I am an atheist because, as my brother once said, ‘If it don’t gel, it ain’t jello’. Religion and supersition in general just does not gel. I see no reason to believe in gods or the supernatural. It took me some time and and a good deal of exploration to come to that conclusion, but in the end there is simply no evidence.
No correlation with experience. There are far too many holes in the theory, if you will. Its a simple as that.
KillJoy
I was brought up to be a Christian, taken to a protestant church from the time I was born until I went off to college. Everyone in my family is a Christian, indoctrinated into the faith with bible stories every night and prayers at every meal and nearly every public event. Christianity was part of who we were and part of my personal identity. I believed, and I prayed, and when I prayed I knew what God wanted me to do.
David Sloan Wilson does not like the New Atheists. He’s pushing something he labels Evolutionary Religious Studies, which, by his view, attracts all the serious scholars of religion. His definition of “serious”, though, seems to be simply scholars who agree with him, who do not regard religion as harmful as the New Atheists do, and who are willing to plug his group selectionist theory of religion as a prosocial phenomenon.
In a new piece at the HuffPo (I’d rather not link to that place, so read it through Jerry Coyne, who ably deconstructs Wilson), he lays out three points comparing ERS to the New Atheism, and his third point is this: that the New Atheism ignores the scientific evidence.
Whenever New Atheists make claims about religion as a human phenomenon, their claims should respect the authority of empirical evidence. Insofar as the new discipline of ERS has added to empirical knowledge of religion, the New Atheists should be paying close attention to ERS. This is especially true for Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, whose names are so closely associated with evolution. Step 3 should go without saying and I doubt that anyone would disagree with it in principle. Yet, by my assessment, there is a serious disconnect between the New Atheism and ERS at the level of Step 3.
To back this up, he uses an example from Dawkins who clearly explains the byproduct theory of religion, and shorts him because he doesn’t fluff David Sloan Wilson’s pet idea, that “religions are fundamentally about the creation and organization of prosocial communities”. I note that Dawkins also did not seriously discuss the Catholic church’s theory that the one true religion is the product of divine fiat, either.
What if he had said that religions are fundamentally about the creation and organization of prosocial communities? That all people require a cultural meaning system to organize their experience, receiving environmental information as input and resulting in effective action as output? That all cultural meaning systems confront a complex tradeoff between the factual content of a given belief and its effect upon action? That secular meaning systems often depart from factual reality in their own ways? The effect upon the audience would have been very different than when they were told that religion is like a moth immolating itself or like a child mindlessly being fed useless information.
This is why Dawkins has a reputation as an excellent communicator, and David Sloan Wilson does not. That humans process data using a mental model shaped by cultural influences is simply a given, a kind of common property of the substrate that does not say anything about the special status of religion in poisoning (or more charitably, shaping) our cultures. It does not increase understanding. And most importantly, it does not address the problem of religion, or beliefs that lead entire cultures into benighted dead-ends of onanistic inanity.
The feline fanatic has a succinct summary of the New Atheist agenda. I concur with this:
Testing whether the tenets of religion are true. The New Atheist answer is “no.”
Assessing the effects of ungrounded religious belief on the world. The New Atheist conclusion is that, seen as a whole, religions have inflicted far more harm than good on the world.
Getting rid of the unwarranted authority and privilege that religion, established churches, and religious officials have garnered for themselves over the centuries.
Even David Sloan Wilson would agree with the first point: religions teach false dogma about the origin and nature of the world. He is reduced to making pragmatic arguments that false beliefs can have beneficial effects on society.
But I have one word for David Sloan Wilson’s benign view of religion, for his argument that it is a prosocial phenomenon. It represents a huge pile of evidence for our second agenda item that he seems to ignore. That word is…
WOMEN.
Whenever I hear that tripe about the beneficial effects of religion on human cultural evolution, it’s useful to note that the world’s dominant faiths all hardcode directly into their core beliefs the idea that women are unclean, inferior, weak, and responsible for the failings of mankind…that even their omnipotent, all-loving god regards women as lesser creatures not fit to be intermediaries with him, and that their cosmic fate is to be subservient slaves to men, just as men are to be subservient slaves to capital-H Him.
David Sloan Wilson can argue all he wants that religion helped promote group survival in our evolutionary history, or that his group selectionist models somehow explain its origins, but it doesn’t matter. Here and now, everywhere, those with eyes to see can see for themselves that religion has for thousands of years perpetuated the oppression of half our species. Half of the great minds our peoples have produced have lived and died unknown and forgotten, their educations neglected, their lives spent doing laundry and other menial tasks for men — their merits unrecognized and buried under lies promulgated by religion, in cultures soaked in the destructive myths of faith which codify misogyny and give it a godly blessing.
