There were some interesting responses to my post on the god worm. There were some that were just annoying. I’m not impressed with the ones that make excuses for religion by calling me “naive” and lacking an impression of the diversity of religious belief out there; one bothersome strategy that I also saw in Barbara O’Brien’s post was an attempt to defocus religious belief.
Here’s how that works. Criticize some attribute of religion, such as its reliance on “faith”, that uncritical acceptance of cosmic baloney. Concerned defender of religion rushes to assert that a) there is evidence for their religion, or b) many religious people have a capacity for critical thought in other areas, or c) their particular religion doesn’t have a faith component (which, I’m sorry, I do not believe). Therefore, because there are these exceptions (dubious as some may be), I should not criticize religion. That’s a bogus argument. One might as well say that because a) some theft is motivated by justifiable causes, b) many thieves would never rob their own mother, and c) their own philosophical world view lacks the concept of property and ownership, we should be more tolerant of thievery.
The other effect of this strategy is to turn religion into a completely empty word. When someone can say they don’t believe in any deities, the supernatural, or any kind of afterlife, but that they are “religious”, then religion is meaningless. It means I am religious. It doesn’t seem to matter that for most of human history, both of us would be labeled “atheists” and condemned for it, and in many periods even executed for it. It doesn’t matter that the dominant religious forces in this country consider us anathema. It just feels so good to sit in our little bubble and pretend we are all one together in our holy sense of the sacred, right up to the moment that a Baptist or a Methodist or a Holy Roller, none of whom are fooled in the slightest, spit in our eyes and damn us to hell. There are about a dozen churches in my small town, and while one is fairly liberal, the rest are stocked with congregations that would reject without hesitation the pointlessly vague usage of “religion” some people are bandying about. We really aren’t swamped with nice, tolerant Buddhists who reject superstitious thinking, I assure you.
Now if you want to be one of those godless, naturalist, live-in-the-moment freethinking types, you have my approval (not that you need it), and I think I’d like more of your kind as my neighbors. When you call yourself religious, though, I think you are doing me harm. You are providing cover for and making common cause with some truly odious beliefs, and you are intentionally dichotomizing people into those good religious people, like James Dobson and the Dalai Lama, and those wicked not-religious people, like me and Richard Dawkins.
Thanks heaps. If you elect to be on that other team, the one with the Dominionists and the Jesuits and the Mormon missionaries, that’s your choice…but don’t get all resentful when I lump the whole lot of you together. And forgive me for laughing when your fellow teammates treat you like dirt.
On a related note, Ezra Klein has a strange post up in which he is saying that the majority of the religious right really aren’t that bad, that what we’re doing is filtering our view of them through a selected subset of their most prominently crazy words and actions. We should look at them more as a predominantly supportive social organization that spins off a few nutty political ideas that get an unrepresentative amount of attention.
The blogs are a booming, cacophonous echo chamber that takes the worst rhetorical excesses of our enemies and amplifies them a hundred times, then repeats them a hundred more. That’s got its utility. And Pat Robertson, to be sure, is an enthusiastic conductor on the crazy train. But Robertson didn’t arise through his inventive theories on the gays, and his television show doesn’t attract advertisers on the strength of his political rants. Mainly, The 700 Club is about religion. And human interest stories. And interviews with authors. And Trinity Broadcasting Network, the source of a couple crazy quotes a week, mainly talks about redemption, companionship, and love. It’s all rather inoffensive; Good Morning America with a bit more Jesus.
True enough, but it’s missing the point. I’m sure Nazis were kind to their dogs and saw their parades as a nice social endeavor that reinforced solidarity with their community; members of the Aryan Nation put out newsletters that promote love of country and their fellow white people, and that contain more cookie recipes than frothing hate-filled racism. Does the fact that all people put more time and effort into ordinary human virtues than they do the implementation of ideology, no matter how heinous or noble, make the criticism of that ideology irrelevant? Is it somehow dishonest to emphasize the differences we find appalling, while filtering out the banalities that trivially unite all of humanity? George W. Bush spends more time sleeping, eating, showering, and shaving than he does promoting tax cuts for the rich, so should the media spend more time describing his grooming habits, to provide “balance”?
Also, I’ve watched TBN and the 700 Club. I agree that they are not exhorting their audiences to go out, club a gay man to death, and vote Republican, and that most of their spiel is babbling about the glory of Jesus and sending more money to Televangelist X. I disagree, though, that it is mostly inoffensive. It’s hour after hour of weird magical thinking and credulous nonsense. Most people are so continually immersed in that Christian froth, though, that they don’t realize how freaky the shows are. It’s anti-intellectual programming through and through, calculated to banish all critical thinking from the viewers’ minds. I am offended by it.
The comparison to Good Morning America is still valid, though—that show is also mindless.
Well said. I’ve personally always thought that much of what passes for “liberal religion” and generic “spirituality” is basically discrimination against non-believers. Even commonly heard defenses such as “there must be more to life / the world” or “I can’t believe this is all there is” betray the fact that these “believers” have bought into the mischaracterisation of non-believers prevalent in our society – i.e., that somehow you need “more” to live a fulfilling life. It’s bizarre to me that people who are usually so well-attuned to seeing other forms of discrimination are incapable of recognising this element of their own behaviour.
I don’t know if any part of what I wrote resulted in this:
“When someone can say they don’t believe in any deities, the supernatural, or any kind of afterlife, but that they are “religious”, then religion is meaningless.”
I don’t think I referred to myself as or think of myself as “religious”. Nor do I side with intolerant views of religious types.
Sorry if my post created confusion.
I was not singling anyone out. I saw a lot of hints of that attitude from multiple sources.
I don’t know that the last half of my point ever really got addressed, and now that this post is here it probably won’t be so perhaps I’ll restate it in somewhat more abbreviated fashion (you can go back to the earlier thread to read it in more detail if interested) . . .
Most people I know are not scientists of any type, most don’t even have any technical training to speak of. Their concept of what rises to the level of proof is significantly less demanding, but to ask them they would not consider it so.
In “their” world, they have seen enough unlikely coincidence to justify belief in their concept of religion. Whether that be the timing of events, or the appearance of natural phenomena at a particular time. We call their individual belief unjustified and irrational, and their collective beliefs dangerous to a free society, but they would contend, just as strongly as you have here for the opposite, that their experience contains all the evidence they would need to see that a God exists and has a hand in this world.
It is true that the have to jettison any question of “why” relating to bad things happening to individual people of their faith, and that the collective question of “why” usually results in the polarizing factor of who curries God’s favor, but all of those are philosophical questions that must be grappled with given what they believe they have experienced. To that end, I’m not sure that calling them out on proof or evidence will mean anything–not only do they pull from personal experiences but in the experiences of their group, which collectively they consider to be too many to be random or coincidental. Their standards of proof are different, and satisfied.
myrddin, so in essense, these individuals have “found” objective proof to their subjective beliefs?
What I’ve discovered is no matter how certain I’ve been about having objective proof for my ideas it has been of no guarantee that it will stand even in online forum discussion. However, many people insist that because it’s their “religion” they should be allowed to have their beliefs without any actual discussion over them.
Since cephalopods are molluscs, as you well know, I take this not as a sign that you believe ‘words mean nothing’, but instead, that you have become a cladist, and joined RPM’s March to War.
It is unfortunate that nowadays it is common for an individual to consider themselves educated despite total lack of scientific knowledge.
Their standards suddenly rise when they consider evolution through natural selection.
“myrddin, so in essense, these individuals have “found” objective proof to their subjective beliefs?”
Yes and no. It’s passed on to them from people they consider to be authoritative about the world, and their experience reinforces it. So their parents, or their pastor or priest says that they have experienced God by the following X experiences, and then that person believes they have experienced the presence or influence of God.
In some ways it is similar to how science has been taught for years at the elementary, secondary and undergraduate level–rarely does a teacher start by stepping students through elaborate experiment recreations and then discuss a particular Theory with a student, normally it’s just the opposite. You tell them the theory, point them to the research, and then sometimes there are experiments they can perform to validate the theory for themselves. It is only at an advanced level that you would consider making the most slight addition to or challenge to a scientifically accepted Theory. Once you’ve been exposed to enough research, or had enough of your own experienced, you would be pretty skeptical of people presenting you with evidence of the opposite . . . sure, it can be done, you have a logical mind, but you’re going to to be skeptical about it.
If you don’t see the parallels to how someone learns and accepts, or falls from, organized religion then you’re willfully ignoring it and how powerful it can be to people who believe they have experienced the divine.
re: arthur
First, I think you need to be more specific about the word “their” as it relates to standard of proof. I know many Christians that fully embrace evolution and what the scientific community has to say about it. Maybe you only mean fundies, maybe you don’t, but at least let the rest of us understand the scope of your objections.
Second, someone who opposes natural selection or evolution believes strongly in the presence and impact of God on the everyday. In their perception of reality, that is observed fact, not faith. Does it match scientific evidence? No, but it matches the evidence they believe they have of how the world operates.
Consider, for a moment, how you would react if someone said they had real evidence against the Theory of Evolution. Do you not think your standards relating to that evidence would be somewhat higher than if the same study or finding supported the Theory? Of course, it stands to good reason that since the Theory is so supported that anyone seeking to seriously undermine it would face a higher standard, a higher burden.
Why then the lack of understanding for how the person you describe would feel? I’m not saying they’re right, but your protestation only describes a natural reaction, so I’m not quite sure what you’re driving at.
