When it comes to religion, I’m more interested in scientific and philosophical questions — Does God exist? Can science say anything about the supernatural? — than in sociological or political ones — Is religion good and or evil?, etc. So there was not much temptation to wade in on Pope Benedict’s recent troubles, or the wider issue of sex scandals in the Catholic Church.
Now, happily, that temptation has dipped to zero, since Phil Plait has done such a good job. Read the whole thing, as they say. Roughly, Phil notes that the Pope seems to be responsible for some very bad things; that he should be brought to justice for any wrong-doings; that there is some relevance to concerns of the skeptical community, insofar as the Church invokes supernatural explanations; but finally, that the strategy should not be simply one of proclaiming superiority and tarring religion as evil and demanding heads on plates. Catholics and other believers, whether we disagree with them or not, are human beings who will understandably be upset and troubled at the recent news. We don’t help to convert them to atheism or naturalism or skepticism by shoving the shortcomings of their leaders in their faces in the midst of a crisis; reason and rational discourse should be more our style. It’s a nuanced argument, which means it’s guaranteed to be misunderstood and caricatured, since even God can’t control the natural impulses of the internet.
Let’s be clear: I want religion to vanish. I think that religious beliefs are wrong, and that the world would be a better place if everyone accepted the real world for what it is. And I believe that many of the actions of the Church when it comes to pedophilia certainly deserve the label “evil,” whatever one might think of the people who perpetrated them.
So the question is, how to bring about the rationalist utopia in which people’s actions are based on reason and reflection rather than faith and hierarchy? I agree with Phil’s answers, as I’ve argued in other contexts. One of the primary tenets of a rationalist philosophy should be that we should be especially skeptical about claims that we want to be true. Our personal preferences don’t have any effect on the truth, so we need to guard against confirmation bias and lazy acceptance of ideas that make us happy. One great example is the idea that we’re going to make the world a better and more rational place by telling everyone how much smarter we are than everyone else, and how evil and stupid our enemies are. The Pope’s recent actions, it seems clear, are some combination of evil and stupid. But now is just not the time for patting ourselves on the back. A lot of people have been deeply hurt, directly or indirectly, and we should be able to show just a modicum of restraint. Not giving up or keeping quiet, but picking our spots. After all, we don’t have to win by being obnoxious — we can win by being right.
This is not the Church vs. the Atheists. I think we should draw stronger lines between being a deist and being a theist. Any scientist who buys into any degree of the anthropic principal is leaving room for a possible deity to exist and have invoked our parochial laws of physics.
That in no way suggests that the human-created precepts of obsolete religions (i.e. the Catholic Church) have any relevance or utility. But while hiding behind the church doesn’t exonerate the pope from prosecution for criminal activity, neither does it obviate the possibility of a god.
Couldn’t we set a good example by cleaning up secular power structures that allow the same abuses as have happened in the Church. For example (since ther eare a lot of academics here), cleaning up university disciplinary committees so that they are unable to cover up campus sexual assaults under the guise of sparing victims the trauma of dealing with the police?
If there is not God, then the complex interaction of information control and power asymmetry should produce similar exploitable loopholes in both secular and religious institutions, so skeptical academics ought to be able to lead by example by cleaning their own houses.
As far as my beliefs go, I believe there are conscious beings with much greater size, energy, and ability than the human being (we are not the penultimate embodiment of thought, or love, or ego, soul, etc.), and if one might characterize the grand mystery that is the flower of our universe as God, then yeah, I believe in God. I do not believe Jesus Christ was God any more than I believe myself (a part of) God, nor do I believe any more modern messiah, from Muhammad to B’Hai u’ Allah to Joseph Smith to George Lucas and Obi Wan Kenobi are – because if anything, God is at heart a dualist (and hence, a trio, tetrad on to infinite splits).
That being said, there are some worthwhile moral perspectives in specific religious texts, from parts in the Bible to the I Ching, and others. I believe humanity has taken a good idea, turned it into a belief (like Kevin Smith relates in ‘Dogma’), and in doing so, perverted it into nonsense. Capitalism now suffers the same fate, and it is imperative we start calling a spade a spade! (so no rose by any other name would smell as sweet, you effing Bard!) To this point I agree with Sean that religion confuses the issue at hand.
