Rise

By far the most common way to become religious is to simply be raised religious.  It happens all the time, and allows sects and fundamentalist groups to thrive within confined and controlled environments.  Take the Westboro Baptist Church for example.  Their beliefs are, to many, conflicting with good Christian values, yet their leader claims to be one of the best versed people on the planet when it comes to the scriptures.

Yet those within the church accept the teachings of Fred Phelps without question, so the question has to be asked, why? For many, the simple answer lies in their susceptibility to Phelps’ charisma (an interesting aside, one of the best definitions of charisma I’ve seen stated that an attribute of a charismatic person is the ability to resist other charismatic people) and authoritative way. For others, they are simply raised as part of the extended family and know no difference.  I’d highly recommend this documentary by British journalist Louis Theroux. One of the most telling aspects of that documentary is the responses given the Theroux by the children he talks to.  They don’t know any different, and they believe everything that protest, even though they don’t understand it.

The Westboro Baptist Church is an extreme example, but in reality, it’s no different to the situation being played out up and down the country, and all around the world.  Children are being formally and informally indoctrinated into religion without really understanding it.  This is something organised religion relies upon in order to perpetuate. Trying to convert developed adults, people who aren’t vulnerable, is difficult because they understand religion and can question it.  They can see the obvious, gaping chasms in the logic of religion and rightly reject it.  Children do not possess these skills, and in the end just become vulnerable victims of organised religion.

The baptism or christening of a child is, quite frankly, a crime against decency and should be punished as such.  I always find it strange that we restrict the age at which people can drink, or get married, to protect them, to ensure they have developed mentally to the point where they can freely make informed decisions.  Yet we allow children, babies even, to be indoctrinated in to a cult.

Fall

I mentioned above that it is difficult to convert adults to religion.  The exception are those people who really want, or need something else to be out there. These people find themselves in difficult or traumatic circumstances and simply can’t cope. Talking to religious people, as I do, I have found that the vast majority of those who came to religion later in life did so in the midst of some form of traumatic event.

The explanation for this should be immediately apparent. People want something else, they want a way to absolve themselves of responsibility.  They want something else to blame, or they want something else to do the hard work for them so they can get out of the situation they find themselves in.

One of the most common examples you’ll hear of, where people come late to religion, is a person who has lost everything, their job, their house, their money and their family.  Then they “find God” and get back on their feet.  What doesn’t  get acknowledged is the fact that they have been helped by people working on the premise that they will receive help in exchange for joining the religious group providing the help. It’s the classic missionary scenario - “before God we had nothing, now we’ve found God we have running water and crops”.

The classic debate relating to these situations goes like so: -

• The Religious say that when people open up their hearts to God in their hour of need, God will help them.
• The Non-Religious say that vulnerable people are being exploited, they want something to blame, to take control, and that it’s easier to believe in something when you really want, or need it to be true.

You will of course know which side of the argument I stand on. In much the same way I don’t believe Children should be indoctrinated in religion, I don’t believe people in a vulnerable position should be either.

You’ll notice that both means described above rely on exploiting those who are vulnerable.  Either through age or circumstance.  This is a consistent thread throughout different religions and cults. It is difficult to convince people of something that isn’t true, and has no evidence to present unless they are in a compromised position, or are unable to logically assess the premise you are putting forward.

So we know that the Bible isn’t perfect, and I’m sure God, being a decent fictional entity, would happily admit that he got things wrong in the past and want to correct them.  But how would he do it?  After all, you can’t just whisper sweet nothings in a human’s ear if your invisible, we have a name for that, so what would you do?

Perhaps, you would manipulate the world to show your displeasure at certain actions you’re Children are taking.  Like the Wildfires in California occuring around the same time they banned gay marriage, possibly?  The problem is that those that follow a religious book are closed to any suggestion that the book may be wrong.  So are they missing the signs, or choosing to ignore them?  Or, as Occam’s Razor might suggest, the book has always been incorrect.

Thankfully this is being covered by some prominent news outlets like the Huffington Post, but really this needs to get out into the mainstream media.  People need to know.  Unfortunately, this won’t happen because of the fear within the mainstream media outlets of alienating some viewers.  In the words of Matt Damon (yes, that Matt Damon):

“Do the actuary tables and there’s a one out of three chance, if not more, that McCain doesn’t survive his first term and it’ll be President Palin… It’s like a really bad Disney movie. The hockey mom, you know, ‘oh, I’m just a hockey mom’… and she’s facing down President Putin… It’s totally absurd… it’s a really terrifying possibility… I need to know if she really think that dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. I want to know that, I really do. Because she’s gonna have the nuclear codes.”  From HP.  Video here.

