The more schizophrenic among us deceive themselves into believing they can communicate with their imaginary friend or friends in the sky, praising them when things go right but skirting the issue when things go wrong. These strange people have a sadistic bent, loving to torture themselves by a cruel moral code that apparently appraises the sacrifice of humanity at the altar of strict allegiance, barbarism and vindictiveness.

 

We also find great pleasure in inhaling toxins until we suffocate, consume fluid chemicals until we drown and have physical orgasms with one another until we dissipate with disease.

 

In other words, we want to party HARD and FAST before we go.

 

The more highbrow of our kind do the same things of course. But since they deceive themselves into believing that they are somehow more civilised and sophisticated than their lower creatures, they do them in the dark, in secret.

 

Discreet services, they say. No cheap trip to Geylang or Orchard Towers for them. They prefer the delicate lady of the night with a PhD, the choice delights of secret liaisons and probably the forbidden fruits of LSD-laced liquors.

 

All over the world, that was what transpired last Saturday night. Yes, even in the sanctimonious middle eastern lands. They revel in fairy tales of how the rest of humankind would wallow in the mire of decay and filth, fire and brimstone while they themselves glory in holy light.

 

What was I doing on Saturday night? What could I do, but to sit idly by in the pew, yawning to the silliness of my fellow herdlings (they call themselves “sheep”, stupid animals, really) as they tell stories about the exploits of their imaginary Friend and how he answered their manifold prayers, all this before the clock struck midnight.

 

One wonders about the countless others in other lands who plea to the same imaginary Friend, who might be in worse circumstances than we ourselves have always been, in affluent Singapore; but somehow, in some twisted logic, this Friend capriciously chose to ignore them.

 

But the sheep don’t ever blame the Friend. Of course not. Sheep do not and cannot think critically and intelligently. They are daft creatures fit only for the abbatoir.

 

The reluctant wolf sits passively by, bites his tongue and wishes life would just end soon.

 

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true, false or useful

 

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

- Edward Gibbon

 

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thinking people

 

All thinking men are atheists.

- Ernest Hemingway

 

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heights of evil

 

“Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.”

(To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.)

- Lucretius (De Rerum Natura)

 

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