Category: critical thinking

6 Movie Friday: God is not good

February 4, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · ethics · religion

At the time of writing, some of you are reading last Friday’s edition of Movie Friday (I haven’t quite got back to my 2-week buffer, and since 2 weeks is too short a time to really respond to news I am making some slight adjustments to how I handle the writing). For those of you who are not regular readers (welcome!) and didn’t feel like clicking on the link (lazy!), last week I showed a couple examples of what I thought was an interesting development in hip-hop music: the introduction of the idea of religious doubt.

The reason why it’s particular interesting (to me at least) is that the black community is stereotyped as being particularly religious – traditionally Christian and more recently Muslim. Both of these faiths and their stereotypical overlap with the black community have good historical and sociological explanations. What’s even more interesting is the clip I want to show you today:

I’m not sure why all the Jews in this film clip have English accents, but whatever.

Jews are, from a sociological perspective, an incredibly interesting group of people. Judaism is an ancient religion that is not simply a philosophical belief, but a “live-in” religion with several traditions and rituals. Even people who are not religiously Jewish follow its traditional practices (I’m not completely sure, but I strongly suspect that all of my Jewish friends are atheist, but they all observe in one way or another). The story of the Jews is one of the oldest we have, and yet there is a lot in it that we would not, if given the opportunity for sober contemplation, consider good. Ultimately, historically, the story of the Jews is the story of a people that nobody wanted and many tried to wipe out.

What we see in this clip is an exploration of the kinds of questions that come with a sober contemplation of the story as it is given. A jealous, petty, vengeful and cruel god makes outrageous and illogical demands of a group of frightened people, and exacts lopsided and chillingly evil revenge against even slight transgressions. In return, he helps them kill and destroy entire cultures for having the temerity to either refuse to give up their land, or for following a different system of belief. It really is a shocking tale when it’s all stitched together.

So when people tell us that they get their knowledge of right and wrong from the Bible (or worse, that everyone should), I get the shivers. It’s a horrendously evil document that can be used to justify all sorts of things. It certainly demands that followers call evil things good and pretend that being punished by an abusive and jealous father is some twisted form of benevolence.

There are important questions that are asked by this clip. Anyone who believes that Yahweh is just and good, and bases that belief on the Bible needs to allow themselves to ask those questions. Those of us who don’t recognize the existence of Yahweh (or any other god) in the world around us already have answers.

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6 Hating gay people brings the world together

February 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · crapitalism · forces of stupid · hate · LGBT · news

We tend to have a fairly blind spot for Africa in this part of the world. Above and beyond our annoying tendency to think of Africa as a single political entity (rather than a continent with 53 distinct sovereign states – there are only 49 in Europe) , we have an entirely fictitious picture of the continent as a whole. I had drinks a while back with a friend who opined to me that part of the reason Africa had such an economic problem was because it lacked the natural resources that were so abundant in North America and Europe. This is, of course, the product of thinking of Africa as a vast wasteland of desert with slim pickings that require subsistence farming by its various tribes of bushmen. That entire picture is ludicrously false – the problem is that Africans have little control over their abundant natural resources, most of which are owned by foreign multi-national corporations.

As a result of this fractured image, we tend to think of ourselves as having little in common with the African people (aside from the sort of universal things we have in common with all people everywhere). However, we can hang our hats on this little nugget: they hate gay people just as much as we do:

A Ugandan gay rights campaigner who last year sued a local newspaper which outed him as homosexual has been beaten to death, activists say. Police have confirmed the death of David Kato and say they have arrested one suspect. Uganda’s Rolling Stone newspaper published the photographs of several people it said were gay next to a headline reading “Hang them”.

Hooray, they’re just as hate-filled as we are! Of course, we should be completely unsurprised by this, as Uganda had gone from being a major international player to a haven for the most vile and disgusting attitudes in the world. There is currently a movement afoot to pass legislation that would authorize the death penalty for the “crime” of being homosexual. I watched the leader of this movement on TV a few months ago being asked why he was persecuting gay people. His response (part 1 here, and part 2 here) was very revealing for two reasons. First, he considers the international opposition to the bill to be fueled primarily by colonial interference (which is a real concern in Africa, so I can’t say I blame him). The second one is that this movement is explicitly defended on religious grounds. He claims that homosexuality is “against God” repeatedly, unashamed to wear his Christianity on his sleeve.

