In my Fathers house are many mansions.

I have been making the argument for years that if various religious groups had the courage (and the decency) to wait until their children were 25 years of age before indoctrinating them into religion; it would die on the vine for lack of believers. No 25 year old who has not been indoctrinated by delusional believers would buy into a belief system that ordinarily could be held only by lunatics.

“In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”  John 14:2

Imagine if a sadistic torturer has promised you everlasting life and never ending bliss if you accept his offer of living in one of his mansions; while at the same time he is torturing in the basement the very same people you once loved.  And what if their greatest sin was being unable to make themselves believe something they disbelieve.  Could you still, in good conscience, accept his invitation? Could you live there forever, knowing that some of the people are in the basement suffering unimaginable torture while you are experiencing unimaginable bliss? 

Would you suck up to him and tell him he’s awesome and work yourself up into loving him? Would you make excuses for him and tell yourself he just must have his reasons? Would you defend him? Would you convince yourself he is the epitome of justice itself? Would you blame the people he tortures? Could you be truly happy there?

Most Christians are unaware that 67% of our planet’s population  reject the notion Jesus is their savior.  At this very moment the population is 7.2 billion. If the bible is true (no cherry picking allowed) that means four billion, 824 million, of us alive and breathing now are headed for eternal punishment. And that doesn’t include those who have already died and those yet to be born.

It’s gonna take a lot of mansions. And the basement will need to have twice as much room as the upper floors. No problem. We all know that Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild was a good carpenter. 

Religion and Intelligence... Not Necessarily Incompatible

An old, but relevant article. But the author misleads us when he states: " Indeed it turns out that there is statistical evidence to flesh out the proposition that the more educated or intelligent one is, the less religious one is." 

Many religious people I know are highly intelligent.   Belief is something that is instilled in children before their brains have developed enough for critical thinking. Scientists once thought that our brains were fully developed by the age of 17. Recent studies have determined that they actually are not fully developed until we are as old as 27.

I have written about this (see my earlier posting) on my blog, charliesitzes.blogspot.com "An Honest Search For Truth." The reason we believe what we believe has nothing to do with truth. What it has to do with is who are parents were. As I point out, if the child of a Baptist mother was accidentally switched at birth with the child of a Muslim mother, each child would grow up convinced the other was going straight to hell.

Imagine if instead of telling our children what to think, we taught them how to think. When they reach the age of 25 we tell them about religion and offer them a choice. Dead men walking, flying white horses with wings, a wafer actually (not symbolically...actually) being the body of a long dead religious zealot, that Jesus will return to Jackson County, Missouri..... all of it. Oh and don't forget to tell them about the Hindu god, Ram, who enlisted the help of an army of devoted monkeys to build a 28 mile long land bridge to rescue his princess from an evil king. If you tell your 25 year old that they are now free to choose any god they want, which one do you think they would choose?

Don't forget to mention to them that if they intend to go into politics, they will be REQUIRED to adopt one of these gods if they are to have any hope of ever winning an election.

So, here's the article which a friend and fellow non-believer sent me today.

January 27, 2008

“Don’t pray in my school and I won’t think in your church.”

The misleading simplicity of this bumper-sticker size witticism aside, I think it contains a pretty accurate summation of my views on the intellectual laziness of the religious. Indeed it turns out that there is statistical evidence to flesh out the proposition that the more educated or intelligent one is, the less religious one is.[1]

Apparently there is also evidence that shows as few as 1 in 12 children escape the religious views of their parents in the cases of children with a secure emotional attachment to their parents.[2]

In this day and age there is no excuse for such laziness. For the greatest minds of the Christian age, Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus and so on, there was an excuse; besides the danger of being denied access to learning or even being executed, the power of the Church permeated all aspects of life. Scientific methods of analysis didn’t exist. That is not the case today.

To believe in God is not an indefensible proposition; to believe in a specific religious doctrine is indefensible. Because Christianity is the most ubiquitous religion in Western Europe, it is the one I know most about but it is by no means the only religion open to serious charge of intellectual laziness. No less so the superstitions which currently pervade our society, despite arguments to the contrary.[3]

The casual acceptance of this laziness, or the denial that laziness exists in the first place, irritates me, as it did in some of these comments on Fruits of Our Labour.[4]

A burden of proof now lies on me to demonstrate that belief in Christianity is intellectual laziness, as that is the proposition which underlines this article. I do not view that as a difficult task. I need only mention a few things to begin with; the massive discrepancies between the Gospels, the patently made up facts surrounding Jesus’ genealogy and the strong current of censorship that accompanies all the writings of the Early Christian fathers.

