Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Grania is cranky today because she has a sore throat and a stuffy nose and her computer at work is operating at minimal speed. Therefore she offers us two rants, both of which I share. The quotes, links, and screenshots are hers, and her beefs are in bold:
“1. Everyone is acting like a British guy getting engaged is literally the second coming of Christ. I was hoping that Americans would be more restrained, but even in the New York Times there is the obligatory fawning and gushing of joy even from the readers. They also have a moronic op-ed from someone who writes that she never had any interest in the UK royal family until now because the female part of the engagement is mixed race.”
Grania is of course referring to the engagement of Prince Harry to American actor Meghan Markle, who wed in May at Windsor Castle. To show her fealty to the Royal Family, Markle will a. give up acting, b. convert from a Protestant to an Anglican, and c. become a British citizen. Oy! As for the link, here it is (click on screenshot to see the fawning), but Grania adds “the NYT has published around TWENTY FIVE stories on the engagement in the last 48 hours.”
And the statement from author Irenosen Okojie about how Markle’s race ignited interest in the monarchy, and may save it! (Markle’s father was white and her mother black.)
Admittedly, for the most part, until recently I’d been indifferent to the monarchy. It felt old-fashioned, an archaic and exclusive institution people of color couldn’t really connect with nor would feel particularly invested in, given its long historical association with colonial projects.
Prince Harry openly and defiantly dating Ms. Markle made me, a black British woman, see the royals slightly differently. Suddenly they — or Harry, at least — seemed more open-minded. And it wasn’t just me: Other women of color, too, I found, had begun taking notice and talking about the monarchy. Friends discussed the possibility of an engagement, whether the royals would be forward-thinking enough to give Harry permission. When the announcement finally came, the reaction from people of color on both sides of the pond was explosive; memes were deployed immediately.
. . . Are we being ushered into a new era where the boundaries of race and class will be blown open in Britain, when people will grow more open-minded about who they can consider as a mate? This is probably optimistic, though in some ways not: Interracial marriages are on the rise in Britain. In this sense, the prince and Ms. Markle are following, not leading. What is more intriguing is the question of whether, as a result of this unlikely pairing, more people of color will come to feel they have a stake in the country’s most old-fashioned institution.
It’s great that people can accept a mixed-race princess, but I don’t think that’s going to save the monarchy, which in my view deserves to die a quiet death. It will either go on, sucking money from the British taxpayer and prompting teenagers everywhere to gush about things like this engagement, or it will die, regardless of who Prince Harry marries. As for Okojie suddenly getting more interest in the monarchy because of Markle, that’s like getting more interest in the Presidency after Obama was elected.
“2. The press headlines after that stupid National Geographic show are weapons-grade stupid and show zero signs of even a modicum of critical thought.”
Here is a screenshot of a web search Grania did; it refers to National Geographic’s uncritical touting of the finding of a tomb that’s supposed to be that of Jesus Christ Himself:
Once again I emphasize that although some Christians, particularly of the Sophisticated Variety™, spurn the need for evidence for their religion, when evidence as thin is this is reported they’re all over it like ugly on a frog. They do need and want evidence, showing that faith is not enough.
For several years I’ve been pointing outNational Geographic’s increasing descent into religious osculation, its lips placed firmly at the level of the Christian tuchas. They love, for instance, to write articles about connecting Mary and Jesus to archaeology, which, though hardly conclusive, act as confirmation bias for Christians who aren’t comfortable accepting the Gospels based on faith alone. Those people need evidence and National Geographic gives it to them. If Christians didn’t want real empirical evidence, articles like this one wouldn’t be published.
Here, for instance, is one of those articles that gives succor to Christians who are encouraged to think that Jesus’s tomb has been located. Despite the site’s disclaimers (“purported tomb”), everything in the piece, including a video featuring an enthusiastic pro-Jesus professor, points toward the conclusion that yes, Jesus’s tomb has been found (sans bones, of course).
What, exactly was found? Well, a limestone tomb beneath Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre that was apparently discovered by the Romans and supposedly turned into a shrine around AD 326. The evidence for its site as Jesus’s burial place?? A marble slab (engraved with a cross) over the cave, which is taken for evidence of a shrine (e.g., Jesus), and the dating of the mortar affixing the slab to the limestone to about 345 AD. That’s about it. Since this was either during Constantine’s reign (the Roman emperor who became a Christian) or shortly after he died, one can confect a story that Christian Romans were making memorial of Jesus’s tomb.
