Dealing with "Things Unseen"

Science deals with unseen things like black holes by developing a testable hypothesis, which essentially describes what we would expect to see if there were black holes. When we observe behavior which matches the prediction, the hypothesis is confirmed. If not, it is rejected. Same for microwaves. When we observe behavior (thermal excitation of water molecules) consistent with energy transfer of microwaves, we confirm the theory! Religion on the other hand, takes an unexplained thing and blindly asserts #GodDidIt.  When the tests for god's existence fail, believers make up excuses for *why* it failed rather than reject the hypothesis. You're likely well aware of this method. The Bible provides many objective tests for the Christian god's existence, all of which demonstrably fail: - Matthew 7:7 “Ask, and it will be given to you seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. - Matthew 21:22 And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.” - Mark 11:24 Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. - John 14:13-14 Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it So as a devout Christian, the first time you pray for something and it doesn't come true, you can know that the Bible is wrong. However, instead of admit their assumptions might be wrong, religious people blame themselves ("I must not have enough *faith*!") or make empty platitudes ("God works in mysterious ways.")

What Makes it a Cult?

I have a high school friend who is considering moving their family from one state to another because they found their "spiritual home." This strikes me as more than just a little bit culty, and got me thinking about what's the right definition for "cult."

Of course, my friend thinks this is all positive. It's wonderful that they've found their spiritual home with this group.  All positive goodness. But don't cult members always think like that when they're inside one?

The meme at right floats around the internet, poking fun at organized religion as nothing more than a big cult. And while I'll admit to having chuckled at the image, I don't think it's an
insightful or valuable representation. It bothers me that cult is too easily tossed around as a term of derision towards all religion.  Some are not particularly harmful.

The google definition of cult isn't much help either. Google defines cult as "a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object." Using this definition, one could easily make the case that Christianity is a cult for Jesus Christ. Then we're right back where we started -- all religion is just a cult.

It seems to me that the connotation of the word cult implies that the organization is fringe and causes significant personal harm at the whim of a single, charismatic leader who dictates the dogma for the group and controls their personal lives.  But again, it's all a sliding scale, isn't it?

One characteristic of cults could be that they cause demonstrable harm to the members. But individual preachers can be charismatic and bilk parishioners out of money without being a cult, right? Here's a few:

• Joel Olsteen has made millions off the "Prosperity Gospel"
• Pat Robertson tells elderly poor people to give him more money so they'll get more from god.
• Creflo Dollar gained notoriety recently for asking for donations for a new private jet.

The Prosperity Gospel sounds SO much like the Nigerian bank scams that it would be funny if it weren't so tragic for the congregants. "Just send your televangelist money and you'll receive even more from god" is just like "Send me money and I'll share my fabulous wealth with you." It plays on people's greed and gullibility. Even though I consider those generally undesirable human traits, they are still people. And these ministers cause them demonstrable harm with this sort of scam. 

So do "Prosperity Ministries" rise to the level of cult? I don't think so. The term in my mind seems to also convey an aspect of self-righteousness and shunning of any people who disagree with the dogma.  

This brings me to a couple religions well known for shunning non-believers or apostates.

• Jehovah's Witnesses - JW's are famous for shunning apostates. Families disown family members for admitting they don't really believe anymore. 
• Catholics  - As recently as 1983, Catholics were expected to shun apostates! Good thing they have a way to revise errors in Catholicism. 
• Orthodox Judaism
• Amish - Shunning is a formalized process for the Amish. 
• Scientology - They even have a formal name for it: Disconnection.
• Islam - Most Islamic Sharia law demands execution for apostasy. Islamic nations have been known to fulfill this law and kill apostates. That's one hell of a shun!

This one seems to be a stronger indicator of "culty-ness".  The end result of this formalized shunning of non-believers is an isolation from mainstream society based on the doctrine of moral superiority. 

In the end, I think it's isolationism in general that I most strongly associate with cults. Closing a group off from the outside world allows radical ideas to persist better than they would if a cult member could tell their friend the crazy things their cult leader said.

So what's the take-away? I suppose it's that we should strive to be as welcoming, multi-cultural, and diverse as possible. The cross-fertilization of ideas will help us discriminate between those which have merit and those which don't. We should be skeptical of ideas that are both secret and sacred. Truth withstands scrutiny.  It seeks publicity and understanding. It never hides because the public isn't ready.

Self-Identity, Beliefs, and Emotional Logic

Introduction

How does this guy feel when his beliefs are challenged? Do you suppose he's able to fairly consider ideas which conflict?

