C.S.Lewis Dispenses With Faith

Here is C.S.Lewis on 'Faith', again from his 1952 book "Mere Christianity". It illustrates well the conceited vacuosity of his religious views and how his frankly annoying patronising style almost seems designed to gloss over it and to rely on the deferential social mores of his target audience. It oozes with 'niceness' and smugly reassuring self-satisfaction but actually says very little other than "believe what I say". I'm sorry it's so long but he probably had space to fill.

I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief-accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people-at least it used to puzzle me-is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue-what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.

Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then- and a good many people do not see still-was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.

When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, "Perhaps she'll be different this time," and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water-or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.

Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

Source; truthaccordingtoscripture.com

Probably the key phrase in all this is, "But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it".

Nowhere in this book does he say what evidence convinced him. All his reasons for being a Christian are based on negatives and absent evidence; because he can't explain something using his rather tenuous grasp of science, or doesn't understand something, he declares it inexplicable, fills the gap with a god and deems it to be the god his parents told him about. To Lewis, it seems 'unknown' and 'unknowable' are synonyms. And of course this god is to be worshipped according the the rites and rituals of the church his was baptised into as an infant. Never a shred of definitive evidence is ever offered for this god nor any explanation of why, if he has to invoke a god, it follows that it must be the god of the Christian Bible.

How could the English have possibly got the wrong god? The idea is not even worth considering.

Nope. There must be a god and it must be Lewis' god because there are things Lewis can't understand, and it is virtuous to just have faith in that conclusion. And faith means never having to change your mind even when the evidence changes or you realise the 'evidence' wasn't what you thought it was.

To borrow a metaphor from Richard Dawkins, there is not sufficient evidence to have a firm belief either way on the cause of the mass extinction of dinosaurs. There is evidence that it could have been a large meteorite strike. It is plausible that it could have been a virus. It could possibly have been a catastrophic climate change caused by a super volcano. It is sheer arrogance to merely opt for one of those and then proclaim it a virtue to cling to that belief even when the evidence changes. Not only arrogant but vain, something Lewis regards as a sin. It can only come from the belief that one can merely 'know' the truth; that somehow something must be true because one believes it.

Faith, in the absence of definitive evidence, is not a virtue; it is the sin of vain arrogance writ large.

The mere fact that C.S.Lewis has opted to believe in the Christian god is sufficient reason for him to believe in it. None of this nonsensical subservience to reality and dependence on evidence for our hero. He comes from a class which not even the universe would dare to question. Reality is what he says it is and that's an end to the matter. He would not believe it if it were not just so.

And of course any reasonable plebeian hearing truth and wisdom dispensed by a brilliant Oxford don who even writes children's books, should accept it as good enough for him and marvel at the benevolence of such a nice man dispensing his knowledge so nicely, and with such simple words too.

What a wonderful example of a nice Christian.

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40 Killer Arguments For Internet Creationists.

So, you've decided to be a Creationist and convince people that science is wrong and your favourite god really created the universe in six days out of nothing, and made humans out of dust (or a lump of mud). I bet you're really fed up with scientists and Atheists having all the facts, evidence and logic on their side and with having to make do without any. I bet you really wish you could win just one debate without having to flounce of in righteous indignation, avoid answering questions, needing to resort to abuse and threats, or simply boring the pants off people by repeating questions and ignoring answers until they ignore you.

Don't worry. You can win! This is all you need to do.

1. Have a list of questions you don't want answered. Check on any Creationist website for these.
2. Keep asking these questions over and over but ignore the answers.
3. Never be tempted to follow any links or read any books which might be recommended.
4. Demand absolute proof for every scientific theory. Never accept it.
5. Claim Creationism is proved because it's written about in a book and you believe it.
6. Produce random quotes from a religious book and claim that proves it.
7. Say that faith is better than evidence so it must be true otherwise you wouldn't believe it.
8. Claim to have absolute proof that your god exists. Never produce it because it might be falsifiable.
9. Promise that you will produce that proof soon but demand that it be accepted first.
10. Refuse to produce the proof because it would be wasted on someone who won't accept it.
11. Never say what you would accept as proof of Evolution or the Big Bang in case it's provided.
12. Never say what you would accept as falsifying Creationism in case it's provided.
13. Never say what testable predictions Creationism makes in case they are tested.
14. Never say what the definitive evidence for Creationism is, in case people look for it.
15. Never explain why your version of Creationism is better then any other.
16. Never explain why, if science is wrong, Creationism should be the only alternative on offer.
17. Claim absence of evidence for your god isn't evidence of absence so it must be proof of presence.
18. Don't worry about using a computer to argue that science doesn't work.
19. When pressed for an answer you don't have, claim you've answered it already.
20. Claim the evidence for Creation is 'everywhere' but people won't look at it.
21. Complain that no one has ever managed to answer any of your questions.
22. Assert that Darwin believed in Intelligent Design.
23. Claim that Darwin recanted on his death bed.
24. Claim that Darwin was a Communist.
25. Say that irreducible complexity proves life is intelligently designed. Avoid technical discussion.
26. Assert that Evolution was falsified by science many years ago.
27. Claim that the Second Law of Thermodynamics means Evolution is impossible. Avoid discussion.
28. Assert that there is no evidence for Evolution.
29. Say that Darwin admitted God must have designed eyes.
30. State that the Peppered Moths experiment was a fraud.
31. State that Coelacanths prove Evolution doesn't happen.
32. Claim that all fossils are forgeries made of plaster of Paris.
33. Assert that there are no transitional fossils.
34. Assert that Evolution has never been seen.
35. Don't take any notice of the detailed rebuttals you'll get.
36. If needs be, resort to condescension, passive-aggressive threats like saying you'll pray for them, and abuse.
37. It's okay to call scientists mad because they usually are from all that reading and learning they do - which is why you should avoid it.
38. Never get into technical arguments with real scientists, especially biologists, because you know how they can prove anything they want with facts.
39. Tell people they'll burn in Hell if they don't agree with you.
40. When you've got through this list just start again. People might have forgotten you had all of your questions answered and arguments refuted.