The source of this story is a teacher who spoke to Palin just after she was elected Mayor of Wasilla in 1998.  The really worrying part of the discussion Palin had with Philip Munger, the teacher in question, was this:

“…she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks…”

This was in response to Munger pushing her in the clear empirical evidence available, specifically prehistoric fossils and tracks that can be dated back far further than 6,000 years.

The question we need to ask is this.  Is Palin dellusional, an idiot or both?  And that really shouldn’t be a question you’re asking about anyone in politics, let alone someone vying for one of the most powerful positions in the world.

The most senior judge in Saudi Arabia has said it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV channels which broadcast immoral programmes.

Yes, you read that right.  The MOST SENIOR JUDGE in Saudi Arabia has given permission, endorsement if you will, for the killing of broadcasters for broadcasting what he deems to be immoral programmes.  Let’s break this down.

Firstly, people will now attempt to kill the station owners, and no doubt their employees, because of this statement made by an absolute bigoted idiot.  People may very well die.  Secondly, what on earth is immoral?  Who judges?  Him?  The prospective murderers?  Their holy book?  Let’s be honest, every holy book is unspecific when it comes to morality, there are grey areas.  Language is ambiguous.  So even of you do believe in a holy book, can you really truly understand it’s intentions?  Quite frankly, if I was a Muslim and I saw this statement being made, I’d really start to reconsider the company I keep.  Do I really want to be part of a movement where one of it’s more senior and influential members believes that murder is a less serious crime than broadcasting provocative television shows?  Does that make sense to ANYONE?

This is what we’re up against.  Biggotry, fear and idiocy.

The hot button topic at the moment is a game called Spore.  Essentially it allows you to create an organism and guide it from single cell to galaxy conquering race.  It’s been a controversial title on both sides of the evolution / intelligent design debate, with evolutionists deriding the intelligent design aspects and id-ers deriding the evolutionary aspects.  Stomping into this debate like the proverbial chimpanzee into an intelligent debate is the AntiSpore website.  As pointed out by gaming blog Kotaku, this is one of those sites that’s so badly written, researched and conceived that it’s initially difficult to know whether it’s a parody or not.

Our first thought was “Ha! A clever satire on religious censorship and the intelligent design debate!” quickly followed by, “hang on, it’s quite deadpan for satire, isn’t it?”

Kotaku

The problem here is two fold.  Firstly, the game isn’t really about evolution.  In fact, it very much falls into the “Intelligent Design” side of things.  Otherwise, it would be quite boring.  You put into place the basic elements of your species, you design them.  Secondly, the website is just like the 100s of other creationist/ID websites out there.  It’s badly written, misinformed, and sets out the deceive and mislead.  The current newest post  is claiming that you have to present ID to see sex in the cinema, but not in Spore!  Well, for starters the game is rated for people 10 years and over.  Secondly, you can watch a documentary about animals having sex at pretty much any time of the day on Discovery.  That, if anything, is what the copulation in Spore should be compared to.  This isn’t pornography, and only someone with a truly distorted view of sex and sexuality would believe it is (my previous comments about Ms Pac-Man not withstanding!).

Update: Thankfully, the site has been revealed as a hoax.  Although it does raise the very serious point that we all know, and have met, people with views this extreme.  The site, while extreme, was not so extreme as to be unbelieveable.  Which is scary when you think about it.

photo credit: Max Choong

I know that there are many readers of this blog who are “of faith”.  Some, I respect for their willingness to enter into open discussion about their religion, and I accept that for some people, religion is a necessary part of their lives.  There are other people, however, who can’t see past blind faith.  And these people really need educating.  So let’s take a look at the most recent example, a group of people, based in Washington D.C believe that fuel prices have fallen because they hold regular prayer sessions at gas stations.

So let’s teach these people a basic rule of the universe.  Causation does not equal correlation.  It’s quite simple, and best illustrated by the Simpsons.  The crux is that if I do a rain dance, rain falling does not prove that my rain dance has worked.  It’s a classic mistake made for those looking for proof of religion.  If they pray for something to happen, and then it does, religious people will assume causation.  That their prayers caused the change to happen.  The problem with this is that, if you believe your prayers have been answered and there is causation there, you also have to accept that every time you pray and it isn’t answered, it’s one mark in the column that’s headed “There is no God”.  And there’s no way I’ll accept any response to this that  says “God moves in mysterious ways”, contains the words “grand plan/scheme” or makes any reference to free will.  Because if there was a God, these would surely be the most inane, selfish, prayers to answer.

After reading that comment, I started thinking about the motivations of Christians to participate in such activities, and I came to two conclusions, both of which are worryingly self-serving.  So let’s take a look at them.

