The new burned-over district lies in the wreckage of Russia — take a look at the new weird cults flowering in Siberia. Jesus is hanging out on a hilltop there, even.
There’s something strange in the human brain that, when people are uncertain and stripped of security and bewildered by too much change, they try to find refuge in any nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it’s said confidently and is reinforced by social pressures. This is a real phenomenon that’s cropped up again and again in human history, and it’s sad to see it rising again.
People have been talking a lot about these “New Atheists” lately, and I haven’t liked the term at all. I don’t think we can call anyone a “New Atheist” yet, until they actually come up with something new…and I think the new thing, the Holy Grail of godlessness, ought to be the articulation of a framework for rational thought, ethics, and social organization that excludes reliance on divinity or revelation, and yet is strong enough to anchor human minds in the face of desolation. Not another cult like the brew fermenting in Russia, but a defense against cultish thinking that inoculates the mind against that kind of susceptibility.
Somebody figure that one out for me, willya?
This is a very important question. Most of the people that I have engaged over the years in a discussion about why they find religion necessary (that includes my mother) say that they find religion a source of support, particularly in face of a tragedy, something that gives them hope for betterment. They seem to believe that religion and religious edicts by-and-large breed notions of basic human morality. Very recently, a physician friend of mine, a Roman Catholic Christian by birth and non-observant, went back to the church after a messy separation from his long-time live-in girlfriend; when asked, he simply said that he found solace in the words of the priest.
I don’t really understand this; I cannot fathom why people need a crutch like religion – and not common sense, which would have been far more preferable – to hold on to in times of stress. Some of these people are fairly intelligent otherwise; many of them do not identify with creationist ideology at all. It is as if wherever their faith is concerned, they practise a deliberate suspension of disbelief, particularly in situations of moral or ethical considerations.
Am I missing something here?
If a muscle is strained, it may be pulled, torn, or sprained, and unable to function correctly for some time, perhaps permanently. Why not the brain?
Kausik, some priests do have a great depth of understanding and are compassionate, caring listeners. (You can tell them from the others because they’re the ones who don’t resort to ‘god works in mysterious ways’-type platitudes.)
If only they didn’t have to spend the rest of their time shoring up the foundations of bad thought, they could really make a difference.
I don’t understand it either. Maybe kind words and a sense of belonging may help one get through tough times, but it doesn’t make it true! How can they overlook such a important part of the whole religious thing? Perhaps these are people who never really thought it through and are now simply reverting to childhood traditions.
I was commenting on llewelly’s friend, not on the Russians, who most likely didn’t have such traditions.
Kausik, in addition to Brownian’s comments, some people are just uncomfortable with the idea that they are powerless to prevent or fix something.
Personally, I don’t think a desire not to be powerless justifies the belief, but I understand how some might think that way.
Death. When people feel they miss their loved ones, I tell them that as long as you think about them, and consider their contributions when they were alive, their life was not in vain. The lives of slaves in human history seem worthless until you consider all the contributions they did. No matter how tiny we might be we are still paving way for the future. Just as much as our children will benefit from our work, we have benefited from the work of those who came before us. And I think science is a very big positive concept to behold in this line of thinking because it so strongly relies on what came before it.
I don’t think there can be such a defense, PZ– and nor should there be. I think it is far better to work on improving the world to a point where everyone will feel safe, vital, and free. It can be accomplished.
the Holy Grail of godlessness
I love it…
“Perhaps these are people who never really thought it through and are now simply reverting to childhood traditions.”
Seems unlikely since they are Russians, they were most likely raised as atheists. I suspect finding a community to belong to is the biggest draw for them.
“There’s something strange in the human brain that, when people are uncertain and stripped of security and bewildered by too much change, they try to find refuge in any nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it’s said confidently and is reinforced by social pressures. This is a real phenomenon that’s cropped up again and again in human history, and it’s sad to see it rising again.”
Why is that strange PZ? It sounds like a great way to survive a disaster. Picture a community of hunter gathers; some catastrophe hits and all the normal social groups are destroyed. Religion gives the survivors an excuse to bond together as a new group and not murder each other because the other survivors are strangers.
Based on what I’ve seen and read, the “new” atheism is specifically going after 3 popular bromides that even many atheists have been accepting:
1.) “Real” religion is good, benign, and reasonable: when people do things in the name of religion which are none of these, that’s because they’re taking religion and distorting it to their own ends. (And even if this is not strictly true, we should say it is, because it will encourage extremists to become moderate.)
