Clearly Jeff Tayler has no intention of letting up on religion in 2016. Amazingly, Salon continues to publish his regular Sunday attacks on faith, yesterday’s being “Religious delusions are destroying us: “Nothing more than man-made contrivances of domination and submission.”
This is his year-end summary of all the damage done by faith in 2015, including, of course, the Charlie Hebdo attacks and similar instances of Islamist terrorism. Nor does he let Christianity off the hook, noting the Republican attacks on Planned Parenthood, the failure of “abstinence-only” sex education in the American South, the continuing saga of the Duggar family, and the ways that Christian fundamentalists still try to sneak creationism into public schools. N.B. The link to one intriguing study cited by Tayler below is incorrect. I hadn’t known about that work:
That religion retards children’s cognitive development has been well established: little ones indoctrinated to believe in miracles find it tough to distinguish fact from fiction.
A working link to a description of that study is here, and the published study itself is here (reference at bottom, free access). I haven’t yet read the paper, and I’m dubious about these psychological tests, but I’ve printed it out to peruse. (Note the correct usage of the frequently misused term “peruse“.) Here’s the abstract:
Tayler’s paragraph below encapsulates several of the characteristics of New (as opposed to “Old”) Atheism: the claim that gods and religious dicta are hypotheses, many testable in principle; that they fail the test of reason and evidence; and on that basis we should not only reject religion, but persuade others to do so, engaging in “anti-theism”. (Tayler’s reference to heads and eye sockets refers to trepanation and lobotomy, which he earlier characterized as the medical equivalent of faith):
The baseline for progressives should be, however, the truth. If a proposition, however unpleasant, can be supported by objective evidence, we need to recognize it as true, at least until new evidence arises that disproves it. If we’re interested in the wellbeing of our fellows, and we see them behaving in accordance with disproven propositions, we should tell them so and help them see the light. We should, thus, importune our faith-addled friend on the way to the church, mosque, or synagogue, and patiently explain to him the errors of his ways. He needs religion, in short, like a hole in the head or an icepick up the eye socket, and we should tell him so.
After listing the woes of the year, he also gives some high spots, and I was chuffed to find my book among them:
Yet harbingers of real progress did emerge. The brave, indomitable Ayaan Hirsi Ali published “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now,” and one of New Atheism’s founders, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, put out, with former Islamist Maajid Nawaz, “Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue.” Both tomes deal with the faith and what can be done to mitigate the extremism it produces. On religion and its discontents more generally, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist (and 2015 Richard Dawkins Award winner) Jerry Coyne authored “Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible,” a well-crafted vade mecum for all rationalists wishing to mount a cogent challenge to the religiously deluded. And David Silverman, president of American Atheists, helped close out the year on a positive note with his “Fighting God,” a polemic for firebrand atheism that will pour oil on faith’s funeral pyre. Yes, that pyre is already burning. The “Nones” are rising, as readers of this column know.
I’ve read all those books save Fighting God (which I will read); Heretic and the short Nawaz-and-Harris book are well worth reading, though I seriously doubt whether Hirsi Ali’s solution for Muslims, which involves reading the Qur’an non-literally, will really work. A huge majority of Muslims throughout the world see the Qur’an as the literal word of Allah.
Finally, Tayler urges us to keep the pressure on faith and the “religiously deluded” (a term that will make him no friends among their ranks!), but really, isn’t what he says about religion in the second paragraph the truth? Religion is to adults what Santa Claus is to children.
We need to argue our case relentlessly, challenge the faith-deranged in every venue, and never lose sight of how free speech about religion can and does convert believers into nonbelievers.
We need to stress the indignity of religion. Superstitions ordaining us to submit to God are the enemies of human dignity. That God is wholly imaginary only compounds this indignity. Coddling the religiously deluded by showing “respect” for the undignified shams to which they are attached (denouncers of “Islamophobia” take note!) drags out the misery they impose on themselves and on the rest of us. In contrast to religious folk, we nonbelievers know how to live free and should never hesitate to point this out. Religion and freedom are incompatible. In fact, religion and true adulthood can’t coexist. One who shies away from bleak facts surrounding our time on Earth is really a child, no matter his or her age.
“No gods, no masters,” declared early feminist Margaret Sanger. Such is the slogan for human dignity and reason, whether we are male or female.
We should remember this during the upcoming year, which may be anything but easy.
___________
Corriveau, K. H., E. E. Chen, and P. L. Harris. 2014. Judgments about fact and fiction by children from religious and nonreligious backgrounds. Cognitive Science, DOI: 1111/cogs.12138
I particularly like the paragraph about the importance of stressing the indignity of religion.
