Frying up God

Stephen Fry recently had an interview where he was asked what he would say to God should Fry die and end up at the pearly gates.  The first thing Fry said is "I'd say, bone cancer in children?  What's that about?" and then went on to talk about how God is evil and bad and just the worst.  He lambasted God as homophobic, mysoginistic, racist, and awful in nearly every way.  The interviewer seemed quite taken aback by the rant and the public, particularly the church going types, have been in a bit of an uproar.  My reaction was more along the lines of "Yeah, obviously.  This isn't new...."

Let us say from the outset that this is about the God of the Bible.  If your version of God is some kind of benevolent creator that sits outside the universe and just started things off 14 billion years ago that is all fine and well but that God isn't turning back gay people at the pearly gates.  Nor, one would assume, would such a creature have anything to do with pearly gates and the associated heaven and hell dichotomy at all.  No, we are talking here about the God that tossed tens of thousands of Jews into holes in the earth to punish them for not doing what he said, who casually watched Job's family be murdered to win a bet, who thought that giving Job a new family made it all cool, and who mind controlled the Pharaoh to keep the Jews in Egypt so God would have an excuse to massacre Egyptians for fun.

There aren't enough bad words in all the languages we have for such a being.

But seriously how is this a surprise?  Atheists are just all about not believing in God.  We have been all about the idea that the God we are so often asked to believe in is wrong, evil, and unacceptable as long as atheism has been a thing.  This goes back roughly forever, probably to the first time somebody tried to convert people to a religion with the "Join me or be tortured to death" line.  If your plan is to torture as much of the world to death as you can I don't think much of the supposedly divine being behind that.

Atheism isn't just about truth.  It isn't all about provable facts, though facts are important.  It is also about a moral code that not only isn't drawn from religious texts, but also deems those texts to be morally repugnant.  If that is God, even if he does exist, then fuck that guy.

One evil dude in a fancy suit

The Connecticut shooting is a tragedy, no doubt.  Thankfully in tragedy there can be hope; lessons that can set us on a better path for the future.  Unfortunately in tragedy there can also be evil people who leverage that tragedy to try to push their crazy agenda.  See exhibit one, Mike Huckabee, who tries to convince us that the reason that God didn't save the children was because society no longer teaches religion in schools.



What bamboozles me is that so many people see this video and comment on it talking about what a wonderful person Huckabee is.  How nice of him to note that God let children be brutally murdered to teach a lesson to a bunch of adults far away.  Because, obviously, God couldn't just blast those adults with lightning, or open up a hole in the ground to swallow them up, or just send an avenging angel down to chop them... despite the fact that he did this regularly in the Bible.

I have no respect for God in any of their various incarnations but the God that flounders around trying to teach lessons to bad people who aren't of the correct religion (or even those who think that people should be allowed to have their own religion, however mistaken) by enabling mass murderers is unthinkable.  That is the kind of being you love and trust to run the universe and be your personal saviour?  I can't say whether that version of God is more incompetent or cruel but they certainly don't lack for either trait.

How religious is the world?

Atheism is on the rise world wide, this we know.  The details, of course, are trickier than that.  Recently there was a large worldwide poll to discover trends in religious belief and the change over just a few years was really substantial.  The same study was done in 2005 with a slightly different set of nations so comparisons can be done but they need to be done carefully.  The question asked was

"Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?"

Worldwide the number of people answering 'religious' was 59%, non-religious was 23%, and confirmed atheist 13%.  The survey revealed a number of trends within the data, most of which are unsurprising.  Atheists tend to be young, educated, middle class or higher, and female.  The male / female split is 12%/14% so the difference between the genders isn't huge but it is relatively easily explained by the very substantial sexism embedded in most of the largest religions.  It is difficult to chart exactly how answers to these questions have changed though because of China.  It was added to the 2012 survey but was not in the 2005 survey and China is both immense in population and the most atheist country in the world at 47%.

The thing that has me wondering is how much of this change towards atheism is people actually changing their minds on God and how much of it is people feeling that it is socially acceptable to identify as atheist?  In Canada we have 46% religious, 40% not religious, 9% atheist, 5% unsure.  That is an awful lot of people who believe that religion is not for them but that there is some kind of God.  Since 2005 the number of religious folk has dropped from 58% to 46% but I find it hard to believe that so many people have actually changed their minds that quickly; most of that must be a change only in their answers.  Some of them are surely people who were raised in a religious setting and completely ignore religion but who haven't really critically thought about their belief in God.  Particularly when the question is phrased as "convinced atheist" there is a huge amount of room for uncertainty.  It feels to me like we won't actually know what people believe until there is more time for atheism to set in as a normal, unremarkable option.  Heck, there are still a few religious folk who confuse atheism with devil worship and that sort of nonsense is going to mess with your response accuracy.

It used to be that the default assumption was that you were a Christian who went to church.  That slowly eroded to the current situation where the default assumption is that you are a cultural Christian who doesn't go to church but has some residual beliefs from a religious upbringing.  (I still remember getting Christian education in public school from the nice old lady who came to tell us Bible stories every couple weeks.  Unsurprisingly she left out the mass murders, rapes, torture, slavery, genocides, and other such atrocities.)  The trend is definitely shifting towards an assumption of agnosticism for some, atheism for others, but what that trend looks like is really hard to know.

There is an amusing article on this on the bbc website.  They have a couple opinion pieces after the actual facts from two very different viewpoints.  The right wing Christian viewpoint seems to be that progression churches are ruining it for everybody by watering down religion and supporting the people who 'believe in God' but who ignore religion.  Apparently people without religion don't have the strength to deal with a hard life and when they come crawling back to Christianity only the serious churches that maintained their hard line on bigotry will be left.  The left wing opinion is that churches that continue to pursue homophobic and sexist policies are doomed because young people won't put up with that these days.  Only those churches that are willing to be progressive and inclusive have any chance.  I doubt that either have any chance at all to remain large scale and influential in the long term; the important point is that they need to do the right thing now.

