Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

Category: religion (page 29 of 36)

RIP, George.

23 June 2008 / / 3 Comments

Deconversion stories: The Dude with the Horns

23 June 2008 / / 9 Comments

As a religious youth, I was told about Satan. The Adversary. The Tempter. The one who puts all the backwards messages in records. Mormons don’t dwell on the Devil — I heard people say it gave him more ‘power’ — but he was always there hovering around the periphery of my morality.

The Satan meme is a real mindfuck. There’s a totally evil supernatural person who wants you to do bad things. Don’t do what Satan wants. How do you know what Satan wants? It’s bad. What makes something ‘bad’? Satan wants you to do it. And round it goes. Figuring out what Satan wants you to do is like asking who the Terrists want you to vote for. Could they do the ol’ Double Reverse Psychological Fake-out? And of course, if someone starts to question the teaching of the religion, who’s been putting those thoughts into your head? Yep. Better get back in line.

Satan isn’t just a great control tool. He’s a dodge to the problem of Evil. If God’s good and in charge, why do evil things happen? For some reason, saying ‘You are evil’ wasn’t the answer people liked, so Satan did the trick. Why is there evil? Satan. There you go. God is still good, but he wants to see if you’ll follow him or the Devil.

P.S. You are evil.

And it answered a whole lot. Why do ouija boards seem to work? Satan (or one of his many helpers) is moving the table thing. Why do I want to do bad things? You’re being tempted by Satan, he’s putting thoughts into your head. (Another mindfuck. An invisible person is putting thoughts in my head? Scary!) Why are there so many religions? Satan is deceiving people and leading them astray. Satan Satan Satan. Very useful. If he didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.

As it seems we did. This page tells how Satan doesn’t appear to be much of a character in early Hebrew lore (talking snakes notwithstanding). The Hebrew word s’tn simply means ‘adversary’ or ‘opposer’. In 1 Samuel 29:4, it tells how the Philistines mistrusted David, fearing that he would be a ‘satan’, or someone who would oppose them. Only later after the Hebrews ran into the Persians with their Zoroastrian dualism did Satan become an actual character, and for a while there he and the Lord were pretty chummy (see Job).

For me, Satan’s undoing was when I ran into this page about the Ouija Board that church leaders so straitly charged me not to play with.

Some users believe that paranormal or supernatural forces are at work in spelling out Ouija board answers. Skeptics believe that those using the board either consciously or unconsciously move the pointer to what is selected. To prove this, simply try it blindfolded for some time, having an innocent bystander take notes on what words or letters are selected. Usually, the results will be unintelligible.

So the church leaders were right, but they had the wrong reason. You shouldn’t play with the thing, but because it’s stupid, not satanic. A scary spiritual phenomenon had a perfectly sane material explanation. I wonder what else does, thought I.

I reviewed my knowledge of the Horned One, and found that he’s usually held responsible for three things:

  1. Temptation
  2. Deception
  3. Possession

But, you say, what about reality TV?

That falls under ‘Possession’.

Let’s take them one by one.

Temptation. Do people really think that a spirit being is somehow… what, whispering to you? And then you want to do bad things? How would that happen? This has the whiff of dissociation. Why not take responsibility for your own desires?

Deception. Well, the world is a confusing place. It’s easy to be mistaken. But I’ve found that the one who deceives me the most is good old me. No need to blame an invisible being.

Possession can be explained these days by mental illness, though it must have seemed devilishly scary to people in New Testament times.

In short, everything that people blame Satan for can be explained simply, materially, and non-mysteriously, leaving Satan as rather extraneous. Our theory works just as well without him. Occam’s Razor claims another victim.

Once I’d got that settled, it was the beginning of the end for supernaturalism. Turn it around, and suddenly everything we thought god did turns out to be the product of natural forces. No gods. No devils. No angels or demons. Just gravitation, evolution and us, working for good or ill. But then I suppose that’s just what Satan would want me to think.

A true believer in the audience isn’t satisfied. But if there’s no Satan, he wails, then why is the world getting worse and worse?

It’s not, but with that attitude I suppose you can make it as bad as you want.

Religious nutter Turing Test

13 June 2008 / / 8 Comments

The Turing Test is a classic in AI. On one side of the screen is you, and on the other side there’s either a human typing to you, or a computer generating text to you. A computer system passes the Turing Test if you can’t tell the difference between the computer and a human.

But when the human is a religious ranter, it tends to lower the bar a bit.

So here’s your test. One of the following text blocks is a bit of an email I got today from ‘Günter’, a poor soul trapped in two false beliefs: that supernatural beings exist, and that he can write comprehensible English.

The other block of text was made with a simple Markov chain trained on word trigrams from Günter’s email.

