Useful things religion gave us

That religion gave us some wonderful cultural or personal goodies is no argument for religion being true, or even useful.   Without religion we would still come up with whatever our psyche demands because our psyche demands it.  People are people.

One example is meditation.  It was developed in Buddhism, migrated around the world, and now can be  completely divorced from the religion that developed it.

I have used it at points in my life and I find it very calming and focusing.  Awhile ago I ran into this article in the L.A. Times about meditation led by a former Buddhist nun.  The local museum here offers it unguided except for downloadable tracks to help you destress at the end of the week.

I'm an art lover, and I can get into a trance state at a concert or at a museum just from the art.  I can also meditate without tibetan chimes or an mp3 over earbuds.  This makes me think that meditation and the resulting feelings could have come about without religion, but without neuroscience people wouldn't understand their illusory mental state.

Neurologists have managed to study the effect of meditation (.pdf) on the brain.  Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows the brain in action, and studies have shown that meditation affects many parts of the brain.  Occam's razor would suggest that meditation is "all in the mind," and not at all supernatural.  I've heard the argument that neurological phenomena that have been interpreted as religious experience are evidence that God has made the human mind such that he can dial in, when the human has made his/her brain receptive of course.  But the same people who make this argument also believe that babies with undeveloped brains, brain-dead people, and people with severe brain damage have souls.  How conveeeenient.  So the soul is in the brain when it's having a religious experience, but it's also in the brain when it's incapable of having a religious experience.
So... religion may have invented meditation, or at least developed it, but it's all-natural and would probably have been discovered at some point anyway.  We discovered mind-altering drugs all over the world.  We would have discovered mind-altering practices, too.  Not to mention, it's possible to have a mental state that feels divine in many different cultures, with many different deities messing with the brain.  If there were one true deity, wouldn't everyone have the same interpretation of their weird neurological states?

And speaking of art, if not for religion, would we have Bach's B Minor Mass?  What about the Sistene Chapel?



Because I'm an art and music lover, this has been lobbed at me by believers more often than any other "argument."  Or perhaps "jabbed" would be the better word, since it is usually said with an implied "Touché."  I try very hard not to sigh before I point out that Bach also composed the Brandenburg concertos and the Mona Lisa is not a religious painting (not by Michelangelo, but still... )

In the past, artists did not have the artistic freedom that they do now.  Michelangelo and Bach had employers, and they had specific job duties.  In some eras, artists worked on commission, but they didn't have a free hand then, either.  They were the best of their generations, so they had employers or patrons with the means to give them a broad canvas so the products were pretty spectacular.  Michelangelo had many "canvases" and Bach had fine singers and instrumentalists to work with.  But Michelangelo didn't have the freedom to paint pagan stories at the Vatican and Bach couldn't tamper with the words of the Mass.  So the argument falls apart because of patronage.  You can turn it around and say something like this:  "Without the greediness of The Church, the best artists of Western Europe would have had the freedom to execute their own vision rather pander in religious sentiment."

The ultimate utility of religion is social control, especially supposed control of supposed morality.  This one gets trotted out often in the letters to the editor in the local paper, and probably all over the country.  A favorite version is: "Since they took God out of the schools there's been a decline in morality and society's going to hell in a handbasket."  Not to mention, Newtown happened because God was expelled.  There are a lot of problems with this, but foremost is that there are two Biblical moralities:  in the Old Testament, God punishes the whole species, or a whole country, or a whole city, based on what only some people are doing.  This terrifies the "good" people who think the rest of us are going to get them into trouble with their brutish sky daddy.  In the New Testament, morality is a total mess, because salvation is based not on works, but on belief, but the main idea is forgiveness.  Except in old-fashioned Catholicism, anything can be forgiven, including murder  (but not butt-sex!)

There is something to the idea that religion influences morality, but not as much as believers think.  First, not hurting other people is something you learn as a child in your family and then extend to your fellow humans in wider and wider circles.  Whether you learn not to hit other kids in school, Sunday school, or the soccerfield, you still learn that lesson.  Likewise, if your family is messed up or you have some brain malfunction and you turn out to be a sociopath, it doesn't matter if you go to church.  A church-going sociopath has a ready-made pool of gullible suckers to take advantage of, and the unchurched sociopath has to make mayhem somewhere else.

Fear of the wrath of the invisible sky-daddy does seem to help some people stay on the "right" side, but only because their beliefs in the supernatural have been a crutch preventing them from developing their natural moral muscle.  Those in the middle, a.k.a. those the Devil and God are battling for, will be influenced by whatever social force is most important to them, regardless of their religion.

So.... does the utility of a religion make any difference in whether it should be followed?  If you think that atheists should join a church even though they don't believe in any of the tenets, then maybe yes (though I strongly disagree on that point)  But if you think that the utility of religion is some kind of proof that atheists should believe in that religion, then the answer is NO!  It's just proof that money, power, and human evolution can sometimes result in something useful.  It's not proof of the supernatural.

