{ Category Archives }
Dan Savage is a wonder! He makes the most persuasive case I’ve seen/heard for gay adoption, coming at it from a number of different perspectives, including an evolutionary perspective. He does it calmly, clearly, and lovingly. If I had a child I was, for whatever reason, unable to raise, I can think of no more fortunate fate for that child than to be adopted by Dan and his partner. Watch, listen, learn.
Winter Solstice, that is. When it’s cold, and the days are short and grey, and any light presents itself as promise. Generosity enlightens, and for those of us who are puzzled and saddened by the dominance of exclusionist religious organizations in the press of charities soliciting our gifts, the list compiled by Techskeptic will be helpful. It’s titled “Atheist Charities”, but Techskeptic explains, “I am considering charities that do not promote a specific religion to be an atheist charity.” 
So The American Red Cross is on the list, as well as Doctors Without Borders, The Southern Poverty Law Center, Oxfam International, and a lot of other organizations whose work we read about in news accounts through the year but are liable to forget in this giving time. There are a few on the list that I’d known about but forgotten, like the Seva Foundation, and still others, like Population Connection and Mercy Corps, of which I’d never heard but which look to be doing really good work.
If you’re inclined to be generous at this time in the year when things are dark and this time in our history when troubles abound, this is a list that can stimulate that inclination and give it something worthwhile to incline toward.
Thanks to Pharyngula for the link.
Harry’s blog is the Ragged Trousered Philosopher, and I’d not seen it until today. “A Division by Zero“, one of the blogs comprising Planet Atheism, pointed me to Harry’s tale:
I met god the other day.
I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did you know it was god?
Well, I’ll explain as we go along, but basically he convinced me by having all, and I do mean ALL, the answers. Every question I flung at him he batted back with a plausible and satisfactory answer. In the end, it was easier to accept that he was god than otherwise.
Which is odd, because I’m still an atheist and we even agree on that!
It all started on the 8.20 back from Paddington…
The conversation between Harry and God, who enters the car in the form of a 30-year-old white guy in jeans and a tee shirt, takes a number of totally unexpected turns. It’s moving, and funny, and wise, and enormously thought-provoking. I encourage you to read it.
Our friend David Shenk has a new blog which will feed into the book he’s writing on genius. The blog is good; I think David has found a subject that engages his own genius with more immediacy than the subjects of his previous books, on chess, and Alzheimer’s Disease, and information overload. Those were good, but they were workmanlike good; I think this one is likely to turn out a little quirkier and more personal.
David’s current post is on IQ; he does a cogent and well-deserved smackdown of Charles Murray’s skanky recent WSJ op-ed, in which Murray basically suggests that we might as well write off stupid kids.
IQ is weird. There’s a lot of data, but I have the uncomfortable feeling that it may not have been collected on the right populations, and that the Intelligence Quotient, despite its obvious success at correlating whatever it is that its instruments measure with various metrics of success in life, may not, in fact, measure anything particularly significant or maybe even real.
My IQ was measured when I was a kid in grammar school; my parents were probably interested in figuring out what to do about my underachievement in school (or perhaps, as Joan points out, determining whether I was, in fact, an underachiever or just a stupid kid.) I don’t know what it was, except that it was high enough to place me solidly in the underachiever category. Joan doesn’t think her IQ was ever measured. If Alex and Kate had their IQs measured somewhere along the way, nobody told us, or we didn’t think it important enough to note or remember.
I have two problems with IQ. First, I think that most people are a lot smarter than their IQ scores would indicate; my experience with people at the Brew House, for example, convinces me that most of them are smarter than they would appear to be on an IQ test, and that they’re smarter than their teachers and parents told them they are, and they’re smarter than they think they are. I’m not sure what I mean by smart, but it has a lot to do with being articulate, imaginative, original, and more than a little clever.
My second problem with IQ is that I believe that the data on how IQ can change with time is probably a lot more suspect than other data describing the IQ story. I know that I’m a lot smarter now than I was back when I was determined to be something other than a stupid kid, and if my IQ score failed to measure that increase in smartness, then it couldn’t be measuring anything very important. And it’s not just increases in smarts. A lot of the kids I went to high school with had IQs as high or higher than mine; that’s the kind of school it was. But a striking number of them, on the evidence of our 50th reunion, have become pretty stupid in the years since then. Again, that’s based on their lack of imagination, curiosity, original thinking, and ability to penetrate the kind of vapid rhetoric they get from their political leaders.
