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| I'm Paul Wright, a software engineer based in Cambridge, England. This is my blog, hosted by LiveJournal. I mostly blog about my interests: religion (I used to be a Christian, and then became an atheist), philosophy, science, and, occasionally, ballroom dancing. You can find out more about me and about this blog in my profile. You're welcome to join in the discussions here, though if you're new, it'd be a good idea to check the comment policy first. If you want to keep track of this blog without having to keep visiting this page all the time, you can subscribe to the feed of it (or "friend" me if you're on LiveJournal yourself):  here's the feed, or you could use  , or  . Feel free to introduce yourself by leaving a comment below. | |
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| ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) scribb1e enjoyed Valerie Tarico's article on evangelicalese, and even watched the video Tarico linked to, of Susan Hutchison speaking at a prayer breakfast. If you'd like a shorter example of more of the same, here's evangelical Christian Peter Vadala being interviewed on Fox News about how he was fired for telling a lesbian co-worker that homosexuality was "bad stuff" after the co-worker repeatedly provoked him by mentioning her fiancée. Intriguingly, Vadala once wrote a "Christian musical": urbaniak has the full story, including a copy of the termination letter from Vadala's former employer and links to MP3s of the musical.   Trigger Warning: watching the videos may provoke flashbacks for ex-evangelicals. To aid your understanding while watching them, here's a brief glossary of terms I remembered from my misspent youth: - Prayer breakfast
- An easy one to get you started: it's a communal breakfast where you pray. My former church had "men's prayer breakfasts". I never found out what went on at them, as I regarded getting up before 9 am as an abomination before the LORD ("Woe to them that rise up early in the morning", as Isaiah 5:11 says).
- Speaking the truth in love
- There's a well known provision of the Highway Code which says you can park where you like as long as you leave your indicators on (well known, that is, to drivers of white vans). Likewise, in evangelical circles, the rule is that you can be as rude as you like as long as it's done "in love". A reference to Ephesians 4:15.
- Lifestyle
- You'd think this might mean "the way someone lives their life", but in fact it always refers to having sex in a way God disapproves of (such as outside marriage, which obviously includes gay sex, as gays can't really get married).
- Convicted
- What you feel when God tells you you've been doing something bad, like not telling off a so-called homosexual for brazenly flaunting their so-called engagement. Traditionally, one is convicted by the Holy Spirit, a reference to John 16:8.
- Struggling with
- Regularly enjoying something, and then feeling convicted (q.v.) about it afterwards. Always to do with sex, e.g. "struggling with pornography". (I also liked revme's definition).
- Bad stuff
- That's a new one on me, though it does follow in a long tradition of using understated words for things you really deeply disapprove of. When I was a lad, those things were "dodgy", but that may be a Britishism.
Let's not accuse of all Christians of being unreflective about this: Adrian Plass does a fine line in sending up this sort of jargon, as does Stuff Christians Like ( Crafting the perfect Christian dating profile is particularly excellent) and Stuff Christian Culture Likes. Back in my misspent youth, I even had a go myself. Still, Vadala could do with a dose of Plass, I think. | |
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| - 'Good Reasons for 'Believing' in God' by Dan Dennett
- Dennett talks about why it's sensible to profess belief in God. He lives up to his reputation of being a bit fluffier than Dawkins.
(tags: daniel-dennett philosophy religion atheism) - Valerie Tarico: Christian Belief Through The Lens of Cognitive Science: Part 6 of 6
- The final part of Tarico's series, which links to the others. "Despite its boundaries, cognitive science, does offer what is rapidly becoming a sufficient explanation for the supernaturalism that underlies organized religion."
(tags: christianity science religion brain psychology cognitive-bias cognition) - WHY DOES THE UNVIERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES: A Conversation With Sean Carroll
- "Inflation does not provide a natural explanation for why the early universe looks like it does unless you can give me an answer for why inflation ever started in the first place. That is not a question we know the answer to right now. That is why we need to go back before inflation into before the Big Bang, into a different part of the universe to understand why inflation happened versus something else."