Grandma Kills Grandkids, Mom Thinks They're With God

http://news.yahoo.com/cops-grandma-shot-self-young-grandsons-car-145334468.html

PRESTON, Conn. (AP) — A woman who picked up her two young grandsons from daycare and was supposed to bring them home so the 2-year-old could open his birthday presents instead drove them to a neighboring town and shot and killed the children and herself, state police and family members said.

The bodies of 47-year-old Debra Denison and her grandsons, 2-year-old Alton Perry and 6-month-old Ashton Perry, were found Tuesday night in a car parked near Lake of Isles in Preston, in the southeastern part of the state.

...Family members said Denison, the boys' maternal grandmother, had a history of mental health problems.

...Denison also had a 13-year-year-old son and, in her suicide note, she said in part that God was watching over him on Tuesday, White [the other grandparent] said.

In Facebook postings late Tuesday and Wednesday morning, Brenda Perry [the mom] thanked people for their prayers and said she loved her sons.

"God (has) two beautiful angels helping him now," the postings said. "My boys are in an amazing place we got a few great angels watching over us. love you Ashton and alton."

Well naturally you're going to go right into the God-talk when you yourself allowed your mentally ill mother to be on the approved list of people to pick up your kids even though the kids overwhelmed her.  And did mom know that grandma had access to a gun?  How did that happen?

Guilt and grief are terrible things, but how does imagining that God has enslaved a toddler and infant make things better?

Grandma left a suicide note, acknowledging that she is leaving her youngest child motherless.  God is watching over him?  God couldn't prevent her from offing the toddler and the baby, what good will God do for the teenager?

I seriously hope for the teen's sake that he gets placed in a foster home far, far away from his nutty Christian family.  As crazy as they are, he'd be better off being sent to a Catholic boarding school and being fucked up the ass by a pedophile priest.  At least those priests aren't murderers.

My interview at Deity Shmeity

http://deityshmeity.blogspot.com/2013/02/an-interview-with-lady-atheist.html

There are quite a few interesting interviews there (besides my scintillating one).  We atheists are a diverse bunch.

CNN Interviews: The Amazing Atheist & William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig wants Dawkins to debate him.  Dawkins won't.

CNN has WLC on, and who is the opposition?  Not someone with a Ph.D., but a vlogger who has a propensity to rant.  No offense to Mr. Amazing, but I wonder what Mr. I-want-to-debate-Dawkins felt when he found out CNN was putting up an unlettered vlogger against him.  Yes, even CNN knows that WLC's arguments are so weak that he's on the level with someone who rants in front of a webcam.  What's that in the background?  Could the disciples be carving up some Humble Pie for WLC?

WLC & The Amazing Atheist on the pope's retirement and the rise of atheism in the U.S.:

Links 2/23

Cut the shit and vaccinate your kids!  This means YOU, Catholics.

That Awkward Moment When Anti-Immigration Protesters Realize They're Immigrants too.  Priceless.

Arizona's attempt to take Medicaid funding away from Planned Parenthood patients gets the axe.  I wonder what would happen if Medicaid were withheld from Catholic hospitals.

CNN offers its Ten Rules of the Internet

Stumbled onto the improbably titled blog, Experimental Theology, which has some posts on something called "Christian A/Theism."   This blog reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."   The corollary could be "It is difficult to get a theologian to admit to being an atheist when his salary is paid by a religious institution."  This poor soul is twisting into knots trying to craft a theology he can believe in.

Huffpo blogger thinks sciency atheists should be nicer to sciency religionists.  As a politically expedient tactic, maybe.  But does religion have a role in science?  uhhh NO!

The Anti-Science Left:  Author Alex Berezow on Why Both Parties Fail at Science.

Salon's list of 10 Celebs You Didn't Know Were Atheists.  I knew about Seth McFarlane and Angelina Jolie & Harry Potter.  Hugh Hefner being on the list is just what we need for the "You just want to sin" argument.  How about "You just want to adopt brown-skinned babies?"   Don't hear that one much.

How the U.S.'s five most numerous denominations view homosexuality (with promo of show about Methodists' dilemma)

George Costanza look-alike neo-nazi opens a yeshiva in Ohio.

Anti-Semitism is up in France.  Do the French like anybody?  Jews are leaving France, and they're also leaving Hungary.  In Tunisia, anti-semitic activity is on the rise.  What year is this?  1933?

Meanwhile, a film documents how The Philippines rescued 1300 Jews during the Holocaust.

New Video: "Sophia Investigates the Good News Club"

hat tip: The Thinking Atheist podcast. He interviews Katherine Stewart, who wrote The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children.  She also has a blog.  The Good News Club (not a club, really fundamentalist education with a five-year curriculum aimed at elementary children in public schools, even kindergartners) came to her hometown of Santa Barbara, California.  They're probably in your town too, or they want to be.  They're in 3500 schools nationwide.

She's not the only one drawing attention to this menace.  Check out "Good News Club: A Critique."

Saturday Night Live: "DJesus Uncrossed" Movie Trailer

Hilarious!