“We need to stress the indignity of religion.” Perfect!
I agree with everything above, yet strategically I feel I’ve moved on from my earlier position of a pure and dogmatic promotion and assertion of atheism. In a similar post elsewhere, I’ve said that ‘Perhaps it was my own arrival at a pragmatic pluralism that seemed to move the argument along? Personally, I mean. Initially, my response to calls (and direct accusations) of islamophobia and the like was to rail against such guillotine’s and broaden my position to cover not just Islam but all religions.
Yet throughout 2015 I’ve found myself pre-empting these stifling accusations by insisting on [the lefts] support for Muslims. Muslims that we can put names to as both individuals and organisations. Reformist Muslims; gay Muslims; trans Muslims, feminist Muslims; Muslim bloggers; Muslim writers; Muslims journalists; refugee Muslims; ex-muslims; Muslims who decide to be apostates; Muslims against FGM; Muslims who demand education for girls; Muslims in the jails of tyrants, and Muslims whose lives and livelihoods are destroyed by the tyranny of ideas that bear no reason. It is these Muslims that demand our support and our respect. Not their abusers, oppressors and killers.
I’m unsure as to why I have adopted this strategy? [In retrospect it seems quite organic] Is it because these very Muslims are becoming more apparent [more vocal]? Either way, I’m somewhat happier at the outcome of such discussions. Happier still, to continue my support and respect throughout 2016.
Anvil.
There is a difference between atheist and secularist, and personally I find my desire/focus to be on convincing people to be secular, not convincing them to be atheist. Whatever your beliefs, just live together peacefully under equal rule of law. Don’t try and push your beliefs on others using force or the power of the state. Don’t demand we carve out an exception in our laws for your beliefs. That’s all I really ask.
Well said.
That is a gem among Taylor’s sermons. The article is paywalled even for our library, but has a ‘that explains a lot’ sort of result.
The study is an important part of accounting for dissonance among ostensibly reasonable people. The trepanation of people’s minds. Classic.
OT, here is a favorable review of Dr. Coyne’s book – http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=9169
“Religion is to adults what Santa Claus is to children.”
This is as good a way of putting it as any. It would naturally be challenged as oversimplifying a complex issue, but in the end the detail doesn’t change the conclusion.
Given the impossibility of the Santa Claus character, how much more impossible is a personified deity who shows up at our beck and call? Given that Jesus couldn’t be more than a couple of thousand light years away, (and his mother much closer given her frequent appearances), how is it we seem to never detect their entry into or exit from the atmosphere? Any problem Santa has with friction and g-forces would seem to pale in comparison to the problems associated with attaining escape velocity without a vessel and the subsequent travel through the vacuum of space.
I’m not sure how they ‘appear’, but this confusion may simply be due to some form of Clarkian ignorance on our part – it may just appear as magic to us.
Anvil.
For example, my hypothesis concerning the use of teenage virgins vagina’s as Star Gates, negating the light-speed problem (scorned by many ‘regressive’ scientists, though now gaining at least some traction over at Templeton) is easily observed as the ‘magic’ of virgin birth by lesser, illiterate, dark-skinned foreigners and women.
Of course, the return journey may take some more explaining but it is only through the continued application of the scientific method by men of good standing that will allow us to glimpse the ethereal world of the Gods.
In the meantime I believe we should concentrate out efforts on prayer. We know that they come in response to prayer: therefore, prayer must travel through space-time in order to reach them – perhaps as a particle or wave (or both).
If we can construct an experiment to detect ‘prayer’, say, using large bodies of subterranean water, and perhaps toast, then, having proved a communication system, we could point said detector towards the stars – or more specifically towards exo-planets – confirming both extra-terrestrial religiosity and possible triangulation points leading us to their lair.
Following this it would then be simple to co-ordinate an attack.
There’s a couple of ways we could define magic. The Clarkian way you describe is advanced technology within the known laws of Physics (at least in reference to the original quote). The miraculous way I allude to means everything we know about Physics is wrong. I’m fine if you want to call either of these ways magic, but if we are applying the same level of scrutiny to the claims about Santa Claus and claims about Jesus, it is certainly more rational to believe in Santa Claus. We didn’t even address the issues Jesus has in collecting, storing and responding to the sheer volume of prayers. To take the type of immediate action necessary, he’d have to have an output that makes the Santa scenario look like child’s play.
