It’s good to be annoying the Christians again

So I wrote this short essay for the Washington Post, and it’s been interesting reaching a whole different audience. It’s not an audience that is increasing my esteem for the human race, unfortunately, but it’s been…different. My twitter stream has been flooded by irate Christians, which is fun, but most of their responses are rather familiar.

Here’s one common flavor: patronizing Christian sympathy.

Berth2020 @berth2020
@washingtonpost @pzmyers you need to work on being kind to others. . I’m sorry you’ve been hurt.

I haven’t been hurt, and I don’t consider wallowing in lies as you do to be “kind”.

Then there’s the usual stereotyping of atheists as amoral monsters.

romesh sharma1949 @romesh1949
@washingtonpost @pzmyers Atheist,a man who is answerable to None, free from all bonds , will behave like an animal 99.99% or saint 00.01%

Right, Mr Made-Up-Statistics. So the prisons must be like 99.99% atheist?

Then, of course, there are the excuses.

Christopher Dull @PaEvengelist
@jeremydavidpare @DavisRBr @washingtonpost @pzmyers One reason for unanswered prayer is God does not here the prayers of unrepentant sinners

Interesting. So if you pray, and you don’t get what you want, you must be one of those unrepentant sinners? What are the other reasons?

But the most common complaint, the one that seems to be winning the votes right now, surprises me a bit.

Jeremy @jeremydavidpare
@pzmyers almost nothing you said in that article even remotely resembles anything Christian’s believe or practice… #misinformedatheist

This particular guy sent out a dozen tweets calling for his buddies to refute me; another fellow repeatedly demanded that the Washington Post allow him equal time to rebut my inaccuracies. I haven’t told the truth about Christianity!

What? Let me remind you of what my essay was about: I talked about the baggage we atheists have freed ourselves from, and I gave very general examples, stuff that is widely true of most of the diverse Christian sects in this country. Here’s a shorter version of what I mentioned.

1. No church and no sermons.

The practice of Christianity in this country certainly does involve church attendance, and it’s customary in most faiths (with exceptions, like the Quakers) to have a priest lecture you on proper behavior and beliefs at these events.

2. No heaven or hell, no bribes or threats.

Again, most Christian sects have notions of reward and punishment in an afterlife.

3. No prayers.

Every version of Christianity I’ve experienced is prayer-soaked — a combination of entreaties and worship of an invisible deity. How can anyone deny this?

4. No guilt about defying a deity.

A common Christian command is to OBEY god, one and only one god. You will be punished if you disobey. Of course there’s a burden of guilt for failure to do as the priest tells you to do!

5. No power from above, no hierarchies.

With rare exceptions (again, Quakers), most Christian sects lay out a very specific hierarchy of power and responsibilities — with Catholicism the most obvious, with power from God to Pope to Cardinals to Bishops to Priests to the laity.

6. No false consolation at death.

Another really common feature of Christianity: just go to a funeral. Look at the political cartoons after a famous person dies. “They’re in a better place,” everyone says. Wrong, say I, they’re dead and lost to us forever, and mourning is the right and proper response.

Nothing I said was in the slightest bit inaccurate; these are general properties of the practice of religion in this country. So what could they possibly argue that I was wrong about?

I have a guess. They’re going to deliver some pious hokum about the True Meaning of Faith™, which will be some pablum about redemption by the torture/execution of a fanatical Jewish preacher in the first century CE, and how the important part of Christianity is love and fellowship and spreading the gospel of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and the story of our immortal, eternal god who died and bounced back a day and a half later, since he was able to perform a Resurrection spell (but unfortunately, was unable to Cure Light Wounds so he had to walk around with holes in his hands).

Which means I forgot to include an important piece of baggage we atheists don’t have to haul around.

7. We don’t have to pretend to believe in obvious bullshit.

Hamza Tzortzis can learn

Tzortzis has learned that claiming miraculous knowledge in the Qu’ran has “become an intellectual embarrassment for Muslim apologists”. Progress!

