Book Review: The Religion Virus

The "New Atheists" have described religion as a delusion, a poison, and now apparently a virus.  The author says at the end that he hoped people would view their religions differently, but I doubt many religionists could get past the title of this book:  The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God, An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity.

Craig James applies Dawkins' theory of memes to the main concepts of religion.  In many ways I found this convincing, but he tries a little too hard to force the meme concept onto the book.

The concept in this book that has stuck with me most of all is the transition from pantheons of single-function gods to almighty, multi-dimensional single gods.  The All-Powerful god meme, which replaces the Warrior God Meme, the Protector God Meme, and the Loving Father God Meme, or rather conflates them all into one god-meme.  This transition wasn't ever complete with Catholics, at least.  They continue to pray to patron saints for help with their specialties. 

Still, it's a powerful idea.  It explains how God could be so contradictory, taking both sides of a football game for instance.  It also explains how the various stories and phases of the Old Testament portray different concepts of God.

The memeplex lost me a bit, but I get the concept of multiple memes sticking together and supporting each other.  I imagine a herd of gazellish ideas sticking together, which would be very adaptive.

Essentially, the analogy states that ideas that are advantageous to themselves will survive.  The most obvious is missionary work, of course.  Religions that prosletyze survive and those that don't, won't.  Christianity & Islam prosletyze and they number in the billions.  Judaism doesn't, and hence comprises a tiny minority in the world.

The virus analogy enters only at the end: religion is a parasite on society, needing to be passed from person to person to survive and yet destroying some of them.  It survives for its own purposes more than for the benefit to society... or something.  I found this part a little bit of a stretch.  A virus spreads through unconscious mechanisms, and religion spreads through prosletyzing, brainwashing, and "educating" young children.  Some of the memes seem to infect other memeplexes a.k.a. religions, though.

Some of the book oversimplifies, especially the virus analogy.  Religion has helped or hurt its societies to varying degrees.  Of course you can claim that there are beneficial parasites as well as destructive ones, and some that are only destructive under the right circumstances.

It's definitely a thought-provoking book.  Anyone who has read the Bible knows that the "unchanging" God has changed quite a bit from the beginning to the end.  Even the commandment "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" implies that at one time Judaism was not monotheistic.  "The" God just wanted to be Numero Uno.  The warrior god seems to have softened his approach.  He wiped out the world, then he wiped out entire peoples or countries in genocidal rampages, then honed in on cities and eventually individuals.  "An eye for an eye" was a big moral improvement over genocide.  Then later there's no payment at all thanks to penal substitution.  God went from destroying the whole world to saying "fuhgeddaboudit."  This book frames a theory that explains these changes.

The War on New Year's

We used to say "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year."  The phrase has been immortalized in song.  We send greeting cards with this message.

Then we got lazy and started saying "Happy Holidays."  A two word catch-all greeting was much less of a mouthful than the six-word greeting that covered the whole holiday season.

And that worked for quite some time.  Many years.  Our hustle-bustle lifestyle fit with our holiday spirit just fine.  We could do Christmas shopping the day after Thanksgiving, then come home and eat leftover turkey.  On the day after Christmas we'd be back at the mall, shopping the sales in the same spirit as "Black Friday."  Then by New Year's Eve we'd be ready for a party that didn't include eating too much or giving gifts that people don't really need.  Just pure partying.  No baggage.

And then the next day we could start thinking about Valentine's Day.

But then certain people got concerned that our abbreviated greeting was giving short shrift to Christ's birthday.  After all, without Christ there would be no holiday season.  They don't celebrate all those holidays.  They just celebrate one, but they start it on Thanksgiving and finish up sometime after January 1.   So they took offense at the suggestion that there was more than one holiday in the "season."

It's bad enough that Thanksgiving gets the smack-down when it is clearly part of the Christmas season now, but New Year's is no longer recognized either.  These people want us to say "Merry Christmas" without adding "and Happy New Year."  They are rewriting history, claiming that "Merry Christmas is all that was ever said.

New Year's Eve used to be about getting drunk, kissing strangers, and waking up with a horrible hangover.  Now it's not even its own holiday anymore.  If it's a holiday at all, it's part of the endless marathon of Christmassing that starts just before Thanksgiving.  It's not about getting drunk and waking up in a fog the next day.  Now it's about organizing your shit into color coded Rubbermaid bins and making impossible resolutions.

