Kilstein will kill

Jamie Kilstein is putting on a comedy show in New York on 2 July, titled No War, No God, No Nickelback. You should go if you can. He’s recommended by that polite, soft-spoken gentleman AC Grayling, so you know exactly what to expect: calm, cerebral, gentle humor, quietly skewering social mores.

Yeah, right. Watch out for a GOATS ON FIRE level of outrageousness. Everyone should go and make him rich and famous, because he’s the one comedian I trust will aspire to someday having a comedy tour featuring a giant inflatable vulva*. He does need to get really rich and famous first, though.

If I were in NY on that day, I’d go.

*He doesn’t actually have such a thing, and hasn’t even mentioned wanting one, but as a fan I think it will eventually be a necessary appliance for his stadium tour.

Weak tea in defense of Mary Midgley

Nick Matzke has taken exception to my criticism of Mary Midgley, and has posted a rebuttal. Well, maybe. Probably not.

Eh, I’ve read most of Midgley’s books and articles, I don’t think you [The Unpublishable Philosopher] or PZ getting her at all.

The short version of what she’s saying is that there is a lot more to life than simply scientifically assessing everything as if it was a hypothesis. The primary reason many people like their religion, despite its obvious problems from a scientific point of view, have to do with things like:

  • providing a sense of community

  • instilling values in children and in themselves

    (And whatever ranting and raving the New Atheists do about the evils in the Bible and the evils promoted by parts of modern religion, an actual fair, non-raving assessment simply has to acknowledge that a large part of religion throughout history, and especially in liberal democracies in the 20th century, has been about providing often-correct moral guidance to the parishioners. For every instance of child abuse or witch burning in history there are probably millions of instances of individuals finding good moral guidance in their religion. Of course there are a good number of cases of people finding poor moral guidance as well, but then you can say this about democracy, scientific leaders, atheist leaders, etc. as well. Religion works for many people much of the time.)

  • providing a hopeful view of their place in the grand scheme of things (the typical atheist alternative is pretty dour and depressing)

  • providing an organizational framework for social action, charity, and/or political action

In these and many other ways, there isn’t much that the atheists offer at the moment that can compare to what belonging to a church offers people. Some people feel fine without it, that’s great, but I wonder if it will ever become a common thing outside of certain professions like academia.

And pretending like these factors don’t exist and don’t matter and that it’s all just a simple matter of scientifically assessing religion based on the worst claims of its craziest proponents, or on the unsupported nature of some very fuzzy theological claims of moderates – which is basically what the atheist campaigners do – is a pretty silly thing to do. This is what Midgley is trying to point out.

The Unpublishable Philosopher and I were not providing a critique of the entirety of Midgley’s writings, but only of a specific article. It’s all well and good to claim that she’s written many smart and sensible things elsewhere, but what would convince me of that is if, say, someone actually cited something insightful from her. There seems to be an Ideal Mary Midgley floating somewhere in the æther that some of her privileged priesthood can reference, but which is inaccessible to the New Atheist rabble, who only get to see the Prosaic Mary Midgley, who is something of a twit.

True confession: Nick could be correct, because I have not read any of Midgley’s books. I’ve read many of her short articles, however, and from those I think it eminently reasonable to conclude that her longer works will be much more of the same, and not worth wasting time upon. I have also encountered many people who differ, though, and say that her books are excellent and interesting…curiously, none of them ever goes on to say why. It’s a very weird phenomenon.

Take a look at that list of thinks Nick says religion provides. How many of those require that we believe in space zombies, magic, or ghosts? Not one. Not one. Those are all social goods, and believe it or not, atheists recognize the reality of society and culture and community. In fact, you could even argue that one of the qualities of the New Atheism is that it provides greater emphasis on exactly the bullet points Nick has made. We’ve been working hard to reduce the stereotype of the atheist as the oddball loner who doesn’t get along well with others.