Facebook memes and nice religious folk

Yesterday on Facebook I saw this picture:

On the surface it seems kinda nice.  It does seem compassionate to love people even though they do things you don't agree with and it also strikes me as good to be able to disagree with a person's choices without hating them.  I do both of these things a lot.  The trouble with this quote though is that it is used to justify doing horrible things to people based on their personal lifestyle choices.  Loving someone despite their choices doesn't excuse trying to ruin their life!

This sort of juxtaposition of love and retribution is a fundamental part of Christianity (as well as some other religions, of course).  Jesus loves you but he is going to make sure you suffer eternal torment unless you do *precisely* what he says.  He has decided that there are particular ways in which a person must live and that living outside that box, even when it hurts no one, is unacceptable and worthy of the most heinous punishments imaginable.  Thus it is probably natural for people who buy into this philosophy to feel like it is okay to love homosexuals but condemn their choices and try to force them to live a heterosexual lifestyle.

It isn't okay.

There is a particular point where the quote above does hold true; that being where you personally disapprove of homosexual behaviour but do nothing whatsoever to try to force people to avoid that behaviour.  This is a theoretical point occupied by no real people.  Real people who disapprove of a behaviour work to prevent it or punish those who indulge in it even if they try their best to remain neutral.  Moreover when you live in a time and place where a particular group is marginalized and you take the stance that their actions are unacceptable you support those who do hate them and you support bigotry against them.  This support occurs even if you adamantly insist that you personally contain no hatred.

This is why moderate religion drives me so utterly bonkers.  The people involved support and empower the fundamentalists while trying to condemn the actions perpetrated by the fundamentalists.  If you want to stop bigotry and show people that you are not hateful the first step is not to say "I disapprove of homosexuals BUT I love them!" but rather to say "I disapprove of treating people badly.  All people.  PERIOD."

My world is not the only world

In my world there are lots of interesting things to debate.  That universal health care is a good idea is taken for granted, of course, but we can talk about the best ways to discourage patient abuse of the system (on my vacation I was told a story of an elderly lady who continually called for ambulances to ferry her to the hospital to visit relatives..) or whether or not the government should bankroll extremely risky or untested new medicines.  It is understood that women should have access to any role in life that they desire but we talk about the pros and cons of trying to raise children while working a lot of hours and how much we should encourage young girls to enter traditionally male dominated roles.  I have real debates about whether or not a child should be spanked under any circumstance and some people say yes, but only in a few extreme situations and some say never.

Then we have other worlds, ones that I often forget really exist.

Worlds like the one this blogger inhabited, where she was told in all earnestness that universal health care in Canada meant state mandated abortions for 'undesirable' children.  Her world also included literal instructions for being a wife that included not voicing opinions, always being available for any need your husband has, and staying at home producing an endless stream of babies since naturally contraception is a tool of the devil.  Let us not forget the child rearing instruction that spanking is the one and only tool that should be used to get children in line; it should be employed in virtually every situation.

I read some of her posts and was blown away by the difficulties of her transition out of 'peon to the patriarchy' to 'actual person'.  Even if you ignore the outrageous sexism and denial of reality when it comes to healthcare she has had a rough time of it since her husband turned out to be a transgender woman and the author came out as a lesbian!  Fortunately these things have some real synergy but it utterly boggles my mind to think of coping with being trans or gay when raised in a society that hasn't even come to grips with accepting straight, cisgendered women as the equals of men.

In the world I inhabit the idea of actually debating whether or not women should be allowed to work is simply not a thing.  I can't even begin to construct a set of rules and guidelines for how I would act in such a world.  It explains a lot of why people vote for right wing religious nutters and why I can't comprehend their decisions though; if you honestly believe that God causes psychopaths to gun down bystanders in retribution for homosexuality being tolerated then there is no chance that I will make sense of who you want to vote for. I don't know what I could say to someone who thinks that fear of Hell would prevent atrocities.

Thankfully the author demonstrates that religious fundamentalist brainwashing is not impregnable.  People can and do open their eyes and renounce faith and the madness that it engenders.  Hopefully the increased connectivity and openness of the world will lead more people cast off their sheep's form and begin to really think.

Pascal's Wager

Pascal's Wager is something often trotted out in discussions of belief in religion.  The idea is that Pascal proposed that one should profess belief in religion even if you are an atheist simply because if you are correct in your atheism then it does not matter which way you go but if you are wrong and God is real then you had damn well better be religious!  The Wager fails spectacularly and simply because it is a false dichotomy; there are a gazillion different ideas about how one must live to please spiritual forces and one cannot hope to please them all.  It also seems unlikely to me that what an all powerful deity wants is someone who spends their life faking beliefs all over the spectrum trying to hedge their bets!

I read another amusing take on the Wager today that used a Homer Simpson quote to outline a new take on the Wager.  Fundamentally it is just "false dichotomy" written for the average person but it is well done and I like to see this sort of thing written up in general news sources.  A little more support for my cause, as it were.    It also doesn't hurt to show Homer Simpson being more clever than Blaise Pascal which certainly would be a rare event.

Catastrophe

Recently I posted about links between religion and environmentalism.  Not to say that one causes the other or any such thing but rather just that these two things fill very similar roles in people's lives.  They both supply reasons for living and heuristics for making decisions that are very simple.  The Naturalist sent me a link to an article that highlights another common theme in the two concepts:  Righteous annihilation.  The article talks about many of the common current predictions of Armageddon and shows pretty clearly how there is a big similarity between the fall from grace of Adam and Eve in the Bible and they common environmentalist theme that the earth was pure until humans messed it up.  In both cases there is a huge price to pay for wrecking the Garden of Eden though what will enforce that price can be either God or some amorphous concept of earth, fate or Gaia.