I’ve alluded to this before, but Christians aren’t allowed to duck responsibility for stuff like this, as much as they’d like to. This false notion of “loving the sinner but hating the sin” quickly metastasizes into outright hatred like this. I’m sure that the people who are pushing for this bill think that they’re “loving the sinner” too. The problem arises when the “sin” is an inherent component of the identity of the “sinner” – when those two things are inextricably linked, it’s impossible to actually accomplish the things that this kind of cognitive dissonance would dictate. It is for this reason that homophobes repeatedly try to case homosexuality as a choice, or some kind of disease, or something that can be “fixed” through prayer and counselling.

Things are “sins” based only on their necessary outcomes. If homosexuality necessarily results in negative outcomes, then it is absolutely a bad thing. Rape, for example, is necessarily a bad thing because it violates the autonomy and security of another human being. Paedophilia is necessarily bad because it violates the trust of a minor who lacks the ability to make mature judgments. Homosexuality is not necessarily linked to the kinds of things that anti-gay advocates thump as proof of the harm of ‘teh ghey’ – HIV, abuse, promiscuity – these things all happen regardless of sexual orientation.

It’s tragic that Mr. Kato was murdered for standing up for his human right to exist without being imprisoned or executed for being gay. We can’t pretend that the kind of virulent ideas that are promoted by anti-gay activists and “love the sinner” Christians had nothing to do with it. Pretending to do so is simply willfully remaining ignorant and pretending that the murder of gay people isn’t a big enough problem for you to care about.

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0 And in case you thought I was being unfair…

February 2, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · forces of stupid · news · religion · secularism

In addition to the majority of my family, I have friends who are Catholic. A person with whom I did my undergraduate degree, who I have a great deal of affection for, reacted strongly to one of my previous posts about the ongoing stupidity present in the Catholic Church. She did not appreciate my characterization of the Church’s policies toward sex and sexuality as destructive and backwards, suggesting that perhaps I lacked understanding of why it was actually God’s manifest will that people in Africa get AIDS because condoms are a greater evil than human suffering.

When I explained to her that I was very familiar with Catholic doctrine, having been an active participant in the Church for the first half of my life, she intimated that perhaps my upbringing was part of the reason I was unfairly targeting the Church. This is a pretty popular attempt to derail a discussion that is common to believers in any kind of deity – you really do believe but you’re just angry so that’s why you’re speaking up. I don’t think it was Mary’s (not her real name) intent to make this argument explicitly, but the subtext was pretty clear.

If I haven’t made this clear before, I will absolutely own up to the fact that I have a particular axe to grind with the Roman Catholic Church. I had great trust in the institution when I was young, but the more I learned about it the more it let me down. I can’t help but feel a sense of personal betrayal that a group that preached morality to me for years is, in fact, so shockingly immoral that it beggars belief. The schadenfreude part of my lizard brain does take some personal delight in their hypocrisy and evil being laid bare. However, as I try my utmost to be a fair journalist in all matters, I take the utmost care to prevent too much of my personal beef from leaking into my analysis of events.

My criticisms of religion, like the one from this morning (which I’m sure Mary will hate, although it’s doubtful she’ll even read it) are about religion, not about a particular religion. I am equally incensed by the stupidity of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, new-age “spirituality” and any other invocation of supernatural nonsense that drapes itself in the robes of undeserved respect that we call “religion”.

An Indian court has remanded in custody a Hindu holy man accused of a string of bomb attacks previously thought to be the work of Muslim militants. Swami Aseemanand allegedly admitted to placing bombs on a train to Pakistan, at a Sufi shrine and at a mosque. He has also allegedly confessed to carrying out two assaults on the southern Indian town of Malegaon, which has a large Muslim population.

There is no religious tradition that is immune from the kind of abuse of its power that is the hallmark of religion. Hindu and Muslim violence is tearing Southern Asia apart, much the way that Buddhist and Muslim violence tore apart the country of Sri Lanka. There is no special status granted to Buddhism or Hinduism (despite what Sam Harris would try to convince you) – supernatural claims and their associated tribal affiliations are not unique to the Abrahamic religions.

Men and women have been banned from shaking hands in a district of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab. Under the ban imposed in the southern town of Jowhar, men and women who are not related are also barred from walking together or chatting in public. It is the first time such social restrictions have been introduced. The al-Shabab administration said those who disobeyed the new rules would be punished according to Sharia law.

