Jebus. After reading Ben Radford’s reply to the criticisms of his awful article denying sexism in the toy store, I feel even more repelled. It was ludicrous. It was ridiculous. It was pretentious.
Here’s Radford claiming the high ground.
So when I insisted that Riley was wrong in her claim that girls are forced or “tricked” into buying or liking pink items or princesses, my purpose was not to be pedantic, but instead to keep the discussion grounded and rooted in objective evidence.
There was something else that bugged me in that odd claim from Ben Radford that girls would just naturally like pink better than boys: it was the terrible evpsych rationale for it that just made no sense.
First was the argument that blue has always been associated with boys, and pink with girls, and therefore it was only natural to sustain the distinction.
The choice of blue for infants has its roots in superstition. In ancient times the color blue (long associated with the heavens) was thought to ward off evil spirits. Even today the tradition continues; in many parts of the world people paint their doorways and window frames blue. Originally [“Originally”? Like in Homo erectus, or are we going back to australopithecines?] only boys were swaddled in blue [apparently, no one cared if girls were possessed by evil spirits. By the way, what color were they swaddled in, “originally”?], and girls were later assigned the color pink for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. But the color distinction between the two genders dates back millennia [Oops. See below].
But what about pink toys for girls? It’s an interesting question, and there are several answers. One obvious reason is that dolls are by far the most popular toys for girls [And boys like fire trucks and little red sports cars and setting things on fire, so they ought to like red]. What color are most dolls? Pink, or roughly Caucasian skin-toned [Girls should favor beige, then]. There are, of course, dolls of varying skin tones and ethnicities (the popular Bratz dolls, for example, have a range of skin tones). But since most girls play with dolls, and most dolls are pink (a green- or blue-skinned doll would look creepy [And brown would be just horrible]), it makes perfect sense that most girls’ toys are pink [So their ovens and cooking utensils and cleaning tools and cosmetics all match their dolls’ complexions? That doesn’t make sense, that’s just weird].
Eh, what? The color distinction goes back millennia? Since when was 70 years equal to millennia?
The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.
For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.
In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.
Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.
Pink for girls is a convention of the baby boomer generation. We’ve only had a couple of generations since, and I don’t think there has been much selection pressure to generate a sex difference.
But let’s be charitable here. Maybe there actually is a sex difference in how men and women perceive the colors blue and pink; that we dress baby girls in pink isn’t causal, but a consequence of a bias in how men and women see the world. Maybe, just maybe, these color preferences are a byproduct of a more significant evolutionary bias. At least, if you’re an evpsych proponent you’d like to imagine so. Which leads us to Radford’s citation of an amazing evolutionary hypothesis from Time magazine.
According to a new study in the Aug. 21 [2007] issue of Current Biology, women may be biologically programmed to prefer the color pink—or, at least, redder shades of blue—more than men…. [Researchers] speculate that the color preference and women’s ability to better discriminate red from green could have evolved due to sex-specific divisions of labor: while men hunted, women gathered, and they had to be able to spot ripe berries and fruits. Another theory suggests that women, as caregivers who need to be particularly sensitive to, say, a child flushed with fever, have developed a sensitivity to reddish changes in skin color, a skill that enhances their abilities as the “emphathizer.”
Really? I read that and thought it had to be some invention of the journalist at Time, so I had to go find the original article, and no, that was taken straight from the paper itself. What disappointing tripe.
It is therefore plausible that, in specializing for gathering, the female brain honed the trichromatic adaptations,
and these underpin the female preference for objects ‘redder’ than the background. As a gatherer, the female would also need to be more aware of color information than the hunter. This requirement would emerge as greater certainty and more stability in female color preference, which we find. An alternative explanation for the evolution of trichromacy is the need to discriminate subtle changes in skin color due to emotional states and social-sexual signals; again, females may have honed these adaptations for their roles as care-givers and ‘empathizers’.
I weep for all the African children who died or failed to reproduce because the enhanced red sensitivity of their mothers’ brains was insufficient to compensate for the reduced contrast caused by the color of their skin; I pity the poor African adults who bumble about romantically, unable to read potential partners’ social-sexual signals as well as their European peers. It’s also sad that even European males are less able, and have less need, to read their fellow human beings’ emotional states.
