Good old human brains. Always picking patterns out of noise. And if you have someone to prime you in a certain direction, then it’s easy to see what you expect to see.
Case in point: this fantastic (and hilarious) music video in Hindi. Once you’ve had the (mildly risqué) English suggested to you, it’s very difficult not to hear it.
After you’ve dried the tears of mirth from your eyes and forgotten the lyrics, try watching the original without the subtitles and notice how the English disappears.
I shouldn’t be amazed at the overheated rhetoric going on, but I sometimes am.
Data point 1: An outrageous outburst from Illinois state legislator Monique Davis. Apparently the governor had been shoveling money to a Baptist church, and when atheist and legal gadfly Rob Sherman took up the matter, her response was (click through for audio):
Davis: What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous–
Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?
Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!
Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court—
Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.
Summary: Atheists have no right to be here, and are dangerous and destructive. Even the knowledge that atheism exists is harmful to children.
Data point 2: Dawkins’ website shows a new book, a bit of pushback to the New Atheism: The Delusion of Disbelief: Why the New Atheism is a Threat to Your Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness
Unpack that title: People who don’t believe in god not only threaten your life and your liberty, but also, somehow, America.
I could go on.
Why are atheists so threatening?
I like the House of Cards theory: Religious faith has no factual basis. Believers secretly suspect this, and aren’t pleased when people point it out. Remember that Monty Python sketch about El Mystico, who would put up blocks of flats by hypnosis? It’s like that; belief holds the edifice up; disbelief makes it collapse.
Another answer has to do with magical thinking: I used to hear people in church express the view that the righteous are somehow protecting the wicked just by being scattered within the population. It’s like the story of Abraham in Sodom: if only he’d been able to find a few good people, the city would have been magically saved. Conversely, atheists within a population can magically undermine it by emanating powerful waves of anti-God energy, capable of destroying countries and institutions.
But I think the most accurate view is the Meme War. Maybe believers are actually right. Atheists are dangerous — to belief systems, not to people. Admittedly, this is a distinction that True Believers have trouble making. When you’re so heavily invested in your belief system that you mistake it for your whole life, then it’s easy to think that a threat to the belief system equals a threat to your life.
What this tells me (yet again) is that religion, if taken seriously, has an unhealthy ability to engulf your entire life. It can encompass your family, your community, and your entire way of living, to the detriment of your ability to see clearly. Certainly true for ‘high-commitment’ religions.
Last year, at the start of the ‘New Atheist’ insurgence, I wondered, “When are we going to see some pushback?” Well, here it is. Unfortunately, instead of bringing good arguments, the believers are making even less sense than usual. Which makes me wonder: is it superstitious for atheists to claim that religious people are threatening?
Lisa: All through history, self-anointed seers have predicted the end of the world and they’ve always been wrong.
Homer: But sweetheart, I have something they didn’t have. A good feeling about this!
– Simpsons: ‘Thank God It’s Doomsday’
It’s April 6th, the day that Mormon leaders pegged as Jesus’ birthday, way back in AD 1. (How that works with different calendrical systems, I have no idea.) Three BYU professors have pointed out problems with this view, but they were just using the science of men, while not one but two prophets of God have confirmed the April 6th birthday. Take that, uninspired smarty-pants scientists!
And this year, April 6th is even a Sunday. Now I seem to remember that back in the 80s, some Latter-day Saints were handing around Xerox copies (just like they email each other now) that Jesus was going to come again when April 6th fell on a Sunday. They were pushing hard for 1986. I have a very clear memory of being in my girlfriend’s bedroom that morning, suddenly remembering that it was April 6th, and thinking, “If Jesus comes today, I’m toast.” And then 6/4/86 came and went, as it had in 1844, 1914, 1975, and every other year.
I suppose Doomsday is on my mind because of this very sad story:
Cult leader Pyotr Kuznetsov tries suicide after realising he was wrong about doomsday
Would you follow this man into a cave? Some people did. They stayed there for about a month because he’d told them the world was about to end. They’ve been trickling out ever since.
But since the failed prophecy, he tried to kill himself by beating his head against a log. He’s apparently schizophrenic, poor guy, but the religion probably masked the schizophrenia. If a schizophrenic guy says that John F. Kennedy is with him all the time, or that Ghengis Khan is his best friend and constant companion, you get him some psychiatric help. But if he says that Jesus Christ is always with him, he’s just a normal religious guy. It may delay an accurate diagnosis, perhaps until it’s too late. Think this guy’s followers would have spent so much time in a cave if he’d said that James Dean was going to come again soon?