Against this conclusion are the facts that the “tomb” contained several niches for different bodies (this is a bit unclear), that there is no dating that it existed around 33 AD (when Jesus was supposedly crucified), the absence of any writing on the slab to indicate that Jesus was buried within, any evidence of the bones (and of course there wouldn’t be any since he was bodily resurrected), and the nonexistence of extra-Biblical evidence for Jesus’s existence as a person. Christians would argue, of course, that Jesus wouldn’t get a new tomb, but his body simply dumped with others, and of course would scoff at the paucity of evidence for a real-life Jesus.
Regardless, what’s clear here is that National Geographic has abandoned any journalistic objectivity or skepticism, assuming that Jesus really existed and was crucified, and and has failed to point out the weaknesses of its case. I wonder why any atheist or science-minded person would even subscribe to this rag any more.
Here’s the memorial over “Jesus’s tomb”; the article doesn’t show the “tomb” itself.
I’ve often complained about National Geographic‘s recent trend towards osculating religion, extolling the virtues and verities of faiths without questioning them in the least (see here.here, here and here, for instance). This is clearly an editorial decision, perhaps exacerbated after the magazine was purchased by Rupert Murdoch.
What bothers me about all this is the totally uncritical acceptance of the claims of religion, which is just not proper for a magazine dedicated to the natural world. It’s not just that National Geographic shows how religious people behave throughout the world, which is within the magazine’s remit, but that it not only celebrates faith but takes the truth claims of religions like Christianity for granted. But if Jesus was just a myth, or a rabbi with no divine origin, then Christianity can hardly have a firm basis. But you’ll never see National Geographic examining with a cold eye the historical evidence for the existence of a Jesus-person, for that evidence is very, very thin. That wouldn’t be a way to sell magazines.
Here’s the latest issue demonstrating the credulous acceptance of the truth claims coming from revelation and scripture. “The real Jesus” is the title article, and you can see from that and the subtitle that there’s not a scintilla of doubt that Jesus really existed. “What Archaeology Reveals about His Life,” they say breathlessly, as if there were any evidence.
Below is the magazine’s summary. As you can see, there’s more than just an article on “the real Jesus,” but also an “editorial” by the Editor in Chief that accepts and extols Jesus, a piece by the archaeology editor and a writer about how Jesus’s life fits into the archaeological data, interviews with those two authors, and added Jesus Features to enhance your experience and strengthen your faith.
Can we expect articles like “The real Muhammad?” and “The real Vishnu?”
Reader Gary F, who read this article, sent his take, which I quote with permission:
The article begins with a visit to the archaeologist and Catholic priest Eugenio Alliata as an authority. Then it goes on to point out the importance of Christianity and thus Christ, by the great number of Christian believers in the world, and wastes no time dismissing the skeptics who argue that Jesus didn’t exist. The author clearly has a great sympathy for the spirituality of Christianity, visiting the holy sites with great reverence and awe. The only substance seems to be the discovery of archeological sites of the sort mentioned in the Gospels, thus adding to credibility of the Gospels, thus adding to the awe and reverence. It is also argued that we shouldn’t expect to find much about one person living at that time so long ago, being careful to set a low burden of proof. (Apparently God didn’t want to establish the truth about his greatest message.) The last sentences, after the author visits a holy site and is inspired [JAC’s emphasis]:
“At this moment I realize that to sincere believers, the scholars’ quest for the historical, non-supernatural Jesus is of little consequence. That quest will be endless, full of shifting theories, unanswerable questions, irreconcilable facts. But for true believers, their faith in the life, death and Resurrection of the Son of God will be evidence enough.”
The Editor in Chief’s column ends with: “…sites that are monuments of archaeological significance as well as vibrant centers of pilgrimage and faith. How gratifying, in this season of goodwill, to see the scientific and spiritual coexist.”
Ugh! But you have already mentioned the decline of the magazine several times on WEIT.