The utility of being able to evaluate when fruit is ripe isn’t in question, and I can see where that is a likely factor in the evolution of our color vision. But both males and females have that ability; there’s no reason to think that females have been selected for a slightly stronger preference for red, and that there’s some deep biological cause for this preference that is found in women, but not their sons.
But hey, I’ve got the paper from Hurlbert and Ling, so let’s look at the data.
They do find a robust difference between the sexes in their study. It’s a simple experiment in which subjects are shown pairs of colored rectangles on a computer screen, and they are asked to select which of the two colors they like best. Do this many times, and you get a profile of favored colors. And what do you find? Most people like blue shades, but women tend to like a little more red in their colored rectangles.
Now hang on, you might say — those data are all from British subjects, and there’s no way to sort out the accumulated cultural biases from the biology. Maybe those British women had been brought up by baby boomers who told them from babyhood on that pink was the color for girls, and so all we’re seeing here is a reflection of that bias. To correct for that, the researchers sought out native Han Chinese who were recent immigrants to the UK, and tested them separately. And look! They also show a consistent difference, with Chinese women showing more preference for reds than Chinese men!
From this, they somehow conclude that the differences are biological. If that’s true, though, they missed another major conclusion: compare the color preferences of Chinese men, in the bottom graph, to UK women, in the top graph.
One obviously must conclude that Chinese men have experienced a long history of selection for the ability to make finely tuned distinctions in the ripeness of fruit, to detect delicate blushes in the cheeks of their lovers, and to diagnose childhood diseases at the first flush. I’m impressed.
Oh, wait — there’s another possibility. Could it be that color preferences are actually affected by one’s culture? The researchers even admit this!
Yet while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience. In China, red is the color of ‘good luck’, and our Chinese subpopulation gives stronger weighting for reddish colors than the British.
I see absolutely no evidence in the paper that the differences are innate, but lots of evidence that color preferences are plastic and responsive to environmental influences. Even the title of the paper looks wrong: it claims to find “biological components”, but nothing in the methodology or the results exhibits any way to separate biological components from environmental responsiveness.
It’s a fine collection of data, filtered by an unjustifiable evolutionary interpretation, processed yet again by a credulous journalist in a mass market magazine, and then regurgitated without question by Ben Radford. Sorry, guy, it’s bad science, and all you saw was the implausible unacceptable bit.
Hurlbert AC, Ling Y (2007) Biological components of sex differences in color preference. Curr Biol. 17(16):R623-5.
(Also on FtB)
Wouldn’t you know Ben Goldacre already addressed this paper back in 2007?
Radford doubles down. Ugh.
The first reason for me is that church was boring. We had an old, nice man for a pastor who I distinctly remember recycling the same sermon at least three times (“Humble yourself and you will be exalted, exalt yourself and you will be humbled” – clear enough, right? But no, we need a half hour sermon relating this to some crap in the bible). There weren’t any fun activities that were church-related. I hated the boring old hymns and the old geezers I had to stand next to and listen to them sing awfully. My dad once made a joke about communion – “You get a little snack today, kids.” But it was actually a slight motivating factor – the communion bread was tasty. Little did dad know it really was the only thing my brother and I had to look forward to in church at times. Apart from the normal angst at having to get up early, I really hated having to dress up. For what? They say god loves you no matter what, so why the hell do I need to wear a nice sweater to impress him? Oh, it is not about impressing god, it is about impressing everyone else.
I remember a sunday where the ususal reverend couldn’t make it so they had some fire-and-brimstone asshole get up and run the show for a day. He told the men not to “look with lust” on women, for that was adultery. For some reason the phrase stuck with me, and when going through puberty I started noticing breasts on women of all ages, but at the same time feeling ashamed about it. I eventually got over that but it sure was annoying.
The only thing that made church tolerable in high school was the fact that they filmed the services, and I learned how to run the camera. This paid off in college when I easily got a job with the A/V department at minimum wage. Thanks religion!