There’s a book called ‘When Prophecy Fails’ by Leon Festinger that figures into the later stages of my deconversion. Back in the fifties, there was this lady who thought she was getting messages from space aliens. (Weren’t we all.) The aliens said that the USA would be destroyed by a massive flood, but that spaceships would rescue those who believed. Festinger et al. infiltrated the group, posing as believers and investigators, to see what would happen when the prophecy failed. Fun, huh? Back in the good old days before ethics committees.
[SPOILER ALERT!]
They found the following:
The book really did a number on my head, I must say. I began to see things about my own faith. I realised that people could have deep belief in absolutely loony and false things, and argue passionately for them. Which I knew, but now I saw myself in that mirror. I also saw that groups use a variety of techniques to keep people believing, like communal reinforcement. And I saw some interesting things about how members may try to usurp power over the group (as happened there), and I reflected on how the LDS church has managed that problem admirably well.
Once I realised that, yes, even I could be wrong about my spiritual ‘impressions’, then it became important for me to be a critical thinker, and to make sure my beliefs were grounded in evidence. And that was the beginning of the end for my religious life. No more doomsday mystics. No more mysticism at all, thank you.
I’ve had enough of sorting through identical sounding ambient glitch bands. Fortunately, I’ve found something really great to rescue me from Click Madness.
If you’ve been around for awhile, you may remember a project by Harold Budd and the Cocteau Twins called “The Moon and the Melodies”. Some great songs there, except that some songs sounded like the Twins and some like Budd, and it never really gelled into the Cocteau Budds. Good stuff anyway.
Now in our post-Cocteau world, Robin Guthrie (of the Twins) and Harold Budd have teamed up again with two albums (released on the same day) called “After the Night Falls” and “Before the Day Breaks”. The two albums are of a piece; even the song titles flow on from each other. Within are exquisitely woven sounds; Budd’s sepia-tinged piano and Guthrie’s flowing guitar, fusing into something airy and watery, light and shade and beautiful. But for the missing vocals of Elisabeth Fraser, it’d be like the Cocteaus never left.
And now this week’s offering of five random songs from the collection.
 Suede by Ken NordineAlbum: Wink You’ve heard Ken’s voice, even if you don’t know the name. He’s done voiceover work for films and commercials for decades now. But he’s also a very hip sort of beat poet guy in his warm cool way. I love his “Now, Nordine” shows, and “Word Jazz“. This album finds him contemplating (in his schizophrenic way, Ken talking to Ken) windscreen wipers in love, the morality of licking lampshades, and here, the dangers of sneezing on suede.
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 All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be a Star) by R.E.M.Album: Reveal Even though everyone knows R.E.M., and I like a lot of their albums, I still find something hidden in R.E.M. that I can’t get to. Maybe I didn’t listen to them early enough; they weren’t one of ‘my bands’. (U2 was never one of my bands either, but now I no longer care.) Maybe the incomprehensible mystique that they cultivated in the 80s still clings to them for me. And after Berry’s departure, trying to ‘get’ R.E.M. became impossible because the band I never really knew was gone. That said, I still like Time magazine’s description of this album: a ride through the rain forest in a hovercraft. This song feels like driving somewhere out West, or maybe the beginning of Mulholland Drive. |
 Stories of Old by Depeche ModeAlbum: Some Great Reward Depeche was hitting their stride here, carving a template that they’d use for their next 20 albums: sexual dissolution encoded in religious metaphor, all wrapped up in the sharpest sound samples anyone had ever heard. When I first heard this song in the autumn of 1984 (driving down to Utah), I decided that Depeche Mode were the kings of neat noise. |
 Hong by KilnAlbum: Sunbox Kiln is the best of the ambient glitch bands for my money. The mix of smooth chill and clicky percussion is perfect. It won’t bore you or put you to sleep, unless you’re happy to go there. Simple, but intelligent. |
 War Pigs by Faith No MoreAlbum: The Real Thing I never had a Sabbath phase because as a young Mormon boy I was askeert, but I do really enjoy this cover. If there had been any doubt about FNM’s metal credentials, let them be dispelled. And the lyrics: relevant for Iraq just as for Viet Nam. |
And just when we need them! All the gang are here, including Fafnir, Giblets, the Medium Lobster, and occasionally Evil Santa and Zombie Lincoln.
