No Random Coincidence? Or Wishful Thinking?

A comment on a Catholic Blog about the apparent intervention of God in subtle ways:

I have experienced this in my life in so many ways! I can’t even begin to tell you. One story I’ll share—though my eyes are welling up with tears at this very moment. My first husband died in a hunting accident--during the deer hunt here in Utah, after we had been married 15 years. At his funeral my friend’s daughter played the music to the country western song, “The Dance”.

Anyway, many years later, I was at an outside Jazz concert being held at Deer Valley Resort, when the jazz band said they usually don’t play country western, but they wanted to play this song tonight and proceeded to play “The Dance”. As I looked up to the mountainside, a huge buck watched through the forest at all of us gathered there. I was at that concert with my new husband, we had just gotten married. Any guesses where...right there at that resort looking over that mountainside. To me that was a wonderful message from what is a very thin veil between here and the afterlife. We’ve gone on to have a son who was born on September 2nd, the same birthday as my 1st husband’s nephew—his namesake, Daniel. You’re right, no event, when lived in faith, is random or meaningless.

If Internet accounts are representative, then so much of Christian witness seems to revolve around superstition; and finding meaning in the most tenuous connections.  Surely what this really illustrates is humans' amazing ability to find patterns in things around them, and their fondness to ascribe meaning where there is none.  I presume that this is comforting and that it gives people a sense of purpose, but that does not mean that their assumptions are correct.

But is this really just harmless nonsense?  Maybe it is.  And maybe if it provides people with comfort then who am I to disillusion them?  My concern is that this mindset leads on to other unsound connections and conclusions which may indeed be harmful.  Is it not better to base our decisions and our actions on reality rather than on wishful thinking?

Ok, so God did it - but which God?

So often one seems to come across debates between a non believer on one side, and a believer in the dominant God of that particular culture, on the other side.  The alternatives frequently appear to be 'No God' or 'This God'.

But isn't that missing out a vital step?  If I'm to believe that the the natural Universe was indeed created by a deity, how can I be sure that it was, for example, the Christian deity rather than the God of a number of other competing religions?

To be honest, the fact that there are many so many people who equally fervently believe that 'their' God is the true God, leaves me wondering how many people of the hghest integrity must, by definition, be utterly deluded.  Pity those poor wretches who may devote their whole life to their chosen religion, and maybe even die for it, when their belief is nothing but a delusion.


How can one tell who is deluded?  There are no proofs or logical explanations for any of these competing deities, and much of the 'evidence' would not last 5 minutes if subjected to impartial scientific scrutiny...

I remain perplexed by people's wholly illogical behaviour.

Religion and Stoning - An unfortunate corollary?

I found this tragic story recently. It's interesting that the Koran does not condone stoning as a punishment, and yet Sharia law is used to condemn individuals to this barbaric death, without even the benefit of a fair trial.

It really worries me that whilst the practice of one of the World's largest religions may in its purest form be relatively harmless, it does not take much for self-important sadistic humans to subvert its teachings to their own twisted morality.

The 2009 film The Stoning of Soraya M. is about the harrowing true story of a woman sentenced to death by stoning because her husband accused her of infidelity. The film is based on a book by journalist Friedoune Sahebjam. He wrote this after hearing the story of 35-year-old Soraya Manutchehri (mother of seven) and her brutal stoning from her aunt while he was stranded in a rural village in Iran. According to the Washington Examiner, Soraya was innocent but the deadly mix of misogyny and extremist Islamic law, allowed that she was stoned to death because her husband wanted to marry another woman:

The victim was Soraya Manutchehri, a 35-year-old mother of seven who, in her own prophetic words, had become "an inconvenient wife." Bartered away in an arranged marriage at 13 to a petty criminal named Ghorban-Ali, who was 20 years old at the time, Soraya bore nine children over the next two decades, enduring two stillborn births and regular beatings from her husband, along with his insults, his consorting with prostitutes, and his campaign to turn her two oldest sons against her.

On August 15, 1986, with the complicity of a local mullah who had been imprisoned for child molesting under the Shah, Ghorban-Ali showed himself to be more than a garden variety sociopath and town bully; he was a sadistic monster, and Islamic fundamentalism was his enabler, his aider, his abettor.
In the anarchic days of the Iranian Revolution, Ghorban-Ali had found work as a prison guard in a neighboring town. There, he met a 14-year-old girl whom he wanted to marry. Polygamy was encouraged in Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, but Ghorban-Ali didn't want to support two families, and did not desire to return his wife's dowry. How to rid himself of his "old" wife? That was the easy part. Accuse her of infidelity. No matter that her husband had not actually seen anything untoward, or that Soraya was completely innocent, or that her husband's cynical accusations were only backed up by his cousin, who as it turned out had been coerced into concurring with the vaguest of accusations: a smile here, a brushed hand there.
What court of law would find someone guilty on such flimsy evidence? A "sharia" court is the answer. And so Soraya was convicted. The sentence was death-death by stoning.

It is even more troubling to see how the religion of Islam is being subverted to justify utterly barbarous murders. I am informed that nowhere in the Koran is stoning mentioned as a punishment.

It is also quite appalling that the majority of cases of stoning sentences have been against women. 9 out of 10 of the people recently awaiting stoning in Iran were women. It is unacceptable for anyone to die by being stoned to death, but it is even more unacceptable that this punishment is being disproportionately meted out to women.

Furthermore, the underlying misogyny at play in extremist Islam must also be called into question. There is a maddening double standard at play here. Men are free in their sexual relationships yet women can be stoned to death for simply doing the same things as their husbands.

