Since I have written very openly about my upbringing by physically and emotionally abusive parents, I’ve received many comments both in public and in private. For those who have written to thank me, you’re welcome. For those who have written to disagree with me, I would like to address a few of the most common comments.

The most important thing I want to ask you is whether your opinion would be any different if, instead of writing about physical and emotional child abuse, I had written about physical and emotional spousal abuse, or sexual child abuse. Would you tell a battered wife to be more understanding of where her husband is coming from? Would the fact that her husband had been brought up in a more traditional culture have any bearing on your advice to her? Similarly, would you ever tell a sexually abused child to be more sympathetic to his parents, or that they were only acting in his best interests?

If you would never even think of saying to a battered woman that she should be more sympathetic to her abuser, why would you ever give that advice to an abused child? An adult in a physically or emotionally abusive relationship could at least be said to have chosen that relationship, but no child chooses his or her primary caregivers. If anything, society ought to hold parents to a higher standard of behaviour towards their children than it holds for the interaction between spouses.

And if you would never take the side of parents who sexually molest their children, why would you take the side of those who beat or threaten them? What difference does it make whether the abuse is sexual, physical, or emotional?

Before I address each of the comments below, let me say that I understand that the people who make them are generally well-intentioned. The problem is that if you have no experience of being abused as a child yourself (or if you have, but are in denial about it), then you’re liable to read into the situation many things which are simply neither applicable nor true. And if you are unfamiliar with the literature on child abuse and bullying, then the advice you give may not only be unhelpful, but can actually be very damaging to the recipients.

Below are some comments I have frequently received (though not necessarily in order of frequency).

• You should be grateful to your parents because they raised you.

  No, you should be grateful to people who have been kind to you. Parents are generally kind to their children, but this is not always true. There is no reason why one ought to feel gratitude towards an abusive parent. If a father feeds, houses, and looks after the health of his daughter, but also sexually molests her, would you ever dream of telling her to be grateful to him?

  Acts of kindness do not cancel out acts of cruelty. To take an extreme example, imagine a couple who murders the parents of a child, whom they then raise lovingly as their own son. Years later, after he has grown up, he discovers the truth. Would you ever tell him that he should be grateful to the murderers (whom he has considered to be his parents for his entire life) merely because they had raised him? Of course not.

  Most people should be grateful to their parents, because their parents had treated them well. I am grateful to the people who supported me and were kind to me while I was growing up. For example, I changed my surname to that of the family who took me into their home after my father had kicked me out of the house for visiting the university library, to acknowledge the role that they had played in allowing me to pursue an academic career.

  You should not be telling people who have been abused by their parents that they should be grateful to them. It is extremely damaging to insist that someone ought to have feelings that they do not naturally have. Many psychological problems and mental disorders have their origin in the repression of natural emotion.

• You shouldn’t be angry.
  I would not describe my primary feeling about my upbringing as anger, but as outrage or indignation. Perhaps you consider these to be the same thing. But either way, what is wrong with feeling angry?

  Anger is the natural reaction of a psychologically healthy human being to injustice. If you don’t feel outrage when you encounter child abuse, and especially if you think that an abused child shouldn’t be angry, then I submit that there is something wrong with you.

• Your parents have had a difficult life or a different upbringing.

  I don’t see the point that people who bring this up are trying to make. What is the relevance of this? Would you ever tell a battered wife, or a girl whose father threatens her life for dating, that she should be more understanding of her abuser because he had been raised in an environment where women are expected to be completely subservient to men? Or would you tell a boy who is being abused by a priest that he should be more understanding of his behaviour, because the priest has led a sexually repressed life?

  In our society, wife-beating and sexual molestation of children are universally considered wrong, without regard for the backgrounds of the offenders. Why should the physical or emotional abuse of children be treated differently?

  Furthermore, the idea that an abuser’s upbringing somehow explains or mitigates his or her behaviour is very insulting to those people with the same or a similar upbringing who are not abusers. I was very fortunate while growing up that I had friends with similar immigrant backgrounds, but parents who treated them well, and so I could see that my parents’ behaviour is not a necessary outcome of their upbringing. They made a choice to be abusive, when they could have chosen to behave differently.

  I know why my mother is so verbally abusive. When I was young, I witnessed her own mother being verbally abusive towards her. She is repeating the same behaviour towards me. I do not care that she is verbally abusive because that is the way she was raised. I was raised in the same way, but I will never repeat her behaviour.

  Please stop telling abused children that their parents are the way they are because of their backgrounds. It isn’t true, and it doesn’t help. The idea dehumanises the abusers, as it treats them as though they were automata with no choice in how they react to their circumstances. You’re also helping to perpetuate the cycle of abuse by implying that the recipient of it has no choice but to act in the same way.