2.) Religion isn’t really about belief in the supernatural, it’s about comfort and community, and people need it — so the actual beliefs should never be publicly attacked or challenged (since they can’t handle the truth the way we can.)
3.) Science has nothing to say one way or the other about the existence of God (and even if it does, we must pretend it doesn’t, or we’ll be killed politically on evolution in the public schools.)
Those aren’t new ideas, of course. What’s new is the concerted focus, and the unwillingness to play the “I don’t have faith, but I’m so glad you do” card. Whether it’s all true or not is a legitimate public discussion. As Vic Stenger put it, “No More Free Ride.”
I really don’t see Atheists comming up with something new. We don’t represent an organized group with a common purpose. To some degree that’s our loss, but to a larger degree it’s our independence of thought that distinguishes us. I have developed a few strong retorical tools to put religionists back into their box. I don’t call them names, I quote scripture “did you know Abraham pimped his wife to the Pharaoh and his wife gave syphilis to the Pharaoh and infected all his concubines?”. I have offered to teach bible school, I call it teaching the controversy!
I don’t know what to do about the seeming fact that most people are animals needing to follow the Big Animal (God, gurus, or both) and to keep to the middle of the herd. I suspect this was once a wonderful adaptation for survival (as it is in other herd animals) that has become, in the context of democracy and individuality, maladaptive.
Here’s a fun experiment. Cut and paste this entire thread into MSWord (or whatever) and replace the word “religion” with “alcohol”. Just as pathetic but makes more sense.
“A misconception is that these people are all the mad and the gullible and the stupid,” Partridge said.
No, actually I think that about covers it.
Perhaps the new atheist must approach the problem of theism from a new angle: rather than trying to demonstrate the incoherencies and contradictions inherent with the theistic position, attempt to answer the questions that the atheistic position raises to a satisfactory degree.
Of course, the dyed-in-the-wool atheist will be quick to point out that it is not the atheists responsibility to answer any questions at all! Nevertheless, atheists can speculate, and reason, and wonder, and think. In particular, I think the two questions that atheists are on the hook to provide good answers for are:
Michael Shermer has written two excellent books about #1, along with Dennet’s work on religion, but the question remains a prominent signpost for anyone wrestling with questions of metaphysics. #2 has no good answers outside of very abstract, philsophical writings, but its answer is the most fundamental of all questions. Other popular theist fallbacks like, “how do you explain consciousness?” or “what happens after we die?” are easy if the universe can be explained analytically.
It seems to me that if atheists could satisfactorily and convincingly respond to these concerns, that the rest would follow. I don’t believe that people want to believe nonsense, but that they do so out of some sort of intellectual desperation or response to unanswered questions. I don’t pretend that it is a simple matter to answer these, especially #2, but I do think it is a prerequisite for widespread acceptance of an atheist outlook.
I blame all the chemical waste that the Soviets left laying around…clearly it’s gotten into the groundwater.
Bob,
“Seems unlikely since they are Russians, they were most likely raised as atheists.”
Nyet! Bob, you’ve succumbed to the fallacy held by a vast proportion of westerners, which is the assumption that the institutional atheism of the Soviet Union and the active suppression of religion and persecution of clergy by the Stalinist regime means that religion was stamped out at some basic level. It was not.
Old, old, story. Cults seem to come and go like mushrooms. This cult seems vaguely similar to the Bagwan Rajneesh cult that came and went on the west coast decades ago. The followers of this one tended to be well off professionals with a lot of money to burn. How else would someone be able to live in the eastern Oregon desert with no job and party all the time?
Some people claim religion is hard wired into the human brain and must serve some evolutionary purpose to persist under any and all conditions. Even communism and its variants are quasi-religious ideologies. Just going to leave this as a supposition, but it would be easier to argue for it then against it.
After 7 decades of atheistic anti-religious efforts, the Russians gain some freedom and promptly re-religion. What do you think the 1.3 billion Chinese will do? Communism never really made a dent in traditional Chinese culture. Like it or not PZ and friends, the 21st century could be the golden age of new cults, religions, and superstitions. LOL, something to think about.
“I think the new thing, the Holy Grail of godlessness, ought to be the articulation of a framework for rational thought, ethics, and social organization that excludes reliance on divinity or revelation, and yet is strong enough to anchor human minds in the face of desolation.”
Zen Buddhism.
DaveX nailed it in #8. Humans behave badly in many ways- of which assenting to absurdities is only one and far from the worst- when they are afraid. We need to continue striving to rid the world of as many reasons for fear as we can- a daunting task, but remember that elephants can be eaten as long as you do it one bite at a time.