Look at the bit in bold. It basically says, “Christians don’t need no stinking evidence, for their evidence comes from faith alone.” What a dire and miserable attitude to foist on readers of a magazine about the world! And, of course, it’s a slap in the face to those Sophisticated Theologians™ who claim that faith is more than “belief without evidence”.
It’s a good thing I don’t have a subscription, as I would have canceled it a long time ago.
I’ve kvetched before about the religiosity and faitheism flaunted by Scott Simon of National Public Radio (see here and here), and about the soft-on-faith attitude of NPR in general. They rarely seem to give atheists a good hearing, but there’s always plenty of opportunity for the numinous, as in the brief interview below as well as the weekly lachrymose lucubrations of Krista Tippett & Company. This brief NPR interview from Saturday (click on first screenshot to listen and see a transcript) is described like this:
The words “thoughts and prayers” are often criticized after mass shootings. Scott Simon talks to David French of National Review, who argues prayer can be the most rational and effective response.
First of all, I don’t see anything in French’s response that says that prayer is the “most rational and effective” response to mass shootings. If you can find it, show it to me.
UPDATE: Reader Mary, in comment #16 below, shows that the quote comes from French’s article in the National Review. And it’s even worse than you think: here’s one quote from French:
“There’s a bottom line here: Either you believe that God intervenes in the affairs of men or you don’t. And if you do, then you know that no one and nothing is more powerful than the creator of the universe. That means that while prayer is not the only response to evil, it is both the most rational response and, in all likelihood, the most effective response.”
The bit above is simply how NPR wanted to sell the interview. But even a believer can’t possibly think that the most rational and effective response to a mass shooting is to say a prayer. Well, listen for yourself.
While I found this interview weird, what’s more disturbing is the lack of any similar response from nonbelievers, who have plenty to say about “thoughts and prayers” after tragedies. The trope “our thoughts and prayers are with the families” sounds good, for it’s a kind of virtue flaunting, but unless it’s matched with either direct expression of those thoughts to the people affected, or tangible action to comfort them and prevent further tragedy, they are completely useless. The thoughts are of course no more useful than prayers. But you’ll wait a long time to hear an atheist discuss the issue on NPR. And if you’re like me, hearing the ubiquitous “our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends” is like listening to nails on a blackboard.
To be fair, French does say that T&P are best supplemented with actions, but doesn’t add that they’re useless without actions:
For example, French clearly thinks that prayer by itself has an effect, even if it’s not helping those who died go to Heaven.
Right. Well, you know, I think a lot of people, when they critique thoughts and prayers, don’t really realize what people are praying for. You know, what people are praying for is comfort for those who are grieving, courage for people who are responding. You know, they’re even praying for inspiration in ideas and how to confront this crisis.
So you know, it’s – the prayer life of a Christian is something that’s very, very rich. And prayer saturates their lives. And it’s going to be – not just a – it’s going to be an automatic response to a crisis. And it’s going to be something that is – provides great comfort to a great deal – you know, a great many people. So when you’re targeting prayers, a Christian, for example, would look at that and be, frankly, kind of puzzled by it.
How, exactly, does prayer comfort anyone but the person who prays—unless that person expresses condolences to the grieving?
I won’t belabor the rest of the short interview, which is more emblematic of NPR’s uncritical attitude of religion than of arrant stupidity, but I want to show one more exchange between Simon and French:
SIMON: Jeannie Gaffigan, the comedy writer and producer who has been publicly battling a brain tumor and happens to be a person of faith, this week tweeted, I’m living proof that prayer works. She’s feeling better now. But it also takes enormous effort along with prayer, sometimes a lifetime of struggle and dedication. Do you agree with that?
FRENCH: Oh, absolutely. I believe – you know, there’s a scriptural principle that faith without works is dead. In other words, you should pray and you should act. But I think the main criticism that many of these Twitter activists are offering is that they’re saying, don’t say thoughts and prayers. Say what I want you to say. And in a political environment where there’s sharp polarization and very different ideas about how to respond to a crisis, that’s just never going to happen. And besides, what use is an activist tweet anyway?
