Unintelligently Designed Brain

You have to hand it to the 'Intelligent Designer'; it's never slow to use a complex design when a simple one would do, or an inefficient design when a more efficient one is available. Ironically, the human brain, for all it's complexity and for all the capability it has given to humans, is an example of inefficient design and unnecessary complexity. Far from being an argument for intelligent design, the human brain is, as you would expect of an evolved organ, a wonderful example of unintelligent design.

The brain is basically a biological computer with millions, billions, even, in the case of the human, elephant and dolphin brain, maybe hundreds of billions of neurological connections which act like computer logic gates. Briefly, logic gates perform binary (or Boolean) logic. Normally a logic gate has two inputs and an output so, according to the type of gate, two input signals can be processed to produce a single output signal, which can then form one of the inputs of another logic gate, and so on.

This isn't important to my point and is just for background, but the six most important types of logic gate are:

OR: (C = A or B). C = 1 if either A or B is 1, or if both A and B are 1.
AND: (C = A and B). C = 1 if and only if both A and B are 1.
NOT: (C = not A). C = 1 if A is 0, C = 0 if A is 1. Note: In this case there is no B input.
XOR: (C = A xor B). C = 1 if A or B is 1 but 0 if both are 1.
NOR: (C = A nor B). C = 0 unless A and B are both 0.
NAND: (C = A nand B). C = 1 unless A and B are both 1.

In a modern computer these gates work at nanosecond speeds or faster so that even the computers inside you laptop, ipad or smart phone are capable of millions or billions of calculations per second. They work with tiny electric currents, in other words, electrons moving at the speed of light. The only problem, and one of the limitations of microprocessor power, is that with all that energy exchange going on in such a small space, the heat produced can be enormous, hence the cooling fan, etc.

Computers communicate with their peripheral devices, and with the outside world like the Internet, with electrical signals, again relying on near light speed electrons flowing through conductors. All of the components of a computer and a computer system, and even a vast computer network like the World Wide Web, are perfectly natural materials, of course, just very pure and very precisely ordered, but surely nothing beyond the capability of an omnipotent god.

So, given basically the same engineering problem, how did the 'Intelligent Designer' solve the need for a communications systems and a central processor?

Probably with one of the worst kludges you can imagine. A kludge is design-speak for anything which works well enough, no matter how inefficiently or inelegantly. A sort of "It'll do!", or "Near enough is good enough!" approach to design.

First a little bit about neurones and how a signals are conveyed by a neurones to and from sense organs or from one neurone to another:

A typical neuron is divided into three parts: the soma or cell body, dendrites, and axon. The soma is usually compact; the axon and dendrites are filaments that extrude from it. Dendrites typically branch profusely, getting thinner with each branching, and extending their farthest branches a few hundred micrometres from the soma. The axon leaves the soma at a swelling called the axon hillock, and can extend for great distances, giving rise to hundreds of branches. Unlike dendrites, an axon usually maintains the same diameter as it extends. The soma may give rise to numerous dendrites, but never to more than one axon. Synaptic signals from other neurons are received by the soma and dendrites; signals to other neurons are transmitted by the axon. A typical synapse, then, is a contact between the axon of one neuron and a dendrite or soma of another. Synaptic signals may be excitatory or inhibitory. If the net excitation received by a neuron over a short period of time is large enough, the neuron generates a brief pulse called an action potential, which originates at the soma and propagates rapidly along the axon, activating synapses onto other neurons as it goes.

Source: Wikipedia - Neurones

Action potentials are generated by special types of voltage-gated ion channels embedded in a cell's plasma membrane. These channels are shut when the membrane potential is near the resting potential of the cell, but they rapidly begin to open if the membrane potential increases to a precisely defined threshold value. When the channels open, they allow an inward flow of sodium ions, which changes the electrochemical gradient, which in turn produces a further rise in the membrane potential. This then causes more channels to open, producing a greater electric current, and so on. The process proceeds explosively until all of the available ion channels are open, resulting in a large upswing in the membrane potential. The rapid influx of sodium ions causes the polarity of the plasma membrane to reverse, and the ion channels then rapidly inactivate. As the sodium channels close, sodium ions can no longer enter the neuron, and they are actively transported out of the plasma membrane. Potassium channels are then activated, and there is an outward current of potassium ions, returning the electrochemical gradient to the resting state. After an action potential has occurred, there is a transient negative shift, called the afterhyperpolarization or refractory period, due to additional potassium currents. This is the mechanism that prevents an action potential from travelling back the way it just came.

In animal cells, there are two primary types of action potentials, one type generated by voltage-gated sodium channels, the other by voltage-gated calcium channels. Sodium-based action potentials usually last for under one millisecond, whereas calcium-based action potentials may last for 100 milliseconds or longer. In some types of neurons, slow calcium spikes provide the driving force for a long burst of rapidly emitted sodium spikes. In cardiac muscle cells, on the other hand, an initial fast sodium spike provides a "primer" to provoke the rapid onset of a calcium spike, which then produces muscle contraction.

Source: Wikipedia - Action Potential

So, basically, a signal is transmitted along a nerve, not by simply whizzing electrons along a conductor but by a complicated process involving a flow of charged ions across the cell membrane, with this 'wave of depolarization' flowing sedately along the cell membrane, or jumping from one node to another, depending on the fibre, and then having to actively pump the ions back again against a potential gradient, so using energy and during which the nerve is briefly 'refractory' and unable to fire again. The result of this is that signals are processed and propagated through nerves about a million times more slowly than in a modern computer.

Now, when the signal needs to escape from the end of the neurone to activate a muscle, stimulate an excretory cell, or just to be passed on to the next neurone in the sequence, whereas an electrical conductor would just need to be touching at the point of contact, the unintelligent designer has come up with another gloriously complex kludge which works, but which only needs that complexity in the first place because of the solution employed. Consequently it slows transmission down considerably and entails a huge overhead in terms of metabolic input and energy requirement. It is a small gap called a synapse.

Synapses are essential to neuronal function: neurons are cells that are specialized to pass signals to individual target cells, and synapses are the means by which they do so. At a synapse, the plasma membrane of the signal-passing neuron (the presynaptic neuron) comes into close apposition with the membrane of the target (postsynaptic) cell. Both the presynaptic and postsynaptic sites contain extensive arrays of molecular machinery that link the two membranes together and carry out the signaling process. In many synapses, the presynaptic part is located on an axon, but some presynaptic sites are located on a dendrite or soma. Astrocytes also exchange information with the synaptic neurons, responding to synaptic activity and, in turn, regulating neurotransmission.

Source: Wikipedia - Synapse

A couple of problems with synapses are that, apart from it's slowness, a neurone can become depleted of it's transmitter substance and become fatigued and, unless the released transmitter substance is quickly deactivated, the synapse won't be ready for the next signal, so a set of enzymes are needed to deactivated them, all needing to be manufactured and replaced, and all needing energy and adding to the general inefficiency.

Why did evolution 'use' this inefficient, slow and kludgey method? Because it had no choice, not having had any say in the matter. Evolution by natural selection is not a planned process and can only work on what is available. It is also impossible for it to scrap a design and start anew, as an intelligent designer would. Evolution only had cells with which to work and the only way to make a cell 'excitable' is with the flow of charged ions across a membrane. And it worked well enough. Just like the qwerty keyboard on our laptops, smart phones and computer keyboards, we are now stuck with it, with all its inefficiency.