I don’t think we’d ever convince the simplistic concerning the plausibility of a complete atheological view of life. Simplicity breeds piety via their teachers, and it is their teachers that possess a defect to rational inquiry. No matter how many times the humanist explains how Stalin’s atheism is in no way linked to secular humanism except weakly by a complete disbelief in divinities, the teacher of the simpletons will never budge.
I think if anyone is truly willing to put forth the effort, it would require only enough to convince the moderates and fence-sitters. But for those with enough time and gull, perhaps completely defeating the teachers of the simpletons would be a goal. Just my input.
And a world in which we could edit our posts here to repair things like italic tags left open would also be a better world. ;)
Re: #18 – I can’t speak for Russia but that certainly also seems to be the case in China – officially atheist, but all manner of woo in practice (I remember reading something somewhere about shrines to Mao in his hometown, and I don’t mean shrines of the political sort either).
Personally, I’ve always suspected that susceptibility to authoritarian regimes is higher in places that are highly woo-woo, which is why the whole “Stalin and Mao were atheists” thing rings so hollow.
This cult seems less pernicious than most. Mostly a lot of benign new age philosophy that I didn’t bother to cut and paste. The rejection of modern medicine is foolish and if they haven’t dropped that nonsense, they either will eventually or die at much higher rates than the usual. Treating a cold with faith healing works great. Treating appendicitis, TB, or malaria and so on with faith can get you dead fast.
I think there are two separate topics getting tangled up here. I just got back from a trip to England and Lithuania. In England, Richard Dawkins’s God Delusion has just come out in paperback and Anglican Bishops, taking a cue from Pat Robertson, are saying that recent flooding is punishment from God because the nation has become tolerant of gays. Same old, same old to this American. New Atheism (or whatever you want to call the phenomena that atheists are tired of being told to shut up), is necessary and positive in these countries, even if it does piss off some moderate religous folk with whom we should cooperate in the fight against fundamentalism.
In Lithuania, the situation is completely different and the books such as Dawkins’s and Hitchens’s (that I was listening to on my iPod during flights and train rides), are largely irrelevant at this point, because of the situation that PZ is mentioning in this post. I don’t think the people in Lithuania could read these books with anything but fear and trepidition. Atheism is so tied to Soviet oppression and to the supression of the Lithuanian national identity, that has been overtly Roman Catholic for centuries, that it is probably impossible to talk about atheism to Lithuanians without conjuring the dread of the recent past. In addition to a huge resurgance of Catholic faith since independence, the traditional paganism of Lithuania (the last European country, by the way, to become Christian) is also finding new followers, and even some (gag) evangelical Christian religions are finding a few followers. Still, by far Catholicism is the main religion, with up to 85% of Lithuanians belonging to the Catholic church, and this is primarily (in my opinion) because the church was so active in perserving Lithuanian culture during the Soviet occupation.
So, I have no answer to these dilemmas, but the fight against religious extremism and forced ignorance is definitely something that needs to be approached differently in Eastern Bloc countries than it is being approaced in the US and the UK. People in Lithuania do not feel safe. They don’t look you in the eye when you pass by on the street, they don’t talk to strangers, they follow you around in stores like KGB agents, and so forth. Even though they’ve been out from under Soviet rule for quite some time now, the repeated traumitizaion (Nazis before the Soviets, and other occupations before WWII) has created a society of people who have a completely different pshychological makeup than those of us in the US and in Western European nations, who have had comfortable lives unencumbered by totalitarianism. In such a case, I personally find it quite easy to understand how religion provides comfort.
You are an evolutionary biologist so you, of all people, should recognize that certain characteristics of the human mind are part of its construction. Humans, under a certain age, deprived of a common language will develop their own, and it will have certain universal characteristics. Unlike evolutionary biology or Hello Kitty keychains, language is found in every human culture. Similarly, music, religion and obsessive compulsive disorder are human universals, all artifacts of the physical properties of our minds.
What we are seeing post-Soviet Russia is no weirder than the creole sign language in post-Samoza Nicaragua, work chanties or lullabies.
Liane (#24): Very interesting. Shrines to Mao? Oh, the irony. Hollow ring, indeed.
This is anecdotal, but FWIW, *all* the Russians I know personally – one of who is near 70, some of whom are my father’s age and most of whom are old enough to have reached at least their twenties by the time The Wall came down – were raised Christian or Jewish. That’s nearly 20 individuals. One of them, a man of 48 years of age, told me that by the time he was growing up the Soviet government had more or less turned a blind eye to religious practice. Despite Stalin’s best efforts, Ded Moroz never died. ;-)
The most devout Christians I know personally (my next-door neighbors) are Chinese immigrants. They came to America for the economic opportunities and for the chance to have a bunch of kids (3 or 4) without the government intervening. Freedom of religion may also have been a factor, I’ll have to ask them.
