New Atheists "Get It Wrong" - How So?

Richard Dawkins: author of The God Delusion, now being taken to task by Sean Illing for 'intellectual laziness' in responding to religionists.

Sean Illing in a recent salon.com article ('New Atheism's Fatal Arrogance:The Glaring Intellectual Laziness of Bill Maher And Richard Dawkins') tries to make the case that "New Atheism" is way off the beam and suffers from intellectual torpor. Illing writes:

"New Atheism became part of the zeitgeist, a well-timed reaction against religious fundamentalism. The New Atheists are notoriously pugilistic. In print or on stage, they never run from a fight. Whatever you think of their tactics, they’ve succeeded at putting fanatics and moralizers on the defensive – and that’s a good thing."

Damned right it's a good thing because we have taken tons of crap, epithets and insults from the hyper-religious for years, hell decades. Thus, it was only a matter of time before atheists collectively struck back - giving as good as they got.  The descriptor "notoriously pugilistic" is therefore not much use without also noting the pugilistic, hostile provocations that incepted it.

Illing goes on:

"But there’s something missing in their critiques, something fundamental. For all their eloquence, their arguments are often banal. Regrettably, they’ve shown little interest in understanding the religious compulsion. They talk incessantly about the untruth of religion because they assume truth is what matters most to religious people. And perhaps it does for many, but certainly not all – at least not in the conventional sense of that term. Religious convictions, in many cases, are held not because they’re true but because they’re meaningful, because they’re personally transformative. New Atheists are blind to this brand of belief."

In fact, this isn't strictly true. I've explored the basis for religious convictions in a number of previous blog posts, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/peeling-back-layers-of-religious-brain.html

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/04/brain-babble-orwords-from-on-high.html

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/01/brain-studies-show-religious-absolutism.html


Also, I explored the personally transformative aspect of religious beliefs in my recent book, Beyond Atheism, Beyond God, noting the appeal of emergent holistic God-concepts and how some of them (e.g. Brahman, Holomovement) could be reconciled with meaningful scientific tenets  - especially from quantum theory. Some aspects of this were explored in a number of other blog posts, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/12/gods-in-brain-but-not-personal.html

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/06/teilhard-style-conscious-evolution.html

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/03/michio-kakus-model-of-mijnd-is-too.html

The key point is not all arguments are "banal" as Illing claims.

Illing again:

"It’s perfectly rational to reject faith as a matter of principle. Many people (myself included) find no practical advantage in believing things without evidence. But what about those who do? If a belief is held because of its effects, not its truth content, why should its falsity matter to the believer? Of course, most religious people consider their beliefs true in some sense, but that’s to be expected: the consolation derived from a belief is greater if its illusory origins are concealed"

Once more a valid point that I've conceded in sundry blog posts, as well as in my recent book. Therein I noted the "Camus conundrum" discussed by Greg M. Epstein ( Good Without God, p62) to do with Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague.  The essence is embodied in a question Camus’ character Jean Tarrou asks his friend, Rieux:

'Why do you show such devotion considering you don’t believe in God?'

Epstein put this in a contemporary setting, referencing a 2006 book tour by Richard Dawkins for his God Delusion. According to Epstein,  Dawkins was somewhat startled when a young man approached him and asked directly: "Dr. Dawkins, I am thinking of committing suicide, what do you have to say?   Epstein relates that initially Dawkins was so nonplussed he could think of nothing to say,  then suggested the young man (a student at Harvard) could go to the humanist chaplain or – if he’d been at Oxford, he could go to the Anglican chaplain.  In understandable astonishment, Epstein observed (ibid.):


"Is that the best we can do? Rage, rage against the dying of the Enlightenment then shoo our troubled youth back to religion because we’re too distracted or cerebral or both to spend a few minutes of our deep thoughts on being more loving and more helpful?"

I went on to point out:

Let’s be clear the Camus conundrum highlighted in modern form by Epstein isn’t just a problem for Dawkins.  I am certain that in a similar situation, all the current hard core crop of atheists (including those waging wars on Christmas) would be at a loss for words. Overly obsessed with combat against the "believers"  and their myths they'd have lost sight of the human dimensions.