And this has meant that, to evolve a brain large enough to have the processing power to give humans the advantage such a brain gave us once we had evolved a bipedal gait, our babies are born with already large heads, which adds another layer of difficulty to the human birth process, meaning that our babies are born especially under-developed needing a long period of parental care, so creating the conditions and opportunity for evolution by natural selection to evolve human cultures.

Of course, as you would expect, evolution has made do and refined the process of neuro-transmission as well as possible within the limits of what is possible, and even taken advantage of some of the opportunities the system presents, like the ability to have an inhibitory feed-back mechanism to, for example, allow the knee-jerk reflex to fire just once and not continually re-fire as the thigh muscles are stretched again as the lower leg drops back.

And almost unbelievable, this gloriously kluge-ridden, clunky system has, by evolution by natural selection, given rise to a fantastic organ like a brain, but no intelligent designer would have gone about it in that hugely inefficient way when simple conductors, logic gates and light-speed electrical conduction were all readily available to it. The glorious thing about evolution is not always the elegance and simple efficiency of its 'designs', but how it gets there in the end.

Unintelligent design gave us the human brain. The intelligence that made available to us, after 13 billion years of evolution, has allowed us to design a hugely more efficient and faster design called the microprocessor in a little over a hundred years since we understood electricity well enough to make it usable, and so we now have the Internet, where I can find out the information in this blog and present it for you to read.

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Even Christians Must Obey The Law

BBC News - 'Ex-gay' London bus advert ban ruled lawful:

Excellent news that the High Court has upheld a Transport for London ban on obnoxious Christian anti-Gay hate messages being displayed on its buses apparently for no other purpose than the gratuitous abuse of a minority.

This ruling confirmed yet again that Christians in England and Wales are not above the law (Scotland has its own legal system and is not bound by this ruling) and may not use their 'faith' as a cover for the bullying of minorities for their own perverse gratification and to artificially enhance their own status at the expense of others. With sexual orientation, just as with skin colour, gender, disability, ethnicity or country of origin, or even hair colour, those who need to feel better about themselves by denigrating others like nothing more than something people cannot change about themselves as an excuse for bullying, because this makes them captive and controlled no less than the bars of a cage do.

The ruling follows a recent trend where the courts have ruled that Christians cannot use their religion as an excuse for committing illegal acts such as denial of goods and services to others, that they are subject to the same laws as normal people, and that hiding behind a cloak of piety does not bring privilege any more.

This is encouraging evidence that the UK is moving increasingly towards a fully secular society and that the repugnant 'morality' of the Bible is increasingly being discarded in favour of Humanist principles, as we build a fair society with equal treatment for all and denial of privilege for the few.

Just as the Bible can no longer be used as an excuse for burning witches and persecuting progressives and non-conformists, so it can no longer be used as an excuse for other uncivilised, antisocial behaviour in England and Wales, and not before time. The Bible is no longer a bullies charter in England and Wales. We can, of course, now expect squeals of indignation and cries of persecution from those sanctimonious bigots who see the right to bully, persecute and deny rights to others in order to elevate themselves above us as one of their precious religious freedoms.

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More Bible Babble

Depiction of the Construction of the Tower of Babel. Unknown German artist c.1370s

Just as with the Adam and Eve, Noah's Flood and the story of the tormenting of Job, the story of the Tower of Babel seems to have been an early folkloric story which was included in the first book of the Bible because it suited the priesthood rather than because it has any real lessons for mankind. There doesn't appear to be any reason an author god would have included these little origin myths and folktales.

If there is a lesson to be found in the Tower of Babel story, then it can only be, "Don't even try looking for the god we are telling you exists, otherwise you'll be for it!" Handy if you're feeling a bit insecure about whether the people are believing the stuff you are telling them or not.

It is obvious from their mutual inconsistencies and contradictions that these tales were slotted in from other sources which were never intended to be bound together into a "book of truth" with no more than a cursory attempt to integrate them into a coherent and consistent whole.

For example, we are told after the Ark story, that Noah's sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, each had several sons who founded in their turn all the nations of Earth, each with their own tongue.

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood...

By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations...

These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations...

These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.

These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

Genesis 10: 1-32

So, that's in about six generations or so... by which time all those nations had been populated from just three men!

And note how these nations had their own tongues (not tongue, singular; tongues, plural). So, that's the Bible's first try at explaining why there are lots of different languages.

Now turn the page, and what do we find?

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

Genesis 11:1

Clearly, whoever wrote that hadn't read the previous story about how everyone is descended from Noah's sons and spoke lots of different languages.

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

Genesis 11:2-4

And you thought the tale of how all of Noah's descendants spoke different 'tongues' was incredible...

Now we are asked to believe two more incredible things:

1. That after a few generations one man can produce enough descendants to build a city and then a tower tall enough the 'reach unto Heaven'.
2. That Heaven, where Yahweh lives, really is up in the sky above the Middle-East and close enough to Earth for it to be possible for people to build a tower up to it.

But that's not all...

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

Genesis 11:5-7

We now have to believe that not only does the creator of the universe really lives just above the surface of Earth over the Middle-East, close enough for a tower to be built up to it (otherwise why would Yahweh be concerned and not just bemused at their naivety?) but that he really would concerned about it.

We also have to believe that a god who is all knowing and from whom nothing can be hidden, has to go 'down' to Earth to find out what was going on - and not for the first time either; he had to do the same with Adam and Eve, apparently, and will do it again a bit later on with the 'Cities of the Plain'.

We also have to believe that an omniscient god wouldn't realise that people can and do learn more than one language and thinks that to cooperate we all need to speak the same language; that, contrary to all the evidence, translation and translators don't exist.

Lastly, we need to believe that an omnibenevolent, omnipotent god would want to prevent humanity from achieving its full potential and that it took steps to ensure division and disharmony because it felt threatened by us and was frightened by our developing abilities. Of course, the thought that an omnipotent, creator god could simply move Heaven to somewhere other than a few hundred feet above the Middle-East was out of the question.

Of course, all this going 'up' and 'down' and building a tower 'up' to Heaven all made perfect sense when Earth was flat and the centre of the Universe. If you wanted to show the ignorant scientific illiteracy of a god, what better way than to claim it would write stuff like this, one of the best pieces of evidence going that the author of the Bible could not possibly have created the Universe and far from knowing everything, saw the Universe exactly the way a technologically primitive, pre-wheel Bronze-age pastoralist would have seen it, with Heaven 'up there, above the sky'.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11:8-9

So there we have the whole point of the tale. No moral message for mankind; simply another naive folkloric account of how we all came to speak different languages, in complete contradiction to the first version in the immediately preceding chapter. I have shown in Talking Bible Babble how this latter explanation for language diversification, like so many other Bible claims, simply doesn't equate to the observable evidence.

But the faithful are required to be gullible enough to believe this naive, primitive nonsense without any analytical thought, and without question, and they are expected to be proud of their ability to do so. Indeed, believing this stuff 'by faith' is probably the only test they are required to pass to join the Christian club.