Writerdd’s interesting comment (#26) forces me to add that I certainly don’t mean to imply that religious practice under the Soviets hadn’t gone underground for a good long while. Of course it had.
Alcoholics Anonymous has a tradition of “Attraction, not Promotion.” The idea is, don’t push sobriety on those who may seem to need it; rather, make sobriety look good by example, and those who need it will be drawn to it.
P.S. I seriously doubt you’ll find your new atheism. Using religion to find comfort is a form of self medication, and has a lot in common with obsessive compulsive disorder which medicates a slightly different form of discomfort. The same impulse that drives us towards spritituality, possibly an artifact of our oversized neocortex, drives us away from the hard work of thinking. The neural comfort pathways are simple different pathways, and they do different things.
Despite this, I can imagine two approaches, but I retain serious doubts.
1) There is a positive response to successful cogitation. Perhaps a series of mental exercises, challenges, readings or rituals, with a “successful” climax of solution or resolution could trigger a good enough comforting response. Unfortunately, this would look a lot like religion, even if denied a supernatural basis, and despite the rational underpinnings, the actual behaviors and rituals would not appear particularly rational.
2) There may be a pharmaceutical solution that simply stimulates or sensitizes the comforting pathways, sort of a best friend and counselor in tablet form. This class of drug has its own risks, an acquaintance of mine recently hanged himself between medications, so there is still a place for human kindness with or without a religious framework.
I think BobL is on to something – a large part of what allows religions (or ideologies generally) to spread and endure is the social network part of it. I think one of the “problems” for atheism is that it comes with no built-in social component; indeed, it means basically that a lot of social groups are cut off to you. Another, related, problem is that atheists have no institutions devoted to perpetuating or furthering the cause- and institutions are vital to any movement that’s going to have a influental and lasting social presence. Individual gun nuts can do little more than creep out their neighbors and worry the local constabulary; get a million of them together under some institutional banner and you have the most powerful lobbying organization in the country.
IMO, the Religious Right is in the right place at the right time to pick up a lot of the pieces from the decline of other social organizations. The Masons, the Elks, the Oddfellows, the Rotary clubs are all dying. Unions, which often offered a lot of social components, are on the wane. The corner bar is now an Applebee’s out on Route 27; the corner store has been subsumed by the SuperWalmart’s grocery section. Churches are in the right place to pick up the slack where a lot of other avenues of social interaction are being cut off.
For there to be a “New Atheism,” atheists are going to have to find some way of creating explicitly atheist institutions, offering social support to other atheists, and reaching out to the broader community.
Re #30, “Using religion to find comfort is a form of self medication, and has a lot in common with obsessive compulsive disorder which medicates a slightly different form of discomfort.”
There is actually such a thing as religious OCD. It is called Scrupulosity. A google search will provide more info than a normal person will need to know.
Lana, I did not mention a friend in my comment. I supect you intended to refer to Kausik’s comment.
Kseniya, re:#28, that’s interesting re: your Chinese neighbours, I’ve noticed a lot of East Asians in the US seem to be particularly fervid Christians, but I always assumed they were descendants of immigrants (ie. brought up here) or from other E.Asian countries like Korea, Taiwan, etc.) Had no idea (though am not entirely surprised) that the newer immigrants from the mainland were similarly afflicted. (I’m ethnically Chinese and come originally from a Chinese-majority country in SE Asia which the fundies seem to be gradually taking over as well. I’d always assumed (based on what I saw growing up) that a lot of Asian Christianity has to do with status perks, but I’ve also met a lot of otherwise amiable people who seem to actually believe, and I mean in some seriously scary stuff as well, like in submission of the freakish VoxDay “if God says to kill babies then one should obey the good Lord” type. Lots of public hysteria there about homosexuality these days too, what with a branch of FotF there and a whole bunch of megachurches.)
When I write that book that founds, only on present and visible facts, such equanimity as we can sanely muster, it will be little more than what science is now save that we should better know our own mind’s limits, proclivities and weaknesses. It does a soul good, if you fancy you have a soul, to mix the reading of the likes of Mixing Memory with your studies of RNA and paleontology.
