Category: atheism

Which is worse on a flag: approbation for slavery or for a nonexistent god?

June 29, 2020 • 1:30 pm

The good news: the Mississippi legislature voted to remove the Confederate flag from its state flag, a symbol that has long and rightfully angered people because it symbolizes the defense of slavery. Mississippi was the last state to have the Stars and Bars on its flag.

The bad news: From the Washington Post (click on screenshot):

It’s not a done deal yet, but I’m betting, it being Mississippi and all, that the state seal, complete with an affirmation of our trust in a Nonexistent Man, will be slapped on the flag. Naturally, the idea was from Republicans supposedly seeking “unity”, though of course they’re “erasing” atheists:

JACKSON, Miss. — Two of Mississippi’s top elected Republicans proposed Wednesday that the Confederate battle emblem be replaced on the state flag with the words “In God We Trust,” seeking a path toward unity in their state amid the backdrop of national protests over racial injustice.

“It is my personal belief that it is time for us to change our state flag to reflect the love, compassion and conviction of our people,” Attorney General Lynn Fitch said. “The addition of ‘In God We Trust’ from our state seal is the perfect way to demonstrate to all who we are.”

Mississippi has the only state flag that includes the Confederate battle emblem — a red field topped by a blue X with 13 white stars. White supremacists in the Legislature chose the design in 1894 as backlash for the political power African Americans gained during Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Mississippi voters chose to keep the flag in a 2001 statewide election, but the design has remained contentious. Elsewhere in the country, debate has sharpened as Confederate monuments and statues recalling past slavery have been toppled by protesters or deliberately removed by authorities amid a groundswell against racial inequities.

Mississippi Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said a new flag would help future generations.

“In my mind, our flag should bear the Seal of the Great State of Mississippi and state ‘In God We Trust,’” Hosemann said. “ I am open to bringing all citizens together to determine a banner for our future.”

Here is the Great Seal of the State of Mississippi. While it would seem to violate the First Amendments, the courts have ruled that “In God We Trust” is a nonreligious phrase (!). After all, it’s on our currency!

In truth, given a choice between the two flags, I’d much prefer the newer version, for slavery is more odious than religion. Some religions are pretty innocuous, while all forms of slavery are immoral and reprehensible. Still, isn’t there a flag that really will unite the people? After all, “inclusion” must deal with the increasing number of nonbelievers in America.

How about a nice emblem of the state bird? Oh, scratch that: Mississippi’s state bird is the mockingbird.

h/t: Stephen

Ricky Gervais chats with Richard Dawkins

May 18, 2020 • 2:00 pm

This video was posted a week ago, but shows a conversation that took place last fall. On 3 September 2019, Ricky Gervais was given the 2019 Richard Dawkins Award. The award recognizes individuals who proclaim “the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truths wherever it may lead.” Gervais received the award during a Center for Inquiry-sponsored ceremony at London’s Troxy Theatre. Dawkins praised Gervais for being a “witty hero of atheism and reason.” And I have to add, in a mixture of both solipsism and humility, that I received that award in 2015, and now, what with other awardees like Gervais, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Stephen Pinker, and Stephen Fry, I feel like I don’t deserve to be in this club. But I’m not giving my cat back (see below)!

Here are the YouTube notes:

Multi-award-winning stand-up comedian, screenwriter, and actor Ricky Gervais was presented with this year’s Richard Dawkins Award, from the Center for Inquiry. CFI campaigns to remove the influence of religion in science education and public policy, and to eliminate the stigma that surrounds atheism and non-belief.

The Richard Dawkins Award has been presented annually since 2003. Past winners have included philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, activist and feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and actor and writer Stephen Fry.

This event was an unscripted conversation between Gervais and Dawkins, in which everything is on the table and nothing is sacred. They were joined by host, best-selling author and professor of psychology, Richard Wiseman.

It’s worth listening to the conversation, but the best part is the last half. (Wiseman’s presence seems to detract a bit from the flow of conversation.) Robyn Blumner, CEO of CFI, introduces the event and Richard until 7:45, and then at 8:38 in Richard speaks, laying out the reasons why Gervais got the award. The award this year seems to be a glass double helix; mine was a small replica of a skull of a saber-tooth tiger (honoring my love of cats).

At 18:50 Gervais comes onstage for the conversation, and in fact has a gulp of beer as he begins.