When you actually look at the Armageddon scenarios that people talk about in the mainstream media though you don't end up with an interesting thesis on the similarities between religion and environmentalism but rather just a slap in the face with the fact that people are really crazy.  There have always been and always will be religious nuts who manage to convince others that they can predict the actual end of the world; no actual facts are necessary but a little time needs to pass between each for people to build up their gullibility again.  Things like the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012 though don't come along every day and people who want to take advantage of fools need to seize the moment.  What I find truly maddening is not that some folks somewhere buy into "People thousands of years ago wrote a calendar and it has a big turnover in 2012, obviously earthquakes are coming!" but rather that these fools wiggle into real discussions as if the idea isn't preposterous.  If those Mayans were so damn prescient they why aren't they our overlords right now, hmm?  Surely they could have predicted and avoided whatever harm might have come their way?  But no, we end up seeing real scientific panels on unrelated subjects field questions about whether or not the world will end in 2012.

Humans as a group sure do have an appetite for apocalypse.  I will admit that I love disaster movies and I find stories about people who live in a time after the collapse fascinating but there is a pretty big jump between wondering what it would be like and buying pet insurance so someone will feed Rover when you are taken up into the sky in the Second Coming.  Probably we all just want to be important and we want our lives and our times to be the BIG ONES.  It is a hard thing to look up into the night sky and realize how utterly insignificant we are even if you don't consider the eventual certainty of maximum entropy.  Somehow by being a tiny part of the grand hurrah people sell themselves on the idea that everything they do is important.  Not everyone can actually win the contests we have between ourselves so people look for a contest they can't possibly lose.

What Bible Literalism Means

I found a great interview with Penn Jillette on BigThink that talked about Penn's take on the religion of the various candidates for US President.  He talks a lot about religion in general and about how he views the candidates in particular but the critical thing to me is that he isn't particularly partisan.  He is a crusading atheist who isn't particularly pleased by Obama and doesn't buy some atheists' theories that Obama is really a nonbeliever who just pays lip service to stay in office.  As far as Penn is concerned it is almost as bad to be lying about believing in completely batshit crazy stuff (his words, though I completely agree!) as it is to actually believe in it.  He really doesn't want to vote for either option.

Penn focuses a lot of attention on the idea of being a Bible literalist.  He wonders how the candidates can portray themselves as such when none of them has a particularly strong record of throwing rocks at people with intent to murder on the basis of working on Sunday.  In point of fact I think that if Mitt Romney wandered into Starbucks and began to hurl stones at the cashiers he would not be labelled a 'Bible literalist' but rather 'a murderous psychopath' and put in jail.  So since these people, and in fact very nearly everybody else, don't actually believe in the literal word of the Bible what do they mean when they say that they do?  Penn portrays himself as simply being clueless here and asks them to tell him what he is missing.  He feels like he is missing a key or a point of translation somewhere and that if only they would tell him what 'Bible literalism' is supposed to actually mean that communication would be so much easier.  I don't know if he is being deliberately obtuse or is genuinely confused but the answer is perfectly clear.

"I believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible."

means

"I support crazy assholes in my religion in their abuse of minorities and outsiders and their attempts to acquire power for themselves which is excused by convenient quotations from the Bible."

Nothing more complicated than that.  When you say you believe in Bible literalism you really just express support in a roundabout way for the greatest evil that comes from religion.  It is a political stance supporting a group and says nothing about the way you personally get your morality, code of conduct or information.  The Bible literalists are really what get my feathers ruffled because so often they are the ones responsible for the most awful crimes committed in the name of religion.  The casual hypocrisy of people who support their religion without believing in what it stands for is intensely frustrating but it is mostly just an enabler for the really bad folks on the fringe.

The Green Religion

I have a few blogs on my blogroll that tend to pretty right wing viewpoints, in particular on climate change.  Sometimes they say things that are spot on (otherwise I wouldn't be much interested) and sometimes I question their veracity but one thing that crops up regularly is the comparison between climate change activism and religion.  If you wander around the blogosphere and check out opinions ranging from the bonkers "Climate change is all a Zionist conspiracy" to the truthful "Climate change just isn't as serious as some pundits would have you believe" this comes up over and over - environmentalism is unfavourably compared to religion.  I tend to find this pretty funny because so often the people making the unfavourable comparison are religious but they tend to think that their Abrahamic religious beliefs are obvious and only other religious beliefs are silly.  What is actually interesting from a objective viewpoint is that what these people are saying is actually true in many ways.

Traditional religion in the First World is definitely on a precipitous decline.  Much of the fixed social values and goals that were imparted by a common religion are utterly gone and people look for something to replace that which can supply that sense of purpose and certainty.  Working out what is moral and what is not by figuring out the complete set of consequences of an action is slow and annoying not to mention hardly worth the time in many cases.  How much will society benefit by me figuring out whether the plastic applesauce container goes in the trash or the recycling?  If figuring that out takes awhile then it is pretty hard to justify worrying about 2 grams of recycling either way.  However, if we operate under the assumption that environmentalism is important beyond the utilitarian calculation then we must work harder to do it right.  If we place environmental concerns on an entirely different plane than monetary considerations then the fervour we see from many activists makes logical sense.

In the book Willpower that I blogged about before the authors talk about this.  They found that religion and its accompanying useless rituals often helped people achieve greater willpower by giving them practice doing things they did not want to do.  They also found that environmentalism was filling this same role in the lives of many modern people, giving them a set of rules and reasons to do things that were hard to justify from a utilitarian perspective.  Note that I don't find this an especially bad thing for society.  I would much rather people have strong feelings about cleaning things up and living a low impact lifestyle than about the infallibility of ancient tomes advocating racism, discrimination and murder among other atrocities.  Of course it is going to have downsides since faith does require a surrender of objective reason but for the majority of people the best thing you can do is give them a set of guidelines to follow without thought as long as the guidelines are right most of the time.