We are just getting started. Don’t worry about those we will leave behind on our journey because they are already busy reading about being left behind while waiting at the jeebus stop. That reading betokens a sterile and misdirectred worry, a reflex conditioned by the intellectual poverty of upbring: they experience being left behind in social and economic realms but react by recasting their drama of privation as somehow resolved by teh Immortality they will never know. They are innoculated against knowledge.
Knowledge is the innoculation you were asking for here but knowledge of the mind comes hardest and is most slippery.
Cults promise relief uniformly to the miserable but at a deceptive price. They offer a focal source of an interpretation that each individual can apply without examination or delay to feel better about their individual circumstance. On the other hand, Darwin, some have infered, says the species, not the individual, is the aggregate that benefits from the struggles of the individual and frankly that is a harder concept to sell to the self absorbed who wish for their own personal salvation. Strict egalitarian principles do not, by that interpretation, have support in a world where a Darwinian process has made us the creatures we are. It will not wash with children or libertarians.
The human heart is a dark, dark forest.
Kaleberg: is your “comfort” the same as my “equanimity”?
we may be thinking along parallel tracks.
Liane (#34),
Interesting stuff. My Chinese neighbors go to a Chinese Christian Church (it’s in the next town over) and I’m quite sure they are Believers. Their children (both born here in the USA) each have popular Old Testament names. They go to church a lot. They many, many more hours at church than anyone I have ever known, not getting home until 11 p.m some Sundays. It’s fair to say that the social aspect of this is very important to them, and many of their friends are also immigrants who attend the same church, but I’m pretty sure their religiousity is not some kind of act.
Hard to say, though. The first word that comes to mind is “devout” and the last is “evangelical” (though they did invite me to a hymn-singalong-dinner at their house – once). I know their comings and goings, but not their inner spiritual lives. I have no idea where they stand on homosexuality (etc) but I will say they are charming, sweet people who have made our block a nicer place to be.
I’m not going to apologize for liking them (dammit/LOL) but honestly, sometimes I do feel sad about the heavy xtian indoctrination their kids may be experiencing. On the other hand, they’re attending the local secularist gummint school, so maybe it’s a wash. ;-)
Kaleberg: is your “comfort” the same as my “equanimity”?
we may be thinking along parallel tracks.
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Aside to host: grousing is bad form and I am full of gratitude for the opportunities and opinions of this forum _but_ I am also a busy person and having to twiddle my thumbs while the queue cooled off enough to take the “potentially abusive” comment as appears above the line is a tad irksome. can I just pay to cut the line?
When my world fell apart several times in the last decade or so, I didn’t go to a church — a church came to me. They didn’t even ask me to believe in their god. They just said “we have this support group for parents of children with disabilities, and this singles group for divorced people, and even this class on surviving divorce, and if you find that you can’t pay your rent for a month or two, call this person.” Trust me, there were no other offers, and nothing to find even looking except spotty and reluctant governmental stuff. I’m still an atheist, but I have a soft spot for Methodists. If you don’t want people turning to religion in times of crisis, you have to have an widely available alternative that offers the same support and companionship that a church offers. Organize, fund-raise, build, network, give support and assistance, develop a positive image — and forget about “let’s think about this rationally and scientifically.” I was willing to pray to trees when my son went through open-heart surgery at 4 months.
oh thats just ducky. now add embarrassment to frustration: I have a duplicate comment. I’d swear the error message suggested that I had submitted too frequently and that I should just wait bit…strongly implying that it did not accept the comment.
Kseniya (#38):
Hope you didn’t get the idea that I think all of ’em are hatefilled borgpods or something :P, I’ve known some genuinely sweet people of that persuasion, along with the scary ones (although the most unnerving type might well be the ones who manage to be both sweet AND scary depending on what they’re talking about).
I’m a bit surprised to hear about the heavy-duty hours though, I’d always associated that more with the (non-Xtian but similarly nutso) sect that I grew up in (the “extra” activities went well past 11pm on a semi-reg basis, even on weekdays – I was perpetually sleep-deprived as a child). Out of curiosity, is this schedule typical of the more fervid churches here in general? (I suppose I’d always assumed that Christianity=church on Sundays and maybe the occasional Bible study group or something.)
Sorry, llewelly. I misread.
I think mainland China will be ground zero for the next wave of cults. The communists never really had much influence on the traditional culture. Now they are rapidly fading away under the new economic model, mixed economy along with all the dislocations going from 2nd world to first world.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Already there has been Fulong Gong and I’ve heard Xianity is making rapid inroads. One source (unconfirmed) said there are now 45 million xians there. With 1.3 billion people being tossed into the crucible of world culture and economies, watch out.