People are emotionally fragile – we all live in a state of fear – and organizations from the media to the Republicans and Democrats, Catholics, Terrorists, etc., that promulgate fear – should be killed. We should recognize the things that are harming the system of life that exists on this planet, and remove them. For example, Capitalism. It empowers greed (which is evil and bad – no matter how much the wealthy cherish it – sorry folks, you have been infected with an evil virus), and greed kills. Capitalism takes a system of merit exchange, and being unregulated Capitalism here in the West, allows criminals and thieves, frauds and pimps and whores, to usurp the better things in life, which are shared. This is where our selfish (Darwinian?) nature is at odds with goodness. It’s the reason for our existence. We are the drama of the conflict between good and evil, and right now, evil is winning. We need Luke and the science of metaphysics (which I believe exists) to thwart all this bad energy stinking up the joint. The energies are subtle and in the noise floor (sorry to all you non-techies – knowledge is power is truth is good), and so we have yet to find it. When we do, we will be able to manipulate it, as we do other very small things like cells and DNA and microchips and lasers.
So our religion should be science, we seeks truth and knowledge, to better the living system. Sometimes we end up with such power that when controlled by greed-crazied, power-hungry madmen (Sarah Palin?), they become a tool for evil. But it is the person that pulls the trigger; blows up their diapers or shoes; hurts the innocent, and these people are just plain bad. This includes the Wall Street gang, the Banker gang, and the DC gang. So these folks are either with us (and Bill Maher), or ‘agin’ us’ (Glenn Beck, Rush and Sarah); they are either good folk (John Robbins, Jimmy Carter, John Stewart, Maher and Ratigan and the left, and pretty much most of those who don’t have a pot to piss in), or they are the lusting, greedy, fat, “I can’t get enough of it” sons of bitches who have stolen our money and should go to jail.
Barack, you better be listening. And you better watch which side of the line you are dancing on – we know what you are up against, and we’re with you when you fight for us. But right now, it looks awfully lot like you have been bought off and are just patronizing us. That would be a very bad thing to do. The stakes are too high. The pressures are coming to a head, and our history shows us which way the pattern tends to. Now it’s up to YOU. Which side are you on? Now live that, fight for it, and make the world a better place – not just for YOU, but for US. We’re a family – a system – a planet – a universe – a God.
When speaking w/ a religious person, you have to remember that you are speaking to a delusional person who firmly believes that they are perfectly correct and that YOU are the “lost soul”. In fact, they think it’s THEIR Obligation Under God to get YOU to “see the light” and accept Jesus Christ into your heart as Your Personal Savior.
Just how do you get a delusional person to wake up and shake off their delusion?
I knew a man in his 50s who had a near-death experience, brought on by disease. His heart stopped. Once recovered, he stopped going to church. Turns out that when he was “dead” he had no feelings of well-being, saw no fields of ambrosia and had no dead relatives welcoming him “into the light”. He learned that when you die, your dead.
Eliminate the “eternal reward” and the “life after death” and I submit you won’t have any Christians left.
Personal Jesus
“One of the primary tenets of a rationalist philosophy should be that we should be especially skeptical about claims that we want to be true. Our personal preferences don’t have any effect on the truth, so we need to guard against confirmation bias and lazy acceptance of ideas that make us happy.”
Quite so. Both naturalists and anti-naturalists should agree that our modes of cognition should, as much as possible, insulate factual claims from the influence of bias, wishful thinking, and other motivational contaminants. If they do not, then we’re at risk of projecting our human hopes and categories onto the world instead of grasping its true nature. Call this the insulation requirement. Meeting this requirement is incumbent on any worldview that purports to represent reality objectively, and thus *applies equally* to naturalism and all varieties of anti-naturalism – theism, supernaturalism, paranormalism, New Age worldviews, etc. The inescapable demand of any claim to objectivity is that we do our level best to separate how we wish things would be from how they actually are.
http://www.naturalism.org/Toogoodtobetrue.htm
Whoa, #3! Put the caps back on the Sharpies and open the windows!
“Let’s be clear: I want religion to vanish. I think that religious beliefs are wrong, and that the world would be a better place if everyone accepted the real world for what it is…So the question is, how to bring about the rationalist utopia in which people’s actions are based on reason and reflection rather than faith and hierarchy?”
Except, of course, no human being lives without illusion and irrational thought, as you have so deftly demonstrated…
No, I’m not criticizing the outsized description, but the idea that an ideal person could possibly run on pure rationality. Our emotions exist for the same reasons that myth exist: we cannot possibly know everything (much less what’s around the next corner), so our stereotypes and emotions are our best answer to an uncertain world.
Also…
I find it ironic to herald oneself as a rationalist while saying the most emotional, self-protecting thing I can imagine: making an errant connection between an individual (the pope) and a group of people (all religious people?) because, really, you just irrationally don’t like them. And why do you have to convert them to preserve the world? Isn’t that obviously just you’re own, equally evil religion? I mean, I hope you know people who are able to read between the lines.