We are expected to believe that their credulous gullibility entitles them to make laws for the rest of us, to be consulted on all matters of ethics and morality, to hector, bully and cajole anyone who disagrees with them and brand them as evil, to have a veto on scientific progress and to be free to tell our children that this is absolute truth and that credulous gullibility and belief without question are good things and personal qualities to be admired and held in high esteem.

And they seriously expect to be taken seriously when they confidently pronounce entire bodies of science to be wrong and react with self-righteous indignation when we don't accept their arguments from ignorant incredulity and ask them for supporting evidence..

The proverbial visitor from outer-space would be right to think many people must be suffering from a form of group madness or to have been infected by a virus which turns people into unthinking automatons.

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Sparring With Creationists

Stag at Sharkeys (George Bellows, 1909)

One of the most frustrating things about 'debating' with religious fundamentalists and Creationists is that they don't know when they've lost. In all probability this is because they either genuinely didn't follow the debate and failed to realise that your answer destroyed their logic or didn't understand its relevance, or even that they don't understand the rules of debate and the logical principles underpinning it.

It could also be because they simply can't allow themselves to believe that their argument has been refuted because it was such an essential ingredient in their delusion that they know better than science from their position of ignorance.

It puts me in mind of a 1909 painting by George Bellows called Stag At Sharkey's. This painting represent a departure in American art when French Impressionism and the American Hudson River School, which tended to glorify the American West, were both rejected in favour of the realism to be found in the growing urban slums. It was called the Ashcan School because it dealt with life with all it's grime and ugliness and found something noble therein which the artist could depict using techniques formerly used to depict beauty and romanticism, and so show them to be beautiful and valid in their own terms. The Ashcan School, or "The Eight" later became know as "Apostles of Ugliness", so, for all it's brutal ugliness, which is rather the point of the painting, Stag at Sharkey's is an important painting in the history of Western Art.

Stag at Sharkey's depicts a prize fight reminiscent of a 'debate' with a Creationist where they assume the idea of debate is to score points anyway possible with no concern for honesty and truth. Punches below the belt and gouging are okay so long as it gets them out of the corner or off the ropes. For example, lying about something you said a few moments ago, name-calling, threats and insults or deliberately misquoting or misrepresenting something you just said.

Their tactics more resemble a street brawl or a playground scrap while you are trying to get across some logical point, explain a scientific process, correct a false assertion or bring them back to the point they are running away from, or simply explain that they are wrong and where they can go to prove it for themselves. In all probability they haven't even understood the rules and, even if they have, they've assumed they don't apply to them because, being religious they are entitled to special privileges and exemptions.

But the worst part is when you have defeated all their 'points', answered all their 'unanswerable' questions, shown their basic assumptions to be invalid and based on disinformation, or explained how their questions merely highlight their ignorance and that that is not actually what science says, and they simply hit the reset button and ask a question you answered a few moments ago denying having seen your answer, they simply do not understand, or refuse to accept, that they have lost.

The point of a boxing match of course is to knock your opponent out by giving them enough brain damage to ensure they can't stand up for ten seconds or more. However, this presupposes your opponent actually has a brain which can be damaged and that they are able to register the fact that they are on the canvas and have been counted out, and that that constitutes defeat.

This generally works with boxers, no matter how badly their brains have been damaged by previous fights. However, this analogy seems to break down with religious fundamentalists and Creationists who don't seem to have the necessary equipment for knowing they've even been knocked down let alone that they're on the canvas and have been counted out. Instead, like mindless automatons they continue swinging aimlessly and even proclaiming victory, seemingly oblivious of the mirth of the audience, or even the rules of the game they were in.

But, for all their brutal ugliness, there is nothing noble in fundamentalist Creationism. It doesn't represent a departure or a rejection of an old and outdated idea and the beginning of something new and exciting. It represents exactly the opposite - a desperate clinging to the past and a desperate attempt to pull us all back to something far more primitive and brutal and which was rejected by all enlightened, progressive and educated people more than a century ago. It's like comparing the primitive scrawlings of children who can barely hold a pencil with a Monet, a Picasso or a Ken Howard.

Much of it of course is genuinely childish; the product of immature minds developing in a scientifically illiterate, superstitious culture which still believes in magic and demons. A lot of it is also arrogant narcissism by those too lazy to learn, indifferent to truth and honesty but desperate to be thought of as wiser and more profound in their understanding than people who have bothered to learn and who do care about things like truth and honesty.

But there is also a sinister group of Creationists who are trying to overthrow science and especially Darwinian Evolution because they do understand it and understand only too well the threat it represents to their ambition. They intend to use religious superstition to undermine secular democracies and make a grab for power with the introduction of a primitive, brutal, Bronze-age style neo-Fascist theocracy, under their control, naturally, the artistic equivalent of a simple rock drawing and the cultural equivalent of abolishing the last 3000 years of human progress.

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Plink! Another Piece Falls Into Place

I love the sound of a penny dropping because it means something else has just been understood. I wish though that a piece of jigsaw puzzle falling into place was a little more onomatopoeic because that would make a better metaphor.

Understanding something anew still gives me that little frisson of pleasure, not quite so thrilling as when I realised that, whilst all religions can't be right, they can certainly all be wrong, but pleasurable nevertheless.

One such little event happened a few minutes ago when I followed the link from a tweet promoting a book and read one of the readers' reviews. The book was Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived by Chip Walter.

To me, one of the puzzles of human evolution was why humans evolved such high intelligence when none of our close relatives outside our immediate ancestral line did to the same degree, and why no other branch on the tree of life has come close to evolving anything like the same level as we have (though very many are probably sentient and even able to hold a conceptual model the world in their brains, but that's s different story).

One of the central ideas in evolution is how natural selection works on the potential for change and how quickly this potential is realised once it occurs. Evolution abounds with examples of a huge burst of diversification whenever a new capability arises by chance, for example, a central nervous system; movement onto land; 'discovery' of flight by insects, then birds; 'invention' of photosynthesis, etc., etc.

Top 10 Reasons to Take Pascal's Wager

Blaise Pascal (1623-1672)

Pascal's Wager (or Gambit) basically argues that, since you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from believing in God (Pascal never specified which one), your safest bet is to believe.

Here are the top ten reasons you should play Pascal's Gambit:

1. Gods are not really all-knowing and don't know what you are thinking, so they won't realise you are just pretending.
2. Someone told you Pascal's Gambit is a good idea and you just can't be bothered to think through the consequences of it.
3. The Gambit works on any god, so you don't need to bother which is the real one or even if any of them are. Just talk about 'God' and it'll think you're talking about it.
4. The Gambit works best on gods which admire dishonesty so chose one which has shown itself to be dishonest and proud of it.
5. The less intelligent the god the better the Gambit works, so it's best to chose a really thick god although playing the Gambit in the first place shows you think none of them are too bright.
6. The Gambit assumes you can put one over on the god in question, so chose a god who doesn't mind you thinking you are smarter than it is, or one which is too stupid to realise that you think you are.

Why Feminism.

This blog was written at the invitation of award-winning Bangladeshi writer, physician, secular humanist, radical feminist and human rights campaigner, Taslima Nasreen, and appeared on her blog, in August 2012.

The reason I am a feminist is really quite simple: I am a feminist because I am a Humanist and a Socialist. I am a Humanist and a Socialist because I am a human being and I have a single guiding principle which, like a coin, has two sides:

1. I am better than no one.
2. No one is better than me.

No one is endowed with the right to assign status on another at birth. No one has the right to restrict the right of another to make their own choices and to take their own decisions in life. If anyone claims for themselves that right, then, with equal ease, I claim the right to deny them that right.

