You believe WHAT?'s Religion Archives

An odd business, religion, and not one - or so it appears - that has much to do with science. To me, it has always seemed no more than a bunch of silly old men in frocks squabbling, often murderously, about who has the best dress designer, but I accept that faith can add real purpose to some people's lives.

Why such a difference in attitude? I ascribe my agnosticism to compulsory school assembly, which long ago immunised me against the divine, but some of my fellow pupils came out of the experience as keen followers of the church. Now, the new science of molecular theology is moving in on why we respond to sermonising in such separate ways.

What unites all believers is the notion of a higher being who watches over them. To St Teresa of Avila, her ecstatic fusions with God were "a sort of fainting fit, which takes over breath and all the forces of the body so that one can no longer say a word", which is a pretty biological description of the sanctified state.

Continue reading "The biology of faith"

Posted by doctormatt at 6:15 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2009

George Carlin on religion

Posted by doctormatt at 11:37 PM

March 19, 2009

Videos - Atheist immorality debunked

Atheist video collection:

One of my favorites. See above link for even more videos.

Posted by doctormatt at 10:09 PM

Video - George Carlin - Touched by an atheist

Posted by doctormatt at 9:53 PM

March 9, 2009

NPR story. Brain vs. Mind - Where is God?

NPR Story on Darwin, Mind and Brain

God is just another guy - NIH study of functional MRI and religious belief

Grafman says the new study says nothing about whether God exists. But it does suggest that religious belief uses a brain system that evolved quite recently.

Posted by doctormatt at 8:16 PM

March 4, 2009

Religion 101 - Final exam

Religion 101: Final Exam
by Terrence Kaye

Original Final Exam Here

1) Which of the following is the most compelling evidence for the existence of an intelligent and loving Designer?

A Caribbean sunset
The screams of a baby seal as it is torn apart by a shark
The first time your perfect new baby smiles at you
The speed of the Ebola virus converting an African child's organs into liquid

Continue reading "Religion 101 - Final exam"

Posted by doctormatt at 5:23 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2009

Belief-O-Matic finds the best religion for you

Try the Belief-O-Matic

Posted by doctormatt at 5:17 AM

Documentary - Judgment Day, Intelligent Design on Trial

"PBS Nova: "Judgment Day- Intelligent Design on Trial" takes an in depth look at Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, the case that tore apart the community of Dover, Pennsylvania, in the 2005 court battle over the teaching evolution in public schools."

Film courtesy of PBS

Posted by doctormatt at 4:41 AM

God Checker . com - Top 10 Chinese gods

A great resource

Chinese religious belief, courtesy of GodChecker.com

1st : MONKEY
2nd : GUAN-YU
3rd : JADE-EMPEROR
4th : EIGHT-IMMORTALS
5th : FENG-DU
6th : YEN-LO-WANG
7th : GUAN-YIN
8th : AO-CHIN
9th : CAO-GUOJIU
10th : DAO

Posted by doctormatt at 3:41 AM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2009

How your brain creates god

By Michael Brooks

A 2007 study showed that the growth rate of evangelical churches in the US jumps 50 per cent with the downturn of each economic cycle. The global downturn is no different: church leaders (and psychics) are now reporting brisk business.

While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.
Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

Continue reading "How your brain creates god"

Posted by doctormatt at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2009

10 Myths about Atheists, and comments

Sam Harris's Editorial

SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term "atheism" has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was "not at all to be tolerated" because, he said, "promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist."

That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims "never to doubt" the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists -- and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness ... well ... meaningless.

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

3) Atheism is dogmatic.

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity's needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.

No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the "beginning" or "creation" of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.

The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, "The God Delusion," this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don't know precisely how the Earth's early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase "natural selection" by analogy to the "artificial selection" performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.

5) Atheism has no connection to science.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God -- as some scientists seem to manage it -- there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

6) Atheists are arrogant.

When scientists don't know something -- like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed -- they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely -- because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as "wishful thinking" and "self-deception." There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.

If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran -- as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery -- and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture -- like the golden rule -- can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

Continue reading "10 Myths about Atheists, and comments"

Posted by doctormatt at 8:46 AM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2009

Statement of Catholic subsecretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family

It is contrary to the truth of the human identity and the design of God to live a homosexual experience, a relationship of this type, and even more to attempt to demand same-sex marriage. It is contrary to the true interests of the persons and of the needs of society. It constitutes a transgression of the sense of love as God has revealed to us through the message of Christ, of which the Church is a servant, as an expression of love toward the men and women of our time.

Posted by doctormatt at 10:08 PM

Bill Moyers on conservative evangelist John Hagee

Posted by doctormatt at 10:04 PM

Mormans fund Prop 8

"Some things that are true are not very useful...In the Church we are not neutral. We are one-sided. There is a war going on, and we are engaged in it." That war is for the minds and souls of the earth's human population-a war that Latter-day Saints wage with all the resources at their disposal."

It's just that God has His own accounting practices.

Continue reading "Mormans fund Prop 8"

Posted by doctormatt at 9:33 PM

January 11, 2009

The Christian Working Woman - Delightful radio show guidance

Audio here

Again, Fran realizes, Jesus knows what he's talking about. And again she acknowledges what a difference it makes to have Jesus by her side all the time. When she simply obeys him, he can take those discouraging feelings away and give her again the joy of her salvation.

Continue reading "The Christian Working Woman - Delightful radio show guidance"

Posted by doctormatt at 1:03 AM