Hence, my arguments and reasoning have been fully in tune with Illing's as when he writes :


"The point is that such beliefs aren’t held because they’re true as such; they’re accepted on faith because they’re meaningful. Consequently, they have nothing to say to those who affirm God for existential reasons.  The New Atheist writers tend to approach religion from the perspective of science: They argue that a particular religion isn’t true or that the empirical claims of religious texts are false. That’s easy to do. The more interesting question is why religions endure in spite of being empirically untrue."

 And that is precisely the issue I addressed in my chapter  13 ('The Problem for Hard-Core Atheism-Reductionism' ) including  the Camus Conundrum and related issues, i.e. that Atheists of any stripe could not simply continue to harp on what they were against but had to state positively what they supported in the world, what they were for. This had special import in the socio-economic realm and I made specific reference to the Humanist Manifesto 2000 .

Atheists then were compelled to respond in some way to such socio-economic proposals and travesties as the "Ryan Budget", the "Ryan Medicare Plan" and overspending on defense (not to mention the Pentagon's inability to account for $1.1 trillion), when million of kids and families remained in poverty - due to Neoliberal policies and a warped system of economic justice. Atheists couldn't simply sit on the sidelines and wash their hands of the cultural and social battles raging in their midst. They had to wade in, or "lean in" as defined in much of the parlance today.

Illing again:


 "Camus was an atheist, but he understood the instinct for transcendence. And he knew that God was a solution (however false) to the problem of meaninglessness. Against the backdrop of death, what matters more: truth or a reason for living? “I’ve never seen anyone die for the ontological argument,” Camus wrote, but “I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others getting killed for ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living.” Today is no different; people continue to kill and die in defense of beliefs that give their lives meaning and shape."

Exactly so - and as I've pointed out, this desperate need for meaning in life is driven by specific brain centers. These brain centers, mainly associated with the OAA or orientation and activation area, are such that the person must give primacy to them in terms of honoring his or her beliefs. of this work has been done by Andrew Newberg, M.D. and his assosciate Eugene Daquill M.D.. Their main findings are published in their book, ‘Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief’.
As the authors note: (p. 5)

“In normal circumstance, the OAA helps create a distinct, accurate sense of our physical orientation to the world. To do its job well….depends on a constant stream of nerve impulses from each of the body’s senses. The OAA sorts and processes these impulses virtually simultaneously during every moment of our lives”

So, in other words, without the benefit of the OAA brain region, we’d be essentially discombobulated vegetables, unable to even get out of bed in the morning. We wouldn’t know which end is up or down, or right from left, and certainly wouldn’t be able to find our way out of a room, far less walk through a downtown of any major city.

The authors’ investigation of how the brain’s OAA translates an image into a religious reality is described in detail in their book, on pages 121-22. This is in connection with a person given an image of Christ and asked to focus on it. Within minutes, neurological measurements show electrical discharges spiraling down from the right attention area (right OAA) to the limbic system and hypothalamus “triggering the arousal section of the structure”.

Now, we know the hypothalamus has both arousal and quiescent components. The authors’ test results and measurements actually showed that as the subject focused on the image of Christ BOTH were activated. As assorted cortical thresholds were crossed, a maximal stimulation (given by spikes in the SPECT scans) produced a neural “flood” that generated feedback to the attention association area.

To make a long story short, the attention area of the OAA was seen to begin to deprive the right orientation area of the OAA of all neural input not originating with the contemplation of Jesus. In order to compensate, and thereby preserve the neuro-spatial matrix (in which the self could still exist) the right orientation area had to default to the attention area focusing on “Jesus”. As the authors put it (p. 121):

“ It has no choice but to create a spatial matrix out of nothing but the attention area’s single-minded contemplation of Jesus”

They go on to note that as the process of cortical threshold "re-emphasis" continues, all irrelevant neural inputs are stripped away until the only reality left is Jesus.

IN other words once the OAA is activated toward a certain belief matrix and certain cortical thresholds are crossed, the person is hostage to his own biology in driving that belief. Presenting him with epistemological or ontological facts is useless because the investment in the belief is already too great to part with it - and if he did his OAA would deprive him of neural input and even balance to enable mobility.

