Picking At Religion Again

And now for your intermittently recurring muttering about the extremely religious.

Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound any more sensible than Lord Xenu and his billions of brainwashed ghosts.

And yet I still have to hear people talk about belief and faith every day as if it wasn’t a sign of some kind of insanity. Sigh. I guess I shouldn’t expect any different given that we’re probably evolutionarily driven to be nuts, and hardwired with all kinds of cognitive biases–it’s kind of a miracle that we managed an Enlightenment at all, much less made the progress we have with philosophy and science.

I’m still on this primarily because of the additional reading I’ve been doing into creationist museums in Canada. Yes, that plural is correct. Apparently there are several. I probably shouldn’t be reading the sites of people who think they are a good idea, but since my default way of engaging with the universe these days seems to be a good old-fashioned head exploding…

Well, here’s a quote from such a site (note that I have edited the HTML to make it less painful, but you can see the original at the source site):

Now check out the major turnover in this year’s poll of Albertans: 37% believed we evolved (down 21 points from 58%!), 40% believed in a young earth creation (up 12 points from 28%), and 23% said they didn’t know (up 9 points from 14%)!

What happened?

So what happened this past year? All of the other provinces retained roughly the same opinion – what made Alberta so special? The impressive Royal Tyrell museum is still there, promulgating the evolutionary myth to the almost half a million people that come through its doors every year.

I can only think of one thing that happened this past year which could affect the statistics like this: The opening of two creation museums. Nothing else changed! Except the opinion of the populace at large in Alberta, and of course, this was the whole reason for the Angus-Reid poll – to take the pulse of the Canadian people’s
reaction to a Creation museum opening up.

…wait until we get one built in Ottawa, our nation’s Capital.

So, just for the record, the next time someone asks me why I’m so “militant” in my positions on this stuff–he’s why. As long as there are people actively working against the ideas of rationality, then I’m going to work just as actively in favour of it. Or at least bitch on my blog–whichever takes less effort. I like Canada, and I don’t want to be forced to move to Sweden.

And, of course, the education issues aren’t limited just to science–there are some pretty serious failings of history, and in particular the history of ideas, as well. Look at our neighbours to the south–they virtually canonise their Founding Fathers, but at the same time they have completely lost a lot of the story of the founding, and the religious angles thereof. If something so basic to the mythology of a country slips away in only a few generations if we’re not watching…

Of course, the tide might turn back. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a popular documentary addressing some basic issues–like why Jesus doesn’t appear in any contemporary accounts of history. (As an aside, I really hope Bill takes on the common Western image of Jesus in that film. I make a lot of allowances for hillbilly ignorance, but if you think Jesus was a brown-bearded, blue-eyed white guy, and you’ve never asked yourself what someone who looked like that would be doing in the Middle East two thousand years ago… Well, let’s just say the bit in Waiting For The Galactic Bus where Yeshua makes the comment that most “good Christians” wouldn’t want someone that looked like him eating in their restaurants–or in today’s terms, flying on the same plane as them–always resonated nicely for me.)

And, lest there is any confusion, my issues aren’t just with religiously motivated attempts to destroy the core concepts of a critical or scientific education in order to prop up a book full of the mythology of some desert nomads. I have intolerance issues as well–yes, thank you, I am well aware of the irony that one of the reasons I find many kinds of deeply religious people intolerable is their intolerance.

Take for instance the on-going issue of gay marriage. Look at what’s happening in California right now. Or remember all the fuss here when we were making it legal. (I can’t help but notice that neither Canada nor Massachusetts have fallen into utter moral decay since making those legislative changes, by the way. Also, no rains of toads or plagues of locusts.)

Again to ensure there is no confusion, let me say that there’s a lot of good ideas in the Christian tradition. I’m all for loving my neighbour and charity and being my brother’s keeper and… etc. I’ve always though that John 11:35 might be the finest passage in any religious tradition. But you just can’t any of this literally–it’s like any other mythology: there are some good ideas, and some stuff that’s whacky. I usually love to pick on the acid trips at the end of Revelations, but anyone who can read through Leviticus and think there’s any connection between that and modern society… well, I’ve got nothing–our axioms are so far apart we can’t even see each other.

There is some hope. There’s a fair amount of evidence that atheism correlates with high IQsI am explicitly not equating IQ with intelligence, although the article does. I just think of it as something measurable.. Perhaps this is not surprising, since there’s also a correlation (although not as strong a one as you might hope) between IQ and critical thinking, and critical thinking really goes after the roots of religious dogma. And IQs have been on the rise in the West for a while now.

Except for one little problem. IQ increase also correlates with a birth rate decrease. And differential birth rates mean the world average IQ is dropping; and kind of dramatically.

So we might finally end up with an atheist leader in some Western country, but the world as a whole might well be on it’s way back to a spooky theocracy. Ironically, the same people who most want religion involved in Western politics will be pretty unhappy if/when differential population drives a different religion into politics…

I’m already boring myself, so I’ll wrap it up before I even get to my rant about religion as a form of social control, etc. Besides it’s been done better.