In late elementary school, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was on PBS. Now that show filled me with awe and wonder, and explained a lot of stuff that church glossed over or ignored. My jaw dropped at the sophisticated animation (for 1980 or so) of polymerase spiraling up some DNA, grabbing nucleotides, and building an exact copy of the split molecule on both sides. So that’s how it works! Awesome! I want to learn more about genetics! There were many other moments on that show that made things clear and inspired me to learn more. I brought it up in science class in 5th grade, “When I was watching Cosmos the other night, they explained that” and all the other students would roll their eyes, because they’d heard that line before.
In 8th grade I actually read almost all of my chemistry textbook over one weekend, again captivated by how the world actually works, with protons and electrons that have opposite charges, and how the charges seek to neutralize each other in chemical reactions. It explained why salt is a cube, why plastic is durable, and why metal conducts electricity, all at once. You never get this in church.
I had a close friend in high school. We were both extreme science nerds, and took three years of Latin as well, just because it was hard. But my friend went the way of creationism in 12th grade, believing the earth was 6000 years old and that Jesus was coming back after the rapture. At one point I went with him to some church where they had a ventriloquist/puppet operator who told christian jokes, bringing on the awkwardness of feeling obligated to laugh. I was still wavering at that point, and may have come close to making the circular connection in my brain that makes christians feel warm and fuzzy all the time, which they call “being saved.”
But later, I didn’t buy any of my friend’s arguments. He said it all came down to your assumptions, which I have heard other creationists retreat towards since that time. I saw him once after graduating high school, I think, and then pretty much didn’t bother tracking him after that. He was the poster boy of a wasted mind to me for two decades.
College was of course eye-opening. I took genetics, biogeography, anatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology, and started reading Richard Dawkins’s books. I took a lot of anthropology, and I have to say it was more of a distraction than anything, but it did lead to some good times and interesting experiences. I learned about cultural relativism, which is the belief that cultures need to be understood on their own terms and that all are worthy of preservation and respect. I don’t buy that so much any more, given knowledge of people living under Sharia law, for example. But I did learn about archaeology which is about empirical evidence of past events. I worked as an archaeologist (“field tech”) for a few years after college.
I also took some geology in college, although somewhat late in my Junior year. Had there been enough time, I would have changed majors. The field trips taught me to see things in hills and along roads that my eye had glossed over before. The earth was clearly very old for such complexity to be present, no doubt about it, and I had only seen a very small portion of it. I started reading Steven Jay Gould’s books about that time.
I also had a good friend in college that was as nerdy as me and like-minded about a lack of a benevolent or even interactive god. We used call up christian hotlines and harrass the racist/sexist idiots at the other end with questions about morality that they gave extremely bad advice about. My friend asked if it was okay to have a freind that was a muslim who was gay. The answer was no, of course. I used to go off about design flaws in anatomy at them, such as the fact that the esophagus and trachea cross making it easy for humans to choke, to see if they had any sensible reply, and they never did.
Somewhere in early college I learned about Richard Feynman too. It is hard not to agree with that guy.
And I got into Rush – listen to Permanent Waves sometime.
I should mention a lapse into irrationality I had for a few years. This is embarrassing, but I read Whitley Streiber’s ‘Communion’ and its sequels, and I believed a lot of it, and was scared by it to the point that some nights I couldn’t sleep for fear of aliens hiding in the closet. But who do I have to thank for clearing my head of such nonsense? Carl Sagan. I read ‘The Demon-haunted World’ and was cured.
I got to grad school after my stint as a field archaeologist, and majored in geology. It mostly solidified my well-established atheism, through better understanding of the complexity of the geologic record and deep time required for it. Creationists have no adequate answer for the geologic record – they run away from it, or lie about it.
And of course, most recently I’ve been reading Pharyngula.
I saw my creationist friend from high school at the 20-year reunion, and things were amicable enough. I’m a geologist now, and guess what he is – an accountant. No science for him.
James Stuby
United States
You know I have a moral imperative to pharyngulate this poll, The Most Influential Female Atheist of 2011. I absolutely forbid you to vote for me, though — that was kind of embarrassing last time it happened.
I am an atheist.