In the words of John Donne (slightly modified)

No person is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each person's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

To me, Women's liberation was always a part of people's liberation and liberation is about freedom to choose. Socialism can never be achieved whilst half the population remain subjugated, restricted, repressed and dependent on the other half.

How pathetic, how utterly shameful for one half of humanity to try to maintain their privileges with bans and proscriptions on the other half. How pathetic for men to use their physical strength, not to liberate women but to maintain their subjugation.

To me, feminism is not about what women should do but about what they have the right to choose to do. If they choose to be miners or lumberjacks, doctors or architects, lawyers, barristers, engineers, emptiers of rubbish bins, fire-fighters or soldiers, they should be free to make that choice. If they chose to be full-time mothers they should be free to make that choice too but they should also be free to expect their partners to take on that role if that's the right choice for them both.

People liberation cannot be achieved by assigning stereotypical roles and expecting people to fit themselves into those stereotypes. People liberation is about choosing the role you want for yourself in consultation as an equal with others involved in and affected by that choice.

It would be easy to blame religions for the institutionalised misogyny women have suffered for centuries. Though they are undoubtedly now complicit in it's retention in many parts of the world, and especially in the more fundamentalist area where women are required to cover themselves or take the blame for men seeing them as mere sex objects, and even for 'loosing control' and raping or sexually assaulting them (what a grotesquely pathetic abdication of personal responsibility that is!), I'm not convinced religions cause misogyny. I think religions are, at least partly, the product of misogyny. It is surely no coincidence that gods are overwhelmingly seen as male and that the Abrahamic religions have a god which closely resembles a despotic Bronze Age tribal chief.

When the origin myths were being invented and written down, and the early laws were being codified, the people who wrote them were almost certainly high-caste males from already misogynistic cultures and women had already been relegated to chattel status. Even the creation myth of Adam and Eve results in Eve being told her role, and that of all women henceforth, was to satisfy the desires of man with "... and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." (Genesis 3:16).

Of course a misogynistic male god would put men in charge with the right to rule over women and to have them merely for his convenience. What could be more natural and 'right' than that? In the blog The Evolution Of God I have shown how I think religions could well have evolved out of the pre-human or proto-human social structure with an alpha male leader. It could have been from this evolved dominance and the assumed right to have first access to the females and to control their sexual activity, that both male dominance and an obsessive interest in the sexual activity of others may have developed and entered the human meme-pool. Having invented gods and religion we then handed over responsibility for our moral development to the high priests of these gods, as I argued in Religion: An Abdication Of Moral Responsibility.

Pat Robertson is a multi-millionaire fundamentalist Christian

But, however it evolved, there is no excuse for it now. We are a very different species to that evolving millions of years ago on the plains of East Africa and we have a very different culture now to that of Bronze Age nomadic goat-herders. We have no use for many of the memes they generated or many of the rules they codified.

It used to be said of Britain that 17% of the people controlled 94% of the wealth. We have a long way still to go to rectify that obscene statistic. The women of the world are said to do 90% of the work but to control only 10% of the wealth. That is an even more obscene statistic which no civilised society or fair-minded person should tolerate.

We are free now, to paraphrase Richard Dawkin's, to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of unthinking replicators in our meme pool. We no longer need to check with sanctimonious moralising high priests and wizards in silly dresses whose living depends on maintaining the status quo and who consult their books of magic words and miraculously come up with the answer which always suits them and those they serve.

We are free now to ask if it is right or wrong that half of humanity should still be a lesser people; a subject people subject to the whim and fancy of the other half and to always be at their disposal. And women are free now to decide whether they will continue to accept this abrogation of power and authority or whether they will deny men this right and take their own lives back under their own control and assert the simple slogan:

No man is better than me because I am part of humanity. Until I am free, humanity will not be.

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A Human Ring Species?

Neanderthal Man

Neanderthal man

Like many questions in science, support for this ideas or that ebbs and flows according to the latest publication and as more data is added to the balance on one side or the other. Gradually a consensus builds up for one or other opinion. This is no less so for, to me, one of the fascinating questions in the human evolutionary story - where do the Neanderthals fit?

Until recently the argument was over whether they should be classified as a separate species to modern man (Homo sapiens) as H. neanderthalensis or were they merely a Euro-Asian subspecies (H. sapiens neanderthalensis) with modern humans appropriately classified as H. sapiens sapiens. The idea that they may have been directly ancestral to H. sapiens has all but disappeared, except in Creationist parodies of human evolution.

Then just as the picture seems to be clarifying, it can become even more confused by the discovery of something previously unknown and unexpected. True to form, a previously unknown group of hominids living at least 41,000 years ago in eastern Asia was recently discovered. Named the Denisovans, they appear to be close to but distinct from Neanderthals and yielded enough DNA to make an even more intriguing discovery - many ethnic groups in South-east Asia have some Denisovan genes, showing beyond reasonable doubt that Denisovans, while being genetically distinct from H. sapiens, interbred with H. sapiens in South-East Asia.

Holy Roman Farce

The Catholic cardinals - that is those who are one rung below the Pope in the Catholic Church hierarchy - are at this moment sealed in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican to elect/select/choose/have revealed unto them [circle preferred option] a new Pope. This can be a complicated process to follow, so I will try to explain the basic principles.

This election is like no other because they are not, officially, deciding who amongst them is the best person to be Pope but are allowing God to tell them who he has chosen. They don't decide by simple majority voting or even by an agreed majority like seventy-five or ninety percent; it has to be unanimous (but see update below). God sometimes has great difficulty getting his decision through because waiting for everyone to get the message often takes many days. The record is nearly three years ending on 1 September 1271 following the death of Pope Clement IV. During this period three cardinals died and one resigned. In the end, having been sealed in and having had their rations reduced to bread and water, and then the roof having been removed from the Palazzo dei Papi di Viterbo where they were meeting, to force a decision, the sixteen surviving cardinals chose a sub-committee for God to reveal his message to, and they duly decided God had chosen Theoboldo Visconti to be Pope Gregory X. One can only assume God was having difficulty making Himself heard above the din of political in-fighting, back-stabbing and wheeler-dealing.

And that was with just twenty cardinals.

On this occasion, there are one hundred and fifteen cardinals, some of them not even white, but, because of the 'Viterbo' debacle, they are still sealed in and not allowed out until they have all reached a decisi received God's Word, nor are they allowed to communicate with anyone outside except carefully selected staff who have sworn to never breathe a word to anyone about what went on in the 'Conclave'. Conditions are not quite the same as in Viterbo in 1271 however. They will probably have to make do with something a little more substantial than bread and water and the roof of the Sistine Chapel will remain on - which at least preserves Michaelangelo's paintings. I understand they also have chemical toilets, and, one hopes, some means of washing and getting some laundry done, as an over-ripe cardinal is probably not the most pleasant of things to be close to.

The cardinals have also sworn oaths of secrecy - something which has taken up a good deal of the day - to never reveal what was said by whom or how they or anyone else voted. Some might see a special irony in servants of Jesus swearing an oath, when he told them to do so was a sin, but I expect there is some good theology behind it.