Regrettably, the scientific miracles narrative has become an intellectual embarrassment for Muslim apologists, including myself. A few years ago I took some activists to Ireland to engage with the audience and speakers at the World Atheist Convention. Throughout the convention we had a stall outside the venue and as a result positively engaged with hundreds of atheists, including the popular atheist academics Professor P. Z. Myers and Professor Richard Dawkins.  During our impromptu conversation with Professor Myers we ended up talking about God’s existence and the Divine nature of the Qur’ān. The topic of embryology came up, and Professor Myers being an expert in the field challenged our narrative. He claimed that the Qur’ān did not predate modern scientific conclusions in the field. As a result of posting the video[8] of the engagement on-line we faced a huge intellectual backlash. We received innumerable amounts of emails by Muslims and non-Muslims. The Muslims were confused and had doubts, and the non-Muslims were bemused with the whole approach. Consequently, I decided to compile and write an extensive piece on the Qur’ān and embryology, with the intention to respond to popular and academic contentions.[9] During the process of writing I relied on students and scholars of Islamic thought to verify references and to provide feedback in areas where I had to rely on secondary and tertiary sources. Unfortunately they were not thorough and they seemed to have also relied on trusting other Muslim apologists. When the paper was published it was placed under a microscope by atheist activists.[10] Although they misrepresented some of the points, they raised some significant contentions. I have since removed the paper from my website. In retrospect if this never happened, I probably wouldn’t be writing this essay now. It is all a learning curve and an important part of developing intellectual integrity.

Of course, he now has a new strategy:

  1. The Qur’ān allows multiple and multi-level meanings.

  2. Our understanding of natural phenomena and science changes and improves with time.

  3. The Qur’ān is not inaccurate or wrong.

  4. In the case of any irreconcilable difference between a Qur’ānic assertion and a scientific one, the following must be done:

    • Find meanings within the verse to correlate with the scientific conclusion.

    • If no words can match the scientific conclusion then science is to be improved.

    • Find a non-scientific meaning. The verse itself may be pertaining to non-physical things, such as the unseen, spiritual or existential realities.

#1 and #2 are correct. #3 is assuming what they want to demonstrate. #4 is an exercise in rationalization, and cannot generate new knowledge; it’s an admission that science will drive progress and understanding, while the religious apologists will follow along behind and try to steal the credit.

TJ Luhrmann needs to study the works of Alan Moore

I was pointed to this wonderful interview with Alan Moore after that post about TJ Luhrmann, the anthropologist who tries to explain psychological phenomena with God. Moore has some weird beliefs — he talks about worshipping an ancient Roman god, Glycon — but he is absolutely crystal clear on the fact that this god has no existence outside the territory of the human mind.


“I understood that everything that people talk about with regard to magic is all absolutely true, as long as you understood that it is happening inside people’s minds.”

Give that man a Ph.D. and a tenured position at Stanford. Religion is interesting because it is a bizarre human phenomenon that tells us something about how our minds work: it is an anthropological and sociological and psychological process that should not be ignored. But when you come at it as if it is an accurate description of the physical universe, rather than a map of the world strangely filtered and modified by passage through the black box of our brains, you will be led astray, and you will be refuted by the evidence of the physical sciences.

Moore also makes the important point (one that I have also made in some of my lectures), that modern fundamentalist religion really is a recent event, within the last century. It is not universal, it is not conservative, it is not a return to the true path of the original church — it is a reactionary response to modernity, and it is a product of our times.

Glossolalia is not God

TJ Luhrmann (remember her? Templeton grant awardee who likes to pretend religion is all sweetness and light?) is now defending speaking in tongues in the NY Times, with one concluding caveat.

Speaking in tongues still carries a stigmatizing whiff. In his book “Thinking in Tongues,” the philosopher James K. A. Smith describes the “strange brew of academic alarm and snobbery” that flickered across a colleague’s face when he admitted to being a Pentecostal (and, therefore, praying in tongues). It seems time to move on from such prejudice.

Why? It’s a silly practice…well, actually, I can see some virtue in the practice, but absolutely none in the rationalizations used for it. For instance, there are bits of this that I don’t object to, until the end.

What dawned on me in Accra is that speaking in tongues might actually be a more effective way to pray than speaking in ordinary language — if by prayer one means the mental technique of detaching from the everyday world, and from everyday thought [yes, isolating oneself in mindlessness], to experience God. [who says?]