So there you are. You can now go on line and hold your head high in Creationist circles, sure of their admiration at the depth of your knowledge and the brilliance of your debating skills.

Those crazy elitist scientists and Godless heathen Atheists won't stand a chance!

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C.S.Lewis Gets It Wrong Again

More smugly self-satisfied moralising from C.S.Lewis' 1952 book, "Mere Christianity". This time it's quite easy to see why he got it wrong. It was a combination of ignorance and arrogance, of which, as so often with Lewis, arrogance was the main failure.

Some people say that though decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular person at a particular moment, still, it means what pays the human race as a whole; and that consequently there is no mystery about it. Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have real safety or happiness except in a society where every one plays fair, and it is because they see this that they try to behave decently. Now, of course, it is perfectly true that safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other. It is one of the most important truths in the world. But as an explanation of why we feel as we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the point If we ask: "Why ought I to be unselfish?" and you reply "Because it is good for society," we may then ask, "Why should I care what's good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?" and then you will have to say, "Because you ought to be unselfish"-which simply brings us back to where we started. You are saying what is true, but you are not getting any further. If a man asked what was the point of playing football, it would not be much good saying "in order to score goals," for trying to score goals is the game itself, not the reason for the game, and you would really only be saying that football was football-which is true, but not worth saying. In the same way, if a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no good replying, "in order to benefit society," for trying to benefit society, in other words being unselfish (for "society" after all only means "other people"), is one of the things decent behaviour consists in; all you are really saying is that decent behaviour is decent behaviour. You would have said just as much if you had stopped at the statement, "Men ought to be unselfish."

And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, nor that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave. On the other hand, it is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the idea, and most of the things we say and think about men would be reduced to nonsense if we did. And it is not simply a statement about how we should like men to behave for our own convenience; for the behaviour we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behaviour we find inconvenient, and may even be the opposite. Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing- a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves. And yet it is not a fact in the ordinary sense, in the same way as our actual behaviour is a fact. It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behaviour, and yet quite definitely real-a real law, which none of as(sic) made, but which we find pressing on us.

Source: truthaccordingtoscripture.com - Mere Christianity

Writing in 1952 it is not surprising that Lewis was ignorant of memes and memetic evolution, so we can perhaps forgive him for that, but never-the-less we should expect him to have been aware of Occam's Razor and how it should be used to produce the most vicarious explanation. Instead, he waves aside any possible natural explanation in favour of one which requires magic and an unexplained mystery, but which serves his purpose if his reader can be relied on not to probe too deeply.

Australopithicus africanus (artists impression)
This puny ape was only ever going to succeed by cooperating.

Evolution of cultures, together with the rules which facilitate co-operative behaviour are fully understandable in terms of memetic evolution by an evolutionary process. Human groups which were more co-operative would have been more successful in the conditions in which we were evolving and co-operation depends on team skills, which themselves rely on mutual trust. In conditions where an increasingly intelligent brain was also evolving these memes would have developed and so in turn facilitated an even more rapidly evolving brain.

Hence meme-gene co-evolution would have facilitated both the development of a brain able to hold and use these memes and the memes themselves, producing more successful groups and cultures, leading eventually to the evolution of an intelligent ape which today we call Homo sapiens complete with a set of evolved cultural norms and ethics which we inherit from our parents, peers and authority figures in our society.

Whilst the basic principles of treating others with respect, doing least harm and the empathetic skill of judging what you would want done to or for you, if you were the other person, are more or less common to all human societies and groups, the details often differ considerably.

Queueing is one example. I remember being shocked when in former Yugoslavia in the 1970 I had waited with some friends for a bus. We had arrived early and took up our position at the bus-stop sign, as we would have done in England. Over the next 15 minutes or so we noticed people gathering around but thought nothing of it until the bus arrived. It was then a scramble of pushing and shoving to get on the bus - the sort of behaviour which might have led to an argument or worse in England - and we were the last to get on the bus.

However, once on the packed bus, it was noticeable how not one woman was standing.

Memetic evolution of cultures, just like the genetic evolution of species, sub-species and regional varieties, accounts for both the similarities and difference. This cannot be explained by a system of objective moral laws handed down by a magic man. And that also begs the question where did this magic man get them from? Is there an infinite regress of higher authorities handing down morals to the Christian god, or are they merely it's capricious and arbitrary whim? (See Xeno's Religious Paradox). Lewis conveniently neglects to explain how this assumed god fed these 'laws' to us. Did it feed them in slowly a little at a time as we evolved into modern humans? Did it provide them fully worked out to our pre-human ancestors, or did it decide one day that humans were now human enough so we could all be given a dose of moral laws? Obviously, this is all part of the 'mystery' element that we mere mortals shouldn't be concerning our selves with.

