Wednesday, 26 February 2014
What if Satan is real?
Imagine for a moment, a world in which God and Satan actually exist. God is omnipresent, omnibenevolent and omniscient.
Satan, like God, is a spirit with supernatural powers, including the ability to communicate with people. Satan likes to make life difficult for God and for humans.
In the Bible, God is shown to be an incompetent, jealous, vain, monster who will kill people for the least reason. He had to start the human race twice because he didn’t like how it went the first time. He had to make a second covenant with humans because the first one didn’t work out. He had to rescind many of his laws because they were not good.
He was violently jealous of other gods, he wanted living sacrifices and he wanted to be worshipped. He even sacrificed his own son as an offering to himself.
None of these characteristics are compatible with an omnipresent, omnibenevolent and omniscient God. I can see only one way to explain all this.
1. Satan actually inspired the Bible posing as God. He did this to discredit God and confuse humans. This was easy for him—humans have no way to distinguish between talking to God and talking to Satan posing as God.
2. God started everything but gave people free-will. He then sat back to allow us to prosper or fail as we will. God let us go—completely.
3. The only being trying to interfere with our free-will is Satan. And the Bible is his masterpiece. He made it so confusing that even Christians cannot agree what it means; from one Christian sect 2,000 years ago there are now around 38,000 denominations.
If I am right, we cannot rely on anything in the Bible. We do not know if there is a heaven or a hell and, if heaven exists, we do not know how to get there.
The best we can do is to ignore the Bible completely and to live our lives helping others and working to make the world a better place for our children to inherit. (Which is probably what God would have told us if he had written the Bible.)
Oddly enough, if God and Satan are both IMAGINARY beings, the same advice works perfectly...
Tuesday, 25 February 2014
The dawn of science
Around 1,000 years ago a few people stopped using intuition, mysticism and faith to explain things and instead started to collect and evaluate evidence. That small step changed everything. It allowed us to test ideas and often to prove them wrong.
A process akin to "Darwinian" selection was born; many ideas went extinct but the ideas that best fitted the evidence survived and improved over time. That this process worked is undeniable—our understanding of the universe increased explosively and the technologies derived from this deep understanding have transformed our lives. The process was codified into what we now know as the scientific method.
Yet there are still billions of people who cling to intuition, mysticism and faith as their lens onto the universe. They persist in this despite the runaway success of the scientific method and despite the fact that these pre-scientific methods have never given us a better answer than science to any question, ever.
Science works, faith does not; get over it.
Read More
A process akin to "Darwinian" selection was born; many ideas went extinct but the ideas that best fitted the evidence survived and improved over time. That this process worked is undeniable—our understanding of the universe increased explosively and the technologies derived from this deep understanding have transformed our lives. The process was codified into what we now know as the scientific method.
Yet there are still billions of people who cling to intuition, mysticism and faith as their lens onto the universe. They persist in this despite the runaway success of the scientific method and despite the fact that these pre-scientific methods have never given us a better answer than science to any question, ever.
Science works, faith does not; get over it.
Monday, 24 February 2014
The benefits of believing in God
Does belief in God offer the believer any benefits? A good way to find out is to compare highly religious countries with less religious countries. So I've done just that.
I've taken the 10 most religious countries in the world and compared them with the 10 least religious countries.
Religiosity is measured by the proportion of adults who agree with the statement, “My religion is important in my everyday life.” This data is collected by Gallup Poll Research.
Across the 10 most religious countries, 98.8% of people said religion is important. In the 10 least religious 21.7% agreed that religion is important. So, you could say, the 10 most religious countries are around 4.5 times more religious than the least religious—a very significant difference.
Does believing keep you safe?
One measure of safety is the number of road traffic fatalities.
Most religious: 4,123 deaths/year/100,000 motor vehicles;
Least religious: 12.
The most religious countries have 343 times more road traffic deaths than the least religious. Believing does not keep you safe.
Does believing make you better off?
We can measure income as gross domestic product per capita (average income per person).
Most religious: $2,565USD per year;
Least religious: $40,639USD.
The least religious countries are 15.8 times better off. Believing does not make you better off.
Does believing make you live longer?