She mentions other practices, like meditation to disengage from thought, and focusing and filling one’s minds with imaginary scenes from scripture. She left out the more obvious example, though: doo wop.

Obvious to me, anyway. Sha na na, sh-boom sh-boom.

There is something in our brains that connects with repetition and rhythms and sounds — it’s why music exists. It can feel good and it can even have physiological effects to remove ourselves from the world or to just soak in a mood, and I can sympathize with the idea that people find pleasure in it. But “to experience god”? No. That’s where Luhrmann goes off the rails. And it’s going to carry a “stigmatizing whiff” for as long as deluded apologists for religion continue to pretend it has anything to do with a god.

Her article is titled “Why We Talk in Tongues”. It doesn’t answer the question at all, and she never will as long as she’s looking for explanations in magic.

Shooby-doo-wop-do-wop-wop-wop-wop.

Y’all can stop patting yourselves on the back now

There’s a study going around by Zuckerman, Silberman, and Hall that purports to show an inverse relationship between intelligence and religiosity. Here’s the abstract.

A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations between intelligence and the strength of religious beliefs ranged from −.20 to −.25 (mean r = −.24). Three possible interpretations were discussed. First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.

After reading the paper, I’m reasonably confident that they processed the data competently. However, I’d add a fourth interpretation that they don’t take seriously enough: that there was systematic bias in the intelligence studies they analyzed. I’m actually personally put off (bias alert!) by any study that attempts to reduce something as complex as intelligence to a simple number amenable to statistical analysis. The various studies measure intelligence by GPA (grade point average), UEE (university entrance exams), Mensa membership, and Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests. Can you say apples and oranges? Yeah, I thought so. And anyone who has spent any time with Mensa people knows they aren’t particularly shining examples of crystal clear analytical intelligence, for instance.

But I would agree with the conclusion that studies have found an inverse correlation between religiosity and something they’re calling intelligence. But that doesn’t mean much.

This was a meta-analysis of 63 studies done on the corelation of intelligence and religiosity. Meta-analysis is a legitimate statistical approach, but it’s just as likely that what they’re detecting is a consistent pattern of abuse of the data, rather than that they’re actually observing a true psychological property of religious people. They’re using a grab-bag of studies; the first warning should be that work by Satoshi Kanazawa, Richard Lynn, and Arthur Jensen are tossed into the statistical stewpot. It cites Herrnstein & Murray’s The Bell Curve.

That’s right, they used Richard Lynn’s work — the guy who produced this gem of a graph.

LynnHarveyNyborg-Atheism-IQ

That’s a plot of average IQ of a country on the vertical axis against the percentage of atheists living in that country; each data point represents a whole nation. Apparently, there are entire countries on this planet where the average citizen has an IQ between 50 and 70 — that is, they are mildly mentally impaired, or capable of education at the elementary school level at best, and sometimes able to live independently. I think we can reject that nonsense out of hand.

Again, the statistics in the paper seem fine to my casual eye, but it really looks like a case of garbage in, garbage out. I’m not at all impressed that we can discern a trend when the floor is defined by people willing to embrace racist bullshit.

I thought the attempts to explain the pattern were quite nice, addressing a number of different hypotheses, and some of them were reasonable in trying to find a broader cause than simply “hicks is dumb”. But I had a hard time getting past the implicit bias in the study that they were looking at “intelligence”. I don’t think they were. I think you could find that ignorance is associated with religiosity — a lot of religions oppose education and insist on keeping certain segments of the population (i.e., women) as uninformed and uneducated as possible, and just that fact is going to skew the results to fit their conclusion. They also note studies that show the higher echelons of academia and educated individuals are less likely to be religious, and I can honestly believe that analytical examination of the claims of religion leads to a loss of faith. But we typically associate “intelligence” with something intrinsic to the individual, a biological property of their brains, and nothing in this study allows that conclusion to be made. The word is heavily loaded and entirely inappropriate.

Also, look at that graph again. If you throw out the obvious bias of classifying whole nations as mentally impaired, if you recognize that IQ is an artificial construct that measures a very narrow range of intellectual potential, it looks to me like the variation reduces to noise — that the supposed debilitating effects of religion are going to be very weak, if there at all. And what does that do to all the cunning rationalizations, no matter how plausible, for why atheists would do better on IQ tests?