• You don’t understand your parents’ motivations.

  A person who says this inevitably has some very specific beliefs about what the motivations of abusive authoritarian parents are. But isn’t it a little bit presumptuous to think that you know what a complete stranger’s motivations are better than people who have known him or her for decades?

  Philip Guo’s article on “Understanding and dealing with overbearing Asian parents” is characteristic of the kinds of things people say about the motivations of abusive parents when they have no personal experience of being abused and are unaware of the scientific and clinical literature on child abuse and bullying. The explanation given in the article of why Asian parents are so obsessed with grades and rankings sounds reasonable (and obvious), but because it does not take into account the psychology of bullying, it does not mesh with the actual experience of people who live with the situation that it purports to explain.

  The most common motivation that people attribute to abusive authoritarian Asian parents is that they just want their children to succeed academically, and are acting in their best interests. The assumption that parents are motivated primarily by the welfare of their child is so beyond questioning for most people that it is essentially dogma.

  But there are instances where most people can recognise that a parent is not acting in his or her child’s interest, but is instead using the child to satisfy their own emotional needs. For example, consider the young girls who are made up to look like sexualised adults for child beauty pageants, or the young boys who are forced to spend an excessive number of hours practising and playing a sport that he does not like. In these cases, it’s obvious that the child’s mother or father is living vicariously through them, and where the child is harmed as a result, we have no hesitation to label it abuse.

  Once you move away from the assumption that a parent necessarily places his or her child’s welfare above his or her own emotional needs, the behaviour of abusive authoritarian Asian parents makes much more sense. These parents come from backgrounds where everyone is expected to excel academically. But more importantly, they come from environments where children are berated and made to feel inferior for their lack of academic success. Simple mathematics, of course, dictates that the majority will not be the top students in their peer group, and so the majority will have experienced being bullied for not doing well in school.

  People react to bullying in different ways, but one common reaction is to become bullies themselves. And that is the reason that abusive authoritarian Asian parents behave in the way that they do, not because they are acting in what they perceive to be their child’s best interests.

  I have written previously about how my parents’ reaction to my academic success was to punish me out of jealousy and revenge. Two anecdotes bear repeating here. My father’s reaction to my receiving praise from my teachers and peers, being nominated for awards and offered opportunities unavailable to other students, and so on, was not pride, but rage. He repeatedly took steps to prevent me from continuing to be academically successful. When my mother learned that I was receiving praise and becoming noticed for my teaching, she repeatedly called me at work to insist that I stop being a good teacher. If they had been motivated by my well-being, then what explains their behaviour which is clearly so detrimental to it?

  You may say that these are just two exceptional instances and that abusive parents are generally looking out for their children’s welfare. But the point is that anyone who has actually lived through an abusive upbringing can easily come up with hundreds of such anecdotes from their own experience, and instinctively knows that their parents act to satisfy their own emotional needs, rather than (and even at the expense of) the welfare of their child.

  Perhaps you are resistant to the idea that parents could act selfishly and put their own interests ahead of their child’s because it’s horrifying to you. But reality does not change regardless of your feelings about it. It is a fact that there are selfish people in the world, and it is a fact that there are bullies in the world. Since parents come from every segment of society, it follows that some parents will be selfish and some will be bullies.

  People who have been abused as children need to learn to trust their own instincts as a part of the recovery process. To insist to abused children that their parents are motivated by their best interests when they instinctively know otherwise is to tell them to suppress their instincts, which is very damaging.

• Nobody benefits from exposing or criticising abusive parents.

  On the contrary, nothing could be more important for society. Abused children need to see that it’s okay to express their emotions, and that their feelings aren’t wrong, contrary to what society normally tells them.

  Many of the world’s human-made problems are caused at least partially by authoritarian parenting. A child’s parents are his or her first authority figures, and how he or she relates to them will have a bigger impact than anything else on how he or she relates to authority, power, and society for the rest of his or her life. There are numerous studies in the scholarly literature linking abusive parenting with substance abuse and addiction, violence and criminality, juvenile delinquency, and other anti-social and self-destructive behaviours. I’m not claiming that if society changed overnight, and it suddenly became acceptable to openly criticise one’s parents for abusive parenting, that these problems would disappear. But the suppression of natural and justified emotions by societal taboo does not do society any good. Suppressed emotion does not just disappear. They simply surface elsewhere, oftentimes as rage, and mostly directed at people other than their original objects.