I guess i became an atheist when i was still in primary school (for the non-Brits out there, thats ages 5 to 11). I used to be christian. My parents had helped re-open a run down Church of England church and my family and a few others became the first parishioners there. I carried a big candle during mass, wore a robe and had a wooden crucifix on a leather cord and generally helped out with the little chores during the service along with a bunch of other kids. Its safe to say that i had absolutely no understanding of the religion of which i actively partook. To me Jesus was a lovely man with a beard who nice dead people went to live with. God was a kindly father figure. All of the atheist arguements and objections to faith with which I am now very familiar were utterly unknown to me. I was perhaps aware of a place called hell but that was reserved for murderers and Hitler.
I can no longer remember my exact age or my exact reasons but one day i decided that i should read the bible. That pretty much did in any faith I once held. I had foolishly neglected to get a recommended list of chapters from my priest and had started at the start. The first thing that struck my mind was that the bible was clearly wrong. Even back then i knew the universe was some 14 billion years old and the earth some 4.5 billion. My paltry science education was wildly at odds with God doing the whole thing in seven days and breathing life into clay men. But what really got me was how poorly written it was. Have you ever tried to read the bible sequentially, start to finish? Its incredibly dull.
I’m blessed (lol) in that i have fantastic parents who encouraged me from a very young age to read. I devoured books with a pace that put my classmates to shame and although i was hardly a critic, i could very rapidly spot that this book was crap. During primary school I read the Hobbit many times and even the Lord of the Rings and those I found to be good books. The bible could not hold a candle to them. It was clearly the same genre, there were wizards and monsters, magic and battles, heroes and villains (more on them in a second), all it really lacked was a likeable character to emphasise with, through whom we could enjoy the story (C3PO or a hobbit for instance). It clearly wasn’t real. More than that, it struck me that some of the passages i was reading really made God out to be somewhat of an arsehole.
Example: In church and from snippets of conversation here and there I was aware that Moses led the Jews out of Egypt and that Pharaoh did not agree with this and chased the fleeing Jews. God foiled nasty ol’ Pharaoh by allowing the jews to escape though the red sea, parting it before them and crushing the pursuing Egyptians. That was exodus as far as i was concerned. What the bible actually says is that when Moses asks Pharaoh to let his people go, Pharaoh actually agrees! But then God changes his mind. Why? Why would a sane person do that? Wasn’t that exactly what God had asked Moses to do? Why change Pharaohs mind when you just got what you wanted? It just got worse from there. God acts like a spoilt bully, demanding obedience and frequently making the lives of his followers miserable with arbitrary rules or freak punishments. I realised that not only did i no longer like god, i also recognised him as a poorly written villain.
I’ve always been a nerd and into my fantasy and sci-fi. I know how heroes and villains act in literature. Heroes protect the weak, fight evil, sacrifice themselves to protect others and try to make the world a better place. Villains demand loyalty, punish failure harshly and brutalise their foes. After reading the bible, it was clear to me. God was nothing but a fantasy setting villain. Even Jesus doesn’t cut the hero grade (although he might make a suitable naive sidekick for a real hero). Dying on the cross seems like little sacrifice when you are the son of god and know that you’ll be ending up in paradise as a god just as soon as you shed your mortal flesh. Hell, i’d be willing to suffer six hours of crucifixion for super powers, let alone full godhood. Only 6 hours too. Crucifixion was supposed to be a long drawn out death from thirst, heat or starvation, sometimes lasting days. He got off a bit light.
No, it was clear to me. Gandalf and Aragorn were far superior heroes to God and Christ. And all of them were fiction.
After losing my faith i pretty much ignored religion until university. It’s easy to do here in the UK. At university i began to look around for a religion, i wasn’t really looking for big answers. Science had pretty much beaten religion to them for me. I just wanted to see if any of the faiths out there actually made sense to me. I looked at Christianity again very briefly, then paganism, Satanism (of the Anton Le Vay type), various occult groups (OTO, etc) and Buddhism. All of it transparent claptrap. One day i found transhumanism and realised that this was it. This was what i already believed, this made sense to me. This is what i was.