Conversion

You’ll notice that any charitable organisation that is affiliated with a religion makes it very obvious that such a link exists.  Take the Christian Missionaries for example, they promised technology, food and social advancement to the people indiginous to the areas they visited.  In return, the people would have to become Christian.  It was a simple premise that exploited the most vulnerable people in the world under the guise of charity.  What they were really doing was exploitation.  We’ll give you X if you convert to our religion.  I’ve spoken about the need for the church to maintain its numbers in the past, so sending workers out to relatively unknown areas of the world in order to “plant” churches seems like a sensible, if not moral, way to do this.

While modern Christian charitable organisations aren’t so overt, they still have alterior motives.  Christian Aid, for example, makes sure that everyone they help knows that they have been helped by a Christian organisation.  In fact, I was asked for a donation by a friend who was collecting for Christian Aid.  I pointed out that while I do donate to charity, I am very careful not to donate to any charity with a strong religious affiliate, because of the reasons detailed above.

Prizes

I think we all know what the prize on offer is, an eternity in the best (but most boring) place not-on-earth, heaven.  What people seem to forget is that all Christians have been incentivised to follow other Christians.  And if they believe in God, they also believe in heaven (and hell), so the incentive, as far as they’re concerned, is a good one.

So when a Christian does a good act, you have to remember that it is never selfless.  At the end of the day, each and every Christian is thinking to themselves “one more point I can make to get into heaven”.  If they can help someone and get them to convert to Christianity, well just imagine how many points that would be!

Conclusion

So based on the two points above, it’s very difficult to accept that a Christian would do a good deed for the sake of doing a good deed.  And whilst I’m sure many Christians will argue the fact that they have been incentivised, they can’t argue about its existence (in their mind).  And once an incentive exists, it’s very difficult to ignore.

On the face of it, it would appear that Atheists acting on bahalf of charities are in a far better position to help.  Otherwise, it’s like letting a car salesman fix your alternator.  You know you’re going to get sold to, and you know he’s looking to get some reward in the end.

What are your thoughts?  Can there be a truly good Christian?

I have really mixed feeling about this claim.  While I think he’s right, I wish it was someone other than Richard Lynn making the claim.  After all, Richard Lynn is known for making outrageous claims.  I’m torn as to whether the person making the statement is enough to invalidate, or call into question, the claim itself.

Quite frankly, in this case, the claim is so strong, and backed up by so much circumstantial evidence.  If you need any evidence of the lack of intelligence evident in “believers” (beyond the obvious), just look for any attempted use of logic, and you will no doubt find it.

When I first read this article, my initial response was “Yeah, and French people speak French”.  It just seems so obvious that to believe in something that clearly isn’t true, to be subjected to years of brainwashing and lies and to not even begin to question it, you must be lacking something intellectually.  After all, those who consider themselves to be intellectual question everything.

Let’s look at the crux of the article’s argument.

No one in their right mind would claim that 10,000 hundred story buildings built themselves from randomness, even over time.  Yet those who doubt the existence of a Creator believe that an entire universe, containing all of the billions of elements necessary for life to form, may have come about without a builder.  As such, they give credence to billions of times more coincidences to having come about.

Now clearly, I am an Atheist.  And I know many other Atheists.  Yet I’ve never heard any of them claim that buildings can build themselves.  Likewise, we don’t claim that humans have built themselves.  The above quote really belies the author’s complete lack of understanding of evolution.  It would appear that the author’s intention is to argue that the sheer complexity of the universe means that it cannot have happened randomly.  Something must have sparked this surge of life.  And that something must be “The Creator”.  What isn’t clear is how a being so complex that they can create a universe of this complexity was created themselves.  And how the being that created that being was created?  if you assume that anything of any complexity must have been created, there really is no beginning. It’s one of the most flawed, illogical, self-defeating arguments I’ve ever had the misfortune of stumbling across (thank you Richard Dawkins!).

And by the way, if the Author doesn’t realize that the opening line alone means that he’s floated into the land of Personal Incredulity, he should read some real books.  Not the hokum pokum the exploitative Anthony Flew churned out.

So what do we have on the other side of the argument?  I was fascinated to read in New Scientist about experiments that have shown bacteria making massive evolutionary hurdles in just 44,000 generations.  To be clear, these bacterium have evolved to a point where they have lost one of the limitations that effectively defined them as a species.  It would appear that the seeds were sown as early as the 20,000th generation, which is a truly remarkable find.  What makes this even more remarkable is the fact that this has been reproduced.  It’s evolution “on-tap”.

Both pieces of news came across my inbox the same day, and really serve as a microcosm of the two sides of the argument.  On the one side we have the religious, regurgitating the same old flawed, defeated, arguments in new and badly written diatribes.  On the other side we have science.  Tests, experiements, results and reproducable scenarios.  The absurdity of the fact that such a so-called argument even exists is clearly evident.