by VorJack

The Boston Globe has an interesting and disheartening article about the relationship between facts and belief:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

[...]

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

The article focuses on what this means for democracy and the idea that an educated population will govern itself wisely. It points out that frequently it is those misinformed people who are most passionate about what they fail to understand. The author actually makes reference to an article in the Onion to explain the problem, Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be.

But it’s hard for me to get too worked up about this; after all, humans have always been this way, and American democracy has survived for over 200 years. But it doesn’t bode well for our attempts to promote science and reason. The more we push, the more pushback we can expect.

by VorJack

I was reading a summary of José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. In a nutshell, Jesus is a human figure who is being used by Yahweh for His own ends. He is guilt-ridden about the Massacre of the Innocents, and about the excesses that will take place in the future in his name.

In the end, realizing that his own sacrifice will not stop Yahweh’s plans or these excesses, he laments, “Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.”

It’s similar in many ways to Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, in which the human prophet Jesus has his message manipulated by his brother Christ. Christopher Hitchens has a good review of it at the NYT. There’s also an expansion on this review on the NYT podcast:

A humanized, manipulated Jesus is also a subplot of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, considered one of the great novels of the last century. In it, Yeshua is pictured as a human philosopher and wiseman who is able to bond with Pilate, even though Pilate is forced to send him to his unjust execution.

There are other examples. I remember a bizarre science fiction story in which a human Jesus is being tortured in hell for inadvertently wrecking monotheism. Part of his torture is to watch the actions of the church founded in his name.

Why is this such a popular theme? Why all these sympathetic portrayals of a human Jesus whose message is lost or distorted? In particular, why do we see it from atheists like Saramago and Pullman?

by VorJack

Last month, Nobel winning author José Saramago died. Saramago was apparently a very well respected figure in his native Portugal, being the only Portuguese-language writer to win the prize for literature.

There have been several attempts to honor him. The Portuguese government declared two days of mourning, and Saramago has been lauded by many Portuguese luminaries. All kind of ironic, because Saramago lived in the Canary Islands since the early ’90s. He fled there when the Portuguese Prime Minister had his most popular and controversial book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, pulled from another literary prize competition for being religiously offensive.

Now, Saramago was an atheist, and his Gospel depicted Jesus as a flawed and humanized figure. Which leads to the most interesting homage to Saramago, by none other that the Portuguese Playboy Magazine.

The image that follows is edited, but still just this side of NSFW.

Carved on the headboard there is the title of Saramago’s work.

The blog Geek System has more images, all edited to protect you from the dreaded nipple.

From the GodBlock Website:

GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions. When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.

Via Jesus Needs New PR, who comments: “To an atheist, God is like porn.”

For five extra points, explain that analogy.

by VorJack

Ugh.

I agree with Slacktivist, it’s too hot to blog. Too hot to think. Too hot coherent sentence make.

When I’m done here, I’m going to go become a Baptist just so that someone will dunk me in water.

Or maybe not. I was listening to a local Christian radio station yesterday and I heard a male preacher chastising his female listeners for dressing immodestly. You see, it was their responsibility not to tempt their Christian brothers towards lust.

No mention that maybe those Christian brothers should learn to cope, grow up, get a hobby. No, it was the woman’s responsibility to protect her fragile Christian brothers from their own hormones. Dudes just can’t help it, y’know? Ugh.

Have you ever noticed that when there’s some stereotypical weakness that women supposedly suffer (i.e. inability to control emotions during PMS) it’s used as an excuse to bar them from something (i.e. having a position of power.)

And yet when men supposedly suffer some stereotypical weakness (i.e. inability to control thoughts when cleavage is visible) it’s used as an excuse to bar WOMEN from something (i.e. wearing tattered shorts and a sports bra when it’s 90+ degrees.)

Maybe it’s hypocrisy or a double standard or something. Right now it’s too hot to think about.

by VorJack

Psychiatrists Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá have a new book out entitled Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. Ryan blogs about its thesis over at Psychology Today:

Biologists distinguish sexual monogamy from social monogamy. As DNA testing has grown cheaper in recent years, we’ve learned that most species formerly classified as “monogamous” (primarily birds) are socially monogamous, but not sexually so. In other words, they form pairs that cooperatively care for that season’s brood of young, but the male may well not be the biological father.

Most of this is not new. My first encounter with these arguments was in 2001’s The Myth of Monogamy, which is a popularization of much of the science involved. Basically, female animals frequently have more control over mate choice than was previously believed, and will frequently exercise that control before going on to choose a mate to raise offspring with.

But Ryan and Jethá take it a step farther:

Applied to humans, we argue that a more flexible approach to sexual fidelity can increase marital stability and thus lead to greater social and family stability.

I’m always worried when we start trying to tie evolution to modern morality. Perhaps, as the authors point out, we’re as sexually rambunctious as the bonobos. But we’ve surrounded ourselves with a very complex culture, and we’re just as much social and cultural beings as we are sexual ones.

I’ll admit, I’m defensive. I’ve just celebrated ten years of monogamy. Of course, the authors don’t do much to help. Consider this analogy for accepting the costs of going against our polygamous nature:

For example, you might happily choose to work the night shift, but the resulting disruption of your circadian clock will increase your risk of cancer, cardio-vascular disease, gastric disorders, and so on no matter how committed you are to your decision. Similarly, we can choose to wear tight corsets, or ill-fitting shoes, or to live on chili-dogs and ice cream, but because all these behaviors run counter to our evolved nature they will cost us over time.