The great thing about Transhumanism is that its not a faith. Its a philosophy. Basically it couples humanism with an urge to improve the human condition. Because it isn’t a faith it has all kinds of viewpoints within it. You have your Kurzweilian singularitarians sure, but even in that group, you have a huge range of opinion on when, to what degree, how, where, etc. Its a conversation, rather than a commandment.
I’ve since found skepticism and joined the Greater Manchester Skeptics. Skeptism i see as a filter to my transhumanism. One keeps me inspired, the other keeps me grounded in reality. My atheism now is very much a side effect of the skepticism and Transhumanism. My skeptic side tells me there is no good evidence for a god, that there are thousands of gods from all kinds of cultures and that the big faiths got big from very real world reasons (Roman empire adopting christianity, incredibly muslim military successes, etc). My transhumanism tells me that gods are old news. An antiquated way of looking at the world and something that holds mankind back from being better than it is and should hence be removed.
Atheism is not enough. It is a necessary state, but not the end of the journey by any means.
Gribble the Munchkin
United Kingdom
I guess R. Joseph Hoffman is trolling for attention again. Joey — or is it Joe? Joseph seems so fussy. Maybe R.? — R., then, is so disappointed in those dissolute insult-mongering New Atheists that he has scribbled up another sloppy, incoherent, lazy whine in which engages in prolonged insult-mongering, nothing more. It’s an astonishing demonstration of projection and an absolute lack of self-awareness: the post is little more than a clumsy list of the atheists who piss off R., with bombastic, affected explanations for why they are so stupid. It’s a rather useful guide, though, to who’s cool in the atheist movement; I’m flattered that he despises me so, and included me in the list.
Here’s R.’s list, with his tumid awkward insults pared down to a single summary sentence:
Dawkins: Unabashed science-thumper.
Dennett: Sloppy.
Harris: Singularly incoherent.
Hitchens: The only true intellectual of the group.
Headlights:
Coyne: How can he be such a scientist when the U of Chicago has one of the most venerable divinity schools in the country?
Myers: Moral nihilist who once destroyed a cracker.
Sidelights:
Christina: Radical feminist and lesbian who sees everything as a weird sexual joke.
Benson: Runs a chat room for neo-atheist spleen.
MacDonald: Another horn in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers.
Rosenhouse: Doesn’t like anything that rises an inch beyond cultural Judaism.
Now you know who to turn to for the intelligent and interesting commentary on religion. Keep in mind, though, that R. is a brilliant fellow who thinks Dawkins’ entire argument was devastated by this Terry Eagleton quote:
“What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?”
The knob-polishers and filigree-painters of religion and theology are not at all relevant to the fundamental question of whether a god exists or not — but they make useful distractions for the pompous, pretentious buffoons who try to hide the fact that there is no elephant in the room with learned discussions about what color he paints his toenails.
You found an odd-shaped rock? You think it looks like a fossilized organ? Don’t send a picture to me: go get some basic education in biology and geology, because I think you look like an idiot.
Yeah, some demented guy just sent me a bunch of photos of a “mineralized brain”. Judge for yourself.
That’s a subset. He also sent me these photos in much higher resolution. Why? Because he’s an ignorant nudnik. These things look nothing like the brain of any creature that has ever existed, unless maybe it’s the lopsided lumpy non-functional excrescence found inside the crania of creationists.
(Also on Sb)
I’m an atheist because I want to live my life honestly, not only in deed but in thought.
I used to be an enthusiastic catholic boy. The notion of an ordered universe, with a clear cause and effect for both good and bad things, was immensely appealing. Ironically, it was catholic school that stomped that belief out of me. First in showing how the actually engaging, intelligent teachers got frustrated and stonewalled by the older, conservative dogmatists, and eventually how even the best of them could only offer non-answers or cruel ignorance when confronted with any meaningful question. Children actually have a good bullshit detector, and mine was always reading off the scale, all the time.
My father actually helped, and not by accident. Like me, he was a catholic school student growing up; since they get colossal tax breaks, they actually offered decent education, comparable to the expensive private schools, for a very affordable price. So when my dad was confronted with the choice of putting me in a lousy school or try to give me a better shot even if it came with religious strings attached…he decided that since he survived it without too many scars, so could I.
