Atheism: What’s a man (of god) to do when he no longer believes?

There an interesting podcast here about (and from) preachers who no longer believe in god. This is from Dan Dennett’s work (his study is here) and he is interviewed by CBC’s Mary Hynes on the hour long show Tapestry.

Religious belief: monsterous or the human comedy?

Let’s listen for 34 glorious minutes to what fifty big-brained and rational people who respect what’s true explain why they think what they do about religious beliefs:

 

 

(h/t to pharyngula)

Does economic inequality foster religious faith?

It appears so. There is a growing body of evidence (here and here and here) that the degree of religosity is directly and positively correlated to adverse social conditions. What this means is that the influence of religion can best be reduced by eliminating those adverse social conditions that promotes it.

So how do we know if economic inequality is an important and significant factor?

In a new paper Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity, the authors have collected data from 76 countries using 12 different measures for strength of faith where we see this very strong correlation:

Across the bottom is the income inequality per country compared to the left column as a frequency of occurrence of whatever the stated question asks. As we can see, the lower the inequality, the lower the frequency, the higher the inequality, the higher the frequency. This is statistically significant and helps to explain that even in developed countries, the impetus for religiosity is based on social conditions that promote economic inequality and not on the truth value of the religious claims themselves.

So is religiosity growing or declining in the United States?

Interesting, eh? This is good evidence that the assumption made by accommodationists – that we need to be less, and not more, critical of religious interference in order to promote science – seems to be misguided. Equitable economic factors seems to be primary.

For a more in-depth look at this study and some of the important questions it raises, check out Jerry Coyne’s assessment and many excellent comments at Why Evolution is True.

What’s wrong with religious belief and why is its exercise so bad for you?

What’s wrong is that by granting faith-based beliefs merit we end up warping our thinking to suit its assumptions about what is true, and when put into practice these beliefs often make the believer cause real harm to real people by exercising those beliefs in reality. Hitchens argues religion poisons everything; I argue that exercising faith-based beliefs poisons yourself… it’s bad for you because it interferes with your ability to interact honestly with reality.

So what?

What’s the harm in believing in some set of theological precepts that helps me to feel good about myself, helps me feel connected to some mysterious agency that cares about me, that has a plan with purpose for my life and helps to provide it with meaning? How can this be a bad thing?

Well, theological beliefs undermine our critical faculties by removing any possible constraints offered by reality. Reality is not accepted as the benchmark against which we can compare and contrast and test the beliefs’ truth claims  to determine their truth value. That is why theological beliefs require ‘faith’ in the religious sense of the word, meaning trust and confidence in the truth value of the central tenets of the theology without strong supporting reality-based evidence… a ‘I heard it from a guy who knows this guy who read about this guy who was there…’ kind of witnessing. It supports taking actions in support of faith, trimmed from what’s true in reality, that are in every way indistinguishable from support of delusion. This harms one’s intellectual credibility and integrity.

As weak and tepid that evidence may be to earn trust and confidence for some extraordinary claim about reality – a claim in conflict of the laws that govern reality as we know it to be – we must embrace the theology’s truth claims as if they were true first in order for us to enter the sacred domain where the really powerful evidence for the truth of the claims exists.

This is the same path to gullibility that provides con artists a means to make a living: don’t trust reality nor use it as an arbiter of what’s true… trust first how the con makes you feel.

So. What does it matter if a few billion people reduce and minimize the evidence provided by reality and first maintain a set of faith-based precepts that are in conflict with what we know about it?

A lot, it turns out.

For example, let’s first assume the catholic version of christianity is true. Let’s assume that the vatican’s leadership absorbs revelations from its god for enlightening its moral leadership in the world community. Let’s trust these assumptions as true for a moment first and see where it leads in the case of caring for Irish children.