It's human nature at times to tie beliefs to our self-identity.  Religion is the most common example, but politics are a close second.  When we do this to ourselves, it makes us emotional about any challenge to our beliefs, as such challenges are also a threat to our self-identity.

For example, if a person says your belief system (be it atheism, Catholicism, or Islam) lead mankind to commit atrocities, the implication is that you are personally capable of and inclined to commit those atrocities. As the anger wells up in your chest, you become unable to discuss the assertion rationally. Our human minds are wired to respond to threats, and the fight-or-flight response responds to social threats as well as physical. Given the relative security and anonymity of the internet, it's a whole lot easier to choose to fight. When we chose to fight while emotional rather than to proceed with deliberate and thoughtful responses, things get ugly and we wind up looking like the "angry atheist".

Such attacks (i.e. the Hitler attack) are common on Twitter, and are blatant attempts to provoke an irrational, emotional response from the opponent.  This behavior should be called out for its immaturity or dismissed out of hand. Do not give the attacker the pleasure of seeing you mad.

Often, the provocation is much more subtle and we can miss the emotional reaction it induces in ourselves.  When a theist asserts that atheists have no morals or purpose, does that make you angry? Notice the biological reaction in yourself and use that awareness to take a deep breath and calm down before you respond.

A Solution

Sexy Lady Justice!

The best way I've found to help minimize my personal sense of threat or social hostility is to dissociate my beliefs from my sense of self. Though I identify as an atheist in this anonymous social-media persona, it's not a defining feature of my identity in real life. I've come to terms with my limited ability to know things. My senses and cognition are human, no more. I have made mistakes big and small, and I will continue to do so. It's okay to admit this fact and continue to do my best moving forward.

This approach to truth and honesty allows me to evaluate any claim that's made fairly and honestly. I'm not in any way set on maintaining my atheist belief. But I am keenly aware of the human cognitive biases which can lead to false beliefs. After all, I've fallen for many of those cognitive bias errors myself.

These cognitive biases are often mental shortcuts and assumptions we all make to simplify the decision-making process. The apply to all of us, and not just in our evaluation of religious beliefs.  I've made that mistake in many areas. Some good examples are irrational fear of flying and our tendency to make snap judgements of other people's motivations. It takes meticulous deliberation to think through beliefs and assumptions carefully, and each of us is liable to make that mistake when we're quick to reach a conclusion.

I often tell theists that I "Will Convert for Evidence", and I mean that with all sincerity. I believe I have drawn the most reasonable conclusion possible given the evidence available to me. If I discover new evidence that leads me to conclude a god actually exists, I will change my belief. Thus far, all the evidence I've seen is better explained by failures of human cognition such as group-think, wishful thinking, and emotional decision making.

The best I've seen from theists seems to be "promising" me that they "know" it's true. While I don't doubt the sincerity of their convictions, I understand the ways that people reach the wrong conclusions, then double-down on those conclusions rather than re-evaluating them.

I generally ask with sincerity how they know their particular god is real and how they selected it from among all the other religious beliefs. Most haven't considered any other religious beliefs. Those who have tend to draw comparisons like, "So which is most plausible? A mad prophet on a flying horse or humble Jesus on a donkey?" [link]

Such statements make it clear just how fair the evaluations of other beliefs were. The fear of damage to self-identity leads people to tip the scales in their identity's favor. The end result is a less impartial assessment of alternative explanations and a greater chance of missing the correct interpretation.

High Pressure Sales Tactics of Religion

High-pressure sales guy. 

"Convert to __________ now. Hurry before it's too late!"

Why? Why on Earth would a god judge us for the conclusions we reach absent any tangible evidence? Having designed us, he's surely aware that we have no senses with which to detect his presence. So there's no way any of us can know for certain.

If it's all revealed when we die, why can't we just decide then? What's with the "hurry, act now!" mentality? Christians say our soul is eternal, so why would a fair God put an arbitrary deadline on our beliefs? It sure seems to me that an ethical god would let you in on the secret and give you time to make an informed choice.

From what I've seen of the scriptures, it's not there. There's several places in the Bible where salvation is described, and the interpretations are inconsistent.  Faith or Works is one of the key points of disagreement in the Christian faiths, contributing to the schism between Catholic and Protestant sects.  But none of the scriptures I've managed to find suggest you have to decide before you die.

So what is this approach and where did it come from? It sure seems to me like a classic high pressure sales trick. The offer (eternal bliss) might not last. You have to decide today before it's too late (you die). In reality, the offer will probably be there tomorrow too. They want the sale.