So, PZ, what colors are you swearing in? :-)
Superstition is clearly supported by faith, but is not quite the same thing. In light of various animal experiments and my own casual observations, I’d guess that superstition represents a natural “failure mode” for associative learning in general.
I’ve more than once seen someone use “Fish are colorful” as evdence for the existence of God as well as “The Vatican has beautiful religious art. If you saw it, you would be convinced that God exists”
This isn’t a standard of proof by any stretch of the imagination. “Things are pretty, therefore God exists” is certainly not terribly demanding. It is, to use the vernacular, freakin’ retarded.
I hadn’t chimed in on this topic on Pharyngula yet, so I thought it might fit here:
And forgive me for laughing when your fellow teammates treat you like dirt.
That’s what I couldn’t understand about O’Brien’s post. She wants religion to be redefined as something unrecognizable to all but a handful of people, yet she goes out of her way to alienate the only people who’d be on her side. I told her as much in her comments thread, but her response left me even more confused:
Wow, sign me up for martyrhood too.
She’s invested tons of energy into obtaining her very own autographed koan from the umpteenth patriarch of the venerable Roshii The Grand Wazoo, and all she’s got to show for all her sitting zazen and getting hit on the head by old bald men when she snoozes, is the comforting glow of religiosity: a saffron robe and a certificate of entitlement–er, enlightenment. Her anti-religion is a religion too, so why are all five or six of the self identified secular humanists so mean and stuff? So she’s an atheist also– what a lot of theming and branding for nothing. Talk about going all the way around the mountain to take a leak next door. Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water, after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water– but not for the fundies!
If religion has been allowed to be defined by the stupid and the warped, it’s because (if you’ll pardon the oxymoron) the rational among the religious have allowed it to happen. She’s another enabler of the stupid and warped, telling all liberal critics of religion to STFU.
She admits that magical thinking is a part of her religion. Apparently the only reason she needs the religion is to wield her “get out of critical thinking free” card. I listen to liberal leftie Bernie Ward on KGO, who’ll rage against the Discovery Institute on his evening political program, but on his Sunday (former Franciscan priest) “God Talk” program, he’ll happily list the argument from design as a reason for a caller to believe. I can’t compartmentalize my brain that way, and ultimately, I can’t trust people who can.
Why the judgementalism toward people who have never done me any offense?
Religion can’t keep up with opiates for all the minds it wastes– if I weren’t a recovering theist, looking at what theocratic dominionists are doing to this country, I can’t imagine what I’d have done with my life instead of finally relinquishing religion’s hold on my brain too few years ago. What religion does in this culture is displace science education and critical thinking. If it weren’t for Carl Sagan in the seventies, I don’t think I’d have returned from the brink of the space cadet glow derived from behaving as if the universe was a vast conspiracy on my behalf.
There are too few voices like PZ’s here, cataloging the absurdity of religion, and sharing his perspective as a scientist. If the current leftie strategy is to go all McCain snorking Dubya’s armpit to get the fundie vote, so ix-nay on the ecular-say, then we’re in for a bumpy ride.
My husband’s parents attend the Evangelical Free Church in Morris. I’ve been forced to attend a few times. That place is nuttier than a fruitcake.
I take some solace in the appearance that this group of people is shrinking with every generation. Not that long ago we persecuted a teacher for teaching evolution.
Before Kensey no one even talked about sex. Now it’s hard to escape it.
This group will fight this change. Their beliefs mandate it. Unless something changes though it seems futile. They are loosing the mindshare of America slowly but surely. The more they fight, the weirder they sound (Plan B encourages sex cults?), and the more people they alienate.
In some ways I think social institutions like this actually are inescapably affected by evolution too. The mind-set won’t die all at once (without something cataclysmic). It’ll just slowly be replaced with a better version.
Look how much we’ve changed socially in the last 50 years? Imagine what it will be like in another 50.
“Also, I’ve watched TBN and the 700 Club. I agree that they are not exhorting their audiences to go out, club a gay man to death, and vote Republican, and that most of their spiel is babbling about the glory of Jesus and sending more money to Televangelist X. I disagree, though, that it is mostly inoffensive.”
Here’s a point overlooked so far, though PZ has got the right of it (mostly). Some of these religious broadcasts are relatively innocuous (though he’s right that even they promote a dangerously magical viewpoint akin to totalitarian propaganda — Big Brother, anyone?) But some of the stuff on TBN, for instance, is far more actively virulent. Try watching D. James Kennedy or Rod Parsley (where do these guys get these names?) sometime. You’ll have more blatant political propaganda than you can shake a crucifix at. These guys are the Hitlers to Pat Robertson’s Goebbels imitation, the nasty side of the same rhetorical coin. They all hold the same social and political views, it just depends on how well they cloak them.
And yes, before anyone jumps on this, I do equate the Religious Right figures I’ve mentioned with the Nazis, and I’m an historian. They use the same methods and have many similar goals, just read some Dominionist literature if you want to know the real thinking behind their public words.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said. I will make this slightly tangential case to the best of my ability.
It’s my experience and observation that religion is one of those things that people use to excuse doing what they want to do anyway. To that extent, a good person who is religious will usually manage to find a religious justification for doing the good thing.
The real downside is that good people who are religious are often suckers for bad people who are religious. I don’t know why this is so. Perhaps it would be a good idea for those of us who are not religious to contemplate when and how we have been suckered into supporting bad ideas, to see it there are elements in common with the religious cases.
From my own observation of libertarian atheists, it has something to do with utopianism and special pleading, but I haven’t been able to get further than that.
Next time you’re in Morris, Nymphalidae, and the in-laws try to drag you off to the EFCA, stop by my place instead and we can watch Dawkins’ Root of All Evil? instead.
The in-laws are welcome to join us, too. I’m very inclusive.
Yeah, when you talk about Robertson and the 700 Club, you really can’t do so and elide, as it appears Ezra has done, their connection to the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), Jay Sekulow’s anti-ACLU.
Next time you’re in Morris, Nymphalidae, and the in-laws try to drag you off to the EFCA, stop by my place instead and we can watch Dawkins’ Root of All Evil? instead.
You makin’ a move on my wife, Myers? I know her entomology gets the guys all wound up, but hands off, fellas.
RE: myrddin
The scope of my concern is the society that does not value science. I such a climate people who do not understand the scientific method feel free to attack evolution.
Lack of understanding?
I think I pointed out the inconsistency and you provided an explanation for it.
Agreed 100%. And now I’m declaring that the Church of the Mouse and the Disco Ball is a non-religious religion.
Oh nonsense. One might as well accuse you of making common cause with Stalinists.
Guilt by association is it? Count me in. I may be atheist (and I am) and believe in precious few supernatural phenomenon (morals. And mind, if you count that as supernatural). But I make common cause with the United Church of Canada on quite a number of issues. Unlike Dominionists I will not spit in your eye and damn you to hell, and I’ll oppose their efforts to do so. (The eye-spitting at least; the damnation I don’t think they can actually perform). But I will call your bigotry for what it is.
The problem in a nutshell PZ: you’re deeply intolerant. People use religion in a lot of ways; some are bad, some good. You write a lot of nasty things about religion and religious people; you fill your posts on religion with hateful language. People can read something like the Bible, or the Koran, in many ways. Along with other intolerant and dogmatic atheists, you insist on lumping together all forms of belief; religious people as a group are responsible for all religious atrocities committed through history in your book. You wouldn’t accept such an absurb generalization directed at you, nor should you.
Perhaps since I was raised a humanist, I don’t have the baggage that you apparently carry on matters religious.
I’ll read you for the science work you do (which is excellent), but I see more kinship between you and Robertson on matters religious than I do difference. To be sure he’s “religious” and you’re not. But when it comes to cosmologies, you both have demons; you just give them different names.
Hi there. I tend to find myself agreeing with most of what PZ says about religion- it’s quite the most arrant nonsense on the planet. But I found myself pausing a moment at the original derision of “faith”.
I’m not a scientist, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying the philosophy of science, and while there have been some minor advances since, you can’t get much more emirical, sceptical and doubting than Hume- and no-one has really moved much past his conclusion that our belief in things like causality, laws of nature and the ability to learn from experience (induction) rest on… well, he said something like “habits of the mind” but “faith” isn’t a bad word for it.
Popper/falsification added something, and I’d love to be wrong- I might have missed something major- but philosophy of science hasn’t advanced a long way from Hume’s sharp, deep and rather dispiriting conclusions (having reduced it mostly to psychology, he gave up philosohpy for backgammon- the coward!). Newton-Smith’s rather excellent “The Rationality of Science” for example, takes a long scholarly road to the conclusion that Science is at least- mildly rational….
Don’t get me wrong: I’m quite certain there ain’t no god/gods and have no time for supernatural explanations of anything (except in fiction- where, call it a weakness of the mind, I find supernatural forces often make powerful metaphors). I’m quite obdurate in my belief that observation and science informs us of reality. But I base that on a very complex web of beliefs that ultimately- sommewhere- probably has to make some sort of a jump of faith. Argh!
Andrew Wade- just out of curiosity, why DO you believe in “morals” as a metaphysical entity outside of human behaviour- or “mind” as a thing disembodied? These ARE supernatural beliefs, for my money, and despite these being positions held by some otherwise very respectable philosophers, I’ve never found any convincing arguments for either.
I think the former is quite all right, the latter not so much. Dismissive, condescending, strident, or witheringly critical is all right with me, but nasty will not get you far.