Sample number one:

Every thing, Love is a ground-need, without Love no Feelings are working, no human can find anymore satisfaction no matter what he trays to do it, the highest law of God, and no grace. Not even when somebody used your Authority-shyness like always, it is exactly the same. With Love the Apocalypse is running for ten years. {Glasshouse-effect? Global warming ?}.You can easy scientific prove, it is up to you. Jesus said <I came on earth to bring the Love and only where the Love and how to do Love, try it and you have to feel it. John says <even when you are doing what I say {that only is FAITH} and not only when you know about it>.Jesus said: sacrifice your self <you have to like them in any way, only give what you have<Logo>!

Number two:

That’s why Jesus said the End is near. The human where believing that Love is: cooking a meal; mending socks; squeeze a lemon; give Money, Tender; Fondness or even Sexuality. They filling up whole Libraries with books about Love, only in the explanation of the Old Testament {Torah; Koran; Kamathutra ;} or Jesus was never one interested. Jesus tried to teach Love and how to do it, the highest law of God. Out of the old scriptures he explained; proofing and showed in life what he is talking about. God says in the in the Old Testament; Torah; Koran; Kamathutra; <I m the Love and only the Love and only where the Love is can I be.> don’t make a picture or allegory {don’t compare me with nothing or nobody} of me. Never!!

Well, humans, which is the person, and which is the computer?

State powerless to protect children from abuse by sex cult operated by parents

2 June 2008 / / 3 Comments

Is how this headline should read.

Religion influenced, killed Bob Marley

26 May 2008 / / 9 Comments

Seventeen years ago this month, Bob Marley died. Everyone knows Bob Marley. A copy of “Legend” is now issued to every infant in the world at birth.

He died of cancer. His Wikipedia page says it started from a football injury in his big toe. Toe cancer. Usually treatable. You don’t want to lose a toe, but if it saves your life, you have the thing off.

But Marley refused to amputate because of the Rastafarian belief that the body must be “whole”. And so the cancer spread to his brain and the rest of his body, and killed him. A religious belief robbed the world of one of its great musical artists.

Maybe it’s not possible to separate Marley’s music from the religious ideas that fired it. I’m not sure, though. Aren’t the songs without the religious lyrics great too? Marijuana influenced Marley’s music, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a great thing.

Marley’s action would probably impress a lot of people. Wow, he really followed his religion, even though it cost him his life, etc. But I just think it’s really sad. If he’d had a different religion, he could have had it taken care of, and been around a lot longer. What ended his life was an idea that was almost certainly false, and that seems wrong.

Why it’s a bad idea to get help from supernatural beings when making decisions.

25 May 2008 / / 10 Comments

Here are two beliefs that are widely held by Latter-day Saints (and I’m guessing more than a few Christians):

1. We can make decisions by praying and getting ‘impressions’ or ‘revelations’ about what to do.

2. Satan tries to trick us into thinking that good is evil, and evil good.

So when you get a personal revelation that something’s good, it could be actually good (in which case you should do it), or it could be Satan telling you it’s good (and you shouldn’t). How can you tell the difference? What if Satan is pulling the ol’ reverse psychology and making you think it’s bad so you won’t do it, but it’s actually good? Or perhaps a triple reverse whammy? How about when something’s difficult or you hit a snag in your plan? Are you facing opposition from Satan and you should keep going, or is it the Lord giving you a signal that you should stop?

It’s a tough question, so I’ll make it multiple choice.

a) I know because of the feelings of the Spirit.

And of course, your feelings can never be wrong. Feelings of the Spirit confer infallibility upon the feeler. Try again.

b) I know because it’s in line with the scriptures.

Your interpretation of the scriptures, a contradictory hodgepodge of fables. You can find anything and its opposite there. Next!

c) If you don’t know the difference, you must have sinned, and are in the grip of the Evil One. Try getting an exorcism.

Tried it. Still possessed, but I’m learning to live with it. Got anything else?

d) It’s silly to do things based on the supposed desires of a hypothetical being.

Hmm. Answer d’s looking good.

The problem here is the opacity of the metaphysical. If I have two physical explanations for something, it’s possible to determine which is right experimentally. But if there are two metaphysical explanations for something (is it Jehovah or Zeus?), then there’s no way to determine which explanation is better. Not that this stops people from trying. They examine feelings, events, and unusual happenings in order to scry the divine will. But it’s superstition and it doesn’t work.

Too much credit for the religious metaphysicists

14 May 2008 / / 14 Comments

I must be the last person to read “Why Darwin Matters” by Michael Shermer. I like Shermer, and I enjoyed “Why People Believe Weird Things”. So this book is a general explanation of evolution and a takedown of creationist arguments. It also gets into recent legal actions where ID activists, having come up empty on the science, are attempting to wedge creationism into schools. It’s a fun and interesting read.