I figure that people just want ideas to idolize and heuristics that simplify their lives.  Religion used to supply those but since it is becoming more and more anachronistic people search for other things to fill that gap.  That doesn't mean that environmentalism is wrong at all, it just means that many people approach thinking about it in the same way they do religion.  You can see this very clearly when small children talk about environmentalism from their lessons in school - their viewpoints have no shades of grey.

As Voltaire said, "If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him."


Voltaire may not have been thinking about other more palatable religious alternatives when he said this but it works for me - many people need something that fills the role of religion and environmentalism can fit the bill.

God Hates America

Check this out:  http://godhatesamerica.com/

This site is amazing.  When reading the Bible I got the questionable priviledge of reading about how God becomes angry with his people and massacres 24,000 of them with a pestilence.  I have firsthand knowledge of the ways in which God targets specific people for punishment and hands out Smitings willy nilly with little regard for smiting those who actually broke the rules.  The website above is dedicated to a bunch of people who actually buy into that stuff.  Obviously the vast majority of religious folk don't buy into the random massacres and arbitrary violence that permeate the Old Testament and believe in a much gentler, more reasonable and more distant sort of deity, but these folks are really into the 'Big strong man in the sky who gets angry and blows stuff up!' version.  They are known as WBC, Westboro Baptist Church.

The crazy doesn't stop with their stated beliefs which are completely bonkers by any virtually anybody's measure.  These people seem to like flying around the country attending funerals so that they can wave placards and chant slogans talking about how the dead deserved their deaths and that those deaths were righteous and deserved punishments from God.  WBC contends that homosexuality, abortion, sodomy, adultery, divorce, and all kinds of other things are prohibited and that because the children of the USA are not being educated in God's will that God is deliberately *tricking* American leaders into wars and then causing them to take hideous casualties as a form of punishment.  They further claim that the swine flu was a direct action by God to kill and punish the world for its sins.  As usual though they froth with anger at the 'crimes' committed that happen to offend them personally they ignore the ones that are equally prohibited by the Bible but don't bother them on a personal level.

In some small way I have to admire these folks.  They read the Old Testament, claim they believe it, and actually go and act as if it is true.  They really believe that God sends plagues to decimate populations that defy him, that God spends his time tricking individual mortal leaders into making bad decisions and massacres soldiers in order to send messages.  This is straight up what is said in the Old Testament - that is God as he was/is written.  Of course in all the other ways they are the scum of the earth.  Showing up at funerals for people who are killed randomly to chant that the person deserved it is unbelievably despicable.  Free speech is something that is important just as much here in Canada as in the USA but there very much need to be limits; it is critical that we have the opportunity to say and think what we want and equally critical that we don't have the idea that that extends to saying those things any time, any place.  Apparently the USA government is trying to ban protests at funerals specifically because of these maniacs which does mean that their goal of getting publicity and being noticed despite their fringe status is working.

The Bible literalists really do exist.  It is a good thing to keep in mind when debating the merits or lack thereof of laid-back religion; when you say that a book is the Word of God you have to accept that sometimes people will actually believe you and act accordingly.

It's not my fault

Normally it is my fault when I end up in a religious debate with family.  Wendy shakes her head when this happens as she really doesn't see the point in me getting involved in these sorts of debates, likely figuring nothing useful will come of it and somebody might well get really offended.  This Christmas though I ended up in a pair of debates with her family members about religion and I am going to claim that it wasn't my doing.  Whether or not she believes that cover story is unclear though it certainly is the case that I could have avoided them if I had really wanted to.

The Actuary wanted to discuss religion with me and led off with the statement that it seemed that I was much more serious about my atheism than he was serious about his theism.  It seemed like he was expecting me to be surprised about that but I wasn't particularly.  In fact, I tend to agree.  There are plenty of people who are very religious in a cultural sense but not especially religious in a belief sense out there and it seems like The Actuary is one of those.  By cultural sense I mean going to church, saying grace, being involved in the religious community and taking part in other religious ritual.  Many of these things are things people do for the same reasons I celebrate Christmas - it is simply a set of activities acquired from parents and community that requires no special mindset or belief.  Obviously there is a pretty big correlation between religious culture and religious belief but there is by no means a bijection between those sets of people.  (I apologize to those of you out there who don't have any idea what a bijection is.  Using it in regular conversation whenever possible is mandatory for a math nerd.) 

Back to the actual debate!  We agreed on the basic principle that the Golden Rule is the best simple summary of morality and encouraging people to act in that fashion is an important goal.  The difference in opinion comes in when we began to discuss what role religion might play in educating people about morality and encouraging them to behave according to the Golden Rule.  The Actuary is of the impression that religion is very useful in this way and helps people to understand and accept good rules for living that make society work.  I disagree.  (Surprise!)  Some of my arguments stem from personal experience when I was young, which surely shaped my attitudes towards religion and religious people.  Many come from books I have read and history classes where I learned much about the horrors that religions following codes of conduct that in theory are very altruistic can inflict.  Not to say atheists in history have all been morally upright; I don't think that at all, but I don't see any reason to assume that religion creates good behaviour in history.  I do find it intriguing that when I got into an argument about religion with a religious person we first led off by agreeing on a series of esoteric principles but started in disagreeing on simple matters of practical implementation.  We agree on the basic principles of how people should act but we disagree on the best way to get the masses of humanity to act that way.  The Actuary made a very good point that religion is generally very accessible and that nearly anyone can become involved and take away lessons from it.  He felt that abstract philosophy was generally not something the majority of people would be able to learn from and that teaching morality from that standpoint would not reach many people.

I agree to some extent.  Teaching philosophy to the average person is going to be a real hit and miss proposition and many people either will be uninterested/unwilling or just unable to really grasp the arguments.  Also in many cases the arguments will not be especially compelling as they fail to have the raw emotional impact that is necessary to compel people to change their ways.  Despite the anticipated lack of success of inducing morality through teaching of philosophy I don't think religion can be supported on that basis because teaching morality through religion requires surrendering of reason.  To teach someone that they should not steal because an all powerful entity says so is simple and clear but it also teaches them that they need to simply believe things people say on faith and not worry about reasons, reason or logic.  I think that the value of reason has tremendous value when trying to teach morality.  The idea that the best thing to do when making decisions is not to simply obey authority but to consider the consequences of the action in the light of the greatest benefit for all is powerful.  It isn't some kind of cureall, but it is far less likely to create an environment where suicide bombings and wars are considered acceptable.