  I believe that suppressed rage against abusive parents is an important factor behind much of the conflict in the world. Alice Miller, in “For Your Own Good”, has documented how many of Adolph Hitler’s actions as an adult can be traced to childhood traumas suffered at the hands of his father. Furthermore, she demonstrated how pre-WWII Germany became susceptible to a dictatorship because of the prevalence of authoritarian parenting which insisted on deference to power and authority. Or, to consider a more recent example, to what extent was George W. Bush’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein motivated by a desire to avenge himself on a father who had made him feel inferior while he was growing up? Incidentally, Saddam Hussein was also abused by his stepfather as a child.

  How many of the world’s conflicts are actually symptoms of suppressed rage against parental abuse and oppression? Why do so many people feel the need to disparage entire groups based on religion, ethnicity, or politics, completely out of proportion with any actual disagreements or differences? I think that much of it can be explained in terms of bullying: people who are bullied by their parents must vent their frustrations on others, because society forbids them from directing their rage where it properly belongs. I grew up listening to my father rant about how entire populations of millions of people deserved to die merely because they were born into the wrong group. While some people puzzle over how ordinary German soldiers could have followed orders to exterminate so many of their fellow human beings, I know exactly the type of person who would do such a thing.

  There are also many clear examples of abusive parenting in the world of entertainment, which one can easily see on the front pages of the tabloids. There are numerous celebrities whose upbringing by abusive parents is a matter of public record, such as Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan, and Tiger Woods. The fact that their upbringing by abusive parents, which is clearly the cause of their psychological problems, is ignored (or at best treated as a footnote) by the media which loves to endlessly discuss every other aspect of their personal lives illustrates the pervasiveness of the taboo against criticising parents no matter how bad they are.

  The argument that parental immunity to criticism is necessary to the social order has been made in the past for other societal taboos, and it is just as insubstantial as in those cases. People used to argue that society would collapse if wives no longer dutifully obeyed their husbands, or if slavery were abolished. Society has been better off since these changes, and I think it will be better off still if it stopped coming to the defense of abusive parents. Denial has never helped anyone, and people can’t get help until they admit that they have a problem and are clear on what that problem is.

• You are a terrible person.

  Abusive parents often tell their children that they are terrible people if they question their authority. I remember when I was growing up that my parents would repeatedly tell me that I should be ashamed whenever I disobeyed them.

  The only reason you would say that I am a terrible person for speaking out against child abuse is if you were abused as a child yourself, and are in denial about what was done to you. There is nothing bad or shameful in defying authority or exposing injustice. If your reaction to my writings about being abused as a child is to tell me that I’m a terrible person, I suggest a long, hard look inside yourself.

• One day you’ll have children.

  The implication here seems to be that by disobeying my own parents and openly criticising them for being child abusers, my own children will one day turn against me. But why would they, if I don’t abuse them? (And if I do, then they should.)

  Yes, one day I will have children. And I hope for my children to live in a world where anyone is free to speak out against injustice and tyranny, no matter who the perpetrator.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Revenge as a Motivation for Abusive Parents
2. Thirteen Abusive Behaviours
3. The causes of my depression, part 18: my parents blamed me for 9/11

If you are a believing Muslim with no intention of actually evaluating the veracity of your beliefs against the evidence, then there is probably nothing I can say to convince you that Islam is not true. But that is not the purpose of this series of posts.

There are plenty of places on the Internet where many people have written extensively about their reasons for rejecting the claims of Islam, which you can easily find for yourself. You may be aware that almost all educated non-Muslims who have studied your religion do not convert into it, and perhaps you think that this is only because they are prejudiced, ignorant, or obstinate.

But whether these people are wrong or not is beside the point. Even if they are, you must still concede the fact that large numbers of people have studied your religion, and made the conscientious decision to reject it.

You must be familiar with at least some of the reasons non-Muslims give for not converting to Islam, such as the (perceived) conflict of Muslim customs and Islamic law with Western conceptions of governance and individual liberties, or the (alleged) propensity of Muslims for violence. You probably know that there is a great deal of debate over whether modern scientific theories are incompatible with a belief in God. You may be aware that many non-Muslims have serious reservations about the character and conduct of Muhammad, even if you think that these can be adequately addressed. You may not know that many of the claims of Islam which touch upon history are contradicted by the historical evidence, or perhaps you believe that Muslim scholars are a more reliable source of information on the history of Islam than (non-Muslim) professional historians, and have never questioned this belief.

These are not the issues I wish to address here, since they have already been written about at length elsewhere. What I wish to point out is that Muslim apologists claim not only that the religion is true, but that certain consequences follow from its implementation and practice, both for individuals and for societies. Because critics of Islam have typically focused on arguing that the claims of the religion contradict the evidence, they have usually left the assertions of Muslim apologists about the consequences of following Islam unchallenged.