Now, it might seem strange that the Word of God is revealed to the world by ballot but apparently there are secret votes every day, and usually two, until God has managed to get his message through. It seems not to be within God's powers any more to simply speak out of Heaven or appear as a burning bush, or in a whirlwind like he used to be able to.

But, having by this process discovered God's will, something magical happens: the Holy spirit instantaneously enters the chosen person and he becomes infallible (see Understanding Papal Infallibility) and able to act as a bridge or 'pontiff' between this world and Heaven, with a direct line to God on all matter moral and ecumenical, in fact, on all matters, since whether they are ecumenical matters depends on whether the Pope er... God decides they are or not.

This devise of having the Holy Spirit descend instantaneously (which incidentally means it travels faster than light, like kingship does when it passes instantaneously to the heir on the death of the monarch) was made necessary because of a rather strange fact. In theory, this Holy Spirit was given to Simon bar Jonah by Jesus when he nick-named him 'Peter' and said he was going to build his church on him. It is the same magical ingredient that the Pope passes on to the cardinals when he puts his hands on their head, and this in turn is passed on to bishops and ordinary priests and is the magic power they use to turn wafers and wine into Jesus with a few spells and special magic hand movements, so the faithful can eat him. However, because the Pope is either dead or has lost faith and chucked in the towel like Pope Benedict XVI did, there is no one to pass the magic on, so it has to come anew from God - which all renders the legendary 'Peter' redundant when you think about it.

Mind you, there is a lot of doubt about the authenticity of the claim that Jesus gave this magic ability to Peter, what with there being no actual evidence that Jesus ever existed or that he was the son of God with plenipotentiary powers to hand out special magic abilities, and in any case, 'Peter' probably means 'father' (possibly of the Roman sect) from the Greek 'Pater', not 'rock' from the Greek 'Petra' (I wonder how many other religions rely as heavily on misinterpretations as the Christian one seems to) and the high probability that the account in Matthew 16:16-18 was added later to boost the Bishop of Rome's claim to be the top boss of Christianity - a suspicion reinforced by the fact that, read properly with the hindsight of history, Matthew 16 makes Jesus out to be both a false prophet and a foolish man.

Because they are sealed in, their only means of communicating that they have reached a decisi heard God's decision is via the smoke from the chimney of the stove they huddle around to keep themselves warm. If there is no unanimity on the ballot papers, God makes them burn with black smoke (because obviously, what with black being evil, the Satanic ballot paper(s) - the ones where the cardinals who heard Satan not God wrote their preference - burn black). When there are no more Satanic ballot papers, God allows them to burn in a non-racist white way to signify that none of them were evil and the cry goes up from assembled nuns and wannabee cardinals 'Habemus Papa' (We have a Pope, in an archaic tongue even more archaic than the rituals we are now witnessing). Just to be on the safe side however, and just in case "God is sleeping" (© 2013 Pope Benedict XVI), someone thoughtfully puts some special powder in the Sistine Chapel so they can ensure the smoke is white when God's voice has been heard properly and they are all sure it wasn't Satan.

To me, the most outstanding and enjoyable feature of all this pomp and ceremony is the way the entire charade is based on mutual hostility and distrust at the top of the Catholic Church:

• The only reason they are sealed in is to stop details of deals being passed outside to backers and vested interests for approval and to stop a splinter-group forming and electing their own Pope as they did in 1305 when we ended up with two Popes, one based in Avignon, France and one in Rome. This followed an eight-month deadlocked enclave.
• The only reason everyone is sworn to secrecy is because they don't want outsiders hearing who voted for who, what was said, what deals were done, what promises were made (and broken), who stabbed who in the back, what arm-twisting went on, and who had what information on others he could use at the right time - while listening attentively for God's decision, obviously.
• The only reason the ballots are secret and the papers are burned immediately, is because no one wants anyone else to know what deals were reneged on, which loser came closest to winning, who had to be cajoled and bullied into relenting and going along with the majority, or what the price of the last to capitulate was. Like a tennis match, the game isn't over until the final point, then it's winner takes all. And because it was 'unanimous', and because the papers aren't even there to be counted, the evidence having been carefully destroyed, no one can later say, "I told you so!"

So we are now witnessing the senior tier, la crème de la crème of the church which purports to be the font of morality and an example to us all of how a good, upright, God-fearing Christian should behave, locked in a power struggle made necessary because they know better than anyone, knowing as only they do what they did to get where they are, that few if any of them can be trusted further than you can throw them. And who are we to disagree?

And the one who floats to the top of the cesspit gets to be Pope.

[Update 13 March 2013] It seems the conclave now accepts a two-thirds majority and that voting occurs up to four times a day. Presumably, God chooses to ignore the papers with Satanic votes on them when they are below a magic number and allows them to burn with a white smoke. It's reassuring to know that up to one-third of cardinals officially can't hear God's voice but go with Satan instead.

Press reports that the conclave is deadlocked between those who think the Catholic Church needs a radical overhaul from the top down and those who see nothing wrong with things as they are, are obviously mere speculation as no one is allowed to talk to anyone about what is going on because they have sworn an oath, drawn up by that distinguished lawyer, Solomon Binding, not to... allegedly.

[Further update]. In a breach with the tradition that God, with a couple of recent exceptions, normally chooses a white European male from Italy to be the next Pope, this time God chose a white European male from Argentina, the son of Italian immigrants to that country. Rumours of his cosy relationship with the Fascist Junta which ruled Argentina while he was progressing up his chosen career ladder seem to have had little sway with God, just as the Nazi Party membership of his predecessor wasn't considered a bar to him becoming God's official spokesperson.

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Good God! No God Needed.

At least in theory, every religion has a set of ethics or a moral code by which their members are expected to live, although sometimes these morals are hard to find in the holy books one would expect them to be in and the moral codes of 'practitioners' of different religions tend to be remarkably similar to one another, and often remarkably dissimilar to those we can find in their books. Almost all religions have either explicitly or implicitly some basic ethics which boil down to the simple universal code - treat other people the way you would want to be treated. This can be expressed in different ways, such as the general "do as you would be done by; first, do no harm", or the specific "do not kill; do not bear false witness", etc.

When we look at the details in the various holy books however, the most noticeable thing is how religions modify or negate these basic principles, as though their purpose is not to ensure people behave in a civilised manner towards others, but to provide an excuse for them to behave in an uncivilised, inhumane manner for when behaving decently becomes an inconvenience.

For example, soon after the Judeo-Christian Bible lays down a few crude rules in the so-called Ten Commandments (although the actual Ten Commandments are something almost entirely different to those normally referred to) where killing and theft are forbidden with absolutely no qualifications or exceptions, we get a list of when and why people should be killed and lots of instructions from God to the Israelites to go and kill people and steal their lands. It's clear that these were never intended as universal ethics applicable to all, but were only ever meant to be internal Hebrew tribal laws applicable only to interactions between Hebrews.

It is revealing how the Bible never ever condemns things which are now rightly regarded as wrong by all civilised societies but actually promotes and endorses their practice or at best treats them with equanimity. For example, nowhere in the Bible do we see a condemnation of slavery, rape (unless it's regarded as a crime against the property of a father or husband), child abuse, misogyny, wife-beating, autocracy, disability discrimination, denial of equality of opportunity, denial of the right to elect governments and hold them to account. Nowhere is there a right to habeas corpus, trial by jury, limitations on the power of government or freedom from arbitrary arrest and execution.

