The Damned

Did you ever notice that the most corrupt countries in the world are the also the ones whose populations are the most "devout"? The Philippines and Latin America where the Catholic Church wields tremendous power are perfect examples of this phenomenon. I have a hypothesis that there is a positive correlation between religion and corruption in almost any given society. It seems that the greater

Many religions propagate by preying on our most deep rooted fears and insecurities. They use carrot and stick tactics to keep followers on side, and to entrap and pounce upon potential converts.  Because these tactics attack deep rooted, deep seeded fears and emotions, they work on people of all ages, persuasions and backgrounds.  There are, evidently, people who can see through these tactics.  For some this ability is born out of the fact they were not indoctrinated into religion throughout their childhood, for others critical thinking leads them in the right direction.

I’m fascinated by this carrot and stick approach, and the lengths established religions go to in order to keep up the charade.  The lengths they go to in order to suppress rational and critical thought, and the lengths they go to in order to convince those that will listen that the rewards, and punishments, are real and present.  It occurred to me that this is unique in our world, there is nowhere else an unproved threat is so feared, and an unproved reward so coveted.  Even considering what I would consider to be “edge cases”, such as the threat of prison for accumulating parking tickets, or the reward of winning the lottery, we do not rely on unsubstantiated claims, we can do the math on lottery odds and we can read the law that law enforcement officers apply.  For religion, it is the various deities that hold us up against their own, in some cases unknown, standards.

One facet of our lives that does seem to hinge on a similar carrot and stick mechanism is actually an offshoot of, or a poor relation to, religion.  Children up and down the land will be familiar with Santa Claus, and his unique brand of “justice”.  Much like a deity, he judges people based on their behaviour and rewards or punishes (punishment through the lack of reward in light of the children’s peers being rewarded) them based on his judgement.  And much like religion, the criteria for gaining this reward is largely unknown and ambiguous. “Be good” isn’t a sufficiently sophisticated mantra on which to live one’s life. “Good” varies based on a persons emotional and psychological make-up and their current situation. To you, someone with money and a job, stealing a loaf of bread may not seem like an altruistic venture, but to someone with no money, and a family to feed, it may seem like a judicial, justifiable, “good” act.  The concept of “Good” as a measurement is relative to a large number of variables, and as such leaves those who are being judged unsure as to where the measurement points lie.

The preceding paragraph is a fairly detailed analysis of what should be a simple concept. “Be good and you’ll get toys” is how it usually plays out, or, equally regularly, “stop that or Santa won’t bring you anything for Christmas”.  The carrot, and the stick.  So why do we grow out stop believing in Santa, but not a deity? Is it because it becomes socially unacceptable to continue your belief in one but not the other?  The similarities are obvious to all, the unproved being that judges us and dishes out rewards and punishments, the mountains of evidence that contradict eithers existence (Santa could no more travel around the earth in the space of a single day than God could create the earth, heaven, the universe, billions of stars and billions of planets in seven) and the clear intent of the creators of these myths (control and power).

While you’re pondering the acceptability of believing one imaginary being over another (remember atheists only disbelieve in one less God than theists - depending on the brand of theist), consider whether Santa Claus is a form of theistic grooming of children.  Is it a way of making it acceptable to believe in such unfounded claims later in life?  Is Santa, and the rewards believing in him provides in your early life, simply laying the groundwork for future theism?  It may just be that the rewards are more fitting to adults.  Many people get to a stage in their life at which point they can just purchase items they desire, in which case offering physical, tangible, rewards to believe in a deity may not be the convincer it is to a child.  It may also be that the punishment is so great that fear drives followers to religion, an eternity in hell is far worse than not getting the latest G.I Joe toy.

However, it is my belief (and I’m no psychologist) that not only is the concept of religion ingrained on our psyches at a a young age, but being encouraged to believe in Santa lays the ground work for a life of non-questioning belief.  It’s but a small piece of the jigsaw, admittedly, but a part nonetheless.

Did you believe in Santa as a kid? If so, why did you stop? And if you currently believe in a deity, why have you continued to believe in that deity long after discounting Santa as a credible, existing, entity?

*Note - I’ve heard of stories where parents have used the tradition of gifting at Christmas to push their children towards Christianity.  If you don’t believe in Christ, then you don’t celebrate Christmas, and you don’t deserve a gift.  As I touched on earlier, this threat can be simply brushed away in adulthood, but when you are reliant on your parents, it’s not so simple.  Quite frankly, these actions are pathetic.  If your child wants to better themselves by freeing their mind from the shackles of religious, dark age teachings, then you should exceptionally proud and encourage it at every opportunity.  The focus of this article is not to deal with these cases, which I hope are few and far between.