If some god(s) answer prayers we would expect believers to be healthier and to recover better when they are sick or pregnant. Average life expectancy is a good aggregate measure of this.
Most religious: 62 years (male and female at birth);
Least religious: 80 years.
This gives the least religious 18 years of extra life on average (29% longer lives). Believing does not make you live longer.
Does believing make you behave better?
One way to assess behaviour is to compare crime rates. For simplicity, I’ve compared intentional homicide rates. This is only one crime but it is the most serious crime.
Most religious: 10 homicides per year per 100,000 inhabitants;
Least religious: 1.
The most religious kill their neighbours at 10 times the rate of the least religious. Believing does not make you behave better.
Does believing make you happier?
Most years the World Happiness Report is published. This uses a range of data known to be correlated to individual happiness. It ranks 156 countries according to their happiness score. So a score of 1 corresponds to the happiest country in the world and a score of 156 corresponds to the least happy. (Togo ranked 156 in the 2013 report.)
Most religious: average rank = 110 out of 156;
Least religious: average rank = 26 out of 156.
So the most religious countries ranked 84 places below the least religious. Believing does not make you happier.
Conclusion
On these measures, believing in God does not deliver any practical benefits. I have reviewed many different measures and found a consistent pattern—the higher the level of belief in God, the more human well-being declines.
Data is available for unemployment, maternal mortality, neonatal mortality, infant mortality and many other measures. I invite readers to check for themselves.
But are there any disadvantages to belief? There are some obvious disadvantages. Believers typically associate themselves with a church and spend time attending services and functions. Attending church costs money and anecdotal stories suggest that poorer people tend to give money they can ill-afford in the hope that God may improve their lot. Tithing (giving 10% of salary) is common is some countries. So believing costs time and money.
Believing in a supernatural God leaves people open to believing in other supernatural agents—some of which are thought to be malevolent. The fears so created leave believers vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous pastors and others.
Even children can suffer when a pastor declares they are infected by demons and offers to exorcise them for a fee. Some such exorcisms can be brutal and sometimes even result in death of the child.
Religious communities can live side-by-side quite happily but conflicts can arise and when they do, they can escalate into wholesale bloodletting. This is happening today in several parts of the world and was a persistent scourge during the 20th century.
There is one benefit for believers—they become part of a mutual help community. This is undoubtedly a genuine practical and psychological benefit albeit one that could be achieved on a secular basis at far less cost and without all the baggage and disadvantages of religion.
All this does raise the question why? Why are there no benefits when believers so clearly believe there are? It is interesting that the 10 most religious countries include mostly Christian, mostly Muslim and mostly Buddhist countries. So none of these belief systems nor their supernatural agencies actually provide any protection from the perils of life. And why do countries, who seek little or no help from gods do so well?
The simplest explanation is there are no benefits for believing countries because no Gods exist. The countries that do well do so because they have the resources and have developed infrastructure and political systems that are effective.
No doubt there will be contrary opinions as to why there are no practical benefits in believing but the facts are crystal clear. Believing in God will not help you—unless you are a pastor or cleric!
---SOURCES---------------------------------------
The 10 most religious countries (alphabetical order):
Bangladesh
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Indonesia
Malawi
Mauritania
Morocco
Niger
Somalia
Sri Lanka
The 10 least religious countries (alphabetical order):
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
Hong Kong
Japan
Netherlands
Norway
Sweden
United Kingdom
Religiosity - Gallup Poll Research: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country
Happiness - World Happiness Report 201: 
http://unsdsn.org/files/2013/09/WorldHappinessReport2013_online.pdf
Life Expectancy - World Health Organisation: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
GPD/Capita - World Bank: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Homicide Rates - UNODC: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Road Traffic Fatalities - World Health Organisation: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
A tale of two ways of thinking...
In 2012, an international team of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss/French border announced they had demonstrated the existence of the elusive Higgs Boson. This was a monumental effort. It took more than 10,000 scientists ten years to build the LHC and a further four years to reveal the Higgs Boson.
The LHC cost more than $4bn. It is the most complex machine ever built. It creates and accelerates beams of protons around a 27Km ring to within 0.000000009% of the speed of light. To process the vast quantities of data produced as trillions of protons collide each day, the LHC has a network of 100,000 linked computers around the world. The LHC collects and processes data equivalent to the entire Google databank every three days.