Most Christians haven’t considered these things. Those that have do not have an answer, though if you wish to see truculence in the face of overwhelming evidence, I suggest looking up virtually any subject on the Catholic Encyclopaedia. These things certainly aren’t mentioned in religious class in school – even in non-faith schools. In faith schools can you imagine how much worse it is?

Even those schools which don’t directly indoctrinate children into a specific religion, the non-specific ethic that pervades things like morning Assembly is generally religious. In many schools it is an attempt to generalise so that all religions feel included – but it still harks back to religious, spiritual reasons for why certain things should be true.

In wider society we can see the effects this has. In the US, millions of Americans are hoodwinked by religious conmen who make hundreds of millions of dollars from people who don’t understand evolution and react against it out of some ‘common sense’ notions which could and should be challenged by the rest of us.

In Britain, we’re conned into respecting the fact that parents, some consciously, some out of the belief that faith schools get better results, seek to indoctrinate their children into their own way of life by ensuring that this is all the children are exposed to. In the US, this is a condition which the Supreme Court has upheld as justified under the Constitution (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 1972).

The ultimate effect is to encourage, to propagate a matching intellectual laziness. Faith, as a rule, is one of those matters which goes largely unquestioned except by an extreme minority. Even the majority of atheists and agnostics who, according to studies on the decline of religion in the UK, make up a sizable chunk of society, let it pass unchallenged.

Faith is widely seen as something to be respected than something which should be ridiculed – as intellectual laziness and an obstinate unwillingness to scientifically engage with evidence. Plenty of ‘the faithful’ attempt to equate atheism with another religion at this point, and suggest that teaching secularism would in effect be no different to what we attack organised religion for.

I have answered this comprehensively elsewhere.[5]

Ultimately what this line of reasoning fails to acknowledge is that most secularists don’t care what opinions people hold and don’t resent difference and discussion. What secularists do care about is denying an institutional stranglehold upon learning, and upon teaching the methods of critical and independent thought – each of which challenge faith.

In conclusion, though one person who jumped into this argument might casually attempt to put rational thought on a par with emotion, I disagree.[6] Religion and emotional attachments to certain views are indefensible in the face of rational, scientific analysis. The two can be in accord, but where they are not, one must triumph.

If we choose religion and emotion, then we become the subjectivists and surrender ourselves to Nietzsche’s concept of the superman who can free himself from objective conditions. We become our darker selves.

Are Believers Less Intelligent?

It’s tempting to accuse believers of being less intelligent than non-believers.  Atheists throw that accusation around quite a bit and nothing could be farther from the truth.

Here is what is really going on and it has nothing to do with lack of intelligence.

As a species we have evolved with a trait called confirmation bias. This simply means that we try to confirm what we already believe. In order to pull this off our brains require us to discount evidence that runs counter to our beliefs and a strong bias for evidence that proves us right.

Here’s an example. Let’s say a believer prays for a sick friend to get well. If the friend actually gets better, the believer sees that as evidence that prayer helps heal the sick. On the other hand, if the patient does not get better or in fact gets worse, that evidence is ignored. In other words we tend to keep the “yes” vote and ignore the “no” vote.  We tally our wins and ignore our losses.

We have also evolved so that as children, we will believe anything adults tell us. Go back a few millennia and it’s easy to see how that came about.  Children who did not believe their parents when they were told that crocodiles would eat them if they swam in a particular place in a river were eaten by crocodiles and quickly removed from the gene pool, as well as children who did not believe their parents who told them not to eat a particular red berry because it was poisoned.

When children are told by adults that a super-natural celestial dictator in the sky is watching their every move and reading their every thought, they not only will believe it, but spend the rest of their lives looking for confirmation of their beliefs.

This is why children of Muslims will grow into adults thinking Mahomet rode a white horse to heaven and back and that Jesus in most definitely not their ticket to heaven.  Children of Christians will grow up to believe that virgins get pregnant, that 10 million species of animals really did fit in a boat 500 feet long and that it rained six feet per hour (feet, not inches) for 40 days and nights. And of course children of Mormons will believe that the con man Joseph Smith really did dig up those golden plates.

And this is why, stuffing all that rubbish into the brains of innocent children before they have attained critical thinking skills should be a crime punishable by imprisonment.

charliesitzes.blogspot.com

P.S. Anyone notice that the pope, the head of 1.2 billion Catholics set a special day aside each year to pray for peace?  Anyone ever notice how his prayers have utterly and miserably failed?

Is God Throwing Rocks?

This morning when I read about the meteorite, no bigger than a Volkswagen Beetle, that entered the Russian atmosphere a few hundred miles east of Moscow, it was a sobering reminder of just how fragile our lives are on this small blue planet.