As is all too common, Sean has done a better of promoting Phil Plaits’ views than the BA himself. Well done and I couldn’t agree with you more.
To quote Steven Weinberg: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. “
One more quote from Steven Weinberg to counter what I see as some degree of appeasement
being suggested by the last sentence of the blog–
“There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. … I respect their views and I understand their motives, and I don’t condemn them, but I’m not having it. To me, the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
* Closing statements of presentation at w:Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival, 2006-11-05
Personally, I think we should be as obnoxious as hell.
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The very notion of cutting the church some slack is to grant it a legitimacy where, I think, none exists. Would you argue the same way if this church were a Satanic cult, believers in Greek gods, followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, worshipers of the easter bunny? This matter is not about being nice to either the pedarists themselves or the organization that, seemingly, went out of it way to hide them away. This matter is about young boys, particularly, who are being savaged and raped by those who claim to be their protectors. No one – no matter what part of society from which they come – would be protected from this behavior, so why should we go soft on those who hide behind the veil of a truly silly belief system?
Crimes have been done. For decades. To the most innocent of our kind. And no quarter should be given. None.
Brad
I think that you all sound a bit defensive. If there is nothing to religion, then why are you fighting it so hard? I am not taking either side -I am simply wondering. I believe that a person who has truly found peace with their beliefs has no need to bash any one else’s beliefs. That is not the way to find truth either. Besides, I believe as Gandhi did that there is small bits of truth in every religion and within each person. He said, “I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.” (quoted from Gandhi His Relevance for our Time). I think any person seeking the truth about this world would agree with his statement. Evil things that happen like the situation with the pope are terrible -especially when they come from a “spiritual leader” or someone who at least pretends to be striving for morality.
Also, another thought to ponder… I propose that whatever you believe is a sort of religion. If you are christian then your reality is that God is the Creator and that you have a loving Father in heaven, if you are atheist then your reality is that when you die you return to dust and that this life is all that there is. If you believe in reincarnation then you believe that you are forever working to become better so that you will be blessed in the next life. All of these beliefs are based on what your personal experience has been and your personal interpretation of those experiences. But, the one common theme is that all of them are based on faith. Like Descartes we must strip past everything we have been taught and everything we “know” and ask fundamental questions about who we are and what this world is and maybe even if we exist or not (I’m joking). But, truly what do you know? Really nothing. We were not here when the big bang occurred or whenever/however this world was made. We don’t know how it happened. All we can do is interpret data and look for clues. The same is true of spirituality or of what you believe about the world. One must simply interpret the data. And, I think that no matter how obvious the data seems there is always room for error because quite simply we don’t know it all nor will we ever. Besides if there is a higher being than us why do we think that we could ever completely understand it or put him/she/it in a box or ever be able to define it?
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“If there is nothing to religion, then why are you fighting it so hard?”
Because we’re surrounded by religious people and imagery, because we are marginalized by both political parties who explicitly pander to the religious, because many people equate atheism with immorality, because many of the religious try to destroy science education (e.g., Texas school board), because we’ve had relationships end because the other person couldn’t stand that we were atheists, etc.? (I’m speaking of the US.) Oh, and many of us are educators (professionally and otherwise), and one of our primary goals is to explain reality to people.
“I propose that whatever you believe is a sort of religion.”
Yes, we’ve all heard that before. And you are wrong. The scientific epistemology is fundamentally different from any religion. Yes, we can’t disprove Last Thursdayism (or occasionalism), but that doesn’t make science a religion.
“Besides if there is a higher being than us why do we think that we could ever completely understand it or put him/she/it in a box or ever be able to define it?”
This seems like an odd question to ask atheists, who have never claimed to be able to do such a thing. (We have asked people to explain what difference the presence or absence of a god would make. I’ve seen no real answer.) Please go ask religious people this question.
As a non-Catholic, I ordinarily would not pay any attention to the Catholich Church. Unfortunately, I can’t not pay attention. It opposes legal abortion. It opposes birth control. It threatens to excommunicate or deny communion to politicians who do not do what it wants. It attacks divorce laws (I live in a officially secular Catholic country in Europe). It expects national goverments to pay it money to keep it running. It controls national monuments constructed centuries ago and charges obsecene prices to visit them. It cooperates with dictators (Franco and Salazar, in Spain and Portugal, come to mind as two easy, not so distant, examples). The list goes on.
And then one must add that it protects and facilitates pederasty (rape! let’s call it what it is) and denies the authority of civil law. It is the last thing that is fundamentally the problem with the Catholic Church. It does not respect civil authority.
