Religion: just another example of 'groupthink'?

Lately on Twitter, a particulary noisome little meme has been doing the rounds.  It's the notion that religion is just another group institution, and thus no more harmful than political affiliation, or following a football team.

This is wrong.

Hats off to the religion virus for evolving yet another survival mechanism.  Religion has already developed vertical transmission through indoctrination at an early age, along with the ability to pass itself off as basically good while simultaneously orchestrating a very great deal of evil.  Now the religion meme group seeks to deflect critical attention by crying, "Hey, guys, lay off; I'm just another type of groupthink."

Religion, through its adherents, seeks to accrue power in this world by making claims about the next.  Followers are promised rich rewards in the hereafter for acts carried out during (and especially at the end of) their lives.  Moreover, it is deemed disrespectful to question or to challenge assertions made in the name of religion.  This makes religion very different from political colours or loyalty to a football club, both of which are considered fair game for public haranguing.

Religion makes false claims about the origin and purpose of life.  It dulls curiosity and stifles inquiry, flatly stating that we already have all the information we can ever possibly need.  This is dangerous, and no other institution makes such an assertion.  Couple that with the immunity from criticism still afforded to religion by the current zeitgeist, and we have a problem indeed.

Educators seeking to encourage young people to think independently, and to appreciate the wonderful world around them, are constantly hogtied by the need to tiptoe respectfully around fenced-off religious territory.  I am not allowed to teach my students the truth about developmental biology, because local religiously-inspired laws favour the perpetuation of a ludicrous Babylonian creation myth.  The best I can hope to do is to encourage them to go and learn the truth for themselves, applying equitably critical scientific thinking to everything they encounter.  Some of them may begin to question the stultifying filth they were fed from infancy.

Genital mutilation of children is exclusively religious in origin.  False claims of improved hygiene or better mental health have long since been exposed.

In the UK, if a slaughterman were to slit the throat of a fully conscious animal and wait for it to bleed to death, he would be called to account before the law.  Unless, of course, he claimed that his religion required him to act with such brutal sadism, in which case the law would politely back off and leave him to get on with it.

No other institution is capable of, or would wish to associate itself with, such mediaeval barbarism.  Religion stands fairly and squarely in the dock.  Humanity will benefit from consigning religion to the archive of abandoned social aberrations.

Huckabee the Huckster

In the wake of last Friday's dreadful shooting in Connecticut, USA, in which twenty children and their teachers were slaughtered by a lone gunman, there has been no shortage of revolting drivel to deepen the world's sense of grief and shock.  Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, clearly implied that the tragedy would not have happened had schools continued to promulgate Christianity.

Mr Huckabee claims that God has been excluded from schools since 1963, and therefore bad things have happened in schools, including Friday's mass killing.  Leaving aside the obvious rejoinder that God's behaviour as documented in the Old and New Testaments makes him a prime candidate for exclusion from any civilized school, Mr Huckabee presumably believes that God is omnipotent.  How, then, can God be excluded from anywhere?  Mr Huckabee must mean that God chose to allow children to be gunned down by a madman, because the ancestors of those children elected to separate religion from education half a century ago.

Such a being as Mr Huckabee's God is surely, in the eyes of any rational and compassionate observer, an evil, egocentric fiend of the first water.  If He has an issue with US education policy, why not arrange a revelation to the President?  Why does He feel the need to terrorise and then murder twenty innocent children, leaving their parents grief-stricken for the remainder of their ruined lives?

Friday's events were devastating, awful, indescribably tragic.  But it is also a tragedy that people like Mr Huckabee can broadcast such repulsive I-told-you-so condemnations, in pursuit of their own political agendas, when people are at their most sensitive and vulnerable.

Mr Huckabee opines that people will refrain from doing wrong only if they are afraid of standing before God.  Does he really believe that the only reason people do not rape and murder is because they are afraid of divine retribution?  If he were to discover that God does not exist, would he then become a murderer?

The Connecticut shooting was perpetrated by an individual human being, empowered by liberal gun laws.  In order to minimize the chance of repetition of this senseless carnage, we must look not to God, but to the reality of readily available, deadly weapons in a world where there are nasty people as well as nice ones.

