When I was in my 20’s, I was called a “God damned atheist” by a man who was sorely disappointed that I didn’t march off to the Catholic Church with his family. I was dating his daughter at the time, and I had been welcomed to visit her family home…
It’s not because I am obstinate, though I can be obstinate.
Rather, I simply can’t believe things like: “A virgin had a baby” or “A man who was dead later became alive” or “This piece of bread is really a man’s flesh.” I can’t believe such things because these things are simply not true. To me, such assertions are nonsense and it befuddles me when I hear other people uttering them. It’s especially befuddling to see the way many people utter religious claims. It’s as though they believe they have knives in their backs and they damned well say such things, or else. “Or else what?” I often think. “Let go of those scary thoughts. It’s just a bad dream. Free yourselves! Wake up!”
I also try to be kind. I am sadded to see people wasting their time and energy due to fear and ignorance. I want to do my part to help those who feel compelled to utter patently untrue things, even if they only do this on Sundays.
I am not alone, of course. In our frustration, many of us non-Believers wish to come up with a quick and dirty explanation for why other people publicly proclaim oxymoronic religious claims. It is this urge to quickly dispense of this mystery of religion (the mystery that anyone takes religious claims seriously) that is addressed by Pascal Boyer in his 2003 article, “Religious thought and behavior as byproducts of brain function.” Boyer is a faculty member in the departments …
For many scientists who study it, religion should be placed into one of two camps: 1) religion is an aberration, a mental virus; or 2) religion is an adaptation–that religion enhanced the survival of Believers. A well-written article by Robin Marantz Henig explores this issue in the New York Times. The title is “HeavenBound: a Scientific Exploration of How We Have Come to Believe in God.” Henig sums up the alternatives by reference to blood. A trait might be “adaptive,” like the ability of blood cells to transport oxygen. On the other hand, a trait might be simply a byproduct, such as the “redness” of blood.
Is blood prominent because it’s red or because it actually carries oxygen?
Several notable scientists and philosophers lead the charge from the first camp (that religion is a byproduct). One of them is Richard Dawkins, who argues that “religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident.” Others falling into this camp include Sam Harris, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer and Daniel Dennett. These believers in religion as a “byproduct” would also include Stephen Jay Gould, who proposed the use of the term “spandrel” to describe traits that have no adaptive value of their own.
If religion is a byproduct or a “spandrel,” of what is it a byproduct or “spandrel” of? Psychologists have looked carefully at several candidates: agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.
We see agents everywhere, it turns out, even in inanimate objects. The byproduct argument is …
In this short video, Max Blumenthal shows that there is no better way to find out what people are really like (really like) than to show up and watch them in action and listen to them. This video is called “The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour." The subject of…
This is the title of a newspaper commentary column that I stumbled onto recently. It was less annoying than I thought it would be. The "New Facts" turn out to be mainly the testimony of Ken Ham's Creation Museum (Here's my earlier post about that). One gripe I have is…