Illing once more time:

"The New Atheists don’t have a satisfactory alternative for such people. They argue that religion is false; that it’s divisive; that it’s unethical; that it makes a virtue of self-deception; that it does more harm than good – and maybe they’re right, but if they don’t understand that, for many, meaning is more important than truth, they’ll never appreciate the vitality of religion."


And I agree for the most part this has been true for most "New Atheists" - but not all. I have strongly defended a person's right to embrace God-concepts no matter how far off from the "truth" they may be - in the interest of attaining personal meaning and transcendence - or what appears so to the believer. This trumps truth because the believer's very life and life quality is bound up with it - given the OAA dynamic described above.

Illing ends with:

"The New Atheists have an important role to play. Reason needs its champions, too. And religion has to be resisted because there are genuine societal costs. One can draw a straight line between religious dogma and scientific obscurantism or moral stagnation, for example. That’s a real problem. But if religion is ineradicable, we have to find a way to limit its destructive consequences. Satire and criticism are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.

If we want to encourage people to care about the right things, we should spend as much time encouraging them to care about the right things as we do criticizing their faith."

No argument there. The question remains what will be the "right things" we encourage the religious believer to care about? I submit they need to achieve a practical translation beyond pure personal meaning. They need to activate that meaning into action in the real world.  That is why the precepts and objectives originally laid out in the Humanist Manifesto 2000 are so critical to tie in with meaning and the business of living - if for no other reason than to ameliorate the most radical extremes of religious expression - which are destructive to us all.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-zuesse/62210/non-religious-population-is-soaring-in-america

Religion's "12 Most Dangerous Ideas" and Neutralizing Them (Part 2)

Ancient image of 'Hell' with Lucifer at the forefront and his demons at work incinerating evil humans. Hell is one of the worst ideas and likely a creation of the reptilian brain.

We now continue looking at more of   Valeria Tarico's "most dangerous religious ideas" (in her salon.com piece) and my responses on how they can be neutralized.

7. Blood sacrifice – In the list of religion’s worst ideas, this is the only one that appears to be in its final stages. Only Hindus continue to  ritually hack and slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale.

When our ancient ancestors slit the throats on humans and animals or cut out their hearts or sent the smoke of sacrifices heavenward, many believed that they were literally feeding supernatural beings. In time, in most religions, the rationale changed—the gods didn’t need feeding so much as they needed signs of devotion and penance. The residual child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible (yes it is there) typically has this function.

Christianity’s persistent focus on blood atonement—the notion of Jesus as the be-all-end-all lamb without blemish, the final “propitiation” for human sin—is hopefully the last iteration of humanity’s long fascination with blood sacrifice.

Response:  As noted above most of these primitive acts are on the way out so need not concern us. The blood atonement is the only one that does - the notion that the "pure lamb of God " (Yeshua) had to sacrifice himself for the expiation of humanity's "sin". But as I noted in previous posts, this is only relevant if Yeshua was really a "god-man" and there is no evidence he is, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/04/jesus-was-he-really-son-of-god-do.html

In the context of the God-concept, Yeshua is derivative and not primary in any case. In other words he is the "son" of the God-concept which most Christians accept. But again, if all such concepts are relative it doesn't matter in the end if people accept him as "Savior" or not. If it comforts them to do so, then that's fine. But because of the relative nature of the primary concept one can't use the son as a belief cudgel to threaten others who don't accept it.

8. Hell – Whether we are talking about Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, an afterlife filled with demons, monsters, and eternal torture was the worst suffering the Iron Age minds could conceive and medieval minds could elaborate. Invented, perhaps, as a means to satisfy the human desire for justice, the concept of Hell quickly devolved into a tool for coercing behavior and belief.