Hold Your Tongue, Vile Heathen!

The three brave members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were today jailed for two years, following a political protest in the form of an unscheduled musical addition to a religious service. Passing sentence, the judge remarked that the defendants had 'offended the feelings of orthodox believers'.

Some years ago, former UK MP Ann Widdecombe defended British blasphemy law, justifying her stance by claiming that 'anything goes' unless there is a law to control what may or may not be said about anything to do with religion.

So, no-one may voice an opinion in the presence of religious believers, if that opinion might question the veracity of their beliefs. Why do such people support such a law?

The answer is quite simple. If dissenting voices are silenced, believers need never face their questions. They can simply shelter within the anechoic chambers of their churches, safe in the knowledge that they will never be called upon to think for themselves. Perish the thought that believers might have to substantiate the assertions of their holy books against searching, sceptical inquiry.

Does the reverse apply? Is there a law against offensive statements BY the church? If there were, then the Pope would have been brought to book for the comments of his clergy that have contibuted directly to the spread of HIV in Africa. Practically every Christian cleric would have been called to account for offending all thinking people with the suggestion that we each bear personal responsibility for the actions of a fictitious lady who allowed herself to be persuaded by a talking snake. Teachers and others who have terrified children with the insane and sadistic notion of hell fire would similarly have cause to view every passing police car with apprehension.

Ye gods, the civilised world must surely do all it can to protect religious believers from ever having to think independently. They deserve to have their beliefs safeguarded by seal of law, exempt from question. This must be so, for if it were not so, those beliefs might be shown as the vile farrago of lies, deceit and self-interested wish-thinking that they are.

In defence of Sam Harris

Sam Harris has come in for a great deal of unwarranted vilification lately, following an article he wrote on airline security screening procedures. He has been accused, quite unfairly, of advocating racial discrimination in risk assessment.

Harris is more than capable of defending himself, and has been kind enough to restate his position with customary polite clarity against a baying tirade of knee-jerking net trolls whose main concern seems to be to show one another how superbly liberal and human they are. I certainly can't add anything to what Harris has already said. His consummate skill is to crystallize hours of careful, profound thought into a few blazingly clear paragraphs of rational argument. His writings deserve to be read properly and considered in depth before we rush to blast inane, bleating responses to all corners of the web.

My understanding of Harris's stance on airport security is as follows. If I've read him right, then there is surely no need for the overloaded bandwagon of furore onto which the PC brigade continues to clamber in droves.

1. The ideology of Islam is self-avowedly wedded to terrorism in pursuit of jihad. Muslim suicide bombers destroy themselves and others literally every day. The last two sentences are plain facts and are open to neither debate nor politically correct misinterpretation.

2. Followers of Islam adopt overt demonstrations of their allegiance, in costume, style of hair and beard, and in their routine daily conduct. Thus many who follow Islam are easily identifiable as such. They opt to associate themselves, visibly, with their ideology (see 1 above).

3. Random screening of air travellers equates to an asinine pretence that there is no link between Islam and the threat of terrorism.

As long as Islam fails to break its links to suicide terrorism, it remains irrelevant to argue that most Muslims are not terrorists. The master stroke of Islam - and of all currently popular religions - is to appear to be all about good, while actually perpetrating a great deal of evil. I would have a lot more respect for the non-terrorist majority of Muslims if they would publicly distance themselves from the pernicious ideology that is Islam, until such time as its violent pretensions to world domination are expunged. When that day comes, and no-one wears, carries or performs active, overt advertisements of an ideology committed to destruction, then truly random screening at airports will be the way to go.

True dishonesty

A few days ago someone (a FB friend of a friend) posted a video online, on the 'true' teachings of Islam.

She appended an appeal to Allah, that he enable us all to spread the true message. I have seen many such links. They are all of the same ilk. They claim that 'true' Islam has no place for violence, misogyny, anti-semitism or world domination through force. 'True' Islam, they claim, is all about a life of peaceful submission to a benevolent, all powerful deity.

They claim to know better than the Taliban. They claim to know better than Al-Qaeda. They claim to know better than the wicked imams and callous indoctrinators who send testosterone-sodden young men to explosive and murderous perdition.