That would be known laws of physics of the perpetrator of said magic. In relation to what we don’t know about physics, all we know about physics IS wrong, isn’t it?
We would have to be in a position, presently, for Clarke’s law not to apply to us, which we can’t be, can we?
Clarke’s Law insists that what we see, we see as magic, precisely because it appears to suggest that everything we know about physics is wrong.
Sorry, three glasses of Shiraz. I appreciate you mean otherwise but love the idea that my scepticism could be overawed and overwhelmed by such technology.
The storage is an interesting point I hadn’t considered. I understand that Santa falls into insignificance when one looks at the storage of prayers. Yet this in itself pails into child’s play when we begin to look at the surveillance problem.
Everyone. Everything. Everywhere. Everyday.
Forever.
Theresa May would be proud to be able to monitor and record so many sins.
Another point may be the security of such information. It may seem that your confession is secure and between you and your god.
History, however, tells us otherwise. Doh! Sorry. Four glasses.
I can’t speak for Chris, but I interpret his description of “means everything we know about Physics is wrong” as that magic is non-physical interaction. We don’t need to know much (but we do) about physics to test for such, thermodynamics that studies enclosure of systems is a classic start.
As for Clarke’s ideas I find them unsuitable. They rely on a philosophical idea of truth-of-the-gaps, to point out the similar theological gods-of-the-gaps idea, that despite sciences have decided quality criteria that rejects Clarke’s idea there would still be a problem. Perhaps, but decidedly not an empirical one. (The rejection constitutes a test of current physics where we can observe that less than 5 %, less than 3 sigma uncertainty, of our physics measurements have run up against the problem with having to cover aliens with seemingly magical powers. In fact, far less of our physics seem to have that problem. =D)
“Four” glasses, are you sure, some liquids makes them appear double I hear!? Something about “alcohol refraction”, I think. 😉
Either way the bottle was empty which negated my refraction problem. 🙂
That’s certainly one way I meant it, at least in the sense that there’s something that can participate in nature (e.g. information collection about every human who ever lived down to the minutest detail), yet at the same time perform feats that violate well established theories.
The Standard Model covers any conceivable way of storing such large amounts of information and special relativity tells us that wherever that information is being stored, it can’t get there faster than the cosmic speed limit. (The company I work for faces this very constraint every day when we have to serve information to people 10,000 miles away from where it’s stored. Minimizing how many times we do this 10,000 mile trip becomes vital).
None of these restrictions seem to apply to God if you follow the reasoning through to anything concrete enough to have an actual proposal about how his omnipotence works, or for that matter how Jesus made his bodily escape from Earth. That’s what I mean by wrong; not wrong in the sense that classical mechanics is “wrong” when it goes beyond the macroscopic domains where we know it applies, but wrong in the sense that Physics simply doesn’t work in the established domains either.
Conversely, I interpret Clarkian magic to be technology that can be explained in principle but simply goes beyond what we know how to do; e.g. people a century ago with no knowledge of QM marveling at our GPS systems. It’s not violating what we know about classical mechanics the way an omnipotent information collector would have to violate both classical and quantum mechanics.
I always thought of Clarke’s Law as more of a sci-fi storyline generator than anything else. At least when Haldane expressed a similar idea, he specifically mentioned ‘the universe’: if it be ‘queerer than we can suppose’, we’ll never know.
C’mon Roux, to dismiss the idea of the 3rd Law as a mere sci-fi storyline generator, one only has to read the 1962 essay which produced it: “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”. (It must be available, so well worth a Google)
He was much more than a mere science-fiction writer. A great historian and popularizer of science, a member (later chair?) of The British Interplanetary Society and winner of multiple scientific awards – one for a system of international communications involving satellites – in 1945 no less.
I don’t believe Clarke meant anything less than the Universe (or Universes, Multiverses, or beyond). Haldane, a biologist, and never short of a great turn of phrase, doesn’t cut the mustard with regards to the 3rd Law. Haldane’s full quote: ‘My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’ falls short of Clarke’s own measure. ‘Queerer than we can suppose’ is to Clarke, a failure of the imagination.
I recall one of Clarke’s such ‘failures’ was the now oft-quoted example of Auguste Comte confidently informing us of the unobtainable nature of the Cosmos beyond our own system. Who would have disagreed with the great man?
No one.
Then along comes spectroscopy and it is like Newton is born aknew.
Another (I think?) was the ability to see through flesh and bone – the invention of x-rays.
We may look at the stars and say (somewhat)categorically we shall never go there given our present understanding of physics. Others, looking at the past, will state that as we can imagine going there, we will – and probably much sooner than you think.