For more on memetic evolution of morality, see Religion: An Abdication Of Moral Responsibility.

Memetic evolution is the most vicarious explanation and does not need to invoke an unexplained, and unexplainable, magic or magician, or an infinite regress of higher authorities. All elements of the memetic theory of moral origins are there to be examined, tested and validated by scientific methodology. There is nothing which needs to be pared away with Occam's Razor because nothing is included merely to arrive at the desired conclusion or to pander to an audience.

Of course, memetic evolution doesn't provide comfort to those who need to feel a magic man is thinking about them and looking after their interests, nor those who like to imagine they alone have the one true culture given to them by the one true invisible friend, but then pandering to such desires should not be part of a scientific explanation even if it is a normal component of a theological one.

So, although we can forgive C.S.Lewis his ignorance of memes, writing as he was before they were discovered, we shouldn't overlook his arrogance. The basic mistake he made was in assuming that, because he couldn't think of a natural explanation for the origin of human morality, there couldn't be one, so the only explanation had to be supernatural.

Of course, as always with Lewis, there is the arrogant assumption of his class that the only possible supernatural explanation must be the god locally popular in England in 1952 - how could the English possibly have the wrong god? - hence his patronising tone and underlying assumption that us plebeians would simply accept what our social superior was telling us and not ask how he got from not knowing why we have societies based on morals to the conclusion that it must have been his favourite god. We could safely be relied on to take that for granted, just as people in culturally arrogant and parochially ignorant societies still can be today.

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More Simple C.S.Lewis

Another quote from C.S.Lewis' 1952 book, Mere Christianity.

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. I will tell you what I think it is like…. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.

One wonders why it took Lewis so many words to say, "This is what you should believe because I say so. Don't expect me to explain it because I've no more idea than fly how it works, or even what it does. Just believe what I say, or my imaginary friend will get you. Okay!"

His arrogance would be astounding if we didn't know that in deferential Britain of 1952, people from his class were expected to be arrogant. They believed they held a monopoly on wisdom and their burden was to dispense it to the rest of us lesser beings. Expecting them to explain their reasoning to us would have been getting above ourselves. It was enough that they believed it themselves. Why would they need to bother with reasons when this knowledge just popped itself into their heads, ready to be dispensed? Simple oiks like us needed to be told what to believe otherwise there would be anarchy. Lewis was merely shouldering his burden - and getting lots of money for it.

C.S.Lewis Turns Out To Be Too Simple.

Believe it or not, the following is an argument for the Christian god which C.S.Lewis put forward in all seriousness and which, if they are to be believed, at least some Christians find convincing. It is taken from his 1952 book "Mere Christianity":

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

So, having realised that his childhood belief was childish, and based on his own false expectations, C.S.Lewis concludes that the only possible explanation is that the Christian god must exist. Quite how he gets from realising that his arrogant notion that somehow the universe should conform to his ideas of justice and the startling realisation that he couldn't define these notions, to the conclusion that therefore the locally popular god from his culture exists is never explained.

Let's break this argument down into it's component steps and see if the dots join up:

1. The universe should conform to my preconception because a god would ensure it does.
2. The universe doesn't conform to my preconception therefore this god doesn't exist.
3. I don't know what my preconception is so I don't know if 2 is right or wrong.
4. Therefore 2 is wrong.
5. Therefore this god must exist.

Did anyone else spot the jump from not knowing if 2 is right or wrong to the conclusion that 2 must therefore be wrong? How does that follow from 3 any more logically than an assumption that 2 is correct?

And how about the initial premise? Where is the logic behind the assumption that my preferred god should be ensuring the universe conforms to my preconception in the first place?

No. All we have proved is that the initial preconception was wrong. There is no requirement at all for the universe to conform to C.S.Lewis' preconception and, there is no reason at all to assume that, because C.S.Lewis realised he didn't know what his preconception was, it was therefore wrong.

Still not convinced? Okay, If Lewis' logic holds we should be able to apply it to other arguments with equal validity, so let's change the initial premise slightly and see what we can prove with the same 'logic':

1. The universe should be unjust because the Christian god doesn't exist.
2. The universe is just, therefore the Christian god must exist.
3. I don't know what justice is therefore I don't know if 2 is right or wrong.
4. Therefore 2 is wrong.
5. Therefore the Christian god doesn't exist.

Hmm... so the same logic can be used to 'prove' exactly the opposite, if only we change the initial, unproven, premise. Talk about starting with the required answer and working backward.

And of course nowhere in all this has Lewis presented any reason to conclude that the only god on offer is the locally popular one. Even if his dots joined up they could be used with equal validity for any god, or indeed a Celestial Peanut-butter Sandwich, if that was what you were trying to prove runs the universe. This is why it can be used equally to 'prove' there is no god. It's nothing more than an intellectually dishonest circular argument designed to hide the fact that the initial premise is merely an assumption inserted to beg the question and rig the logic so the outcome is the required one.

