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Weekly quote #32: D. Graham Burnett July 4, 2008

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This week’s quote is a paragraph from “Funhouse Goddess” — an essay in the current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly (pp 183-189 of Vol I No 3). In the paragraph, which appears on page 188, Burnett explains a possible take on Charles Fourier’s reasoning behind a rather liberated philosophy, involving really loving thy neighbor:

“Assuming a loving God who’s trying to speak through nature, it followed that our desires are His very clearest instructions. And even if they are bizarre (Fourier briefly touched on foot fetishes, dress-up fantasies, and a variety of other unconventional appetites), they must all fit together somehow in that “divine order” that the theologians had been ratcheting on about since the age of the Church Fathers. You can sort of understand Fourier to be calling their patristic bluff: “Loving God? Divine Plan? Natue as Norm? Okay, my firends, let’s try to make this work, given what we know about life down here….” In view of his answer, Fourier was either a satirist of super-Swiftian proportions or one of the most devout men ever to live. That you can’t quite decide which is testimony to his uncanny literarty gifts.”

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A fabulous delusion? July 3, 2008

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“I was watching the 1966 classic film, A Man For All Seasons, about the Thomas Moore’s principled stance in opposition to Henry VIII’s grab for power. Ultimately, Moore is found guilty of treason, and in the final scene, after giving his executioner the customary tip for a clean blow, tells him, ‘don’t worry, you are sending me to God’. Considering the fear of death is one of the greatest anxieties for a conscious being, what a fabulous delusion!”

That’s how a post on investing behavior begins at OB. And the analogy is quite fitting. But, I fixated on the last phrase quoted above, describing the delusion held by one about to die that paradise awaits as fabulous. I would say that it is hardly so. Rather, a belief that death is merely a passing on to something better — or, in the case of most afterlife beliefs, something vastly or even infinitely better — can’t have much of an effect other than to render the believer much more willing to die. And I don’t see much good in that at all; even if one discounts the negative consequences that come to mind — an increase in reckless behavior, a willingness to ignore the future, and of course the perhaps too-obvious example of our time, suicide attacks — anything that makes people less likely to struggle to exist, to continue to live as much as they possibly can, is something that can only work to deprive them of the only thing they have: their lives.

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Religion as spandrel, the book June 27, 2008

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Via Mind Hacks, a link to a review at The Immanent Frame of a book written by Pascal Boyer which takes a cognitive science-based approach to religion, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.

The review seems mostly dismissive, but it’s description of the author’s explanation is one to which I am sympathetic:

“…we should understand religious ideas… and related practices… not as more-or-less functional (or dysfunctional) human responses to recurrent human conditions and experiences but, rather, as the effects of the automatic operation of a number of specific, highly specialized, innate and universal mental mechanisms.”

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movin’ on up June 14, 2008

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I must be doing something right* — first my recent visit in the comments on “overestimating religon” (Hi, Mike!), and now a “comment” on my last post, “cult evolution”. Well, less of a comment and more of a sad attempt to advertise a ridiculous web site, The Quest of Right, which is a mish-mash of ID, New Age, and some other crap. No need to seek it out, fair reader (and I’m certainly not gonna link to it, and I edited the comment to remove any links): nothing to see there but the usual: ‘correcting science’, ‘quantum electrons’, ‘oxidation’, ‘anti-matter’, and so on.

At any rate, I’m finally attracting some theistic oddballs! Yay!

*Most likely, it’s a result of having blog posts featured at the bottom of the forum main page.

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overestimating religion June 9, 2008

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Two sciencebloggers, Jason Rosenhouse and Razib (at his non-sciblog blog), on an article by Alan Jacobs at the WSJ on whether or not religion is as powerful as people make it out to be.

Money quote from the WSJ article:

“That those seeking to acquire or keep power do use [religious] language, and regularly, indicates that religion has influence. But the idea that without religion people would stop seeking power, stop manipulating, stop deceiving, is just wishful thinking of the silliest kind.”