My view on “intolerance” is this: it is perfectly all right to be intolerant of traits or behaviors, such as blind faith. Expressing intolerance for faith does not mean that one is a bigot, or intolerant of people who have faith. Atheists (at least those of us who accept materialism) ought to be tolerant and understanding of the poor theists who have had their brains invaded by the religion virus, and do what we can to stem the damage. We can do this by cajoling and insult (not my favored tactic), by setting a good example, or by reasoned argument.
RobStowell: I look at it from a pragmatic perspective; The leaps of faith we make to do Science are unprovable but necessary if we are to talk about things or interact with the universe.
Without things like causality or induction we can’t assume objects will act in a comprehensible way, and if things are incomprehensible they can’t be talked about or interacted with in any meaningful fashion.
Scott Hatfield here. At the risk of being presumptuous, I bet I would enjoy the Dawkins video over the church in Morris, as well. If only I could finagle an invite (sigh).
Anyway, I wanted to say that while I agree with RobStowell that something like faith is required for the axioms of science, I must demur from the notion that ‘mind’ as described, “a thing disembodied”, necessarily appeals to the supernatural.
One could take the position that objects like ‘mind’ are emergent properties of natural objects, but not amenable to objective investigation by beings such as ourselves. No naturalistic description is possible; that is not the same position as saying that there must be a supernatural explanation.
Cheers….SH
I’m not sure why anyone would believe there are “leaps of faith” in science. Philosophy doesn’t have quite the track record of science, so when philosophy says science is impossible, I’m inclined to think philosophy is wrong. Hume’s inductive scepticism is a straightforward denial of scientific progress, as is Popper’s falsificationism, and everything Kuhn wrought. These aren’t things to be taken lightly.
Hume’s weaker position of inductive fallibalism is current in philosophy of science, but is not anything like “faith,” it merely means induction is fallible. Many simply take that to mean inductive logic is probabilistic (I think this is also the view of most scientists). No leaps of faith there. But even though most modern scientists agree with it, I think even rejecting the possibility of certainty in science on these grounds is a stretch.
No, the problem is that there are many people like you who think that being deeply intolerant is necessarily bad. The nature of the things that one tolerates (and does not tolerate) determines whether one’s tolerance (and lack thereof) is good or bad.
Being intolerant of foolishness, deception, illogic, and untruth is no vice.
PZ, most of the time, when you criticize Christians or Christianity, we richly deserve the criticism. Some oxes need goring, from time to time. Keep up the good work.
I think that rationality is not as widespread as we would hope, and in fact it is a rare gift. And this is why religion persists, and will persist.
http://tuibguy.messagemonster.com/rationality.htm
Pardon me for being self-referential….
robstowell wrote:
Put simply, I suspect there are theories of human behaviour that are quite good at explaining why we think things like murder are immoral. But I do not think naturalistic explanations for why murder is immoral exist. In any event I haven’t found any in any way convincing, and so I treat morals as a metaphysical entity. One way out is to simply deny “Should we not murder?” is a meaningful question; I’m not willing to do that.
I don’t think minds can be disembodied. I don’t relate to other minds quite the same way as I do to most natural phenomenon, it’s not so much that I believe minds to be supernatural as that I treat them as such.
Of course, you may simply be making a logical mistake (petitio principi to be specific), by surreptitiously reifying the category “moral” when you should confine yourself to the question you already admitted is answerable, why people consider certain things moral.
The problem in a nutshell PZ: you’re deeply intolerant.
“No, the problem is that there are many people like you who think that being deeply intolerant is necessarily bad. The nature of the things that one tolerates (and does not tolerate) determines whether one’s tolerance (and lack thereof) is good or bad.
Being intolerant of foolishness, deception, illogic, and untruth is no vice.”
Try reading the whole thing. There are brands of religion that are foolish, deceptive, etc. Calling them as such is not intolerance; the Earth is not 6,000 years old. PZ extends this treatment to all religions and casts group blame on all religious people for everything bad ever done in the name of any religion. That’s not the same as calling things by their right name.
OhioMarc- I’ll join PZ here. ALL religion is foolish, deceptive, etc. by definition, since it involves swallowing rationally insupportable beliefs that are easily recogniziable as wishful thinking. (I make NO exceptions- for example I’m quite sympathetic to Buddhism as philosophy of life and mental hygiene, but I have no time at all for any form of it that is religious in the sense of involving silly metaphysical beliefs.) Either clean up your own cognitive house, or learn to live with the disrespect of those who have theirs in order. Since we’re a pretty small and very powerless minority, I don’t know why you find that “hardship” so unbearable.
Why yes, do.
That is deeply, profoundly incorrect. I blame all religious people for promoting a deficiency of critical thinking and raising generations of fantasists, which is entirely correct. I do not make the mistake of accusing all religious people of the crimes that a minority commit because they are unable to tell reality from fantasy. Encouraging sloppy thinking is not the same as encouraging gay bashing, for instance, but gay bashing flourishes in sloppy thinkers.
Religion is inherently a bad thing, in that it induces people to wall off certain portions of their beliefs and absolve that portion from critical analysis or rational debate. The content of the religion is irrelevant to this form of harm.
The problem is that you are foolish and ignorant, inferior human wormbaby.
Joker Cross, I’ve even heard (paraphrased) “Bach’s music is amazing, therefore Christianity is correct.”
ryanb: The problem is I see increasing polarization. While it is true that larger numbers of people are becoming secular, the fundies (of all stripes) are also massively gaining in numbers, mostly by much larger birthrates.
robstowell: Short answer – Hume was too much of an empiricist for his own good. The essential insight of the rationalist school is that in order to understand the world one must invent hypotheses. We do this all the time, and scientists are those who systematize and have great checking procedures. (I said this was a short answer.) For an amusing look at this sort of answer as it pertains to refuting Berkeley (rather than Hume, but it works for either), see Bunge’s 1954 paper, “New dialogues between Hylas and Philonous”, which is also reprinted in his Scientific Materialism.
How do we invent good hypotheses? I don’t know, and that’s the mystery, if you ask me. (This process of “abduction”, as Peirce called it, is very hard to explore, as it amounts to the study of creativity.)
James Killus: “It’s my experience and observation that religion is one of those things that people use to excuse doing what they want to do anyway.”
I agree, and PZ has said as much previously.
“… good people who are religious are often suckers for bad people who are religious. I don’t know why this is so. ”
That comes directly from religion’s origins in tribal identity. Consider: In a small tribe, everybody knows everyone else, and knows who they can trust. When society expands to larger groups, trust becomes a major issue. Religion represents an attempt at a “memetic greenbeard”. (From a Dawkins metaphor.) Ideally (for the religion), authenticating someone as a member of your own religion would mean that you could “immediately” trust them as if they were a member of your tribe. That would be not only because you share common morals and standards of behavior, but because you’re both subject to the same religious/tribal sanctions if you violate the rules. (Note that knowing the proper myths and rituals is just part of the authentication.)
In practice, once your religion has spread “beyond eyeshot”, it becomes much easier to “forge”. Especially when the standards are being set by people you’ve never actually met, but enforced by locals who may well have their own agendas. So, this guy you met *says* he’s a devout worshipper of the Mighty Frug, even knows the story about how Frug defenestrated the evil Toad Lords… but how sure are you that he’s not secretly consorting with the toad-worshipping Thantarians, or that he’s not hoping to drag off your daughters while you’re busy at the Festival of Dripping Blankets? Unfortunately, you might not be thinking about that, while you’re trying to outbrag him about your respective toad-pitching skills….
Religion as memetic greenbeard…
Sure, it makes you trust strangers with candy, but what do you get in your all day sucker (apart from the toxic center) that keeps you coming back for more?
Religion’s sugar coating feeds the muscle for magical thinking, that internal dialogue that makes every coincidence cosmic; a gauze of rainbow tarting up the Kansas of the mind. Dull daytime drama wins first prize in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest of personal narrative, starring angels, devils and you!
PZ: “I blame all religious people for promoting a deficiency of critical thinking and raising generations of fantasists, which is entirely correct.”
There is a bucketload of assumptions in that sentence. First, you’re assuming that all religious people promote a lack of critical thinking. You’re also assuming that they’re engaged in raising generations of fantasists. This amounts to projecting your understanding of religion onto a large majority of people on the planet. You might, for example, read the work of the Jesus Seminar on interpreting the New Testament. (Literalists hate their work.) You could look to Thomas Jefferson and his Bible, where he cut out all portions that were contradicted by the science of the time, which included the resurrection. Yet he was a deist. Does this make him a deluded man? For Buddhism, you might wish to read “On Questions Not Leading to Enlightenment”, where he refuses to answer questions on what happens to us when we die because they are unknowable and unprofitable to explore.
People use religion in so many different ways that generalizations of the type you make are not worthwhile. Your point of agreement with Robertson and Dobson is that you’re quite convinced that you know the answer to the question that the Buddha did not. I have an ingrained suspicion to both your certainty and your unreasoned hostility to the motives and methods of the other (in your case, the religious; in Robertsons case, the secular). Our common history provides ample evidence that the consequence of such polarization can be dire. People do terrible things to folks that they dehumanize. Delusions are bad, after all; why not punish those who harm their children? The intellectual content of your argument does not rest on your ability to carry it through – as you note, and I also believe, the US is rapidly becoming a more secular nation.