He was right, but not for the reasons he thought. My father came out of catholic school a faint deist, perhaps, with a somewhat comical distrust of clergy. He doesn’t think much about it. I found the library and became an early history buff. I learned about Phoenicians and ancient greek and romans, and all the gods they believed in, with as much fervor as any christian or muslim of our times, and about as much proof. Even the funny gauls in the Asterix comics had a roster of deities as believable as the Christ being used to officiate marriages, fight sin and give us our morals.
Becoming a teenager, I kept waiting for the excuses and dogma to make sense, as if it was my failure to trust them that caused any confusion. But it only got worse. Seeing priests and religious people passing both judgment and comfort in the name of something so tenuous felt increasingly uncomfortable, then repulsive. It’s odd how you don’t really feel how omnipresent religious presence (and pressure)in society is until you start to doubt, and it was a disquieting time, to say the least.
It wasn’t until I leafed through Carl Sagan’s A Demon-Haunted World in high school that I finally saw I wasn’t alone. Ironically, I heard about it from a friend who had thoroughly misread the book and thought it was a vindication for superstition and pseudo-science (“He says there are demons in the world! And he tells of how he could remotely see the war in Europe from the USA as a kid!”). It wasn’t an overt defense of atheism, and that made it even better. It showed me that there were other people in the world saying “They don’t really know. All the mystics and priests and holy books do not have the automatic claim to truth and respect they try to claim”, and it was educated, respectable people saying so.
And so I stopped even pretending to believe. If I do anything praiseworthy or noble to and for others, I want it to be due to my empathy and commitment, not to earn points with some vague, unearthly being, nor to advertise my piety to my religious tribe or convert others. And if I ever do anyone harm, the responsibility is also mine. There doesn’t need to be anything more attached to that premise. It works fine without theistic add-ons and glitter.
Brazil used to be overwhelming Catholic, but now evangelical Protestantism is putting a large dent into that and in turn making the Catholic church more obstinate in its pursuits. It’s not a good shift for the non-religious here. Popular television anchors say on the air here that all the criminals in prison are atheists and only get more fame out of the deal. I’d never say atheists and agnostics here have it worse than anywhere else; not even close. But it’s still seen as synonymous with evil and immorality, and it’s going to stay that way for a good bit yet. I’ve lost girlfriends when I told them of my lack of faith. But I don’t believe in hiding it. There’s a lot of comfort and not a small amount of pride in knowing that whatever friends, ideas and respect you have, you came by it being honest to yourself.
Fábio Jardim
Brazil
The reason I am an Atheist is a very simple one: It is very important to me that the things I believe, are true. I accept that it’s logically impossible to prove a negative, but considering that in the entire history of humanity, nobody has ever found any good evidence for the existence of supernatural entities of any kind – and it’s certainly not for want of looking! – it seems reasonable to be just as certain that there really are no gods, as that there really is no ether and no phlogiston.
How I got here is a long story. Ironically enough, the seeds for my escape from religion were planted by the church I attended as a child. My family went to a Mennonite Brethren church, which was composed mostly of families like mine – Mennonites whose parents or grandparents had pursued an education and become city folk – as well as people of other ethnicities who had joined over the years. What we had in common with the Colony Mennonites was eating and singing, and a commitment to non-violence and social justice. A common theme of lessons and sermons was, “The Truth Will Set You Free.” Of course, the main “truth” they were talking about was salvation, but it also came up in the context of social justice, for example fighting prejudice, or using science to fight hunger and disease. The result of all this was that I was a very idealistic little girl.