Is there any way in which this nonsense makes for a better world? The Orwelian doublethink of the religious would have you believe that such ridiculous restrictions are the way to instill a sense of dignity in the women of Somalia (at least that’s what Mary tried to convince me) – ultimately opening the path to their gaining civil rights. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for a rational mind to look at this kind of abject nonsense and have to square the circle of clear maleficence being committed in the name of morality. Well, actually I can imagine because I did it myself for the better part of a decade.

An Indian shaman who allegedly forced women to drink a potion to prove they were not witches has been arrested. Nearly 30 women fell ill after they were rounded up in Shivni village in central Chhattisgarh state on Sunday and made to drink the herbal brew. A senior police officer told the BBC that six villagers had also been arrested. Witch hunts targeting women are common in east and central India, and a number of accused are killed every year.

This isn’t happening because of a religion, or a particular religious tradition. This is what happens when people actually believe the ridiculous superstitious nonsense that is the bread and butter of faith. When we are told that belief without evidence is some kind of virtue, we open a dangerous door – a door that permits us to murder those who believe differently, to outlaw completely harmless and potentially beneficial practices in the name of an unseen deity, and to poison people on the suspicion of heresy. It is only by throwing out the need for logic and evidence in the name of “faith” that such things are permissible – I don’t care what religious tradition that kind of brainlessness manifests itself as.

Of course the real problem isn’t the religious – it’s us. The emperor’s clothes only exist because we willingly insist that because he believes that he’s not nude, we must do so too. Any respect we grant to the bare naked stupidity that is “faith” is too much. While I’m perfectly willing to respect my neighbour’s right to believe whatever she likes, I will confer no such deference to how I treat the lunacy itself.

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3 Abuse? What abuse? Quick, look over there!

February 2, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Catholic church · crapitalism · critical thinking · forces of stupid · news · religion

The long, depressing collapse of the Church of Rome continues unabated, as close scrutiny keeps turning up case after case of child abuse and systematic attempts to shield the perpetrators from punishment. The latest piece of evidence is a letter from Vatican to the bishopric of the Irish Church:

The letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican’s rejection of an Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests. The letter’s message undermines persistent Vatican claims that the church never instructed bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. Instead, the letter emphasizes the church’s right to handle all child-abuse allegations and determine punishments in house rather than hand that power to civil authorities.

Anti-church forces were quick to claim this letter as some kind of “smoking gun” implication of the Church’s hand in covering up the crimes. People have known that this practice was going on for a long time, to the point where it has become a sort of running gag. What the Church long denied was that these kinds of practices were done with the knowledge and implicit approval of the Vatican, and the use of Church political power to shield the guilty from prosecution. That claim has been repeatedly put to the lie by the increasing number of revelations against the Church.

I took the liberty of reading the letter. It is far from definitive proof of anything, let alone the “smoking gun” that conclusively demonstrates that the RCC was taking an active role in shielding child rapists. It is, more or less, consistent with the Church’s ongoing stance of insisting that canon law supersedes secular law. Abusers should be, according to the letter, handled by Church authorities rather than being treated like one would treat any other criminal – automatically turning them over to police. While it’s possible to connect the dots between an exhortation to circumvent the law and a de facto cover-up, this isn’t the document that’s going to pull the whole case together I’m sorry to say.

What’s more interesting than the emergence of this letter is the way the Church is reacting to it. I’m not really referring to their perfunctory and depressingly-predictable denial of reality:

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the letter was genuine. But he told the New York Times: “It refers to a situation that we’ve now moved beyond. That approach has been surpassed, including its ideas about collaborating with civil authorities.” Fr Lombardi said the letter was “not new”, and insisted that “they’ve known about it in Ireland for some time”.

That kind of response is predictable – “oh yes we knew about it the whole time, but that was the old church! This is the new church!” Never mind that the letter isn’t even 15 years old, just keep sweeping that evidence under the rug. But as I said, this kind of response is exactly what you’d expect from a corrupt organization whose misdeeds are finally coming to light.

This is something only the Church could come up with:

Pope Benedict XVI on Friday attributed a miracle to the late Pope John Paul II, which moves the former pontiff one step closer to sainthood. Benedict declared that the cure of a French nun who suffered from Parkinson’s disease was a miracle. A Vatican-appointed group of doctors and theologians, cardinals and bishops agreed that the cure of a French nun, Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, was a miracle because of the intercession of John Paul.