Futurists such as Clarke, though, tell us that our method of getting there will be like nothing we could ever conceive.
His gift to science was to tell us to expect that the unexpected will change absolutely everything. Absolutely.
And of course, it will.
Anvil.
Sorry. A two glass ramble. Merlot.
aknew???
Although the religious almost unanimously wax indignant over the comparison (“MY God is NOT at all anthropomorphic!”) a quick reading of the popular Santa Claus apologetic “Yes, Virginia … there is a Santa Claus” demonstrates how much of a resemblance there may very well be. Look at this for example:
To me this looks suspiciously like those “sophisticated” apologetics which equate God in His aseity with poetry, love, romance, beauty, and hope while simultaneously using these things as evidence of His existence. Coupled with the constant references to things we do not know and our need for humility, we’re dealing with the same methods and presumably the same phenomenom — and this is for the proudly non-literalists.
Of course, the editor who wrote this letter compares believing in Santa Claus to believing in fairies. As someone who knows people who DO believe in fairies (and who respect trepanation, though not lobotomy), I can attest that the butthurt indignation towards someone trying to tell them they’re wrong is pretty much equivalent as that in defense of religion.
Priorities. Children care about presents. Adults are scared of death. At least the illusion of Santa is a metaphor for cool things to entertain yourself while you are alive. Religion restricts the kinds of toys you get to play with.
Christmas is a choice: Either be happy giving and receiving gifts or remind oneself we are nothing more than suffocating slaves who want death. What a nightmare it must be to sustain one’s faith in a virgin born illiterate who could scarcely know the chemical constituents of water, let alone wine.
Jeffrey speaks the truth and does it better than most. In the U.S. at least, this is a battle whether you want it to be or not. Just take a look at what came out of the mouth of Scalia in a speech a couple of days ago. He does not even read the constitution any longer but has apparently written his own. If we understand the delusion of religion and what it does to children and adults, you can only agree with this article by Tayler. Religion and Freedom cannot coexist.
Our founders did not understand this and gave religion an inch so they could take a mile.
I think that the causation might be the wrong way round. I have always attributed my early rejection of religion, despite the daily propaganda in school, to my scepticism.
But then maybe you were the exception to the rule. Some of us got here sooner rather than later.
Fearing that I was using the word “peruse” incorrectly, I checked the definition at the link provided. There are two definitions listed, apparently at odds with each other: “to look at or read (something) in an informal or relaxed way” and “to examine or read (something) in a very careful way.”
Which one is the correct usage?
I like Brother Tayler and enjoy his essays, but I think he has a tendency to step right into one of the most common criticisms of gnu atheism: that it equates ALL religions to fundamentalism. The faithful then argue that his arguments can be ignored as far as they’re concerned. He’s so obviously not talking about them OR their wonderful, human-rights loving, humanistic God.
Sloppy statements about how “Christians .. don’t understand evolution” feed into this delusion. Yes, I know he means only the creationists here, but if you don’t make this clearer the vast majority of the more reasonable, liberal group of the spiritual eagerly latch on to the lifeline of imprecision and start playing the damned “Not ALL Religions” card like it’s trump.
I don’t think the “Christians don’t understand evolution” statement is wrong, at least if by “Christian” you refer to people who believe in souls, Jesus-as-born-of-a-virgin, life after death, and so forth. Those faith ideas are clearly at odds with an evolutionary understanding of life.
If you exclude those kinds of ideas I’m not sure the term “Christian” applies much. But one could argue about that. It becomes an argument about the bounds of the label.
Given that all religions are delusional, blanket criticism is warranted and legitimate. One can be in a more convivial delusion depending on weather you like the sight of blood or drinking a cup of tea whilst acting out the finer or coarser points of that delusion.
Now you will paint yourself into a corner as showing how intolerant you are to other views of the world, of belief in delusion but thats the point here, no quarter should be given and it need not be said, not to the person but to the belief held.
At the beginning of the day, it is how a 21st century enlightened individual behaves that is observed that will make the difference. To expect change in others is not an option it is on the individual to show how facts, reason and science work in this world and leave the delusional behind if they can’t keep up. After all we are all learning.
And in the end like those delusional others gone and after been given their dues grim as this may sound, it really doesn’t matter.
It is their extraordinary loss.
Wikipedia informs me that vade mecum is just a fancy Latin way of saying “enchiridion”.
Oops, I think parsing quotation marks inside link text is too much to ask of poor WordPress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handbook
LOL @ “enchiridion!”
Thanks for the link.