religion and lies

[miriam_e]

I had a visit from the Jehovah's Witlesses recently while I was out and they left me a copy of their "Awake!" magazine.

The publication is terrible. The lies begin with the cover. The headline is "What does the MORAL BREAKDOWN mean?" and the people on the cover are taking pills, drinking alcohol, gambling, and the implication of the sexily dressed women is that they're prostitutes, but all appear to be non-anglosaxon. At the bottom of the cover is another question asking "What does it mean to be a christian?" which unfortunately seems to be already answered: it appears to mean a willingness to be xenophobic and accept abyssmal lies.

Inside the magazine it begins with "Worldwide, morals have declined dramatically" which is a bald-faced lie. Any criminologist can confirm that crime rates have been declining since we began keeping records. People have become more moral, not less.

Slavery used to be perfectly acceptable. Even Jesus didn't see anything wrong with it. It was an unquestioned part of the way things were; some people simply owned other people. These days we are far more moral and easily see how wrong slavery is. Just a single lifetime ago women were commonly owned by men and it was not unusual for a man to show his displeasure by beating his woman. Now most of the world acknowledges women as independent entities who deserve control over their own lives. In recent decades children were owned by their parents, whereas they now have rights of their own. There is even a growing popular movement for animals other than humans to have rights. Morality has made great advances in recent times. But there are some places these advances have been stunted, and it turns out that these places are exactly where religion is dominant.

Religion portrays itself as the wellspring for morality, but instead of simply having faith in their pronouncements, if you look at the facts, you find something quite different. Religion turns out to be the common denominator for almost all forms of social ill. The more powerful the religion the greater the immorality. Fundamentalist christians have the highest divorce rate in Western society. See the report in The Journal of Religion and Society for the results of research showing that religion correlates directly with violent crime, homicide, sexually transmitted disease, abortion, teen pregnancy, child mortality, and shorter life expectancy.

It amazes me that the vague fear-promoting claims made in the "Awake!" magazine are accepted by anybody at all, but of course it will always lure some people. It uses old tried and true methods of brainwashing. Make your subject feel fear and hopelessness mounting on all sides, then offer a single beacon of hope (the religion). Reality is far too messy for such tactics. Instead of telling of the great improvements in the world they make many broad claims of decline, unsubtantiated allegations of worsening morality, and quote people over and over again who all say "things are worse now than in my day", all leading up to the implication that the world is going to hell. They ignore the fact that most people are nostalgic for how things were when they were young. That doesn't mean things are declining, just that we are attached to our past. But the magazine keeps pounding home the message of fear. Things are getting worse. Evil is rising. If you want to survive you need to belong to us. Of course once you join them you are compelled to give them your money and spend your life getting them more converts. This terrible publication should more properly be called "Asleep!".

Incidentally, Jehovah's Witnesses have predicted the end of the world many times: 1914, 1918, 1925, 1975, and 1989. Why do these poor sods have any credibility left at all?

Comments

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

I generally agree with you, but your statement about religion being the common denominator for social ill reminds me of the recent publicity about Dawkins et al and some of the statements that they have made.

I think it is in some respects too simple to make this leap; religion doesn't cause problems, it's the people's interpretation of the religion that causes problems (it's much like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" slogan). And that interpretation is often dogmatic and their mentality is often closed to any form of challenge.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Hi Annie,

Take a look at the research mentioned above.
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html

or I've uploaded an easier to read version to my site. The original uses a tricky, but difficult to view, technique of swapping graph images in and out of the page. My version simply inlines them all.
http://miriam-english.org/files/religion_ill.html

The research itself doesn't say anything about causes. It simply gives the data.

It had always been clear to me that religion was wrong to insist it was the source of morality when I know so many good and moral atheists and agnostics. I used to feel that religion was simply a way that people (good and bad) justified their morals and that it was unrelated to how good or bad they were, so I was quite surprised to find that religion actually is directly related with so many social ills. But when I started to think about it I realised it should not be surprising at all.

The teen pregnancy figure probably results from the totally useless abstinence bunk that religious organisations preach. Sexually transmitted diseases are spread through religions discouraging use of condoms. Abortion is surprising until you remember that the high rate of teen pregnancies among religious folk also goes along with extreme social shame at that event. The high divorce rate among fundamentalists is well known and obviously grows out of their intolerance and extreme views. Perhaps homicide and violence are also due to intolerance.