Despite this gargantuan effort, the team and LHC are not CERTAIN they have found the Higgs Boson. Their data suggests a 4.9 sigma level of confidence—the chance that they are wrong is one in 2 million.
Meanwhile in a windowless meeting room at an office in Columbia Street, Seattle, five men and two women are discussing a 2 million-year-old fossil hominid found in South Africa. Australopithecus sediba is a candidate for the last link between australopithecines and our genus Homo.
The people at this meeting are endowed with a certainty the scientists at the LHC lack. They are 100% CERTAIN the truth is to be found in a book written between 2 - 3 thousand years ago by people who lacked scientific instruments, who knew nothing about the size of the universe and nothing about the composition of matter. They did not even know the shape of the Earth. Their most advanced technological achievement was a bronze sword.
But they had something possibly more important—they believed they were the chosen people of a god who created the entire universe and all life-forms in just six days.
A tall man with a shock of brown hair picked up a marker pen and turned to the whiteboard, “Ok, let’s get down to business. How do we discredit australopithecus sediba?”
Sunday, 23 February 2014
How creationists distort evolution
The courageous folk who prefer the God hypothesis have the odds stacked against them. For starters, they do not have any evidence that their creation mechanism (God) exists whilst those who accept evolution understand and can demonstrate the existence of the mechanisms that power evolution (genes, reproduction, genetic variability, environmental pressures and so on).
But, the God hypothesists have even bigger problems. When we look around us we find a huge mass of evidence that could falsify one or both approaches. There is the fossil record, the DNA relationships between species, faulty genes shared between species and "design" glitches that are perfectly explained by evolution but can only be explained by the God hypothesists by assuming God had a "bad day".
In summary, all of this and much other evidence supports evolution and falsifies the God hypothesis. So where do the the God hypothesists go from here? Well, many of them create strawman versions of evolution which they can show to be false. This Muslim video is one such example.
This video attempts to show the absurdity of constructing a toy helicopter by randomly shaking a bag of Lego bricks. This is presented as an analogy to the probability of life evolving but, of course, this is not how evolution works—not even close.
But, there is a way to make this analogy represent evolution rather better...
Firstly, evolution does not create a sophisticated organism at one attempt—it relies on multiple attempts and many failures with a selection process to weed out the less effective organisms. So let's imagine instead of one bag of lego, we have 1,000 bags of Lego. And let's imagine we have 1,000 trained monkeys each attempting to build a helicopter.
Secondly, evolution is a cumulative process whereby each successful change becomes the starting point that future changes build upon.
To build our helicopter will take 100 pieces of Lego. We start by asking the monkeys to put any three pieces of Lego together randomly. Then have a selection process.
What are the chances that one monkey has unknowingly assembled 3% of the helicopter? Pretty good. Then give all the moneys this assembly as a starting point and let them add another three pieces of Lego. Now select again and see if any of them has assembled 6% of the helicopter. Again, there's a pretty good chance and if they haven't, just try again.
Continue like this until you have a complete helicopter.
This is not perfectly analogous to how evolution works but it's much closer than expecting that shaking a bag of Lego will produce a fully complete helicopter at one attempt. If you remove "selection" from Evolution by Natural Selection, you won't get evolution but that's exactly what the helicopter analogy does.
Using my model, what are the chances of coming up with a complete helicopter? Quite close to unity. In other words, you're almost certain to get a helicopter.
Finally, why do the God hypothesists so often argue, not against evolutionary theory but against an invented and distorted version of it? And why do they focus almost exclusively on picking holes in evolutionary theory, rather than presenting the evidence for their own hypothesis?
Perhaps, it's simply because they have no evidence?
One God, many hells?
Judaism spawned two further major religions: Christianity and Islam in that order. These three religions worship the same God but in quite different ways. However, if one God inspired three religions, we should expect some central teachings to be common.
For example, all three religions have some concept of hell.This is a crucially important doctrine because it could affect the quality of [after]life for billions of people for eternity. So how do these religions view hell?
The Jewish hell is not eternal and not a place of torture—it is a place of purification.