So, I guess what I’m saying is that IQ, whatever it is, is different from smart, whatever that is. And smart is more important.
The science blog “Mixing Memory” has a story about a clever experiment designed to test the extent to which fundamentalist Christian beliefs help believers deal with angst. (Chris, the proprietor of “Mixing Memory”,is interested in Terror Management Theory, which asserts, among other things, that “in order to avoid the fear that comes with thoughts of our own mortality, we erect and cling to belief and value systems.”)
In this particular study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Mark Friedman and Steven Rholes measured a number of things about their subjects’ belief systems, and they assigned each subject to one of two categories: Low Fundamentalists and High Fundamentalists. They then divided the subjects into groups and had them read several texts, some from the Bible and some, as controls, from texts that had nothing to do with religion. The reading for two of the groups was designed specifically to demonstrate inconsistencies in the Gospels, thus challenging the subjects’ fundamentalist beliefs. Finally, all subjects were presented with a task in which they were asked to complete words for which they were just given a couple of letters (imagine Jeopardy without the clues). Some of those word stems could be completed by words that were related to death.
Those subjects who were in the High Fundamentalist category and whose faith in biblical inerrancy had been shaken by the gospel inconsistencies that were made salient for them in the readings were much more likely to complete the word stems with death-related words than subjects in other groups. Chris draws the (unsurprising) conclusion that “religious beliefs, for fundamentalists at least, serve to minimize existential anxiety”, and he goes on to point out how the study’s results indicate problems ahead for those who would teach evolutionary theory, or, indeed, any good science that threatens fundamentalist belief.
I would draw a slightly different conclusion from the study. I believe that many of us are engaging in a more directly challenging discussion with our religious colleagues than we used to engage in, back in the days before the fundamentalists themselves began to ratchet up the heat on such discussion. What studies like this one tell us is that we must make an effort, without backing down on our insistence that fundamentalist beliefs are irrational and delusional, to help those whose faith we challenge to see that it’s possible to live perfectly well without such delusional thinking – that they can, even without maintaining faith in impossible things, still be good people and lead good lives, rich in happiness and friendship; that they do not need to fear death, which comes to all; that they can, by exercising their rationality and keeping their minds open, develop the intellectual and emotional strength to face even very painful experiences and very uncertain outcomes without becoming paralyzed by terror or surrendering to morbid thinking. In other words, when we are challenging another’s deeply held faith, it is important to maintain our compassion, and to focus more on what rationality adds to ones life and not so exclusively on what it takes away.
I have been reading three books recently that take just that approach – Stephen Batchelor’s “Buddhism Without Beliefs”, Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation”, and Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”. All three are uncompromising in their rationality and direct and powerful in the challenge they present to delusional thinking. But all understand, clearly and compassionately, the emotional significance of belief to the believers, and all three authors are positive in demonstrating ways of thinking about the world that are emotionally rewarding and intellectually bracing.
I will have reviews of the three books in the coming days.
Wesley Elsberry: I’m a Christian believer, a member of the United Methodist church. I think that the assertion that one must give up belief if one accepts the findings of evolutionary biology is a misguided attack on the faith that I and many others hold. Certainly the "intelligent design" advocates have advanced this notion, saying that "intelligent design" is no friend of theistic evolution. If one looks at the transcripts of the 2005 Kansas board of education hearings with their antievolution advocates, one will see this reflected in particularly virulent form.
There you can see various "experts" opining that people like me simply have not given this matter due consideration. This is what "separation of church and state" is all about, though. The First Amendment means that they don’t have the legal authority to put their particular theology, which is hostile to mine and millions of other Christians, into the public school classrooms. If they want to preach a sermon on how awful they find the faith of myself and others like me, they have to do it on their own dime and without appropriating the authority of school teachers to do it.
Last week’s issue of The New Yorker had a fine article on Philip Pullman, whose superb trilogy, His Dark Materials, makes Narnia and Harry Potter look like, well, kids’ books by comparison. The article calls the trilogy “the first fantasy series founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment rather than upon tribal and mythic yearnings for kings, gods, and supermen”. A thrilling plotline, inventively developed, complex and sympathetic characters, and a prose style that refuses to condescend to its adolescent audience all combine to make Pullman’s books a rich reading experience. And it’s an experience that’s carefully tailored to improve the moral education of its readers.