(tags: physics cosmology big-bang universe inflation string-theory) - RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags - Stack Overflow
- "If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes." Quite right: you should use Beautiful Soup like everyone else does.
(tags: funny programming humour xml parse lovecraft stackoverflow regexp regex html) - The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality
- Alex Rosenberg argues that scientism is a good thing, and puts forward a very reductionist naturalism which he applies to consciousness, morality and a bunch of other stuff philosophers like to worry about. His fellow naturalists disagree in the comments (notably, Richard Carrier and Tom Clark produce good arguments against him).
(tags: naturalism philosophy science reductionism morality consciousness) - Riffs: 11:14:09: Patrol Magazine and Evangelicals Who Won’t “Get Over It”
- "It is astonishing that so many intelligent Christians seem to believe there is a deficit in emphasis on evangelism and scriptural literalism, and that, if the hatches are just battened down on a more solid “worldview,” evangelicalism can resume explaining the universe to new generations of believers."
(tags: evangelicalism christianity) - I’m Belle de Jour
- Former blogging prostitute Belle de Jour reveals her real identity to the Times. She was an impoverished PhD student.
(tags: culture sex identity anonymous science prostitution) - What Stormtroopers do on Their Day Off
- Funny photos of stormtroopers at play.
(tags: humour funny scifi images starwars toys photo photography) - Valerie Tarico: Speaking Evangelese: Tips for Politicians
- Tarico's article on evangelical jargon phrases and dog whistles. Some of these sound familiar
(tags: evangelicalism christianity politics religion jargon language) - Experimental Theology: Christians and Torture: Part 6, Hell and Torture
- Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology has been doing a series of posts on Christian and torture. His survey said: "Christians who believed in a horrific and never-ending hell were more likely to endorse torture. As God tortures so we torture." Unsurprising, perhaps, but interesting to see it backed up by research. In the comments, Beck notes the correlation is not strong, but is significant.
(tags: hell torture politics religion christianity morality)
- Tags:atheism, christianity, cognitive bias, consciousness, culture, daniel dennett, funny, hell, link blog, morality, philosophy, politics, programming, psychology, religion, science, sex
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| Following on from my link to The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy, londonkds wonders how legitimate it is to say "This person has previously shown themselves to be ignorant/misinformed/lying/batshit on this subject on several occasions, therefore I have better things to do with my time than to rigorously investigate all their arguments this time". I've replied on the original thread, but I thought I'd create a new post with my reply in: Reminds me of Yudkowsky's stuff on reversed stupidity and the follow up, Argument Screens Off Authority. If someone is reliably wrong (a well informed liar), you can learn something by listening to them: you just increase the weight you give to beliefs which contradict what they say on topics where you know they tend to lie. But this might not be useful, if you already strongly believe stuff which contradicts what they say. In practice, the people are ignorant or batshit haven't carefully studied how to be wrong. There are more ways to be wrong than right, so they probably are wrong, but you don't learn anything by listening to them, because their statements aren't tangled up with the truth at all. As Yudkowsky and brokenhut say, you can decide not to listen to such people because life is too short, but that decision shouldn't influence your opinion on the truth of their argument (though it's hard not to be influenced in practice). So I think your quoted statement is a justifiable one as long as you don't append "and I'll believe their argument less as a result". Suber's stuff on logical rudeness covers the case where your belief that they're batshit is because of some theory you hold which includes explanations of how all critics of the theory are batshit (examples exist in evangelical Christianity, atheism and feminism, that I've seen). ISTM that such a theory can't be used to dismiss critical arguments, though it can be used to explain why so many people apparently don't believe the theory. (You can comment on the original post: I've disabled comments on this one to keep all the discussion in one place). | |
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| - Why the Big Bang Singularity Does Not Help the Kalam Cosmological Argument for Theism -- Pitts 59 (4): 675 -- The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
- Paper on whether the Big Bang supports theistic arguments for creation ex nihilo, and particularly the Kalam argument. Notably, the author points out that if the singularity in the past requires a Creator, surely singularities in the future (such as black holes) require a Destroyer.