But HOW do they justify this superior knowledge and understanding of holy writ? Whence is their authority? If the authority is the deity himself, then why are his many allegedly holy books not written to be less ambiguous? Moreover, why does he not intervene to promulgate the 'true' message himself? To do so ought surely to lie within his omnipotent purview.

The simple fact is that they do not know. They cannot know. They are simply putting forward the interpretation of Islam that best suits their own chosen world view. And that is precisely what the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are doing too.

No-one has proved the existence of any deity, and there is no evidence at all in his favour. In all probability he does not exist. We certainly are not entitled - none of us - to use the word 'true' in connection with a treatise on his actions or intent.

What were Sydney Carton's true intentions when he took another's place at the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities? Does it mean anything at all to speak of his true intentions, his true beliefs, his true feelings? Carton is a product of Charles Dickens's imagination. He is words on a page, describing a character in the mind of an author. Readers could - and do - debate endlessly on subtle facets of literary characters, what they might have done had the circumstances been slightly different, etc., but is there a real truth out there, waiting to be found? Of course there is not. And neither is there a 'true' interpretation of Islam.

So, in order to make an honest declaration of their position, the soft Islamic liberals ought surely to drop the word 'true' from their propaganda. They mean 'what we would wish to be true', not what is demonstrably true.

If I were to claim that Stoke City Football Club were the 'true' epitome of footballing excellence, I would not have to wait long for someone to question the validity of the word 'true'. They would quickly point out that truth is objective, not something that varies according to one's point of view. Why does the same not happen to the truth-wielding Islamic liberals? Again we see the disproportionate respect which we are all expected to hold towards claims based on religion. Well, not in my case. I will not respect any claim about objective reality that cannot be tested by rational means.

For my part, I would certainly not wish for the existence of a monstrous despot like the god of the Bible or the Qur'an. If I were to post my utopian wish list on FB it would not include anyone or anything so vile, selfish or arrogant. It would feature the universal popularity of reasoned thinking, and the pursuit of a fulfilling life for all, based on using every means available to maximise the well-being of all sentient creatures. No omnipresent supernatural dictators, no threats of everlasting servitude in so-called paradise, and of course no eternal torture for thought crime.

If you are advertising what you would wish to be true, have the common decency to admit it instead of superciliously trying to claim impossible privileged information. If you are claiming something that is demonstrably true, back it up with verifiable evidence, please.

Dr Williams faces reality

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Easter sermon, admitted at last that the idea of God is imaginary, unnecessary, degrading and dangerous.  Oh, all right then, he didn't.  But to do so would have been an act of honesty and integrity.

The Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter sermon can be read in full here.

Once again, Dr Williams has underlined two colossally important points. The first is the utterly obscene, unbridled immorality of the central doctrine of Christianity. The second (and more breathtaking) is the social acceptability of the pernicious rot that he and his kind regularly visit upon us.

The Archbishop cites the resurrection of Jesus as evidence that Christianity is true. Truth, he says, is more important than usefulness. Modern vernacular is eloquent enough in response: he is wrong on so many levels. Firstly, and irrefutably, the so-called 'evidence' for the resurrection comes from Christian literature, and so it is circular to use it as proof. Secondly, even if the resurrection were proven to have occurred, that fact alone would tell us nothing about who or what occasioned it, or whether or not we should work on Sundays, or whether any of Jesus's alleged ravings should be taken seriously.

The Archbishop's assertion is pure wish thinking. There is no logical path from 'actuality of resurrection' to 'truth of everything in Christianity'. That is so obvious as to be hardly worth saying. But what risks going unnoticed is the real nub of the issue. Why would the Archbishop, or anyone with an ounce of humanity, wish such a sordid collection of filth to be the truth?

God, claims the Archbishop, created the universe and maintains its existence, second by second, through his purposive action. Thus, everything that happens can be accounted for by God, and everything that doesn't happen can be accounted for by God's choosing not to make it happen. Let's not go down the road of examining man's supposed fall in the light of this claim, for the outcome is plain enough before we even start. Instead, let's look at what really happened, according to the Williams model.