In an earlier post, I pointed out why linguists reject the notion that apes (or birds, or dolphins, or other non-humans) can use human language. Sure, they can manipulate symbols to get what they want, just like we do. But human language is unlike anything we see in the animal kingdom.
Ask a linguist what’s the difference, and she’ll probably say it’s a matter of syntax. In a human language, the words have to come in a certain order. ‘John hit Bill’ is different from ‘Bill hit John’. Or if I say “The fluffy bunny exploded,” you have an automatic understanding that ‘fluffy’ and ‘bunny’ have a special relation to each other. They’ve grouped into a structural unit. Non-human communication — and even apes who are taught human language — never shows any syntax of this type.
(If you’re new to this area, here’s a really good article about it. All the major players weigh in, and it’s very readable.)
But beyond the ‘language or not’ issue, there’s an even more interesting discussion. Namely, if it’s not language, what is it?
Linguists break into two camps: There are the linguists who say that human language is something qualitatively different from animal communication. This would be Chomsky et al. They’d say there’s a Language Acquisition Device in the human brain (as yet undiscovered) that no other animal has, and though they may be intelligent and communicate, they’ll never ‘graduate’ to real language use. We humans have the principles of syntax — that all human languages follow — hard-wired natively into our human brains.
Then there’s the other team that say human language is just more complex than animal communication. Maybe there’s a continuum where animal communication can be more or less language-y, and all animals fall short of real language behaviour. Maybe if animals were doing something different, they’d slide up closer to language. Maybe syntax is something a very smart animal can do, and if other animals were smarter, they’d do syntax too. Maybe people use syntax to keep everything straight because talking is so demanding. And so on.
This view is interesting because if we suppose there’s a scale of languageness, we can see how far up the scale animals can go. Which takes us to some interesting work from a while back.
Nonhuman primates are unable to grasp a fundamental grammatical component used in all human languages, researchers at Harvard University and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland reported recently in the journal Science. Their work provides the clearest example to date of a cognitive bottleneck during the evolution of human language, suggesting a sharp limit to animals’ capacity to generate open-ended communication and possible restrictions on other domains of thought.
The experiment was this: they played sounds of a man and a woman speaking nonsense syllables to groups of cotton-topped tamarinds. The actual syllables weren’t important; what mattered was the male/female order of the voices.
One group heard patterns of male and female voices that could be generated by a regular grammar, the simplest kind of pattern generator you can have and still call it syntax. This generates very simple sequences like MFMFMF. Once the monkeys got used to the pattern, the experimenters broke the rules by switching up the sequences. Sure enough, the monkeys noticed; they would turn their heads to the loudspeaker as if to say, “What the?”
But other monkeys got patterns generated by a context-free grammar, one step up in complexity. Here the monkeys would hear patterns like MF, or FFMM, or MMMFFF. When these patterns were broken, the monkeys didn’t even notice, which indicates that these grammars were too complex for them.
Most human languages are a step up even from that, following rules allowed by ‘context-sensitive’ grammars. So, conceptually, the syntax of human language is way beyond the capabilities of even these clever types.
Some animal researchers claim that their African Gray Parrots are understanding them and generating real English sentences. I’d love to see what kind of patterns these birds are capable of. Seems this kind of test could help sort out the difference between simple parroting and real language use.
‘Anonymous’, who’s done such great work on the Scientologists lately, made a comment in the last thread on bones from other planets:
Strange that he felt a need to defend an idea that, as far as I remember, is not part of official mormon doctrine.
Ah, yes, OMD.
But why isn’t it official? How many Latter-day Saints (and what kinds) need to believe it before it becomes official? Is there a list? Determining official Mormon doctrine is harder than it ought to be.
Usually religions make statements that can’t really be confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical evidence, like ‘God exists’ or ‘After you die, you continue to live on as a spirit’. But occasionally a religion will make a claim that can be tested and disconfirmed. For example, physical evidence indicates that the earth came together right where it is, instead of being smooshed together. People with dark skin who join the Church do not become whiter, contre the Book of Mormon and General Conference.
What’s a true believer to do? Easy. Just say that the claim was never ‘true church doctrine’ in the first place. This is possible because of the LDS concept of ‘continuing revelation’: that later statements by church leaders trump older ones. So old doctrines can be dropped without much trouble; they’ve been superceded by new knowledge. This is why people in the know no longer teach that the whole of North and South America was populated by Hebrews, and they now say that the entire Book of Mormon narrative took place within a few square blocks in Guatemala.
