Religion's Twelve Deadly Sins

Alternet's Valerie Tarico has written an insightful piece about 12-concepts, integral to organized religions, that "promote conflict, cruelty, suffering and death rather than love and peace."

First up is the concept of "chosen people" - that separates believers from non-believers, the believers alone linked to God.   Then there's the companion concept of "heretics."  Again, non-believers.  Call for the headsman!

Religions have also introduced us to the notion of Holy War.  Gott Mit Uns, that sort of thing.  When Muslims do it we call it Jihad.  When we do it, it's just getting rid of Satan.  Man has been doing it for thousands of years and, it seems, it never gets old.

Then there's "blasphemy" - the crime of saying things that offend religious doctrine.  The Bible has a cure for that - death.

Religions have also introduced us to the notion of "glorified suffering" and who doesn't love a martyr who suffers agony and death in the name of God.  The Catholic church loves them, makes them saints.  Islam goes a step further and provides them with explosive vests.

"Genital mutilation."  Alright, let's get real - circumcision.  No illustration required.

"Blood sacrifice."  It's more than killing goats.

Then there's the trump card, the ace in the hole, "Hell."  It's an awful place.  It's forever and ever.  And it's where you go if you don't do what the nice man at the front of the church tells you to do.  The nice thing is, it never gets old.  We do and, as we draw ever nearer to our final exit, Hell looms ever larger.

Religions that go the reincarnation route fall back on "Karma."  Stay in line or else you'll pay for it in the next life when you return as a toilet seat.

If life on Earth is brutal and nasty, don't fret, there's always the afterlife.  That's your payoff, "Eternal Life."  Now, don't forget to tithe and, remember, the guy with the keys to Heaven, he's counting.

"Male Ownership of Female Fertility."  I'll let you get this directly from Val:
"The notion of women as brood mares or children as assets likely didn’t originate with religion, but the idea that women were created for this purpose, that if a woman should die of childbearing “she was made to do it,” most certainly did. Traditional religions variously assert that men have a god-ordained right to give women in marriage, take them in war, exclude them from heaven, and kill them if the origins of their offspring can’t be assured. Hence Catholicism’s maniacal obsession with the virginity of Mary and female martyrs."

And last, but by no means least, "Bibliolatry."  This is book worship so integral to all modern religions.  It binds the faithful to notions of what is and isn't, right and wrong, as envisioned way back in ancient times when writing was discovered.  We know that the apostles didn't write their chapters of the New Testament.  Somebody else did.  But, hey, it's in writing so it's magical, divine.

It's particularly prevalent in religious fundamentalism whether Islamic, Judaic or Christian.  There are plenty of Christian fundamentalists who hold a fierce belief in Biblical Inerrancy.  No matter how contradictory, no matter how vague or at odds with reality, it's the Word of God and that's all there is to it.

I urge you to read the entire article here.

Analytical Thinking Curbs Religious Conviction

Duh, really?  We now have a scientific study, courtesy of UBC, that shows analytical thinking can be really bad for clinging to religious faith.

The psychology report, published today in the prestigious journal Science, reveals that religious belief drops after subjects perform analytical tasks or are exposed to Rodin's sculpture, The Thinker.

However, UBC social psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan insist they are not debunking religion or promoting atheism. Instead, they are trying to figure out the psychological origins of spirituality.

The dynamic UBC research duo, who have earned international reputations for their groundbreaking studies into religion in the past six years, maintain all humans use two valuable types of thinking - intuitive and analytical.

How much you rely on one kind of thinking over another generally determines how religious you are. People who are highly intuitive tend to be more religious.

Intuitive thinking helps people recognize the difference between the body and the mind, imagine life after death and discern purposes in the universe, said Gervais, lead author of the Science article, titled "Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief."

And intuitive thinking helps people recognize non-existent crime waves that, in turn, leads to the development of  PPF disorder, also known as Punishment & Prison Fetish.

"...Gervais cited the Danish existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who encouraged people to use their rational minds in shaping their spiritual convictions.

Kierkegaard also suggested, in the midst of analytical thinking, people often need to take "a leap of faith" to experience the universe's deeper transcendent mysteries.

Most people don't recognize there is a key difference between the "irrational" and the "non-rational," Kierkegaard taught.

The "irrational" describes that which is illogical and unreasonable. The "non-rational," on the other hand, refers to intuition; the sphere of the imagination, emotions and the arts.

