But can they get it on MTV?

When I need a good laugh, the folks from the Westboro Baptist Church never let me down. Their message is so absurdly anti-gay, so over the top, that I have long suspected that they are really a performance art troupe trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records by pulling off the longest-running prank in history.

Now they have decided to create a music video to spread their message. Check out the result.

Frankly, I think it needs work and so here’s some advice, Westboro folks. No need to thank me.

First ditch the tune. “We are the world’? Please. Find something that is not so hackneyed and has a decent beat. Also ditch the keyboardist, and get some decent guitarists and drummer.

You also need to rewrite the lyrics to make it more catchy, cut the length in half, and get a better film editor. It would also help to have less mean-looking people as lead singers. Having people who can sing would also be a good idea. And what, your people couldn’t take the trouble to memorize those cheesy words and had to read every one? That shows lack of commitment. And what is the deal with that guy waving a Canadian flag at the end?

The present music video is not going to achieve your goal of making people angry. It will make them fall asleep.

Anyone want a used Koran?

Now that the Florida church has decided against its Koran cookout, there is a question that I have not seen asked, and that is what the pastor Terry Jones plans to do with the 200 reprieved Korans now in his possession.

He can’t give them away or put them alongside the Bible in motel rooms because that might seem like proselytizing for Islam. He can’t simply toss them in the trash, which would seem almost as incendiary as burning them. I presume he does not want to hang on to them and risk being struck by a thunderbolt from his god, because these gods get really jealous when they think you are flirting with other religions. His options are really limited.

Anyone know what he is going to do with them?

As The Daily Show points out, this episode illustrates that the religious loonies have taken over the national discourse…

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Islamophobiapalooza
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
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… so may the best god win!

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Team Mohammed vs. Team Jesus – Religious Conflict
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

The fog of religious language

When one discusses the science-religion conflict with sophisticated religious apologists, one has to be alert to two things in order to avoid finding yourself in a fog where unsure of what you are talking about.

One fog generator is that sophisticated apologists tend to shift without warning between metaphor and the concrete, something that I have written about before. In order to stay on firm ground, it is good to keep clear what the discussion is about.

The first thing is to ask believers whether the god they believe in exists as a separate material entity, just like a photon or electron. If the answer is yes, then the question of god’s existence becomes an empirical question, like the existence of a photon or electron, and they are obliged to provide evidence for why we should believe in its existence. If the answer is no, and their god is some kind of metaphor, then we can stop the discussion right there. The usefulness of metaphors is not something that the methods of science are designed to investigate.

What usually happens though is that they refuse to be pinned down. They assert that god is not material and exists outside of space and time but then proceed to ascribe properties and actions to god that can only be true if god is a material entity existing within our space and time. You should press them as to how they can possibly know that their conception of god exists at all, let alone its properties, if it ‘exists outside of space and time’, since the speaker obviously lives within our space and time.

What one should be alert for is the sleight of hand that speaks of god as a metaphor in order to avoid having to provide evidence when it is requested and then, when the discussion has moved on, to make assertions (‘God wants us to do this’ and ‘God is like this’) that treats god as if it has a material existence.

As an example of the kind of woolly thinking that permeates religion-speak, consider this disappointing interview that Jon Stewart of The Daily Show had with religious apologist Marilynne Robinson. The problem with the interview was not that Stewart made some trivial errors like confusing dark matter with anti-matter. It is that the whole conversation was highly vacuous, reducing Stewart to making absurd statements that science is like faith.

While watching the interview, I felt there was something familiar about Robinson’s name and then I remembered. She had written a review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion for Harpers magazine back in November 2006. She did not like the book but that is fair enough. Reviewers are not obliged to give positive reviews. What was bad about the review was that it gave the reader little idea of what the main argument of Dawkins’ book was, because of the fog of religion-speak that she generates.

POST SCRIPT: Richard Dawkins on clarity

He makes a good point in that what religious people object to about the new atheists is that we are shunning complicated theological/philosophical circumlocutions about god and stating clearly why there is no reason to believe in him/her/it. Clarity is the enemy of religious apologetics.