Response: The point about the limitations of "Iron Age" minds is apropos and fits also with their primitive god-concept of something along the lines of the vengeful, petulant demiurgos. Beaten down by climate upheavals and with tribe members eaten by beasts, these minds could only come up with vicious gods that punish for the smallest offenses, and demons that enforce "justice"

But at some point human brains - especially since the Enlightenment - were able to see through this nonsense, and with the advent of science moved on to more sophisticated God-concepts.  This meant religions had to figure out a new way to integrate "eternal" punishments into their dogmas. They also had to make "Hell" more believable - away from it cartoon fire basis. Dante Alighieri's great contribution lay in using the power of his imagination, in his Inferno, to remake Hell away from its childish, cartoon Hellfire imagery.

Instead of unending "fires" which were impossible and spelled  numerous metaphysical problems, including demon reproduction, Dante invoked and created subtle forms of eternal torments peculiar to the violations of the damned. For example, in the 2nd Circle of Hell we find those condemned for their lust, "the carnal malefactors"- for letting their raw carnal appetites subdue their reason. They're the first ones to be truly punished in Hell. (The First Circle is not truly a punishment level but rather "Limbo" - for all unbaptized infants. Not even Dante could image them being sent to eternal perdition!)

The RC Church, especially, began to invoke similar, more nuanced Hell visions to reinforce  its objective to coerce behavior, i.e. if you have sex before marriage you go to Hell, if you masturbate you go to Hell, if you kill yourself for any reason, you end up in Hell.

But the problem for the Hell mongers is that the concept isn't even logically coherent, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/07/hell-impossible-fiction.html


9. Karma – Like hell, the concept of karma offers a selfish incentive for good behavior—it’ll come back at you later—but it has enormous costs. Chief among these is a tremendous weight of cultural passivity in the face of harm and suffering. Secondarily, the idea of karma sanctifies the broad human practice of blaming the victim. If what goes around comes around, then the disabled child or cancer patient or untouchable poor (or the hungry rabbit or mangy dog) must have done something in either this life or a past one to bring their position on themselves.

Response: There is not much to add to this, other than the 'blame the victim' meme comes to the fore.  Also, it appears none of the karma backers grasps the unending karmic loop engendered, and where it ends. If some bad guy did evil act E1  to Y, and it was Y's "karma" and Y does evil E2 to Z to make it Z's "karma" where does the karmic chain end? One karmic adherent I had a debate with claimed the Jews  that died in the Holocaust were all receiving "karma" for terrible things they'd done in past lives. The absolute abominable subtext of this needs no elaboration but it gets to the bottom (glaringly!) of what is wrong with the karma idea. That last example alone ought to be sufficient to neutralize it.

10. Eternal Life – To our weary and unwashed ancestors, the idea of gem encrusted walls, streets of gold, the fountain of youth, or an eternity of angelic chorus (or sex with virgins) may have seemed like sheer bliss. But it doesn’t take much analysis to realize how quickly eternal paradise would become hellish—an endless repetition of never changing groundhog days (because how could they change if they were perfect).

The real reason that the notion of eternal life is such a bad invention, though, is the degree to which it diminishes and degrades existence on this earthly plane. With eyes lifted heavenward, we can’t see the intricate beauty beneath our feet. Devout believers put their spiritual energy into preparing for a world to come rather than cherishing and stewarding the one wild and precious world we have been given.

Response: The last part is especially cogent and why I personally hate the idea of "eternal life" or "heaven" because it leads directly to the dismissal of Earthly life, environment and living in the here and now. It is no wonder then that those who cling the most to concepts like heaven have the least care about climate change and acting to stop it. "What's the point? Earth is only a way station anyway, heaven is my final destination".

But as I also noted in an earlier (April 14, 2012)post:

"The error of the Heaven confabulators, then, is basically the same as for the Hell inventors, since the two represent opposing poles of the same afterlife fantasy or two sides of the same sanity-raping coin. In any reward-punishment setting, one must offset the other. If you invent Hell to punish the unfaithful or the hardcore sinner who refuses to repent, you must have a Heaven for those who comply."

Thus, heaven falls just like Hell because they are two sides of the same "reward-punishment" God-concept. Since all God-concepts are relative then all afterlife concepts are as well, none is to be preferred to any others. Thus, the Buddhist concept of afterlife nothingness is as justified as the heaven-Hell model.