We know from his utter lack of vision that Harper isn't burdened by an excess of "non-rational" intuition.   No, his intuition falls squarely into the "irrational" category.

Can't Find a God? Don't Worry, You're Just Fine

Non-believers are really nice people.   In fact, studies are finding that secularists are often better educated, more tolerant and more knowledgeable about God than supposed true believers.  This, according to Spiegel Online.


"Churches in the US are losing up to 1 million members every year. In Europe, secularization has advanced even further. The number of non-religious people, those who do not believe in God or any higher power, has reached approximately 40 percent in France and about 27 percent in Germany. 

... So what do these increasing numbers of non-believers believe in, if not God? Sociologist Phil Zuckerman, who hopes to start a secular studies major at California's Pitzer College, says that secularists tend to be more ethical than religious people. On average, they are more commonly opposed to the death penalty, war and discrimination. And they also have fewer objections to foreigners, homosexuals, oral sex and hashish.

The most surprising insight revealed by the new wave of secular research so far is that atheists know more about the God they don't believe in than the believers themselves. This is the conclusion suggested by a 2010 Pew Research Center survey of US citizens. Even when the higher education levels of the unreligious were factored out, they proved to be better informed in matters of faith, followed by Jewish and Mormon believers. 

 ...Boston University's Catherine Caldwell-Harris is researching the differences between the secular and religious minds. "Humans have two cognitive styles," the psychologist says. "One type finds deeper meaning in everything; even bad weather can be framed as fate. The other type is neurologically predisposed to be skeptical, and they don't put much weight in beliefs and agency detection."

Caldwell-Harris is currently testing her hypothesis through simple experiments. Test subjects watch a film in which triangles move about. One group experiences the film as a humanized drama, in which the larger triangles are attacking the smaller ones. The other group describes the scene mechanically, simply stating the manner in which the geometric shapes are moving. Those who do not anthropomorphize the triangles, she suspects, are unlikely to ascribe much importance to beliefs. 

"There have always been two cognitive comfort zones," she says, "but skeptics used to keep quiet in order to stay out of trouble."

Only a small portion of secularists are as radical as the "strong atheists" championed by British evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins. The majority are more likely to be indifferent to religion or mildly agnostic, according to Kosmin's analysis. There are also secular humanists, free thinkers and many other factions. "One problem of atheism research is that we simply can't agree on a unified terminology," notes [religious market researcher Barry] Kosmin. "Every researcher thinks he is Linnaeus and invents his own labels."

Somehow I don't think many of my fellow secularists will find any of this particularly surprising.  We grasp that religion, as prescribed by church hierarchies, often promotes intolerance and practices that seem astonishingly unethical to secularists.  If there is a God it must be driving her crazy to realize that many of the really nice people aren't filling the pews.

When It Comes to Religion, Americans Don't Want to Know

Americans love their religion.  The United States is one of the most religious countries in what we used to call Christendom.   But it seems that Americans may love religion just so long as they don't have to learn about it.  From The New York Times:

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.


On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.


Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age
and racial differences.

Are Religious Fundamentalists Inherently Bigoted?

Researchers from Duke, USC and Augsburg College have published a study in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review that finds the more tightly fundamentalist a person is, the greater the likelihood that person is racist. From the online journal, Miller-McCune.com:

In a new study drawing on nearly a half century of data, a team of researchers report that religious adherents in the United States — especially fundamentalist Christians — are more inclined than agnostics to harbor racist attitudes toward blacks and other minorities.

This “religion-racism paradox,” as University of Southern California social psychologist Wendy Wood explains it, is deeply embedded in organized religion which, by its very nature, encourages people to accept one fundamental belief system as superior to all others. The required value judgment creates a kind of us-versus-them conflict, in which members of a religious group develop ethnocentric attitudes toward anyone perceived as different. The study, “Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic Review of Religious Racism,” appeared in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.

“Religion creates a very strong sense of a moral right and wrong within the group,” says Wood. “When you do that, members of the group will be more likely to derogate anyone who is not part of it.” And because religion in America is practiced largely along segregated lines (just 12 percent of U.S. congregations report even a moderate level of diversity, one study shows) that derogation, and the sense of superiority that drives such diminishment of others, can extend beyond religious differences to race, class and ethnicity.