But I’ve run aground on this bit where Shermer argues that religious people can ‘believe’ in evolution. He mentions the three possibilities for how science and religion can interact:

  • the ‘Conflicting-Worlds’ model: science and religion is describing the same thing, and one must be wrong
  • the ‘Same-World’ model, where science and religion are both describing aspects of the same thing, and both do a good job of it
  • and the ‘Separate-Worlds’ model (which is basically the ‘Non-Overlapping Magisteria’ argument): that science describes the physical world, religion describes the spiritual, and this can work because the two don’t converge.

Inexplicably, Shermer plumps for the ‘Separate-Worlds’ model:

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. Thus, the most logically coherent argument for theists is that God is outside time and space; that is, God is beyond nature — super nature, or supernatural — and therefore cannot be explained by natural causes. God is beyond the dominion of science, and science is outside the realm of God.

And there the chapter ends.

Shermer is careful here. He’s arguing that this is the only plausible road that theists can take, without saying he’s taking that road himself. And yet, by leaving it there, he’s making it sound approving.

You could take a Carnival cruise ship through the holes in the NOMA argument. Okay, if God is outside time and space, he’s outside time and space. What’s he doing creating planets, then? Or dictating books, or appearing to prophets, or healing the sick, or finding your car keys? As soon as he interacts in the physical world like believers claim he constantly is, then the two realms collide, and we can examine things to check for goddy effects. (None so far; keep you posted.)

Not surprisingly, I’m an unabashed ‘Conflicting-Worlds’-ist. But check out Shermer’s paragraph on it:

This “warfare” approach holds that science and religion are mutually exclusive ways of knowing, one being right and the other wrong. In this view, the findings of modern science are always a potential threat to one’s faith and thus they must be carefully vetted against religious truths before acceptance; likewise, the tenets of religion are always a potential threat to science and thus they must be viewed with skepticism and cynicism. The conflicting-worlds model is embraced by extremists on both sides of the divide. Young Earth creationists, who insist that all scientific findings must correlate perfectly with their own (often literal) reading of Genesis, retain a suspicious hostility of science, while militant atheists cannot imagine how religion could contribute anything positive to human knowledge or social interaction.

To read Shermer erecting the scarecrow of militant extremist atheism is particularly disappointing. 

Imagine that he’s talking about Gershon’s equation: 2 + 2 = 4. If this equation ran up against some religious tenet, you’d hear people saying, “Oh, two plus two could equal five in a spiritual way. To say that two plus two equals four and can only ever equal four is some kind of extremist point of view. You must be a militant fourist. Who’s to say that the fiveists can’t contribute something to our understanding? Maybe the answer isn’t five exactly, maybe it’s closer to four. But coming right out and saying it’s just four… well, that just seems a bit extreme.” And then Shermer says, “The only way to think the answer is five is if you believe that it’s five on a non-material plane that doesn’t interact with this one. Therefore, you can be a fiveist, and still accept that the answer is four.”

I’m sure Shermer knows this terrain, which makes his support for NOMA all the more baffling. Is he trying to trick the rubes into thinking that evolution’s okay? In that case, what you’ll get is people making a nominal committment to science being okay, while being ignorant of what science is, or any of its implications. Which seems kind of dishonest to me. 

The fact is, religions are trying to describe the physical world, and they’re getting it wrong, and science is getting it right. And if they’re trying to describe the spiritual world, they’re doing a pretty crap job at that too, since they can’t seem to agree with each other on any but the most obvious ethical points. Science, on the other hand, gives us better and better descriptions of the physical realm, with a way of disproving bad explanations.

Okay, I’ve changed my mind. Religion is child abuse.

28 April 2008 / / 4 Comments

(via Pharyngula)

See, I always used to feel uncomfortable when people would say that religion was a form of child abuse. That’s a bit harsh, I’d think. Some children are abused for real, and it’s not the same as being brought up in a religion. Which would you pick, real live sexual or physical abuse or church?

Ah, but not all abuse is the same. There’s the kind of abuse where your body is beaten or used for someone else’s pleasure, and then there’s the kind where your mind and reasoning powers are harmed or co-opted for someone else’s idea of reality. (In both kinds, the abusers were frequently abused themselves.) And if your parents, your neighbours, and your community enable this kind of abuse, you may not end up like this kid (or the three others featured in the BBC show ‘Baby Bible Bashers‘). But you might end up like the pile of rubes cheering in the audience.

Seriously, what kind of people applauds this kind of performance? Certainly it’s a curiosity, but think of the harm done to this child. He should be out looking at rocks or digging around outside, wondering about things, not being so damn certain about everything. Think you could actually explain evolution to him? No way. The mental blocks are already up. And for every child like this, there are millions more being indoctrinated into a false magical worldview. The people who ought to be building them up are robbing them of the ability to reason, and I think that’s criminal.