See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/02/myth-of-heaven.html


11.Male Ownership of Female Fertility –  The notion of women as brood mares or children as assets likely didn’t originate with religion, but the idea that women were created for this purpose, that if a woman begets life she must be subjugated is part of many religions.

Response: Again this goes hand in hand with the patriarchal nature of most primitive god-concepts: envisioning "God" as an old white man with a beard,  ruling over everything and everyone- especially women. Of course, the . most expeditious way to eradicate this foolishness is by replacing all personal God-concepts with impersonal ones, i.e. defining the ultimate in terms of energy. Since energy has no gender the male patriarch image becomes redundant.  The nature of a holistic impersonal Being is explicated in my recent book, Beyond Atheism, Beyond God.


12. Bibliolatry (aka Book Worship) – Preliterate people handed down their best guesses about gods and goodness by way of oral tradition, and they made objects of stone and wood, idols, to channel their devotion. Their notions of what was good and what was Real and how to live in moral community with each other were free to evolve as culture and technology changed. But the advent of the written word changed that. As our Iron Age ancestors recorded and compiled their ideas into sacred texts, these texts allowed their understanding of gods and goodness to become static. The sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam forbid idol worship, but over time the texts themselves became idols, and many modern believers practice—essentially—book worship, also known as bibliolatry.

Response: This is something I have commented on in previous posts. In terms of the God-concept context, it means that the Jewish concept of Yahweh, the Muslim concept of Allah, the Hindu concept of Brahmin and the Christian concept of the Trinity all stand in the same epistemological relation.  From an informational point of view, none can be selected as “true” to the exclusion of the others.

 This is completely analogous to there being inadequate information to distinguish one religion’s claims as true to the exclusion of all others. In the case of individual religions and religious traditions, the embodiment of the respective truth claim is found in a sacred revelation, or holy book. For example, the Holy Bible for Christianity, the Talmud for Jews, the Koran for Muslims and the Upanishads for Hindus, each proclaims inherent truths. For many of the respective faiths’ followers, these inherent truths are also absolute in the sense they dare not be contradicted. But if God-concepts are all relative and subjective, then all the sacred books on which they are based must be. None can be "true" to the exclusion of the others.

 

The problem is that the early writers for each scripture suffered from the same limitation of comprehension as their modern counterparts. A finite neural capacity means limited intellectual grasp, irrespective of the particular conceptual allegiance.  This then leads to a "holy" document or scripture that itself is limited and subjective, not absolute.

Note, a genuine God putatively doesn’t make mistakes since perfection is surely a fundamental divine attribute. However, a human brain is quite likely to project its flaws onto its concepts and that includes beholding the contrived deity botching assorted events and actions. No one can blame (finite) brains for this propensity, but humans at least need to recognize that they do it!

 

On the other hand, this defect means that worshipping holy books is to avoided at all costs as another form of idolatry.

The "12 Worst Ideas Unleashed On the World By Religion" - How They Can Be Nullified (Part 1)

Heretics meet their tortured ends at the hands of the Inquisition.

Let us agree as a starting proposition that any form of intellectual enterprise or program predicated on fantasy worlds or what are deemed "beyond the natural" realm (i.e. supernatural) are bound to be rife with terrible ideas. The reason is simple: By ignoring natural world constraints and natural laws (e.g. 2nd law of thermodynamics) then "anything goes" and the casual violation of the laws becomes as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

This then can lead to a fictitious morality and sanctions that have no realistic bearing on what is humanly feasible or possible. These can then lead to arrogant overstepping of bounds and persecution of others simply because they don't share the same beliefs.

So we are clear where I am coming from, and as I pointed out in my recent book, Beyond Atheism, Beyond God, religions ought to be accorded respect but only in so far as they agree they are really  espousing God-concepts - not any actual God. The reason is logical and simple: If there are 2,000 religions they cannot all be claiming  the same truths - or the same "God"- which is the same thing.  Hence,  the only conclusion must be their dogmas and sacred books are about God-concepts. These are fallible, artificial creations of the human mind which are inherently flawed and limited.