As several posters have pointed out, atheists might well have to come up with their own church or equivalent. And then pick out some offbeat cause to promote. Equal rights for cats or some such.
Re: #44 –
I think mainland China will be ground zero for the next wave of cults.
Word. I understand that there’re already a whole bunch of weirdo cults there (even apart from Falungong and Xtianity). Desperate people in times of transition and all that. (On the other hand, it’s not like weirdo cults aren’t springing up everywhere else as well, so who knows. I’m sure, though, that China is poised to contribute its fair share – or more – to the phenomenon.)
And
To me, this is the real motivation behind religion: it is a social thing. When people say they want to be closer to God, what they really mean is they want to be closer to, and feel part of, the group of other people who also worship. That’s one of the reasons Atheists are looked upon with suspicion. We aren’t just trying to erode a belief system, we are, in their eyes, threatening an entire way of life, a reason for commonality and an excuse for weekly get togethers. I don’t think you can dissect the irrational belief component of religion without addressing this very basic desire for security within a group.
Burned over district – I’d be wary about using that, given theists’ historical fondness for burning people who disagree with them.
Good grief, one can only assume Jeebus must have really pissed off the old man this time. Instead of sending him to the Romans like the first time he banished him to SIBERIA. Have you no mercy ?
The english on-line version of Pravda published this little gem last December:
There are two basic types of sects. The first one consists of sects serving purely religious purposes. Their leaders are mentally diseased people who pathologically seek other people’s notice and worshipping. They suffer from both complexes of inferiority and super-adequateness.
Well put.
http://english.pravda.ru/russia/history/21-12-2006/86047-sect-0
Liane,
Oh, I didn’t! Fear not. (Fearest thou not?) The line I wrote about not apologizing was sort of a wink and a nod to all of Pharyngula, for the people I describe are often at the butt end of comments about delusion and even child abuse, but I can’t say I know two more delightful, happy kids who are cared for and loved by who parents of gentle disposition.
I believe your assumptions about church-hours are generally correct. The heavy-duty hours suprised me, too. I suspect it’s social activities with their community of fellow Christian Chinese immigrants that keep them there. They host small gatherings at their home quite often.
S. #40 – I have had, and have witnessed, similar experiences. In my family’s case, it wasn’t “a church” exactly, it was the community. Friends, neighbors, church groups (and not just the church of which we were active members) pulled together to help families in need.
Many of the lines we perceive and sometimes draw are, in real life, actually pretty blurry. Walls have a way of coming down when there’s a crisis. (They have a way of going up, too, but that’s another story.)
I hear that soon we will be able to create artificial religion in the lab. It’s easy! Using an empty mind as a beaker, combine the four basic building blocks of religion: A (angst), C (cowardice), G (gullibility) and T (timidness). Earlier attempts at cloning religions have failed however, due to sectarian incompatibility.
RamDude,
True in part, but I don’t think it’s quite so black-and-white. There are quite a few people who pursue the fulfillment of a desire to have a relationship with their Creator. See David Rockwell’s comments in the “never debate a creationist” thread. I think there are a lot of
Christianstheists like Mr. Rockwell – by which I mean intelligent and reasonable people who, for whatever reason, have voids that cannot be filled by what Nature alone can provide. I understand the desire, I just don’t happen to share it in any great quantity.Another reason why atheists are looked upon with suspicion is that for millenia people have been taught, by their holy men, to do so. You know all the usual canards. Atheists believe in nothing (and will therefore believe in anything. Say what? You mean, like, genocide an’ junk?). Atheists live a life of no meaning, one devoid of ethics and morality. Blah blah blah freakin-blah. Those presumptions have to come from somewhere, and where if not from the people whose position of power are threatened by the very concept of (let alone a walking manifestation of) non-belief?
I would like to point out (since nobody else seems to have caught it) that these are two separate statements, not necessarily related. (Actually three, and the third is false. Religion doesn’t persist under the conditions inside my brain or PZ’s. But it persists under enough sets of conditions to be worthy of study.)
Even if religion is “hard wired into the human brain”, it does not necessarily serve any purpose, evolutionary or otherwise. Plenty of things don’t. If it *does* serve a purpose, it’s not necessarily one that benefits humans – it may just be good enough at self-perpetuation to beat human evolution to resist it (i.e. the “parasitic meme” hypothesis).