Is religion good for anything?

As science has advanced, religious believers have been increasingly threatened by the fact that religion may become irrelevant in the sense that god is not actually required for anything, other than to provide comfort to those people who fear death and feel the need to believe in some powerful deity. The response has been to assert that religion and science do not conflict because they provide answers to different kinds of questions. In effect, they are said to occupy different niches in knowledge space. Over time, a cottage industry has grown up devoted to finding different ways to state this single idea. So now we have statements such as that science addresses ‘how’ questions while religion addresses ‘why’ questions or that science deals with questions that have a material basis while religion deals with non-material moral and ethical questions, questions of meaning, etc.
[Read more…]

The New War Between Science and Religion

(This article of mine was published on May 19, 2010 in The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the antievolution forces in the 2005 “intelligent design” trial. The new war concerns questions that are more profound than whether or not to teach evolution. Unlike the old science-religion war, this battle is going to be fought not in the courts but in the arena of public opinion. The new war pits those who argue that science and “moderate” forms of religion are compatible worldviews against those who think they are not.
[Read more…]

File this under things that are unlikely to turn out well

An evangelical church in Florida is threatening to burn 200 copies of the Koran on September 11, “to honor those who were murdered” in 2001. The priest behind this effort says that the goal is “to send a message to al-Qaida.” Of course, the ‘message’ that will be received is that there really is a war between Christians and Muslims.

We will be lucky if the only retaliation is that some equally crazy Muslims somewhere in the world burn 200 copies of the Bible. But if the Muslims up the ante and burn more than 200 Bibles, we may have an escalation that results in all religious books being burned.

What is it about religion that inspires crazy behavior on the part of its most ardent devotees?

Stephen Hawking on the universe and god

Recently religious apologists have taken to harping on the question “How can something come from nothing?” because they think that science cannot explain how the universe came into existence. Of course, their own answer that “God must have done it!” is not an answer at all since it merely shifts the problem to that of how god could come into being from nothing.

Stephen Hawking has recently published a book that says that we can indeed understand how the universe came into being without invoking god. The idea itself has been known for sometime but when Hawking says it, it generates a lot of media attention. Cosmologist Sean Carroll explains Hawking’s ideas in a three-minute video.

In short, science has not proved that there is no god (because such proofs are impossible) but has shown is there is no need for god.

The origin of religion-9: Real and fictive kinship

For the last post in this series, I want to look at the strategies that religions use to both grow and retain their members. Elisabeth Cornwell and Anderson Thomson in their article The Evolution of Religion suggest that the growth of religion could have been aided by the idea of ‘fictive kinship’. To understand this, we need to bear in mind that what evolution selects for are individual genes, not the full organism. The full organism (a human or chimpanzee or bird or plant) is simply a vehicle for carrying and reproducing genes.

The early research of W. D. Hamilton and R. Trivers showed how it can be evolutionary advantageous for a gene for the organism that contains it to nurture, protect, and even sacrifice itself for a relative because of its shared genes, and that this could form the basis for what we call altruism. As the mathematical biologist J. B. S. Haldane replied when asked if he would give his life to save his drowning brother, “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins”, which reflects when the number of his own genes that he loses by dying breaks even with the ones he saves in others.

(For the foundational papers in this area of research, see The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior I and II by W. D. Hamilton (1964) Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 7, p. 1-52, The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism by Robert L. Trivers, (March 1971) The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 46, no. 1, p. 36-57, and The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod and William D. Hamilton, (March 27, 1981), Science, vol. 211, p. 1390-1396. For a clear summary of the research on how evolution can provide an explanation of the biological basis of altruism and cooperative behavior, see Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1989).)

This drive to perpetuate a gene by aiding the survival and reproductive success of those who share that same gene, our ‘kin’, is evolutionarily advantageous and is thus likely deeply embedded in our primal brain.