Christians also argue about the nature of hell. Some say it is eternal fiery torture (Biblical references to this are easy to find); some say it is separation from god and others say it is complete annihilation. In fact, there are several other interpretations too. We should note:
1. The Bible leaves room for debate about why one goes to hell and what it is like when you arrive there.
2. Christian hell is very different from Jewish hell.
Islamic hell (jahannam) resembles Christian eternal hell but has several embellishments. Muslims can look forward to a selection of hells, with punishments graded according to your behaviour whilst on Earth. One hell is unbearably cold whilst the others are unbearably hot. One hell is specifically for hypocrites. (It is not clear what happens to people whose transgressions span several hells; perhaps they do a tour?)
Maybe there is a simpler solution. Perhaps, all these religions were invented by men. Perhaps, as these religions evolved, their inventors took parts of earlier religions and developed and enhanced them. This option fits the facts perfectly, whilst the option of one God changing his mind every now and again makes no sense.
Read More
Jewish Hell
Early Judaism seems to have had no concept of hell—just a place, Gehenna, where deceased people rested. Later, this was developed and an afterlife was introduced (see Daniel 12:2). In the later version, Gehenna became a place where souls resided temporarily and were purified before entering the “world to come”.The Jewish hell is not eternal and not a place of torture—it is a place of purification.
Christian Hell
Christianity introduced an entirely different form of hell. Hell is a punishment for those whose behaviour or beliefs does not meet God’s requirements. Strangely, for such a vital doctrine, there is much dispute among Christians as to what these requirements are (or even whether we can influence the outcome at all).Christians also argue about the nature of hell. Some say it is eternal fiery torture (Biblical references to this are easy to find); some say it is separation from god and others say it is complete annihilation. In fact, there are several other interpretations too. We should note:
1. The Bible leaves room for debate about why one goes to hell and what it is like when you arrive there.
2. Christian hell is very different from Jewish hell.
Islamic Hell
Islamic hell (jahannam) resembles Christian eternal hell but has several embellishments. Muslims can look forward to a selection of hells, with punishments graded according to your behaviour whilst on Earth. One hell is unbearably cold whilst the others are unbearably hot. One hell is specifically for hypocrites. (It is not clear what happens to people whose transgressions span several hells; perhaps they do a tour?)
Conclusion
When we compare the different hells we could ask how it is possible that a single, perfect unchanging God could have revealed such different hells, with different entry requirements, to these three religions?Maybe there is a simpler solution. Perhaps, all these religions were invented by men. Perhaps, as these religions evolved, their inventors took parts of earlier religions and developed and enhanced them. This option fits the facts perfectly, whilst the option of one God changing his mind every now and again makes no sense.
Adiós Christianity
Christianity is an elderly religion that is showing its age. It contains such huge helpings of magic and nonsense that it speaks to fewer and fewer people in the age of science.
It has a long and wrong and bloody history from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the oppression of science to child abuse and people cannot understand how goodness can come from such a dark past.
It has a deeply pessimistic view of human nature and requires people to be saved from their own God.
In modern times, we encourage people to reach for the sky, not to cower in fear and submission. Christianity represents the past—a relic from an unenlightened and ignorant age.
Perhaps, most importantly of all, we have no reason to believe it is true. No reason to believe God is real, that Jesus ever existed, that anyone was conceived of a virgin and was restored from death after three days, that eternal life is possible. And, if there is no reason to believe, we won't believe.
The figures speak for themselves. People are leaving Christianity in droves across the developed world. Churches are closing and have vacant parishes as they struggle to find people prepared to take a career in ministry.
So Goodbye Christianity. I would say it was nice knowing you but really it wasn't. It was a burden we carried for 2,000 years that can, at last, be put aside.
Read More
It has a long and wrong and bloody history from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the oppression of science to child abuse and people cannot understand how goodness can come from such a dark past.
It has a deeply pessimistic view of human nature and requires people to be saved from their own God.
In modern times, we encourage people to reach for the sky, not to cower in fear and submission. Christianity represents the past—a relic from an unenlightened and ignorant age.