We didn't really conclude the debate in any particularly satisfactory way.  That is, unless you consider a mutual agreement to disagree satisfying.  I assume Wendy considers that a very satisfying way for us to stop arguing though since it means that nobody is bitter and no punches get thrown.  I would like to conclude with a quote I really like which summarizes the way in which decisions can be made without any reference to religion whatsoever.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

-Budda

Relics

I was looking around the decorations at Elli's school the other day and saw a copy of a few interesting documents on the walls there.  Quotes from those documents:

Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:


The Parliament of Canada, affirming that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions;


The first quote is the beginning of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the second is the beginning of the Canadian Bill of Rights, which is the precursor to the charter.  The Bill became law in 1960 and the Charter in 1981, but what was remarkable to me was the tremendous difference between what was considered necessary then and what would be possible now.  If anyone tried to set out a new standard for Canadian law these days and the preamble implied that Canada was/is a Christian nation and that being a Christian nation was a necessary assumption for agreeing with these laws it would get laughed at.  Of course these aren't the stand out exceptions as the documents also reference the Queen of England as our iron fisted ruler; not exactly representative of anything but an amusing anachronism.  I do wonder if those lines will ever be struck out of their respective homes.  I doubt it will happen because there simply isn't any compelling need to go through the incredible process of changing those documents when the edits in question are changing something that is completely irrelevant anyhow.  Much like the Queen being our monarch we really haven't any reason to change what everyone knows isn't true.


I got to thinking about how attitudes towards religion have changed.  I remember back in public school when we had to stand up and recite the Lord's Prayer every day.  There was one girl in my class who was a Jehovah's Witness who did not stand and recite with the rest of us - presumably at her parent's insistence.  At the time it was more than a bit strange because the school absolutely insisted on everyone saying the prayer after singing O Canada.  I suspect that it was simply an obedience thing and that they worried that if they made the prayer optional then everyone would ignore it and they feared that the contagion of disrespect would spread outward; better to hold the line.  I even had religion taught to me in class though very little time was spent on it.  I recall a very old, very nice lady who came by maybe once a month to teach us Bible stories.  I don't know what year exactly those things ceased but they are long gone now.  What I wonder is what other religious habits that seem rooted firmly now will vanish over the next 20 years?  Certainly the practice of saying grace before meals, once ubiquitous, now is reserved far more for dinners with the older folks who expect it as a matter of course.  I am clearly an outlier in this case but I really notice those little things like the stark difference between religious Christmas music and pop culture Christmas music this time of year.


The changes that must occur when a nation changes mindset from 'singular religion' (inaccurate and ridiculous as that statement is and was) to 'many religions, including none' are substantial and take a long time to happen.  Much of the things that change are not hard to change because of religion itself necessarily but instead hard to change because people are used to them.  They support and defend the old ways simply because they are familiar so it takes generations for habits to really shift.  I expect that we will slowly lose nearly all the trappings of religion from public life as Canada continues to become more and more multicultural but it is a process that will most likely outlive me and my generation.


That is, unless some scientist gets off their behind and comes up with a formula for immortality.  Come on guys, you probably only have another 50 years before it will be too late for me, get cracking.

Do people care about religion?

It looks like this week is going to be a heavy religious themed week.  In particular I wanted to talk a little more about a comment that Sthenno made on my post yesterday, specifically

Most people tend to believe the same things their families do on most issues - particularly those issues that they never have cause to put a lot of thought into. We could regard the trend of sharing your parents' religion as evidence that most people just don't actually care that much about religion, so it's never worth their time thinking about it.

I think this is a very telling observation.  Many people obviously care a great deal about religion in that they have strong feelings about other people based on whether or not their religions are the same.  However, just because someone cares very much whether or not someone else is part of their religion has basically nothing to do with the details of the religion.  If you consider the incredible violence that has taken place in the world between religions with only very slightly different ideas it becomes clear that religious disagreements are clearly about the us vs. them mentality and not at all about the difference in details.  If the details were really the issue then one would assume that everyone within a religion must have a tremendous grasp of the ins and outs of their beliefs and the exact differences with other groups but surely this is not the case - most people involved in religious conflict just know that they other side is wrong and they are right.  You might also expect that if conflict were in some way due to the differences in beliefs that the conflict would be greater with greater differences in belief but that is not at all the case - Buddhists have a much greater difference of belief with Christians than the various Christian sects do with one another but yet the Buddhist/Christian violence isn't greater than the violence between various Christian sects.

Another powerful note is that religious people very often pay absolutely no attention to the supposedly infallible and divinely inspired holy documents their religion reveres.  Reading the whole Bible isn't something rare just amongst atheists, it is rare amongst everyone, including those who theoretically think it is the source of all morality and a direct translation of God's will.  I know that if I really thought that a book contained the literal word of the creator of the universe and contained within it the instructions for living according to that creator I would have the entire thing memorized and yet many/most religious people who claim to believe that exact thing have skimmed a few pages here and there.

Clearly people feel very strongly about religion but only in the sense that it defines 'us vs. them.'  Certainly if people were really interested in the details they would learn about them (they don't, by and large) and if the details were important to their acceptance of a religion there would be a smaller percentage of people who take up the religion of their parents/region/culture.  So most people just take up a religion because it is what surrounds them, ignore the details and use it as a definition of tribal allegiance.  There are people out there who choose a religion based on the specifics of the religion instead of simple proximity but those are very much in the minority.