(tags: science religion creationism kalam bigbang big-bang Singularity philosophy) - August and Everything After (San Francisco, 2004)
- Adam Duritz singing the Counting Crows song whose lyrics are on the album cover of August and Everything After (but which doesn't appear on the album itself). There are a couple of live versions of this: this one's better because the crowd aren't yelling through it.
(tags: counting-crows adam-duritz music) - Gastronomic Realism—A Cautionary Tale
- Loeb's charming paper comparing Moral Realism and Gastronomic Realism (the idea that some foods are simply better than others, independent of individual tastes).
(tags: philosophy morality food realism gastronomic don-loeb system:filetype:pdf system:media:document) - “The Collapse Of Intelligent Design”
- Ken Miller demonstrating why ID is not backed by evidence. Miller's a Catholic, not a neo-sceptical atheist neo-rationalist.
(tags: ken-miller intelligent-design id evolution creationism science biology dna) - Don Loeb – Moral Irrealism
- Philosopher Don Loeb in conversation about moral irrealism, the view that there are no moral facts independent of our beliefs about them. Touches on whether introducing a God would help moral realism: Loeb thinks not.
(tags: philosophy morality atheism don-loeb) - Mr. Deity and the Identity Crisis
- "any time anyone's said anything comprehensible about the Trinity the Church has declared it a heresy." - Gareth
(tags: funny video religion christianity trinity mr-deity) - The Non-Expert: IKEA by Matthew Baldwin
- A walkthrough of the various levels of the IKEA game: "As you continue through the main SHOWROOM you will see groups blocking the walkways while chatting and others moving against traffic. These people should be killed immediately."
(tags: funny humour culture parody games ikea furniture shopping) - David Nutt: Governments should get real on drugs - opinion - 04 November 2009 - New Scientist
- David Nutt's opinion piece in New Scientist.
(tags: drugs science badscience government law medicine politics david-nutt) - A life changed by evidence
- Series of videos by a former evangelical Christian explaining why he became an atheist. Well produced and informative stuff. The chap makes a palpable effort to show how he was a Christian and how, for much of the time before his deconversion, he thought the things he was learning could be incorporated into Christianity rather than working against it.
(tags: video youtube de-conversion christianity evangelicalism bible morality)
- Tags:atheism, bible, biology, christianity, creationism, culture, evolution, funny, intelligent design, ken miller, law, link blog, morality, music, philosophy, politics, religion, science
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| Over at Ex-apologist's blog, the former apologist links to a paper and a response to it which straddle the boundary between physics and theology. I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff. The paper is J. Brian Pitts's Why the Big Bang Singularity Does Not Help the Kalam Cosmological Argument for Theism, and the response comes from William Lane Craig, who revitalised the Kalam argument for the existence of God. There are some real physicists reading this, so I'd be interested to know what you think of this stuff. I've left a comment over on the ex-apologist's blog, which I've pasted below: I love this stuff: it combines physics, philosophy and religion. I don't think Craig's response addresses Pitts's paper terribly well: they appear to be talking past each other. I have a physics degree gathering dust and a passing acquaintance with the philosophy of science, and I don't find Craig terribly convincing (but then, I'm also an ex-Christian atheist, so I wouldn't, would I?)  Craig seems to have misunderstood Pitts. Craig says the Kalam does not rely on a singularity but merely on the universe having a finite age, but as a matter of fact, Craig does appear to argue that the Big Bang singularity represent divine intervention, so Pitts's Cosmic Destroyer argument seems to have some force. When Pitts makes this argument, he accepts, for the sake of the argument, Craig's own claim that the past singularity of the Big Bang represents God's creative intervention, and asks why someone who accepts that claim would not also say that God intervenes destructively in black holes. The idea that God would do so probably seems silly to Christians, but Pitts says that on Craig's own argument, this feeling of silliness isn't well motivated. On the other hand, if the feeling of silliness is correct, perhaps Craig is wrong about singularities. A third possibility is for Craig to find some way to distinguish between the singularities, but Craig does not address this directly in his response. Pitts's thoughts about possible other theories aren't necessarily an expression of Pitts's theological commitments (whatever those may