Almost all the things we now take for granted as the norm in a civilised society are either never mentioned in the Bible or are actually forbidden and very many things the Bible instructs have had to be made illegal because, apart from being grotesquely cruel, unjust and inhumane, they would have made it practically impossible for a decent, civilised society to function.

It's no different with the Qur'an where misogyny, child abuse and summary execution are all taken for granted, even required and encouraged and nowhere is discrimination, wife beating, slavery or autocracy ever condemned and nowhere is equality of opportunity, democratic government, the right to education for both sexes ever advocated with the result that societies based on Koranic 'ethics' are becoming increasingly regarded as primitive, backward and uncivilised.

So how did we arrive at this absurd position where intelligent people assume we need religion to give us morals, and that without them we would revert to a notional savage, uncivilised society where people kill, steal and rape as a matter of course, when the facts show precisely the opposite; that societies strictly based on the moral codes in the holy books would actually be more like the societies from which they think religions are saving us - as we can readily see in those few remaining societies actually based on the morality in a holy book?

The answer, of course, is delusion and ignorance. Few people actually read the holy books but rely for their 'knowledge' of them on priests and preachers who cherry-pick the less embarrassing passages. It is just assumed that a holy book written by a benevolent, just and merciful god would contain instructions for living the way civilised people today live. It's also assumed that other people only behave well for fear of punishment or in the hope of a reward - though not me, obviously!

As Plato said, if God defines morality then God's morality is arbitrary and not the objective morals apologists claim. On the other hand, if God is inherently objectively moral then there must exist some standard of morality independent of God to which God is subject. So, an objectively moral god is not an omnipotent god, since it is bound by an independent standard. And if an independent standard exists, morals come not from the god but from this standard, so a god is unnecessary.

Theists can't have it both ways: God can't be simultaneously inherently moral and an omnipotent source of morals. It comes down to the problem of knowing whether the god you follow is good or evil. If you have no basis by which to objectively judge your god you have no way of knowing and your choice of god might as well be decided on the toss of a coin. If you do have such a basis you do not need a god to tell you what is right and what is wrong.

Consider the following three scenarios. For each, fill in the blank with morally "obligatory", "permissible" or "forbidden."

1. A runaway trolley is about to run over five people walking on the tracks. A railroad worker is standing next to a switch that can turn the trolley onto a side track, killing one person, but allowing the five to survive. Flipping the switch is ______.

2. You pass by a small child drowning in a shallow pond and you are the only one around. If you pick up the child, she will survive and your pants will be ruined. Picking up the child is _______.

3. Five people have just been rushed into a hospital in critical care, each requiring an organ to survive. There is not enough time to request organs from outside the hospital. There is, however, a healthy person in the hospital’s waiting room. If the surgeon takes this person’s organs, he will die but the five in critical care will survive. Taking the healthy person’s organs is _______.

If you judged case 1 as permissible, case 2 as obligatory, and case 3 as forbidden, then you are like the 1500 subjects around the world who responded to these dilemmas on our web-based moral sense test [http://moral.wjh.edu]. On the view that morality is God’s word, atheists should judge these cases differently from people with religious background and beliefs, and when asked to justify their responses, should bring forward different explanations. For example, since atheists lack a moral compass, they should go with pure self-interest, and walk by the drowning baby. Results show something completely different. There were no statistically significant differences between subjects with or without religious backgrounds, with approximately 90% of subjects saying that it is permissible to flip the switch on the boxcar, 97% saying that it is obligatory to rescue the baby, and 97% saying that is forbidden to remove the healthy man’s organs. . When asked to justify why some cases are permissible and others forbidden, subjects are either clueless or offer explanations that can not account for the differences in play. Importantly, those with a religious background are as clueless or incoherent as atheists.

These studies begin to provide empirical support for the idea that like other psychological faculties of the mind, including language and mathematics, we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong, interacting in interesting ways with the local culture. These intuitions reflect the outcome of millions of years in which our ancestors have lived as social mammals, and are part of our common inheritance, as much as our opposable thumbs are.

These facts are incompatible with the story of divine creation. Our evolved intuitions do not necessarily give us the right or consistent answers to moral dilemmas. What was good for our ancestors may not be good for human beings as a whole today, let alone for our planet and all the other beings living on it. But insights into the changing moral landscape [e.g., animal rights, abortion, euthanasia, international aid] have not come from religion, but from careful reflection on humanity and what we consider a life well lived. In this respect, it is important for us to be aware of the universal set of moral intuitions so that we can reflect on them and, if we choose, act contrary to them. We can do this without blasphemy, because it is our own nature, not God, that is the source of our species morality. Hopefully, governments that equate morality with religion are listening.

Morality Without Religion. Marc Hauser and Peter Singer, 2005 Ch.8 Ethics

As I showed in Xeno's Religious Paradox, the facts simply do not support the notion that our morals are handed down to us by a supernatural deity. In fact, they support the idea that morality is an evolved human cultural artefact which is modified locally by the local cultural environment to give slight variations on a basic theme with certain major principles in common to all human groups, exactly as you would expect of an evolving, intelligent, co-operative ape. The evidence that human ethics evolved and are evolving is overwhelming, as I showed in Religion: An Abdication Of Moral Responsibility.

One of the important cultural changes which is currently driving our ethical evolution is the growing realisation that religions are mere superstitions which are becoming increasingly irrelevant, so we no longer regard women as lesser beings just because the Bible or Qur'an say they are; we no longer tolerate racism and slavery just because the holy books say they are okay; we no longer allow girls to be sexually exploited just because people who wrote holy books saw nothing wrong with it and we no longer regard disability as a punishment inflicted for sin by a creator god or caused by demons allowed in due to moral weakness.

Because we are increasingly rejecting the primitive tribal savagery which passes for ethics in the holy books we are becoming increasing more civilised, not less. Gradually, we are taking responsibility for our ethical development away from the clerics and priests who usurped it in the childhoods of our species and who have been abusing it, and us with it, ever since by using it not for the good of mankind but to extend and enhance the power and privilege of the priesthood.

We will soon be in the position to take responsibility for ourselves once again and to develop ethical codes suitable for a modern, technological, scientifically literate culture and free from primitive fears and superstitions.

Humanism - an idea whose time has come.

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Good Job God!

William Blake, Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils c.1826

The Book of Job in the Bible is a curious book. Like the story of Noah and the Flood, its only purpose seems to be to remind us what a capricious, murderous and unpredictable deity Yahweh is, as thought whoever decided to include it in the Bible thought we needed to be frightened of the deity in it and cowed into submission lest we dared to question what the priests were telling us.

Like Noah and the Flood, and much of the Old Testament for that matter, it seems to carry no moral message for mankind, unless the morality being espoused is "Obey without question or suffer the consequences and never take Yahweh for granted", like the lesson taught by a protection racketeer's heavies when they accidentally drop that antique vase or set fire to a shop down the road, just to remind you to show your appreciation for Big Ron's protection. Or maybe the moral is, "Just keep smiling and all will turn out right in the end - and don't ask us why things don't seem to be right just now!", like a rogue trader who's taken your money with no intention of ever delivering.