We are naturally shocked – Shocked!, I tell you – that a great deal of sexual abuse took place involving tens of thousands of children under the watchful eye of catholic clergy charged with their care. We are shocked – Shocked!, I tell you – that the local church leadership in Ireland failed at every step to put the safety and welfare of children in their direct care ahead of protecting the reputation of the church when all kinds of abuses took place. We are shocked – Shocked!, I tell you – to find out that they put the interests of the church first and did so under specific direction of the vatican leadership over many, many decades. We are shocked – Shocked!, I tell you – that for many, many decades abusers were protected and that the increasing numbers of victims over many, many decades were blamed for their own abuse including rape. Of children. By clergy. And we are further shocked – but not so much in this case – to find out that sometimes even those in positions of public trust within various secular authorities – both in government and law enforcement – helped the church cover up the misdeeds of its agents, assuming first that such widespread abuse had to be the work of ‘a few bad apples’, the exception of rare abuse, a temporary and unfortunate set of misdeeds by some of those church agents too easily swayed by the secular times and secular expectations of behaviour. But public officials in government and law enforcement are not in the business of being agents representing god’s vicar on earth as are the catholic clergy; their job is to make and enforce secular law. And raping children – even in Ireland – just so happens to be against the secular law.

In spite of previous investigations and settled law suits and orders to make changes and agreements how to implement these changes, there remains a problem of catholic compliance. I wrote about it here. And, yet again, we find the vatican interfering to first protect its reputation.

So.

Another report was commissioned by the government called the Cloyne report.  In its finding we are shocked – Shocked!, I tell you – to hear the author of the report tell us that ““words are not enough nor is condemnation sufficient” to describe what has been allowed to continue to happen. But how can this be?

Of news to no one is the idea that systemic child abuse within any organization is morally wrong. That such abuse is allowed to continue in order to protect that organization’s reputation – a reputation clearly contrary to what is practiced in reality – is morally wrong. That no one who has ordered this skewed protection (not only in Ireland but around the world) is held accountable and culpable is morally wrong.

How do we know?

Well, if we lifted this entire mess out of the workings of the catholic church and its Irish and placed it, let’s say, in the public school system of a secular country, the vatican and catholic supporters would be clamoring to be first in line to condemn this abuse of secular power. (Secularism, after all, is assumed by most religious believers first to be a bad thing because it is not beholden and submissive to some theologically acceptable doctrine.) But when the abuse occurs under an organization that claims moral leadership by the assumption that it is in such a privileged position because of the truth of its theological claims, then we have a never-ending stream of inadequate excuses and apologies and promises to do better later. I am not aware of god serving a summation to those charged with crimes for a specific and public court date. That’s why the abuse has gone on for as long as it has; no one is accountable for their criminal behaviour except under legal decisions of secular law.

In total, then, what we see in practice is a moral capitulation by all those who continue to support the catholic church from its rightful responsibilities in order to protect its ‘reputation’ as an assumed  moral authority. Evidence from reality contrary to the truth value of the assumption doesn’t matter, you see. Belief is not beholden nor constrained nor restrained by what’s true in reality. And left in this belief’s wake in Ireland is tens of thousands of abused children with an unknown number yet to be sacrificed on the alter of the church’s reputation as a moral authority. For as long as the church is assumed first to be a moral authority as a matter of faith-based belief, then no evidence gathered from reality contrary to that belief will matter. And that belief – in action – causes ripe conditions for ongoing abuse that produces real victims of real people.

Whether the specific faith-based belief justifies this act or that, what we see are the symptoms. It can be argued that some faith-based symptoms are benign – like charity and aid and community work – while others are malignant – like misogyny and bigotry and abuse. What I am suggesting is that we have a faith-based problem: that reality and not belief must be granted primacy in arbitrating any truth claims. To grant theology the right to establish assumption and assertion and wishful thinking as equivalent in truth value without any outside checks and balances is to invite the conditions pregnant for abuse.

What is the vatican’s response to this report? I’m almost, but not quite, shocked – not quite Shocked!, I tell you – to find that they disagree:

Fr Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, denied that a letter sent by the former Papal Nuncio to Irish bishops encouraged them to cover up abuse allegations. (He said that) harsh criticisms of the Vatican following the report were “curious”, claiming they “demonstrate little awareness of what the Holy See has actually done over the years to help effectively address the problem.”