Many of these assertions deal with the material aspects of Islamic societies, and they can be examined independently of the religious or spiritual claims of Islam. Proponents of Islam take it for granted that a society’s adherence to Islamic principles and law determines its success, and that a civilisation based upon and organised around the shari`ah would naturally be materially successful, economically prosperous, and scientifically advanced.

But suppose that these assumptions are wrong. What if a society’s adherence to the Islamic shari`ah guarantees that it would be a perpetuator of ignorance, headed for economic bankruptcy, and be militarily weak? In the following posts, I will argue that the sad state of most Muslim-majority countries today is due primarily not to external factors, but to internal and specifically Islamic ones.

(To be continued.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Islamic societies and the economics of ignorance, part 1
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 13

The recent uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries have cast a spotlight on the role of communications technologies as a tool of social and political change. According to some commentators, these popular revolts were made possible by devices such as cell phones and digital cameras, and social media web sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Others retort that only a small fraction of the populations of those countries have access to the Internet or depend on it for news, that the protests were mainly organised by more traditional means such as word of mouth, and that the importance of Twitter and Facebook in creating the conditions for the uprisings has been exaggerated by Western digirati unable to comprehend that social media does not play the central role in the lives of others that it does in theirs.

My purpose in this series of posts is not to argue to what degree the Internet played a role in facilitating the uprisings in the Middle East. Rather, I’d like to point out that, regardless of the depth (or shallowness) of Internet penetration in that region today, it is virtually guaranteed to only increase in the future. And that has serious implications in the long term for the political and social character of Muslim societies, implications which are missed by analyses that focus only on the proximal causes of current events.

The famed Canadian communication theorist, Harold Innis, linked the rise and fall of empires to the development and spread of communications media. The elites in a society are often defined by their mastery of and control over a medium of communication, and the introduction of a superior alternative medium often spelled the end of their stranglehold on power. The most obvious example of this in history is, of course, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press, which greatly reduced the cost and labour involved in producing printed materials, and made scribal copying obsolete. This led to the rise of a literate middle class which challenged the power of the religious authorities who had formerly monopolised literacy and the interpretatin of the Christian Scriptures.

Islam has been called an “empire of faith”, and as with all empires, the power of its leaders derives from their control of information. The most significant aspect of the introduction of the Internet to Islamic societies is not that it allows people to organise protests, but rather the potential for the Muslim masses to learn that most of their religious beliefs are simply wrong.

(Updated 2011-03-12: Continued in part 2.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Islamic societies and the economics of ignorance, part 2

As I wrote in the beginning, the fact that there is not a single shred of evidence in the entirety of recorded human history supporting a religion which came from outsiders to the religion, and especially not from anyone not in contact with its believers, is one of the strongest arguments that religion is a human creation. All of the evidence provided by religion for supernatural beings are compatible with the thesis that they do not exist outside of the human imagination.

The Maps of War web site has an animated map on the spread of five major world religions. I strongly recommend that you view it.

As you watch, ask yourself where and when, say, Christian angels have been spotted, or Hindu gods, etc. The observed pattern of the spread of beliefs about supernatural beings is sufficiently explained by human imagination, migration, and communication. Religious believers who assert that supernatural beings actually exist in the real world must explain why the pattern of historical sightings of and interactions with these beings don’t look like that of creatures that we do accept as existing in the real world, such as tigers, or giraffes, or kangaroos, or giant squid. Supernatural beings appear limited in mobility to those areas of the world where humans believe in them, but despite being apparently confined geographically, no humans have ever discovered a new type of supernatural being by moving into a previously uninhabited area. When believers in the same supernatural beings move apart geographically or doctrinally, the details of their descriptions of these beings begin to diverge, in proportion as they are out of communication with one another. The geographic evidence is simply overwhelming that the supernatural beings found in the major world religions are mythological characters.

The religious believer may nevertheless argue that this does not rule out the existence of God. This may be true for some definitions of God (such as the non-interventionist God of Deism, or the all-pervading God of pantheism), but it certainly does rule out the God of the Abrahamic religions, who is said to interact with the world by sending angelic and human messengers to humanity. The archangel Gabriel is indistinguishable from a mythological character, since he appears to be either giving different messages to the believers of different religions, or is uninterested in correcting those believers which have either misunderstood or corrupted his message or are mistaken about having received a message from him in the first place. The same thing can be said of the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, the archangel Michael, and any number of allegedly supernatural entities which are shared between multiple religions. Furthermore, the scriptures and beliefs of the Abrahamic religions conflict with evidence from numerous academic fields, such as archeology, geology, linguistics, history, biology, and so on.

