The Tashnuba Case
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/nyregion/17suicide.html?hp&ex=1119067200&en=59dc0c13ad38064f&ei=5094&partner=homepage
On reading this front page story on the New York Times Website, I was struck by two things. The first was the ostensibly callous manner in which a 16 year old girl called Tashnuba (originally from Bangladesh) was dealt with by the Feds and second was the scary devotion to religion this 16 year old exhibited which was the basis of the suspicion that she was perhaps an Islamic terrorist-in-traning.I do not know which of the two facts is more frightening but I am willing to place my money on the second. However, there are numerous ideologies which can lead to fanaticism or fascism of different kinds. The point being that if you want to persecute a 16 year old for listening to lectures on the Koran and taking notes, you also need to persecute those who read Heidegger and most post-modernist theorists, and of course Marxists. Every ideology can lead to two paths - one toward a possible Utopia, the second to mindless violence and fundamentalism. With Marxism we got a cruel USSR and Eastern Europe, with Heidegger we got Hitler, with the Koran we have got a new kind of terror and NO ONE is placing the blame on AGENTS but instead the focus has usually been on the TEXT. The text is not to blame. People who interpret it are and the worst are those who seek to misinform. In the latter category I would place most Muslim clerics.
I feel the time has come to put a blanket ban on all religions and their clerics across the world including Hindu gurus, the Vatican and priests of all denominations and the Muslim clergy. We DO NOT need religion. it is no longer our opiate and only breeds contempt and hatred.
On reading this front page story on the New York Times Website, I was struck by two things. The first was the ostensibly callous manner in which a 16 year old girl called Tashnuba (originally from Bangladesh) was dealt with by the Feds and second was the scary devotion to religion this 16 year old exhibited which was the basis of the suspicion that she was perhaps an Islamic terrorist-in-traning.I do not know which of the two facts is more frightening but I am willing to place my money on the second. However, there are numerous ideologies which can lead to fanaticism or fascism of different kinds. The point being that if you want to persecute a 16 year old for listening to lectures on the Koran and taking notes, you also need to persecute those who read Heidegger and most post-modernist theorists, and of course Marxists. Every ideology can lead to two paths - one toward a possible Utopia, the second to mindless violence and fundamentalism. With Marxism we got a cruel USSR and Eastern Europe, with Heidegger we got Hitler, with the Koran we have got a new kind of terror and NO ONE is placing the blame on AGENTS but instead the focus has usually been on the TEXT. The text is not to blame. People who interpret it are and the worst are those who seek to misinform. In the latter category I would place most Muslim clerics.
I feel the time has come to put a blanket ban on all religions and their clerics across the world including Hindu gurus, the Vatican and priests of all denominations and the Muslim clergy. We DO NOT need religion. it is no longer our opiate and only breeds contempt and hatred.
posted by Vasundhara at 4:49 AM
1 Comments:
"Religion's ... profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness. ... Nature cannot afford frivolous jeux desprits. Ruthless utilitarianism trumps, even if it doesn’t always seem that way."
Something I read online. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? More extracts of the same below...
"Though the details differ across cultures, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking, fecundity-forfeiting rituals of religion. All this presents a major puzzle to anyone who thinks in a Darwinian way. We guessed why jays ant. Isn’t religion a similar challenge, an a priori affront to Darwinism, demanding analogous explanation? Why do we pray and indulge in costly practices that, in many individual cases, more or less totally consume lives?
"... Not all individuals are religious ... But religion is a human universal: every culture, everywhere in the world, has a style of religion that even nonpractitioners recognize as the norm for that society, just as it has a style of clothing, a style of courting, and a style of meal serving. What is religion good for?
"There is a little evidence that religious belief protects people from stress-related diseases. The evidence is not good, but it would not be at all surprising. A non-negligible part of what a doctor can provide for a patient is consolation and reassurance. My doctor doesn’t literally practice the laying on of hands. But many’s the time I have been instantly cured of some minor ailment by a reassuringly calm voice from an intelligent face surmounting a stethoscope. The placebo effect is well-documented. Dummy pills, with no pharmacological activity at all, demonstrably improve health. That is why drug trials have to use placebos as controls. It’s why homeopathic remedies appear to work, even though they’re so diluted that they contain the same amount of the active ingredient as the placebo control—zero molecules.
"Is religion a medical placebo, which prolongs life by reducing stress? Perhaps, although the theory is going to have to run the gauntlet of skeptics who point out the many circumstances in which religion increases stress rather than decreases it. In any case, I find the placebo theory too meager to account for the massive and all-pervasive phenomenon of religion. I do not think we have religion because our religious ancestors reduced their stress levels and hence survived longer. I don’t think that’s a big enough theory for the job.
"Other theories miss the point of Darwinian explanations altogether. I refer to suggestions like, “Religion satisfies our curiosity about the universe and our place in it.” Or “Religion is consoling. People fear death and are drawn to religions which promise we’ll survive it.” There may be some psychological truth here, but it’s not in itself a Darwinian explanation. As Steven Pinker has said in How the Mind Works (Penguin, 1997):
"... it only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false. A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit. (p. 555)
"A Darwinian version of the fear-of-death theory would have to be of the form, “Belief in survival after death tends to postpone the moment when it is put to the test.” This could be true or it could be false—maybe it’s another version of the stress and placebo theory—but I shall not pursue the matter. My only point is that this is the kind of way in which a Darwinian must rewrite the question.