The book of job is one of the most powerful arguments against God in the atheist arsenal. It proves once and for all that YHWH is not a good god. Even if such a god exists, we surely cannot rely on him to define our morals, to tell us what is good or bad. If holiness is what gods do, then holiness is a terrible thing.

Victor J. Stenger. The New Atheism:
Taking a Stand for Science and Reason.
(Kindle Locations 1587-1589). Kindle Edition.

Like the Flood myth, Job seems to be based heavily on a folk tale rather than someone's idea of real history, although, in the days before writing, there was probably no real distinction between traditional stories and 'history' as both would have been related by story-tellers with a blurred distinction between fact and fiction. Curiously, in another example of the glaring contradictions in the Bible which Christians find so embarrassing they have to pretend not to have noticed them, Job is described as 'perfect', so, presumably, the author of this tale was unaware of the Adam and Eve story when God decreed that everyone was to be a sinner, and therefore definitely not perfect. Another example of authors writing stuff they never imagined at the time would be gathered together with other stories, bound up in a single book and presented as inerrant truth - a problem which plagues the New Testament even more than it does the Old.

Like the Flood and the story of Lot and the 'Cities of the Plain', Job seems to be derived from a volcano god, or at least a god of natural disasters. As we shall see, the killing of Job's flocks of sheep seems to be the work of a volcano god.

The story is that Job was a 'perfect and upright man' who (understandably as things turned out) 'feared God'. He was rich and successful and owned a lot of sheep, and offered sacrifices every day just in case his sons and daughters had got up to anything improper during the previous night's feasting and drinking.

Now the story takes a bit of a strange turn, and one in which the previous banishment of Satan from God's presence seems to have been set aside for the sake of the narrative, or because the author was, yet again, unaware of the other Bible stories. One day, God and 'the sons of God' (who they?) were gathered together when who should turn up but Satan, apparently one of the lads. Satan tells God he's been taking a bit of a look at Earth and God asks what he thinks of Job, like Job is some sort of prize exhibit.

The story seems to be set in time when there were lots of gods and this particular god was the father of them, like the Graeco-Indian god, Dyaus Petar (God the Father) who became Zeus, Jupiter, Dios, Dei and Theos, and God and his sons would regularly gather together in Heaven to watch the humans below.

Satan then taunts God and says Job only fears him because he's protected him and prevented anything bad happening. "I bet he'd soon change his mind if you took away everything he has", say's Satan.

"Rubbish!", says God, who, although he's the supreme ruler of the Universe and accountable to no one, decides he's got to prove himself to Satan by making life unbearable for Job

William Blake, Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan 1821

Satan 1: God 0.

And there was a day when his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: And there came a messenger unto Job, and said, The oxen were plowing, and the asses feeding beside them: And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The Chaldeans made out three bands, and fell upon the camels, and have carried them away, yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house:

And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.

Job 1:13-22

Wow! What a class act, eh? When you need a roll-model, look no further than God for how to treat those who love and trust you when they need to prove themselves to one of the lads!

But it gets worse!

A few days later, Satan happens by again and taunts God some more, with, "That was nothing! All you did was take away his property and kill all his children! Hurt him! See what he does then!"

And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.

And Satan answered the Lord, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face.

And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life. So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown.

Job 2:3-7

So God gave Job to Satan to do whatever he wanted with him, except let him die, no matter how much he wanted to, and Satan, ever the imaginative demon, gave Job a nasty case of the boils.

Satan 2: God 0.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, after Job has been urged by his wife (who then mysteriously seems to disappear from the story) to put a stop to all this by cursing God, and after being mocked by his friends, he still refuses to curse the person responsible for it, so God speaks out of a whirlwind (I'm not making this up!) and Job agrees that God can do whatever he wants, proving the point to Satan, at least to God's satisfaction, so God gives him back everything he had taken away, with a bit extra for his trouble, and gives him some replacement children to make up for those he had killed to win his bet with Satan and they all live happily ever after.

Apart from the disappeared wife, and the murdered children, and the servants (i.e. slaves) who obviously counted for nothing.

So, who won the bet exactly?

At the start of the story, God is benignly watching over a man and his family making a success of their lives and enjoying the rewards for their endeavours; at the end of it, God has shown himself to be a psychopathic bully, quite capable of victimising an innocent man, killing his family and his equally undeserving servants, and making his life a misery to prove himself to one of the lads, like an insecure adolescent trying desperately to one of the gang and having to go through some sort of laddish rite of passage.

And Satan has proved he can make God do whatever he wants him to do because God has a need to prove himself and God shows that, for all practical purposes, he is indistinguishable from a malevolent, evil god, quite capable of inflicting suffering on a capricious whim with no thought for his victims - and so not the omnibenevolent, omnipotent god children are told about in Sunday school and Bible class, and which even some otherwise perfectly rational adults still believe in.

Some giver of morals, eh?

Satan 3: God 0.

But very effective for frightening superstitious people with, as no doubt the Bible's authors intended.

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The Argument From Incredulity

The argument from incredulity is one of the commonest 'arguments' against science and history, and for gods. It's not based on rational discussion, or a dispassionate assessment of the evidence, but on intuition and usually ignorance and an intellectually dishonest attempt to shoehorn the Universe into a preferred view of it and force it to conform to requirements.

A person who has never read any science or history or paid any attention in school, never-the-less feels competent to dismiss it as wrong and scientists or historians as mad because they find it hard to believe they are a biological member of the Great Ape family or that there really was nothing before the beginning of space and time, or that the Exodus story might well have been made up.

You only need spend a few minutes on Twitter when a swarm of Creationists are calling other people names for not agreeing with them to see examples of it being made by people who couldn't tell a test tube from a Bunsen burner or a amoeba from a cabbage and yet feel able to announce to the world that the science they are using to send the message to the world, has got it all wrong, and magic is the best explanation for everything.

That's just stupid! It can't be true!

The argument from incredulity is of course just another form of the God of the Gaps fallacy which argues that, because I can't think of any way this can be explained it must have been done by [insert preferred god]. It's found in the Cosmological Argument and the Teleological Argument, including it's modern pseudo-scientific versions, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity and Fine-tuned Universe.

Personal incredulity

Another form, the argument from personal incredulity, takes the form "I can't believe P, therefore not-P." Merely because one cannot believe that, for example, homeopathy is no more than a placebo does not magically make such treatment effective. Clinical trials are deliberately designed in such a way that an individual personal experience is not important compared to data in aggregate. Human beings have extremely advanced pattern recognition skills, to the extent that they are objectively poor judges of probability.

General incredulity

Sometimes argument from incredulity is applied to epistemological statements, taking the form "One can't imagine how one could know whether P or not-P, therefore it is unknowable whether P or not-P." This is employed by some (though not all) strong agnostics who say it is unknowable whether gods exist. The argument in this case is, "No one has thought of a way to determine whether there are gods, so there is no way." The implied major premise, "If there were such a way, someone would have thought of it," is disputable.

Source: RationalWiki - Argument from incredulity.

I don't believe it! If that's what scientists say, they must be mad!