So why is there an arbitrary deadline being pushed here? Seems like the church really needs you to join up now. You're not much use to them once you're dead. The only relationship that has any sort of urgency is your relationship to the church. God is eternal. A few decades don't make a difference to him.

Honesty

"… these forced communal chants make skeptics feel like an outcast for sitting out or a liar for playing along. "

Photo by Jason Wohlford, used without modification under a Creative Commons 2.0 License.

As I stop and reflect on what bothered me the most about religion, it was the lack of honesty with ourselves and the congregation. This was most glaringly apparent in the certainty with which we claimed to know that Presbyterian dogma was True. This had a euphemism: "faith."

Faith was held up as an ideal to achieve, and rational skepticism was shamed. People with reasonable doubts were described as "losing faith" or "struggling with faith." This euphemistic language is clearly intended to attach a negative stigma to the people honest enough to look with rational skepticism at the extraordinary claims which formed the foundation of Presbyterian beliefs.  Faith is a goal to achieve, meant to imply that it's not just okay, but actually good to claim to have certainty about things for which you have no evidence or rational justification to believe.

This frequent communal statement of certainty known as "the apostles Creed" was recited at each and every Presbyterian worship service I ever attended. Something about a large sanctuary filled with many hundreds of people saying the same thing helped make us doubters feel silly for our rational doubts. And I suppose that's the crux of my problem with religion. It works to quell rational doubts in its members by weekly shows of unity in belief. When this culture is part of a person's social networks, the idea of turning against the group becomes frightening at an instinctual level.

It's bad enough that the church tells people what to believe. What's worse is that they instruct the congregation to recite an affirmation of belief that is provided by the church. For years, as my parents dragged my skeptical ass to church, I felt dishonest for even playing along with this ruse. I won't go to church with them anymore because these forced communal chants make skeptics feel like an outcast for sitting out or a liar for playing along.

Religion is Like a Cathedral Built on a House of Cards

Note: If you're good with graphics, this is a very visual image analogy.  I'd love to have a better picture to illustrate it! 

"Canterbury Cathedral - Portal Nave Cross-spire" by Hans Musil.

This is a powerful analogy to explain why religion seems so beautiful to the believer but so patently absurd to a non-believer.  Whether you're on the inside or the outside makes a huge difference on your perspective.

What do I mean by this? When I was a Christian, I was on the inside of the Christian cathedral.  I admired the beautiful artwork on the walls, the complex network of hallways and sanctuaries.  Over hundreds of years, great minds had mapped and decorated the hallways of the Christian cathedral with such works as Dante's Inferno (1317), the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1512), and the Catholic Church's "Immaculate Conception" concept (1854).

Of course, there's some artwork in the Christian church that people disagree on: Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon (1830, older than "Immaculate Conception, by the way"), Cargo Cults (1885), Rastafarianism (1930).  People identify themselves by which of the many sanctuaries in the Christian Cathedral they worship in, which colors how they see the cathedral itself, almost to the point where it seems like they're in entirely different buildings.  Westboro Baptist would never associated with United Church of Christ, and they may not even admit they're in the same cathedral.

When I was on the inside of the Christian cathedral, I only associated with people who worshiped in nearby sanctuaries.  I didn't explore the whole cathedral, much less the outside. But in my late teens / early twenties, I learned about cognitive biases as sources of human error. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that all of Christianity might be well explained by these biases: Ambiguity effect, bandwagon effect, confirmation bias, congruence bias, gambler's fallacy, the observer-expectancy effect, the Semmelweis reflex, and subjective validation. There's a lot of ways we trick ourselves into believing things, and the Church seems designed to exploit them through weekly worship and structures which discourage challenging authority (AKA. blasphemy).

When I first started looking for objective reasons to believe my Christian upbringing, I believed it would be there, but I was careful not to leap to the conclusion I know I wanted to find.  I unknowingly used the outsider's test: Asking myself if I would accept each piece of evidence if it were presented to me for another religion like Islam or Hindu.

Taking the outsider's perspective was critical for me seeing my own religion for what it is: just one of many attempts by early man to explain the world around him.  By taking the outsider's perspective, I began to see the outside of the cathedral.  Still mostly looking up at its beauty, but more and more noticing problems with the foundation: "How could an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving god allow evil?" and "How could such a god punish non-believers when their only crime was not seeing the evidence I was having troubles identifying myself?" I decided he couldn't.  That the only moral choice was to conclude that god would chose our destiny based on our behavior, not our beliefs.  I didn't know it, but in hindsight this conclusion was heresy.  And for good reason.  It took away my fear of exploring my faith more deeply and more critically.