For an unintentionally amusing counterpoint, though, read this article by John Wilkins, about an atheist who was so annoyed by a Dawkins talk that he decided to call himself an agnostic. What did he discover when Richard Dawkins spoke that was so awful? Why, that these New Atheists were providing a sense of community, instilling values, and talking about beauty and truth in the natural world. He doesn’t cite the idea of providing a framework for social action, charity, and politics, but the Richard Dawkins Foundation is doing that, too. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

I’ll also disagree that religion has been about providing moral guidance. It certainly has not. Religion has been about the enforcement of social conformity, which is then conflated with morality. A framework for belief that actually gave instruction in morality would be reducible to a few simple non-supernatural principles — the familiar “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and I’d add “think for yourself” — which would be consistently practiced. Most religions seem to about providing theological loopholes to get around those pesky moral principles, or in some cases, even endorsing morally pernicious practices (for example, the Bible clearly endorses slavery and misogyny — this is one case where religion’s propensity for looking for loopholes actually worked to people’s benefit).

If religion actually were the source of moral thinking, then religions would always be at the forefront of virtuous social change, and we’d actually see some consistency. Look at the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and gay rights. You can find some people of faith working for the cause of justice, and unfortunately, too often using it as an advertisement for the value of religion — the civil rights movement, for instance, has been retroactively annointed as the workings of liberal religion, when the religious establishment was diligently opposing it at the time. But most often, the majority of religious leaders are out to kill any advances in equality under the banner of ‘morality’.

I do agree that religion works for many people much of the time. It is not because religion is any good, though — it’s because I optimistically believe that most people are good, and you can give them a book full of self-contradictory gibberish and they’d generally work out some way to get along with each other out of it. It’s just too bad that that book of Abrahamic gibberish is most easily interpreted to mean that our strategy for getting along is tribalism and hierarchies of control.

We might as well claim that smallpox is good, because most people survived it, and because it gave them greater immunity to the disease afterwards. Religion is like cultural smallpox — something that most people muddle through, doing as best they can, while a minority have their lives ruined. And of course, as many atheists will tell you, the surest way to become immune to religion is to actually think about what it is saying.

Donohue vs. Hawking

It’s like Bambi vs. Godzilla, except no one would consider Donohue cute and innocent. In an interview, Hawking talked about gods:

“What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God,” Hawking told Sawyer. “They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.”

When Sawyer asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, Hawking said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

Straightforward and sensible, that’s a scientist talking. Bill Donohue, who is anything but sensible, took exception to all that.

How any rational person could belittle the pivotal role that human life plays in the universe is a wonder, but it is just as silly to say that all religions are marked by the absence of reason. While there are some religions which are devoid of reason, there are others, such as Roman Catholicism, which have long assigned it a special place.

Human life plays a pivotal role in the universe? How? Is the orbit of Mars influenced by human activities, does the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years away, care in the slightest about a species so remote that they’re still waiting for the glimmerings of light from the fires they used to roast a mammoth? We could wink out of existence right now and the universe would go on, fundamentally unchanged.

I agree that the Catholic church has assigned reason a special place: apologetics. Rationalizing the irrational. Throwing up a smokescreen of scholarship to hide the fact that deep down, they’re worshipping a jealous bronze age patriarchal myth wedded to a howling crazy Eastern mystery religion. But they aren’t any different than any other religion: for instance, the Baptists found universities and pay lip service to logic, too. As Hawking said, science works, and every charlatan in every church dreams of hitching a ride on its record.

It was the Catholic Church that created the first universities, and it was the Catholic Church that played a central role in the Scientific Revolution; these two historical contributions made possible Mr. Hawking’s career.

Reason, in pursuit of truth, has been reiterated by the Church fathers for nearly two millennia. That is why Hawking posits a false conflict: in the annals of the Catholic Church, there is no inherent conflict between science and religion. Quite the contrary: science and religion, in Catholic thought, are complementary properties. Ergo, nothing is gained by alleging a “victory” of science over religion.

The Catholic Church was a religion laced throughout the substrate of Western culture; everyone was Catholic (or alternatively, after the 16th century, some flavor of Protestant), and being anything else was not tenable because the Catholic Church would set you on fire. After centuries of waging war on every alternative that emerged, the Church does not now get to claim, “Oh, yeah, we did that” when a powerful and better way of thinking does manage to rise up out of the foolishness of superstition.