First of all, there’s Simon’s uncritical acceptance that prayer becomes more efficacious with practice. Well, it probably becomes easier with practice, but Simon implies that it works better with practice. Does he mean works to reduce tumors, or just to feel better about them? It’s not clear, but I suspect it’s both.
As for French’s Dictum that “faith without works is dead”, yes, faith without works is useless, but there’s an entire set of Christian religions that believe in the principle that faith alone makes a religion live, and brings salvation, and that works aren’t needed for salvation. This is called justification by faith alone, or sola fide, and is followed by some Protestant sects like the Lutherans. In other words, you can be Hitler, but if at the end of your life you finally accept the salvific power of Jesus, you go to Heaven. (I don’t think I’m exaggerating here.) And sola fide, like French’s own doctrine of “justification by faith and works,” has also been supported by citing Scripture.
Finally, it’s true that, as French notes, an activist tweet is pretty useless—but so are thoughts and prayers.
Reader “Airbag Moments”, however, had a stronger dislike of this program, and not only sent me the link but the following message, and two tweets he sent:
Scott Simon’s choice to cover the story from this angle, to defend prayer in general, and the awful use of prayer by pro-gun politicians in particular, says everything you need to know. I like to call Simon out on Twitter because I know he reads it – and often engages with me. So I Tweeted this example of the original and my fantasy improved version of the story:
Yes, it would be nice to have Simon do a second show with Dawkins. The thing is, however, that Simon interviewed Dawkins back in May, and took an aggressive and confrontational approach completely unlike his bum-licking of Mr. French. So it goes.
Reader Saul called my attention to a Daily Beast article called “Can you be good without God?” (subtitle: “New research raises questions about whether people can be truly good or truly bad without religion”) by Brandon Withrow, whoteaches religious studies at the University of Findlay.
I call the article “deceptive” in the sense that both the tile and subtitle, designed to draw attention to the piece, imply that it will try to actually answer the two questions posed. But it doesn’t even deal with those; rather, it describes work on (and gives comments about) worldwide attitudes towards atheists and their ability to be moral.
The article is actually about the findings reported in a new paper on worldwide attitudes towards atheists in Nature Human Behavior (itself a new journal) by Will M. Gervais and others. (Reference below; free access.) Here’s the study’s abstract, which pretty much tells you what you need to know:
Mounting evidence supports long-standing claims that religions can extend cooperative networks. However, religious prosociality may have a strongly parochial component. Moreover, aspects of religion may promote or exacerbate conflict with those outside a given religious group, promoting regional violence, intergroup conflictand tacit prejudice against non-believers. Anti-atheist prejudice—a growing concern in increasingly secular societies—affects employment, elections, family life and broader social inclusion. Preliminary work in the United States suggests that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from deeply rooted intuitions about religion’s putatively necessary role in morality. However, the cross-cultural prevalence and magnitude—as well as intracultural demographic stability—of such intuitions, as manifested in intuitive associations of immorality with atheists, remain unclear. Here, we quantify moral distrust of atheists by applying well-tested measures in a large global sample (N = 3,256; 13 diverse countries). Consistent with cultural evolutionary theories of religion and morality, people in most—but not all— of these countries viewed extreme moral violations as representative of atheists. Notably, anti-atheist prejudice was even evident among atheist participants around the world. The results contrast with recent polls that do not find self-reported moral prejudice against atheists in highly secular countries, and imply that the recent rise in secularism in Western countries has not overwritten intuitive anti-atheist prejudice. Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religion’s powerful influence on moral judgements persists, even among non-believers in secular societies.
They assessed the degree of prejudice by asking people this question:
. . . participants read a description of a man who tortures animals as a child then as an adult exhibits escalating violence culminating with the murder and mutilation of five homeless people. Then, participants are judged whether it is more probable that the villain is (A) a teacher or (B) a teacher who either (manipulated between subjects) is a religious believer or does not believe in god(s).
Since the correct answer must be “A” (there are more “A”s than “B”s, no matter whether Bs are believers are atheists), the relative frequency of the two “B” answers give an idea of the degree of moral prejudice against either believers or atheists. (The idea that “B”s are more probable than “A”s despite their relative paucity is known as “the conjunction fallacy.”) As you might expect, the authors found universal prejudice against atheists. As they note, ” . . . people overall are roughly twice as likely to view extreme immorality as representative of atheists, relative to believers. Importantly, the effects hold even after adjusting for country variability in the strength of intuitive moral prejudice and individual-level variability in demographics.” And this holds whether the countries are mostly Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or even secular! People just don’t like the godless. But that’s old news.