But some of us know better, and it's up to us to stand up for what's Right and True.  If you know any sanctimonious Christians who claim that "Christ is the reason for the season," walk right up to them from December 26 through January 1, and say "HAPPY NEW YEAR."

Death of a God

The death of Kim Jong Il has brought to light a lot of information I didn't previously know.  I'm surprised he isn't mourned by more people.  His birth was accompanied by a heavenly miracle.  He talked within a few months and walked way ahead of schedule.  He authored thousands of books as a college student, and composed an opera. He made several holes in one on his first time on a golf course. But don't just trust me.  Read it here.

Or check out the movie:




So many people couldn't believe something so untrue, could they?  Sure, they were all taught to believe that, but they were taught it because it's true

Skeptics dispute the details of his life, of course.  Bitter hopeless people with nothing to live for but the evil wish to hurt the reputation of a beloved god will always try to dissuade the true believers.  The tears of the faithful should be proof enough that he is indeed a good and beloved leader.   

I prophesy that he will appear again to his people and tell them to obey his holy son's commandments. 

"She's in God's Hands Now"

Last week a seven-year-old little girl and her 21-year-old uncle were killed in what seems to have been a burglary.  Their funeral was on Saturday and the TV news showed several people making comments about it.  And of course someone said the inevitable "She's in God's arms and God is taking care of her now."

I've heard that sentiment a million times but this time I realized.... why would you want a crime victim to be in the hands of the same god that let her get murdered?  I mean, if being "in God's hands" was some kind of protection, then obviously God isn't all-powerful or else he'd have protected her on Earth.  Not much of god if he can only keep her safe after she's shed her corporeal self and starts hanging out with him and the angels.  I thought there was no suffering in Heaven, so he's protecting her from what?  Boredom?  What a challenge!

Sometimes when a child dies they say "God needed another angel in heaven so he took her."  (Usually just the girls.  I suppose when boys die the Devil gets them?  *shrug*)  What?  Why would he need another angel?  What do angels do besides sing his heavenly praises?  There's no work in heaven, and if there was, why make children do it?  And why would God need an angel?  Why would God need anything for that matter?

  

And anyway, you'd think God would know how many angels he needs to surround himself with and not have to change his mind after letting one be a child for seven years.  There's no death or disease in Heaven, so it's not like one of the angels came down with laryngitis and had to drop out of the Heavenly Choir.

I can understand the need for comforting thoughts in a time of grief, but how can these fairy tales be any kind of comfort?  I find it rather dismissive of the absolute horror that the child experienced.  "Oh yeah she was terrified and then she got shot and maybe she bled and hurt for a little while, and maybe she saw her favorite uncle take a bullet too, but it's all okay now."   Uhhh yeah, her suffering is over, but not that of her family. 

When challenged about it, most people would admit that their fairy tales are just made up to soothe their feelings.  People say these things without any thought for the theology of it, or even the logic of it.  They make up a way to reframe their situation in a way that makes it less painful.

It reminds me of Dissociative Disorder.  The abused child has been taxed beyond their ability to cope, so their mind supplies them with another personality that can take the lumps for them.  We've all probably been in situations where we mentally "check out" because it's so uncomfortable.  The next phase would be imagining you're watching yourself taking in the pain.  After that, dissociation.  And then after that.... dissociate the entire universe.  Make up a universe in which the unfair becomes fair and pain is turned to comfort.

Life is tough.  Death is also tough.  We atheists comfort ourselves that Hitch left behind his writings and the fond memories people have of him.  We had the luxury of being able to prepare for his loss, but  we still miss him.  The little girl's life was cut so short that there wasn't much of a legacy there.  It was truly horrific, and we can empathize with the grief of her family and friends. 

Thanks to vaccines, water treatment plants, sewage systems, and food safety inspections, the girl's family was not unrealistic in believing she could have lived into her eighties.  But life still has its risks, however small, from day one through the "natural" ending.  This is one of those times when a rare event happens.  We wish they were even more rare, of course.

In the Middle Ages people seemed to believe in Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck.  (Yes, even in the supposedly most religious age of Christianity there was a lot of pagan stuff floating around!  Who'da thunk it?)  She turned her wheel (The Wheel Of Fortune) and people rose or fell according to where they were on the wheel.  Even though they had a thousand or more years of Christian theology to turn to, they still had to admit that in the end sometimes shit just happens and it's out of your hands.  They didn't imagine that it was in God's hands, either. 