By examining when and where each text or section of text was composed, and the environment in which the composers lived, it is clear that the contents of the Bible and the Qur’an simply reflect the knowledge of their human authors. If God had wanted to send a message to humanity, He has done so in such a way that His message is indistinguishable from human invention. An omniscient being would have been able to see that the development of technology would one day allow any person to easily visualise the geographic and temporal spread of religious ideas, and that such a person would then have very good grounds for rejecting any alleged divinely revealed message not sent to multiple geographically isolated groups. The fact that the God of Abraham interacts with characters who behave as if they were mythological, as recorded in books which contain numerous statements that contradict external evidence, and sends messengers only to people who are or have been in contact with His believers, is sufficient grounds for categorising Him as a mythological character along with any deity fitting that description. And the gods of all of the world’s religions appear to also fit that description as well.

That religion is the invention of human beings is not a new idea, of course. But what is new is the fact that the evidence to verify this is within reach of more people than ever before. Thomas Paine had noted in The Age of Reason, in the late 18th century, that it was all but impossible not to see in Christianity the pre-Christian Roman “heathen mythology”. Today, a person with access to a good library or the Internet can easily verify that the origin of every major world religion can be explained entirely in terms of what is known to its founders, without recourse to any supernatural element. Furthermore, anyone can easily discover which aspects of his or her religion conflict with the evidence, and which of its beliefs are untrue. In previous eras, this was impossible due to the cost of accessing this information, which many people could not afford, and which was also artificially inflated by governments and religious leaders who acted to keep knowledge damaging to their authority away from the common person.

Of course, most religious believers do not set out to falsify their religion, and typically seek confirmation instead. But as the material cost of accessing information casting doubt on their religion (or on all religions) decreases to close to nothing, it will become extremely difficult for religious believers not to encounter this information. Of course, there is the social cost involved in reading materials which are disapproved of by one’s religious authorities or community, and a fear of punishment or a sense of loyalty to the communal identity may still lead a religious believer to automatically reject evidence that his or her religious beliefs are untrue.

Religious apologists are trying to keep one step ahead of the game by pre-emptively dismissing evidence unfavourable to their religion before their followers have a chance to examine it for themselves, and of course they have the advantage that they are already considered authorities by their followers, whereas scientists and members of other religions are not. This is why Christian creationists are so eager for students to learn about evolution from proponents of intelligent design, and why there are so many Muslim web sites touting alleged scientific miracles in the Qur’an. The fact is that modern scientific knowledge demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that many aspects of traditional Christian and Muslim beliefs are just wrong.

The overabundance of evidence supporting the reality of biological evolution is such that no one would arrive at the conclusion of intelligent design unless they already believed in God. Similarly, evidence from geology and astronomy converge to give an estimate of the Earth’s age in the billions (and not thousands) of years. Archeological evidence strongly suggests that many stories in the Bible are exaggerations if not outright fiction, and similarly for the Qur’an. Discoveries of previously unknown collections of manuscripts (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, and the Sana’a manuscripts), and advances in the field of textual criticism, have revised our understanding of the development of the Bible and the Qur’an, in ways which are not congruous with the traditional understanding according to the religions for which these texts are scriptural.

The arguments put forth by proponents of intelligent design, or of the view that the Qur’an contains miraculous foreknowledge of science, contain nothing that would convince a broadly educated, scientifically literate person who is not already a believer. But that is not their target. Rather, it is the Christians or Muslims who are already predisposed to belief in creationism or miracles, and whom the apologists for their religions wish to keep away from examining the actual evidence for themselves. These religious apologists are fighting a defensive battle against reality, and it is a battle that they will most certainly lose in the long run, but in the meantime they can still do a lot of damage.

I was involved in interfaith dialogue activities for many years while I attended university, and in that capacity I interacted with many people who wanted to study the different religions, ostensibly to discover which one was true. Of course, people convert to a religion for different reasons, such as fellowship and community, but even when they do, they usually couch their conversion in terms of being convinced of the veracity of its doctrines. However, based on my discussions with many such religious seekers, I can state that many of them came up with some version of the argument I’ve described in this essay after their own investigations. Bear in mind that these people were not “enemies of religion”, but were sincerely searching for religious truth. It is simply very difficult not to notice that religious beliefs appear to be spread by no agency other than human migration and communication, after you have studied the history of several religions. This was in the mid- to late 1990s, and information on the history of the world’s religions is much easier to come by now then back then, and will only become even easier in the future. Also, geographic information systems have become much more common, and people have become much more used to thinking of information in terms of data points on a map, which should make the argument easier to understand for more people.