Isn’t that reason enough to tear down the cathedrals — that with this one far-reaching, difficult change to our cultures, we double human potential?
I was raised in the quite conservative Reformed Church of America. I was a very curious child and read the entire bible through a few times starting at a young age, yet I still swallowed every lie they fed me. I never really fit in in high school youth group. We went to a smallish church and my school friends all went to different churches. In addition I wanted to learn things like theology and apologetics; the others wanted to learn about pop culture and dating. We also weren’t much of a priority for the church (we got no funding and the room we used twice a week had to be arranged the way the elders wanted it for their monthly meeting). Because of this I was slightly bitter towards the church I grew up in, although not religion in general yet.
It’s quite obvious, actually. Say we have a gigantic economic competitor (like, for example, China) that’s creeping up on our accomplishments in science, while our schools are struggling with idiots demanding that we waste time teaching the non-controversy of creationism. One approach would be to shut down the nitwits and fund good science education…yeah, like that’s ever going to happen. But how about the alternative? Instead of correcting our own problems, let’s start poisoning other countries!
We’ve got great examples that show it can be done. Turkey, of course, is now a center for Islamic creationism stolen wholesale from American missionaries. The latest news is that South Korea is stripping evolution out of their textbooks, another victory for Christianity.
I’m going to suggest that every American church do their patriotic duty and stop sending missions off to poor countries, like African nations, and instead start pouring them into China, Japan, Taiwan…places where their Stupidity Induction Fields will do us more good in the struggle for economic dominance. I suppose the European Union would be good, too — they’re getting too damned secular over there.
Wait, no, not Cyprus — they’ve got enough problems as it is. Come on, Christians, wreck wealthy economies for us, OK? No more of this cowardly picking on the little guys.
While most of the articles on this topic have been from ex-Christians or people born to non-believers, my story is quite different.
I was born to religious Muslim parents (in one of the various sub-sects of the Ismaili sect in the Shi’ite branch) in a small rural town in India. This caste is very similar to the Roman Catholic Church setup, where there is a religious leader who claims to be the god’s representative and has a network of priests spread over the world wherever the leader’s followers live. This leader and his coterie also need a lot of money and keep track of everything happening in the followers’ life and family.
I’ve been reading Jonathan Haidt’s work over the years with an attitude that follows an unfortunate trajectory, downwards. At first, it was with interest — his ideas about moral intuition being defined by a kind of emotional response first with the intellectual response forming a veneer of rationalizations after the fact seems valid. But then he went off on this “moral foundations” stuff, where he identified different axes of motivations, like care vs. harm, and then the axes started proliferating, and pretty quickly it all became a lumpy mush without much utility. He’s succumbed to Labeling Disease, something that hits some psychologists hard, in which they observe that which they measure, stick a name on it, and try hard to reify it into existence, even if it has no correspondence to any substrate in the brain at all. Id, ego, superego, anyone?
Then he won a Templeton Prize, shredding most of his credibility. Lately he’s been wandering around in a fog of sincere open-mindedness, letting his brain sublimate into a kind of misty moral ambiguity that looks more like blithe nihilism than anything else.
And now he’s done an interview on Freakanomics, where glibness rules, and manages to be so vapid I’m completely turned off to the new book he’s flogging. He did manage to solidify my opinion of him, though…just not in a good way.
Orac and Paul Offit agree: get rid of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Harkin’s Folly has had opportunity enough to show it is a waste of time, so let’s stop tossing money into that sinkhole.
My rational journey began with my grandparents oddly enough. My grandfather was a Jewish journalist in Nazi Germany. Through an amazing stroke of luck, he was on holiday in Switzerland when the entire paper was shut down and employees shipped off to concentration camps. His sister sent him a simple telegraph saying “don’t come back”, and although he managed to get his parents out, he never heard from her again.
When I really look back and think about where I started becoming an Atheist, it’s a bit funny. I never was raised explicitly Christian- I did go to a Methodist preschool, but I didn’t retain a thing save for the fact that there was apparently a God and Jesus, which I never questioned- it was just a thing that was true and mentioned very rarely, as we never went to Church after I finished preschool. Nevertheless, I certainly was Christian, if only because I didn’t know there was a choice.