So the Gervais et al. study tells us something we already know: people are prejudiced against atheists. But that doesn’t answer the question posed, which is “how likely is it that atheists are immoral compared to believers?” That question requires empirical study, and not just college psychology experiments that show how much people cheat on a test after reading either religious or secular passages.
What we need are studies of the per capita rate of criminal behavior by believers versus nonbelievers, somehow controlled for the fact that believers may, for instance, come from milieus that, for different reasons, inculcate them with religiosity and promote moral behavior—a correlation without causation. (It would be much harder to measure general immorality, which is want we really want, versus criminal behavior unless you used answers on psychology tests, a dubious procedure at best.) I’ve heard of studies showing a much lower percentage of atheists in prison than in the general populace, but that is contaminated by both prison “conversions” to faith as well as any correlative factors promoting both religion and immorality.
And we just don’t have those data. We know that whole societies that are nonreligious, like those of northern Europe, can certainly be “good”, so the title question is answered in general. You can be good without God. The empirical question of whether on average you’re less good without God remains unanswered, though as a heathen I’m biased to think that we’re just as good as the faithful, if not better, and certainly have better motives for being moral. (I won’t mention the Euthyphro argument here as it’s not relevant: even if people are wrong in thinking they get their morality from God’s dictates, they could still become more moral simply as a consequence of religiosity.)
The authors recognize that their work isn’t relevant to what the Daily Beast asks:
Our results highlight a stark divergence between lay and scientific perceptions of the relationship between religion and morality. Although religion probably influences many moral outcomes and judgements, core moral instincts appear to emerge largely independent of religion. Additionally, highly secular societies are among the most stable and cooperative on Earth. Nonetheless, our findings reveal widespread suspicion that morality requires belief in a god. For many people, including many atheists, the answer to Dostoevsky’squestion “Without God … It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?” is “Yes”, inasmuch as ‘everything’ refers to acts of extreme immorality.
But a “widespread suspicion” isn’t the same thing as answering the Beast’s title question, and secular humanist James Croft worries that the last sentence could be used to smear atheists as immoral. Read that sentence on its own, and see if you don’t think it makes a conclusion about real morality rather than perceptions of morality.
The Nature paper’s authors are aware of this issue; as the Beast reports,
When asked about Croft’s concerns, Gervais reiterates that the study is only descriptive of individual intuitions.
“It’s really important to note that our paper focuses on people’s perceptions of a religion-morality link,” he says. “Perhaps most people on Earth intuitively feel that morality requires belief in a god or gods. But at the end of the day, morality is a really complicated beast, built upon various prosocial intuitions and cultural processes, including—perhaps, in some cases—religions.”
. . . “Morality is 100% possible without religious belief,” Gervais clarifies. “Just look at Scandinavia, where you see some of the least religious, most peaceful, most cooperative societies in the history of humankind.” “And yet,” he adds, there is still a paradox. “The intuition that moral evildoers must be atheists seems to persist, even among atheists in largely secular countries.”
But even the last sentence of the second paragraph (“But at the end of the day. . . “) sort of implies that religion has a positive effect on morality. But never mind: the lesson is that a liberal magazine has misled its readers (after all, one decides to read based largely on a title, and readers may not read carefully) by giving this article a title and subtitle that are completely deceptive.
To be fair, the Beast does quote some atheists trying to answer the title question (the question that the Nature study didn’t ask!). Maggie Ardiente, for instance, says this:
“Even though we shouldn’t have to prove ourselves to anyone, it’s important to demonstrate that atheists can be good, just like religious people can be good. And atheists can be bad, just like religious people can be bad. It’s as simple as that, and we should call out prejudice against atheists wherever we see it.”
Monette Richards of Secular Woman adds:
“People are, in general, good,” insists Richards, who sees the motivation as something shared by all humans regardless of where they stand on religion.