EvolutionBlog, responding to an earlier paragraph in the article, but I think it’s applicable to the part quoted above as well:

“No one, not Dawkins not Hitchens not Harris, believes that religion is the source of all, or even of most, of the evil in the world. They believe simply that it is a major source of bad things, and one singularly worthy of attention because of the bizarre societal taboo against criticizing it.”

And Gene Expression:

“The ingroup-outgroup dynamics in world religions lead to the emergence of fictive kinship. Anthropologists and sociologists have done a great deal of work about the functional importance of religious groups for individuals in terms of generating social networks and undergirding civil society. Social networks and the emergence of civil society are not necessarily features of religion, but religion is sufficient to generate both, so its utility is rather clear.”

I’m of a mind that the analogy between the dictator claiming patriotism and the theocrat claiming religion is actually a strong one — odds are both are using certain language and concepts to promote their own selfish ends. The fact that they can use that particular concept causes me to take a much more critical stance regarding it: religion, patriotism, any idea which can be so easily bent to serve one’s own ends deserves strong scrutiny — and sacred cows, the notion that certain areas of life should be beyond public questioning, should be looked at more closely still.

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seriously June 6, 2008

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No, really, if you don’t read Overcoming Bias, you should.

Here’s Eliezer on free will.

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all of us bayesians May 31, 2008

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Via Mind Hacks, a post at Reverendbayes’s Weblog which is an article appearing in New Scientist about a postulated over-arching theory of how our brains work, starting from Bayes’s Theorem (wonderful explanation of the theorem by none other than OB’s Eliezer Yudkowsy here):

“In fact, making predictions and re-evaluating them seems to be a universal feature of the brain. At all times your brain is weighing its inputs and comparing them with internal predictions in order to make sense of the world.”

I’m a big fan of the idea of human-mind-as-hypersensitive-pattern-imposer, so this fits in well with that framework (and hence feels nice to me, making me less likely to be critical of it…). One (speculative, of course and as almost always) thing that occurred to me as I read the post was that, if our brains do indeed function along the lines of predict-and-refine, than it would be very easy for them to interpret phenomena based on predictions — which themselves are heavily influenced by our social brains’ also-hypersensitive and highly-developed theory of mind — which point have as their starting point sentient intent… In other words, the idea that there is an actively intelligent force (or forces) behind the workings of the universe stems from our brains predicting (based on prior information) that things happen because they are intended to happen. If we feel a breeze on our face, we predict that something somewhere is ‘blowing’ just as we realize that another person — or we ourselves — blowing on us causes the sensation of a breeze. Humans evolved to see supernatural spirits all around just as we evolved to see faces in clouds.

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weekly quote #29: PZ Myers May 27, 2008

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O! happy rat!

PZ Myers’ Pharyngula is the origin of this week’s quote, which is taken from a dissection of the argument from warn-and-fuzzy. The post is here, the quote is taken from the first paragraph after the first quote block, responding to the idea that the emotional rewards of religious belief possess some sort of beneficial power:

“Put rats on a variable reinforcement schedule in a cage with a button that dispenses electric shocks to the pleasure centers of their brain, and they will push that button with passion and energy and even, as near as we can interpret it, joy … but that is a rat that has thrown away its rattiness and has dedicated its life to a shallow, empty abstraction. It is a rat that has found its god.”

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darwinogenebang theory May 14, 2008

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Via EvolutionBlog, a link to Dispatches from the Culture Wars and a post featuring two comments about how and why creationists attack evolution as they do; particularly featured is why it is so common to find questions about big bang theory and abiogenesis blended into the anti-evolution mix.

I find myself almost completely in agreement with Jason Rosenhouse’s commentary; I think the only point of departure is that I dislike theistic evolution because it contains elements of supernaturalism, to which I am staunchly opposed in all its forms.

As for the atheism-evolution link, I think it’s best to try to separate the two in discussion, which can be quite difficult to do. But that’s on account of both the willful ignorance and purposeful obfuscation of creationists.

At any rate, both posts are worth a look.

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