‘Official Church Doctrine’ (which I’ll hereafter call ‘OCD’) is a slippery notion. There’s an incredibly high bar for a doctrine to be considered ‘official’, and even statements that meet the criteria for OCD can be disavowed if the belief becomes problematic.
An idea can be taught by Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, spoken from the pulpit of General Conference, written in Church publications, be widely believed by the membership and still be disqualified from OCD status if the need arises.
So what is OCD? The Doctrine and Covenants says that anything that missionaries say when they are “moved upon by the Holy Ghost” is scripture. Since there’s no way to tell when someone’s been ‘moved upon’ in this way, we need another definition.
Here’s a page that addresses this question:
Virtually every religion has procedures for distinguishing the individual beliefs of its members from the official doctrines of the church, and so do the Latter-day Saints. In fact among the Mormons the procedure is remarkably similar to that of many Protestant denominations. An example of the procedure can be taken from the records of the Fiftieth Semiannual General Conference of the LDS church, 10 October 1880, when President George Q. Cannon addressed the conference:
I hold in my hand the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, and also the book, The Pearl of Great Price, which books contain revelations of God. In Kirtland, the Doctrine and Covenants in its original form, as first printed, was submitted to the officers of the Church and the members of the Church to vote upon. As there have been additions made to it by the publishing of revelations which were not contained in the original edition, it has been deemed wise to submit these books with their contents to the conference, to see whether the conference will vote to accept the books and their contents as from God, and binding upon us as a people and as a Church.
Subsequent changes of content in the standard works of the Church have been presented similarly to the membership in general conference to receive a sustaining vote. It is that sustaining vote, by the individual members or by their representatives, that makes the changes officially binding upon the membership as the doctrine of the Church.
In other words, OCD is anything that is
a) in the Standard Works, and
b) sustained by the membership.
In fact, this definition of OCD is a bit of a furphy. There are wide swaths of doctrine that Latter-day Saints believe to be true that aren’t in the Standard Works, including ‘bones from other worlds’, policies on illegal drugs, almost everything concerning temple work, and lots of ideas about the spirit world. There are also some ideas that are in the Standard Works, but that Mormons don’t really practice, like Jesus’ views on divorce, and meat in the Word of Wisdom.
This is not a bad thing — it’s completely normal, as religions go — but it does mean that Mormon doctrine can metamorphose to protect itself. It makes it very hard to disconfirm an official doctrine, which is probably the point.
What I think is happening is something I call ‘revelation by prevailing belief’.
1. Joseph Smith et al. started a lot of ideas during the early fertile part of church history. Some were based on made-up stories in the scriptures, and others they made up themselves (Book of Abraham, King Follett discourse).
2. These ideas go to work within the general membership, and at times compete in the minds of members. It’s those memes again: the ideas are involved in an evolutionary struggle for mindspace, and some ideas will prevail. What gets taught in church and at conference are the beliefs that are winning. For example, the prohibition on R-rated movies was folklore when I was a lad, but in 1986, Benson mentioned it in conference, which was certainly enough to get that idea canonised.
3. If by some chance the belief becomes problematic, the Church’s immune system kicks in. We start to hear some members claim that it’s ‘not church doctrine’ in Sunday School or Elder’s Quorum. This retroactive expungement will take a while to propagate through the community, just as the original doctrine did. It’s hard to expel an entrenched doctrine though. It takes about 40 years, if ideas about Blacks and the pre-mortal life are any indication.
The difference, then, between true Mormon doctrine and Mormon folklore is that True Mormon doctrine is doctrine that is considered to be true by most Mormons at any given time. It’s not pronouncements from General Conference that gives the official imprimatur — those statements are sometimes disavowed. It’s not being published in the Standard Works — Latter-day Saints can ignore scriptures that don’t coincide with prevailing belief. It’s whether Mormons believe it enough not to challenge it in church.
This is why we see Mormon doctrine change subtly from generation to generation as unpalatable or scientifically bogus ideas are dropped. It’s not just a Mormon thing; it happens in lots of religions these days (I’m thinking Vatican II). It’s people making things up, and then adapting their beliefs when needed.