Compared to the size of the earth, the meteorite was only a speck of dust, yet it caused hundreds of injuries and millions in damage from the shock wave.

Our species, arrogant as it is, nevertheless is vulnerable to extinction at any time by any one of the billions of these things caroming around within our very own solar system. We had a near miss by one named Asteroid 2012 DA14, just today, Feb 15th 2013. (I prefer to call it a near hit) It was much larger and if it had impacted on land would have caused total destruction of an area of over half a million acres. If Asteroid 2012 DA14 had crashed into the sea, (a more likely event)  tsunamis would have been more massive that the Dec. 2004 event that killed over 230,000 people and caused billions in property damage.

The really sad part is that Christians believe that we are the cause of all this. We are all worthless miserable sinners and if it were not for sin, none of this would happen.

How pathetic.

Why is this? How can the critical thinking of otherwise intelligent and kind people be so flawed?  Richard Russell, the brilliant mathematician and philosopher provides what I think it the best answer. (EMPHASIS IS MINE)

“Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

What We Must Do

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.

WHEN YOU HEAR PEOPLE IN CHURCH DEBASING THEMSELVES AND SAYING THAT THEY ARE MISERABLE SINNERS AND ALL THE REST OF IT, IT SEEMS CONTEMPTIBLE AND NOT WORTHY OF SELF-RESPECTING HUMAN BEINGS.

We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.”

I would add to Russell's analysis that religion  is also nurtured by laziness. It takes effort to know while believing takes  no effort at all.

Grow Up!

This may sound like a strange way of putting it but I believe part of the problem with fundamentalists is that they are not puzzled enough. Unless we are profoundly puzzled by something, our minds are not open to inquiry. It all boils down to how important truth is to us. To get at truth, it’s necessary that we have the capability to entertain a thought or idea and still be capable of rejecting it. People who are genuinely interested in truth have this capability.  Scientists have this capability and we can thank them for most of the progress made in our short reign as sentient creatures on our small planet.

Of course fundamentalists are fond of reminding us that “science isn’t everything” or “logic isn’t everything.” This is true. In our human experience we have discovered music, art, comedy and other pursuits that don’t necessarily depend on logic and science.

But religion doesn’t fall within those examples. Religion is a belief. Belief, to be accepted must be consistent and not contradictory. Religions (Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Mormonism and Hinduism) are not only contradictory with each other, they are internally contradictory.  For example the Christian bible is chocked full of contradictions which a cursory internet search will quickly reveal.

 Jesus allegedly said (Matthew 18:3) “Except you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

I disagree. The last thing we need to do is become as little children. Little children will believe anything an adult chooses to implant in their innocent brains.  No, we should not become as little children. We should grow up.

Dumb and Dumber

“If humans  one day become extinct from catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of human life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves, but because we lacked the foresight.

The dominant species that replaces us in post- apocalyptic Earth, just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbial pea-brained dinosaurs.”  Neil deGrasse Tyson

I am extremely gratified to have someone as prominent as the great Neal deGrasse Tyson, state what I have been pointing out for several years; that pea brained dinosaurs ruled the earth for over 200 million years. They became extinct some 66 million years ago when an asteroid only eight miles across slammed into the ocean off the Yucatan Peninsula, causing darkness on the earth along with freezing temperatures and destroying most life.  

Meanwhile, we evolved into our present state a mere 200,000 years ago which means we have been here about 1/1000th the time that dinosaurs ruled the earth. Is there any reasonable thoughtful person, considering the way things are going now that thinks we will survive another 200 years, much less 200 thousand or 200 million. We constantly wage war on each other and much of it can be traced to religion. Look at what is going on in the Middle East where the majority is Muslim. Their population which stands at 1.6 billion is the fastest growing religion and the least educated.

When nations are ranked according to a human-development index, which measures such factors as life expectancy, literacy rates and educational attainment, the five highest ranked countries….Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands…are the least religious. (And also better educated)  Of the fifty countries at the bottom of the index, all are under-educated and intensely religious.

Whether atheism leads to positive social indicators are whether positive social indicators lead to atheism doesn’t matter. What matters is the idea that atheists are somehow less moral, honest or trustworthy has been dis-proven by study after study.  

Famous People

Who was Jesus of Nazareth?

He lived a couple thousand years ago and miraculously cured 10 lepers. Over two billion people worship him.

Who is Jacinto Convit?

He was born 100 years ago and in 1988, he was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of an anti-leprosy vaccine.

Never heard of him, right?

Mark Twain was spot on when he said, "A lie can travel half way round the world while the truth is tying its shoes."