Two months after John Paul’s death, the nun claimed she woke up feeling cured of her disease. The nun and the others in her order had prayed to John Paul, who also suffered from Parkinson’s. In a statement issued Friday, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints said Vatican-appointed doctors “scrupulously” studied the case and found that the nun’s cure had no scientific explanation.

Imagine for a second that you read this in the newspaper:

Former BP CEO Tony Hayward and a team of company-appointed scientists announced today that the catastrophic oil leak that caused irreversible damage to the Gulf Coast of the United States was, in fact, caused by Mole Men.

“We have long suspected,” said Hayward in a prepared statement “that Mole Men live below the surface of our planet. Given that BP has scrupulous safety standards in place to prevent leaks like this from happening, it is therefore impossible that anything could have gone wrong that was our fault. The only logical conclusion we are left with for this disaster is that Mole Men did it.”

In order to pull that kind of shenanigans, BP would be relying on the fact that everyone in the world is a complete and utter moron. That’s the only way that a line of bullshit that long and stinky could possibly hold up to even the most casual level of scrutiny. But that’s exactly what religious belief does to people – it erodes our ability to hold ridiculous supernatural claims like “a woman got better from Parkinson’s… therefore it was the result of the direct intercession of a particular dead person” up to appraisal. We are expected to simply nod and accept it with open arms.

This kind of ridiculous diversionary tactic should not work. The fact that it does is why I, and other anti-theists, are vehemently opposed to the exalted position of religion. It turns people into idiots who willingly swallow crap and tell you it’s caviar, while all the while committing unspeakable acts of evil and calling it virtue.

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4 Alternative therapies aren’t ALWAYS full of shit… but this one is

February 1, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · health · medicine · science · skepticism

It seems that once again I am donning my ‘scientist’ cap and wading knee-deep into the shit…

Literally:

A hospital physician from a major B.C. facility says several patients died in the last year from C. difficile — unnecessarily — after the health authority stopped her and her colleagues from giving an experimental, simple and highly effective treatment… The treatment, called a fecal transplant, involves introducing stool from a healthy donor — usually a relative — into an infected patient’s bowel, usually through an enema.

Yes, you read that correctly. Dr. Jeanne Keegan-Henry is proposing transplanting somebody’s poo into the bowels of someone with a Clostridium difficile infection in order to cure them.

Poo.

Transplant.

Poo Transplant.

It sounds like the name of a doomed-to-obscurity high school punk rock band. And yet, Dr. Keegan-Henry, who is by all accounts an able and qualified physician, is recommending it. Skeptical smackdown time, right?

Here’s the crazy thing about skepticism. Detractors would characterize it as being resolutely opposed to anything that doesn’t sound like Big Pharma drugs, or is too experimental or outside the realm of conventional medicine. While it is often worthwhile to listen to the criticisms that come from one’s enemies, it is important to resist the temptation to allow them to define your position. More often than not, they are all too happy to succumb to the temptation of straw-manning you into oblivion rather than give a dispassionate description of what it is you actually think (cue the peanut gallery coming out of the woodwork to point out the many times I’ve done it to them).

Skepticism is about evaluating claims, all claims, according to their plausibility and the evidence supporting their truth. When I first caught wind of poo transplants (reader’s note: this article will be stuffed full of poop jokes – you have been warned) my skeptic hackles immediately went up. It’s really the prototypical case – we have a brave maverick doctor who is standing up to the medical establishment and recommending a completely natural remedy to a condition that is usually treated with drugs. For bonus points, it involves enemas. Seems like this ripe stinker was dumped right on our plate as another crazy whackaloon looking for attention (and possibly a book deal).

So, what does a skeptic do? She goes to the evidence! A quick search on PubMed (the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health centralized research database) for “fecal transplant clostridium difficile” reveals 30 hits – not exactly a stellar start; usually it’s in the neighbourhood of a few hundred to a few thousand results. The majority of these hits were commentaries and letters rather than full-blown research articles – also not a good start; what we’re looking for is systematic reviews of clinical trials, or at least trials themselves. We don’t have that – what we have is a handful of case series reports, each representing a tiny number of patients.

So I took a look at the largest case series, that of a 12-patient sample. And the results? Well… would you forgive me if I say “holy shit”?