If  religions or religionists claim they are advancing the SAME God but in different ways, then the critical thinker must point out the redundancy and all but one are useful. Since they will never agree on whose God meets that standard, then we must come back to the notion of relative God concepts.

The use of the term God-concept then recognizes implicitly that the nearly universal allegiance to some God concept or other is separate from the issue of any factual existence of a deity. In other words, the widespread use and appeal of God concepts does not mean that there is a genuine correspondent in reality. In fact, humanity's penchant for creating Gods via God-concepts is full explainable by appeal to brain architecture and tendencies such as described by Michael Persinger in his monograph, The Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs, 1983.

All this is put forward before I examine each of the '12 worst ideas unleashed on the world by religion' discussed in a recent article  by Valeria Tarico on salon.com. Now, taking them in order - with the author's (edited) descriptions-  then my take:


1."Chosen People" –The term “Chosen People” typically refers to the Hebrew Bible and the ugly idea that God has given certain tribes a Promised Land (even though it is already occupied by other people). But in reality many sects endorse some version of this concept, i.e. he New Testament identifies Christians as the chosen ones.

Religious sects are inherently tribal and divisive because they compete by making mutually exclusive truth claims and by promising blessings or afterlife rewards that no competing sect can offer.

Response: This is pretty well spot on, especially the last part. If then we were to replace "God" with God -concept most of the problems would vanish because mutual exclusion vanishes since all God-concepts are relative one to the other (i.e. none can be known absolutely) and hence none is superior to the others.  Effectively, God "competition" ceases and there can be no spoken idiocy such as one Gen. Jerry Boykin once uttered ("My God can beat your God!")

In the same way, if all are relative, none can promise special "eternal" rewards that the rest can't - because again, all are relative to each other, and subjective. Thus, their beliefs - such as concerning afterlives - must also be relative and subjective.  As I observed in Chapter 1 of my book:

 The implicit relativism acts as a restraint, backing the believer away from a militant absolutism. Ideally, this should dispose him or her to be more tolerant toward unbelievers, and tolerant toward those of different religions


2. Heretics – Heretics, kafir, or infidels (to use the medieval Catholic term) are not just outsiders, they are morally suspect and often seen as less than fully human.

Response: Again, spot on.  "Heresy" is merely a lingual confection and device to isolate a person or minority group if their beliefs do not coincide with the primary belief group's.  In thereby performing this lingual exercise the outcasts created  ("heretics") are rendered sub-humans and can thereby be tortured by the primary group at will - such as shown in the depiction of heretics tortured by the Inquisition.

But if all "Gods" are relative to each other, and also subjective - since as James Byrne observes ('God', Continuum Press, 2001, p. 151.):

"The idea of God as Being is the creation of the philosophical gaze, a result of the drive to objectification which is the hallmark of the history of metaphysics. It is the ‘God’ which is argued about in theism and atheism, and which can only be a projection of humans"

Then it's a wash. No one's God is truer than any other's so anything one person says pertaining to its nature is as good as any other description.  Hence, "heretic" becomes meaningless and superfluous because the original need for isolation is eliminated. This can be formulated as a kind of axiom: "In a world with only God-concepts, which are all relative, there can be no such thing as heresy or heretics."

3. Holy War – If war can be holy, anything goes. The medieval Roman Catholic Church conducted a twenty year campaign of extermination against heretical Cathar Christians in the south of France, promising their land and possessions to real Christians who signed on as crusaders. Sunni and Shia Muslims have slaughtered each other for centuries.

Response:  Given what has already been said in my response to "heretic" the application of the God-concept meme is even more cogent here. Indeed, since all God-concepts are relative and subjective it becomes a stupid waste of time to wage "holy war", crusades, or "jihad" - call it what you will.

Understand here the fundamental thrust of all holy wars is forced conversion of the invaded population to the religion or beliefs of the invaders. But if all Gods are relative, via God-concepts, then conversion emerges as asinine and useless. Conversion would only make sense if one could be absolutely certain his God was superior to all others, But he can't because his brain architecture is too limited to know that. Its capacity for absolute insight is foreclosed and since even the brains of the authors of the respective scriptures are limited, then one can't learn any more from those works either.