This is why tolerance on religious matters is so fundamentally crucial – it protects everyone. And this protection emphatically includes those with no religion whatsoever.
Now, there are some schools of religious thought that you really could falsify, and there are many believers who really could be classified as operating outside the bounds of rationality. Some is not the same as all; mark this boundary.
No, I think you’re the one who needs to reread that, with understanding this time. I’m quite sure the Buddha would have been appalled to know that his teachings were eventually turned into a religion; that’s something he quite specifically warned against. So for you to cite this as part of an attempt to argue for the non-stupidity of religion is remarkably confused, in keeping with your thinking in general as it appears.
Try something interesting. Substitute the words “pseudoscience” for “religion” and reread the post and comments. Has anything changed? Some pseudosciences are fairly normal and rational: some aren’t. Sometimes we criticize the pseudoscience itself (crystal healing, creationism, astrology, vitalism), other times we go after the believer.
I suspect that PZ and those who more or less agree with him (including me) pretty much lump religion into the same category as pseudoscience, and have problems with it for the same reasons. It doesn’t matter if there is a loving, caring, compassionate network of Reiki practitioners and their patients who find meaning in the practice of Reiki. It’s still crap, it doesn’t do what it says it does, and that needs to be pointed out. Failing to do so at all — or minimizing criticism — because of a deferant attitude of “respect” towards Reiki and its power to inspire people is, in the long run, a form of disrespect and condescension towards the people who believe in it.
YES.
I love the title of this thread, though the content is just so-so.
I’m not a big poetry reader, but a couple shreds stick in my dilettante mind. One is Neruda saying (roughly) “I am sick of being a man.” and Baudelaire (again roughly) “Don’t look for my heart, the beasts have eaten it.” PZ’s statement is similar, but it’s the despair of a rational, empirically driven man. I’ve felt this sort of exasperation, but never seen it put so movingly.
PZ has given up on reason and become a cephalod. Let’s all raise our tentacles in honor of him.
Oops. That should be “cephalopod.”
David,
Tribal identity can explain a lot, but I don’t see it as part of the “sucker phenomenon.” Tribes generally have pretty good mechanisms for dealing with members who are detrimental to the tribe. Religions and other tribalesque affiliations have plenty of warnings about “false prophets” and similar double-dealers.
I’m more inclined to think that many good people simply tend to think that other people are like them, especially if they “seem nice” and part of seeming nice to them is mouthing the correct platitudes.
It may also be that religions supply a ready made narrative for con men, and people in general tend to fall for narrative.
People usually apply the warnings against false prophets only to people trying to get them to change their religions.
I think you’re right Sastra. I sympathize, which is why I haven’t been moved to critique this stuff until PZ turned it from an occasional sideshow into a regular feature. Another exercise may be illuminating. You could substitute “atheist” for “religious” in some passages of what PZ wrote and replicate some silly things that religious folks can write about people whose motives they don’t understand. E.g. you could say
“Thanks heaps. If you elect to be on that other team, the one with the Stalinists and the Maoists and Robespierre, that’s your choice…but don’t get all resentful when I lump the whole lot of you together. And forgive me for laughing when your fellow teammates treat you like dirt.”
The difference with pseudoscience is directly related to making claims about how the physical world works, as opposed to making claims that can’t be tested. Homeopathy makes people feel better, but so do sugar pills; its basis contradicts modern science directly and in testable ways and I’d make no apologies for saying so. The Earth is ancient, not 6000 years old; and so on. I sympathize with the frustration, but cannot agree with the broad dismissal of all religion as delusional.
PZ is playing a game, beloved of those he opposes. He finds an example of abhorrent behavior in a subgroup and then implies that it also applies to a much broader group of people. e.g. Opus Dei is a reactionary organization; members of Opus Dei are Catholics; therefore, all Catholics are reactionaries. The logical flaws in this approach are obvious ones.
I can think of a lot of precedent for declarations that all other belief systems besides that of the speaker are false. None of them inspire confidence in the system that follows. (And, yes, atheism is a system founded on assumptions, albeit not religious ones. Constructing a moral system requires axioms.)
Calling atheism (the simple absence of a certain kind of metaphysical belief) a “system” is a sure sign of cluelessness.
Your disagreement with “the broad dismissal of all religion as delusional” has so far merely the status of an emotional reaction, since you seem unable to state a clear position and defend it with arguments.
Ok then, which parts aren’t? I’m serious lets make a list.
What people like you never seem to understand is PZ rails against the core of irrationality. So rather than defend the core you go off and say things, usually explaining exceptions and individuals and calling PZ a bigot and such without ever understanding the core of what he is trying to do.
And atheism is based on an assumption, but rather a lack of empirical evidence. It is perhaps the simplest concept that is screwed over again and again.
And I’m not even one.
Nope Steve. Making gross generalizations about what other people believe is a sure sign of cluelessness. I have stated a clear argument, and your emotional hostility to religion apparently doesn’t permit you to understand it. So I’ll spell it out for you, hopefully in a form that is useful.
1. The following chain of logic is flawed:
Group A has bad belief system x.
Group A is a subset of group B.
Therefore, group B has bad belief system x.
A logical argument of this form is required to dismiss all forms of religion based on the beliefs and practices of some religious people.
And, by the way, you have no idea of what my religious system is. Unitarian-Universalist, for the record. No creed, and no requirement for belief in God. We do emphasize the role of reason, and we have a long heritage of opposing dogmatic utterances on questions that can’t be answered. PZ may agree with the State of Texas that we aren’t a real religion, but I won’t fit into his box or theirs.
So, explain to me: what beliefs make your “box” a religion, and why should I consider them reasonable?
I’d also be curious to know what “box” you think I’ve put you in.
1) You failed even to address your logical gaffe of calling absence of belief a “system”.
2) Whatever you’re trying to say in your latest post makes equally little sense. You’re still not getting it at all: I don’t dismiss religion on the basis of any particular subset of religious people practices; I categorically abhor all empirically unjustifiable belief sytems, period. That includes even the most content-free varieties of “spirituality”.
3) I’m quite familiar with UUism, I used to attend UU churches until they started making secular humanists feel more and more marginalized in favor of “paganism” and other such bullshit.
As I said, you seem incapable of stating or defending any actual philosphical position, and I don’t think I’ll bother reading or responding to any more of your tantrums.
James Killus wrote,
‘Tribes generally have pretty good mechanisms for dealing with members who are detrimental to the tribe. Religions and other tribalesque affiliations have plenty of warnings about “false prophets” and similar double-dealers.’
Which leads directly to the 11th commandment “Thou shall not be found out.”
(Thanks to P.G. Wodehouse for that one.)
Warnings about miss-placed trust are all well and good, but it often takes some time to determine if a person is truly trustworthy or not. By that time a travelling con-artist may be in the next town. I’m thinking to the scene in O. Henry’s ‘A Tempered Wind’ where the con-men trick farmers into signing checks disquised as marrige licences. The groom, bride, and preacher were taking advantage of specifically religious appearances in order to deceive people.
Religion is often used as a short-cut to acceptance in a tribal sense. We use short-cuts of this nature all the time. Religion can be particularly hazardous to use simply because it’s so broad a category and our typical immediate social circle is likely to be of a similar religious bent.
Can anyone identify other social short cuts we use to generate trust?
Are you more likely to trust a lawyer or a college professor?
What if the college professor teaches law?
Cheers,
-Flex
Yep Steve, I’ve run across your soulmates in UU churches. I roll my eyes at the neo-pagan stuff as well, but I’m happier in a tolerant church than in one filled with intolerant folks.
Inherent worth and dignity of all people, and all that.
I don’t think that’s what we’re doing, really.
We are not dismissing all forms of religion based on the beliefs and practices of some religious people. We’re perfectly capable of making a distinction between extreme forms of fundamentalism which do a great deal of damage, and milder, more liberal forms of spirituality which are consistent with the general use of science and reason.
I think PZ is making a point more like this:
Group A (religion in general) has bad belief system X (spiritual faith is an important aspect of a mature and meaningful life, and it should be nurtured and respected.)
Group B (dangerous religion) is a subset of group A.
Therefore, Group B has bad belief system X.
Sure, not all members of Group A are in Group B (dangerous.) It’s just that the problem with Group B is not that it’s somehow distorting X, which is a wonderful thing unless it is being “misused.” They are using it just as honestly as everyone else.
Spiritual faith is like pseudoscience. Sure, there are harmless forms of pseudoscience, and people can derive personal benefits from their use. But the real problem is not that some other people use pseudoscience the “wrong” way. There’s a problem at the core.
Interesting question PZ. Here are the principles and purposes of Unitarian Universalism, from the UUA webpage:
We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote
* The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
* Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
* Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
* A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
* The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
* The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
* Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
That’s the closest we come to a creed. You’re arguing that folks like me would be seen by the literalists as just another group of the godless, and that we aren’t a “real religion” anyhow. Sorry, but you don’t get unilateral power to define religion, any more than you can decide whether other people are happy or whether a sunset is pretty. A definition of religion that excludes Buddhists and Taoists may suit Christians and militant atheists, but it is patently inadequate.
A majority of UUs are humanists, but there are a mixture of folks who would be classified more traditionally as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, pagans, or a mixture of all of the above :) This is reflected in the traditions which UUs draw their inspiration from. Since tolerance of differing religious belief systems is critical in a community like this, you may not find it surprising to see strong objections to examples of religious intolerance from any angle. UUs have taken strong stands against the so-called religious right, for example, in a lot of contexts.