“It’s how we have managed to have civilizations. Most people don’t want to hurt others, regardless of their religious faith. I have worked with non-religious, religious, converts and de-converts, all of them wanting to make the world a better place, not because it will get them into heaven, but because it is, simply put, the right thing to do.”
Clearly, you needn’t be religious to be good, and atheists have and can articulate their reasons for doing good. But that still doesn’t answer the question whether, on average, atheists are as “good”, or moral, as believers. That question remains unanswered. But even if the answer is “no, believers are better”, the fact that there’s no evidence for the truth of religious claims promotes the patronizing attitude that we should promote a falsehood if it makes people behave better.
The Clarion Project, a think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., states that its mission is “to [educate] the public about the dangers of radical Islam” and “[to deliver] news, expert analysis, videos, and unique perspectives about radical Islam, while giving a platform to moderate Muslims and human rights activists to speak out against extremism.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, of course, has designated Clarion as a group that spreads “Isalmophobia.”
A new post on Clarion’s site, “Pro-Islamic indoctrination in public schools?”, by Meira Sversky, paints a disturbing picture of American secondary schools not only teaching Islam over other religions (a violation of the First Amendment), but also whitewashing the religion à la Reza Aslan. The motivation, I suspect, is admirable: to stamp out bigotry against Muslims, but you can’t do that by violating the Constitution and distorting a religion in the service of liberalism.
One aspect of this “indoctrination” is a U.S. Department of Education program—yes, funded by the taxpayers—called “Access Islam“. Clarion also notes that the program is also supported by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and the Smithsonian.
Below is a video from that program aimed at children from grades 5-12 (note that it’s presented by the “Christian Action Network”, which surely has its own agenda). Since I haven’t found the original government materials myself, take this with a grain of salt. But note as well that there are no similar programs for other faiths—a clear violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition of the government favoring one religion over others. Clarion notes:
Parents across the U.S. have objected to a Department of Education program called “Access Islam.” The federally-funded program is directed at children from grades 5-12 and is also featured on various websites, including PBS Learning Media.
The Smithsonian also promotes the course as does the Indiana Department of Education and the United Nations.
Parents charge that the course amounts to nothing less than proselytizing about Islam in public schools. In addition, they note that the Department of Education provides no comparable study or promotion of any other religion.
A video from the course prominently features a Christian convert to Islam, who declares emotionally how he has found the true religion without any “intermediaries.”
In addition to videos, students are given worksheets to learn the Five Pillars of Islam and how to pray. Children are also expected to memorize verses from the Quran and know the meaning of those verses.
The video (with its Christian gloss):
Note that there is a link to a Snopes investigation of this charge of “indoctrination”. Examining the claim that “Seventh graders in California are subjected to an intense three-week course in Islam that requires them to pray to Allah and memorize Koran verses”, Snopes judges the claim “mixed” (you can see the California history and social science standards here, which certainly do privilege Islam over other faiths). Snopes criticized the use of this curriculum in one California school district:
We think the Byron School District erred badly on the side of liberalism in how it chose to teach this segment and that it displayed an appalling lack of sensitivity to the fears that even more will be drawn to the fundamentalist Islamic faiths that spawned the terrorist attacks on America if Islam is made attractive enough, but that’s a judgment call, not a matter of fact. What can be argued is whether the line separating teaching about a religion and teaching the religion itself was blurred by how the district chose to fulfill the Islamic history element of the Grade 7 social studies curriculum. Whether that line was actually crossed remains a matter of debate (the district is not at this time addressing charges that it had students memorize Koran verses), but it must be said if the shoe were on the other foot — had the portions of world history centering on the spread of Christianity been taught in similar manner — the outcry would have been thunderous.
Clarion discusses the teaching of Islamic doctrine in other states. Not all use the “Access Islam” materials, but all, by preferentially teaching the tenets of one faith and not others, seem unconstitutional.
Maryland
As part of the school’s “World History” curriculum, high school students in Maryland were taught extensively about Islam — without any context of current events — and required to list the benefits of the religion.
In one homework assignment obtained by a news outlet, the question was asked: “How did Muslim conquerors treat those they conquered?” The correct answer was, “With tolerance, kindness and respect.”
One parent, John Kevin Wood, who objected to the mandatory class said, “I don’t force my religious views on them, so don’t force your religious views on me.”