be). The reference to van Fraassen is a clue (and the fact that this stuff is published in a philosophy of science journal): Pitts is talking about the arguments between scientific realism and more empiricist philosophies of science which owe something to logical positivism, such as van Fraassen's own constructive empiricism. He's taking a middle position: the unobservable objects posited by theories are meaningful but we ought to be careful about how far we believe they are real (van Fraassen says we can have no grounds to do so, though, contra positivism, we can accept that our theories meaningfully make such claims about unobservables; realists say there are grounds for believing in unobservables). Craig appears to be quite a bit more of a realist about General Relativity than Pitts, or indeed than working physicists like Sean Carroll. The references to Bach-Weyl and so on are waved away (I'm no expert, but I think in that specific case, rightly, since as far as I can tell Pitts is talking about an early, failed attempt at a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism), but the possibility of a theory which does not give lengths (durations) to curves should worry Craig, unless he is completely committed to GR. What does it mean to say "the Universe began to exist" on such a theory, or if the universe looks like Carroll thinks it does? Dennett: "What Professor Craig does, brilliantly and with a wonderful enthusiasm, is he takes our everyday intuitions—our gut feelings about what’s plausible, what’s counterintuitive, what couldn’t possibly be true—and he cantilevers them out into territory where they’ve never been tested, in cosmology where whatever the truth is, it’s mindboggling." (thanks to Daniel Fincke for that one). | |
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| The talk to CUAAS was surprisingly well attended, given I spoke at the same time as Jo Brand, who I met on my way to the loos (we exchanged nods, as one speaker at the Cambridge Union does to another: it is not the done thing to make much of these things). I'm not sure how many CICCU people turned up, since they didn't make themselves known to me (apparently one woman was frantically making notes during my sermon, a well known evangelical habit, so I suspect there were a few). I spoke too fast, but people in Cambridge hear fast, so that's probably OK.
Below, you can find my notes, with some hyperlinks to expand on the things I said. ( Read more... )
There was a question and answer session afterwards. I remember some questions along the lines of:( Read more... )
Thanks to CUAAS for inviting me and giving me pizza. I had fun, and I hope my listeners did too.
Edited: Rave reviews continue to pour in. Well, William liked it, anyway, and has some observations on "atheist societies" to boot. - Tags:atheism, bible, cambridge university, christianity, ciccu, doubt, eliezer yudkowsky, morality, my life, theodicy, william lane craig
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| I'm giving a talk to the Cambridge University Atheist and Agnostic Society tomorrow, Monday 19th October, at 7.30 pm in the Union Society building (the one behind the Round Church). Apparently it's £1 for non-members, a bargain if ever I saw one. I'll cover some of the ground covered by my Losing My Religion essay, with a bit more of a Cambridge focus. I think they're hoping for some dark secrets about CICCU, which is unfortunate, because as far as I know there aren't any (anyone who knows different is invited to leave a comment below), but I'll do my best. Edited: I've blogged my notes and what I remember of the Q&A after the talk. | |
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| - Atheism, Reason, and Morality: Responding to Some Popular Christian Apologetics
- D Gene Witmer on how best to response to Christian presuppositionalists. I ran into one of them online recently, which was fun.
(tags: religion presuppositionalism apologetics christianity philosophy rationality logic induction morality system:filetype:pdf system:media:document) - God is not the Creator, claims academic
- In a sense, this isn't news: a lot of the religions that were contemporaries of Judaism had a creation story involving gods making order out of chaos rather than creating the universe from nothing, though I'd previously read that this was referred to in the Bible more obliquely than the this new theory suggests (e.g. water + Leviathan symbolises chaos in Psalm 74). If this idea catches on, it'll be interesting to see the new ideas the Abrahamic religions come up with to harmonise this with science :-)
(tags: religion bible history christianity creationism creation god chaos) - Plantinga: Religious Beilef as Properly Basic
- A nice introduction to Plantinga's ideas. I've not read his books, so I don't know how accurately they're summarised, but it seems to fit with what I've read elsewhere.