I have come to see UUism as a rather pathetic enterprise- a desperate attempt to hold onto the comforting religious emotions of childhood (the great majority of UUs are “come-outers” from other religious backgrounds)without having to commit to any particular doctrinal baggage. But hey, whatever floats your boat; just don’t expect to get a pat on the back for hanging onto such a crutch. By the way, if it was ever true that most UUs are humanists, I don’t believe it’s been true for quite some time, and your congregation is pretty unusual if it’s true there (perhaps you’re in a university town).
I asked what makes your “box” a religion. All of that is pretty much what I believe (except that that bit about “spiritual” growth is just empty noise). What makes it different than a philosophy, a system of ethics, a set of social guidelines?
You’re really reinforcing my point that this whole argument is about one side expanding the word “religious” to engulf everything, rendering it meaningless.
Quite insightful Sastra. The key gap there is the inference that one particular approach (spirituality) is fatally flawed. Someone may say, for example, that seeing a beautiful sunset makes them feel a deep mystical connection to a greater whole that they call God. Are they wrong? How could you prove that they’re wrong? I don’t think that I can evaluate the truth of something like that in any meaningful way. What I can do is to evaluate critically the validity of claims that people make about the natural world, and I can also make moral judgements about their actions based upon my own code. I find that more fruitful than arguing about things that can’t be solved. This permits me to distinguish between Martin Luther King and Pat Robertson. To put it another way, I fail to see the direct linkage between spiritual belief and bad outcomes, or a lack thereof and good outcomes. If I’m reading you correctly, you’re contending that spirituality itself is not logically supportable, and things derived from spirituality have no basis of support. I’d agree that it isn’t logically based, but don’t agree with the conclusion that it is useless.
I occasionally attend, but have not joined, the local UU fellowship. I admire and respect the UU’s –they are certainly humanist in ethics (meaning that what matters is how one relates to other human beings, not how one relates to God.)
The dicey area which can cause a possible conflict with secular humanism is this:
“* Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.”
Secular humanists do not see the supernatural as a sacred area beyond critique. Honest debate and dispute on the truths or value of “spirituality” is our expression of respect for the worth and dignity of the individual, who is thereby being taken seriously, and treated as an equal in a common search for truth.
This can cause a problem if the Spiritual insist on interpreting disagreement as attack. Instead, respect for the individual is sometimes equated with a hand’s-off respect for their beliefs. Bland acceptance and “encouragement to spiritual growth” — whatever form it takes — is tolerance. Secular humanists do not see debate as intolerant.
OhioMarc wrote:
What does “spirituality” mean? Like “religion” — or “God” — the definitions go all over the place. You can find interpretations of all 3 words which are perfectly consistent with a thoroughgoing Naturalism.
The trouble is, as PZ has been pointing out, that using words in a way which will then be misinterpreted by 90% of the people (and probably equivocated on at some point by another 5%) obscures and confuses. It does not communicate.
To answer your question, are they wrong? No, of course not. They DO “feel a deep mystical connection to a greater whole that they call God.” If that is a bit of poetry, metaphor, personal value, or expression of awe, how could it be “wrong?” Contrasted with what?
But sometimes people actually MEAN something specific when they say things like that. In which case, I think they may or may not be wrong, and may or may not be reasonably disputed, depending on what sort of actual content they’ve put into what they’re saying.
Someone might say that when they see a black person they see a person who is essentially inferior to a white person. Can you say that they’re wrong? I use this analogy because I fail to see the difference between your position and racism. You’ve taken religion, hollowed it out, and the result is a shell that retains a single aspect of what you started with: differentiating yourself from nonbelievers. You use an empty word – “spirituality” – to pick out this difference. What is truly astonishing to me is that you do this in broad daylight, and you and anyone else can easily trace your steps in doing this and see exactly where they lead, and then you turn around and call those you’re discriminating against intolerant for calling you on it.
To be slightly less incendiary about this. It’s surely possible for you to accept the hypothetical that the term “spirituality” and it various synonyms and related catch phrases lack any coherent meaning. I doubt such a notion is hard to entertain, given that the term is so difficult to define coherently. Now, given this, let’s say I’m a liberal Christian or UU or Western Buddhist or identify with some generic form of spirituality. Let’s also say that I’m rather proud of the fact that I have no other particular dogma or creed beyond being “spiritual” in this sense. Since the term “spirituality” lacks meaning, its only purpose, I propose, can be to define a boundary between those who identify themselves as spiritual and those who do not. Those who use the term, let’s say, also use it to describe a number of other practises that do have particular dogmas and creeds beyond simply being “spiritual.” In this sense the term also serves to ally me with these people. I have, therefore, successfully created a distinction between myself and nonbelievers, a distinction that allies me with believers, but at the same time remains contentless. By doing so I obtain, perhaps not intentionally, the social effect of marginalising nonbelievers and bolstering believers. This despite the fact that by any account I have more in common with the nonbelievers than the believers (except this empty term “spirituality” of course). In what sense is not simple bigotry?
The hallmark of racism and sexism and various other forms of bigotry is a certain kind of essentialism. Racists and sexists, for all their tortured apologetics, see an essential difference between the races and sexes and “fit the data” to it. If this term “spirituality” is contentless and does simply mark a boundary between so-called believers and nonbelievers, I don’t see how it differs from the racist’s essentialist notion of “whiteness” or the sexist’s essentialist notion of “maleness.” The fact that “spirituality,” unlike these other notions, picks out no external traits just seems all the more damning to me. It exists solely to buttress the forces in society that would curtail the freedom to choose not to believe.
Anyway, that’s what I think, I don’t mean to imply that you’re a nonbeliever-hating bigot, I’m sure you’re not, but I’ve simply never seen this notion of “spirituality” defended in a way that makes me think it’s not just there to marginalise nonbelievers.
Well, that’s…different. Based on both my own moral code (see the UU principles above), I not only have no problem telling a racist that they’re wrong – I have a moral obligation to do so. I don’t think all moral codes are equal. I’d actually note that problems of the sort that you allude to are actually an *advantage* of some flavors of religious belief over a moral code based on science. The existence of differences in intelligence between different ethnic groups can be cast as a scientific question, albeit one for which there is no evidence. If such evidence did exist, however, those religious folks could legitimately view them as irrelevant, because they have other axioms that take priority. With a purely scientific approach you might end up forced to other, more destructive, conclusions – see the Bell Curve for an especially wretched example. It is not a religious book.
What you’re doing Poke is an attempt to define the belief systems of others in a negative way; this is stereotyping at best. Spirituality is a broad idea, but it isn’t meaningless. It simply means something different than what PZ is defining it to mean. I see false equivalences being made by PZ between between forms of religion that have radically different views. For reasons I don’t fully understand, he wants to define all religion as the enemy of reason. The purely secular have real problems with the religious right. The religious left simply isn’t attempting to marginalize the secular in the same way, at all. Feel free to find their beliefs silly or annoying. Just don’t be intellectually lazy and claim that there is no difference whatsoever, or accept the fundamentalist claim that theirs is the only religious viewpoint (and differ with them only in then claiming that this proves that all religion is therefore false and meaningless).
Nonsense. UUs have many dogmas, one of which is that they are without dogma or creed. It explicitly says so in their creed.
The organization is a striking example of people drawing boxes around their beliefs and declaring everything within those boxes out-of-bounds for rational thought.
Please, somebody, tell me what “spirituality” means. Everyone tells me it doesn’t mean what I think it means, but they never tell me what it does mean…and since my understanding of the word is that it is a placeholder noise for something undefined but supposedly good, I think it does mean what I think it means.
Yes, there are radically different forms of religion. No, they are not all equally noxious. But they all have at their core something bad- the abandonment of evidence and reason for faith. Logically, they differ only in the volume of that “box” and its contents. But what OhioMarc still doesn’t get about what I, PZ, poke et al. are saying is that our position is that drawing ANY box, and exempting its contents from rational scrutiny, is a bad thing. Even if the contents of the box are minimal and innocuous, promoting the acceptance of even a flabby UU-style “belief system” contributes to the climate of poor intellectual hygiene that feeds the vitality of much more obnoxious systems. So no, we are not going to pat Marc on the back and tell him that his insistence on HAVING a “religious viewpoint”, of whatever kind, is a good thing. 100 more comments by Marc that continue to miss the point will not change our minds about that at all.
A little meta-comment: Does anyone participating in these Pharyngula religion discussions actually believe that (A) you are going to learn something new from the discussion, or (B) you are going to say something that we haven’t all heard a thousand times before?
I think that it is theoretically possible to have an interesting discussion about religion, but it’s not going to happen here.
Since you are a participant in this discussion, does that mean you are a) feeling a deep self-loathing at your inability to contribute, or b) holding back some wonderful insight from the rest of us?
PZ,
What I believe is that you are closed minded on this subject. That’s perfectly fine—we all decide at some point that we’ve heard all that we need to hear about some topic. I’m not open-minded about the world being created 6000 years ago. I’m not open-minded about the possibility that slavery may have been a good thing. I’m not open-minded about the possibility of perpetual motion devices.
But what’s the point of continuing to argue about something when there is no possibility of learning or teaching anything new?
So you’re saying you have nothing new to teach me?
That’s the thing. No one ever has anything substantive to say about their religious beliefs, but they go on believing in them. Maybe if I keep pointing out that you all are running around naked, someone will look down and say, “Hey! I haven’t got any clothes on!”