Celebrity deconversion story: Scientology edition

20 April 2008 / / Comments Off on Celebrity deconversion story: Scientology edition

Jason Beghe, a former Scientology celeb, trashes the church, including their creepy habit of taping all those auditing sessions:

“Not one auditing session—which are supposed to be private—is not recorded on film,” he says, and claims that secret cameras are used at every session at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles, recording sessions that for Scientologists are supposed to be something like confessionals in the Catholic church.

“Will Smith is supposedly dabbling in Scientology. Let Will Smith know that his shit was fucking recorded. And tell him to look them in the eye and see if he believes it when they deny it.”

This incident was also interesting.

Beghe says the proof that Scientology was no longer working for him came when he was almost killed in a car accident. After the L’s, he points out, that shouldn’t happen. “A clear isn’t supposed to have a car accident. You’re supposed to be practically immortal.”

Right, because religions always make huge claims that don’t come true. So the leaders finally had to admit their claims were bullshit, right?

To the Scientologists, the accident was an indication that someone was “suppressing” Beghe. So they pulled him in for more interrogation.

“What about this gay person you’re friends with,” Beghe says one official asked him, implying that somehow the gay friend was causing Beghe’s clear state to be sabotaged. When Beghe objected, he says the official responded, “Well, he’s gay.”

Well, that’s creative. Usually they blame you for not having enough faith. All of which tells me that Scientology is not only stupid, but it’s also run by evil jerks. Maybe next time I’ll tell you something you don’t already know.

Deconversion stories: The last Sunday School lesson

15 April 2008 / / 7 Comments

I was a Sunday School teacher when I hit what turned out to be the initial months of my deconversion. I’d promised myself years earlier that I wouldn’t testify that anything was true unless I believed it to be true. As belief ground down, that eventually meant that I couldn’t say very much at all. So I began to notice that I hadn’t been teaching church doctrine as ‘true’, but rather as merely ‘helpful’ (although that claim could have used some scrutiny). My Sunday School lessons tended to focus not on the truthfulness of the gospel, but on self-improvement, learning to be happy in life, and other humanist values. Pretty watered-down stuff, but it was best I could do if I wanted to hang on to religion and reason.

I remember the last lesson I ever gave in Sunday School. I hated it. I realised that I was talking around the subject material, probably because I was coming to the uncomfortable realisation that I didn’t believe it. I guess I was having a conflict between what I had always thought and believed was true, and a whole body of opposite information that seemed to be demonstrably true. How I hated that conflict.

Toward the end of that lesson, I said “I’m grateful for the scriptures. They’ve taught me a regard for truth, and while insisting on truth isn’t always comfortable, I’ve found that it can be a help when…”

The class waited.

“…when your belief system changes very rapidly, as mine has.”

It was the closest I ever came to making a public confession of doubt in church.

Of course, I closed the lesson “in the name of Jesus Christ” as was customary, but it felt like my mouth was full of sand. How could anyone presume to do anything in his name? What were we all doing here?

Compared to some, I got off easy. It’s difficult to go through a deconversion, but how hard must it be when your religion is also your job? Jeffrey has forwarded me this article about priests and pastors who deconvert.

McAllister has learned that you can tell inspirational stories, grounded in social justice and tolerance and peace, without having to bring God into the picture—and this sermon was a masterful case in point. A woman in his congregation had recently dropped everything to care for her cancer-stricken daughter, and that selfless commitment was sacred in its way. “You can see how I cook the books a little bit to make it easier to look in the mirror,” he says of his sermons. “But there are times when I get that sort of empty feeling in my stomach, like I’m a fraud.”

I hear that.

McAllister is not just scared for himself. “I know that my parishioners look to me for comfort,” he says. “They’re coming to the end of their life and they want some assurance that it’s all going to be OK. I have sat at the deathbed of people in my congregation and told them what I regard as lies—or fantasies, at least—just to give them comfort. I’m willing to do that up to a point, but not for the rest of my working life.”

Then there’s the practical dimension. McAllister owes the church $18,000 for his schooling, at the same time as he’s trying to put his last son through college. “I’m 56, which isn’t a real good age to be pounding the pavement, and I’ve got a master’s of divinity, not the most marketable degree in the world.”

Ouch. I guess the Mormon tradition of having a lay ministry saved me some pain.

But have a look at an idea being floated by the RDF:

Richard Dawkins is convinced that McAllister’s situation is common; in fact, he hopes one day to address it through “clergyman-retraining scholarships,” set up through his charitable foundation, to “bridge the gap between living a lie and getting a new life,” as he puts it.

Damn, that is forward thinking. I’m going to have to give a serious look at adding the Richard Dawkins Foundation to my charity list.

This is an amazing article. I felt like every one of the stories from the ex-clergy contained something from my own experience. See if you don’t agree.

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