His wife, Melissa, noted, “We cannot discuss our Ten Commandments in school but they can discuss Islam’s Five Pillars?”
New Jersey
Two mothers who spoke up about the courses on Islam that they charge amounted to indoctrination about Islam were smeared with the label of “Islamophobes” after bringing up the issue at a school board meeting.
The mothers objected that their children were required to learn intricacies of Islam but no similar courses were being taught about Christianity or Judaism.
Here’s one video shown to children in New Jersey, and to me it looks like material straight out of CAIR or some similar propaganda organization. Nothing similar is shown about Judaism, Hinduism, or Christianity:
Massachusetts, one of the nation’s most liberal states, has long been dogged by accusations that they show a sanitized version of Islam to students in public secondary schools. Clarion reports this:
Massachusetts
Charges that teaching materials about the Middles East are biased and funded by Saudi, Palestinian, and other Arab states were levied against Newton high schools.
One of the books the schools recommend as reading material included extremist writings by Muslim Brotherhood leaders Sayyid Qutb and Yusuf Qaradawi, who is known for his sermons calling for the murder of Jews and homosexuals.
Newton schools officials have continuously refused to make school curricula and teaching materials available to residents. [JAC: this is unconscionable, as those residents are the ones who pay for their children’s education and, to my mind, are entitled to at least see what those kids are learning.]
Public pressure previously forced the high schools to discontinue using the Saudi-funded Arab World Studies Notebook, which makes spurious charges against Israel. The book has been rejected by a number of other school districts as well.
There’s information on other states as well; here’s one “lesson plan” that thankfully was never adopted, but shows how clueless (or biased) educators can be:
New York
A lesson plan developed in New York State and promoted by the New York State Education Department called “Dying to be a Martyr,” featured video interviews with Islamic terrorists who explain why their attacks on Israelis were justified. The lessons plan contains no instructions for teachers to denounce the views. In addition, the plan does not contain an Israeli response.
The plan was offered to teachers for a decade through the taxpayer-funded Public Broadcasting Service’s “LearningMedia” website.
Whether this form of preferential presentation was done to defuse anti-Islamic bigotry, or to show concern for what the Left sees as an “underdog faith,” the results are clear: a violation of the Constitution. This is what would happen were the Huffington Post to be put in charge of American education.
I have no objection in principle to students learning comparative religion in public schools. As Richard Dawkins has long argued, religion is an important part of human history, and you can’t understand a lot of Western literary references without understanding Judaism and Christianity. However, that cannot, at least in the U.S., justify preferential teaching of the Bible over, say, the Qur’an or Bhagavad Gita.
Further, there’s a big tactical problem in teaching comparative religion: how is it to be done? One can easily see how various groups would quarrel over how their faith is presented (which tenets are important?), and even subgroups, like Sunni versus Shia Muslims, might argue about the presentation of their differing claims. Do you teach Mormonism? And Scientology? If not, why not? After all, Scientology has official tax-exempt status in the U.S. as a “religion”. There are tens of thousands of different faiths in this world (I haven’t even mentioned “folk religions,” of which there are many), and how do you decide which ones to include and which to leave out?
Nobody ever seems to recognize that any kind of religious-studies curriculum is going to be seen as offensive to some people, particularly the dominant faith in America, Christianity. This makes me despair about the possibility of religious education, although I think it might be feasible to construct a curriculum that offends very few people.
Some say that such a curriculum will help mitigate the religious conflicts and hatreds that plague our world, but given that kids are indoctrinated at home well before they’re of an age appropriate for religious education, I’m not sure that such religious education will have the desired effect.
Do readers (especially those in America) think that religious education should be required in public schools? If so, is it possible to design a fair yet useful curriculum?
There’s a new book out called The Mind of God: Neuroscience, Faith, and a Search for the Soul. It’s by a neuroscientist: Jay Lombard, who appears to have started out respectably but now is going the Chopra route (i.e., off the rails), as you’ll see below. In fact, the book has been endorsed by Deepakity himself:
“The Mind of God is inspiring, insightful and thought provoking. This book will awaken new connections in our understanding of the exhilarating relationship between reality, reason, and faith.”