Gosh, thanks.

I believe that the authors are correct that our evolution has given us instincts that leave us more suited for serial monogamy. But I think it would be wrong to conclude that we’re all that beholden to those instincts.

Humans are varied and flexible creatures, and each of us will deal with our instincts in our own way. Some will ignore them, some will go with them, and some will subvert them. While I agree its best to be aware of them, I suspect that we shouldn’t be drawing too many conclusions from our evolutionary past about our current behavior.

by VorJack

Some Christians and former Christians are fond of pointing at the doctrine of biblical innerrancy and calling it idolatry – the act of taking something less than God and making it out to be God. Robert Price is fond of doing this in his BibleGeek webcast.

The idea is that Christian fundamentalists are making the Bible itself into a God and placing an heap of of expectations on it that are to much for any collection of books to bear. There’s something to this, but I notice there are all different levels to which even fundamentalists ascribe.

Inspiration

As some basic level, beneath that which most people would call idolatry, is the idea I remember from Catholic school: the Bible is inspired. This meant something very similar to what we means when we say an artist is inspired; the author received some insights and ideas (from God, it was assumed) that they proceeded to work into prose. But they were human authors, who were capable of writing some poorly worded sentences or confusing an issue. Thus we needed something more with which to illuminate the text, and the Catholic answer to that is Christian tradition maintained and developed by the Church.

Dictation

Somewhere beyond that is verbal inspiration, in which the Gospel authors are merely secretaries, taking dictation from the Almighty. This sidesteps the messy process of having to consider the mentality of the author; instead, we’re getting it straight from God. One doesn’t have to believe that every jot and tittle is accurate since the books may have changed a bit since their original manuscripts, but presuambly the Bible is absolutely reliable on matters of faith and salvation.

One idea I often hear is that God is loving, and would not leave us with flawed instructions on how to achieve salvation. This assumes a lot about the way God might operate, or what “loving” means in the context of an infinite non-corporeal entity, but it does make a certain sense. However, once you start reasoning this way, there really is no limit. What else might an all-loving God provide us with in his Word?

Absolute Sufficiency

Ken Pulliam over at Why I De-Converted from Evangelical Christianity has some thoughts on the more extreme form of this idolatry, in which the Bible offer guidance on things having little to do with salvation. As one fundamentalist co-woker explained to me, “All truths are found in the Bible,” and these apparently include truths relating to psychology; thus Biblical or “nouthetic” counseling:

“Nouthetic” comes from a NT Greek word meaning: “to admonish,” or “to correct.” This type of counseling says that man’s basic problem is sin and that the job of the counselor is to point out to the counselee the nature of his sin and then admonish him to confess it and ask God to heal him. The father of the movement is Jay Adams, longtime Professor of Pastoral Counseling at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Westminster is a very conservative evangelical Reformed seminary. Adams burst on the scene in 1970 with his book, Competent to Counsel: Introduction to Nouthetic Counseling. The very popular book has been used by thousands of Pastors to guide them in their counseling methodology.

And so Adams believe he can derive principles for the Bible which allow him to deal with depression and other psychological problems. You can read Pulliam’s entire post, but I can give you a hint: Adam’s methods are both misogynistic and toxic.

Let me close with a joke that Darrell Dow, blogger at Stuff Fundies Like, left in one of his comments on the topic:

Jay Adams, Tom Cruise, and Mary Baker Eddy walk into an emergency room…and see a man in a full body cast moaning in pain.

Tom Cruise declares “this man is not injured, he merely needs to audit himself into a clear state to uncover his thetan reality then his so-called pain will cease.”

Mary Baker Eddy contradicts “No, this man merely needs to acknowledge that his physical flesh is a sinful manifestation and that only pure spirit can be righteous then he will understand his pain is an illusion.”

Jay Adams says nothing but picks up a Gideon Bible and begins beating the man on the head with it.

“What are you doing?!” ask the other two in horror.

“Discipleship!” yells Jay loudly “By the time I’m done he’ll still be in pain but by golly he’ll at least have the decency to feel guilty about it!”

by VorJack

Johnathan Acuff, creator of Stuff Christians Like, wrote about the inspiration of his site on the CNN’s Belief Blog some time back:

As a pastor’s kid, I always found it odd that we Christians sprinkle a little church flavor on popular secular ideas and make them our own. We turned, “Got Milk” into, “Got God,” and “Adidas” into, “Add Jesus.” I feel like we often don’t use our best creativity to express our love of the person we believe created it all. So when the site stuffwhitepeoplelike.com blew up, I thought it might be fun to discuss that problem by committing that problem. I started stuffchristianslike.net thinking it would be like one of the many ideas I’ve written online.

That’s as good a way of describing the problem as any. A lot of American Evangelical pop culture seems to consist of taking something popular from the wider culture and importing it into the subculture after sprinkling it with a little magic Jesus dust.

And there’s only so much we atheists can complain.

But, seriously folks, with all due respect … just stop rapping. Please. Magic Jesus dust doesn’t work on everything.

Case in point:

And frankly, magic Jesus dust doesn’t work really well when the original was painful to begin with:

(both videos via Scotteriology. Blame him.)

by VorJack

‘Tis the tenth anniversary of my marriage, and according to my co-workers this is when it all start to go downhill. (working in a house full of divorced women has it’s downsides)

I’m going to go off and enjoy the good times while they last, so I’ll be out of the loop for a couple days. Ya’ll don’t make trouble for Daniel.