For instance, in the Iranian Penal Code, a married woman has no right to divorce, a privilege which is reserved for the husband. Women have no custody rights of their children after age seven. As a result, women who can obtain a divorce by proving their husbands are either abusive or an addict, choose not to do so for fear of losing their children. A man can marry up to four wives simultaneously, and may establish a sexual relationship with any other single woman through a temporary marriage, without the requirements of marriage registration, ceremony, or obligation to any possible child that may result. Furthermore, a woman is legally obliged to submit to her husband’s sexual demands and to do her best to satisfy him sexually. Hence if a man is sexually unsatisfied or in an unhappy relationship, he has many avenues open to him to dissolve the marriage and/or satisfy his sexual needs in a temporary “marriage”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these legal options are denied to Iranian women, and any woman seeking alternative intimate relationships is, in the eyes of the law, “committing adultery”

The practice of stoning is more widespread. For example, on October 27, 2008, Aisha Ibrahim Duholow, a young Sudanese girl, was stoned to death in a stadium in front of 1,000 spectators. According to the government she had begged for the "Islamic punishment" after confessing to infidelity; but according to Amnesty International, she was just a 13-year old girl who had gone to the authorities to report a gang-rape. The gang rapists were never charged.

Laws condoning stoning are still on the books in Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

Is human morality a result of evolution or God given?

I discovered a fascinating study at the "Trends in Cognitive Science" website. The following is an extract. The full report is at the link, including sources. Click on the title above to go to the link.
See also my earlier post: "A monopoly on moral behaviour?"

"...

For some, there is no morality without religion. For others, religion is merely one way of expressing and legitimating one's moral intuitions. Religion can be linked to morality in different ways: moral principles are either decided by gods or by ancestors, or saints and holy individuals provide a model to be followed. Alternatively, gods and ancestors are regarded as interested parties that pay attention to what people do and people thus feel that their moral choices are never merely a private matter.

It is important to distinguish explicitly held religious beliefs and affiliations from religious intuitions. Bering, for example, presents experimental evidence that even non-religious subjects intuitively consider some mental states and processes, such as emotions, more likely to continue after death than others, such as hunger. Bloom argues that all humans are intuitive dualists in the sense that we feel our self to be the owner of the body, but we are not the same as our bodies. Thus, in folk psychology, the death of the body does not mean the cessation of personhood. Furthermore, because human reasoning is characterized by a promiscuous teleology, a capacity that causes us to see meaning and intentionality in everything that happens, we automatically postulate an agent as an explanation of various events; often this is some god -like concept.

Arguably, these tendencies make religious beliefs contagious in the sense that they are easy to spread and propagate because they functionally resonate with many of the basic operations of the mind. Consequently, they are also easy to use in moral reasoning. This does not mean, however, that there is a necessary link between morality and religion. There is evidence that at least some religious concepts and beliefs need certain cultural input in order to become adopted and to persist. The Vezo of Madagascar, for instance, seem to have two conceptions of death. Guided by their everyday experience, they construe death in biological terms as the breakdown of all vital functions, but see it as the beginning of a different form of existence in a ritual context. These two conceptions of death are activated in different contexts, and thus the Vezo do not feel that there is a tension between them.

Thus, although it seems undebatable that religiously colored intuitions can affect moral reasoning, and that religious primes can affect prosocial behavior, these observations do not license the conclusion that the mechanisms are specific to religion, nor that religion provides the central explanatory factor. Even when the intuitive content is interpreted as religious, the mechanisms that support reasoning are more general in scope.

There are endless often pointless web arguments about whether religion is necessary for humans to be moral. But surely that's the wrong question. I think most of us would agree that humans have an innate sense of morality. The really important question is surely whether this is God given. I hold the belief that it is not, but I cannot prove that, any more than someone else can prove that it is.

An alternative version of the Noah's Ark story

Yes, I know it's silly, and there will be Christians who will explain away Genesis as a parable or as an analogy. My concern is the way that apologists selectively discount those parts of the Bible that do not make sense and still feel enabled to quote other parts that do appear to make sense. I am reminded of a colleague who assembled many details about his birth, and sent them away for a horoscope reading. Back came a 4 page horoscope "specially compiled" using his details. He was delighted with the result and showed it to me. He had used a yellow highlighter to show all those parts that were "true" and he said he was amazed at how they had got it so right. I pointed out to him that although there was an even distribution of yellow throughout the piece, only about 30% of the the report was coloured yellow, and that many of the highlighted sections could equally apply to me or many other people. I then used a different coloured marker to show the statements that applied to me, and guess what, the ratio was about the same! Interestingly he was not convinced by my argument. I wonder which parts of the Bible he highlights and which he does not?

A curious video...

The Prosperity Gospel from The Global Conversation on Vimeo.

Do you find this as disturbing as I do? Roll on the truly secular state!

The Periodic Table

I watched a fascinating programme on TV last night. It was part of a series explaining how the elements were discovered, and how a process of experimentation and the rational application of logic enabled scientists to predict elements which were not yet discovered. Within the space of a hundred or so years we progressed from a World where many still thought that there were only 4 elements from which all things were made - Earth, Water, Air and Fire - to the spectrum of around 100 naturally occuring elements we know today.

This is to me a shining example of the triumph of human inspiration over wilful ignorance and superstition. I feel so privileged that I should be living in the present day and not at any time in the past. And I'm excited to think that withion my lifetime there may be further astounding discoveries, which change forever our understanding of our World.

The wonder of the Universe in which we live is truly astounding, and the more we discover about the real causes of our existence, the less reason we have to believe in something which is not a physical part of all this.