It's hard to believe that C.S.Lewis could not see the blatant logical fallacies this argument contained, the parochial and cultural arrogance and intellectual dishonesty which underpinned it, and how it could, with equal validity be applied to any god or any daft notion he could dream up, if he was the intellectual giant he is portrayed as.

But, he was marketing his wares to a culturally arrogant and parochial British public in 1952 of course, and he knew that market well, having lived off it for many years. He was in the market for confirmation of bias, not the market for information designed to make people question their assumptions.

No. There is no proof of anything in this argument but it does highlight the following problem for Christian theology. If the universe is run by an omnibenevolent god, why does it look just as you would expect it to if such a god is entirely absent? Perhaps it was his subconscious awareness of this fundamental problem which motivated him to abandon his intellectual integrity in order to try to dismiss it. Cognitive dissonance, and years of practice at coping with it, often seems to explain much of religious apologetics.

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Why Did The Believer Cross The Road?

Faith: The sure and certain way to know that every other faith is wrong.

Faith is just not a sensible way to live your life. If you tried to use 'faith' in anything but a religious context, and as an excuse for believing what you want to be true rather than what you know to be true, you would, if you were lucky and lived in a society which cared, be taken into care and kept under supervision for your own good.

Take a simple thing like crossing a road:

A normal adult with average intelligence will step up to the edge of the curb, look both ways, check that there is nothing coming and not even turning out of a near-by side road, and, if they see no cars, will accept that absence of evidence for a car as evidence of absence of a car. They will then cross the road, not considering for one moment that there may be an invisible car coming. They happily, and perfectly rationally, bet their life on the absence of evidence.

Imagine the reaction you would get if you tried to stop a normal person from crossing the road by telling them absence of evidence was not proof of absence and so the wrong way to go about it; they should have faith in a car being there. After all, if they have faith and accept there is a car coming and don't cross the road, what do they lose even if there isn't one? On the other hand, if there is a car coming, they gain everything. Risk nothing to gain everything.

No contest! Go with faith and save your life!

Before I went shopping today I checked in the larder first to see what we needed. I could have just used faith and assumed we had enough of everything, and anyway what would be the point of checking when absence of something like a tin of beans or a bag of rice isn't proof that we had none? In fact, what was the point of going shopping at all?

Fortunately, I'm a sane, rational adult and don't believe that things are real just because I have faith that they are.

And so do most Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Shintoists and followers of other religions requiring their followers to 'just have faith' and to bet their lives on the absence of evidence not being enough evidence of absence. It's only when it comes to believing the things their priests and preachers tell them to believe that they are told this infantile, irrational and intellectually indolent approach to reality is a virtue.

I'm not sure which is the least rational here: believing by faith or believing what the priests and preachers say. If you really believed their logic you could not live a normal life and would not even cross the road.

Why did the Believer cross the road? Because they don't believe in faith; they believe in evidence, just like normal people do.

Note: Believers who got this far and think my logic is wrong, are free to explain why.

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Feel That Christian Love!

A faith which is afraid of contradiction is not a faith - it is a fear.

You would think anyone secure in their beliefs would be content to explain their reasons and have done with it, confident that their beliefs are based on sound reasoning which can stand the test of doubt and counter argument. Even in the absence of good evidence you would think they could explain the inescapable logic behind their beliefs and the faults with all the other logic.

Surely, Christianity, with it's worship of 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild' who tells us to forgive our enemies and turn the other cheek, and of a god of peace and goodwill to all, is going to use non-violence against its doubters, especially those who simply disagree over some detail or other of the nature of their god and how exactly it should be worshipped? Surely, in the spirit of brotherly love, a good Christian secure in his own beliefs would simply explain to the doubter where and why he had gone wrong and trust the doubter to see the good sense of his argument.

Well, if you believe what they tell us, that might be what you expect, but is that expectation born out by the facts?

Not a bit of it.

The facts show that's not how religion, and particularly Christianity works. What we see is not a confident presentation of the arguments, but an assertiveness and ready resort to violence which betrays a lack of any such confidence and which betrays an underlying fear of counter-argument.

This time next week we'll be well on our way to the South of France, to the Languedoc-Rousillon region where, in the middle ages, one of Christianity's many little wars of persecution and violent suppression of dissent and disagreement took place - the crusade against the Cathars, also known as the Albigensians after the town of Albi, called the Cathar or Albigensian Crusade of 1209-1229.

The Cathars regarded themselves as Christians. Catharism had spread into Northern Italy and Southern France, especially the Languedoc region into the Pyrenees. It's origins are slightly obscure but seems to have included elements of the Paulician movement from Armenia, Bogomil gnosticism from Bulgaria, Egyptian Arianism and Persian Manichaeism.

In those days, the more powerful centres of Christianity, despite a frenzy of persecution and document burning which followed the recognition by Constantine of Christianity as the official state religion, had not managed to suppress all the various sects which the early Christians had spawned in the first few centuries after Paul of Tarsus and others had exported their different versions of the myths to various parts of the Eastern Roman Empire. In addition, many of these were co-existing with Islam and rubbing shoulders with other ideas like Buddhism coming along the developing trade routes across Central Asia, so there were a large number of bizarre creeds all coming under the broad umbrella of Christianity on the basis that they were centred on a belief in the Biblical Jesus and on various translations and interpretations of early versions of documents and 'gospels', some of which found themselves sanitized and bound up into the official Bible.