"Psychological statements to the effect that people find some belief agreeable or disagreeable are proximate, not ultimate explanations. As a Darwinian I am concerned with ultimate questions.
"Darwinians make much of this distinction between proximate and ultimate. Proximate questions lead us into physiology and neuroanatomy. There is nothing wrong with proximate explanations. They are important, and they are scientific. But my pre-occupation is with Darwinian ultimate explanations. If neuroscientists find a “god center” in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me want to know why the god center evolved. Why did those of our ancestors who had a genetic tendency to grow a god center survive better than rivals who did not? The ultimate Darwinian question is not a better question, not a more profound question, not a more scientific question than the proximate neurological question. But it is the one I happen to be talking about here.
"Some alleged ultimate explanations turn out to be—or even avowedly are—group-selection theories. Group selection is the controversial idea that Darwinian selection chooses among groups of individuals, in the same kind of way as, in accordance with normal Darwinian theory, it chooses among individuals within groups. The Cambridge anthropologist Colin Renfrew, for example, suggests that Christianity survived by a form of group-selection because it fostered the idea of in-group loyalty and brotherly love. The American evolutionist David Sloan Wilson has made a similar suggestion in Darwin’s Cathedral.
"... Could religion be a recent phenomenon, sprung up since our genes underwent most of their natural selection? Its ubiquity argues against any simple version of this idea. Nevertheless, there is a version of it that I want to advocate. The propensity that was naturally selected in our ancestors was not religion per se. It had some other benefit, and it only incidentally manifests itself today as religious behavior. We’ll understand religious behavior only after we have renamed it. It is natural for me as a zoologist to use an analogy from nonhuman animals.
... “What is the survival value of religion?” may be the wrong question. The right question may have the form, “What is the survival value of some as yet unspecified individual behavior, or psychological characteristic, that manifests itself, under appropriate circumstances, as religion?” We have to rewrite the question before we can sensibly answer it.
" ... My specific hypothesis is about children. More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations. Theoretically, children might learn from experience not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be a selective advantage to child brains with the rule of thumb: Believe whatever your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents, obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Obey without question.
I have never forgotten a horrifying sermon, preached in my school chapel when I was little. It was horrifying in retrospect: at the time, my child brain accepted it as intended by the preacher. He told the story of a squad of soldiers, drilling beside a railway line. At a critical moment, the drill sergeant’s attention was distracted, and he failed to give the order to halt. The soldiers were so well schooled to obey orders without question that they carried on marching, right into the path of an oncoming train. Now, of course, I don’t believe the story now, but I did when I was nine. The point is that the preacher wished us children to regard as a virtue the soldiers’ slavish and unquestioning obedience to an order, however preposterous. And, speaking for myself, I think we did regard it as a virtue. I wondered whether I would have had the courage to do my duty by marching into the train.
Like ideally drilled soldiers, computers do what they are told. They slavishly obey whatever instructions are properly delivered in their own programming language. This is how they do useful things like word processing and spreadsheet calculations. But, as an inevitable by-product, they are equally automatic in obeying bad instructions. They have no way of telling whether an instruction will have a good effect or a bad. They simply obey, as soldiers are supposed to.
It is their unquestioning obedience that makes computers vulnerable to infection by viruses and worms. A maliciously designed program that says “Copy me to every name in any address list that you find on this hard disk” will simply be obeyed and then obeyed again by the other computers to which it is sent, in exponential expansion. It is impossible to design a computer that is usefully obedient and at the same time immune to infection.
If I have done my softening up work well, you will already have completed the argument about child brains and religion. Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. And this very quality automatically makes them vulnerable to infection by mind viruses. For excellent survival reasons, child brains need to trust parents and trust elders whom their parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the “truster” has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot tell that “If you swim in the river you’ll be eaten by crocodiles” is good advice but “If you don’t sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, the crops will fail” is bad advice. They both sound the same. Both are advice from a trusted source, and both are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience.
The same goes for propositions about the world, the cosmos, morality, and human nature. And, of course, when the child grows up and has children of his or her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot on to her own children, using the same impressive gravitas of manner.
On this model, we should expect that, in different geographical regions, different arbitrary beliefs having no factual basis will be handed down, to be believed with the same conviction as useful pieces of traditional wisdom such as the belief that manure is good for the crops. We should also expect that these nonfactual beliefs will evolve over generations, either by random drift or following some sort of analogue of Darwinian selection, eventually showing a pattern of significant divergence from common ancestry. Languages drift apart from a common parent given sufficient time in geographical separation. The same is true of traditional beliefs and injunctions, handed down the generations, initially because of the programmability of the child brain.
Darwinian selection sets up childhood brains with a tendency to believe their elders. It sets up brains with a tendency to imitate, hence indirectly to spread rumors, spread urban legends, and believe religions. But given that genetic selection has set up brains of this kind, they then provide the equivalent of a new kind of nongenetic heredity, which might form the basis for a new kind of epidemiology, and perhaps even a new kind of nongenetic Darwinian selection. I believe that religion is one of a group of phenomena explained by this kind of nongenetic epidemiology, with the possible admixture of nongenetic Darwinian selection. If I am right, religion has no survival value for individual human beings, nor for the benefit of their genes. The benefit, if there is any, is to religion itself."
Interesting. what?
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