Medieval theology was based pretty much on the Bible, unlike the theology of the ultra-religious of American society (who claim to be "Biblical").  They believed in salvation of the soul, but as for the rest, shit happened.  I have to admire the fact that they spun off their dissociation into a different deity rather than rewriting the theology of The God to ameliorate their pain.  I think Christianity was as successful as it was in converting "pagans" in part because it originally lacked that promise of making things happen on Earth in the same way that pagan gods did.  The pagan god of harvest, childbirth, or whatever, was fickle and could let you down.  The Christian god of damnation and forgiveness wasn't interested in those things, just what you believed about him.  Of course, this left open the door to pagan ideas and celebrations, such as Fortuna, and yule logs and gift-giving at the Solstice.

Now, apparently, instead of reverting to Pagan gods or studying The Problem of Evil, people just make shit up about God.  You don't have to have a theology degree or even to have read the entire Bible to do it.  Here's the formula: 

1. Feel bad. 
2. Imagine a Hollywood fairy tale ending. 
3. Attribute the fairy tale ending to God.

The End.

Goodbye, Hitch

Although I disagreed with some of his opinions, I will miss his voice in the atheist world.  He was one of the few outspoken atheists not to come from academia or the sciences.  His  voice was the voice of the common sense human being who looks at the world's superstitions and the damage done and says "This is crap."

Of course as an atheist blogger who isn't a scientist I appreciate that voice.  I also admire his way with words and I believe he opened the door for other voices to join in.  With Dawkins and Hawking we have representatives of the "answers" that counter the creationist worldview.  A lot of believers take the Genesis story with a grain of salt, anyway, so we need to point out the many other reasons why religion is false.  Hitch took on the "Religion does good things" meme. 

His "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" was one of the "New Atheist" books of the past few years.  I had never heard of him until I picked up that book.  It's worth the read just for his writing style, but also gives you plenty to ponder.  I'm a fan of religious art and music, and I have often had to deal with friends who point out "If it weren't for religion Bach wouldn't have comnposed his B Minor Mass!"  [so there].  It's tedious to have to point out that Bach composed a lot of secular music and DaVinci's Mona Lisa is just as important as the Sistene Chapel ceiling.  Without religion, Bach and DaVinci would still have been great artists, just not with religious themes.

So... I don't necessarily believe that religion poisons everything but I admire Hitch for expressing himself and showing another side of the atheist spectrum.  He will never be replaced, but his niche will be filled by some of the people he inspired.

YAY for Team Atheist!!!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/12/us-atheists-donations-idUSTRE7B81SU20111212


Athiests on reddit got together and donated to Doctors Without Borders.  Awesome!

Doctors without Borders (DWB), also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, gets about 4,000 hits on its U.S. website on an average Sunday. Last Sunday that number ballooned to 50,000 as a horde of redditors, subscribers to the social media site reddit.com, thundered across the DWB homepage.

Thousands more clicked through from the atheism sub-reddit, a site normally given over to finding holes in religions and picking fights with creationists, and headed for a dedicated site at firstgiving.com, where they have so far given $180,000...

DWB normally gets a few million dollars a year from about 250-300 third party fundraising events, anything from reddit to a child selling home-made lemonade on the street corner. Reddit has contributed about 10 percent of that total in a few days.

I have never posted at reddit so I took a quick glance.  It's kind of overwhelming.  But google came to my rescue and I found the actual donation page.  It's at $194k now, just shy of the $200k goal.  Open your wallets if you can and help Team Atheist reach the $200k mark!

http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/r-atheism/ratheism

Nerds and Male Privilege

Men in the nerdlier professions tend to be atheists.  They are the ones who study the logical subjects but yet still have the instincts of any normal human being.  Sadly, they don't get the exposure needed to learn as much about women as they do about computers, computer games, and whatever science they love because women are typically discouraged from them even today.  (We also develop language skills earlier, possibly to the detriment of the parts of the brain necessary for science)

So... anywho, having observed Elevatorgate and contributed my two cents, I had some deja vu while reading this essay:

http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2011/11/nerds-and-male-privilege/

Completely different corner of geekdom, completely similar issues.  A brilliant, brilliant essay, from a man who "gets it."  Highly recommended.