Basically, Cathars believed there are two gods, a bad one (Satan) who created the material world, and a good one (Jehovah), and that Jesus was a messenger from Jehovah whose teachings should be followed to avoid Satan's evil. They believed that at best, Jesus was only God's son and not God, so they denied the Trinity as taught by both the Roman and Orthodox Churches. They also rejected oaths, including marriage and taught that sex was sinful and anything which was the result of sexual reproduction was also satanic, so they were vegetarian. Obviously no one had told them how plants reproduce but at least they knew it didn't involve dangley bits and pleasure.

The presence of the Cathars was encouraging regional independence in southern France which meant the Catholic French King was losing his grip on his southern barons, but of course their worst 'sin' was in rejecting the authority of Pope Eugene III and even refusing to pay tithes! To make matters worse, in theological debate, the Cathars were winning more often than not, seeming to appeal particularly to the theologically literate, so the Catholic church was losing its local intelligentsia, and being humiliated. Whole congregations were reputedly converting en masse along with their clerics (who probably knew which way the wind seemed to be blowing). This clearly could not be tolerated, so, after feeble attempst to convert them by sending a Cistercian monk, a cardinal and a bishop to preach to them, all to no lasting effect, the Papacy resorted to the time-honour fall-back theological arguments - violence and murder.

When Pope Innocent III came to power he asked King Phillip Augustus of France to launch a military campaign against the Cathars. Phillip Augustus sent Simon de Montfort and Bouchard de Marly, two of his more ambitious barons. To encourage their religious zeal, Pope Innocent III ordered that all Cathar land could be seized. There followed twenty years of 'persuasive' murder and persecution. In one siege, Simon de Montford ordered that 100 captured Cathars should have their eyes gouged out and their lips and noses cut off, then be sent back to the town of Béziers, led by a captive with one eye remaining.

Béziers was also defended by a large number of Catholics who had opted to stay to protect their homes and property when offered free passage at the start of the siege. As the siege came to an end, Arnaud, the Cistercian abbot-commander who had ordered that all the Cathars were to be killed, was asked how to tell the Cathars from Catholics. His answer was a tribute to his humanity and Christian love for his fellow man. "Kill them all, the Lord will recognise his own". When the doors of the church of St Mary Magdalen were broken down, the 7,000 people who had taken refuge in it were dragged out and killed. In all, up to 20,000 people from the town were killed by being used for target practice and by being dragged behind horses for sport, interspersed no doubt, with bouts of brotherly love, goodwill and reasoned discourse on matters theological. Or perhaps not.

On 16 March 1244, 200 Cathars were ritually massacred by being burned alive on a large fire outside the Cathar-held castle of Montségur.

So, it's good to see that Christians, confident in their faith and in their reasons for holding to it, are able to persuade their fellow man to see the good sense of their theological arguments and are able to practice the teaching of Jesus to forgive their enemies and not live by the sword, the way they tell the rest of us we should live.

Or it would be, if only examples of them doing so were virtually non-existent and if only there were not so many examples of them doing exactly the opposite.

Further reading:

Cathars and Cathar Beliefs in the Languedoc
The Cathars: What was the Albigensian Crusade?
Cathars & Albigenses: What Was Catharism? What did Cathars Believe?

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The Outsider Test Of Faith

Faith - the sure and certain way to tell that all other faiths are wrong.

The Outsider Test Of Faith:

John W. Loftus' challenge to believers to apply the same test they use for other faiths to their own:

If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would be a Muslim right now, say it isn't so? That is a cold hard fact. Dare you deny it? Since this is so, or at least 99% so, then the proper method to evaluate your religious beliefs is with a healthy measure of skepticism.

Test your beliefs as if you were an outsider to the faith you are evaluating. If your faith stands up under muster, then you can have your faith. If not, abandon it, for any God who requires you to believe correctly when we have this extremely strong tendency to believe what we were born into, surely should make the correct faith pass the outsider test. If your faith cannot do this, then the God of your faith is not worthy of being worshipped.

To this I would add:

• If you were born in Madrid, New York, Rome or Kansas you would almost certainly be Christian.
• If you had been born in first century BCE Jerusalem you would be Jewish.
• If you had been born in fifth century BCE Greece you would believe in the Greek pantheon.
• If you had been born in pre-WWII Japan you would be Shinto.

Wherever and whenever you were born you would almost certainly have the same faith as your parents.

Unless, that is, you had applied exactly the same standard to your parents' faith as you have to all the others. If you had, you are very unlikely to have any faith at all because, like every other faith, yours has no evidential basis and so would fail John W. Loftus' Outsider Test Of Faith.

In fact, if you were honest, you would admit that you have never really even thought about the other gods and other faiths, let alone applied any of the tests you just assume someone else must have made when they accepted your faith and rejected all the others.

If you disagree, please show your reasoning:

Hint: Arguing that all the other faiths must be wrong because yours is right won't work because that could be used with equal non-validity by all the others.

Debunking Christianity: The Outsider Test.....:

'via Blog this'

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Christian's Christians

1960s Replica of HMS Bounty

The Pitcairn Islanders are devoutly religious Christians so you would expect them to behave like true Christians, wouldn't you?

Yet, they have a culture which included the routine sexual abuse of girls from the age of about 12.