Of 12 patients with infections ranging from 79 to 1532 days (mean length = 352 days), 100% of the patients in this sample experienced a clinical response, defined as “cessation of diarrhea, cramps, and fever within 3 to 5 days”. The authors describe their inclusion and exclusion criteria clearly, as well as the treatment protocol. Patient followup ranged from 3 weeks to many years after the intervention (which is a necessary evil of a case series – it’s not a prospective trial where follow-up can be standardized).

So, cut and dry answer right? Obviously it worked for these patients! No need for further study – let’s approve the shit!

Not so fast…

The reason for putting on the brakes (and possibly leaving skid marks) is that this is one sample of patients. These results are certainly dramatic, but there were no enterobacteriology cultures done – the gut was not examined to see if it was truly the poop that did the trick. The patients from whom the samples were taken had taken doses of antibiotics before donating their sample – was it the poo or the drugs that done it? Even the authors of the paper admit that they don’t have a certain mechanism by which fecal transplantation works. There are certainly some plausible attempts at explanation, but they still don’t know.There was also no control group for comparison (although in a time-series design it is permissible to use the patients as their own controls, comparing them to their pre-trial state – I am channeling that degree in epidemiology!), meaning that we cannot rule out the placebo effect or some other event as explanatory.

Is Dr. Keegan-Henry right? Should we be allowing fecal transplanation? Maybe – the preliminary results are certainly compelling (to go from years of suffering to resolved in 3-5 days is really remarkable). We should be enrolling people in small-scale clinical trials to test for efficacy. Given that there are no observed adverse effects of the transplantation, there’s certainly no reason to block the investigation:

Dr. George Sing, a gastroenterologist at Burnaby Hospital, also wants to provide the treatment to patients. “We did table [a proposal], but it fell into the cracks,” said Sing. “We have been through all the channels … but when it goes through committees it gets bogged down.”

Heh… he said “fell into the cracks”.

This is the hallmark of skepticism – even if something looks totally batshit insane, we test claims against evidence, not against what we think should work. I’ll be interested to see if this story develops.

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11 Privilege: when turnabout isn’t fair play

January 31, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · feminism · privilege · racism

There is an age-old adage when it comes to argument – “turnabout is fair play”. Basically, the idea is that if an argument is reasonable in one direction, then it’s entirely reasonable when turned around and used the other way. When a homeopath demands 100% positive proof that homeopathy doesn’t work, it is an entirely fair argument to ask them to provide 100% proof that gremlins and faeries don’t exist. Because neither argument is reasonable, they can be scrapped. Similarly, when religious people invoke scripture to prove that something or other is ordained or banned by God, it is reasonable to turn that same argument around and show where the scripture ordains or bans something that contradicts the believer’s position.

Turnabout is entirely fair play in most cases, save one – when privilege is in play. Regular readers of this blog will probably remember my previous discussions of how privilege manifests itself in religious people, in discussions of racism, and even in the atheist movement itself. Privilege, for those unfamiliar with the term, is what happens when belonging to a particular group gives you an automatic advantage over those who are not in that group. The characteristic of this advantage is that it is not inherent to real differences between the groups (it is not, for example, an example of “tall privilege” that tall people can reach high shelves easier than short people), but due to some undeserved social assumption or historical advantage (the fact that tall people are considered more trustworthy and attractive than short people would be perhaps an example of “tall privilege”).

Members of a privileged group are doubly-cursed (or blessed, depending on your perspective) since the usual kind of advantages that accompany privilege are completely invisible to those inside the group. White folks will angrily rant until they are blue in the face (as only they can be) about how they earned everything they ever had, and how life wasn’t handed to them on a silver platter, and how the real racists are the ones who think that white people enjoy privilege at all! Men will insist that men are the truly oppressed sex, since they are no longer allowed to use sexual banter in the office, and that feminists are neutering their manful impulses. Meanwhile, those of us not in the in-group will patiently wait until they run out of steam and point out that the phrase “mighty white of you” exists for a reason, as does “crying like a little bitch.”

It is in cases like this, where privilege is in play, that turnabout doesn’t function as a reasonable argument. For example, imagine this (not so) fictitious exchange between two people:

Boy: I don’t understand why you’re mad
Girl: That guy just slapped my ass!
Boy: So?
Girl: So it’s degrading and basically sexual assault!
Boy: I would love it if girls came up to me and slapped my ass. I don’t see why you’re making such a big deal out of it – you should take it as a compliment.