Steve LaBonne:
Sorry, I thought I was being explicit in reifying the category “moral”, and that I was not willing to confine myself to questions that are answerable without “dubious” axioms. Hence the qualifications on my self-labelling as “atheist”.
I was not attempting to argue for (absolute) morals being real, merely to explain my beliefs.
I have one other point: “Should we not murder?” is unanswerable in the system of thought I am assuming as a common basis of this conversation. (Loosely “science”). But how do you know that system of thought is correct? Try arguing for it without using circular arguments. It can be done, but then how do you know that the meta-logical system you made the argument in is correct? You see the problem I hope: axioms are not unique to religious folks, they are fundamental to “critical thought”. At best they can be disguised as rules of inference.
So you’re saying that you have nothing new to teach me?
That’s what I’m saying: as far as I can see, there is nothing anyone can teach you about this topic, and there is nothing you can teach anyone else.
That’s the thing. No one ever has anything substantive to say about their religious beliefs, but they go on believing in them. Maybe if I keep pointing out that you all are running around naked, someone will look down and say, “Hey! I haven’t got any clothes on!”
I never claimed to have any clothes on.
Andrew- then you are definitely committing petitio principi. Are you familiar with any of the philosophical literature on moral realism? If you’re going to take a moral-realist position (with which I sympathize, actually- I think Kant was at least partly on the right track) you need to arm yourself with actual arguments instead of just assuming what you would like to be the case. (You know how we feel about unsupported “beliefs” around here. ;) ) You do appear to be flirting with the good old “argument from bad consequences”, but that’s not a valid argument.
Daryl McCullough wrote,
‘But what’s the point of continuing to argue about something when there is no possibility of learning or teaching anything new?’
Actually, there are probably any number of people reading this debate and thinking about the ideas being presented, but who are not responding themselves.
Personally, I decided that the the word ‘spirituality’ has no possible clear meaning years ago. ‘Spirituality’ is a Humpty-Dumpty word which means what the speaker wants it to mean. This doesn’t mean the word can’t be used, but does anyone really know what I mean if I simply wrote, “I am feeling spiritual.”?
In context it adapts to the meaning I want it to:
“Sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon was a spiritual moment for me.”
“Reflecting on the delicacy of human culture led to my contemplation of our spiritual heritige.”
‘Spiritual’ apparently means some feeling which is beyond rational expression or communication to another human being. This doesn’t mean that the feeling doesn’t exist.
In a religious sense, ‘spirituality’ is often seen as a more important facet of life than other areas of the human experiance. Even if this feeling is uncommunicable. There are those of us who recognize the feeling, and enjoy it (whatever we mean by it), but feel that it is only a one of many facets of human existance which shouldn’t be exhaulted over rationality.
There are some points in this discussion which are helping me clarify this view. So I, for one at least, enjoy reading it.
Cheers,
-Flex
Flex: It’s not so much a “Humpty Dumpty” word as a word that is describing an attitude towards or way of looking at life and the world. It’s a description of an inner state, and it can’t be defined. Instead of “spirituality” try “happiness” or “love” or “loneliness”. How would you define those things? You can give examples of the sorts of things that (usually) make you happy. You can give examples of the sorts of things you (usually) do when you are happy (e.g., smile). But what is the definition of happiness?
There really isn’t a definition of happiness, but through introspection you can recognize when you are happy and when you are not. If it doesn’t have a definition, then what’s the point of the word “happiness”? Well, even though we don’t have an externally meaningful explicit definition of happiness, we recognize the condition, and we assume that there is some similar condition that others experience. We hope that the way we use the word is sufficiently close to the way others use the word that communication about our inner states is possible. But we can never know for sure.
The same to me is true about spirituality. We can describe circumstances in which we “feel spiritual”, and we can describe how that feeling effects us, but we can’t define it. We have to hope that others feel something similar in similar circumstances that we can meaningfully converse about it without the need for a definition.
PZ and the others here are demanding a definition. There isn’t one. But that doesn’t make the word meaningless, any more than the words “happiness”, “love”, etc. are meaningless.
PZ Myers:
That is not at all correct. It is unfortunately common for religious people to promote a deficiency of critical thinking, but it is very far from universal. I know of a number of counterexamples, who believe in a being who created the universe and knows of their conditions, hence “religious” by a reasonable definition, and are very much for critical thought. Yes, even about fundamental tenants of their religion.
Meanings vary. :shrug:. Can’t precisely define “religious” either, But confusion over definition doesn’t seem to be at the root of this disagreement, unless you’re asserting that religious people promote a deficiency of critical thinking by definition. Such a definition would exclude quite a number of people commonly thought of as religious, including quite a few who believe in such things as a creator-god. BTW, what is your definition of “critical thought”? I don’t have a precise definition for that either, but I would include such things as using a fairly systemic (logical) system of thought, and willingness to consider new thoughts/arguments.
Daryl,
I don’t disagree with you, but the problem I have with the use of the term is that organized religion (even the UUC) claims that spirituality is a defining aspect of their religion. Even though they can’t define what that word means.
When an organization, like a religion, takes a stand on a non-communicable idea like ‘spirituality’, ‘happiness’, or ‘love’ and claims that it can discriminate based on this non-comminicable idea I see a problem.
Let’s take ‘love’ as another example. I don’t know of a single religion which doesn’t think ‘love’ is an important aspect of that religion.
But ‘love’, being another word which means someting different to everybody out there, is not a reasonable thing to use to define your religion. In that context the word is meaningless.
In the context of an organized religion, ‘spirituality’ is meaningless.
Maybe I can approach this with a more concrete example. I have a coffee can full of different types of screws. Machine screws, wood screws, the occasional bolt. I can call every one of them a screw (well, technically not the bolts, but I do anyway). But while I can call them all screws, for any particular project I have to sort out exactly the ones I need.
Every object in the coffee can has the characteristic of screwiness, but that tells me nothing about how many screws are available for any particular project.
Each screw has a certain thread-pitch, but just labeling it a screw doesn’t tell me that. Every screw has a certain type of head, a certain diameter, a certain shaft length. But calling it a screw doesn’t tell me any of that. What I do know is that the term applies to everything in my coffee can.
‘Spirituality’ is like the attribute screwiness, while the entire human race (or more if you are so inclined) are the contents of my coffee can. It cannot be defined any more clearly than a vague term without leaving out some members of that set. To define your religion in such a vague way renders the term itself meaningless as part of the definition.
Now, some religions like to define their members as part of a subset. That’s like saying that only pan-headed machine screws are part of this religion. Does that exclude the rest of the screws in my coffee can from having the attribue of screwiness? Only if you change the definition to say that the only true screws are those who are pan-headed machine screws.
Again, the point is that even though we can experiance the feelings of ‘spirituality’, ‘happiness’, and ‘love’, any defintion which excludes any part of the human race is bigotry, and any definition which includes all the human race is so vague as to be meaningless except on an individual level. That is, an organization (be it a religious one, a professional one, or a governmental one), cannot claim ‘spirituality’ as a core aspect of their society without either excluding people or making the term so vague as to be meaningless.
-Cheers,
-Flex
I don’t think we need a precise definition of “spirituality.” The slightest hint that it serves any other purpose than to differentiate “us from them” would do. The problem with definitions such as an “attitude towards or way of looking at life and the world” is they just serve to reinforce my conclusions. I can’t figure out how an “attitude towards or way of looking” differs from the essentialism I’ve been describing. If I wanted to describe racism, “an attitude towards or way of looking at minorities” would be a safe bet. It captures the fact that there’s nothing substantial there other than the fact that you’re differentiating between two groups.
OhioMarc: I’m not sure what a “moral code based on science” is but I don’t see anything in science to contradict the view that people aren’t particularly responsible for their biological lot in life. (Everything I know about evolutionary, reproductive, and developmental biology tends to reinforce it; not that it really needs reinforcing.) In that respect I don’t think any result from science regarding the meaningfulness of race boundaries, IQ differences, or differences between the sexes would alter my position on equality. (As far as I know this is the mainstream liberal view on equality; hence support for equal rights for the disabled, for maternity leave, etc, none of which would make sense if we thought people should be penalised for their biology.) Some philosophers (Pereboom, Honderich, et al) have drawn these sorts of conclusions from determinism, which is a materialist doctrine par excellence, but they’re current in all secular work in ethics.
poke writes: I don’t think we need a precise definition of “spirituality.” The slightest hint that it serves any other purpose than to differentiate “us from them” would do. The problem with definitions such as an “attitude towards or way of looking at life and the world” is they just serve to reinforce my conclusions. I can’t figure out how an “attitude towards or way of looking” differs from the essentialism I’ve been describing. If I wanted to describe racism, “an attitude towards or way of looking at minorities” would be a safe bet.
Yes, of course that’s what racism is. Calling something an attitude doesn’t make it good or bad.
As for The slightest hint that it serves any other purpose than to differentiate “us from them” would do, I’ll try.
First, by way of analogy, I assume that the concept of a parent loving his child is something that you are familiar with. But what does it mean? Well, to me it means that the parent is emotionally connected with the child in such a strong way that the well-being and happiness of the child means as much as the parent’s own well-being. More, the well-being of the parent includes the well-being of the child; I can’t be happy if my children are not well.