Perhaps, most importantly of all, we have no reason to believe it is true. No reason to believe God is real, that Jesus ever existed, that anyone was conceived of a virgin and was restored from death after three days, that eternal life is possible. And, if there is no reason to believe, we won't believe.
The figures speak for themselves. People are leaving Christianity in droves across the developed world. Churches are closing and have vacant parishes as they struggle to find people prepared to take a career in ministry.
So Goodbye Christianity. I would say it was nice knowing you but really it wasn't. It was a burden we carried for 2,000 years that can, at last, be put aside.
The argument from design
The argument
One of the common arguments for the existence of God is based on William Paley's famous watchmaker analogy (see here). The argument can be used for any "creator" god and it goes like this:"There are evidences all around you, but most importantly, look at yourself, You have the ability to talk, walk and reason. You have bones, tissues, organs and systems of your body that work perfectly together in harmony like a machine. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Everything you see around you was made by someone. Things like cars, houses, electronic gadgets and what have you. All these things were made by someone but who made you?"
This is the argument from design or the teleological argument. Put more formally it would be:
P1) Things that look designed have been designed
P2) Things that are designed must have a designer
P3) Humans exist and look designed
THEREFORE
C1) A human designer must exist
P4) The Bible says God created humans
THEREFORE
C2) God must exist
Critique
For this argument to be valid ALL the premises must be true and the conclusions must necessarily follow from them with no logical fallacies.Premise P1 is not true. It can be successfully challenged in, at least, two ways:
1) We can find examples of things that look designed but are not. Consider for example, snowflakes. They look exquisitely designed but are completely natural. We know in great detail how they form.
Also, consider the Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland; hundreds of evenly shaped basalt rocks that fit together perfectly like a grand design but the Giants Causeway is known to be a natural phenomenon.
If things can LOOK designed but be natural, premise (P1) is not true.
2) When we place living things and non-living things into a single group and argue what is true for non-living things is also true for living things, we are making a category error. Life has some distinct properties that non-life does not have:
Life reproduces itself. Non-life does not. Reproduction is not a perfect process so populations experience variability—not all dogs or humans or any specie are identical. For example, some may be taller, faster, see or hear better, have more intelligence, make more efficient use of food and so on.
Life is subject to environmental pressures which some members of a population can deal with better than others. This leads to gradual changes in populations. Over time, especially when environmental pressures are high, these small changes can accumulate into large changes. So life adapts to its environment (or becomes extinct). Non-life does not.
This means life can appear to change its design in response to its environment with no help from a designer. Non-life cannot do that.
Consequently, it is not true that things that look designed necessarily are designed so premise (P1) is false.
Premise P2 is agreed; things that are designed must have a designer.
Premise P3 says, “Humans exist and look designed”. Humans may look designed, but as we have seen at (P1), not all things that look designed are designed so (P3) is not agreed.
If humans were cars, we would all agree with conclusion (C1) but humans are in a different category, so the conclusion “A human designer must exist” is not proven.
Premise (P4) says “The Bible says God created humans”. The Bible does say that but that does not mean it is true. Fatally, this premise ASSUMES the very thing we are trying to prove—that God exists. So this premise is an example of circular reasoning and must, therefore, be rejected.
Consequently, conclusion (C2) “God must exist” is not proven.
Conclusion
The teleological argument is a very bad argument. It relies on at least two false premises and circular reasoning. Its conclusions that a designer of life exists and that designer is God cannot be accepted.
Saturday, 22 February 2014
We are stories
Our lives are like fabric. Fabric woven from stories; some written by people long dead, some more recent. We absorb these stories from childhood and they become part of us. They help us to make sense of the world—they give us substance.
But every now and again someone comes along and tells new stories. Stories so different that we cannot reconcile them with the old stories. What do we do?
We attack the new story-teller, we deny his stories, we tell him he is insane, we turn our backs on him. We may even kill him.
But once the new stories have been told, they can't be untold.
They rest in people's minds.
And, one day, the new stories become the old stories...
Read More
But every now and again someone comes along and tells new stories. Stories so different that we cannot reconcile them with the old stories. What do we do?
We attack the new story-teller, we deny his stories, we tell him he is insane, we turn our backs on him. We may even kill him.
But once the new stories have been told, they can't be untold.
They rest in people's minds.