Now, remember that this is about people in bulk. It says little about any individual. I know plenty of good and compassionate religious people, just as I know plenty of good and compassionate atheists and agnostics. But statistically it is clear that the stronger the religion, the more social ills accompany it.

My own feeling is that religion is the root cause of these and many other problems. Any belief structure that requires one to suspend skepticism in the ways religion does is dangerous, and we shouldn't be surprised when it is associated with social ills. If it was simply about people's interpretation of religion rather than the religion itself then you would expect to find little difference between religious and non-religious people.

Clearly we don't need religion in order to understand that being good to people is the right and sensible thing to do, or that honesty is the generator of trust, or to give us a sense awe at the world around us. And we certainly don't need it to implore us to mass murder cities full of people who follow a different god (Deuteronomy 13:12-16), or to contradict the fossil record, or to tell us gay people are bad. The bible is full of thoroughly wrong and immoral pronouncements, as is the koran, and I suspect, most other religious works. How can you feel that religion itself is not the culprit here?

I hope you don't feel I'm attacking you through your religion. I'm not. You are one of those admirable people who I see as good in spite of their spiritual leanings. :)

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

I'm at work, I'll have to look at those sites later.

I think it's dangerous to suspend skepticism too! I've always looked upon the enforcement of fundamentalist or dogmatic belief as dangerous and even a little bit sad, in a way. Religion in general doesn't however directly imply that one needs to suspend skeptical views -- in fact to have a healthy sense of spirituality/religion one needs to question things all the time. One would expect if God gave her creation brains, she'd expect they be used!

I also don't think that religion is the sole source of morality either. Religion I think serves best to provide a prototype or framework which to work with, but it becomes dangerous to apply ancient morality to the present (there's a reason why people don't obey the pedantry in Leviticus, for example).

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

:) See? This is why I have high respect for you.
I agree with everything you said.
... except the bit about religion providing a framework. If that was so how is it that so many atheists and agnostics manage to be good and moral people? In the light of that, what possible use could religion perform?

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think it's the only framework at all. People can come up with their own :)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

:)

[idealistagain.livejournal.com]

Good post, but I think you could even go further and point out that many advances in morality (including quite a few of the ones you mentioned) have actually happened in spite of religion. Priests and pastors used to go on all the time about how it was God's way to have slavery or separation of the races or any number of other awful things.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yes. I'll have to gather more data on that. It always seems that when people are denouncing other people and calling for some horrible judgement upon them, religious people are always in the forefront and using religion to back up such viciousness. I wonder how many of the truly depraved things masses of people have done in history have used religion as the motivation. My guess is that most of them have. It is just too easy to get people to do insane things if you appeal to their desire to blindly believe.

There are always religious people counselling care and tolerance too, but I'm always struck by how few atheists and agnostics rush to condemn people. Even Richard Dawkins, who has come in for much criticism for his forceful denouncement of religion, doesn't call for their blood or or use hate when describing religious people. He simply holds religion to account for all the truly horrid things it is responsible for. Atheists and agnostics, in my experience, tend to be less easily led by illogical belief... but I guess that just makes sense.

It seems that religious leaders have pretty consistently been the worst specimens of humanity. It is pretty clear to me that this is due to the strength of their religion, and that more moderate and sane religious people are nicer and more humane largely because their religious beliefs are less strong.

It would be interesting to do a survey of people's psychological profiles to find out if the statistics relating religion to social ills applies to individuals too. My feeling is that it would.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

I don't think these religious leaders have much religious strength -- what they have is dogma, and they cling to dogma with every breath they have, and that's a sign of religious weakness if anything. Dogma is release of rational thought, and that's always dangerous.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Well, I have to agree with you that dogmatic religious leaders are really showing great weakness, but this really comes down to definitions, and that is the core of the problem.

Your definition of "true religion" and religious weakness or strength conflicts with theirs.

As religion is purely in the eye of the beholder there can be no external definition of "true religion". All religious people can say is my religion is the right way to do it. And all religions do; they all insist that theirs is The Way. (Even the bahai faith who seek to unite all religions do this -- they say that intolerant religion is the wrong way to seek god.)

Religion isn't externally verifiable. This is the big trap that it falls into. Unfortunately, seeking refuge within its subjective definitions offers no help at all, because viewed from inside there is no way to say that a fundamentalist that takes Deuteronomy 13:12-16 to heart and goes on a mass murdering rampage destroying most of the people of Earth is wrong.