Spirituality is an emotional connection like that, except that the entity that you feel connected to is something vast: humanity, nature, the world, the universe. You care about the world above and beyond your own life, you feel part of it, and you want the best for it. “Differentiating us from them” is exactly the opposite of how I think of spirituality. When you’re feeling spiritual, your concept of “us” grows to include, in the limit, the entire world.
Many people care a lot about things bigger than themselves without feeling any need to describe themselves as “spritual”. Frankly, your comment is both meaningless and condescending, and merely shows that poke had it exactly right.
Flex writes: When an organization, like a religion, takes a stand on a non-communicable idea like ‘spirituality’, ‘happiness’, or ‘love’ and claims that it can discriminate based on this non-comminicable idea I see a problem.
Sorry, I don’t know what kind of claims to be able to discriminate you are talking about.
But ‘love’, being another word which means someting different to everybody out there, is not a reasonable thing to use to define your religion.
Why not?
In the context of an organized religion, ‘spirituality’ is meaningless.
Why?
‘Spirituality’ is like the attribute screwiness, while the entire human race (or more if you are so inclined) are the contents of my coffee can. It cannot be defined any more clearly than a vague term without leaving out some members of that set. To define your religion in such a vague way renders the term itself meaningless as part of the definition.
Why does religion need a definition?
Again, the point is that even though we can experiance the feelings of ‘spirituality’, ‘happiness’, and ‘love’, any defintion which excludes any part of the human race is bigotry, and any definition which includes all the human race is so vague as to be meaningless except on an individual level.
Again, why the need for definitions? What’s wrong with something only having meaning at an individual level?
I’ll assume you meant ‘tenets’.
If these people are in favor of critical thought, why are they not applying it to their beliefs about a Creator-God? At present, there is no evidence supporting such an assertion. Critical thought would thus cause them to reject such a belief, IF they had examined the belief critically.
The fact that they have not rejected the belief is powerful and convincing evidence that they do not in fact support critical thought.
I agree with Wittgensein’s argument that there is no such thing as meaning that is only on an individual level. If you can’t communicate it, it ain’t meaning.
Many people care a lot about things bigger than themselves without feeling any need to describe themselves as “spritual”.
Then my conception of “spirituality” includes those people.
Frankly, your comment is both meaningless and condescending, and merely shows that poke had it exactly right.
How did he have it exactly right? He asked to understand how I was using the word “spirituality” in a way that doesn’t “serve to differentiate us from them”. I explained that the way I use the word doesn’t serve to differentiate us from them. So it seems to me that he had it exactly wrong.
I’m not splitting the world into “spiritual people” and “non-spiritual people”.
Then your category has no content, does it?
Steve LaBonne writes: I agree with Wittgensein’s argument that there is no such thing as meaning that is only on an individual level. If you can’t communicate it, it ain’t meaning.
The last sentence does not follow from the first. If there is an experience, or feeling that is common to a group of people, then it is possible for them to develop a word for that inner experience and to understand what that word means. That does not mean that the meaning has been communicated.
Take as an example “pleasure” or “pain”. I know what it feels like when I accidentally hit my thumb with a hammer. If I witness someone else hitting his thumb with a hammer, and he says “that hurts”, I guess what the verb “to hurt” means. But it isn’t because anyone defined it for me. If I had never felt pain myself, I would have a hard time coming to understand what “hurt” means.
And, once again, aren’t we back to where we started? Isn’t the implication that those without “spirituality” don’t care about the world above and beyond their own life? (Which is, of course, the prevalent image of atheists.) Isn’t that a negative characterisation of atheists and nonbelievers? My feeling is that any non-empty characterisation you give of “spirituality” will be something that the rest of us take to be universal (at least among those who are, in some vague sense, good people). Or are you saying we’re all “spiritual,” in which case, what’s the point? Any why do you identify it with religion?
If the experience/feeling cannot be communicated, then how can the population determine that the experience/feeling is common to the whole group?
Perhaps you should leave logic to those better qualified in it.
Isn’t the implication that those without “spirituality” don’t care about the world above and beyond their own life?
I prefer the contrapositive: The implication is that those who care about the world above and beyond their own life are spiritual in my sense.
Isn’t that a negative characterisation of atheists and nonbelievers?
I’m not excluding atheists and nonbelievers.
My feeling is that any non-empty characterisation you give of “spirituality” will be something that the rest of us take to be universal (at least among those who are, in some vague sense, good people). Or are you saying we’re all “spiritual,” in which case, what’s the point?
Well, we all feel love at times. We all feel sadness at times. Does that mean that there is no point in having the words “love” and “sadness”? No, because we don’t all feel those emotions all the time. Sometimes we don’t feel loving. Sometimes we don’t feel sad. Sometimes we don’t feel particular spiritual (in my sense). Many people don’t think much at all about things beyond their immediate life.
Any way do you identify it with religion?
I’m not identifying it with religion. I think religions are a response to feelings of spirituality, or the desire to feel them, but I don’t consider it the only possible response.
The root of ‘spiritual’ is ‘spirit’.
One wonders why Mr. McCullough would choose that word to act as the label for his concept when there are so many potential words without the metaphysical baggage that he could have used instead.
Hmmm…
Caledonian writes: If the experience/feeling cannot be communicated, then how can the population determine that the experience/feeling is common to the whole group?
They can’t. People generalize from their own case, but such generalization is always error-prone. You have no way of knowing for sure whether you are using the word “love” in the same way as someone else is. Usually, you aren’t using such words in the same way.
Perhaps you should leave logic to those better qualified in it.
Okay, now you’re just being pointlessly insulting. Do you need to see a proof of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem? How about a proof of the completeness of first-order logic? How much logic do you think is needed before someone can have a discussion like this?
Caledonian writes: The root of ‘spiritual’ is ‘spirit’.
Yes, and “spirit” is from the Latin spritus, meaning “breath”.
Daryl wrote,
‘Again, why the need for definitions? What’s wrong with something only having meaning at an individual level?’
Nothing is wrong with something having meaning at an individual level. I never said there was problem with that.
However, there is something wrong with a group taking an attribute that varies with each individual and claiming that this vague, undefinable, attribute is a core part of their group.
‘Spirituality’ as a concept applies to all humanity. Our individual ‘spiritual’ experiances are personal, individual, unable to be fully communicated, and vary greatly from person to person.
‘Spirituality’ is also not rational, or accessable by reason. It is magical thinking, or possibly you would prefer to call it emotional thinking. (If an emotion can be called a thought.)
Religion claims, in every case that I know of, to welcome and even claim a superiority for ‘spirituality’.
My view is that as ‘spirituality’ is strictly confined to an individual’s experiances, any attempt for a group to claim ‘spirituality’ either leads to a meaning which includes all members of the set, or a seperation of the members of the set into ‘spiritual’ and ‘not spiritual’.
I suppose there is another option, where no one is ‘spiritual’, but our experiance suggests that this is not true.
If you want to claim to be ‘spiritual’, or to have had ‘spiritual’ experiances, fine. I have no trouble with you being unable to fully define what you mean by the word ‘spiritual’. It means what you need it to mean at the time.
A group of people can individually claim to be ‘spiritual’. But because the meaning is different to each person in the group, the group itself cannot be called a ‘spiritual’ group without broadening the meaning of the word to include all the members of that group.
Looking at the entire human race, we can claim it to be ‘spiritual’, and a lot of religions do. However, at that point the meaning of the word, now expanded to include all the various possibilities of the individual meanings of ‘spiritual’ becomes so vague as to be meaningless.
‘Spiritual’ starts out as a nebulous, personal emotion. Once the concept is spread out over all humanity, the individual emotion is lost. A mere ghost of it’s original emotional power.
-Flex
Flex writes: However, there is something wrong with a group taking an attribute that varies with each individual and claiming that this vague, undefinable, attribute is a core part of their group.
Well, I don’t see anything wrong with it, if there is some reason to believe that there is enough overlap among the members of the group. What’s the advantage to forming a group? Well, for one thing, collective action. A group can do things like start soup kitchens, build homes for the homeless, collect money for disaster relief, and so forth. These sorts of activities are a way of feeling connected that work better if you have a group involved.
But there is. There’s the fact of a habitable universe, there’s “historical” evidence for a God of some sort, and there are the internal experiences of many Christians. Granted, it’s not good (IMNSHO) evidence, but neither is it absolutely no evidence whatsoever.
That’s the level of evidence we have for the existence of fairies, elves, leprechauns, and unicorns. When the kind of evidence you have is below the background level of noise for random beliefs in just about anything, it is a perfectly reasonable approximation to say there is no evidence for gods.
I agree with PZ’s statement that evidence for existence below the level of ‘noise’ (explicable through random fluctuation) would constitute a reasonable approximation for non-evidence. That’s good science, and I don’t dispute that the vast majority of religious statements either flunk this test, or (which is worse) define themselves in a manner which is untestable.
With that in mind, here’s two “belief” statements, not exactly randomly chosen:
“I believe the fine structure constant is not a constant at all, but has changed subtly as the universe evolved. At one time, its value might have approached one.”
“I believe the fine structure constant is truly a constant, and that its value is 1.875 E -18 has not varied since the Big Bang.”
Both are plausible. One (Barrow’s) is heterodox. Either could be employed as part of an ad hoc description of the present state of affairs,including those that include a First Cause.
I don’t care for ad hoc arguments, especially for life on Earth. The universe is teeming with life, and we might just be one really unusual place. But, absent evidence for multiple universes I find the ad hoc arguments for the ‘fine tuning’ of the one universe we have data for difficult to dismiss out of hand.