And, one day, the new stories become the old stories...
Why beliefs are important
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Our beliefs, working with our emotions, play a crucial role in determining how we will react in any situation. Our emotions and beliefs engage in an intricate dance, moving so quickly and quietly that we are usually unaware of their tireless cavorting. This frenetic dance drives our behaviour and leaves us, to a significant extent, as mere spectators.
That is why beliefs play a such big part in our lives and in the lives of those around us.
We have evolved to be this way for a reason. Our childhood socialisation, gives us beliefs and skills to ensure we fit within our social group. Social groups are likely to be more harmonious, productive and effective when they share common beliefs. Our beliefs are part of our culture.
Kuru is an incurable and deadly neurological disease found among the Fore, Yate, and Usanufa tribes in Papua New Guinea. The disease was first reported in 1953 by two anthropologists, Ronald and Catherine Berndt.
Kuru was of epidemic proportions in Papua New Guinea but was not known anywhere else in the world. The cause was traced to a form of prion protein that lodged primarily in the brain and central nervous system of carriers and was passed to members of these tribes by their cannibalistic funeral practices—it was considered a sacred duty to eat the bodies of deceased relatives which was believed to return the deceased person's "lifeforce" to the tribe.
Researchers noted that the disease was much more prevalent among women and children than among men. This turned out to be because men were entitled to the choice cuts of the corpse whilst the women and children were left with the organs, central nervous system and brains.
The Australian government outlawed cannibalism and the practice eventually came to a halt. The last person to die of kuru died in 2005.
But guess what? Almost no-one does that. What we do is think of ways to defend our false belief. Or avoid getting into challenging discussions. Or walk away from them. Or get angry—we may even lash out at our tormentor.
We do have a rational brain but, too often, we use it fruitlessly to search for arguments to support the beliefs we enjoy rather than to seek beliefs that are true.
Not all beliefs are equal. Some are foundational and buried deeply with strong emotional ties. You could think of an inverted pyramid of beliefs where the higher beliefs rely on the lower beliefs.
For example, you may believe in the Christian God. This may make you believe the Bible is the word of God and is inerrant which, in turn, may make you believe the universe is 6,000 years old and that life was created and, therefore, did not evolve. Very many beliefs may hinge on the foundational belief that God is real.
So sometimes, you cannot change a single belief, there may be a domino effect and you may have to change many interdependent beliefs.
Despite the difficulties, people do change their beliefs although they rarely change overnight. More often, deep, emotion-laden foundational beliefs take years to change. Some people say it feels like going through a grieving process.
It is possible that believing false things could harm you but it is very unlikely that believing true things will.
Believing true things puts you in charge; believing false things can make you vulnerable and make you a victim. As Sam Harris said, "There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."
For me, apart from the practical benefits of believing true things, there is something else. Not believing false things is quite simply a matter of self-respect.
Read More
That is why beliefs play a such big part in our lives and in the lives of those around us.
How are beliefs acquired?
You may think, as intelligent creatures, we use our intellect to arrive at our beliefs. But we don't. We have little direct control over our beliefs. Many are laid down in childhood and are stubbornly resistant to change.We have evolved to be this way for a reason. Our childhood socialisation, gives us beliefs and skills to ensure we fit within our social group. Social groups are likely to be more harmonious, productive and effective when they share common beliefs. Our beliefs are part of our culture.
Are our beliefs true?
Our beliefs are not necessarily true. Religious affiliation is an example of a cultural belief. There are 22 major religions in the world today and many thousands if we include minor religions and those that are no longer practiced. Since, these religions have contradictory beliefs, we can be sure that many religious beliefs are not true (and they may all be untrue).Are untrue beliefs harmful?
Some untrue beliefs are positively harmful. Every year we see examples of people dying of easily curable illnesses, such as diabetes, because they believe prayer offers superior treatment than medicine. This is particularly tragic when children are the victims.Kuru is an incurable and deadly neurological disease found among the Fore, Yate, and Usanufa tribes in Papua New Guinea. The disease was first reported in 1953 by two anthropologists, Ronald and Catherine Berndt.