The people of this group of the Pitcairn Islands, four remote islands in the South Pacific, are all descended from the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians who set out from Tahiti with them. Led by the Bounty's master's mate, Fletcher Christian, the mutineers had returned to Tahiti to collect a few friendly Tahitians as servants and wives after they had seized the Bounty and set her Captain, William Bligh and his loyal sailors adrift in a small boat. In an astonishing feat of seamanship and navigational skills he had learned under Captain James Cook, Bligh succeeded in navigating 3,618 nautical miles to Timor in 47 days, otherwise we would probably know nothing of the mutiny.

Having arrived at Pitcairn, the Bounty was burned and scuttled to prevent anyone leaving and betraying the mutineers, after her cargo was stripped of everything, including a Bible, a prayer book and a still.

Racial tensions, which arose because of the sexual imbalance and the fact that the Tahitians found themselves to be virtual slaves, caused fighting in which most of the mutineers were killed, the rest dying of alcoholism or disease. The last remaining survivor was John Adams who found solace in the Bounty's Bible. As leader of the community he imposed a strict Christian fundamentalism on the islanders based partly on childhood recollections. Apparently having remembered that it was traditional to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday he decreed that the islanders should fast every Wednesday and Friday.

However, one of the Christian moral codes which was ignored, probably because it would have meant not only total abstinence from sex but also the extinction of the population, was the prohibition on incest, or rather the definition of incest in the prayer book. With all the islanders closely related, having been founded by such a small founder population, these rules were relaxed. Not so the Levitican laws however, which were strictly enforced, particularly the dietary laws. 'Unclean' birds were strictly prohibited. The Pitcairn Islands Study Centre website, a Seventh-Day Adventist site, has more details on this.

And so the Pitcairn Islanders' religion waxed and waned, given a boost now and then when a ship called with a chaplain to preach a sermon or two, until in a large box of Seventh-Day Adventist literature was delivered on a ship from California in 1787. At first this was ignored until it was 'rediscovered' by the daughter of the islanders' leader Simon Young. One of the changes he introduced was changing the 'Sabbath' from Sunday to Saturday, which was ironic because they had been calling Saturday the Sabbath thinking it was Sunday until they were told the Bounty had crossed the International Date line without anyone noticing and their calendar had been a day out. I wonder if their god minded.

Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Adamstown, Pitcairn Island

Eventually, after a concerted 'mission' in 1890, almost all the islanders converted from their own distinct form of 'Church of England' Christianity to Seventh-Day Adventism, and a strict moral code which included a prohibition on dancing, displays of public affection, smoking and drinking alcohol was imposed and remained in place until recently.

Another Christian tradition which seems to have been adopted with more than a little enthusiasm is hypocrisy, especially in matters of private versus public sexual attitudes and activity. The islanders had been unwilling to reform their sexual practices which had been tolerated by John Adams and bring it into line with their new-found Christian fundamentalism. In 2004, seven men from Pitcairn were charged with 55 sexual offences with minors. In 2005 another 6 were charged with a further 41 offences. All were convicted of some or all of the offences. It transpired that sexual abuse of girls from the age of about 12 was routine.

Mayor of Pitcairn, Steve Christian.
A Conviction Christian.

Protected by their remoteness and by the reticence of the subservient women to break the code of silence of which any Sicilian Mafioso or Vatican enforcer would be proud, good, upright, God-fearing fundamentalist Christian men had been uninhibited in their abuse of their female 'underlings'. Obviously, there was nothing in the Bible which told them it was wrong.

A study of the island's records showed that most girls had their first child between the ages of 12 and 15. In a strongly patriarchal society in which women had no real option but to accept the abuses, they had become institutionalised and routine, and even defended by some of the older women on the grounds that it had done them no harm. In a society dominated by moralising 'Christian' male leaders, sexual abuse of children was even more systematic than that frequently found in Christian boarding schools, orphanages, choirs and almost anywhere where priests and nuns have unsupervised control of children, now being exposed throughout the developed world, where abused children are gaining the courage to talk about their abuse, just as the abused girls of Pitcairn have.

Just another example of how religion is used to control a population and how it works in favour of the powerful and against the interests of the weak and powerless whom it works assiduously to keep that way, and an illustration of what religion can produce when left unchecked and feels itself to be above the law.

Religions provides excuses for people who need excuses.

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What's In A Name?

Wouldn't it be good if we had a record of how genes are spread through a population going back some 500 years or so? It would be a bit like watching ripples spread out when we drop a stone in a pond or genes flowing through a population over time.

What we need is some sort of marker which got recorded fairly frequently, unlike hair or eye colour, which, if they got recorded at all before we had photography or passports, were far too patchy and were probably only written about then if they were unusual and belonged to a person of some importance. We all know about Queen Elizabeth I's red hair, but what colour was Henry II's or Thomas Beckett's hair? Who know what colour Alfred the Great's eyes were?

As it happens, we have just such a marker, which has been recorded in England since 1837 and since about 1500 or even earlier in some places. We have the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages and, before that the records of baptisms, marriages and deaths maintained by churches, albeit in a non-standard format and often badly stored so that many have fallen foul of mildew, mice, water, fire and fading ink so that getting back beyond 1600 is often a matter of luck.

But what has that got to do with genes?