There is an inherent conflict between science and religion. Mr Donohue believes a cracker turns into a slice of god in his mouth; he thinks there is a magic man in the sky who speaks to the Pope; he believes a series of rituals will allow an invisible ghost in his body go to Disneyland in Space after his meat dies. He also believes that one young species of ape on this planet somehow plays a “pivotal role” in affairs on Jupiter. These are irrational, unscientific beliefs — they are anti-science, because he believes in arriving at conclusions because they are what he wishes to be true, or because the dogma has been repeated to him enough times, or because someone claims a supernatural revelation.

Sure, science arose out of Catholicism…in the same sense that plumbing, sanitation systems, and public health policies arose out of sewage.

I want to see this movie

It’s called Agora, and it’s about Hypatia, who was a kind of non-Christian martyr, murdered by a religious mob. Here’s one account of her death:

And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through Satanic wiles…A multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the magistrate…and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments. And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her…they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesareum. Now this was in the days of the fast. And they tore off her clothing and dragged her…through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire.

She’s definitely a wonderful subject for a movie, they’ve got a big name, Rachel Weisz, playing the leading role, and the film is done and looking for a distributor. No one wants to give it wide release. I wonder why? It could be that it’s badly made (not likely, since it was the highest grossing film in Spain for 2009), or it could be that a movie about an intelligent godless woman who is persecuted and slaughtered by a mob of mindless fanatical Christians with the approval of the church is a poor fit to the American political climate.

Minchin morning

At the youtube page for this video, it’s recommended that you buy his DVD. I agree! I want it! But, unfortunately, I only found one Minchin DVD at Amazon, and it won’t play in the US. Any suggestions? Anyone? When I see Tim Minchin in London in the fall, do I have to beat him up, steal his computer, bootleg everything he has encoded on it, and get rich selling the stolen data on the internet? No, that wouldn’t be nice at all, especially since he’d probably beat me up and then write a satirical song about me that would mean I could never leave my house ever again.

Where’s the Minchin HBO special?

I get email

Just for something completely different, here’s an email I just got that isn’t threatening me with death or causing me to choke while laughing because of its absurdity.

Dr. Myers,

Over the last several years I have been “converting” from a once very strong evangelical faith to atheism. It was a long road and involved many different facets, one of which was a steady tide of atheist reason and thought I received online. And my main source, well none other then you, Dr. Myers. My first movement towards rationality came when I started researching evolution and what do you know, it was true. While I was still an evangelical, I started tracking the creation and evolution controversy, which often through a link landed me on you blog as you are very prominent in the discussion. I would read a post about evolution and learn something new and then stay awhile and read another post hear or there and cringe and you tore into my religion. I was threatened by you, most prominently because I often had no good answers for your criticisms. I won’t write out my entire deconversion story but I’ll summarize you’re role in that over the last several years I have spent more and more time on your site, reading and thinking. You are now the only blog I follow and I read everything your write. I write this note as encouragement that your persistent defense of rationality and reason does make a difference.

So, how do you come by all these different stories to comment on? Are people sending you links of things they might think you will find interesting? I have long suspected that most of the polls you have us trash are being sent to you by readers who happen to stumble upon them as they travel around the web, that or you have developed you own poll search engine.

That’s good news, and I should mention that I get half a dozen messages like this a week — they’re more common than death threats, but not quite as frequent as the crazies. It’s also fairly typical (not to diminish the writer’s clear commitment to reason) in that I don’t get stories about epiphanies and ‘road to Damascus’ deconversions, and I’m glad of it, because that’s not how one should come to atheism. It’s usually a long, difficult process of thinking for yourself … and I can’t honestly take credit for it, as if I were some sort of evangelical missionary for godlessness, because all I do is provoke and, with luck, jump-start some critical thinking. Like the writer above, sometimes it works because I get someone angry and they go off to prove me wrong, and when they actually look at the evidence, reason unfolds slowly and painfully in their cranium, puncturing old preconceptions with its pointy bits and sharp edges.

To answer his question, yes, I get a flood of email every single day with hundreds of requests (and sometimes demands) to post something about X, Y, and Z. Sometimes I just click randomly into the inbox and throw up something about it; sometimes a story just tickles me. I can’t address it all, of course, but it means all I have to do is tap into the collective outrage and humor of the community of readers here, and presto, I’ve got something to write.