That's why it causes so many problems. The definition is derived solely internally. There is no way to consistently apply its rules from outside. Once you step outside religion it no longer applies. This is why a moslem can call another moslem an infidel if they don't agree with everything they think. This is why every religious group condemns every other religious group. Some religious groups are beginning to see the danger and become more tolerant of other religious groups. This is a good thing, but to do so they actually need to selectively discard much of their own religious texts -- a bit of a dangerous stand to take, and it causes them to be seen as even more of an enemy by all other, more strict, religious groups.

This is the great thing that science and maths stumbled upon: falsifiability. If you can show that something is testable then that is is a useful concept. But religion, by its very premise, can't be tested. This is its great danger and its great downfall. It calls itself "truth" without verifiability... worse, thousands of mutually incompatible forms make exactly that same claim to "truth", and none offer any reason to take it more seriously than any other.

Sorry to press on with this Annie. I'm only doing so because I figure you, with your sharp mind, will see my point. I think it would escape many other people and I wouldn't bother.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

I don't really think that there is a "one true religion" (but my beliefs on this are for another day!), what I mean by "true religion" is a belief structure that most logically adheres by the axioms put forth by its respective religious texts. Most of these dogmatic religious leaders do not put forth arguments that flow logically or reasonably from these axioms.

(And indeed, religion is not falsifiable; but faith in an unfalsifiable statement doesn't make it inherently dangerous. Like I mentioned, a religion is not inherently dangerous -- it is its followers and and adherents that make up and follow dangerous interpretations that are dangerous.)

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

BTW, this answer doesn't adequately answer all the points you raise, but I don't want to hijack the thread much more and I'm not in the best frame of mind to answer them right now :)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I think you've been misled by religious people's own rhetoric. If anybody is to have a true and consistent religion then as far as I can see the only way to do so is to believe (as you seem to) in a less specific form -- that people should follow the broad guidelines laid down by smart and compassionate thinkers like Jesus, Ghandi, Peter Singer, etc and not simply give over their responsibility for thinking to muddled, ancient texts written by superstitious savages. Which, of course, is why I agree with you so much. You feel more or less the same as I do, though with a god and a soul added on.

The difficulty of adhering to any religious texts is complicated by the ambiguous and contradictory nature of those texts. The old testament is particularly notorious for this. There are many places where people are told to kill one another for "holy" reasons, yet it also says that you shouldn't kill. There is a particularly nutty pair of statements in the bible:

"God is not like men, who lie; He is not a human who changes his mind. Whatever he promises, he does; He speaks and it is done." - Numbers 23:19

"So the Lord changed his mind and did not bring on his people the disaster he threatened." - Exodus 32:14

It is impossible to adhere logically to something that is illogical.

The situation is worsened, of course, by those who would add other, spurious rules to their religious texts.

• Some moslems maintain that female circumcision is religiously mandated, when it isn't.
  
  
• Many christians believe that abortion is murder when actually the bible specifically states that killing an unborn child is not murder.
  
  
• Although homosexuality appears to be gently chastised (in the same league as wearing 2 different kinds of thread), yet there is a gay marriage between Jonathan and David (1 Samuel 18:1, 3 - 4). And Ruth, who even has her own book in the bible, appears to have been lesbian (Ruth 1:16-17).

You may be right that an unfalsifiable faith is not, by any logical requirement, necessarily dangerous, but unfortunately the evidence leads to a different conclusion. It correlates just too neatly with social ills.

It may be possible to have religion in mild doses and suffer no harm at all. I know plenty of moderate believers who are good people. But I have a feeling that using this to say religion is okay sounds a little like arguing that cyanide is good because it's not dangerous in small amounts.

Sorry to rattle on about this. It is rare to find someone who has spiritual beliefs that I can discuss these things with. Don't feel compelled to answer if you are too busy. :) I totally understand. I shouldn't be spending so much time on it -- I have an AI to program.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

No, that's exactly what I mean. It's obviously illogical to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time; either one or the other is correct. The process I am talking about is to discard what seems illogical or unreasonable and to instead focus on what seems logical and reasonable.

For example, it seems unreasonable that a god would create homosexuality in people and in the same breath have it condemned at the same time; or for example it seems unreasonable that a god would permit the murder of "infidels" and then condemn murder elsewhere.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

As to the other point, any ideology, not necessarily religious without rational thought can lead to great harm as well, and there are certainly historical examples of this as well.

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