I doubt that anyone would find this sample conversation bizarrely unrealistic. Boy is trying to set up a bit of “turnaround is fair play” to illustrate that Girl’s position is unreasonable – being sexually objectified is a compliment and Girl should not be offended. Boy is doing this by showing that when the situation is reversed, there is no offense felt by the objectified party – indeed there is a positive reaction to the same stimulus. Any feeling of offense must therefore be purely in Girl’s mind, and all she has to do is adjust her bad attitude.

And of course this would be a completely reasonable position to take but for the existence of male privilege. Boy exists in a world where women are not sexually aggressive in the way that men are. As a result, he has rarely (if not never) had cause to feel as though his merits are judged solely on his physical appearance. He is not constantly bombarded by messages that make his sexuality the sine qua non of his entire existence. He is not meant to feel stupid for simply being born a man. Perhaps most frustratingly (to Girl, at least), nobody ever condescendingly tries to “woman-splain” to him that his totally reasonable objection to being physically and sexually assaulted is just because of his bad attitude.

Boy is not necessarily a bad person, he has simply not taken the time to consider the real differences between his default position in any social situation and the position of Girl. There are a great number of other forces at work on Girl that Boy doesn’t even have to think about. By assuming that those forces, because he can’t see them, simply don’t exist, Boy is preserving the conditions that creates those forces in the first place.

This isn’t an abstract concept for me – I’ve been Boy more than my fair share of times. It’s a tempting trap to fall into, because then problems become everyone else’s fault and you can sit back and pass judgment on the rest of humanity. This type of thinking definitely runs outside of sexism, to be sure. Anyone who has ever said that black people need to just “get over” something are operating from that exact same position of privilege – racism is someone else’s problem! Anyone who has ever said “this is a Christian country, and if you don’t like it you can leave” is, in addition to being sorely deluded about their facts, operating from another position of majority privilege – civil rights are someone else’s problem!

This is why I harp on about privilege so much – failing to recognize its presence forces us to spend a lot of valuable time pointing it out. There will always be those who stalwartly refuse to recognize that it exists, being much happier to mischaracterize it as a device used by bleeding hearts to make white Christian men feel guilty (which is a crock), but there are others who are genuinely ignorant and are willing to put in the work to see how things might look from another perspective.

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6 Movie Friday: Show me a God

January 28, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · bmusic · movie · religion · skepticism

There’s never been a conscientious believer who has gone through life completely free of doubt. There is an interesting passage in Mark 9 in which Jesus is asked to heal a child with epilepsy, and the father is told that all he has to do is believe hard enough, and his son will be cured (Jesus was an early Deepak Chopra, apparently). The distraught father says “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief!” and his son is immediately cured.

The story is complete bullshit, to be sure, but that line “I believe, help me overcome my unbelief” has been uttered, in various permutations, by the lips of the faithful for as long as people have been told to believe in ridiculous stories and impossible propositions with no evidence.

Tech N9ne turned it into a song:

There is an entire branch of theology called “theodicy” that is devoted to trying to square the circle of things in the world that are evil with the idea of a benevolent creator. Guys like Ken Ham, Ray Comfort and Hugh Ross make the claim that suffering is intentionally introduced into the universe to test mankind’s resolve to turn away from sin. If mankind is able to bear up under the crushing weight of temptation and overcome evil, then he is rewarded with eternal bliss in heaven (citation needed). Of course this is a facile explanation that falls apart under even casual scrutiny. Why would a loving god make such a test? Why not make it easier to be good? Why not create mankind with an inner drive to be good? Why punish those who are innocent of any misdeeds, while rewarding those who sin? Why bother testing us at all if it knows who will pass and who will fail a priori?

The other explanations are that YahwAlladdha is not good at all, but a petty heartless trickster who delights in human suffering, or that it is completely indifferent to the suffering of its creation.

Or, more parsimoniously, that it doesn’t exist at all and you’re wasting your time asking stupid questions.

While there are a lot of reasons to hold onto religion in the black community (community organization has traditionally centred on church groups, the belief in ultimate justice helps you ignore many of the day-to-day injustice you see around you), I am glad to see/hear influential voices within the hip-hop community begin to broach the taboo around criticizing religion. Maybe none are so poignant as this track from The Roots:

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P.S. Sorry about the embedding. VEVO is… I have mixed feelings.

4 This too, also

January 27, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · funny · privilege · racism

And another one, archived here for future reference.

I know it would be nice if you could be “non-racist” by simply not being actively racist, but sadly it ain’t the case.