I found the most enlightening part of the conversation to be Gervais’s defense of his in-your-face “offensive” comedy style, which starts at 48:00. Richard names his favorite book (you might be surprised), they discuss why comedians tend to be atheists rather than believers, and then Gervais talks about his new Netflix show After Life, which I am still very keen to see.

h/t: BJ

LA Times publishes atheists’ letters

April 18, 2020 • 11:00 am

First, if you haven’t seen Ron Reagan’s video ad on behalf of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which has now been aired several times on national television, including during CNN’s Democratic debate, have a look. (It’s very short, and yes, he’s Ronald Reagan’s son.) I love the jab of the last bit: “. . . not afraid of burning in hell.”

In 2014, however, the ad was rejected by CBS when offered by the FFRF for placement on the popular “60 Minutes” show; indeed, it was rejected for any show on that network. It was a hot potato! Six years later, however, despite the claim of Social Justice Atheists that people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have been counterproductive in promoting unbelief, atheism has become more mainstream than ever.

Submitted for your approval: today’s piece in the Los Angeles Times, sent by reader Paul Topping. According to the paper, someone wrote a letter to the Times criticizing Reagan’s ad, and over a dozen readers then wrote in defending it. This was deemed noteworthy by the paper’s Letters Editor, who published his own take and some excerpts from the letters. Read and smile:


These are good letters, and their number and straightforwardness are heartening. And, as the editor notes, the proportion of disbelief continues to grow.

Here are data from a Pew study last year showing the percentage of those who declare that their religion is “nothing in particular”—a figure that’s grown to the current value of 17%. Atheists and agnostics, too, have doubled their numbers in a bit more than a decade. The percentages are still relatively small, but declared atheists are at 4% and agnostics at 5%.  I think we can safely say that a lot of the “nothing in particulars” would fall into a definition of atheists, so let’s put the proportion of nonbelievers at 20%.

Since the number of Americans over 18 is about 254 million, that makes about 50 million Americans who don’t hold a belief in God (I’m just doing a back-of-the-envelope spec-calculation here). That’s a lot, and what it means is that we aren’t alone—not by a long shot.

A certain odious segment of the Internet, including nonbelievers who simply cannot stand prominent atheists, say that “New Atheism is dead.” I say, “Well, its proponents have moved on to other things, but they gave nonbelief a shove whose momentum continues.” All over the West, religion is waning, driving believers into defensive positions or even hysterics.

Now is the time, what with religion on the run and atheism no longer the equivalent of leprosy, to come out. Write letters, have discussions with people, and, like the writers of letters above, fight back when someone goes after atheists and atheism. We don’t have to let religionists spill their delusions all over the media. No, we don’t have to prosyletize by bringing up nonbelief at inopportune times. But we shouldn’t hide under a bushel, either.

At least, like Ron Reagan, we should assert our right to nonbelief, and call out the believers when they stick their camel noses in the public tents.

 

Crowdsourcing answers to an important question from a child

March 13, 2020 • 1:00 pm

A reader whose name I want to withhold (for obvious reasons) asked me this question. I answered the person, but I also asked if I could put the question up, as one might get better advice from a panoply of answers from readers. The parent said “sure”.  So if you have time, please give your answer, and I’ll alert this concerned parent.

Lo, the question (main one in bold below):

I’m long time reader of your website, and this is my first email to you.  First let me say that I greatly enjoy your content, especially the science posts!

I’ve been motivated to write this email because of a question my 7-year-old daughter recently asked me.  She loves to read, particularly about nature, and is a lover of big cats (especially cheetahs!)

Also, like many children her age, my daughter believes in God.  She clearly sees God in a functional role as a designer.  When I asked her if she could imagine a Universe without God, she answered, “but then how did everything get made?”

Neither my wife and I are religious, and we are not forcing her into atheism.  Rather, we help her think through her questions and arrive at her own answers.  Recently, one her questions provided us with a very good learning opportunity.

After learning more and more about a cheetah makes her living, and the tough life of a predators (and prey) in general, she was very upset.  She asked me the following question:

“Dad, why did God make life such a challenge?”

When I asked her what she meant by this, she elaborated.  She knew that cheetahs have to work very hard to get their prey.  She knew that if the mother cheetah couldn’t catch enough food, her cubs might die.  She knew that the cheetah’s prey must constantly be on the watch in order to survive.  She knows about droughts and floods, and parasites and sickness, and that most baby animals don’t survive.  Why, she asked, did God make it so tough?