Or maybe it *isn’t* good enough at self-perpetuation to beat human evolution to resist it, and we’ll find that out in just 100,000 more years. On a larger time scale religion really might be just a passing fad, a fault in the human ability to discover purpose and intention behind actions. That’s a great ability to have and has done a lot for our species, but it might benefit us to evolve some sort of proper regulator on it so it isn’t constantly going off half-cocked and seeing intelligent purpose in every passing hurricane. All living species are works in progress.
I agree, it’s not entirely that black and white, but here’s the thing, deep down where the truth exists, in everyone, there is the knowledge that “God” is a concept born in human imagination.
We are all products of this big, orderly universe that we live in. But the whole concept of god takes it further than that, into the realm of imagination. And why imagine a creator that isn’t simply the universe itself?…To feel even more security. It’s this desire for security that motivates people to focus their attention on images of comfort. And what images of comfort, (of our creator), are we inclined to dwell on? The images, and beliefs, that have communal support. In the end, it mostly boils down to sharing a common communal nexus with friends, hence the desire to proselytize and expand the belief. It’s not for the glory of God, it’s for the greater inclusivity of the belief system.
There’s very little difference between apes and monkeys gathering together to groom each other, and us big brained primates gathering together in church and sharing the experience of weeping for Jesus.
The Siberian cult would make an excellent setting for a psychological thriller. Just think of it – remote location, isolation & cabin fever kicking in, the manic glow in the eyes of his followers, nowhere to run…just make sure M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t lay his filty hands on the rights to it.
I did like the Pratchettesque touch that they had a symbolic guardian to the path up the master’s hill, too… like another Karon, or St. Peter.
Whenever I want to think about something, or reflect on things, rather than head to a church I pull on my walking boots. I am lucky in that I live only a few miles from the West Wales coast and so have access to some pretty spectacular walking. I find a good walk of 10-20 miles does wonders for my mood and spirit, and as a bonus it help keeps me fit.
So there you go, my solution to the problem of religion. Give all the believers a pair of boots and a map.
Even more effectively, drop the map.
Matt Penfold: I like your solution. I’m the same way.
RambDude, I basically agree, with one qualification:
Whether or not this truth exists and could be extracted is open to debate, but more to the point, not many Believers would admit to possessing (or being a repository of) the knowledge that you describe. Ever. Are you saying that all theists subconsciously understand and fight against the implications of this knowledge? That’s an interesting proposition. If true, it might actually explain a lot of the dysfunctional behaviors associated with religious zealotry. ;-)
I mention it, though, because your thesis rests on the validity of that first paragraph, and I’m not sure it’s valid. (Nor am I sure that it’s not – I just don’t know.)
Chris:
I love this idea, similar thoughts have crossed my mind before, and I sure hope you are right. The part of my mind that isn’t still struggling with the idea, implanted in my head when I was very young, that religion is inherently good and useful, screams: “People of Earth! My brothers and sisters! It is time to grow the fuck up!”
(This phrase is not to be confused with “grow the fuckup” which means something entirely different.)
I wonder if other animals – apes in particular – ever ponder the existence of some kind of Creator.
LOL, yes!
“A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the religion in the world.” (With apologies to Paul Dudley White.)
Siberia’s pretty big. There are locations in Siberia well above the Arctic Circle and in the chain of volcanic islands south of the Kamchatka peninsula that make their spot look like Orlando. Feh. Wimps!
Yep. The desire for security is very real, but the images, the ceromonies, the Godhead hierarchies–all play pretend. And everyone knows it.
Thunder storms are knocking my power out, gotta go.
@ Kseniya re: “(This phrase is not to be confused with “grow the fuckup” which means something entirely different.)”
I think it’s pretty clear that they’re already pretty good at this. :/
A long time ago, the churches realized that they could do a better business in crutches if they broke their customers’ legs.
Kseniya (#49):
Glad you understood :). That said, re:
butt end of comments about delusion and even child abuse
I must admit that I do still think of indoctrination as a form of (albeit highly unintentional) abuse, mostly due to the fear-and-gaslighting factor. Am very fond of the parental units (also nice kind well-meaning people) myself but really I wouldn’t have needed all this therapy over the years if I hadn’t had to deal with all the nutso theology and social conservatism (not to mention crazy peer-pressure from the group) in the first place. Was seriously effed up when I was a believer (not infrequently suicidal, with heavily obsessive-compulsive tendencies). Funny how the really pathological stuff evaporated when I stopped believing, though; I’m still in therapy but mostly to deal with emotional residue (trust issues, fear of people/being controlled, that sort of thing).