Until recently, the law in England required a child to take the surnames of the father if the parents were married, or the mother if not, so, even though birth out of wedlock was common, families were large and the majority of births were in marriage. This means that males tended to inherit their y chromosomes along with their surnames. (For the uninitiated: males have an x and a y chromosome; females have two x chromosomes. Sperm always has either an x or a y chromosome and ova always have an x. The gender of the baby is determined by the chromosome in the successful sperm, so men determine the gender of the baby and boys will always have their father's y chromosome). Not that the y chromosome is of any special interest in this because breeding success, and especially producing more males, may have nothing to do with it. It is a convenient metaphor, however.

What all this means is that, since boys always have a copy of their father's y chromosome and they usually have their father's surname, the y chromosome is 'marked' by the surname and the surname has been recorded, so, in effect the y chromosome has been marked.

This is not an exact mapping for two reasons:

• Children of unmarried mothers take their mother's name, not their fathers. While the mother may well have taken her father's name, she didn't take his y chromosome.
• Children may not have the father they think. It's a wise child who knows his own father.

Now, suppose something about a man's genes made him more likely to have male children or more healthy children, or just more children? What we would expect is that, over a few generations from a more-or-less even spread of surnames, his surname would become more common in a small area to begin with and to spread out from that focal point at each generation. But, because of the diluting effect of the two factors above, this effect would die away as it spread.

Is this what we see?

These surname distribution maps for names in my family tree are taken from the 1891 census. They are from Ancestry.co.uk:
It is quite clear from this random sample that surnames are not randomly distributed across the country but tend to be much more common in some areas than in others. Major centres are also surrounded by zones of diminishing frequency, just as I hypothesised above.

One of these maps is especially interesting and not just because I'm related to probably all the people in it. The Pratley surname has been the subject of a One-name Study by Michelle Hawke, an Oxfordshire genealogist. From Michelle's website:

The origins of the Pratley surname are clear to see, but not so easy to explain. The very first Pratley was originally William Spratley, who came to Leafield, Oxfordshire from a town near Banbury in around 1620. During his life in Leafield, the surname in the records fluctuates between Spratley and Pratley, but after his death in 1660, the family permanently took the surname Pratley...

The first few generations of Pratleys are easy to trace from parish registers and wills. William married twice, producing a dozen children, four of whom were boys who went on to continue the Pratley line. After a few generations, each branch of the family became quite distinct - not only were Pratleys marrying other Pratleys, but Pratley gamekeepers were arresting Pratley poachers! But it was still more than a hundred years before more than a few Pratleys left Leafield and started families in other villages.

By this time they filled all strata of working society - from paupers living on parish relief to farmers of a couple of hundred acres. At first they migrated to neighbouring villages and counties, but with the advent of the railways, and a couple of notable events in Pratley history, they spread across England and off to America, Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand.

Today there are more than a thousand Pratleys around the world - not a large number as surnames go, but not bad for just three hundred and fifty years! And there are still Pratleys living in Leafield today, all these years after William first arrived.

April 30, 1832 First Pratley Baptism.
Baptisms for Leafield were performed at Shipton-Under-Wychwood until
A church was built at Leafield. L in the margin indicates from Leafield

We can see how, from a single 'seeding', the Pratley name, and with it, the Pratley 'gene for success', which I'll use as a general term for whatever factor it might be for any particular surname because it might well be any number of possible factors, spread from it's nucleus in the Wychwood forest. Now, anyone like me who is descended from families who were present in Oxfordshire at least before 1500, and who isn't a recent new-comer to the area is almost certainly related to one or more Pratleys. If you are a 'native' of North West Oxfordshire, from the general Witney - Chipping Norton - Woodstock area, and you think you aren't related to a Pratley, you or one of your ancestors, have probably been lied to.

If my theory is correct, that this local success of a surname is due to something in the male genes which either produces more healthy children or, even better, more sons, we should see this in the record.

And guess what?

A quick count of the number of Pratley births registered between 1837 and 1887 in the Witney and Chipping Norton Registration Districts. of 688 registered births, 53% were of males and 47% of females. I got this from a search on FreeBMD.org.uk

But if that were true, you might expect the 'Pratley gene' to spread very rapidly because each new centre, as Pratleys moved out of the area, should have set off a new explosion. And this is just what did happen when George Pratley, a forester from Leafield in the Wychwood Forest upped and moved to Perthshire in Scotland in 1829, taking his foresting skills, his wife Jane and his two surviving children with him to work on the Scottish estate of his employer, who also owned the Cornbury Estate in the Wychwood Forest. As this map shows, Edward and his Wife Jane soon founded a new colony of Pratleys, producing another nine children .

But this doesn't always apply and the tendency is for the 'gene for success' to lose it's vigour as time goes by. This apparent reduction in 'vigour' is caused by the two things I mentioned earlier - marital infidelity, and the law of matronymics for children of unmarried mothers. This means that some 'Pratley' genes will be in people with other surnames and some Pratleys will not have the Pratley genes.

This isn't the only interpretation of course, and it is equally possible that William Pratley (or Spratley) had the good fortune to marry a woman who carried a gene for making more breeding males. However, I think it is easy to see how a gene which is firmly linked to something which gives breeding success, will spread out from an initial 'seeding' or advantageous mutation.