(tags: belief philosophy plantinga epistemology christianity religion alvin-plantinga) - PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness
- Peter Watts talks about a paper which claims consciousness arose out of the need to chose between conflicting motor impulses.
(tags: consciousness science scifi sci-fi peter-watts) - Demon ready to kill in city church
- Magus Shadee (Wiz 5, Necromatic) apparently cast Summon Monster in the big Catholic church in Cambridge. Local clerics of Papem, god of guilt about sex, say they'll summon the City Watch, though it's not clear what they'd do about it. I'd've thought the clerics would be better off casting some defensive spells of their own.
(tags: woo-woo christianity cambridge occult paganism witchcraft)
- Tags:bible, cambridge, christianity, consciousness, creationism, history, link blog, morality, paganism, philosophy, presuppositionalism, rationality, religion, science
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| I recently had a random encounter with a proponent of Christian presuppositionalism, over on the Premier Christian Radio forums. Presuppositionalism is a pretty odd position: not content with pointing out the evidence in favour of Christianity, as most Christians do, the presuppositionalist apparently reckons that unless you presuppose the existence of the Christian God, you can't possibly make any sense of the world at all. The original thread the discussion was on got very convoluted (not helped by Ning's limit on thread nesting depth: if you ever want to start a social network, don't use Ning, it's crap). I started another one over here. My initial posting is below, for my reference and also because I'd like to know what you guys think of it. I'm an amateur philosopher, but I know there are some pros reading. Here's what I said:
I'd like to clear the decks a bit rather than arguing in circles. I'm kind of new to presuppostionalism. I used to be a reformed evangelical, but more of an evidentialist (now I'm an atheist, as you might have gathered). Here's what I've managed to glean so far:
Presuppositionalism (as advocated by Sye, at least) seems to be the position that it is necessary to presuppose that the Christian God exists in order to make any sense of the world at all. On this view, the Christian God is the only possible explanation for various stuff which we need for the world to make sense, like logic, mathematics, and our apparent ability to reason from specific cases to general cases ("all the copper we've seen conducts electricity, so all copper conducts electricity"). (This sort of reasoning is usually referred to by philosophers of science as "induction", but note that it's not the same thing as "proof by induction" technique you may have learned in maths lessons). I'll refer to these things as "logic and stuff".
( Now read on... )
To sum up, presup seems a vain attempt to avoid the problem that every theory of knowledge has to start somewhere (or be circular or infinitely recursive, I suppose) by grounding the starting point in God. However, I think I have more confidence that, say, logic "works" than we do in why. I drive my car without knowing what's under the bonnet, and, unless there's a Cartesian daemon deluding my senses, it apparently still gets me from A to B. I might claim that it runs on petrol (gasoline) or on batteries or on some as yet unknown technology, Sye might claim it runs on God. Yet the world is as it is: my car runs on something, and if it isn't God, it's something else. | |
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| As promised, the link blog stuff is now working. It's pulling links and descriptions from my Delicious bookmarks and posting them to LJ in batches of 10 or more, or when there's stuff to be posted and nothing's been posted for 4 days. Let me know if it becomes annoying. Here comes the scienceIt turns out there's a PHP script called Delicious Glue to do this, but that would involve using PHP, so no (gateway drug: next thing you know, you'll be using Perl). It looks like that script also doesn't cope with the brave new world of Unicode terribly well, doesn't tag the LJ post using the tags from Delicious, and doesn't support the elaborate posting scheme described in the previous paragraph. Also, it wasn't invented here. So I did it in Python. Mark Pilgrim's excellent Universal Feed Parser module does much of the heavy lifting. Posting to LJ using XML RPC turns out to be surprisingly easy using the built-in xmlrpclib. Most of the faff comes in getting it to persist state between runs of the script, which I'm doing using pickle. Here's the code: you'd need to be a programmer to adapt it for your own use, but if you are, it shouldn't be hard. I'll probably run it daily using cron. | |
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| - What Is Evil For The Darwinist, Ctd
- Andrew Sullivan posts some well-reasoned letters from readers on the question of what a non-theist would call "evil" (presumably responses to the old "how can you say God is evil when you don't have a basis for morality?" question). Bizarrely, he then describes them as showing "contempt" for religion. There's no pleasing some people. The letters are good, anyway.