The New Yorker article covered a speech that Pullman made at the University of East Anglia on the subject of “Religion and Education”. Pullman’s speech contrasted morality as it’s preached by theistic religion—morality based on fear, focussed on sexuality, obsessed by God—with the lessons in behavior that are transmitted through stories with “morals”—lessons about acting decently, thoughtfully, independently, with kindness and courage.
In his speech, Pullman contended that the literary School of Morals is inherently ambiguous, dynamic, and democratic: a “conversation.” Opposed to this ideal is “theocracy,” which he defined as encompassing everything from Khomeini’s Iran to explicitly atheistic states such as Stalin’s Soviet Union. He listed some characteristics of such states—among them, “a scripture whose word is inerrant,” a priesthood whose authority “tends to concentrate in the hands of elderly men,” and ‚”a secret police force with the powers of an Inquisition.” Theocracies, he said, demonstrate “the tendency of human beings to gather power to themselves in the name of something that may not be questioned.”
This impulse toward theocracy, he announced at the end of his speech, “will defeat the School of Morals in the end.” He sounded oddly cheerful making this prediction; in his books, Pullman enjoys striking a tone of melancholy resolve. He continued, “But that doesn’t mean we should give up and surrender. . . . I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference. . . . We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding. We should act as if life were going to win. . . . That’s what I think they do, in the School of Morals.”
Consider the marks of a theocracy as Pullman identifies them. And then consider the behavior of the anointed leader of our country and the elderly men who surround and advise him. His Dark Materials ends with a difficult journey through a cold dark land, and an achingly sorrowful sacrifice. Are we prepared to make such a sacrifice to save our enlightenment values from the theocracy that threatens to destroy them?
As you might expect, PZ Myers provides a cogent, readable, and marvelously well-informed review of Judge Jones’ decision. The whole decision is available in PDF format; here’s the paragraph that brought hope to my heart:To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
OK, here’s what you need to do:
Wasn’t that worth it?
The New York Times reports that Cody Young, an evangelical Christian who attends a religious high school in Southern California, has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the University of California, charging that they practice “viewpoint discrimination” and that their admissions standards violate the free speech and religious rights of evangelical Christians because they refuse to certify some of the Christian school’s courses on literature, history, social studies and science.
The university system’s reasons for refusing to certify those particular courses is that the textbooks used in the courses and the curriculums themselves have a specifically Christian viewpoint. Here’s a sample:
In the last year, the board has rejected courses like Christianity’s Influence in American History, Special Provenance: Christianity and the American Republic, Christianity and Morality in American Literature and a biology course using textbooks from the Bob Jones University Press and A Beka Book, conservative Christian publishers.
The officials rejected the science courses because the curriculum differed from “empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community,” the suit said. Calvary was told to submit a secular curriculum instead. Courses in other subjects were rejected because they were called too narrow or biased.
What interests me most about the suit is an argument made by Robert Tyler, a lawyer for Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, CA, where Cody Young is a senior: “What really lights the fire here is when you look at courses the U.C. has approved from other schools. In the titles alone, you can see the discrimination against us.” And he pointed out that the university has approved courses on Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and gender and counterculture’s effects on literature.
I’m in favor of teaching courses on all those things, and on Christianity as well, at all levels. But I think that courses in religion must be taught in the same spirit of rationality and open inquiry as are courses in other subjects, like history, sociology, and science. Here’s an illuminating quote from John Dewey, probably the most profound thinker about education that this country has produced:
It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The “religious” would be the last to be willing that either the history or the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit.
So let’s accept a course on Islam, as long as that course permits teacher and student to introduce viewpoints questioning the Prophet’s sanity or his womanizing; let the course on Christianity use materials from the Jesus Seminar, and require the students to read passages from Bertrand Russell (and from Dewey himself) that question the rationality, morality, and historical truth of Christian beliefs. Let the universities certifying those courses for their admissions policy focus, not on the subject matter, but on the pedagogy, and accept only those courses that exemplify what Dewey calls the “method of free inquiry” that must characterize all honest search for truth.
