Science vs religion

Here's a new picture I made.
Comes as a T-shirt too: http://www.cafepress.com/strappado

World Atheism

New piece on Deviantart

Research Suggests Militant Jihadists Are Inspired By Night Dreams

"This is the conclusion of a study of the reported dreams of many of the best-known al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders carried out by Dr Iain Edgar a social anthropologist at Durham University.
Edgar identified four key themes from his research:

* Militant jihadists are inspired by night dreams
* Militant jihadists legitimize their actions partly on the basis of night dreams
* The inspirational night dream can be more 'real' than reality, connecting the individual to a mythical past
* Militant Jihadism can be directly authorized by dream content"

Medical News Today, 09 Jun 2008

Interesting, and slightly worrying, but after a quick search in the hadith it doesn't seem like such a big surprise after all.
Check out this link to the USC-MSA hadith collection and do a search for "Dream" in all four hadith collections, and you will get approximately 170 hits.

Here's one from the Bukhari collection:

"Volume 1, Book 5, Number 260: Narrated Maimuna:
The Prophet took the bath of Janaba. (sexual relation or wet dream). He first cleaned his private parts with his hand, and then rubbed it(that hand) on the wall (earth) and washed it. Then he performed ablution like that for the prayer, and after the bath he washed his feet. "

The Untruth movement

"If the Truth movement's only job is to uncover discrepancies, it's dooming itself to forever pulling facts apart. It's kind of a Zeno's arrow of illogic: Truthers will never come to a reasonable conclusion because there's never going to be an absence of doubt. It's time for them to put up or shut up, in other words—it's been six years since 9/11 and they've yet to produce anything coherent."

"Towers of Babble", Utne Reader, January-February 2008 (Reprinted from the Stranger Sept. 6, 2007)

I don't usually do 911 stuff, but this is an interesting article and the excerpt above shows what the real problem is. They can never be satisfied. It's a bit like creationists who are never satisfied with transitional fossils, because between two transitional fossils, there's always room for one more - "and it can't be found".

Anyway, here's another lengthy quote showing that this unreasonable way of doubting leads to a fragmentation of religious proportions:

"There are almost as many notions about what happened on September 11 as there are members of 9/11 Truth organizations. To add to the confusion, the movement is home to not a few eccentrics. After the coffee shop meeting with We Are Change Seattle, I got the first in a series of e-mails from a woman named Rebecca. Rebecca was angry that she wasn't allowed to take part in the group interview, a decision that Konrad justified as a way to present a "more united front" to the media.

Rebecca and three other original members of 9/11 Truth Seattle— the umbrella entity that makes communication between various Truth groups in Seattle possible—had decided to abandon We Are Change Seattle anyway after a disagreement. Most recently, Rebecca has decided to stop being part of any 9/11 Truth organization. In her words: "I have instead decided to give priority to my creative work with political satire and performance poetry."

This tiny schism is emblematic of larger rifts within the Truth movement. Its first few years have seen a number of organizations come and go in a flurry of arguments and personality clashes. For instance, last year, after a prolonged argument about whether the towers were felled by miniature nuclear weapons, some members of a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth voted to disband and reform as the new, improved Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Many Truthers rejected a man named Webster Tarpley as a major public face of the movement because of his previous work for the LaRouche Connection, a news service funded by the LaRouche organization. "Many of us felt like he took some credibility from the movement," a Truther who wanted to be anonymous told me. Tarpley is rumored to be considering a run for president on a 9/11 Truth ticket, which could draw some of the Truth votes from both Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, who seem to be running neck-and-neck in popularity with the primarily Libertarian-leaning members of 9/11 Truth groups."

I said religious proportions quite deliberately, because just as various religious branches within the same religion will disagree on infalsifiable things that a priori can never be settled, so the truthers' constant doubt can never be satisfied.

If there really was a conspiracy (and not just a stupid government) then it should be possible to put pieces together, but that's not what the truthers are here for. Their mission in life is to take things apart, and their hyper-scepticism runs rampant, like a Sceptic-Midas who has to doubt everything he touches. They're looking for untruths, not truths. And they find them, just like any paranoid can discover that he is indeed followed.

And so they doubt each other as much as George W. Bush.

Islamic converts more prone to terrorism

"There are many reasons people choose to convert. Some do so for love and marriage, others because they are looking for spiritual meaning. However, there are also those who convert to Islam as an alternative to the current liberal ideology. Especially after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, converts tend to lean more towards political choices rather than spiritualism and personal choice.

[...]

In his book "Al Qaeda in Europe", Lorenzo Vidino expresses a similar viewpoint. Converts reach radical Islam through disillusionment with Western and European society. Especially with Islam, people convert as a form of social protest, with Islam serving as an alternative to neo-Nazi or anarchist groups.