And how did they help effectively address the problem of clergy raping children and avoiding prosecution? I’m sure it had nothing whatsoever to doing with failing report cases of abuse to the civil authorities as required under Irish law, failing to put a system of support for victims in place after promising to do so, failing to appoint an independent advisory panel after agreeing to do so, and failing to properly record cases of sex abuse (we wouldn’t want to help any secular investigators, now would we?). See how the lack of awareness is on the part of secular authorities? The proof – exempt from reality as usual – is how the Holy See says it is doing everything it can to be as helpful while not doing whatever it can to be as unhelpful as possible.

When you are not beholden to reality to be arbiter of what is true, you are free to just make shit up and pretend it’s true. That’s what’s wrong with theology in that there is no way to tell in theory if it’s just made-up shit. And it’s bad for you because the inevitable result is behaviours justified within the context of the made-up shit that act contrary to what they pretend they are supporting. That’s why misogyny is presented as respect for women, bigotry against gays as loving the sinner but hating the sin (as if the two were separate entities), cruelty in law to honour god’s concern for us, and so on. Up means down, white means black, catholicism means moral.

What is true and how can we know?

In conversation with many people of faith and accommodationists, I often face a postmodern notion I find deeply disturbing: a claim that what’s true is in the eye of the beholder – whether a believer or non believer. The notion of respecting reality to be any kind of arbiter for claims about reality seems to be a trivial point for many believers when discussing metaphysical notions while the liberal use of the term ‘truth’ in its supposed multiple guises falls off the tongue with ease when they unfailing apply these same notions to matters OF reality.

That’s cheating.

Such an assumption about the nature of what’s true – to afford the believer a way to effortlessly cross this line of demarcation between the metaphysical and the physical – allows subjective faith claims about god to be presented as equally valid ‘truths’ that somehow compete successfully with the scientific sense of the word ‘truths’ about physical reality. This is a bait and switch tactic, of course, in that a scientific truth is different in meaning than a faith-based assumption. The relativist would have us accept that each of us can subjectively assign the word ‘truth’ to whatever claim we want to believe and that this has no significant and detrimental affect on what we can know is true for all. The common misapplication is that something can be true for some but not for others in matter within this universe, such as jesus really, really, really was the son of god and performed miracles… as if each of us has a separate and distinct claim that is equally valid merely because we assign belief or lack of belief to it. But conclusions held to be true in the scientific sense of the word do not work this way.

As Jerry Coyne writes over at WEIT:

Different theologies have different “answers,” and even within a single faith different people diverge in their notion of religious “truth.”  In contrast, scientists—regardless of religious creed, ethnicity, or nationality—converge on single, agreed-upon answers (of course there is still scientific disagreement about many cutting-edge issues). Water has two hydrogen and one oxygen molecules whether you’re a chemist in Africa, Eurasia, or America.  DNA in the nucleus is a double helical molecule consisting of sugars and nucleotide bases. Evolution is a fact for scientists in every land, for they can all examine the massive evidence supporting it.  There are many faiths; but there is only one science. The fact that different people from different backgrounds converge on the same scientific answers also implies that there really are objective truths about the universe.

And truths about reality that can be known, I will add.

Also, we need to recognize that a lack of evidence for certain faith-based truth claims about reality has an important bearing on the equivalency of faith-based beliefs and scientific conclusions that are at odds. And nowhere is this more evident than in the dishonest presentation of evolution by agenda-driven supporters of certain theologies as just another kind of belief similar to a faith-based one. This is an intentional misrepresentation – what many of us legitimately call ‘Lying for Jesus’ – of what is true in reality and an organized attempt to discredit the scientific method in this matter only to serve those who wish to pretend that reality in this matter only has no bearing on what we can know about its truth. These self appointed lovers of science in all other matters do not find this theologically driven hypocrisy to be disturbing to their equilibrium of intellectual integrity. Theology in this sense can be seen to exercise its power of selective anesthesia.

This use of the term ‘truth’ based on a shared materialistic and physical reality (existing separate from our subjective wishes but in which we are immersed) decries the believer’s failed postmodern notion that all truths are subjective.  In contrast to a scientific ‘truth’ that recognizes the submission of what is true to the constraints of reality – that we recognize and test through evidence found in reality and not what we simply believe or wish to be true –  if there were objective truth about God (and his nature and intentions and desires and expectations revealed to believers through revelation), scriptural authority, explanatory dogma we should find believers to be of the same faith. That within christianity we find well over 30,000 different sects should be seen as very strong evidence recognizable even by the postmodernists and other faith-based believers that subjective truth claims are not true in any reality-based and meaningful way comparable to a scientific truth claim. The word ‘truth’ is being abused by relativists-with-an-agenda where its central meaning – being in accord with a particular fact or reality – is simply ignored in order to co-opt its scientific sense for the believer’s own and dishonest purposes.