If I was still a religious person, I might have given some vapid answer about God’s mysterious ways, or perhaps a horrid explanation about how the sin of Adam is responsible for all of this!  But as a reasonably informed layperson, I think I know the answer to my daughter’s question, and it has a lot more to do with Darwin than God.

So Jerry, can I ask you a favor?  Do you think that you can provide, in a concise form that is understandable to a 7-year-old, science’s answer to why life is such a challenge?  I would greatly appreciate this opportunity to give my daughter a far better answer to this question than what a child typically gets.

Quote of the month: Bertrand Russell on why we shouldn’t believe in fictions that supposedly make us behave better

December 27, 2019 • 9:00 am

Most of you have heard of Russell’s Teapot, the hypothetical but undetectable orbiting object that Bertrand Russell used to show why we shouldn’t believe things for which there is no evidence (i.e., “religion”). But perhaps you don’t know where that simile came from.  While futzing around on the Internet, I came across Russell’s essay “Is there a God?“, which is described as “commissioned by, but never published in, Illustrated Magazine, in 1952.” It’s apparently been published in his collected papers, though, and I give that reference at the bottom. And it’s the first mention of the fabled Teapot.

A lot of the stuff in this essay was taken from Russell’s famous and earlier piece, “Why I am Not a Christian“, first published as a pamphlet in 1927.  If you think that the hallmark of New Atheism is its vociferous, in-your-face anti-theism, think again, for people like Russell, Ingersoll, and Mencken were going hammer and tongs at religion since the 19th century. The two Russell essays are examples. (My own take on what makes New Atheism “new” is its connection with science and its insistent demand for evidence.)

At any rate, while you may be conversant with Russell’s arguments in “Is there a God?”, it’s still worth reading for the concision of its prose. I could make the same arguments as Russell, but not nearly as well or as readably. He’s particularly good at using examples.

I also noticed that his essay deals with issues I’ve written about lately.  For example, the first excerpt below takes up two claims: that religion is a fount of morality essential to make a society behave well (see here), and that even if we don’t buy the existence of a god or the claims of a particular faith, we should lie to our kids about this stuff so they’ll behave better (see my piece on the odious psychotherapist Erica Komisar).  If you haven’t formulated a solid argument against why we should lie to our kids to make them morally upright and happy, Russell has the answer:

There is a moralistic argument for belief in God, which was popularized by William James. According to this argument, we ought to believe in God because, if we do not, we shall not behave well. The first and greatest objection to this argument is that, at its best, it cannot prove that there is a God but only that politicians and educators ought to try to make people think there is one. Whether this ought to be done or not is not a theological question but a political one. The arguments are of the same sort as those which urge that children should be taught respect for the flag. A man with any genuine religious feeling will not be content with the view that the belief in God is useful, because he will wish to know whether, in fact, there is a God. It is absurd to contend that the two questions are the same. In the nursery, belief in Father Christmas is useful, but grown-up people do not think that this proves Father Christmas to be real.

Another argument is, of course, that if a kid grows up and finds her parents lied to her, she’ll not only distrust her parents, but have wasted any number of years of her life.

Indeed, I’m not the first to point out that Santa serves the same purpose as God to many kids: you have to behave well to propitiate Santa so you’ll get good presents at Christmas rather than coal. Likewise, you have to propitiate God lest you be tortured by burning coals after you die. And Russell is right that you can’t force someone to be religious unless they really believe that there’s a God as well as a minimal set of religious assertions.

Russell goes on to explain the bad consequences of lying to people for their own good. While such lies may help individuals in some ways, it instills an unwarranted respect for “faith” in society, and that respect undermines a lot of salubrious social practices:

. . .  it is always disastrous when governments set to work to uphold opinions for their utility rather than for their truth. As soon as this is done it becomes necessary to have a censorship to suppress adverse arguments, and it is thought wise to discourage thinking among the young for fear of encouraging “dangerous thoughts.” When such mal-practices are employed against religion as they are in Soviet Russia, the theologians can see that they are bad, but they are still bad when employed in defence of what the theologians think good. Freedom of thought and the habit of giving weight to evidence are matters of far greater moral import than the belief in this or that theological dogma. On all these grounds it cannot be maintained that theological beliefs should be upheld for their usefulness without regard to their truth.

There is a simpler and more naive form of the same argument, which appeals to many individuals. People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true, it is a coward’s argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a fool’s paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in one case and admirable in the other.

What a great and concise pair of paragraphs!