- seek and ye shall find…. but what?
- “If you REALLY had been a Christian you would have never de-converted.” vs the observation that many de-converts are former Christian ministers.
(tags: de-conversion religion christianity) - Buddhism and the God-idea
- Interesting. I liked: "Whether we call those superior beings gods, deities, devas or angels is of little importance, since it is improbable that they call themselves by any of those names."
(tags: buddhism god religion) - Why it's so hard to quantify false rape charges. - By Emily Bazelon and Rachael Larimore - Slate Magazine
- False accusations probably account for 8 to 10% of all accusations, though the research isn't conclusive, and it's not clear how this compares to false reporting of other crimes. Interesting story about the falsely accused man who found support from his girlfriend who had been raped some time ago: emotions were similar on both sides.
(tags: feminism research rape crime) - Justice with Michael Sandel - Home
- Harvard has put Michael Sandel's justly popular "Justice" course on the web. Well worth watching.
(tags: education philosophy morality ethics video community politics harvard justice) - Messy Revelation: Why Paul would have flunked hermaneutics
- Susan Wise Bauer in Christianity Today, writing about Peter Enns, who noticed that the NT authors don't interpret the OT the way evangelicals would. I liked this bit: "This is the exactly the kind of exegesis that terrifies most evangelicals. The man who admits that meanings can be "read into" Scripture stands on the fabled slippery slope, right above a sheer drop-off, while below him churns a sea of relativism, upon which floats only a single overloaded lifeboat, captained by a radical feminist gay & lesbian & transgender activist who is very anxious to make the final decision about who gets pitched overboard."
(tags: bible hermaneutics peter-enns christianity religion paul old-testament) - What’s so great about being an ex-Christian? Intellectual integrity.
- This sounds familiar.
(tags: ex-christian de-conversion atheism christianity religion) - Omnipresent G-d (LORD_YHWH) on Twitter
- God's on Twitter, with some new commandments. I don't know why these atheists complain about divine hiddeness. "My word is a knife made white by heat, such as that which one uses to cut pastrami." - wisdom for us all there.
(tags: god yhwh religion funny satire christianity judaism twitter) - Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks
- An interesting essay which talks about the demarcation problem in science and argues that we should be against creation science because it's wrong, not try to argue about what science is. I'm shocked he referred to a Christian belief as "bollocks". I got told off for that once.
(tags: bollocks science pseudoscience epistemology empiricism logical-positivism karl-popper popper creationism dover) - Thunderbirds will grow a generation of mad engineers
- FAB, Mr Ellis.
(tags: warren-ellis thunderbirds tv) - On The Possible God Of Philosophy And Cosmology Vs. The Personal, Historical God Of Faith
- Camels With Hammers links to Dennett's remarks on hearing William Lane Craig's cosmological argument, and then talks about the gap between the source of the universe (which we should properly be agnostic about) and the gods of major religions.
(tags: daniel-dennett dennett william-lane-craig craig cosmology kalam philosophy physics) - Rock-Bottom Loser Entertaining Offers From Several Religions | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
- Cruel but funny
(tags: onion religion funny satire humour) - "A Different Way of Knowing": The Uses of Irrationality... and its Limitations
- Greta Christina talks about "other ways of knowing" and their uses, as applied to the theism/atheism debate.
(tags: religion epistemology science atheism greta-christina empiricism) - Understanding Sarah Palin: Or, God Is In The Wattles
- Peter Watts gives his grand theory for why religion hasn't died out. It's all about preventing free-loading once societies get above a certain size.
(tags: peter-watts religion evolution sarah-palin politics psychology signalling) - Whence Rationality?
- Some responses to the evolutionary argument against naturalism. The point that evolution is unlikely to come up with the sort of elaborate errors Plantinga mentions is new to me.