This line of reasoning has been expounded before by the late Christopher Hitchens, so I don't claim originality. (Note that the Archbishop's assertions aren't original either.) Recognisable humans are reckoned to have existed on Earth for one or two hundred thousand years. Dr Williams asserts that the omnipotent creator of the universe watched, with (presumably purposive) passive detachment, while the struggling wretches starved and died, often after brief lives of tormented agony, for between ninety-eight and a hundred and ninety-eight thousand years, after which he decided it was time to intervene. And how did the almighty choose to carry out this intervention? By appearing to the Chinese, who had an organised civilization and written language? No, he chose to interact with unlettered peasants in an obscure part of the Middle East, making sure there were as few reliable witnesses as possible, and carried out a filthy and demeaning human sacrifice, thereafter claiming that we, who had no say in the matter, were and still are responsible. This disgusting act of murder, which any of us, if present at the time and in a position of influence, would have been duty bound to try to prevent, was supposedly necessary in order to atone for an earlier misdemeanour in which we also had no part. The grisly details aside, the very idea of vicarious redemption is a deeply unethical one. If you have been caught speeding, I can pay your fixed penalty for you, or serve your jail term in your place if you are a repeat offender, but there is nothing I or anyone else can do to absolve you of the responsibility for what you did. The responsiblity comes bundled with the fact that you did it. The suggestion that one can load one's responsibility onto a hapless individual who is then tortured to death is hardly an honourable one.

I would have a good deal more respect for Dr Williams if his speech had gone something like this.

My dear fellow Christians, it is high time we faced up to a fact which, if we are honest, we have long known in our hearts to be true. While many of the teachings of the Christian Church are admirable, resulting in help for the needy, support for our neighbours, and succour in times of strife, we must at last recognise that these things come from humankind alone, and not from any invisible celestial deity. The evidence for God as an all-powerful being, who created and manages the universe, is precisely nil. The idea of eternal bliss in heaven arose from cynical exploitation of our innate and childish fear of death. The spiteful and complacent corollary, that of eternal torture of the damned, was added later (see the New Testament) as a further incentive to follow the directions of the clergy. We should look back with pride on the achievements of human civilization, and with humility upon our own mistakes and those of our forbears. We should learn from such mistakes and do our utmost to avoid repeating them. The State of Israel exists, thanks to a series of such mistakes, and the best we can now do is try to avert a nuclear exchange in the Middle East, by striving for an equitable, two-state solution. We have nothing to gain by clinging to ancient, divisive dogmas that would have died out long ago if they had not been drilled into children before they were old enough to think. So, take a deep breath, go forth, divest yourself of the enervating chains of totalitarian serfdom, be assured that you will not be called upon to sing the praises of the Dear Leader throughout eternity, make the most of your one finite life, and leave the place as you would expect to find it for your children and those who follow them. Amen.

The harmless face of faith?

As I was relaxing over a drink with friends I hadn't seen for a while, the conversation turned to religion. The three of us who were present are all atheists. We shared thoughts on books we'd all read, and recommended others. An air of easy common sense and reassuring rationality prevailed.

Sadly it wasn't long before accommodationism elbowed its way into the group. "I know a really lovely lady," remarked my old friend, "whose faith in God gives her great strength and support during difficult times of her life. Now that can't be a bad thing, can it?" My heart sank slightly as an explanation gradient swam into view before me, with 'belief in belief' engraved on the bottom step.

My friend had been seduced by that succubic, sugar-sweet coating so artfully exploited by the religion virus: its appeal to our sense of human empathy. (I suspect that it also appeals to our sense of superiority, insofar as someone else needs an imaginary crutch which we ourselves can manage without, but let's leave that aside for the time being.) The lady's beliefs had only positive effects, and therefore could only be good.