In many places the social opprobrium of criticizing religion is effected through blasphemy laws, still enforced as capital crimes in a half dozen Muslim-majority countries and as criminal behavior in several Western ones. But there’s also “social censorship” practiced by those who osculate religion or go after those who criticize it. For an example of the latter, see the mean-spirited and misguided essay by Rupert Shortt, religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement, who takes apart Richard Dawkins’s new book Outgrowing God: A beginner’s guide to atheism for being “relentlessly confrontational.” (Shortt also cites a handful of religious scientists, like Simon Conway Morris and the muddled Denis Noble, to demonstrate that science and religion aren’t at odds.) It’s this social opprobrium—the ostracism you receive for criticizing widespread religious lies—that keeps many atheists from “coming out.”

Of course Russell mentions theodicy, which I consider the most powerful evidence against an omnibenevolent and loving God (and who thinks that God is otherwise?):

. . . I will say further that, if there be a purpose and if this purpose is that of an Omnipotent Creator, then that Creator, so far from being loving and kind, as we are told, must be of a degree of wickedness scarcely conceivable. A man who commits a murder is considered to be a bad man. An Omnipotent Deity, if there be one, murders everybody. A man who willingly afflicted another with cancer would be considered a fiend. But the Creator, if He exists, afflicts many thousands every year with this dreadful disease. A man who, having the knowledge and power required to make his children good, chose instead to make them bad, would be viewed with execration. But God, if He exists, makes this choice in the case of very many of His children. The whole conception of an omnipotent God whom it is impious to criticize, could only have arisen under oriental despotisms where sovereigns, in spite of capricious cruelties, continued to enjoy the adulation of their slaves. It is the psychology appropriate to this outmoded political system which belatedly survives in orthodox theology.

Finally, here’s the bit on Russell’s Teapot, which Mark Alpert should have read before he wrote his recent Scientific American piece on why science hasn’t ruled out God:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.  It is customary to suppose that, if a belief is widespread, there must be something reasonable about it. I do not think this view can be held by anyone who has studied history.

While the teapot analogy has been criticized on various grounds (some, for example, say it’s unlikely because there’s no evidence that anyone ever put a teapot in orbit), it has been restated in modern form by the New Atheist Christopher Hitchens. Here’s what’s known as “Hitchens’s Razor“, and we should remember it when trying to argue with believers:

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

The question, “What’s your evidence?” should shut up believers, but of course it doesn’t because they mistake emotion for evidence. Perhaps a more effective question is “What makes you so sure you’re right as opposed to, say, a Muslim, Hindu, or Mormon believer?” If a Christian or a Jew answers that one, the answer is always amusing.

_____________________

From Bertrand Russell, “Is There a God?” (1952), in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943-68, ed. John G. Slater and Peter Köllner (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 543-48.

New talk by Dawkins on taking courage from Darwinism

December 11, 2019 • 10:00 am

Reader Michael called my attention to this 40-minute talk from October’s CSICon in Las Vegas that was posted just this morning by the Center For Inquiry. There are only 150 views so far. First, the YouTube notes:

Compare two ways of knowing the world. On the one hand theologians claim that the universe and all that’s in it was divinely made and can be understood through faith and revelation. On the other hand there is science, and the scientific method which extols evidence, and demonstrated, repeatable outcomes.

Science knows a lot, but has the humility to acknowledge what it still doesn’t know, and is working on. Theology, by contrast, has contributed literally nothing to our knowledge, and hubristically makes stuff up.

Science is continually surprising, even shocking. Darwin dealt the biggest shock of all when he showed that the prodigious complexity of life has a stunningly simple explanation. Darwin’s courage should arm us to face the remaining deep puzzles of existence: how did the universe and the laws of physics originate? Why is there something rather than nothing?

Inspired by Darwin, this lecture celebrates the godless world-view as not just scientifically valid but courageous. We need intellectual courage to resist facile non-explanations. And we need moral courage to eschew comforting but empty illusions and face into the cold but bracing wind of reality.

Richard’s talk is actually two talks. The first discusses the contrast between religion and science, reprising, I have to say, many of the points I made in Faith Versus Fact. Dawkins notes, for instance, that some of the truth statements of Christianity, like the bodily assumption of Mary into Heaven, were simply made up by Church authorities—without even any scriptural justification. He also dilates on the minutely detailed rules of behavior promulgated by some branches of Islam: behavior that is both senseless and unjustified (he uses breast-feeding as an Islamic index or being a “relative”). He calls this religious authoritarianism “control freakery,” and contrasts the dogmatic certainty of religion with the tentativeness of science. He concludes that “religion has contributed exactly zero to what we know.”