[..]

This radicalization is not theoretical. Converts make up at the most 1-2% of the Muslim populations of different countries in Europe, but according to a recent study, they make up 5-6% of terrorists. According to Edwin Bakker, head of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, converts tend to radicalism because they try to be as true to their religion as possible. In other words, for those converts, Islam is seen as a non-democratic movement, set on destroying liberalism.

Esther, International Relations, 01.15.08

There's plenty of links in the original text.

Northern Ireland: 'Dangers of secularism'

"A new thought-provoking survey on religion has raised eyebrows across Northern Ireland. Belfast Telegraph Religion Correspondent Alf McCreary looks at the wider implications and argues that Churches need to remain aware of the dangers of secularism"

Belfast Telegraph, December 12, 2007

Haha! Yeah, we all long back to the days when religion was a matter of life and death in Northern Ireland. It is going to be a lot more dangerous now.

Anyway, let's take a look at the stats:

"For example, the survey found that only 42% of those questioned could name the four Gospels, with a 52% response from Catholics, compared with 36% from Protestants.
Other key findings were that only 54% could name the Holy Trinity (Catholics 65%, Protestants 45%) and that only 31% could name Martin Luther as a leader of the Protestant Reformation.
A Prime Time survey in the Republic last year claimed that 67% there attended church at least monthly, whereas a Tearfund poll in the UK more recently found that the equivalent figure for Northern Ireland was 45%."

Somehow I think it would be good if the Middle East forgot who received the Koran too.

Terror: Can We Blame Religion?

"In the wake of recent terror attacks, Western society has jumped to an easy and, it might seem, obvious conclusion. [blabla] [Sam Harris] contends that religion propagates myths that are dangerous, and that the world would be far better off without them. [blabla] What both Harris and Dawkins seem to overlook, however, is that religion has never been the unique instigator of violence. [blabla] The Soviet Union was a professedly secular society. [blabla] And there are more recent examples. Saddam Hussein led an Iraqi nation that “was thoroughly secular, [ruled] by a western-style legal code,” according to Gray."

Donald Winchester, Vision, Summer 2007 issue

Heard it all before right? Neither Harris nor Dawkins ever "overlooked" this straw man. It has been repeatedly rebutted, and just as often repeated again by believers. Here, Mr Donald Winchester, take a look at the famous "Problem with Atheism"-speech of Sam Harris.

"So too with the “greatest crimes of the 20th century” argument. How many times are we going to have to counter the charge that Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot represent the endgame of atheism? I’ve got news for you, this meme is not going away. I argued against it in The End of Faith, and it was immediately thrown back at me in reviews of the book as though I had never mentioned it. So I tackled it again in the afterword to the paperback edition of The End of Faith; but this had no effect whatsoever; so at the risk of boring everyone, I brought it up again in Letter to a Christian Nation; and Richard did the same in The God Delusion; and Christopher took a mighty swing at it in God is Not Great.

Did they overlook it? No, Donald Winchester overlooked it.
In a surprisingly (for him) nuanced comment he writes this:

"Does this mean that atheism or secularism is to blame for such slaughter? It would be hard to argue this. It simply shows that in these cases religion is not the cause of violence and terror. The absence of religion did not equal the absence of violence; the Jacobin Terror and Stalin’s purges demonstrate as much. On the other hand, the Spanish Inquisition and Islamic terrorism show that atheism is not the sole cause either. Indeed, many religionists are largely peaceful, as are many secularists. To ascribe the urge to violence to either is plainly unreasonable. Instead, we must search deeper."

That absence of religion does not mean absence of violence is pretty clear. We do not promise a world without violence. But what makes religions particularly dangerous when it comes to violence is that they are not falsifiable. Communism, as horrible as it was, is de facto falsified. We have all seen that it didn't work. While Christianity and Islam both promise an afterlife, Marx promised a paradise on here on Earth. And while there are lots of comparisons between religion and Marxism, the fact is that all communist regimes quickly turned sour. The experiment didn't work, and we have seen it with our own eyes. No such experiment will satisfy religious people, because their evidence will only come after death. The fact that living in the Middle East is probably worse than living in the USSR does not mean anything to them, because they expect a better life when they're dead.
So while Atheists can and will start wars in the future, they can not rest upon strange beliefs that can't be rationally discussed. Silly ideas won't last 2000 years.
Further, the argument about Stalin has magnitude as one aspect. But I think Winchester knows all too well that if the Spanish Inquisition had all the fancy new weapons of Stalin, they'd kill a lot more people. The crusades would have been much more effective too. I'm not sure, but I think that 911 probably set some world record as well. Not anywhere near the damage of the nuclear bombs dropped by the (so I hear) Christian country of USA, but you get the point. So as time passes, terrorists or religious fanatics in power are armed with better weapons and can inflict much more damage than the Spanish Inquisition could ever dream of(and I'm sure they did). I don't know what kind of nukes Iran are working on, but I bet they'll be more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
But let's hear more from Winchester:

"Stalin and Hussein aimed for unbridled power; the Jacobins, like today’s al-Qaeda, hoped to convert the world to their own worldview. Even Dawkins’s and Harris’s recent tomes fall inside this tradition, belonging to a genre of books that is among the most ideologically violent in modern publishing."

Yeah, right. How many people have Dawkins and Harris killed? Ideologically violent... al-Qaeda blabla. This is simply nonsense, and it shows how dishonest the anti-Atheist bigotry is. (Sorry, if this blog post equals an attack by al-Qaeda)

In the end, I refer everyone to this brilliant story I posted earlier:

"Then there's the problem on the other side -- among the atheists such as Richard Dawkins who have been labelled "fanatics." Now, it is absolutely true that Dawkins' tone is often as charming as fingernails dragged slowly down a chalkboard. But just what is the core of Dawkins' radical message?

Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so.

That's it. That's the whole, crazy, fanatical package."

Dan Gardiner, The Ottawa Citizen, May 05, 2007

Logical Path from Religious Beliefs to Evil Deeds

"It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things [because of religious texts]. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. Of course, many evil deeds are done by individuals who happen to be atheists. But it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women, or to perpetrate any of the evils on the Hitchens list."

Richard Dawkins, On Faith, October 2, 2007

Atheists still hated in USA

PEW has released a new survey that shows how Americans view Muslims. I won't bother with that, but take a look at this stat.
43% of Americans have favourable opinions on Muslims, while only 35% have favourable opinions of Atheists. Further, while 35% have unfavourable views of Muslims, 53% have unfavourable views of Atheists.

So I just have to ask: who crashed two planes into the fucking WTC? Who are the terrorists in the Middle East? Who used bombs in Madrid & London? Who are behind most of the terrorist attackes the last ten years if you check out this list?
Atheists? No, I don't think so. There are a couple of really mean writers, but I doubt anyone of them even has a gun (well apart from Hitchens perhaps).

America. Get real.

Nebraska Senator Sues God to Stop Terror Threats

"Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers filed suit against God Friday, asking a court to order the Almighty and his followers to stop making terrorist threats.
The suit (.pdf), filed in a Nebraska district court, contends that God, along with his followers of all persuasions, "has made and continues to make terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons." Those threats are credible given God's history, Chambers' complaint says.
Chambers, in a fit of alliteration, also accuses God of causing "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like."

Likewise the suit accuses God of having his chroniclers "disseminate in written form, said admissions, throughout the Earth in order to inspire fear, dread, anxiety, terror and uncertainty, in order to coerce obedience to Defendant's will." [...]

The senator also wants the court to issue a permanent injunction prohibityin God from plagues and terrorist threats. [...]
Chambers does admit that God is omnipresent and omniscient, however. Since God is everywhere, the Nebraska court has jurisdiction, Chambers argues, and since God is all-knowing, Chambers need to serve him with a notice of the lawsuit."

Wired.com September 17, 2007

Haha, that's fucking excellent!

This is also a brilliant opportunity to plug the film: The Man Who Sued God. I saw it earlier, and it had some very nice court scenes.

Prejudice alive and well in America

"By a wide margin, respondents believe Americans think Muslims are the most likely to engage in terrorism (83 percent). Moreover, 42 percent believe Americans would be most concerned about their child dating a Muslim; followed by an atheist (17 percent), and a Mormon (14 percent). In addition:
* 37 percent believe Americans think Catholics are most likely to be involved in sexual abuse-far more than any other religious group.

[...]

62 percent said they believe Americans oppose same-sex marriages. Yet 58 percent would elect a gay person for president-about the same as for an Arab-American (57 percent), and more than for a person over age 70 (51 percent), or for an atheist (51 percent)."

Frost Illustrated, 1. August 2007

If Muslims revered cattle, Shambo would still be mooing

"Shambo, the sacred Hindu bull, was executed by lethal injection on Thursday night and reincarnated the next morning, quite possibly as a member of the Welsh assembly or indeed a spiteful Welsh farmer. [...]

There were fervent protests across the Hindu world but the Skanda Vale sect, which both harboured and revered Shambo, was rather more sanguine. One monk said: “This will simply add to the drama of his life cycle and he will come back again.” In which case, what was all the fuss about?