6 “Cultural Sensitivity” meets clear stupidity

January 27, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crapitalism · cultural tolerance · forces of stupid · health

It’s been a while since I talked about one of my first pet topics, the burqa bans going on in various places in the world. The point I laboured to make in those early articles was that there may be some specific circumstances under which it is better for society to brook some contravention of its rules in the name of being tolerant of practices imported from other cultures. This is particularly true of Canada, with its wide variety of cultural groups. If we want Canada to remain a place where groups from all over the world can feel at home, then we have to occasionally put aside our discomfiture toward “the other”.

But other times, “the other” is stupid and there needn’t be any accommodation:

Plans for a hospice on the University of British Columbia campus have been put on hold after some neighbourhood residents said the proposed facility offended their cultural sensitivities around death and dying.

“It is all about cultural sensitivity,” said Ms. Fan, a Chinese-born immigrant who lives in a high-rise near the proposed hospice site. “We came here as new immigrants with our own belief system. And in our beliefs, it is impossible for us to have dying people in our backyard.”

The main gist of this argument is that many Chinese-born immigrants share a cultural taboo about death, feeling that it brings bad luck and will spoil marriages and businesses and all sorts of other pursuits. Building a hospice in a neighbourhood with many immigrants from this area lacks cultural sensitivity for such beliefs.

My response: fuck your superstition.

This proposed building is on the campus of the University of British Columbia. UBC has a right to build whatever legal structure they like on their grounds. UBC also has a hospital on its grounds. News flash: people die in hospitals every day. People also die in car accidents, stabbings, from heart attacks… the list goes on ad infinitum. Death is a part of life – in fact, death is the thing that makes life precious. If your beliefs are in conflict with biological fact, it is not the responsibility of the rest of the world to move in line with your beliefs; it’s your responsibility to figure out a way to deal with it.

I feel passionately about this issue, as someone who works in cancer research. The majority of people who pursue hospice care suffer from terminal cancer. At the end of the course of this disease, patients are often in near-constant pain that gets limited (or no) relief through the use of drugs and radiation. The idea behind hospice care is to allow the dying person to maintain a bit of dignity and comfort. It is the sign of a compassionate and caring people when the sick and dying are cared for. Adequate hospice care means that people are not languishing in long-term care facilities, at home, or worst of all in a hospital, unable to access sufficient relief from their symptoms as their bodies shut down.

A very good friend of mine worked in a hospice on a co-op term. She would be able to speak much more eloquently and passionately than I can about what a great job hospice care does of improving the quality of life of people who are lucky enough to have the opportunity to die there. I say ‘lucky’ in full awareness of the fact that it’s not exactly ‘lucky’ to get cancer, but since there are far fewer spaces than there is demand for those spaces, getting in is indeed a stroke of luck.

I hope nobody would accuse me of being a person who is not sensitive to the fact that not everyone sees the world the same way. I am aware that different groups have different ideas about life, and that some issues hit people more viscerally than others. However, in this case we’re talking about conflating superstition with the real suffering of real people. The proximity of death has zero effect on whether or not your business is lucky – the flourishing funeral home business is perhaps a counter-example. People who work in hospitals around dying people can maintain happy relationships, and in some cases the death of a close family member can bring people closer together. To suggest that dying people should put relief of their suffering on hold because you’re afraid of the dark is the height of childish arrogance.

We should make our decisions based on what is real, not what spares the delicate feelings of stupid people.

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5 Religion is bad; that’s why I have FAITH

January 24, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · religion

Maybe this has happened to you before. For the past 2 or 3 weeks, I’ve found myself using the phrase “distinction without a difference” in conversation over and over again. It hadn’t previously been part of my usual lexicon, although I know the phrase well. It describes a circumstance in which two concepts are contrasted, despite the fact that they are similar in every way that is relevant to the discussion. If, for example, you were about to be devoured by a great white shark, and a helpful passer-by (or swimmer-by?) pointed out that it was actually a hammerhead shark, in what way would that information be useful to you? While such a distinction would certainly be relevant in discussions of ecology or evolution or taxonomy, for your purposes as the soon-to-be devouree, it’s a fuckin’ shark!

So for some idiosyncratic reason, I’d caught myself using the phrase more often than usual. So when I watched this video, it really seemed to fit. Dr. John Lennox, a Cambridge-educated professor of mathematics, responds to Richard Dawkins’ claim that religion encourages us to embrace nonsensical claims by saying “maybe religion does do that, but not true Bible-based Christian faith!” Dr. Lennox doesn’t have a great white, it’s a hammerhead! Distinction without difference.