Such an institution, in this case the oldest and largest continually extant human institution, cannot be ignored.
The law ought to be such that church administrators who knowingly protect known (even convicted) child molesters, are themselves committing a crime. I don’t enter into that these men (they are all men) pretend to be arbiters of morality, constantly haranguing politicians for proposing laws that don’t coincide with their notions of morality, all the while rationalizing and preserving the degenerates their own infrastructure supports. The only rational explanation for what happened in Boston, L.A., Ireland, Poland, etc. has always been that men high up in the Catholic Church’s administrative hierarchy are directly implicated in shielding the perpetrators from civil authority (at the least). Recent documentary evidence has confirmed this explanation.
This has nothing to do with what one things about religion, or even the poorly named Catholic religion. Any large institution actively confronting civil authority is a menace to the public order, much more so when the particular confrontation turns on protection of child rapists. The Catholic church imposes itself on me, so I have no choice but to fight back. It should be denied public funding. It should be denied exemption from taxation. It should be treated as the sectarian, political, anti-democratic, anti-civil institution that it is.
Proof by analogy: religious people have done bad things, so religion is evil. People in the comments here should stop making that mistake.
Also, this from Phil Plaits’ post:
“[…]then again the perpetrators need to be hauled in front of a tribunal, and, if found guilty, they get to find out first hand how child molesters are treated in prison.”
What happens to prisoners in american prisons is a disgrace. Child molesters have rights too, whether you like it or not. Suggesting they are to be beaten and raped is plain evil. So many people state this off hand as if it is normal, it really annoys me.
(I’m pretty sure I agree with the rest of his post, but this bit just got to me)
Some constants =>human doesn’t say much about religion. Some kind of number voodoo?
Human exists, so are the constants? That is just a problem.
Well said 14. The problem here is an organisation has made a concerted effort to shield people from the authorities and cover up their crimes. It is ones duty to cause an outcry against these people and ask for them to be brought to task for their crimes and for aiding and abetting these crimes. It doesn’t matter what religion or lack of religion is held by the persons calling for justice and should not need to be known or discussed. The crimes are made worse by being perpetrated by persons who are the ones who tell us what our morals should be but this is not the reason why they should be brought to justice and it is only trying to obscure the details and point the blame in other directions by bringing the beliefs of the accusers or accused into the argument. Surely there can be no moral person who does not think that the victims here are the children and all the red herrings in the world cannot change that.
If the person calling for justice is an atheist it is irrelevant to the main issue that crimes need to be investigated and whoever has commited them or connived to sweep them under the carpet must answer no matter who they are.
» Sean Carroll:
… that the strategy should not be simply one of proclaiming superiority and tarring religion as evil and demanding heads on plates.
But Sean, how can one conceivably characterise as “demanding heads on plates” etc. the insistence that an institution which we have proof in writing obstructed justice and aided and abetted criminals face legal consequences just like anybody else in a comparable situation? How on earth?
A lot of people have been deeply hurt, directly or indirectly, and we should be able to show just a modicum of restraint.
Yes, a lot of people have been hurt, especially the fucking victims! (Pun very much intended. And I’m disappointed you don’t mention them directly even once.) Why on earth should we show restraint towards the perpetrators of crimes?
Not giving up or keeping quiet, but picking our spots.
Then what exactly are you advocating? This sounds for all the world like, ‘Whatever we do, let’s try not to appear to endorse the shrill Dawkins and PZ.’
What on earth can possibly be wrong with calling for the prosecution of any institution that for decades had an official policy of effectively covering up crimes of their employees?
This blog post is about forwarding the rationalist cause, specifically in opposition to Catholicism. This is not a scientific issue, since rationalists, Catholics, atheists, deists, Protestants, Orthodox, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, agnostics, etc., can all be scientists. So why is this here?
I look at this and the other Discover blogs and wonder if Discover Magazine has a policy of opposing religious positions. Would the editors ever entertain the idea of a science blog, say, if the author happened to be a Jesuit astronomer?
One more quote from Steven Weinberg to counter what I see as some degree of appeasement
being suggested by the last sentence of the blog
No, no, and no. You’re conflating criticism or restraint with appeasement, which is hopeless.
Back to the question: what should we do about the Pope?
I say let the Pope and the Church face the same legal scrutiny as any other person or institution would face, be that law suits or criminal prosecution. No immunity and no special treatment. What on earth is wrong with that?
@wds #18
Phil Plait (the BA) is not known for his emotional maturity. which is one reason I stopped following his blog. While I share his skepticism, emotionally he is a 15 year-old boy in a man’s body.