Question: would either of the above ‘beliefs’ rise above the level of ‘background noise’? And, while we’re on the topic, would ‘string theory’ make it through that threshold, given that some versions of it also hold out for multiple universes?
As in ‘hot air’.
It’s not a matter of ‘how much’. Leverage is as much a function of place as force — if you can’t apply logic to the subject under discussion, it doesn’t matter what you know about first-order logic, and if you can, formal mathematical education is redundant.
There is ‘historical’ evidence for God. WOW! Where is it?
And there are the internal experiences of Muslims, Hindus, Buddists, Pagans, and if you go far enough back 100,000 other sects.
The fact of a habitable universe is certainly no evidence at all especially in light of current scientific thought.
So essentially you have just provided points 1-2-3 on how wishful thinking makes one see anything.
Daryl writes,
‘Well, for one thing, collective action. A group can do things like start soup kitchens, build homes for the homeless, collect money for disaster relief, and so forth. These sorts of activities are a way of feeling connected that work better if you have a group involved.’
The problem is not necessarily in the actions, the problem is in the justification for those actions. You don’t need to be spiritual to engage in the activities you mention. You certainly don’t need a religion to either organize and perform those activities or even get the feeling of connectedness by working with other people.
I enjoy the occasional ‘spiritual’ feelings I get. (And I hope that everyone reading this by now knows that Daryl and I are not speaking of ghosts or paranormal phenomena. It’s an undefinable emotion which is common to human experiance.) I can even use my reason to create situtations where I can get that ‘spiritual’ feeling. I spent four months planning a vacation in Florence, Italy in some part driven by the desire to experiance ‘beauty’, ‘happiness’, and ‘spirituality’.
But ‘beauty’, ‘happiness’, ‘love’, and ‘spirituality’ have never resulted in reasoning. In fact, just the opposite, am urge to experiance these ineffable, inexplicable emotions can insprire reason and logic to create situations where these emotions can happen. The emotions themselves do not lead to reason, but like a drug, the desire for additional experiances.
A drug induced feeling may inspire people to use reason to get more of the drug, but the feeling the drug causes does not inspire reason. The urge for more of the feeling does.
Organized religion, and in fact any organization which claims to provide opportunities to experiance these highly individual emotions, are using the urge to experiance these transitory feelings as a hook to attract people.
Then to exhault these feelings, to make them more important than the other facets of human experiance, reduces the importance of logic and reason. Logic and reason are the tools which an individual can use to create opportunities to experiance these fleeting emotions. Many, if not most, religions claim to provide the opportunity to experiance ‘spiritual’ feelings. These orgnanizations request that an individual subsume their own reason and accept the orgnanizations doctrine in order to experiance ‘spirituality’.
That is the pernicous aspect of religion. One of the main tenents is to abandon your reason, let the organization do your thinking for you, because the organization will then be able to provide these feelings of ‘spirituality’, ‘happiness’, and ‘love’.
That’s why I distrust any organization which claims to promote or provide these feelings. I know from experiance that the only way to ensure I can experiance those emotions is through using my reason.
Note that I am no longer talking strictly about religion. Any group which claims to provide ineffable emotions like ‘happiness’, ‘love’, ‘freedom’ or ‘patriotism’ through abandoning reason is guilty of exhaulting an individual, undefinable emotion, and manipulating it’s followers.
In short, reason can provide emotional satisfaction.
Emotional satisfaction cannot provide reason.
Organizations which promote emotional satisfaction over reason reduce the ability of people to use reason to reach emotional satisfaction.
Cheers,
-Flex
Flex has it right, spirituality is an emotive term, not a cognitive term. It has been used in particular by the boomer generation to describe a vague numinous feeling that can be brought about purposely or accidentaly by numerous causes differing from person to person. The value of the term to many people seems to be that it does not involve commitment to any specific religious ideas or propositions.
The metaphysical component of thoughts about spirituality harks back to Cartesianism, the notion that the mind/spirit and body are separate and largely independent substances, that the mind can exist without the body. This concept was pretty thoroughly rebutted by the mid 17th century, but there is a remarkable nostalgia for it.
Flex: You write: The problem is not necessarily in the actions, the problem is in the justification for those actions. You don’t need to be spiritual to engage in the activities you mention.
I’m not saying that you do. I’m saying that if you feel the need for connections, then those sorts of activities can serve that need.
You certainly don’t need a religion to either organize and perform those activities or even get the feeling of connectedness by working with other people.
Maybe not, but historically, it tends to be connected with religious groups. It is certainly possible for new secular organizations to take the place of religions in serving these needs.
Organized religion, and in fact any organization which claims to provide opportunities to experiance these highly individual emotions, are using the urge to experiance these transitory feelings as a hook to attract people.
Then to exhault these feelings, to make them more important than the other facets of human experiance, reduces the importance of logic and reason.
The way I see it, logic and reason are tools for accomplishing things. They don’t give any guidance as to what should be accomplished.
These organizations request that an individual subsume their own reason and accept the organizations doctrine in order to experiance ‘spirituality’…That is the pernicous aspect of religion…
I don’t have a big disagreement with what you say here. Whatever organization you participate in, you should never hand over the right to think for yourself.
Oh? And what if the task I wish to accomplish is to learn what sorts of things I should try to accomplish?
The way I see it, you have utterly failed to understand the nature of logic and reason.
Journalism’s kinda scary
And of it we should be wary
Wonder what became of Mary?
Voice Of Mary’s Vision:
Hi! It’s me . . . the girl from the bus . . .
Remember?
The last tour?
Well . . .
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
Truth is not beauty
Beauty is not love
Love is not music
Music is THE BEST . . .
Wisdom is the domain of the Wis (which is extinct)
Beauty is a French phonetic corruption
Of a short cloth neck ornament
Currently in resurgence . . .
Calcedonian: I hope you are enjoying talking to yourself.
Why don’t you answer my very simple question, Daryl McCullough? Here, I’ll restate it for you:
What happens when we apply logic and reason to the question of what we *should* attempt?
Daryl wrote,
‘The way I see it, logic and reason are tools for accomplishing things. They don’t give any guidance as to what should be accomplished.’
I see this as a false dichotomy. Logic and reason can be used to decide what we should attempt.
Most goals we choose have several paths toward them. One way to get rich is to rob a bank. Reason and logic can tells me, guides me, to reject that path.
Further, you could be thinking that it was my emotive desires which cause me to desire wealth, not my logic. However, I can use logic and reason to decide if my emotive goals are really what I want. I currently make enough money to be able to do pretty much whatever I want. I am not rich, by no means, I can’t do things on a whim. However, I can achieve my my modest goals of traveling by planning a couple years in advance.
Of course, I would love to have so much wealth that I could do things on a whim. That is an emotive goal. Reason tells me that this goal is not very likely to be accomplished, and is used to modify my desires accordingly. So what I should accomplish has been determined through a combination of emotive and logic.
I doubt that you disagree with what I’ve said. I’m just illustrating the false dichotomy of assigning emotive desires for what should be accomplshed and logic and reason solely to the task of how to accomplish these emotive desires.
Cheers,
-Flex
Flex,
What I would say is that in making a decision, there are two different issues: (1) What are the likely consequences of the decision, and (2) do I want those consequences. I think what you are saying is that issue (2) is not purely emotional, because one can talk about consequences a day from, a month from now, a year from now, ten years from now. Something that you might think you want, looking only one day into the future, may look less desirable if you look a year into the future. But it seems like no matter how far out you project the consequences of an action, there will always be an emotional component to evaluating which consequences you want.
Not quite: neither leprechauns nor Gods talk to me. That’s not true of everyone. But yes, the evidence for the existence of God available to me does seem to me about as compelling as evidence for the existence of fairies, elves, leprechauns and unicorns.
Ken Cope: “Sure, it makes you trust strangers with candy, but what do you get in your all day sucker (apart from the toxic center) that keeps you coming back for more?”
Community! My example showed the failure of the system, but the thing is, it actually works most of the time, and especially within local groups. And when it does work, it gives you a strong sense of “connection” with the other members of your tribe or pseudotribe. The sense of community is inherently pleasurable, because it’s a basic psychological need. To break away from the religion, independent of any magical threats, represents a basic separation from the associated community.
Daryl McCullogh: [parental love] “Well, to me it means that the parent is emotionally connected with the child in such a strong way that the well-being and happiness of the child means as much as the parent’s own well-being. More, the well-being of the parent includes the well-being of the child; I can’t be happy if my children are not well.”
But note that the behavior dictated by this feeling can be justified on long-term pragmatic grounds. As it happens, the justification matches up nicely with the evolutionary impetus that mandated the behavior in the first place (by way of those feelings!) Those who didn’t take care of their children tended to leave fewer descendants, or none at all. Note that caretaking a human infant is far too complex for the details to be hardwired into instinct. On the other hand, our individual intelligence is such that the developmental process only needs to stick a few predetermined associations (instinctive goals) in our brain, and let our general intelligence work out the details.
Spirituality, while it’s certainly a commonplace experience, does not provide a goal or purpose. It is, however, pleasurable and inducible in a variety of fashions. That makes it an ideal “bait” for use by parasitic memes….
You have provoked much thought with this posting. I find it refreshing to be the son of a minister and I can still think of organized religion objectively. I am inspired to find that as a free thinker that I can warm up to the fact that I can come out of the closet and be associated with the atheist of the world.