A somewhat baffling result: atheists are like aspies, but not?

I’m really confused by this psychology study — the problem is that I’m getting it second-hand, and the source is a poster at a meeting. It’s interesting, but I want to know more.

Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering (author of the “Bering in Mind” blog and a frequent contributor to Scientific American MIND), she asked them to speculate about why these important events happened–for instance, why they had gone through an illness or why they met a significant other. As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response–for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.

I’m liking the aspies here — they sound so much more rational than the neurotypical people, who invent magical explanations. But then an additional experiment with a twist comes along:

In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)

I’m liking the atheists, too, and I’m not at all unhappy with being compared to people with Asperger’s. What I’m mystified by, though, is how they classified non-teleological vs. anti-teleological statements, and how they came to the conclusion that atheists are reasoning teleologically, since that doesn’t really follow from the description above. When I’m dealing with those neurotypical religiots, I am aware that they will ascribe divine planning to events…so it’s not necessarily that I am thinking teleologically, but that I’m aware that I need to short-circuit a logical leap they routinely make.

Oh, if you’re put off by the comparison of atheism with Asperger’s, don’t be: aspies aren’t that bad, are often difficult to detect, and besides, the article compares religious thinking to schizophrenia.

Anyway, one of the authors of the work has a blog, maybe there will be some clarification there sometime.

Marshmallow reviews fierce book

Nicholas Kristof seems like a decent enough fellow, with a concern for humanitarian causes. He’s also something of a simpering apologist for religion — anything with a whiff of godlessness seems to put him on edge and start him whining about intolerant, obnoxious atheists.

He is definitely not the right person to have review Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book. He might be able to sympathize with the human rights issues she confronts, but at the same time he’s got a kind of willful blindness to the contributions religion makes to human misery, and is guaranteed to belittle the problem of Islam.

If you haven’t read Ali’s previous book, Infidel(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), get cracking; you’ve got to catch up. It was a harrowing description of the life of a Muslim girl in a poor country who managed to escape both poverty and her misogynistic faith. Her new book is Nomad(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), about her move to America. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on the list.

Kristof’s review is aggravating, though, because it is so thick with — and here I’ll use a word often applied to atheists — condescension. He is a privileged white American male criticizing a black African woman…and he is completely incapable of appreciating her opposition to Islam.

Even now, she needs bodyguards.

That’s partly because she is by nature a provocateur, the type of person who rolls out verbal hand grenades by reflex. After her father’s death, Hirsi Ali connects by telephone with her aging and long-estranged mother living in a dirt-floor hut in Somalia. Hirsi Ali asks forgiveness, but the conversation goes downhill when her mother pleads with her to return to Islam. Near tears, her mother asks: “Why are you so feeble in faith? . . . You are my child and I can’t bear the thought of you in hell.”

“I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny,” Hirsi Ali thinks to herself. “I am feeble in faith because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman — because I don’t want to be like you.” What she says aloud is: “When I die I will rot.” (For my part, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: “I love you.”)

Ah, it’s partly her fault. Kristof can’t bring himself to mention that the reason she is threatened with death, the reason she spoke out, is because she opposes the oppression of women under Islam, something radical Islamists find blasphemous and deserving of death. She holds a reasonable, rational position that has earned her a death sentence from fanatics, and all Kristof can do is make excuses for Islam, saying that they aren’t all bad (which we know; if we can’t criticize the ideology because some of those who hold it are kind to kittens and give flowers to their grandmothers, we’ll end up supporting some heinous regimes with our silence), and it’s better for the rude critics to learn some manners and shut up.

That’s really what that parting line above is about: an outspoken critic of Islam should simply silence herself and mumble consoling platitudes. What Ali wrote is honest and heartfelt: we hate to see loved ones trapped in the fearful web of superstition, and if we really care, we’re willing to tell them exactly what we think, without fear.

Not to the marshmallow man, Nicholas Kristof, though. Religion is exempt from dissent, for some reason — a strong atheist can reach out in concern to a family member who responds with more god-fueled terror and anger, and all he sees is someone who wasn’t sufficiently deferential to the superstition that has ruined people’s lives.