Even if you are a religious believer and are not convinced by the argument described in this essay, I think that you must admit that the evidence is such that a person can sincerely say that they know that God does not exist (even if you think they are mistaken). As scientific knowledge progresses and education spreads, there are only going to be many more such people in the future.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The geographic and temporal spread argument for religion as a human creation, part 1
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 5
3. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 6

Any religious argument based on expertise in a language is necessarily unconvincing to someone who doesn’t already consider that language to be special or holy. Numerous languages have been asserted by various religions to have special or divine properties: Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Tibetan, Persian, and even English. The question of linguistic competence is often brought up by religious apologists seeking to deflect issues raised by skeptics about problematic passages in their scriptures, but when good translations and linguistic resources are available, this is just a smokescreen. When there are errors in fact or reasoning in a translation, or instances of morally reprehensible behaviour, the problems are rarely made better by referring to the primary text in the original language. (In fact, the problems are sometimes worse, as religious translators attempt to minimise or downplay those aspects of the text which they think might offend their target audience.)

The fact that a lack of linguistic expertise is not actually a real issue with many religious apologists is made evident by the double standard of insisting on linguistic qualifications from critics of their scriptures, while criticising the scriptures of others without studying those in their original language. For example, no Muslim apologist has ever refrained from arguing that the Torah has been corrupted, in spite of not being able to read Hebrew and not having any substantial knowledge of the history of Jewish scripture. Similarly, many of the popular apologists for various religions are not trained in the study of religion, nor in the fields whose findings they claim support their religious beliefs.

Linguistic expertise, or indeed expertise in any field, is nowhere as important as demonstrating the ability to reason. For example, if I claimed that the arguments made by the Indian Buddhist philosophers against monotheism are absolutely devastating, no monotheist would accept that they are disqualified from rebutting these arguments on the grounds that they cannot read Sanskrit. Arguments must stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of which language they are expressed in. Linguistic expertise may allow a religious believer to gain a deeper understanding of the texts of his or her religion, but it can never defend his or her beliefs against criticisms made on the basis of logic or facts.

In the intersection between history and language, we find the story of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–8). In order for this story to be true, it would have to be possible to build a skyscraper using nothing but Bronze Age brick technology. Any material sturdy enough to support a tower that reached to the sky would also be durable enough to leave behind some evidence for the present day, but no such evidence exists, and it is difficult to believe that the technology was used in just the one tower if it had existed. Furthermore, we humans have subsequently built towers reaching into the sky. Indeed, we have entire cities full of them. We have even left the confines of the Earth’s surface and walked on the Moon. And yet none of these developments brought about any visible divine intervention. Instead, they are the products of science and engineering.

So, even though the spotlight is on biology as a field where science and religion are in conflict, it is not the only one. I have discussed some examples from history and linguistics above, but there are many others. The point is that the more broadly educated a person is, the more obvious it becomes that every religious belief can be explained as a human product of its time and place, without recourse to divine intervention. In order to maintain a belief in the literal inerrancy of the Bible, it is not sufficient merely to assert intelligent design creationism as an alternative to the biological theory of evolution. One must also propose alternate theories to the standard theories in the fields of archeology, linguistics, history, hydrology, geology, astronomy, material science, and so on.

Religious believers cannot accuse a skeptic of ignoring the evidence. As I hope I have shown, the more evidence one examines, the stronger the case becomes that religion is a human invention. Conversely, religious believers often do not examine the evidence themselves, instead relying on people they presume to be experts. But even if there are experts in Middle Eastern history, say, who are fervent Christians, or experts in classical Arabic who are devout Muslims, there are people who are equally expert in those subjects who believe in other religions, or in no religion. Furthermore, an expert in Middle Eastern history may be quite ignorant of another area in which the evidence demonstrates that their beliefs are false, and no one can be an expert in every field touching upon their religious beliefs.

When religious believers defer to supposed authorities as their reason for believing that their religion is true, they’re essentially admitting that they do not consider themselves qualified to judge the evidence and arguments for themselves. But in that case, they would also be unqualified to judge whether the evidence is actually incompatible with their beliefs or whether the arguments allegedly supporting their beliefs are wrong. When religious believers cite an authority whose arguments they do not themselves understand as the justification for their beliefs, the discussion is basically at an impasse. For example, there are what I think are serious problems or errors in the arguments for monotheism made by Ghazālī and Plantinga. If I’m right and their arguments are wrong, then citing these authorities has done nothing to convince me. However, if I’m wrong and their arguments are right, then I’m simply incapable of seeing how they could be right, and thus I am not convinced by their arguments in that case either.