4. Blasphemy – Blasphemy is the notion that some ideas are inviolable, off limits to criticism, satire, debate, or even questioning. By definition, criticism of these ideas is an outrage, and it is precisely this emotion–outrage–that the crime of blasphemy evokes in believers. The Bible prescribes death for blasphemers; the Quran does not.

Response: Again, if Gods are replaced by God-concepts, then blasphemy becomes redundant and irrational. It is no longer possible to rationally invoke it because one's deity is no better, no more advanced or "perfect" than another's. This is admittedly a difficult pill for the religious absolutist to swallow, but there it is! Also, let's be clear that severely limited god-concepts can themselves wreak havoc. (Since God-concepts are relative, it is possible to have inferior or puerile ones as well as more sophisticated advanced ones -depending on the level of culture and intellect of the people who created it).

To distinguish retrogressive deity concepts from the more advanced, I invoke "god-concepts"- with the common 'g' indicating a primitive version. In the case of the Biblical prescription of death for blasphemy cited above, let us note this comes from the Old Testament where the primitive concept of the demiurge  or demiurgos dominated. [1]


5. Glorified suffering – Picture secret societies of monks flogging their own backs. The image that comes to mind is probably from Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, but the idea isn’t one he made up. A core premise of Christianity is that righteous torture—if it’s just intense and prolonged enough–can somehow fix the damage done by evil, sinful behavior. Millions of crucifixes litter the world as testaments to this belief.

Our ancestors lived in a world in which pain came unbidden, and people had very little power to control it. An aspirin or heating pad would have been a miracle to the writers of the Bible, Quran, or Gita. Faced with uncontrollable suffering, the best advice religion could offer was to lean in or make meaning of it.

Response: This grotesque idea was at the heart of many of the critics' responses to Brittany Maynard, i.e. to just "offer your pain and suffering up to God".   But what if Brittany didn't believe in God, or in the "God" of these fanatics? Then again, the notion of God-concepts comes to the fore. If Brittany adhered to a more subtle or nuanced God-concept, i.e. that rejected unnecessary pain, then her first duty would be to eliminate the possibility of reaching that stage, e.g. of a pain-wracked vegetable with no cognition who could only experience agony and lacked bowel, urinary control.

Others may insist that THEIR God declares this to be "suicide" and a "mortal sin" or whatever, but since all God-concepts are relative, it doesn't matter. Brittany's choices (even if she adheres to NO God-concept) are as good and as justified as those who accept a more stringent or punitive God-concept.


6. Genital mutilation – Primitive people have used scarification and other body modifications to define tribal membership for as long as history records. But genital mutilation allowed our ancestors several additional perks—if you want to call them that. Infant circumcision in Judaism serves as a sign of tribal membership, but circumcision also serves to test the commitment of adult converts.

Response:  All true, which is exactly why,  as I noted in a previous blog post, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/12/cdc-trying-to-get-male-teens.html

that all forms of such mutilation, including male circumcision, amount to an antiquated religious practice that has no place in the modern world. Neither does it have any place in any objective religious world where all "Gods" are really God-concepts, and "covenants" are derived from these and also subjective and relative.


[1] See, for example, Elaine Pagels’ explanation in her book, The Gnostic Gospels, p. 37, wherein demiurgos is a lesser divine being who gives the law and metes out judgments to those who violate it. Obviously, demiurgos is a primitiv concept for a preliterate people or culture.

(To Be Continued)

The Younger Demographic Abandons Religion - It's About Time!

As I've noted in earlier blog posts, religion is distinct from the belief in a transcendent Being. While the endless search for the latter is likely rooted in the brain, i.e. the brain’s orientation and association area(OAA) ,  see e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/peeling-back-layers-of-religious-brain.html

religions are cultural-social creations, arising from particular ethnicities and geography.

That is, while the brain and OAA engender the God-concepts which we embrace, these concepts are not dependent on having a religion.