Personally, I don’t mind if Mormon doctrine changes. There are quite a few beliefs that need to go. And even the scientific method allows for change. The difference is that when scientific ideas change, it’s because new evidence (in the form of empirical observation) renders an old theory untenable. But when old Mormon beliefs get discarded, it’s based on no evidence at all, or because Mormon doctrine needs to flee from scientific advancement.
However, as scientific knowledge expands and the God of the Gaps shrinks, I think there may come a time when overwhelming evidence may come head-to-head against a core Mormon belief, such that members won’t be able to ignore it without disavowing the scientific method entirely. That will be interesting.
Every once in a while, the LDS missionaries find me, and every time it’s a revelation. The contents of a missionary’s mind are basically everything they remember from church, plus anything that gets them out of a scrape with some competing doctrine. Which means that I hear them saying mostly the same crap I used to say when I was a missionary. Not verbatim; the doctrine has evolved since I wore the badge. Think of it as Mormonism’s Greatest Hits, but with bonus remixes. And so it was this Sunday.
The opening move was mine: I explained that I was an RM and now a vocal atheist. I think this threw them off a bit; they were expecting to visit a member.
They responded with the crafty “Look Outside” defense. It goes like this: Just look outside. If there’s no god, than how did all those trees and plants get here?
My riposte, of course: Evolution is a very well-supported theory that answers many questions about the complexity of life on earth, and it doesn’t require you to believe that goddidit.
I suppose to the senior companion, ‘evolution’ meant ‘dinosaur bones’, so he decided to impart. “You know that the Lord can make things seem older than they are,” he said. “When he changed water to wine at the wedding in Cana, he was making something that was ‘older’ than water.” I made a mental note that water is just as old as wine, but I let it slide. “In the same way,” he continued, “he can make dinosaur bones that seem older than they are.”
I promise you I never would have said anything like that.
“Why on earth would he bother to implant fake dinosaur bones just to fool us?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“Well,” mused the elder, “when God made the world, he made it out of other planets. Some of those planets had the bones of animals already embedded in them, and those are our dinosaur bones.”
The Stupid was strong in the room that day. I hardly knew where to start. Explain about the from earth forming, not from being smooshed together, but by a coalescing cloud of matter pulled together by gravity? Point out the absurdity of layers of fossils being preserved in chronological order despite the smoosh? Ask what orifice he pulled that answer from? Demand evidence for the claim?
The cognitive overload was too much. All my tools of scientific sophistry were helpless. I was paralysed before the sheer magnitude of Stupid presented to me. Well played, elder. Well played.
This is great: a rationalist challenges a magician to kill him with magic.
Of course, magic failed.
On 3 March 2008, in a popular TV show, Sanal Edamaruku, the president of Rationalist International, challenged India’s most “powerful” tantrik (black magician) to demonstrate his powers on him. That was the beginning of an unprecedented experiment. After all his chanting of mantra (magic words) and ceremonies of tantra failed, the tantrik decided to kill Sanal Edamaruku with the “ultimate destruction ceremony” on live TV. Sanal Edamaruku agreed and sat in the altar of the black magic ritual. India TV observed skyrocketing viewership rates.
…India TV, one of India’s major Hindi channels with national outreach, invited Sanal Edamaruku for a discussion on “Tantrik power versus Science”. Pandit Surinder Sharma, who claims to be the tantrik of top politicians and is well known from his TV shows, represented the other side. During the discussion, the tantrik showed a small human shape of wheat flour dough, laid a thread around it like a noose and tightened it. He claimed that he was able to kill any person he wanted within three minutes by using black magic. Sanal challenged him to try and kill him.
The tantrik tried. He chanted his mantras (magic words): “Om lingalingalinalinga, kilikili….” But his efforts did not show any impact on Sanal – not after three minutes, and not after five. The time was extended and extended again. The original discussion program should have ended here, but the “breaking news” of the ongoing great tantra challenge was overrunning all program schedules.
…
After nearly two hours, the anchor declared the tantrik’s failure. The tantrik, unwilling to admit defeat, tried the excuse that a very strong god whom Sanal might be worshipping obviously protected him. “No, I am an atheist,” said Sanal Edamaruku.
I gotta hand it to the tantrik. He really thought he was the real deal, accepted a challenge, and was Unambiguously Disconfirmed.
Maybe he could take a few cues from Christians. They do a lot of spinning when their claims are disconfirmed. Pick any of the following:
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