This of course is exactly what we would expect to see if a new advantageous mutation arose in a local area of a wide-spread population. However, this is not the only mechanism by which alleles spread and change their frequency in the gene pool. Genetic drift plays a part and so does the 'founder effect' when a small population becomes isolated from the main population. The founders are statistically unlikely to have the same proportion of different alleles as the parent population and, with a small population, the effects of chance will be more marked. In these populations, and especially if there are local environmental pressures different to those acting on the main population, shifts in allele frequency can be marked.

Using the surname analogy again, a 'founder effect' can be seen in the population of Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific, which was populated by the Bounty mutineers and a few islanders, mostly women, from Tahiti. The leader of the mutiny, Fletcher Christian had married a Tahitian girl named Maimiti with whom he had two sons before he died, Charles and Thursday October (No! Really!). Fletcher and all but one of the mutineers, John Adams, either died of illness or were murdered in in-fighting. A very large proportion of the Pitcairn Islanders now have the surname Christian or Adams and like me and the thousands of Oxonians with our little pieces of Pratley in us, so they have a little bit of John Adams or Fletcher Christian in them.

The Ascott Martyrs

I just came across this story when researching for another blog. It happened in 1873 in a very rural part of Oxfordshire, in one of a group of villages collectively known as the Under Wychwoods, a stone's throw from where David Cameron now lives. It seems deference to the ruling class and the landed gentry was not always what it is today where anything with a blue rosette will get elected to Parliament and local and county councils.

I'm proud to think I'm almost certainly related to Ellen, Elizabeth and Mary Pratley who played a leading role in this important piece of Trades Union Movement history in Britain.

The trouble started when Mr Hambidge of Crown Farm Ascott sacked his men who had joined the Agricultural Workers' Union and then employed men from Ramsden to do his hoeing. The Ascott women stopped these men from working, and tried to persuade them to join the Union. The women were arrested, taken to Chipping Norton, and charged with obstructing and coercing John Hodgkins and John Millen with a view to inducing them to leave their employment on 20th May.

The two magistrates conducting the trial were Rev. T. Harris and Rev. W.E. Carter. Mr Hambidge engaged a solicitor (Mr Wilkins) to conduct the prosecution but the women were not defended by counsel. The magistrates pleaded with the farmer not to proceed with the prosecution, as they would have no option but to send the women to prison. This he refused to do.

Read more... The Ascott Martyrs

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The Good Shepherd's Purse Is Bad News For Creationists

Capsella grandiflora

Creationists will always wave aside examples of observed evolution as 'micro-evolution' but not 'macro-evolution', which is what they call the evolution of new species. For some reason they seem to find this a threat to their favourite easy answer of the creation of all living things out of nothing by a magic man, so it must be devastating for them to hear of yet another example of it.

This one has recently been found in the family of common garden weeds, which I have always known as 'Shepherd's purse', with the generic name Capsella. They have a characteristic heart-shaped seed capsule which gives them their English name. These plants are something of a garden pest because they can harbour the fungal root infection of the cabbage family known as club root disease.

Capsella grandiflora, like many species of plant, has a mechanism which prevents self-pollination or 'selfing', known as self-incompatibility. Loss of this mechanism is fairly common in some plants because if offers a short-term solution where pollinators are rare. In that situation the disadvantage of not exchanging genes with another individual can be outweighed by the advantage of being able to produce fertile seeds, so natural selection can favour it in the right circumstances and work against in in other circumstances.

Capsella rubella

A very closely related species, Capsella rubella (red shepherd's purse), however is self-compatible.

By comparing the genomes of the two species, a team of researchers working at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Germany, found that the two species diversified only 30-50,000 years ago and, because of the low number of different alleles in C. rubella, it must have gone through a very narrow bottleneck and probably arose from a single incidence of selfing, probably in Greece. Its spread, and maybe its survival, was facilitated by the spread of agriculture in the area at about the same time.

So, human agency at the dawn of agriculture may well have created the right environmental conditions in which 'selfing' became an advantage. That allowed a new species to arise and prosper, and one which continues to be an agricultural weed.

Source:

Recent speciation of Capsella rubella from Capsella grandiflora, associated with loss of self-incompatibility and an extreme bottleneck. Guo YL, Bechsgaard JS, Slotte T, Neuffer B, Lascoux M, Weigel D, Schierup MH.
Department of Molecular Biology, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A.;2009 Mar 31;106(13):5246-51. Epub 2009 Mar 23.

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More Rapid Human Evolution

Tibetan Plateau

In Rapid Human Evolution we saw how the Fore people of Papua New Guinea evolved resistance to the prion disease, kuru in as little as 200 years under intense selection pressure, so giving the lie to Creationist claims about evolution. This blog is about an almost as impressive example of recent human evolution, albeit at a somewhat slower rate, but not, like the Fore example involving a single gene, but involving more than 30 genes. Again, the observable facts destroy another Creationist myth.

This example is found in Tibetans who have adapted to live in the high altitude of the Tibetan plateau, over 13,000 feet above sea level, where oxygen levels are 40% lower than at sea level. (To be technical, it's not the ratio of oxygen in the air which is lower but the air-pressure itself. This means the partial pressure of oxygen is 40% lower than at sea level, so it is much harder for it to cross the thin membrane in the lungs into the pulmonary capillaries, where it can be taken up by the haemoglobin in blood.)