[...]

It was isolated from other livestock and, being divine, was unlikely to find its way into the food chain. The campaign to have it killed seemed motivated at least in part by pure vindictiveness on the part of those angry, badger-strangling Welsh farmers. And a sort of paralysis on the part of the authorities, terrorised by their own health and safety legislation and indeed by the baying farmers.

[...]

The only conclusion is that by this stage they wanted the creature dead and there’s an end to it.

But I wonder too if the members of the assembly would have dared to make their decision if it were Muslims rather than Hindus who chose to revere cattle? And what would have happened if they did? By now there would be priests set alight from Jakarta to Rabat, effigies burnt, fatwas issued. Cardiff airport would be missing an international departure gate.

The assembly would probably have come up with a compromise: okay, the bull lives but it has to wear a burqa when it goes out. I suppose Britain’s Hindus can console themselves with the thought that having their sensibilities trampled on suggests they are a community with whom the rest of us feel at ease and can thus victimise with impunity."

Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times, July 29, 2007

Why Are Atheist Books Best Sellers?

"First and most significant is the amount of evil coming from within Islam. Whether Islamists (or jihadists, Islamo-Fascists or whatever else Muslims who slaughter innocents in the name of Islam are called) represent a small sliver of Muslims or considerably more than that, they have brought religious faith into terrible disrepute.
How could they not? The one recognized genocide in the world today is being carried out by religious Muslims in Sudan; liberty is exceedingly rare in any of the dozens of nations with Muslim majorities; treatment of women is frequently awful; and tolerance of people with different religious beliefs is largely nonexistent when Muslims dominate a society.
If the same were true of vegetarians -- if mass murder and violent intolerance were carried out by vegetarians -- there would be a backlash against vegetarianism even among people who previously had no strong feelings about the doctrine."

realclearpolitics.com July 10, 2007

That's all very well, but here's an interesting part regarding the very "unfortunate" secularisation of Europe.

"I have taught college students and have found that their ignorance not only of the Bible but of the most elementary religious arguments and concepts -- such as the truism that if there is no God, morality is subjective -- is total."

Morality is subjective. Heard it all before, yet monkeys help eachother. Now watch this:

"Indeed it is virtually impossible to distinguish between a liberal Christian or Jew and a liberal secularist. Neither holds any text to be divine, both get their values from their hearts and minds, and they come to identical conclusions about virtually all moral issues."

How's that for "subjective morality"?
This just goes to show that the sum of human experience, or the human history if you like, has given us more information about good morality than religious texts.

While I think Prager has some nice clear thoughts in between here, he conveniently forgets that it's not only Islam which is the background for these books. American creationism is considered as maybe the most puerile fringe of Christianity. A couple of pedophile priests would never sway anyone, but systematic idiocy will.
Islam is a very serious problem, of course, but being liberals we are terribly understanding to people with lousy childhoods and poor education in violent countries. But God-fearing Americans have the possibility to get a proper education, and all they wish is to corrupt it with silliness from Genesis.

Terrorism may have been the final straw, but the reason why Atheist books are best sellers is because there's a lot more to religious problems than Osama Bin Laden.

As long as parents mislead their children, religious belief will lead to atrocities

"WHAT would turn eight intelligent, respectable doctors and other medical professionals into terrorists bent on a killing spree?

Faith.

For intelligent young people brought up in religious households and grappling with the concept of faith, fundamentalism can be one of only two options: it is either all or nothing. When it comes to faith, there is no logic to holding a moderate viewpoint. You either believe fully that some supernatural being created everything around us and eavesdrops on all six billion-plus of us, monitoring every word and deed, every minute of every day, now and forever, or you don’t."

Irish Examiner, 11 July 2007

Muslim Americans, White Evangelicals Similar in Religious Fervor

"The Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Muslim Americans, 80 percent of white evangelicals, and 87 percent of black Protestants say religion is "very important" in their lives.

These high percentages stand in contrasts to Catholics, only 49 percent of which said religion was "very important" in their life, and white mainline Protestants, only 36 percent of which responded likewise.

Moreover, Muslim Americans are similar to white evangelicals and black Protestants in their tendency to personally identify themselves first by their religion before their nationality.

[...]

The majority of white evangelicals (66 percent) and black Protestants (68 percent) said they take a literal view of the Bible, while half of Muslim Americans consider the Koran as the literal word of God."

Christian Post, Jul. 10 2007 (See also How Muslims Compare With Other Religious Americans )

Evangelicals, the new Muslims! The next Osama bin Laden is apparently going to be white, and will love Jesus.

Newsflash: Christian Terrorist Cell Caught in Texas