How we deal with toxic thoughts

I have long been confounded that otherwise intelligent people can claim, straight-faced, that the earth is only 6,000 years old or that a virgin got pregnant.  Such people are utterly sincere, of course.  Many of them excel at highly technical jobs and they generally embrace the results of science (they choose doctors who use high-tech medicine and they dare to fly on airplanes) and they are capable of great skepticism (they scoff at the dogma of everyone else’s religion and if one of their own unmarried daughters gets pregnant, they don’t believe her story that she didn’t have sex). 

I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand this unevenness of skepticism. Though fundamentalists are generally intelligent, inquisitive, and skeptical, they are science-adverse only with regard to a limited range of topics. While in their “Believer” mode, they seem to be totally transformed people. What is grabbing their brains and making them say such things, I’ve often wondered.

The deepest, most treasured, assumptions of many religious Believers are somehow cordoned off.  Once hooked on religion, they seem incapable of truly considering whether God exists.  They seem psychologically and intellectually incapable of considering that the writings and history of the Bible seem flawed, self-contradictory and all-too-human. 

Before you start thinking that I’m picking on religious fundamentalists . . . well, I am.  But I’m also picking on anyone else who’s ever shuddered and become glassy-eyed at simple questions aimed at their most basic assumptions.  I’m talking about all of us, …

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Whence comes intelligent design?

In a recent post (http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=166), I discussed God's attractive nuisance in His garden of Eden:  the Tree of Knowledge.  Let's take that discussion one step farther.  Not only did God plant his deadly tree smack in the middle of His garden (bad garden design), not only did He fail to…

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How We Really Think About Religion and Politics: The Power of Metaphors

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

The above is an excerpt from “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a poem on which John Godfrey re-told an ancient Indian fable that serves as an allegory. The lesson is this: the lens through which we view reality accentuates some features while downplaying others.  It must be this way, because we are creatures of limited attentional capacities. 

Metaphors are the lenses through which we view our world.  In abstract fields like religion and politics, the use of metaphors isn’t just fanciful (although it can be fanciful); the use of metaphors is absolutely necessary to understand abstract concepts.  Further, research has shown that the use of conceptual metaphors is systematic, not ad hoc. 

Just as physics students understand the flow of electricity by reference to the flow of water, the rest of us use metaphors to understand our own abstract concepts (e.g., in the fields of religion and politics).  More important, without metaphors, we would have no meaningful understanding of most abstract concepts.  Therefore, whenever we discuss any abstract concept, we are compelled to relentlessly engage in the use of metaphors–there is no other way to talk or write about such things. 

Not convinced? What does this matter? Read on and consider the examples.  This was literally and truly a life-changing idea for me.

In Metaphors We …

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Come all ye faithful atheists….

Something struck me: aren’t the atheists just as much condemned to relying on faith for the view as the God fearing people they often criticise?  Let me expand and explain.

1. The existence of God is unverifiable so you can never prove or know for sure whether He really exists (a typical atheist claim).

2. But similarly, you can not prove his non-existence either, for the same reason.

3. Therefore, in order for atheist to believe that God DOES NOT exist, he must rely on an article of faith, just as much as the theist requires an article of faith for his belief that God does exist!!

This is kind of interesting because the main ground on which the atheist attacks the theist is usually on the basis that faith is not a legitimate ground for believing in anything!!! Kind of hypocritical, don’t you think?

It seems that the only escape from being committed to faith is to be an agnostic: the claim that the question of God’s existence can not be/should not be answered….. In other words, they just pass over the question without any kind of commitment either way. Almost like they are running away from the question because they have no way of answering it…. not the most exciting position, don’t you think?
But one does not get off so lightly. To hold the atheist or agnostic positions comes with more of an intellectual cost than one might think!! Here are 3 possible problems:

1. The prime …

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What’s it means to be a “Bright”?

I recently received the following, with regard to my endorsement of Brights (see the link at the bottom of the right column): "[I'm] not sure about being a Bright though...its not healthy to believe there's a clear answer to everything, or isn't one at all." Because this not the first…

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