Obviously ymmv (probably depends on a bunch of other factors like the kids’ personalities, the nature/intensity of the claims that are made, the degree of fear involved), but I definitely must admit to a certain sympathy for the religious-indoctrination=abuse equation :P.
Caledonian:
A long time ago, the churches realized that they could do a better business in crutches if they broke their customers’ legs.
LOL — and also crying at the same tiome ‘cos it’s so damn true!
Ditto Tony. I COL’d. (Chuckled Out Loud.)
Liane, yup this is a clear case of not enough info. The church they go to may be as far from the baying hounds of the fundy church as is the lefty-liberal Episcopal and Congregational churches my family once attended. As for your experiences, well… I’m glad you’re doing better. Breaking free from a dysfunctional situation is never a bad thing, eh?
Two quotes I thought of today that seem about right:
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.”
Karl Marx
and
“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
Mary Poppins
I think the question is all wrong. An analogy: If you stop teaching people to read, illiteracy will crop up everywhere, almost as if illiteracy is hardwired into our brains. Maybe our fear of death or need for comfort keeps us illiterate; ignorance is bliss after all. My point: Thinking about the world objectively does not come naturally to us; it’s a skill. It’s like being able to read; you’re always going to have to teach it. That doesn’t mean we’re “hardwired for religion” (in the sense people interpret as having a need for religion): religious superstition is just a type of feral nonsense. Religion will continue to crop up anywhere civilization doesn’t prioritize objectivity highly enough (and right now that’s everywhere).
NickM
-may pirates steal your booty for getting Mary Poppins songs stuck in my head.
Raven (#19)
“This cult seems vaguely similar to the Bagwan Rajneesh cult that came and went on the west coast decades ago”
Don’t forget it was the same cult (Bagwan, not the Siberian one) that also engaged in nasty things like bioterrorism (Salmonella anyone) and other illegal activities. That is primarily why they went away.
bpower (#14) wrote:
This is more accurate than one might think at first glance. You could do it with “heroin” or “abusive husband” as well.
The truth is, religion is addictive. And while you can temporarily kick an addiction if you work hard enough, in times of hardship, you’re suddenly going to wake up and realize you’re craving an eightball
(read: communion) again, or else you’re going to start wondering what it is that everyone sees in cocaine (read: pentacostal glossolalia).
Religion is a drug, and an effective one, at that. If you want to deal with the adverse effects of religion, you’re going to have to start looking at atheism as a contrived drug rehab program, and as an atheist myself, I don’t think this is what our lack of belief is about, and I definitely don’t think we should lower ourselves by adding all the spiritual mysticism necessary to turn ourselves into metaphysical methadone.
But that’s just me.
Jordan: The answer to #2 is also relatively simple to state though more difficult to fully spell out – namely – there could not have been nothing.
jDP: But fixing the broken social aspects of life might work …
Keith: Yes, it might.
JDP: Word. “Attraction, not promotion.”
I was here in Japan when the 1995 earthquake hit, and I can say as a non-religious person that when something so shattering happens, and your world is turned upside down and the familiar becomes strange, superstition becomes incredibly tempting. It is a natural response, I suspect. In big disasters weird stuff happens. Nothing is normal, and your brain tries to make sense of what appears senseless. While I was sure (logically) that everything that seemed to not make sense had a perfectly rational explanation, at times like that you’re in shock and the whole thing is overwhelming. You do not think rationally. Nothing that’s happening seems rational, so it’s hard to.
I heard people who are normally perfectly sensible talking about ‘angels’ saving them and guiding them from the wreckage of their homes, stuff like that, and while I found it hard to listen to without telling them to get a grip, I could also understand it. I, myself, ‘saw’ aliens in my house immediately after the quake, which just goes to show I’ve seen too many science fiction movies. (Funny how they disappeared the moment I got our brain around the fact that there had been an earthquake, and it wasn’t a UFO crash-landing on the house. Earthquake lightning is a weird and scary phenomenon, and when it’s blue your brain goes into Spielberg mode, especially when you’ve just been woken from a deep sleep VERY VIOLENTLY.)
Japan is not a religious country, but it is a superstitious one, and after that experience I can sort of understand why.
The best thing about the experience as far as I was concerned was that I had such an embarrassingly ludicrous ‘vision’ it couldn’t stick more than a few seconds. The people who saw ‘angels’ were foreign (funny how the non-Christian Japanese didn’t see them) and I suspect it was harder for them to dismiss, coming from a background where such things could be considered valid.
I wonder whether short sharp shocks result in superstition, and slower traumatic changes tend to lead to more organized religion?
BadAunt: Very interesting observations.