Kuru was of epidemic proportions in Papua New Guinea but was not known anywhere else in the world. The cause was traced to a form of prion protein that lodged primarily in the brain and central nervous system of carriers and was passed to members of these tribes by their cannibalistic funeral practices—it was considered a sacred duty to eat the bodies of deceased relatives which was believed to return the deceased person's "lifeforce" to the tribe.
Researchers noted that the disease was much more prevalent among women and children than among men. This turned out to be because men were entitled to the choice cuts of the corpse whilst the women and children were left with the organs, central nervous system and brains.
The Australian government outlawed cannibalism and the practice eventually came to a halt. The last person to die of kuru died in 2005.
Can we change our beliefs?
What happens when someone challenges one of our unproven beliefs? A rational person would acknowledge the challenge, evaluate the evidence for the contrary belief and, if the contrary belief is sufficiently well-supported, abandon the former belief.But guess what? Almost no-one does that. What we do is think of ways to defend our false belief. Or avoid getting into challenging discussions. Or walk away from them. Or get angry—we may even lash out at our tormentor.
We do have a rational brain but, too often, we use it fruitlessly to search for arguments to support the beliefs we enjoy rather than to seek beliefs that are true.
Not all beliefs are equal. Some are foundational and buried deeply with strong emotional ties. You could think of an inverted pyramid of beliefs where the higher beliefs rely on the lower beliefs.
For example, you may believe in the Christian God. This may make you believe the Bible is the word of God and is inerrant which, in turn, may make you believe the universe is 6,000 years old and that life was created and, therefore, did not evolve. Very many beliefs may hinge on the foundational belief that God is real.
So sometimes, you cannot change a single belief, there may be a domino effect and you may have to change many interdependent beliefs.
Despite the difficulties, people do change their beliefs although they rarely change overnight. More often, deep, emotion-laden foundational beliefs take years to change. Some people say it feels like going through a grieving process.
Why bother to change your beliefs?
Trying to believe only things that are true may have minimal benefit for you or, depending on your beliefs, it may transform your life. It may make you safer, happier, nicer and give you a more fulfilling life.It is possible that believing false things could harm you but it is very unlikely that believing true things will.
Believing true things puts you in charge; believing false things can make you vulnerable and make you a victim. As Sam Harris said, "There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."
For me, apart from the practical benefits of believing true things, there is something else. Not believing false things is quite simply a matter of self-respect.
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About Me
- Nildogma
- As a 20-year-old I was insatiably curious about the world and passionate about rejecting superstitions and all kinds of false beliefs. I still am today. Sometimes when people believe things that are not true, it make little or no difference but sometimes the consequences can be disastrous and deadly. Now, I do what I can to help people improve their thinking skills, especially in how they impinge on core beliefs, such as cultural values and religious beliefs. I have an active Facebook page for which I create memes and write articles almost daily. I also engage people in on-line debates. You can find me here: https://www.facebook.com/bill.flavell.1 I lecture at universities around the world and present or debate at public meetings. I also, draw on my management consultancy background to help freethought groups, almost anywhere in the world, to get organised, develop strategy and improve their media and presentation skills. If you would like me to present at your university or for your church group or freethought group, please contact me.
Popular Posts
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Here is a simple problem of logic. “Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a marr... -
God is said to be omniscient and unchanging. But what are the implications of these characteristics? 1) Stupid people cannot learn God ca...
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According to Christian theology, before Adam and Eve's famous serpent-induced transgressions, they were sin-free, just as God had made... -
Christianity is an elderly religion that is showing its age. It contains such huge helpings of magic and nonsense that it speaks to fewer an...
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Imagine for a moment, a world in which God and Satan actually exist. God is omnipresent, omnibenevolent and omniscient. Satan, like God... -
There is no corruption-free country in the world—every country experiences some level of corruption. But the huge differences in the leve... -
Does belief in God offer the believer any benefits? A good way to find out is to compare highly religious countries with less religious c... -
In 2012, an international team of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss/French border announced they had dem... -
Thales of Miletus In a letter to Robert Hooke, written in February 1676, the great Isaac Newton wrote, "If I have seen further it ... -
So much misinformation surrounds the lives of YHWH (God) and Jesus that it is hard to unravel what is true and what is hyperbole. Almost ...