- Tags:atheism, bible, buddhism, christianity, creationism, daniel dennett, education, evolution, feminism, funny, judaism, link blog, morality, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, science, william lane craig
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|  The ever-reliable Cambridge Evening News reveals that dark forces are gathering in Cambridge: "Magus Lynius Shadee, self-named King of All Witches, has announced he will open in the city centre by December 24" (I don't know what it means for a magus to "open in the city centre", but I'm not sure I want to stick around to find out). Local church leaders aren't too pleased about this, and warn of bad juju.
This set me thinking about the time the vicar at my former church told us that educated Cambridge Christians hadn't taken the stuff in the Bible about demons seriously enough. Basic theism is all very well at first, but inevitably you move on to the harder stuff. Initially, you're all "everything that begins to exist has a cause" but before long you start thinking that the Resurrection is pretty good evidence for Christian theism (after all, as the Christian sort of God exists, it's likely that he would raise Jesus from the dead, therefore the Resurrection is not terribly unlikely; therefore, given the New Testament evidence, the Resurrection happened; therefore the Christian sort of God exists). Tragically, for some people even that's not enough. Not satisfied with a Trinity, they crave other supernatural beings. From there, it's a slippery slope to "I had doubts about the validity of that Resurrection argument / fancied that boy/girl/sheep / had a bit of a funny turn late at night: SATAN DUNNIT!"
When I was a lad, the school Christian Union leaders told us Dungeons and Dragons was a doorway to danger, a gateway into Satanism. I'd like to suggest that Christianity is a gateway to Dungeons and Dragons. This isn't a completely new idea: arkannath suggested it in the comments of one of my old posts, which you might also enjoy.
Father David Paul's (Cleric level 1, patron: Papem, god of guilt about sex) warning that "People who go to these things often end up with mental problems" is best read as a caution to people with poor Will Saves. Rev Ian Church is clearly some sort of adventuring cleric (level 3, patron: Jeebus, god of circular arguments) on a quest to put a stop to Shadee (Wizard level 5, necromancer). Our hero has tracked the villian to his underground lair, wherein "there were several ritual and seance rooms and what really struck us was the intense and extreme cold in the rooms". Church (by the way, am I alone in thinking that naming your cleric "Church" is only one step up from calling your characters "Bob's fighter 1", "Bob's figher 2", and so on? Not sure what the DM was thinking with "Shadee", either) neglects to mention how he turned several undead and avoided some tricky pit traps while he was down there, but we can assume he's just being modest. There were plenty of XP given out that day, I can tell you. Still, it looks like Shadee escaped, and now the campaign is coming to the streets of Cambridge. The local peasants are pretty excited by the prospect. | |
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| Link blog?I keep a sort of mini blog over at Delicious. It's a collection of links I want to save, plus a short description. On LiveJournal, there's a feed of it at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) pw201_links, but there's no point posting comments there, as I won't see them. andrewducker regularly posts batches of his links to his LJ, and they often create some interesting discussion. I wondered whether I should do the same, or whether that would mean death was too good for me, as it is for those people who use Loudtwitter to post their "tweets" to LJ. I'd probably post links once a week or in batches of 10, whichever happened sooner. What do you think? Poll #1462193
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14 Should I make link blog entries? LJ links up with Google adsAs you might have seen over on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/newsinfo.gif) news, LJ have formed a partnership with Google, allowing users who pay for their journals to place Google ads on them and earn a bit of money (LJ itself probably makes money off people who sign up, they're not taking a cut of the money for people viewing the ads). I won't be doing this, as the small amount of money I might make from ads isn't worth the annoyance to my readers. As someone whose comment I can't find said, it looks like LJ have done this to keep up with other services like Wordpress, who offer ads as an option. SUP bought out LJ because LJ apparently is blogging in Russia, so perhaps this is part of a trend. I hope they might do more "serious blogging" stuff as opposed to social networking stuff: I'd like to see LJ on my own domain working properly, comment feeds (so I don't have to do it myself with Python scripts and gaffer tape), Google Analytics, and a pony. Of course, the best thing about news postings is the hordes of whining commenters and the responses mocking them for whining. Pages 6 and 7 are particular rich in put-downs and image macros. It's interesting to see that the "bugger off to Dreamwidth" response is getting popular: DW has made a name for itself as the place where you flounce to because The Man is keeping you down, Man. Fandom folk are pretty self-aware, so they mock this stereotype themselves. All good fun. | |
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| I've produced a new version of LJ New Comments which works with Dreamwidth again: looks like they changed how comments are marked up at some point. | |
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| Richard Beck, an Associate Professor and experimental psychologist at Abilene Christian University, writes a blog called Experimental Theology. It's full of his research and his reflections on the psychology of religion, and is well worth reading. Beck, a Christian himself, is happy to use psychological tools to study belief.