What is the vatican’s underlying problem with facing and changing its child raping ways?

It’s really just a problem with language, you see.

Whereas clear documentation has shown smoking gun after smoking gun – a smoking arsenal these days – linking vatican authorities to actively and intentionally and criminally covering up systemic child abuse within the institution of the catholic church, the problem I think may stem from a simple linguistic misunderstanding.

For example, the vatican’s ”ambassador’ to Ireland, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, assures us of  “the total commitment of the Holy See for its part in taking all the necessary measures to ensure the protection of children.”

Now doesn’t that sound reasonable? Who doesn’t want to protect children? So what might that protection look like, let’s say, in the case of Ireland?

What this actually has meant on the Emerald Isles is the active protection of abusers from legal prosecution, while taxpayers pay out nearly 1.5 billion dollars in damages to some 13,000 victims. The vatican, through its then-ambassador Archbishop Luciano Storero, warned Irish bishops in a 1997 letter that a powerful church body, the Congregation for the Clergy, had ruled that such mandatory reporting of abuse claims to civil authorities conflicted with canon law (clarified in no uncertain terms by the catholic’s Dear Leader, version XVI.0, aka ‘Pope Palpatine’, Himself). Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed.”

See? That’s what the protection of children looks like to the vatican.

The confusion as I see it is between the very similar looking words ‘children’ and ‘the church’.

When we revisit ambassador Leaza’s statement with the confused word removed and the correct words inserted, we can see how it lines up beautifully with the evidence that “the total commitment of the Holy See for its part (is) in taking all the necessary measures to ensure the protection of children the church.” That that includes the taxpayers funding the damages caused by child raping clergy is just so much sweet icing on the vatican’s cake, which the vatican has not only been able to have, but has eaten (along with other criminal acts), too. It’s all somebody else’s problem, you see, and so these somebody else’s can pay for the privilege of holding the vatican to account for its criminal agents. The church – no matter how evil and corrupt and criminally liable it may be – must be left with enough secular power to determine which laws it may or may not follow but none of the responsibility for exercising it. As I mentioned, a very sweet deal. God is apparently pleased with this compromise. After all, the church means well in its insistence that it is the moral voice of god even if its actions show – century after tedious century – that it does not. As I like to say, never let what’s true interfere with good belief.

But perhaps the times, they are a’changin’.

Ireland’s Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore said, “”There’s one law in this country. Everybody is going to have to learn to comply with it. The Vatican will have to comply with the laws of this country.”

How very bold. No doubt he’s up for excommunication for that one.

Now imagine… the catholic church operating under and beholden to secular law. End of days must surely be upon us when priests can’t just rape children and then go on their company’s mandatory vacation.

Meanwhile, good little catholics continue to go to church and pay their tithes and fund this criminal organization in the name of catholic ‘morality’. Now I am left to wonder what that term has been confused with?

(From AP)

 

 

 

What if there is only an atheist heaven?

Ah ha! A third option to Pascal’s Wager…

 

How does theology work?

One of my favourite cartoons.

Why is the god-of-the-gaps argument called a science stopper?

This is what the argument looks like Sudoku style:

 

As for an excellent article about this typical theistic argument – and why those who use it are intellectually impoverished – check out  Doctor Steve’s post at NeurologicaBlog.

Why do people believe in woo?

From The Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC 4: Does science kill the magic?

Robin Ince and Brian Cox are joined on stage by actor and magician Andy Nyman, psychologist Richard Wiseman and neuroscientist Bruce Hood as they take on the paranormal. They’ll be looking at some of the more popular claims of supernatural goings on, and asking whether a belief in ghosts, psychic abilities and other other-worldly phenomena, is just a bit of harmless fun, or whether there are more worrying implications in a belief in the paranormal. (30 minutes)

Listen here.