Of course I don’t have Dawkins’s eloquence, and you’ll be amused at his contrast between how theologians versus scientists would answer the question, “Is second-hand smoke dangerous?” Finally, he calls out the Left for coddling religion, saying, “I find it nothing short of disgusting the way the Liberal Left in America, people who should be on our side, bend over backwards to overlook the illiberal, homophobic bigotry of Islamism.”

The second part of the talk gets to the title’s point: we should draw courage from Darwin. But how do we do that?

Richard’s solution is to list the “deep questions of science”, and admit that, in contrast to the certainty of theology, we don’t have the answers. These questions include how does our brain’s physiology lead to the subjective phenomenon of consciousness, where do the laws of physics come from, and why is there something rather than nothing. (He alludes to Lawrence Krauss’s solution to this question, but admits that Krauss’s definition of “nothing” is contested.) The intellectual courage that we should derive from Darwin is the courage to work on these deep problems, confident that there is a naturalistic solution even if we ultimately can’t find it. It is the courage to accept the possibility “that something as complex as life and the origin of the universe could have just happened.” It is the courage “to kick oneself out of our emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no rational choice beyond accepting a naturalistic explanation, to think that solutions can be found to these deep problems.”

But why draw the courage from Darwin rather than science itself or pure naturalism? Because, argues Richard, Darwin already solved the biggest problem, the one that people thought could never be solved by reason: how the illusion of cosmic design could be explained in a purely naturalistic fashion. If Darwin could do that, then we should not quail before “lesser” problems like consciousness, dark matter, or the origin of life. As Richard says, Darwin’s success “should armor us with courage to tackle the remaining problems.”

And atheism should armor us with the moral courage: the courage to face our finitiude, and the courage to live our lives knowing that we’re not being overseen and protected by a celestial father.

It’s a good talk, but many of us who have been steeped in Dawkins’s speeches and books may not hear much that is new. Still, remember that he’s speaking not to the readership here, but to many people who can benefit from his kind of inspiration. As for Darwin, well, I greatly admire what he did, persisting in finding a naturalistic answer to the diversity and change of living creatures. Am I inspired by that to tackle harder problems? Well, I don’t tackle harder problems, but if I was inspired by anything when I was doing research, it was by pure curiosity. As scientists we’re inculcated with the idea that scientific problems have naturalistic solutions, and that comes unconsciously and not as an explicit lesson from Darwin. In fact there are many scientists working on hard problems who don’t even know much about Darwin.

But for this audience, yes, perhaps the lesson of Darwin should impart confidence that things appearing intractable almost surely have naturalistic solutions. I myself would have listed a bunch of problems that once were thought insuperable, requiring the intervention of a God, but now are known to have purely naturalistic solutions.

 

 

Therapist advises atheists to lie to their kids, pretending there’s a god and a heaven

December 8, 2019 • 9:00 am

The Wall Street Journal is of course a conservative venue, but this time it’s exceeded even the normal right-wing love of religion. The article below, by psychoanalyst Erica Komisar, is behind a paywall, but I’ll give some quotes. And judicious inquiry might turn up a copy.

Komisar’s argument is based on a 2018 study showing that church attendance and prayer or meditation are positively associated with some measures of well being in growing children. She concludes that we should tell our kids that there’s a god and an afterlife, even if we are atheists. In other words, we should lie to our kids. After all, don’t we care about their welfare? Here’s the article, which leads to a paywall:


Komar’s thesis is based on the paper below from the American Journal of Epidemiology; a free pdf is available by clicking on the screenshot.

I couldn’t be arsed to read the whole paper in detail because it’s long and tedious, but I did look it over. The authors used longitudinal data from the Nurse’s Health Study II and the Growing Up Today Study, enrolling 116,430 nurses aged 24 and 42, and, using questionnaires, assessing their children aged 9 to 14. There were three categories of “religious service attendance”:  never, less than once a week, or at least once a week.  Religiosity (actually spirituality) was measured as answers to the question, “How often do you pray or meditate?”, with answers ranging from “never” to “once a day or more”. They then correlated these measures with other measurements that, they say, indicate well being.