My objections are threefold. Firstly, to what extent does the lady believe that God is managing her life? I believe in lots of things without feeling the need to assert them to others. For example, I believe that my employer will give me a decent reference and an end-of-service bonus when I want to move on, although I do not feel the slightest inclination to state my belief out loud (except of course when citing it here as an illustrative example). I believe that my car will start when I go out later, even though it has been standing, unused and ungaraged, in mixed weather for three days while I was away on business. I feel not the tiniest urge to share my beliefs with others in conversation, so why does she need to spread hers around? I suggest that the lady has grave doubts about the influence and the existence of her divine guardian, and these doubts manifest themselves in repeated assertion, to convince herself as much as anyone else. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

This leads to my second objection. Can such a doubt-ridden belief system make its adherents truly happy? Rather, the niggling, anxious abrasion of worrisome uncertainty, twenty-four/seven, must surely become eventually as excruciating as physical torture. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, religion's promise of eternal bliss does not appear to content its followers on the whole. And what about the risk of crashing disillusionment? While accommodationists like my friend applaud (and perhaps envy) the faithful their comforting blanket, do they think upon the potential experience of loss of faith? I suggest that the lady is at constant risk of developing a rational outlook on life, with consequent withdrawal symptoms upon divestment of a mindset which she would have been much better off without in the first place.

My third objection is to the superfluity of faith as a source of comfort. How do atheists deal with adversity, such as bereavement, job loss, or terminal illness of a loved one? We deal with these things like rational adults, sharing our human grief with other humans who are close to us, and doing the same for them in return. I have no time for the popular excuse that some people have no-one to go to. There are seven billion of us on this planet, and if someone has no-one to go to, they need to look just a little harder beyond the end of their nose.

"I respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs."
-Johann Hari

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-H. L. Mencken

Free Speech Rules OK!

"He's a free speech martyr," sneered my close relative across the table. He said it in the same way he might have said 'flat-earther' or 'water diviner'. We were discussing David Irving's imprisonment in Austria, for planning to make a speech questioning the historicity of the holocaust.

I do not agree with David Irving, and I believe that the holocaust did happen. However, I was recently engaged in an email debate by a former colleague, who asserted that the evidence for the mass murder of six million people is extremely thin. I was quite indignant at first; unable to comprehend how an educated, well-read, former headteacher could earnestly make such a bold and ridiculous claim. I spent some time surfing relevant websites on both sides of the debate. I learned a great deal. Assumptions which I'd previously regarded as historical facts suddenly appeared differently. The points made by holocaust deniers deserved to be taken seriously, and rebutted with eloquent, corroborated clarity. I had previously carried a vague mental picture of fields full of buried bodies discovered by the Allies as they liberated Europe. This never happened, and there was much speculation in the immediate aftermath of the war regarding the whereabouts of the millions of murder victims. I must reiterate that I am not a holocaust denier, and my former colleague and I emerged from our robust yet civilized debate, both convinced that the holocaust is indeed reliable historical fact. However, exposure to counter-arguments gave me cause to unearth relevant evidence and to learn much of which I had been unaware.

That, I think, is a powerful argument in favour of free speech. Let the nutcases state their views, and let them give us pause. Let them question our comfortable, long-held prejudices. Let them set us surfing and clicking, reading and thinking. Let them impel us to examine critically and thoroughly that which we believe simply because we have been told repeatedly that it is true. Rigorously tested by healthy scepticism, history is reinforced and we gain a clearer, truer picture of what really happened. By simply assuming and never doubting, we become complacent, and find it difficult to expound the basis of our standpoint.

Making scepticism illegal is a very dangerous game indeed. It grants unwarranted respectability to the nutbar views of the deranged extremist. It diminishes truth, suggesting that truth cannot stand up for itself and needs the protection of law. It makes nauseating trash-speak like "free speech martyr" admissible at the dinner table. It creates a climate in which free speech martyrs can exist, and flourish. It is a myopic, backward step.

I am soon to read Nick Cohen's new book on censorship, You Can't Read This Book. I'm stimulated by commentaries I've read on the book, including a blog post published today by the author himself. However, I can't help tending slightly toward the stance of Devil's Advocate when reading his assertion that successful censorship must, by definition, go unreported and unrecorded. Nay, the censors who silenced David Irving advanced their cause, promulgating after-dinner air pollution of the type described above. Visibly successful censorship brings out the ovine liberal in otherwise intelligent adults. Complicity of sovereign governments in the suppression of scepticism buttresses people's innately perverse desire to gainsay the obvious and thereby score points in conversation. Legally condoned censorship changes the landscape subtly, and makes all censorship that bit more acceptable; that bit harder to argue against. Thus creeps the pernicious, contagious, darker side of the zeitgeist.