Recruiting Early

In my post on Sunday I talked about my difficulties with the idea of getting Elli baptized.  One crucial part of the equation didn't make it into the post, which is strange because it is such a big part of why I dislike the idea.  That crucial part is the issue I have with religions recruiting children and indoctrinating them when they are too young to question what they are being told.  In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins talks a lot about how children are often referred to as "Jewish children" or "Christian children" or "Muslim children" but that we have an obligation to not profess children to be part of a religion since they cannot reasonably choose for themselves.  He wants us all to call them "children of Christian parents" instead, and although Dawkins is confrontational and nitpicky as usual he has a very strong point.  We don't let children do many things because they simply don't have the capacity to make those choices reasonably yet and barring historical trends religion would certainly fit in that group.  In the past children have traditionally been raised to be a part of their religion from a very early age to ensure that they do not break from it; it is much easier for an authority figure to imprint an idea indelibly into a child's mind than an adult's so religions naturally aim their recruitment at young ones.

The truth of the matter is that if children are raised without indoctrination and are taught about many different religions and that teaching is expressed as "these people believe this" rather than "this is truth, do not listen to anyone who says otherwise" they end up mostly as agnostics or atheists.  Any religion claiming some great access to truth must contend with the issue that hardly anybody believes that truth unless they have it drilled into them when they are very young.  Since clearly a lot of religions actively want recruits they take the easiest path to getting them even if it only works because of the fragility of their chosen targets.  Admittedly many believers are encouraged to believe that anyone who they don't convert is going to suffer eternally so they have the excuse that they are only trying to help.  If you have the choice of indoctrination of a child or eternal damnation of the person it is reasonable to think that indoctrination is a morally acceptable choice but the very idea of eternal damnation is so ludicrous I can't imagine a lot of people actually sit down and think that way.

I am not going to convince most religious people with these ideas I expect.  Religions do have their hardcore members but most people involved in them think along the lines of "Well, baptism is just a little ceremony, everyone goes through it.  What possible harm could their be in sprinkling water and saying a few words?"  I would tend to argue back that if the ceremony isn't powerful and significant then removing it entirely should be no problem but I doubt that is going to win anyone over.  Just like we don't let children vote and we don't let them drink and we don't let them have sex we shouldn't let them choose a religion.  If an adult wishes to believe things that aren't true then they are in good company - pretty much everybody has ideas, religious or otherwise, they hold dear that are ludicrous.  Giving people the best possible opportunity to learn and develop wisdom before they set themselves on a treacherous path is of critical importance and I think we need to apply that to religion just the same as we do to other important choices that children are not ready to make.

A dunk in the river, metaphorically speaking

Tonight my mother in law inquired about getting Elli baptized. This has come up in the past but always indirectly and I never have had a real talk with my inlaws about my feelings on the issue. My gut reaction is a resounding "HELL NO" but I don't want this to be something that causes a lot of friction; even if I don't agree with the religious beliefs of my relatives there isn't a compelling reason to make my life difficult by being belligerent about it. Our conversation tonight was intriguing to me because it highlighted the drastic differences in approach that myself and my mother in law take towards making these sorts of decisions.

She has a Master's in Biochemistry so she has no lack of exposure to scientific thought. In fact she talked about the difficulties she had while going through school when it was obvious that the scientific facts she was studying wholly contradicted the religious beliefs she was raised to accept. She was never able to reconcile those two and instead of sitting down and really trying to hammer out what her worldview really entailed she mostly just accepted that she had two mutually incompatible belief sets and continued to hold both of them anyway. She wants to get Elli baptized because that is how things were done for her and how she raised her children but I think she hasn't really sat down and thought about all the things that baptism entails.

For one, baptism is a ceremonial washing away of original sin. I think original sin is one of the most revolting concepts in Christianity so I certainly dislike taking part in a ritual focused around it. It is also a ceremony signifying acceptance into the church and a promise on the part of the parents (or the adult being baptized, if they are old enough to decide for themselves) that the person in question will be part of the church and raised to follow church beliefs. The church in question is Anglican so it isn't the most hardcore of churches but it still goes entirely against my beliefs. I don't want original sin washed off my daughter since acknowledging it as a real thing is unacceptable to me and we certainly aren't going to raise her in the church so there isn't really anything left of the ceremony aside from habit.

The trick is communicating my dislike of this ceremony while respecting their desires. When it comes to these things only two people get votes but Elli's grandparents are a big part of her life and I want them to be able to have some say in how their part of her life goes.  In this I have to be very careful because of the warring sides of me that have very different sorts of things to say.  Sometimes I want to just yell "WE ARE ATHEISTS, WHY AREN'T YOU?!?" and sometimes I want to just give in and let them do whatever they please as long as I don't have to fight about it.  It takes a lot of patience and caution to walk that line of maintaining politeness while insisting that our atheist notions be paramount, just as their theist notions were paramount when raising their children.

You suck Al Gore

Back in the year 2000 Al Gore was running against George Bush for president of the United States.  At the time I was very much for Gore and figured he would be a good president.  I wasn't completely informed as to US politics but everything Gore said seemed reasonable and I have always ended up being in favour of Democrats over Republicans.  We all know how it turned out of course, and along the way there was much cursing that Al Gore would have been much better.  I don't take that stance back now as I still think with Gore in charge there would be much less pollution, at least one less awful war and vastly more trust in the United States worldwide, but oh man has my opinion of the man plummeted.  You see, I just finished reading Earth in the Balance, Al Gore's book on environmentalism and climate change and he managed to offend and disappoint on so many levels.

I will lead off with some quotes:

"[The United States] will once again redeem its promise as the last best hope of humankind on earth."

"The American drive to correct injustice - from the abolition of slavery to the granting of women's suffrage - has constantly renewed our moral authority to lead."

"The United States has long been the natural leader of the global community of nations."

There are plenty of others of course, all mirroring the idea that the United States enjoys some kind of undeniable moral high ground and is looked up to by the world as the greatest among us.  Not only this, but he insists that the US Constitution is the basis of democracy worldwide; he stops just barely short of suggesting that every country was a depotism prior to US independence.