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Further to my post yesterday that contained the news about homophobic christian wingnuts from Westboro Baptish Church planning to protest a performance of The Laramie Project at a college in Basingstoke, the BBC reports that the UK Border Agency has banned the group from entering the country.

The UK Border Agency said it opposed “extremism in all its forms”.

A spokesman added: “Both these individuals have engaged in unacceptable behaviour by inciting hatred against a number of communities.

“We will continue to stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country.

“The exclusions policy is targeted at all those who seek to stir up tension and provoke others to violence regardless of their origins and beliefs.”

Phelps-Roper is reported to have described the UK government as “filthy” for not letting them in to spread their retarded hate diatribes. I’m sure Brown et al are shitting themselves.

BBC News: Anti-gay preachers banned from UK

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You’ve got to admire the sheer audacity of the bollocks Thomas Tobin keeps under wraps (and away from the kids, we hope) under his godly dress. This frock-wearing wingnut has unapologetically fabricated, out of whole (purple) cloth, a supposed interview with new US president Barack Obama in order to frame his misogynistic dogma.

/hattip: Homosecular Gaytheist (which I still think is an awesome blog name)

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It’s been a busy couple of days in the UK with regards to religious stupidity (as opposed to boring everyday stupidity, but there’s plenty of that too), and today is the first chance I’ve had to mention any of it. Time is short, so I’ll simply leave you with the articles concerned, and withhold commentary.

First of all, yesterday’s The Guardian had a feature in it’s G2 insert about Britain’s creationist community, and how batshit insane/ignorant they are. Thankfully they’re nowhere near as numerous nor well funded as their transatlantic (or antipodean, for that matter) compeers, although they do appear to have just as much (or, perhaps I should say, little) perspicacity.

The Guardian: Defying Darwin

Later on, I read in The Telegraph that the hate-filled gay-obsessed funeral-chaser christian homophobic fundie wingnuts from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas were planning to demonstrate at a student performance of an anti-homophobia play, The Laramie Project, in Basingstoke. These morons, who describe the queen as a “whore” (which I suppose could be considered technically accurate if you accept that the old biddy has been paid from the public coffers to have produced a number of sprogs destined to to sit on a shiny chair and wear an expensive hat), haven’t expressed whether they’re coming over to the UK themselves or if they have local sympathisers (Stephen “Birdshit” Green, perhaps?) to do it on their behalf.

The Telegraph: Westboro Baptist Church announces first anti-homosexuality picket in Britain

Deputy gobshite in chief (after the insane old guy who I’m convinced was the Tall Man in the Phantasm films) and matriarchal clown-car of the litigious arseholes, Shirley Phelps-Roper, was also in correspondence with The Telegraph, and the CAPS FILLED bible bashing wingnuttery is of the calibre that only these eejits can come out with. It’s tremendously amusing.

The Telegraph & Phelps-Roper: Westboro Baptist Church justifies UK picket

And, today, news from the Home Office broke that the law lords had determined that hate-filled murder-inspiring muslim fundie dipshit Abu Qatada was to be extradited from the UK to face terrorist charges in Jordan, and that cretinous and credulous HomSec Jacqui “Two Flats” Smith was creaming her knickers over the news, obviously still on a high from banning Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering the UK because a bunch of ass-backwards muslims might get upset and have a violent tantrum if some other people get to see his Fitna film.

BBC News: Law Lords back Qatada deportation

Phew! After all that, I think I need a nice hot cup of tea and a sit down.

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While browsing the TVOD provided by my ‘phone/Interet/television service provider I was pleasantly surprised to discover, quite by accident, a channel called BookZone.tv from the booksellers Waterstone’s.

Being a lover of books I thought I’d take a look around and see what they had for someone like me. Here, I was even more pleasantly surprised that they not only have a short chat with palaeontologist Dr Richard Fortey on Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species (obviously to coïncide with the 150th anniversary of that legendary tome’s publication and the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth) but it’s also the 150th anniversary of the publication of John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty, where they have a discussion with Professor Paul Kelly of the LSE.

The telly version has a further discussion with both Fortey and Kelly which I can’t find online, but the BookZone.tv web site has the two initial discussions available online to view individually.

Sorry, but they don’t offer embedding of their videos.

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‘Alfinched from Psychodiva.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:

1. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2. Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3. Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4. Tally your total at the bottom.

My reading list:

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X+
6. The Bible X
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X+
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X+
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy X
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X+
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh X
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X+
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens X
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34. Emma – Jane Austen X
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell X+
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy X
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X+
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding X+
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel *
52. Dune – Frank Herbert X
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X+
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X+
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas X+
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy X
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville X
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker X
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce X
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome X
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert X
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White X+
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton X+
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad X+
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X+ (one of my favourite books ever)
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks X
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams X+
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas X+
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X+
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

60/100.