I’m more inclined to accept Gregory Paul’s thesis that religiosity is coupled to socioeconomic status — that if you’re poor, you’re less likely to get the education that would help you see beyond the delusions of faith, and that also you’re going to be more reliant on the social safety net of your church. But it’s not lack of intelligence that is at the heart of religion, it’s class and emotional/cultural/historical concerns. Poor performance on IQ tests is simply a side-effect of discrimination and deprivation.

And, I must add, even if the correlation does hold up in studies that aren’t from racist jerks, it’s no consolation for you: your intelligence is a property of the individual, and being a member of statistically slightly superior group doesn’t confer any special abilities on you, other than the ability to hide behind Richard Feynman and pretend his brilliance somehow rubbed off on you. It didn’t, sorry.

I also think that Paul is closer to the solution: reduce socio-economic disparities, increase access to education, provide a secular social safety net, and you’ll get two effects: it’ll increase the knowledge of the population, and it will reduce religiosity. It won’t work by making poor people more “intelligent”, but it will increase their understanding and give them less reliance on religion — it will give already intelligent people opportunities to use their minds.

But it won’t make religion go away completely — smart people will still believe. And it won’t make all atheists uniformly non-stupid.

There has been a complaint that this paper didn’t actually use the data from the Lynn paper in their meta-analysis. This seems to be true. Although they do use data from Lynn’s coauthor, Nyborg, and certainly do cite the offending work without noting any caveats about its premises.

The last decade also saw studies on the relation between intelligence and religiosity at the group level. Using data from 137 nations, Lynn, Harvey, and Nyborg (2009) found a negative relation between mean intelligence scores (computed for each nation) and mean religiosity scores.

Why is anyone continuing to cite that sloppy work?

A warning

Here’s another challenge for the growing atheist movement: can we avoid the trap of charismatic leadership and the cult of personality? As church attendance declines (a good thing), as pastors wake up and realize their faith was a lie (a very good thing), and as we try to embrace even church leaders who want to join the secular movement, we have to beware of the temptation to just put them to work doing the same old thing they’re familiar with, in atheist “churches”. Donald Wright does a fine job expressing reservations I’ve also had about adopting the trappings of religion.

One of the joys I celebrate in escaping from religion and church is no longer participating in this unbridled authority and reverence given to the pastor; the position of entitlements. Their needs and desires are always met or a concerted effort is attempted by the membership with much toil and sacrifice. The pastor is doused with honor and respect, given a god-like public image, and proclaimed a truth teller. A celebrity is added to the culture.

After receiving these former religionists with open arms and nurturing their non-belief, how will the secular community respond when they seek leadership positions? Will the secularists, humanists, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, and skeptics embrace these individuals with greater enthusiasm just because they are ex-pastors? Will they seek to find the true character and uncover those holy skeletons? Will they put forth adequate vetting to determine that their integrity matches their charisma? These are my concerns, because a secular church in the hands of a cult personality is a religion disguised as a humanist community. Will there be a secular church on every corner filled with sheeples?

What we need to construct are egalitarian institutions that do not simply co-opt the corrupt schema of existing religious institutions. We should be modeling democratic political forms rather than buying into destructive ecclesiastical patterns of organization.

Scientology’s views on evolution

historyofman

I had a conversation with Tony Ortega about L. Ron Hubbard’s book, A History of Man: Antediluvian Technology. He is the author of a blog, Tony Ortega on Scientology, and he had cruelly sent me a copy Hubbard’s book specifically to inflame my already enlarged outrage gland.

The post there emphasizes everything Hubbard got wrong about evolution, but let me tell you: there isn’t much evolution or history of Man in History of Man. The bulk of this book, written in the preening style of a pretentious fourth-grader, weebles on and on about his tech and how it can cure cancer, illuminated with little anecdotes about sending gullible victims back along their history track to the time when they were clams. It was appalling drivel, like all religious stories.

The most revealing moment for me was when he confidently announced that he had seen his ideas confirmed by medical science in their best source…Reader’s Digest. That’s L. Ron Hubbard’s mind in a nutshell.