The authors report that going to church at least once per week was associated with greater volunteering, great forgiveness, less marijuana use, later sexual initiation, and fewer lifetime sexual partners (the last three are clearly considered positive traits).  More frequent praying or meditating was associated with greater positive affect, better emotional processing, greater volunteering, a greater sense of mission, more forgiveness, lower drug usage, later sexual initiation, and fewer lifetime sexual partners. However, more frequent prayer or meditation (these weren’t separated) was also associated with more physical health problems. But the authors dismiss that result by arguing that those in poorer health may pray more often. They don’t consider, however, whether more puritanical or virtuous  people might have a tendency to want to go to church or pray more often. In other words, the negative result (poor health) is assumed to drive religiosity, while the positive results are assumed to result from religiosity.

As an alert reader noted (see comment #7 below), the funding for this study came in part from A Usual Suspect:

Based on that work, Komisar simply tells everyone to pretend that there’s a god and and afterlife when their kids raise the questions. Presumably we want our kids to be better off (and use less drugs and lose their virginity later!), so why not lie?  What’s the downside? Here are some excerpts from her article:

Nihilism is fertilizer for anxiety and depression, and being “realistic” is overrated. The belief in God — in a protective and guiding figure to rely on when times are tough — is one of the best kinds of support for kids in an increasingly pessimistic world. That’s only one reason, from a purely mental-health perspective, to pass down a faith tradition.

I am often asked by parents, “How do I talk to my child about death if I don’t believe in God or heaven?” My answer is always the same: “Lie.” The idea that you simply die and turn to dust may work for some adults, but it doesn’t help children. Belief in heaven helps them grapple with this tremendous and incomprehensible loss. In an age of broken families, distracted parents, school violence and nightmarish global-warming predictions, imagination plays a big part in children’s ability to cope.

. . . [Gratitude and empathy]can be found among countless other religious groups. It’s rare to find a faith that doesn’t encourage gratitude as an antidote to entitlement or empathy for anyone who needs nurturing. These are the building blocks of strong character. They are also protective against depression and anxiety.

And so the good psychoanalyst concludes that we need to cram religion down the throats of our kids, for it’s for their own good:

Religion or spiritual practices can teach children mindfulness, a sense of physical and emotional presence necessary for mental health. No matter how active my children were when they were young, they knew when they entered our temple for services they had to calm their bodies and relax their minds. Though they complained when they were kids, and still complain at times as adolescents, they have developed the ability to calm themselves when overwhelmed.

Today the U.S. is a competitive, scary and stressful place that idealizes perfectionism, materialism, selfishness and virtual rather than real human connection. Religion is the best bulwark against that kind of society. Spiritual belief and practice reinforce collective kindness, empathy, gratitude and real connection. Whether children choose to continue to practice as adults is something parents cannot control. But that spiritual or religious center will benefit them their entire lives.

Now I’m not going to quibble with the J. Epidemiology paper, as it would take too long to scrutinize it carefully, but I invite readers to have a look if they’re interested. One thing worth looking at is whether the size of the positive effects are substantial enough to prompt one to interfere in their kids’ lives. But let’s assume that the effects are real and palpable. Should we then lie to our kids?

The idea that we should pretend that there’s a god and a life after death, even if we ourselves reject them, goes against my grain, and I simply can’t accept the idea of lying to children about such things, no matter how salubrious the lie. One could say, “we’ll discuss that when you’re old enough to understand,” but even taking a kid to church is roughly equivalent to affirming the truth of church doctrine.

So why do I instinctively reject Komisar’s advice to lie? (I don’t have kids, so the isn’t doesn’t really come up for me.)  First, if you are an atheist, your kid is going to know it, and see that you don’t practice what you preach. That might confuse the kid, and at any rate I don’t see Komar telling atheist parents to try to believe. But she does seem to be telling us that we should drag our kids to church and make them pray, which of course is bad for us atheists. After all, if our kids go to church, we have to take them there.

Further, there’s no control for other social activities that may foster mental health, like being on sports teams or clubs. It’s just religion versus no religion, yet those in nonreligious countries like Sweden probably find well being in other social activities that weren’t assessed in this study.

And what happens when the kid grows up and figures out for him/her/hirself that religion is bunk and we go nowhere when we die? They’ll not only feel cheated, but they’ll realize that you lied to them. And if you’re an out atheist, it’s even worse, for they’ll see you as an arrant hypocrite.

Finally, as I don’t want to rant at length, Komisar asserts at the end that if you’re religious as a kid because your parents lied to you, then even if you reject religion as an adult, you’ll still carry the benefits of your youthful belief. Now where is the evidence for that?

h/t: Dave