Some of these I’ve never heard of, and some I have absolutely no interest in reading (Brigitte Jones being an example).

Admittedly, a number of these (occasionally considered “classics”) I probably wouldn’t have read if I weren’t expected to at school (notably Austen and Brontë — I find them dry and uninspiring) but that alone would easily have put me over the six the BBC would have.

Saying that, I’ve not read much in the way of fiction of late, most of my reading (list to be updated with my most recent holiday reads soon) has been popular science or other reality-based tomes. The fiction I have been reading is mostly things that I’ve previously read and really enjoy re-reading, Stranger In A Strange Land (Robert A Heinlein) and The Launching of Roger Brook (Dennis Wheatley) being the latest ones.

If you’ve read thus far, consider yourself tagged (if you like).

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Bob Churchill of the BHA has set up an excellent Netvibes collection, Humanism Universe of a bunch of humanism related stuff and other things of interest those the likes of me.

Dead handy it is too.

/hattip: No Double Standards

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Last week I noted an article in The Independent by Johann Hari defending free speech and the right to criticise religion. The article was also picked up by the Indian newspaper The Statesman, but a bunch of (4,000 or so) muslim fundies saw it an bitched and bawled, eventually rioting in front of The Statesman’s offices and calling for the arrest of the editor, the publisher and Hari.

Two days ago, the editor and the publisher were indeed arrested, and have been charged with deliberately acting with malicious intent to outrage religious feelings.

Hari has responded to this news in the Huffington Post with another spot-on article.

What should an honest defender of free speech say in this position? Every word I wrote was true. I believe the right to openly discuss religion, and follow the facts wherever they lead us, is one of the most precious on earth — especially in a democracy of a billion people rivven with streaks of fanaticism from a minority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So I cannot and will not apologize.

I did not write a sectarian attack on any particular religion of the kind that could lead to a rerun of India’s hellish anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh pogroms, but rather a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their critics. The right to free speech I am defending protects Muslims as much as everyone else. I passionately support their right to say anything they want — as long as I too have the right to respond.

Hari has been criticised by both fundies and those multicultural dhimmi eejits who always step up to support mad-islamists when they whinge enough.

It’s also worth going through the arguments of the Western defenders of these protesters, because they too aren’t going away. Already I have had e-mails and bloggers saying I was “asking for it” by writing a “needlessly provocative” article. When there is a disagreement and one side uses violence, it is a reassuring rhetorical stance to claim both sides are in the wrong, and you take a happy position somewhere in the middle. But is this true? I wrote an article defending human rights, and stating simple facts. Fanatics want to arrest or kill me for it. Is there equivalence here?

[My emphasis.]

The solution to the problems of free speech — that sometimes people will say terrible things — are always and irreducibly more free speech. If you don’t like what a person says, argue back. Make a better case. Persuade people. The best way to discredit a bad argument is to let people hear it. I recently interviewed the pseudo-historian David Irving, and simply quoting his crazy arguments did far more harm to him than any Austrian jail sentence for Holocaust Denial.

Please do not imagine that if you defend these rioters, you are defending ordinary Muslims. If we allow fanatics to silence all questioning voices, the primary victims today will be Muslim women, Muslim gay people, and the many good and honourable Muslim men who support them. Imagine what Europe would look like now if everybody who offered dissenting thoughts about Christianity in the seventeenth century and since was intimidated into silence by the mobs and tyrants who wanted to preserve the most literalist and fanatical readings of the Bible. Imagine how women and gay people would live.

One commentator summed up their comment with this insightful note:

Those who seek to shut down opposing views expose their essential weakness, and nothing else.

Indeed, the biggest weakness of all dogma is the rational discussion of same.

“Despite the Riots and Threats, I Stand By What I Wrote” — Johann Hari, The Huffington Post

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Ed Buckner, President of the American Atheists challenges author Ray Comfort on his position on Darwin's theory of evolution.

[0:05:35] ... Elements always have to do is go to pull the plug on atheism dot com and you'll see. Proof that the evolution has no. ...

Super-cute instigator of the ‘atheist bus’ campaign, Ariane Sherine, engaged in a (very) short (very) public debate (in the street), and it’s available on the BBC News site.

A Christian group is responding to an atheist bus advert campaign [which in turn was a response to a previous christian advertisment campaign, but nobosy ever seems to want to bother reporting this little factette] which carried the slogan, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”.

The Trinitarian Bible Society is now launching rival posters for London buses which contain religious verse and details on how to obtain a bible [ed: free winter fuel?].

Here, comedy writer Ariane Sherine who came up with the atheist campaign and David Larlham of the Trinitarian Bible Society debate the issues.

Watch the short video.

/hattip: The Enlightened Observer with some interesting commentary.

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