This is the reason that the geographic and temporal aspects of the evidence that religion is a human invention are so powerful. It is so easy to explain to anyone: just plot the spread of the world’s religions on a series of maps corresponding to successive instances in time. When you do so, it can be clearly seen by anyone that religious beliefs and ideas are spread by human migration, conquest, and contact. You do not have to be an expert to immediately notice that there are no instances of “misplaced jinn”, that is, reports of human interactions with supernatural beings in a place and time where humans did not already believe that such beings exist. The simplest and best explanation for this readily observable fact is that supernatural beings such as gods, or angels, or demons, or jinn, do not exist outside of the human imagination.

This is not to say that the phenomena which they were concocted to explain do not exist, such as people hearing voices, seeing strange lights, feeling a presence that is not visible, getting spontaneously cured of diseases, becoming inexplicably ill, and so on. In fact, given that these phenomena do exist and need explaining, it is easy to see how people all over the world came up with the idea of supernatural beings, or witchcraft. And, for a person who is surrounded only by those who share the same view of the supernatural world (which would be most people in history), the explanation is good enough. The problem only arises when you begin to compare what different religions teach about the supernatural world, and examine how the descriptions of the supernatural world coming from a particular time and place just happen to correspond exactly with the religious composition and dispositions of the people living there. This is something that only a few scholars would have had the privilege to even be in a position to notice in a hundred years ago, but with the spread of libraries and the Internet, it is something that many people now can see for themselves.

(Continued in part 20 here.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 16
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 7
3. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 18

In my experience, whenever I have raised these problems with religious believers, the explanations they have come up with have always missed the point. An expert in the history of the ancient Near East can indeed come up with an elaborate hypothesis as to why there is so little evidence for David and Solomon. A Muslim apologist can indeed assert that the Biblical account of Solomon is corrupted where it contradicts or lacks details given in the Qur’an. Yes, you can cook up theories that agree with your religious beliefs to fit the evidence (or, even better, which ignore the evidence). But then the theory is only meaningful for someone who already accepts that your religion is true, or special, to begin with. If you want your argument to be convincing to someone who is not already a believer, you have to explain why it cannot be applied just as well to another, and possibly conflicting, religion.

Here is a theory that fits the evidence: the Biblical accounts of David and Solomon’s splendour are simply made-up. They may have been actual people, but they were relatively unimportant at the time that they lived. However, they later became very important to their political successors, who invented or embellished stories about them to promote a unified set of religious beliefs for the purpose of legitimising their rule and increasing the cohesion between their subjects. If David and Solomon had not subsequently become regarded as important personages in several major world religions, what I have suggested so far would be completely uncontroversial. Rulers making up stories to aggrandise the accomplishments of their ancestors is nothing new, and has happened repeatedly throughout history all over the world. However, the lineage of David became important in the development of the concept of the Messiah in Judaism, and Jews and Christians carried the stories of David and Solomon with them wherever they went. The oral tradition underwent further evolution by assimilating local elements, eventually resulting in the version found in the Qur’an.

Not only does this theory fit all of the evidence perfectly, it does so without special pleading or convoluted reasoning. I would draw exactly the same conclusions based on the same evidence from another religion, unlike Christians who claim that archeology supports the religious beliefs of ancient Israel but not those of ancient China. The theory avoids the logical problems that follow from the Islamic belief that the Qur’anic account of Solomon is factual and that any differences between it and the Bible is due to corruption of the Bible. The Muslim apologist must explain how Jews and Christians, who were fairly widely scattered across Eurasia by the time of the founding of Islam, could have managed to corrupt all of their Bibles in exactly the same way by removing all references to the jinn and birds in Solomon’s army (and indeed all references to jinn whatsoever, and not only from the Bible but from all buried caches of pre-Islamic scriptures of the Abrahamic religions, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library), and reduced Solomon’s ability to speak to animals to the mere ability to speak knowledgeably about animals. Even if the religious believer is not convinced that this theory is correct, he or she must nevertheless admit that a reasonable person could honestly think so.

The inconsistency between the evidence for David and Solomon and the claims of various religions regarding them is just one example of how the study of history casts doubt on religious beliefs. There are many more examples not just from the Bible or the Qur’an, of course, but also from the scriptures of religions outside of the Abrahamic fold. I have never encountered an instance of a religious belief apparently conflicting with evidence where “the belief is not true” is not a much better fit and much simpler explanation for the evidence than any of the arguments apologists have come up with to interpret the evidence to fit the belief.