There is plenty in the book that focuses on climate change instead of grandstanding for his home country of course; unfortunately he provides precious little in the way of numbers and concrete data and plenty of rhetoric and hyperbole.  He is right of course that climate change is real and that the consequences are probably going to be very serious but it is hard to take anything he says seriously when it is so peppered with ridiculous statements.  In particular when Gore starts to theorize about the root causes of climate change he suggests it is all attributable to Plato and Descartes.  You see, their theories about the mind being separate from the world separated religion and science, which of course lead to the current state of environmental degradation.  To be sure, I don't see that at all, but apparently Al Gore does.  He also has this idea that scientists are coming around on the God issue because obviously something had to exist before the Big Bang, so clearly scientists who believe in the Big Bang are beginning to see how God must exist.  Al Gore seems to have forgotten that you don't convince people of scientific fact very well when you spend much of your time shouting about spirituality, mind/body dualism and how science needs to get back to God.

I think the world would have been a much better place if Al Gore had won that election in 2000.  I also think that he is quite the lunatic after reading this book and seeing his movie.  Al Gore, you are better than George W. Bush for president, but I sure wish we could have had someone else entirely.

Numerical Religion

Wendy finally got me to read Foreigner.  This is a Sci-Fi series with 12 books in it so far and no signs of stopping so getting into the series is a bit of a commitment.  I find the author's style really quite irritating at the start but the world building is exceptionally good so I am willing to overlook the rocky beginning.  In the first book the main character is a chump.  While I don't mind characters starting out a little weak and uncertain I find that the level to which Bren does everything wrong, panics constantly and has absolutely no idea what to do really annoying.  This is particularly true because the whole book is told from his viewpoint and even by the end the reader feels out of place and clueless as to what actually happened.  However, an online review by a bunch of people who liked the series basically said that Cherryh's style is always to have a useless main character at the start and have that character rapidly improve with time.  This convinced me to give the second book a shot since Wendy liked it so much.

The second book of the series is intriguing not because of the main character but because of the way the author approaches religious commentary.  Bren grows up and becomes someone respectable, which is good, and Cherryh spends a lot of time dealing with the idea of alien religions coping with new scientific facts instead of emphasizing how terrible the hero is.  The twist is that the aliens in this case, though they are in many ways similar to humans, have very different ideas about numbers.  Their ideas about numbers are some kind of cross between astrology and religion in that they make absolutely no sense, are not agreed upon at all between various alien groups and are considered extremely important to making nearly any decision.  The aliens are forced to adapt to new ideas and technology from the more advanced humans and their number-religions are thrown all into chaos when scientific fact collides with dogma.

Cherryh has classic scientific-religious points of conflict like the world going round the sun, the size of the universe and such appear in the book as the humans and aliens scramble to avoid a war over the supremacy of one number-religion over another.  Amusingly she even has these far future humans wondering if humans in the past had problems with scientific developments conflicting with 'known' facts.  She goes so far as to talk about how the fact that the aliens are gripped by these number-religions has crippled their growth and kept them from advancing because of their constant conflict between what is obviously true and what their religions proscribe.  It is fascinating to see a really different interpretation of the problems with religion and the conflict with science because it really brings to light how hard it can be to see out of your own situation.  I suspect many/most people would read the book and think that the aliens are being foolish and naive while not even realizing how their own views fall into the same traps.

Religion in Relationships

I have been reading a book lately called Parenting Beyond Belief.  It is a collection of essays, letters and columns by a variety of authors talking about raising children as an atheist/agnostic.  In it I found a story about dealing with differences in religious opinion within a marriage that really brought me back to a particular relationship I had in university.  The essays were from the perspective of an atheist who married a former Catholic.  Initially in their relationship the former Catholic was either against or indifferent to religion but eventually went back wholeheartedly to religion and they struggled to maintain their marriage and to raise their child but did prevail with much difficulty.

My religious relationship experience started out similar but ended up very differently.  Initially the girl involved seemed pretty indifferent to religion and gave me the impression of being some sort of agnostic or perhaps a believer in non religious spirituality.  I was an atheist then as now but back then I was much more sold on the side benefits of religion and felt it to be more of a mistaken curiosity than a menace.  I was also overconfident and felt sure that eventually I could bring her around to my point of view.  I was wrong.  Eventually through the course of 3 years her attitude swung around to being much more traditionally religious and eventually it became a major factor in our breakup.  We never attempted to convert or enforce values on each other but it was certainly clear from my perspective that religion was an insurmountable problem.

Certainly children figure very heavily in my doubts about having two very different religious views within a marriage.  It is entirely possible to be very laissez-faire religious and essentially do nothing different from an atheist when no children are involved and to have a fine relationship that ignores that topic for many people.  I am not those people mind you, as I would always challenge my partner to justify their beliefs when those beliefs are supporting groups that have committed and continue to commit terrible crimes.  However, when children are involved these issues immediately come to the fore because the child has to be told what to believe and people find it very hard to watch someone they care about be imprinted with beliefs they find abhorrent or even just incorrect.

My experience with Wendy is much different.  She had a religious upbringing and occasionally has moments of spirituality but they never stay for long.  Inevitably I end up talking with her about what exactly she believes and the precise reasons for it and eventually we come around to the fact that it is "a nice thing to think because it makes me happy but it isn't really true."  I have no problem with that - I have plenty of my own little mental tics that cause me to do strange and foolish things.  The crux of the issue for me is the ability to step back from a position, evaluate the reasons for it logically and objectively and then choose an action.  I might decide that walking over specific patterns of tiles on particular bits of my feet every time is fun but I don't try to insist that it is right, useful or important.