As I tore away the facade that concealed the foundation of my religion's cathedral, I discovered there was nothing sturdy supporting it.  What I once saw as strong stone walls, unmovable and indestructible, I now understood were human constructs with no supporting physical evidence. Unable to support or withstand any modern test of their strength.  The walls inside the Christian cathedral can stand ONLY because nobody is allowed to test them.

On the inside, we were taught to look at them but never to test their strength by questioning their validity. Prayer worked. And when it didn't, that was because "we lacked the proper faith" or "God was testing us".  The weakness of the cathedral walls was explained away by instilling self-doubt.

We were taught to take the strength of the Christian dogma "On Faith". As if that was a good thing.

Open Letter to Christians

Note: If you are a believer, you will naturally read it as a cynic. You'll look for quick opportunities to dismiss the things I say which make you uncomfortable. Be cognizant of this tendency within yourself. When you notice yourself thinking "That's ridiculous!" or "What an idiot!", use that as a cue to stop and consider the claim more carefully.

I was once a Christian. Just like you, I felt Jesus's love. I talked to him through my prayers. I believed he loved me personally. But knowing is more important than believing, so I explored the justifications for the beliefs I was taught as a child. This exploration of my core beliefs was both frightening and incredibly valuable for me. If you're ready to consider the same, I have some fundamental questions to ask you, or rather for you to ask yourself. I'll lay them out below.

How do you know it's real? 

If it's a feeling, have you considered that every religion has the same sorts of feelings about their particular incompatible beliefs? I occasionally attend secular services and have the same feelings of joy and love and awe I had in church.

If you know because the Bible is true, how did you learn that? Did you test it yourself? Or did you learn that from an authority figure as a child? What method could possibly confirm that  the entire Bible is accurate?  It's passed through so many human hands.  How would you know if some of them influenced it or even created it?

I've heard so many times that he Bible is true for one reason or another.  Here's a few and some questions about each:

• The Bible is true because the stories are confirmed by archaeologists and / or historians.
  This certainly can't be true in its entirety.  Many parts of the Bible stories couldn't be verified if the events happened yesterday.  Take for example the stories in Matthew 8, Healing people and driving demons into a herd of pigs. Such stories leave no historical or archaeological trace to be verified.  If someone told you this happened today, what evidence would you need to believe it?
• The Bible says all scripture is God-breathed.
  The Bible makes claims in its text, just like the Koran or the Odyssey. Its original authors or their intentions are lost to history. But make no mistake: The bible you hold in your hands is man made. Humans printed it. Before that, humans translated it. Before that, humans copied it. Before that, humans wrote it down. I could fabricate anything I want and call it a "bible." So could any of those other humans along the way. We would never know. Each of these steps is subject to human error or worse: deliberate misrepresentation. 
• If the Bible isn't true, the consequences would be bad
  By this logic, we should reject that the holocaust ever happened.  It's very negative, reflects poorly on humanity, and I'd very much prefer that it didn't exist. But it does. And pretending it doesn't just because I don't like it would be dishonest. For me, honesty is more important than happy outcomes. I hope that's true for everyone, but I'm not sure.

Would you believe it today?

You were most likely taught your religion as a child. The vast majority of religious people follow the religion of their parents or their local culture.  What do you think of other religions from other parts of the world which you learned about as an adult? Good examples might be Scientologists, Mormons, or Buddhists.  Did their beliefs like reincarnation or alien visitors seem silly or absurd? Are you able to take an outsider's perspective at your own beliefs? Seriously challenge the assumptions you've taken for granted since childhood. If you're Christian, consider this: 

• How does the death and suffering of Jesus pardon your own sins?  How is that moral or ethical to transfer guilt like that? We'd NEVER let someone else take the punishment for a criminal. Isn't that basically what God did with Jesus?
• Do you really believe that your faith is somehow different from the faith of other religions or sects? 
• It's plainly evident that people can firmly believe false things. You're a person. How do you keep from believing false things? 
• Do you apply the same kinds of skeptical and rational thinking to religion as you do to making a purchase or healthcare decisions? Why or why not? 

Conclusions

I believe that honesty in our beliefs requires us to treat all claims equally.  And in my personal experience, believers do not.  It's common to give one's own belief system a free pass on all the absurd claims while criticizing others for beliefs that to an outsider seem no more absurd. 

It's very hard to be objective about faith.  In fact, I believe the church tries to teach us not to.  But honesty demands objectivity, and true things stand up to scrutiny. Giving your personal faith a pass on scrutiny is tantamount to being dishonest with yourself.