The psychological process going on here is our old friend, coping with cognitive dissonance. What ever it is being waved aside and dismissed is inconsistent with a pre-existing and preferred world view, so believing it would have set up a dissonance or conflict. The simplest way to resolve the conflict is to dismiss it as stupid or the opinion of someone who is mistaken, stupid or insane, or even evil. Voilà! Conflict resolved, no need to assimilate that new knowledge and a nice warm glow of smug self-satisfaction that your careful ignorance gives you a deeper kind of wisdom, a superior form of knowledge and the moral right to tell others what's right and what's wrong. A preferred view is preserved, undamaged by real-world facts and without much concern about its truth.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not knowing.

Richard Dawkins

And preserved along with it is a sense of superiority to those who 'waste their time' learning all that 'nonsense' when superstition, intuition and believing what mummy and daddy, or that preacher at Bible/Qur'an class, said is obviously the best way to understand things.

And so much easier too!

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The Finely Tuned Fallacy

One of the strings in the theists bow is the argument that the Universe is 'fine-tuned' for the existence of intelligent life in it. It takes many forms from the frankly childish to the scientifically sophisticated but the conclusion is invariably the same - so obviously [insert desired god] did it. It is also one of the hardest for Atheists to counter because the more sophisticated arguments normally take place in the specialist realms of physics and higher maths that few lay people understand well enough to mount a competent rebuttal.

Mind you, it is also one of the hardest for the normal scientifically illiterate Creationists to defend too. It can be quite funny, when they rush excitedly into social media like Twitter announcing that the fine-tuning of the Universe proves their particular favourite god, to ask them why they would expect the values of the 'parameters' to be anything different to what they are. Chances are they won't know what the 'parameters' are, what their values are, or how they have any bearing on the existence of life. Many of them will be hard-pressed to explain what a 'parameter' is, exactly.

More On Mormons

Religions are not sources of objective morals, they are sources of excuses for behaving immorally. This is why no one who is not indoctrinated into the abusive ways of cults like Mormonism can read accounts like the following and not recoil in horror, mystified how any rational person can behave that way towards others.

Incidentally, this is the same deranged cult thinking which was behind William Lane Craig's professed puzzlement and 'disappointment' with people who react with revulsion at his spirited defence of genocide and especially his casual declaration that there is nothing wrong with killing children because it is good for them and makes them happy. Find that hard to believe? Read it here in William Lane Craig's own words.

Cult thinking

Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

William Lane Craig

But this blog isn't about William Lane Craig's repulsive creed or how he insults our intelligence to promote it. It's about how cults are founded by people looking for an excuse for their repugnant behaviour and how they attract other like-minded individuals, and then, when a systematic process of childhood brainwashing is in place, they gain a rationale of their own and a perverted culture is produced, inducing people to behave in ways which normal people find repulsive.

But should we really be surprised by this when a brief study of history reveals so many examples of all mainstream religious cults behaving in exactly similar ways?

This account of the behaviour in a fundamentalist Mormon cult, called, appropriately, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or FLDS was published in the Denver Post, 4 March 2001. It was related to the reporter by a woman, Laura Chapman. who had escaped from the cult.

As a little girl, Laura Chapman taped the words "Keep Sweet" on her bathroom mirror to remind herself how to get by in this remote, polygamous community. Keeping sweet, Chapman says, meant staying silent as her father molested her starting at age 3. It meant hiding her secret from her 30 brothers and sisters. It meant being lashed with a yardstick by one of her father's four wives. It meant having to quit school at age 11, then work without pay in a store owned by her church's prophet.

Keeping sweet meant being forced into marriage at age 18 to a man she didn't know, let alone love. It meant having a baby every year. It meant walking 10 paces behind her husband. And, above all, it meant smiling, sweetly through her pain.

Polygamy prevails in remote Ariz. town Slavery to some is salvation for others.
Denver Post, March 4, 2001. Article ID: 1058372

As Los Angeles Times reporters found:

Among sect members, girls as young as 13 are forced into marriage, sexual abuse is rampant, rape is covered up and child molesters are shielded by religious authorities and law enforcement.

Boys are thrown out of town, abandoned like unwanted pets by the side of the road and forcibly ostracized from their families to reduce competition among the men for multiple wives.

Children routinely leave school at age 11 or 12 to work at hazardous construction jobs. Boys can be seen piloting dump trucks, backhoes, forklifts and other heavy equipment.

Girls work at home, trying to keep order in enormous families with multiple mothers and dozens of children who often eat in shifts around picnic tables.

Wives are threatened with mental institutions if they fail to “keep sweet,” or obedient, for their husbands.

FLDS: Blind Eye to Culture of Abuse
David Kelly and Gary Cohn. Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2006

Just think: a very large number of rational Americans actually wanted a member of this cult as their President in 2012, albeit, at least officially, a member of a reformed and 'moderate' branch.

I never once considered going to the police, Going to the police would have been going against the whole town. Everyone was [molesting]. The church never said it was all right, but it was treated nonchalantly.

Sara Hammon, 30, after enduring years of sexual abuse at the hands of her [FLDS] father and brothers.

All this is very reminiscent of what was happening on Pitcairn Island where an isolated fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventist cult had been established and where a culture had developed in which systematic abuse of young girls by older men was the norm, even being defended by some older women. Strong cult leaders who manage to convince their followers that they speak to God and get instructions from him, as Mormons claim to do, can and do abuse the power this gives them.

But what is informative is the way, when the abuse becomes so widespread, and especially when they come into contact with cultures where humanism is prevalent, many cult members eventually see it as immoral and repulsive, just as many Pitcairn Islanders did, and just as former victims of Mormon cults are doing. There is an innate human morality which sees through those imposed by religious cults and even eventually by mainstream religions like Christianity and Islam. Just as nominally Christian countries have now rejected much of what Christianity's holy book, the Bible, calls for and instructs because it is frankly repugnant to innate human decency, so Muslim countries will eventually overthrow the more repulsive diktats of the Qur'an, maybe cherry-picking the few good bits, just as some Christian societies have. It is this humane rejection of so much of the Bible which was obviously concerning William Lane Craig and his fundamentalist, would-be theocrat backers.

Human beings don't get their morals from religion. Where religions are civilised and humane it's because they have been tamed by civilised human beings and have been forced to adopt our standards. The Catholic Church, for example, is just beginning to come to terms with the fact that many people, even those still professing to be Catholics, are rejecting much of what it teaches and much of what it tolerated in the form of clerical abuse of power, hence the general air of crisis and decay pervading it from the top downwards. The fall in recruitment to the priesthood is as much to do with people rejecting what the church stands for as it is to do with the thought that power without real accountability no longer offers the opportunities for abuse that it once did.

When people no longer need excuses, and when people no longer tolerate a pretence of piety as a cover-all excuse, religions cease to have any purpose. Tweet

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Religion Kills - Mormon Massacre

The Mountain Meadow Massacre

To illustrate how readily and easily religions turn their followers into killers in the name of their gods, here is a little bit of history of the new kid on the religious block, the Mormons, or Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) as they style themselves.

The LDS was invented in the early nineteenth century by convicted fraudster Joseph Smith and is based on a novel, written in a pastiche of the same seventeenth century English that the King James translation from Latin of the Christian Bible was written in. It is thought that Smith either believed God spoke this form of English and personally wrote the Bible in it, so naturally, any novel purporting to be written by God would be written in the language God spoke, or that, correctly as it turned out, the people he was aiming to con with it would believe God spoke and wrote like that, and were so more likely to believe his scam.