–Deepak Chopra, MD, and New York Times Bestseller of How to Know God
The book is doing pretty well, too: it was touted at HuffPo and yesterday was #189 among all books on Amazon US. It’s #1 in Amazon’s “Science and Religion” section, just ahead of neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s bogus bookProof of Heaven, which has sold very well despite being partly questionable and partly fraudulent. All you have to do to make a million bucks these days is write a book showing that science itself proves God, and that’s apparently what Lombard has done. I must say, the prospect is tempting: though I don’t need the bucks, I’d love to hoax the credulous, God-loving public. But now I can’t, for I’ve said it.
At any rate, you can read how Lombard touts his book by clicking on the screenshot below of his New York Times interview’. (Lombard’s photo looks like a hybrid between Steven Pinker and Harrison Ford):
Lombard appears to be a frank dualist, someone who thinks that the mind transcends the material. Although he’s a bit cagey about God in the interview, his statements are still bizarre. Here are a few:
This one espouses a God-of-the-Synaptic-Gap view, in which Lombard’s failure to fully understand the physical basis of mental illness pushes him toward the metaphysical:
Trying to find the biological origins of psychiatric disease is much more difficult than for a stroke, hypertension or A.L.S. But it’s there. And you see that no matter how reduced you get, you’re left with sand going through your hands. That took me to a completely opposite place, which was to ask questions about purpose and meaning; about suffering, and about how patients themselves make sense of their suffering; and about how I make sense of it as a clinician.
Of course “making sense” of something doesn’t mean you’ve said anything true.
This Q&A baffles me:
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
How much we are dependent on our own brains for whatever form of faith we experience in our lives. How reliant we are on the physical aspects of our spiritual being.
That’s a classic Deepity: it’s trivial (of course our beliefs depend on our brain, as does any spirituality we espouse), but sounds Deep and Meaningful.
Here’s his most egregious statement, which is basically a falsehood. It’s the second part of his answer to the question just above:
What I learned personally is that neuroscience is totally wrong. Neuroscientists don’t believe that such a thing as the mind exists. They flat-out reject the concept of mind. I find that a very scary, slippery slope. I think psychiatry has lost its mind, both literally and metaphorically. A lot of the book is about that part of our brain that connects us to our deeper, spiritual underpinnings. It’s not our rational brain; it’s our narrative brain.
Where is there a neuroscientist who says that the mind doesn’t exist as a reification of physical processes? It’s not a glob of stuff that resides in one place in the brain, nor a non-physical thing that’s detachable from the brain, but saying that mind doesn’t exist as an abstraction (even though it’s not what most people think it is) is like saying that “you” don’t exist. But I believe Lombard is a dualist, as evidenced by the stuff below and by the final bit of his interview:
Persuade someone to read “The Mind of God” in less than 50 words.
I believe we are living in a time of huge existential crisis in our society. I want people to ask themselves, first and foremost, if they have a sense of purpose. If they say yes, but they don’t know what it is, they should read the book.
Ten to one that “purpose” says something about God, and if I’m wrong I’ll eat three freeze-dried mealworms. But wait–there’s more! Here are a few screenshots from the book itself, which you can preview on The Mind of God‘s Amazon page:
p. 12, an espousal of Intelligent Design and a claim of a creator God:
p. 40: Some misunderstanding of evolution and a claim that human compassion comes from the “feeling of God”. I’d be curious to see if Lombard takes the position that there really is a God, which is implied above, or claims that the mere idea of God is sufficient to motivate us, regardless of whether it’s true:
I’m a bit distressed but not surprised that the NYT ran this palaver. It’s woo: a scientific rationale for God (Templeton must love it). But the NYT really needs to look at this crap more closely. It didn’t even review Lawrence Krauss’s new book The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far, which is a true history of modern physics, but the paper gave publicity to the kind of woo described above. Oh, the humanity!
I’m a bit distressed but not surprised that the NYT ran this palaver. It’s woo: a scientific rationale for God (Templeton must love it). But the NYT really needs to look at this crap more closely. It didn’t even review Lawrence Krauss’s new book The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far, which is a true history of modern physics, but the paper gave publicity to the kind of woo described above. Oh, the humanity!