Of course, I didn’t stay a little girl, and the idealism got squashed pretty hard. My church, and my extended family, either took a pretty hard swing to the right, or maybe they were always there and I hadn’t realized it. The messages changed, from “God is Love” and “We are called to a ministry of serving the poor and the sick and the oppressed,” to “Hell is awful and the Rapture could be any second” and “You are personally responsible for every sinner who goes to hell because you didn’t witness to them.” The graphic descriptions of the torment of hellfire and the horrors of the Tribulation were more than I could handle, and I often woke up from nightmares. To compound my terror, this particular brand of Evangelicalism makes one testable prediction: if you pray to accept Jesus as your personal saviour blah blah blah, then something (though it’s never described eactly what) is supposed to happen. A feeling of inner peace or connection with God or love or something. You’re supposed to Just Know you’re Saved. I prayed and prayed for years, with increasing desperation, and nothing happened. I never felt Saved. Clearly there was something wrong with me. I didn’t dare talk to anybody about it.
At the same time, other discourse in the church was giving me some ideas about why God might not want me. In the 1990s, in a church that considered itself radically progressive, there was a heated and divisive debate going on about whether women could be ordained as pastors. When it came down to a vote, the decision was the Bible said no, so that was that. There was plenty of anti-gay rhetoric going on as well. Plus a developing streak of dogmatism that frowned on asking questions and came with a goodly dose of anti-intellectualism on top. I came to believe that my existence was a massive case of entrapment: if God made me, and he hates queers and uppity women and people who can’t seem to stop asking “why”, then he deliberately made something he hates and I would be going to hell unless I somehow managed to not be what God made me as. What a setup!
I spent a few years as a straw atheist: I believed in God and was deeply afraid, and I hated him. I sat down to really read the Bible, to see if God really was the monster I’d come to believe in or if my church had gotten it wrong. Of course, what I learned was that if my church had gotten it wrong, it was by painting a far too rosy picture.
As I grew up, I got access to more and more books, and then the Internet, and learned about how the Bible actually came to be what it is today, and it looked less and less like the Divinely Inspired, Unerring Word of God, and more and more like a collection of confabulations selected to support a particular ideology.
I majored in psychology when I went to university, and we talked a lot about epistemology and the philosophy of science, and I learned about Karl Popper and the idea of falsifiability. Something clicked. I decided that if there was no scenario in which any possible outcome could prove there was no god, then God, for all practical purposes in this life, is irrelevant. I decided to live my life now, according to who I feel I am and what I believe is right and wrong, regardless of afterlife consequences. After all, it’s noble to stand up for what you believe is right, even at great personal cost. I’d take my martyrdom in the afterlife – but that’s another thing that’s impossible to make falsifiable predictions about.
Though I didn’t become a neuroscientist, I did take a lot of neuroscience courses towards my degree, and that sent mind-body dualism to the intellectual rubbish heap. If my mind is a function of my body, then it dies with my body and there’s nothing left to burn for eternity, so I have nothing to fear. The truth had set me free.
I haven’t escaped unscathed though. My depression probably also has genetic roots because it’s all over my family, but subjecting a child to that level of fear, accompanied with a heaping dose of self-loathing, can’t have improved matters. I have to really fight against thoughts like “I’m a depraved sinner who deserves to die.” I still have nightmares though they’re decreasing, and I have to be careful about stories featuring end of the world scenarios – I wasn’t old enough to see Terminator when it first came out, but I tried to watch it a couple years ago and had a panic attack during the opening credits and nightmares and flashbacks for a good week after. And I’m still angry – not at God but at the people who force the poison of religion on children’s minds.
Tricia
Canada
I very much like this insightful post; it points out that the big theological question of the ancient world was “where does the sun go at night?“, and that it was answered only relatively recently in human history — and answered with such resounding certainty that the question seems trivial to everyone now.
And how was it answered?
I think it’s an awkward fact for theology that, as far as I can see, a lot of theological issues have been conclusively solved, but all of them were solved outside the field. I don’t see this changing – one of the vibrant issues across a number of academic disciplines, including theology, is the very broad area of ‘consciousness’. I very strongly suspect we’ll see key breakthroughs in my lifetime, a real shift of understanding about what constitutes awareness, consciousness, intelligence, how these things can originate, how to define them and so on – but these breakthroughs will almost certainly come from the computer science departments, from the evolutionary biologists. It’s hard to see how they might even come from a theology department.
We’re just waiting for the theological corpse to rot away now. I don’t expect to see religion go away in my lifetime, but I don’t think it’s too much to hope that theology will get the disrespect and contempt it deserves.