I got very lucky to end up in the situation I did I think.  It is easy to end up with a tiny person standing in front of you asking "Where do people go when they die?" and look at your partner and realize that answering that question is going to create tremendous friction no matter what the answer is.  I am not one to pander to "There are many paths to truth" or any other such nonsense that pretends that people can base their lives around destructive lies with no consequences and I suspect that I would end up divorced quickly had I ended up married to someone with strong religious views.  My answer to the above question is as follows:

When people die their bodies eventually break down into tiny pieces that end up being part of new plants, animals, buildings, air and everything we see around us.  A big part of who we are is in other people, in their feelings and memories of the things we did and how we lived.  We can change people's minds in positive ways and give them memories of us so that a big part of who we are goes on long after we die.

Religion and Global Warming - Seriously

I decided after making my climate change posts to go and read a bunch of what various authors have to say about climate change.  I read a ton on the internet and ordered a bunch of books from the library and in most cases I found what I expected to find.  There was one very dramatic exception though, and it is in the book titled Why We Disagree About Climate Change.  I fully expected this book to be a bunch of skeptics arguments about why climate change is not happening or even some kind of middle ground talking about the many suggested responses.  What I did not expect was someone trying to talk about climate change in the context of religion.  What that sort of thing seems tailor made for me to read and talk about it certainly surprised me to see it.

The author talks a lot about how religions view climate change and what sort of action they advocate in response to it.  He obviously knows a lot about climate but he seems to be seriously lacking in knowledge about religion.  For example:

There is a reverence for life - a sacredness - that is central to nearly all religious writings, even if expressed in different ways. There is also a belief in the innate value of the entire created order, the material universe brought into being as an expression of the creative will of God, or the gods.


I don't know what religious writing Mike Hulme has been reading that suggest these things but it sure isn't the Bible.  This is strange since Mike claims to be a Christian, so one would think that if his holy book (and one that is a basis for several of the largest religions in the world) held exactly the opposite views that he does he would know.  Unfortunately for anyone hoping for objective reporting this book espouses the view that religions all agree that climate change is real and that we have a duty to stop it and to put the welfare of future generations first in our thoughts and considerations.  The Bible does *not* have sacredness of life or value of all creation as a central theme.  Sacrifice, burning, wanton destruction, murder and war are enshrined as central to God's desires and hopes.  Though God does advocate helping widows and orphans he also advocates heinous crimes against anyone violating any of his laws (or anyone not born a Jew) and displays virtually no respect or reverence for anything that isn't human.

This sort of view isn't surprising.  People don't read the Bible, nor do they actually concern themselves with what it says, which is good and bad.  It is good in that there is practically no value in knowing what the Bible says when it comes to making decisions, but it is bad in that they can continue to do whatever they want content that the Bible has something in it that justifies their actions.  It is all well and good for a few religious people to say that their religion has various 'pro-earth' concepts buried in it, but by and large they are simply assuming that their religion epitomizes their own values when in fact there simply is not consensus among those that follow the religion nor agreement from official religious sources.

Like in many other situations it is well and good to say you feel one way, but simply assuming that any group you belong to must agree with you and that your group must have been founded on those principles is simply hubris.  This is all entirely aside from the matter that it is quite trivial to be against bad things and quite difficult to come up with good solutions.  The author does at least acknowledge that religions have not been any more successful than the rest of us in coming up with solutions that actually work.

Bible wrapup

I finished my Bible project but never really gave a overall impression of it since all my posts were broken up and specific to little sections.  I am going to remedy that today and give you 'The Bible in brief'.  This will presumably be the last post about my Bible reading directly, though of course my interest in religion in general remains unabated.

The Bible is not about the sort of God most Christians (and other religions that take the Bible or part of it as a base for their beliefs) think it is.  The God of the Bible has the following characteristics a lot of people wish to ignore or deny:

-God and the Bible are incredibly racist in favour of Jews.  Other cultures and groups are simply unimportant.
-God is random.  Punishments are meted out with no rhyme or reason and are not remotely proportional to the crimes committed.
-God and the Bible are frankly and unapologetically sexist.  Women are unimportant, owned by men and expected to obey.  They are defined by how many male children they can produce.
-God is concerned first and foremost with loyalty to him personally.  Following other laws is good, but worshiping other deities is by far the most heinous crime.
-God is extremely concerned with and impressed by human authority structures.  Men in positions of power are exempt from the rules and are treated as massively more important than humans without power.
-God and the Bible are supportive of slavery and ownership of people.

There are many, many interesting tales in the Bible, but they aren't the ones being told.  The tale of Noah and the Ark as told by religious figures very often ignores the fact that God decided to kill everything on the Earth.  He didn't save Noah from the big flood, he killed every single person on Earth except Noah and 7 relatives, not to mention virtually all other creatures.  Even the stories that seem all nice like Daniel and the lions turns out to be a hideous perversion of morality when you actually read the original.

The Bible is incredibly contradictory.  God is portrayed many different ways by the different authors and there is no clear vision or agreed upon way in which he acts.  He is the Creator of All, the God of the Jews, The Angry, Powerful man in the sky and the source of all Good and Evil depending on what part of the Bible you are reading.  The laws and ideas contained therein are usually contradicted by something else in the Bible and those that aren't often are unclear or wrong.  There is truth to be found therein but since the only way to figure out what is truth and what is wrong is to know it before you open the book that isn't particularly helpful.

The New Testament is purported to be a nicer, gentler set of guidelines to follow but does not live up to its star billing.  The God of the New Testament is still jealous, random, racist, sexist, violent and amoral.  It is perhaps less of those things than the Old Testament but to hold it up as a shining light for humanity is to ignore the actual contents.

The Bible is undoubtedly interesting.  It contains the tales and legends of a people and the ideas that helped to form their beliefs, culture and laws.  I found it to be sometimes a fascinating read and often to be deadly boring but the ideas contained therein certainly are worth preserving as an insight into the mindset of people who lived long ago.  Having read the entire thing cover to cover though I can say with some authority that the Bible is not the place to turn for anything but historical or cultural curiosity.