This is a common reply when atheists and religious folk discuss. Many believers will happily agree with atheists that religion is bad. While atheists list ad nauseum the list of atrocities committed by religious people, such believers will sagely nod their heads in agreement and say “what a shame” at the appropriate moments. At the end of such diatribes, however, such believers will smugly assert “you’re right: religions ARE bad. That’s why I think it’s better to have faith.” The argument such people are trying to make is that the organized religious authority is the problem, and if only people followed their individual beliefs then there would be no problem.

Distinction without difference.

There are several problems with this argument, chief among which is the fact that it is simply the “No True Scotsman” fallacy turned on its side. A straw man is created of religious people as adherent automatons who believe and behave as they are told, which is then contrasted with the idea of “true” faith, in which individuals are free to question and discover the “true” answers within whatever religious text they choose. It’s a pretty picture, but it’s ultimately false. Within any group of religious people there is a diversity of belief and adherence, none of which fails to qualify as “faith”. To be sure, specific dogma exists within strict religious traditions, but it is rarely so overwhelming that it fuels the kind of violence and vitriol that is the hallmark of religious conflict.

The predictable rejoinder to this argument is that it is the religious trappings – the ritual, the chants, and particularly the clergy – that fuel the real conflict. In Rwanda, we saw church leaders directing state genocide forces to massacre Tutsis. In the Inquisition, we saw the bishops and cardinals directing the Inquisitors to burn heretics. In modern Iran we see mullahs and ayatollahs issuing fatwas and directing jihads. It is the religion, say the “faith” proponents, that leads to these problems; not the beliefs of their followers. If only the followers had found their own “faith” rather than following religion, they would know better and would refuse to follow such monstrous orders.

This counterargument is simply another straw man, in which the cart is put well in front of the horse. What constitutes a “religion” is simply a group of people who share a certain number of articles of “faith” with each other. The trappings of organization are a consequence of that process, not the antecedent. To contrast “faith” with “religion” is like saying ‘let us come together as a group and decide who will be responsible for certain leadership tasks; that’s a better system than having “a government”‘. Once again, distinction without difference. In every way that is germane to the discussion, the two things are identical and it contributes nothing to the discussion to try and forge some kind of contrast between them.

The second major problem with this argument is that it presumes the possibility of a “correct” interpretation of something like religion (or maybe it doesn’t – more on this later). “What I believe is right,” says the argument “and if people simply read the Bible/Qur’an/Bhagavad Gita the way that I do, they’d see that these things are right and those things are wrong.” This is either conceit leagues beyond anything that we arrogant atheists could possibly aspire to, or (more likely) a failure to recognize that scripture works the same way as a Rorschach ink blot – you see what you want to see. If you believe that it is permissible to seek revenge on those who wrong you, then you can explain away the whole “turn the other cheek” thing; vice versa for pacifists who ignore the Mark of Cain or Jesus’ wrath against the money-changers in the temple (to use Christianity as my most familiar example, though Islam is subject to the exact same process, perhaps even more so).

All “faith” is simply interpretation of stories, and as such flies in the face of any claim of the “correct” interpretation. The mind is made up first, and then the evidence is found to support it. A person may not be aware that they are doing this, just as we are not aware of the way that subtle cues and organization patterns in the supermarket influence us to do things without us being conscious of making a decision. Afterward, if we are confronted, we back-fill our reasons and find a way to make it look rational. Watch a kid explain why she/he did a random action – she/he will hunt for a reason and often make up a convoluted and fanciful explanation for an arbitrary act. We adults aren’t much better – we’re just less likely to shug and say “I dunno”. Faith is the same way – we find justifications for our beliefs after we already hold them (and yes, I include myself in this “we”. Although I try my best not to, I am only human).

The only way for this argument to possibly work is to say “everyone should hold their private beliefs, and not share them with each other.” After all, since religion is simply the sharing of faith-based ideas, the only way to have faith and not be religious is to hold those ideas in your own head and make group decisions on a non-faith basis. Under such an arrangement, we immediately divest ourselves of churches, clergy, religious heirarchy and dogma, leaving only the content of people’s conscience left in which faith could possibly operate. If that’s what you mean when you say “no religion; only faith”, then congratulations! While you might not be an atheist, you’re most definitely a secularist.

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