Has Pope Francis done anything to tackle clerical child abuse?

The National Secular Society's Keith Porteous Wood argues that the widely-hailed Pontiff has failed to address his Church's greatest scandal

Should Hamlet travel to North Korea?

Should We Reach Out to Conservative Atheists?

Last month, American Atheists sought to rent a booth at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Surprisingly, CPAC accepted their money at first, only to change their mind at the last minute. That entirely foreseeable outcome would have been more than sufficient as free publicity, but American Atheists president Dave Silverman decided to attend as [Read More...]

Convincing others of reality

by John Watts

Photo by BWJones









John Watts is a long retired financial adviser living in Somerset, an enthusiastic humanist, and a writer and poet keen to support humanist ideas.

Could assisted suicide be legalised?

How farming gave us the iPhone


Announcing: Broken Ring

Last autumn, I published my first novel, DARK HEART, an epic fantasy in a world where mortals rebelled against the gods. Today I’m happy to announce that the sequel, BROKEN RING, is now out! If you liked the first book, I’m confident that this one is even better. Here’s the synopsis: One month out of [Read More...]

The Primitive Bias: Language & Religion

australia-aborigines-460-300x215“Traditional Australian Aborigine societies were, from a material and technological standpoint, relatively simple. This relative simplicity has blinded many to the fact that traditional Aboriginal worldviews were (and are) exceedingly complex. Indeed, these are so complex that it is tempting to posit an inverse relationship between level of technology and creativity of worldview.”
— Cris Campbell

One of the common misunderstandings of evolution is that it is progressive — leading to better and better forms. Likewise, many people view religions as evolving — as getting more and more sophisticated and better adaptive than earlier religions. Early religions are often then wrongly labeled as “primitive”. Such a mistake is similar to how people misunderstand evolution. Add Cris Campbell’s Genealogy of Religion to your RSS to read someone who fights against common misunderstandings of the hunter-gatherer worldviews (which, for good reasons, he refuses to call religions).

In linguistics too, speakers of dominant languages often look down on non-dominant neighboring dialects as being inferior, less sophisticated and primitive. It seems the primitive bias reflex is thus not just the consequence of not understanding evolution, but of assuming that present day holders of power *must* be more advanced than those who don’t hold power. I am sure Marxists have scathing criticisms of this cognitive trap.

Question to readers: Do you feel some languages or some religions are more primitive than others? Why?

Weekend Coffee: Rewilding

While I was doing research for this week’s post on de-extinction, I came across an article by George Monbiot on the phenomenon of “accidental rewilding” that I thought was worth sharing. I loved the book The World Without Us, which describes how rapidly nature would move in and erase the artifacts of civilization if human [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged: The Fires of Kuwait

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter X While Dagny has been criscrossing the country seeking the inventor of the motor, she learns from Eddie Willers that the looters are once again making absurd demands, this time clamoring for new laws that would kill the John Galt Line and strangle the industry of Colorado: The Union of [Read More...]

Do you like this Muslim?

Abdur Raheem Green

Abdur Raheem Green

Abdur Raheem Green is a British convert to Islam who does a great deal of speaking on his religion. Here is one entitled “How I came to Islam” (90-min).  I think conversion videos, like ghosts, can be another touchstone to distinguish certain types of atheists from others: some atheists will can feel empathy for well presented faith conversions and some certainly won’t.  Which one are you?

I found Green’s talk touching, funny and inspiring — I could feel his zealous sincerity.  But with only a little searching, the not so pretty side of his Islam is easy to find.  Apparently Green admitted that back in the 90s he said that Muslims and Westerners cannot live peaceably together and that dying while fighting jihad is one of the surest ways to Paradise and Allah’s good pleasure. Though he now swears off his former radical views.  Those supposedly rejected views was why in 2005 he was banned from speaking in Australia. But has he given up his fundamentalism?  Here he vehemently preaches hell and brimstone to put to shame a Christian fundamentalist. And here he speaks against Sufism (5-min) where he sounds all too much like an Evangelical Christian belittling Pentecostals.  Ah the in-fighting in Islam is as complicated as that within Christianity.

My experience with Islam is limited. I lived in Pakistan with a Muslim (Shiite) family for a season studying language (Urdu) and religion (Islam). During that time, I would occasionally visit mosques (masjids) with my favorites being Sufis shrines where I participated in some swaying prayers. Prior to living in Pakistan, I had an American Urdu professor who was a Muslim convert and he would tell me stories of why he loved Islam. Later I other nationalities of Muslims during a few weeks in Java and in China where minority Muslims were in one of my favorite parts of Chengdu. I have also read a few books on Islam and love some Irani films.

Books critical on Islam abound.  But in understanding any faith, it is important to seek both critical and sympathetic material. As far as readings, I really enjoyed reading Karen Armstrong’s “Muhammed: a biography of the Prophet“. After reading it, I remembered saying to myself, “Wow, I can feel how a Muslim could love his faith”. I can easily feel my self flux between empathy and antipathy depending on the material.

The main point in this post is not to discuss the pros-and-cons of Islam. I am talking about religious empathy.  I am trying to point out that I don’t think every mind is built for religious empathy though mine certainly is. Religious empathy is absent in many atheists and I think this may be a temperament issue that causes people to talk past each other. I was amazed watching empathy rise in me as I watched Green’s video, given all my other knowledge. And though another part of my mind is built to see through the self-deceptive and dangerous aspects of religion, I am still OK holding both of these apparently contrary feelings (empathy & antipathy) simultaneously.