Beck recently finished a series of posts entitled The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience. In this series, he talks about two ideas of the psychological purpose of religion, those of Sigmund Freud and William James, and relates the results of some experiments he did to test these ideas.
Tell me about your mother
 Freud wrote a book called The Future of an Illusion. In it, Freud argues that religion is a narcotic, not in the social sense of Marx's famous saying, but rather, psychologically. Religion provides consolation in the face of uncertainity and death. In describing this psychological purpose, Freud does not argue that this means religion is necessarily false (see logical rudeness), but he says (and Beck agrees) that this consolation is suspicious: "We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be."
James wrote a book called The Varieties of
Religious Experience, in which he speaks of healthy-minded
believers and of sick souls. The healthy-minded believer is an optimist,
who lives by "averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the
light of good". There are good things to say about living like this, but
ultimately, James thinks healthy-mindedness functions as an anaesthetic. In this,
James's view of the healthy-minded believer is similar to Freud's view of all
believers. But James doesn't stop there. Sick souls, he says,
don't find consolation in religion and are convinced that "the evil aspects
of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes
home to us when we lay them most to heart". For Beck, the laments found in some of the
Psalms come from sick souls. Beck cites Mother Theresa, whose letters
show she felt a spiritual emptiness for much of her life, as another
example.
Is Freud right? Experiments done to investigate Terror Management Theory suggest he is. Christians were primed to think about their own deaths and then ask to evaluate essays they were told were written by a Christian and a Jew. They were significantly more likely to denigrate the Jewish author than Christians who evaluated the essays without the death priming. In the face of death, believers exhibit what the theorists call "worldview defence".
It is not the healthy who need a doctor
But, says Beck, these experiments failed to distinguish the healthy and the sick believers. If James is right and the sick souls exist, they should be less likely to defend their worldviews when primed with thoughts of death. Beck came up with what he calls the Defensive Theology Scale, a set of questions designed to rate how much Christians think God gives special insight and protection, answers even mundane prayers, and guides events in their lives. People who have these consoling beliefs score highly, and are healthy-minded, in James's terminlogy, or Summer Christians, in Beck's. It turns out that when the death priming experiment was re-run, high DTS scores correlated with worldview defence in the face of death. The sick souls, those Beck calls the Winter Christians, did not react like their Summer counterparts: they didn't feel the need to defend their worldview even when primed to think of death.
There's much more in Beck's essays (for example, the correlation between healthy-mindedness and belief in an active Satan), but you should read them for yourselves.
Worshipping tables
Reading Beck's stuff, I'd classify my former belief as healthy-minded or Summery. It's pretty hard for an evangelical to be anything else: sick souls don't have a personal relationship with Jesus, and aren't inclined to blame sin and Satan when things get tough in their faith. Perhaps there's some lingering remnant of evangelicalism in me, because I can't quite see the point of being a sick soul and still being part of a worshipping community, even if you've had a religious experience which leads you to think there's a God. Terry Pratchett writes that witches don't believe in gods in the same way that they don't believe in, say, tables: they know they exist and have a purpose, but don't feel the need to go around saying "O mighty table, without whom we are naught". God seems inscrutable to Winter Christians, so, as Daniel Fincke asks, Why worship someone with mysterious motives? (in the posting, we also see the important contribution of Chef from South Park to defeating various Christian theodicies). I'll have to read more of Beck's old posts to see whether he addresses the question of what motivates Winter Christians. | |
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