The importance of false and oxymoronic religious claims

Quite often, our use of language is puzzling, indeed.  For instance, we often walk up to each other asking, “How are you doing?” or “what’s happening?” when we would be annoyed if the person we addressed tried to answer our question.  We spend a lot of time talking about the weather when it really doesn’t affect most of us.  We crave to talk with our friends and co-workers about entertainment such as the performance of professional sports teams, as though our lives and moods should depend upon such things. And we love to gossip.

What is language for?  Most people consider language merely as a means of preserving and communicating ideas.  In “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” Andy Clark set forth six additional ways in which we use language, each of these uses serving to “re-shape the computational spaces which confront intelligent agents.”  

Clark discusses Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist of the 1930’s who “pioneered the idea that the use of public language had profound effects on cognitive development.”  Vygotsky focused on the role of private language and scaffolded action in guiding behavior by focusing attention and controlling action.  For instance, he found that children who are working on their own internalize the verbal directions previously given to them by responsible adults in order to guide complex tasks. 

Clark makes a strong case that his “supra-communicative” account of language can transform, re-shape and simplify computational tasks that confront our biological brains in six ways.  According to Clark, we …

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Where is the consistency in Republican positions?

In a past post, Grumpypilgrim asked : “Why do the two parties divide the issues the way they do, and who decided that the issues should be divided the way they are?”

I’ve often wondered that too.   After all, you would think that the “pro life” Republicans would also be against capital punishment.  You might think that a “conservative” Republican would be in favor of conservation, not squandering, of either the treasury or the environment.  You would think that those supporting smaller, weaker starve-the-beast government would resist laws that harass gays.  Asked in another way (regarding Democrats), what do gun control, generous welfare benefits, pro-union and pro-choice positions have in common? 

George Lakoff asked these questions too.  Writing of conservatives, he wondered:

. . . What does being against gun control have to do with being for tort reform?  What makes sense of the linkage?  I could not figure it out.  I said to myself, These are strange people.  Their collection of positions makes no sense.  But then an embarrassing thought occurred to me.  I have exactly the opposite positon on every issue.  What do my positions have to do with one another?

(p. 5) Lakoff proposed a solution to these questions in his bestseller Don’t think of an elephant!: Know your values and frame the debate (2004).  He concluded that our two different ways of understanding the nation come from two different understandings of family. 

The conservatives model government off of a “strict father” model, where the government’s …

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Six Flags over Jesus

After reading this account by someone who attended a so-called "mega-church," I was struck by the many parallels between the methods used by that church and the methods used by Hitler.  Slick propaganda, belittling and scapegoating of outsiders, blending religion with nationalism, using fear to manipulate emotions, praising self-interest, etc.,…

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Give us this day our daily endorphins

Why do people engage in religious rituals? 

In keeping with suggestion of ethologist Niko Tinbergen, this question is actually four separate “why” questions.  Rather than dealing with the first three Why questions (Phylogeny, Ontogeny or Function), I’d like to consider only the fourth Why, Proximate Cause, with regard to the practice of engaging in religious rituals.  In other words, this post will consider the bodily machinery that leads people to attend religious rituals: the immediate payoff to the human animal.

Many believers would answer this question by introspecting.  Believers have often told me that they go to church because they “experience God.”  [How strange that God doesn’t so often hang out in the home, at cocktail parties or in Las Vegas!].  Many believers thus think that you can simply think about thinking to figure out why they do things.  Numerous and repeated experiments have proven introspection to be woefully unreliable, however.

For instance, in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” [Psychological Review 84, pp. 231-259.]  They allowed female subjects to examine and select stockings.  The subjects offered lots of reasons for why they selected the stockings they selected (they spoke of such things as texture and sheerness).  Unbeknown to them, the stockings were identical.  This and numerous additional experiments robustly demonstrate that people, though they always gave reasons for their choices, are often mistaken. “Inner workings of important aspects of the mind, including our own …

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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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