So, before arguing on religion with an atheist, ask them if they have ever felt religious empathy (not sympathy).  Likewise, before arguing with an exclusivist religious person, it may be useful to see if they can feel empathy with a faith expression of someone their faith tells them is bound for hell.

Question to readers:  So, what does the religious sympathy touchstone reveal about you?


See: my other posts on Islam here.

Something awesome happened

Something awesome happened:


We’ve got some big news.


Big congrats to CashMusic. It’s a great service I use for my websites and I’m happy that it’ll be moving forward even faster. You guys deserve it.

blue-voids: Destiny Womack - acrylic on canvas


Destiny Womack - acrylic on canvas

Do migraines cause religion?

Stop sniggering there at the back. I'm serious!

This is a study on nearly 25,000 Norwegians conducted over 10 years (the Nord-Trøndelag Health Survey (HUNT)). The purpose of HUNT is to track changes in health in the whole population over several decades - and one of the things they measured in the latest survey round (HUNT 3, conducted 2006-2008) was religious attendance.

After controlling for other factors related to headache (age, gender, educational level and chronic musculoskeletal complaints), they found that those who had headaches in 1995 were more likely to be frequent attenders at religious services in 2006 (by frequent religious attenders, they mean in the Norwegian sense - i.e. at least once a month!).

Now, this was entirely down to migraines (rather than regular headaches), and the effect was quite large. Those who had migraines more than 7 days a month were 50% more likely to be frequent religious service attenders 10 years later than those who were migraine free.

What was really interesting was that there was no relationship to current headache levels. So it's headache in the past, rather than current headache, that's associated with current religious service attendance.

And it was something particular about religion, too. There was no relationship with visiting concerts, cinema and/or theatre.

Now, they didn't measure religious service attendance in the earlier surveys. So there's a little bit of ambiguity here. But on the whole, it's pretty good data and it fits with some theoretical expectations.

The study's authors point out that other research has found that patients with chronic pain often report that they turn to religion.

Indeed, in the HUNT study itself they have previously found that regular churchgoers had lower blood pressure. And one of the symptoms of raised blood pressure is... you guessed it - headache!

I'm not entirely convinced, however. In particular, why does current headache not link to religious service attendance?

I'd like to see how headache changed among individuals between 1995 and 2006. Some people stopped having headaches - was that linked to frequent religious service attendance?

If not, then why would people with headaches turn to religion?

Erling Tronvik, Torgeir Sørensen, Mattias Linde, Lars Bendtsen, Ville Artto, Katarina Laurell, Mikko Kallela, John-Anker Zwart, & Knut Hagen (2014). The relationship between headache and
religious attendance (the Nord-Trøndelag health study- HUNT) The Journal of Headache and Pain, 15 (1)



islam-symbolBelow are my posts specifically on Islam


Jewish_symbolsHere are my posts specific to Judaism.

Like it or not, the ritual slaughter debate is about much more than animal rights

They may find it uncomfortable, but opponents of halal and kosher who simply point to the evidence need to acknowledge the context in which the argument occurs, says Paul Sims

Defining Religion: Ninian Smart

I can’t stop emphasizing that “religion” is a contrived word and not a thing to be discovered. Thus, not surprisingly, people (scholars and lay folks alike) put forward all sorts of conflicting definitions for religion. Even Sabio Lantz offered a Syndrome Model in 1999. This is not to say such contrived words aren’t useful, but we need to recognize them for what they are.

Ninian Smart

Ninian Smart

The definition model I have illustrated above is Ninian Smart’s, a Scottish pioneer of secular religious studies who took his stab at defining “religion” and created this 6-dimensional definition where he describes 6 ingredients or flavors that comprise the mix of what we call religion.

A 3 Quark Daily article (where I am banned, if you’ll remember) used Smart’s model to test if Internet-Centrism is a religion or not.  The conclusion of the article is not important to me.  But instead, keeping in mind my previous “Religion as a Pejorative” post, we can see that the ways Internet-Centrism is likened to religion has negative connotations.  ”Religion” is used to point out the weak sides of “Internet Centrism”.

But heck, most groups of people would qualify as religious for having stories, community, rules, rituals and experiences between them — according to Strong’s definition.  My definition, on the other hand contains a few more criteria to narrow the application of the word and thus to exclude the broader use of the word “religion”.  Either way, it is fun to play with definitions, but remember, people are inventing them, not discovering them.


On the Morality of: De-Extinction

I was fascinated by a lengthy article last week on “de-extinction“, the emerging science of cloning extinct species back to life. While we almost certainly won’t be recreating dinosaurs Jurassic Park style, there are many vanished animals for which we have well-preserved specimens from which we could extract genetic material, from passenger pigeons to woolly [Read More...]

“Religion” as a Pejorative

Man_ReligionLook at this fellow’s claim. Fill in the “X” with whatever activity, worldview, person or thing you’d like and try to imagine the emotion being conveyed when this sort of sentence is declared. Almost always when “religion” is used this way, the speaker is implying some negative quality such as:

  • blind devotion
  • all-consuming
  • obsessed
  • exclusive

Most believers want to deny that their faith is a religion. First because they don’t want their faith to be generic (like so many others) but second because of these common negative connotations of “religion” in English.

Woman_ReligionQuestions for readers:

  1. Can you name other negative connotations of this sentence?
  2. Can you think of this sentence being used as a compliment? What connotations would they be implying?
  3. Imagine a woman saying the same thing, instead of a man.  Did that bring up different connotations in your mind?  Why?
  4. If are fluent in another language, does your language have a word used for religion which also has these negative connotations?