Religion - by contrast- is an entirely human artifact generally contrived for the purpose of control of a population via mind viruses.  Religion has been described as a "reaction to the experience of the transcendent" - and this may carry more truth than all the religious books one could ever read in a lifetime. It means that at some phase religion short circuits itself by inveighing against the natural instinct for spiritual self-discovery in most humans. It means that religion's warp and woof is to filter out the transcendent so its power implications are dispersed into assorted secondary human channels or  "media" (e.g. priests, popes, rabbis, ministers etc.)  as opposed to being allocated to the individual to exercise on his own. (Which would allow him to become too much like the ancient Gnostics).

Thus, religion FEARS too much self-autonomy, independent thought and questioning which is why it often retains an absolutist stance regarding the nature of the transcendent- and has historically held out assorted punishments when it beholds any transgressions of concept, or "belief", i.e. for heretics:















Heretics undergo torture at the hands of the Inquisition, for their rejection of basic Catholic tenets.

The mind virus basis for most religions (except the impersonal) was first articulated by biochemist Jacque Monod in his book Chance and Necessity. On page 155 Monod observes:

"The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will ensure the promotion of the idea itself. Its promotion value' bears no relation to the amount of objective truth the idea may contain."

He goes on to note (ibid.):

"The might of the powerful armament provided by a religious ideology for a society does not lie in its structure, but in the fact that if this structure is accepted, that it gains command".

And indeed, we already detect this playing out on the national stage as a group of powerful religious interests, as embodied in 'Hobby Lobby' - seeks to have certain contraceptive provisions in the ACA overturned by the Supreme Court so that they do not have to comply. As Justice Elaine Kagan noted in one of her ripostes, "What next? Will another religion choose to reject vaccinations? Another choose to reject sex education? Where does it end?"

But this is the point given that the most powerful and insidious memes- mind viruses are those dedicated to the spread of religious beliefs.  The most pervasive as well as pernicious are those that hijack political or social power  using what Monod, for example, calls their innate "infectious power", or how easily they are spread.  (One reason one must always be wary of proselytizers in any form! They all clearly seek to enhance the "propagation value" of the virus)

All of this is why it's so gratifying to now learn that of those aged 18 to 35, three in 10 say they are not affiliated with any religion, while only half are “absolutely certain” a god exists. These are at or near the highest levels of religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the 25 years the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.

In fact, the numbers could be even more favorable, and they might be closer to 4 in 10 unaffiliated with a religion. Why? A clue is provided by columnist Tina Dupuy, who  observes. “When it comes to self-reporting religious devotion Americans cannot be trusted. We under-estimate our calories, over-state our height, under-report our weight and when it comes to piety—we lie like a prayer rug.”

So 'Muricans are too chicken shit to divulge their real leanings and predilections in many polls- namely those bearing ultra-sensitive topics like weight, religious belief etc.. So what's new?

Anyway, even more satisfying is that e very piece of social data suggests that those who favor faith and superstition over fact-based evidence will become the minority in this country by or before the end of this century. In fact, the number of Americans who do not believe in a deity doubled in the last decade of the previous century according to both the census of 2004 and the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of 2008, with religious non-belief in the U.S. rising from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001. In 2013, that number is now above 16 percent.

If current trends continue, the crossing point, whereby atheists, agnostics, and “nones” equals the number of Christians in this country, will be in the year 2062. All of which is terrific, except that I will likely not be around to see it.

How did this turnaround from specious religious faith happen? Perhaps many reasons, including the emergence of the "New" atheists prepared to take on religionist bullies where and when they see fit - as opposed to cowering. And also the overreach of the religious politicos - as in the 2012 election with assorted nitwits talking about "legitimate rape" and other nonsense.

But it likely began even earlier. Political scientists Robert Putman and David Campbell, the authors of American Grace, argue that the Christian Right’s politicization of faith in the 1990s turned younger, socially liberal Christians away from churches, even as conservatives became more zealous. “While the Republican base has become ever more committed to mixing religion and politics, the rest of the country has been moving in the opposite direction.”

Nowhere is this being played out more than in the arena of abortion and contraception, and one can see again how the religious will likely overplay they their hand with this new round at the Supreme Court. Whichever way the Court rules, the non-affiliated demographic is likely to grow and that is a good and healthy thing for this nation!