Compounding the effect, the study’s authors explain, are similarities in the moral makeup of people drawn to religion and of people who exhibit racist attitudes and behavior. Previous studies have shown that religious adherents are more likely than agnostics and atheists to rate conservative “life values” as the most important principles underlying their belief systems.

On God and Spirituality

I just finished viewing a panel featuring Hitchens and Dawkins discussing why there is no God and what should be done to spread the word. Very interesting, intensely intellectual discussion.

In case you haven't noticed, their message is spreading. A lot of people are going down the path to hard atheism.

Since you asked, I'll tell you what I think. I don't know, I really don't.

Listening to the views expressed by these leading atheists I was struck by one fatal flaw that has plagued mankind since the beginning of civilization - the firm belief that we're at the centre of everything. It's a powerful urge, given that the religious and the atheists both lapse into it at every turn.

Remember when we had to believe that the planets, including our sun, rotated around the earth? We just had to be the centre of everything. Most of the monotheistic faiths have an idea of their God looking just like - why, me! Oh, c'mon Buddha sure does.

What if we're really way too dumb to get it? We don't expect humans in a vegetative state to be able to intellectualize very much. But what if, in the greater scheme of things, our greatest minds are just a tiny notch above that? What if we're all severely mentally challenged on some galactic scale and are just too damn dumb to know it?

We're still puzzling a lot of things out. Get into quantum physics and the string theory and some of the experts predict there are eleven dimensions, seven more than the mere four that we humans are capable of recognizing. If they're right, you inevitably have to ask what's behind Doors 5 through 11, eh?

We've learned so much over the past century and we're still just scratching the surface of the body of universal knowledge. So, my question is, what's the rush? Do we really have some, make that any legitimate need to resolve this God v. no god question now? Maybe we should just put it all on the back burner for another millennium or so until we get answers to all those questions that we're just now discovering that we didn't even know existed a decade ago and that aren't mentioned anywhere in anyone's holy book.

Now we've used religion as a crutch to try to deal with some of the great, unanswerable questions that have plagued man since he first looked up at the starry night sky. Maybe we were taking unfair advantage of religion, sort of like the dad who says "because" when the kid asks "why." But that would just be another typical human failure, not proof that there is no God.

Religion is curious. Everybody belongs to the right one and all the others are wrong. Look at Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We all share the same, Old Testament God, we just use different prophets to persecute the innocent. Neat trick, eh?

So I think that, for now, I'm going to remain firmly agnostic. But I'm always willing to change my vote just as soon as you can tell me where it all began, I mean really began, and what's behind those seven doors.

And a very merry Christmas to you all.

Kofi Annan - Embrace Our Differences

"...an embrace of differences—in opinion, in culture, in belief, in way of life—has long been a driving force of human progress.

"During Europe’s Dark Ages, that was how the Iberian peninsula flourished, through the interaction of Muslim, Christian and Jewish traditions. Later, the Ottoman empire prospered not only because of its armies, but because it was an empire of ideas, in which Muslim art and technology were enriched by Jewish and Christian contributions.

"Some centuries later, our own globalized era is regrettably marked by rising intolerance, extremism and violence. Closer proximity and improved communications have often led not to mutual understanding and friendship but to tension and mutual mistrust. Many people, particularly in the developing world, have come to fear the global village as a cultural onslaught and an economic drain on their way of life. Globalization threatens their values as well as their wallets.

"The terror attacks of 9/11, war and turmoil in the Middle East, ill-considered words and drawings have all helped to reinforce this perception, and have inflamed tensions between different peoples and cultures. They have especially strained relations between followers of the three great monotheistic faiths.

"Demonization of the “other” has proved the path of least resistance, although healthy introspection would better serve us all. In the 21st century we remain hostage to our sense of grievance and to our feelings of entitlement. Our narratives have become our prison. Many people throughout the world, particularly Muslims, see the West as a threat to their beliefs and values, their economic interests and their political aspirations. Evidence to the contrary is just disregarded or rejected as incredible. Many in the West dismiss Islam as a religion of extremism and violence, despite a history of relations in which commerce, cooperation and cultural exchange have played at least as important a part as conflict. It is vital that we overcome these resentments. We should start by reaffirming, and demonstrating, that the problem is not the Qur’an, not the Torah, nor the Bible. The problem is never the faith; it is the faithful and how they behave towards each other."