Farmers know this and take advantage of this altruism towards actual kin by tricking animals into creating a false sense of genetic connection, a ‘fictive kinship’, in order to make an animal help another not related to it. For example, sheep and lambs can die during the birthing process and although it would help the farmer if an ewe that had lost its own lamb allowed an orphaned lamb to suckle it, ewes are reluctant to allow a lamb not its own to do so. This is understandable behavior in Darwinian terms because the ewe’s genes do not benefit from spending its resources on an unrelated animal. But by skinning the dead lamb of an ewe and using it to cover the body of a lamb whose mother has died, the ewe can be fooled into thinking that the lamb is her own and allow it to suckle.

Cornwell and Thomson suggest that the perpetuation and growth of religion is aided by this idea of fictive kinship. In primitive societies, we recognized as kin those who lived with us or very close to us. As societies grew larger and more complex, other devices had to be created to keep track of who was kin and who was not. Family names were one such device but in even larger groups we find ways to trick people into thinking in terms of kin by using labels such as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, ‘fatherland’ and ‘motherland’, and so on. These terms are targeted to appeal to the primal brain that has evolved to instinctively rally to help kin, and are exploited by armies and religions and politicians in order to get people to band together as fictive families to fight against other fictive families.

Christianity, especially Catholicism, exploits the fictive kinship aspects extensively. It speaks of ‘god the father’ and ‘Mother Mary’, their priests are referred to as father or brother, their nuns as sister or mother, and the liturgy constantly invokes the idea of the congregants as brothers and sisters.

Another explanation for the origin of religion is the idea that belief in an afterlife is a precursor to belief in god. This view suggests that in primitive societies, older adults may have found it advantageous to themselves to initiate and propagate the idea that there is an afterlife in which they still wielded influence over events in this life. It enabled them to command respect and good treatment from the young in this life even when they were old and decrepit and of little practical use. It is not a big step from believing in a world of the afterlife to believe in some sort of hierarchy existing there, with the ruler of that after-world transmuting into a god-concept.

It is unlikely that we will definitively answer questions about the origins of religion since those events lie in deep evolutionary time and beliefs don’t leave fossil remains or their imprint in DNA.

Those of us who wonder why religions still exist in the face of modern understanding of how the world works tend to underestimate the determination of believers to hold on to their beliefs. A Pew poll finds that while the public may say that they respect and understand science, “much of the general public simply chooses not to believe the scientific theories and discoveries that seem to contradict long-held religious or other important beliefs.”

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll. Indeed, in a May 2007 Gallup poll, only 14% of those who say they do not believe in evolution cite lack of evidence as the main reason underpinning their views; more people cite their belief in Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%) as their reason for rejecting Darwin’s theory.

This reliance on religious faith may help explain why so many people do not see science as a direct threat to religion. Only 28% of respondents in the same Time poll say that scientific advancements threaten their religious beliefs. These poll results also show that more than four-fifths of respondents (81%) say that “recent discoveries and advances” in science have not significantly impacted their religious views. In fact, 14% say that these discoveries have actually made them more religious. Only 4% say that science has made them less religious.

These data once again show that, in the minds of most people in the United States, there is no real clash between science and religion. And when the two realms offer seemingly contradictory explanations (as in the case of evolution), religious people, who make up a majority of Americans, may rely primarily upon their faith for answers. (my italics)

But whether we treat religion as a mental illness (as argued by Albert Ellis) or understand its origins and presence in any number of other ways, we clearly have our work cut out in trying to expose it because of its deep evolutionary origins that can make people choose to believe in illusions over reality.

But the big weakness of religion, the one that works against it and will ultimately lead to its demise, is that it is a false belief with zero evidentiary support and such beliefs, however strongly held, eventually crumble.

POST SCRIPT: Trying to discredit science to preserve religion

Following up on the above Pew poll, you can see the comical lengths that religious people will go to in their attempt to show that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Incidentally, the creationist Kent Hovind (aka ‘Dr. Dino’) who is featured in the video is now serving a ten year prison sentence for tax fraud.