In addition to history, another field which religious believers like to draw upon to bolster their claims is linguistics. But this is yet another field where the evidence is contrary to religious claims. No serious academic linguist would ever make the claim, as some religions do, that a particular language is “perfect”. Any system of communication has to make trade-offs (e.g., efficiency vs. precision), and each language has its own strengths and its own flaws. Furthermore, it is clear today that languages change over time (as do the cultures that speak them), so that the preservation of a text is not sufficient to guarantee the preservation of its meaning. Many religious scriptures contain passages the meanings of which are puzzling to readers today, but which would have been clear to anyone living in the time and place in which it was first composed (or edited into its current form).

Even when the meaning is clear, the mere fact that a reader today lives in an entirely different culture and has a completely different background from the original audience of a scripture means that his or her reaction to the text may be very different. A clear example of this is the challenge made in the Qur’an that if it had come from a source other than God, it would have been filled with contradictions (4:82). (Similar assertions ares made by the believers of other revealed scriptures.) Even leaving aside the issue of whether or not there are contradictions or errors elsewhere in the Qur’an, the immediate reaction of a person trained in logic to this verse is to see that the verse itself is wrong. Its contrapositive is easily seen to be false: it is not the case that a book which is without internal contradictions necessarily comes from God. The rhetorical force of the challenge depends on the listener coming from a cultural background where the certitude or confidence with which such a challenge is uttered takes precedence its logical consequences. This is yet another example where, as knowledge (in case this, of logic) grows and spreads, religion is left further behind and becomes less and less relevant.

(Continued in part 19 here.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 16
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 17
3. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 2

The myths about David and Solomon, and in particular the latter, would continue to evolve after the Biblical accounts were set down in writing. Already in the Bible, Solomon was wealthier and wiser than all the other kings on Earth, and he was so wealthy that he made silver as common as stones in Jerusalem (1 Kings 10:14–29, 2 Chron. 9:13–28). His wisdom was greater than that of everyone in the East (I’m sure the inhabitants of India and China would’ve begged to differ, had they even heard of him or the remote and insignificant minor stretch of land that he ruled) and in Egypt, and he could capably discourse on all manners of animals and birds (1 Kings 5:9–14, or 4:29–34 in some numbering systems). His ability to talk about animals became the ability to talk to animals in the development of his legend, and accounts of his conversing with animals and commanding them are found in post-Biblical Jewish literature and the Qur’an (verse 27:16).

The amount of wealth attributed to Solomon in the Bible is implausible. This is not a problem for someone who recognises that ancient peoples often used hyperbole when acclaiming their kings, but it poses enormous problems for religious believers who take the Biblical accounts literally. The same can be said for the number of able-bodied fighting men counted in the census ordered by David (2 Sam. 24:9 and 1 Chron. 21:5 give different numbers, but the total is in the neighbourhood of one and a half million). Every time archeologists discover some artifact related to a person or an event mentioned in the Bible, religious believers proclaim that archeology “proves” the Bible. But it does no such thing. Instead, what archeology has actually shown is scant evidence for the united monarchy period of Israel. If David and Solomon had been as powerful and influential as the Bible claims they were, believers must explain why there is so little archeological evidence for their reigns, or corroborating evidence from Israel’s neighbours.

We do have such evidence for the Pharaohs, the Emperors of Persia and China, and so on, so we have a fairly good idea what the evidence would look like for a ruler who had vast amounts of wealth and governed a population with over a million able-bodied fighting men. It is extraordinarily difficult for a historically literate person to believe that the kings of Israel could have been wealthier and more powerful than the rulers of some of the largest empires in history, while leaving behind barely any archeological evidence (and especially as, according to 1 Kings 3:1, he married the Pharaoh’s daughter). On the other hand, the evidence is exactly what you would expect if the stories of David and Solomon in the Bible were historical fiction, developed in subsequent centuries out of a small kernel of historical truth.

Muslims, in addition to these problems, must also explain how the existence of an army that included jinn and birds among its rank (see verse 27:17 of the Qur’an), led by a military commander able to converse with birds and ants (27:18–28), could have failed to escape the notice of historians (not to mention the writers of the Bible, who did not spare any detail in ascribing incredible things to Solomon). Of course, the alleged ability of animals and insects to think and communicate complex abstract ideas such as monarchy and monotheism are further problems in the Qur’anic account. An educated reader cannot help but notice that the Qur’anic story of the encounter between Solomon’s army and the ant amalgamates a Judeo-Christian story with elements from Arab folklore (the jinn, which are demons in the Jewish version) and the tradition of animal fables (such as Aesop’s fables).

(Continued in part 18 here.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 18
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 16
3. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 2

I have studied the world’s religions much more thoroughly than the average religious believer, and probably more than many devout ones. There are, of course, religious clergy and academic specialists who have much more in-depth knowledge of a specific religion, or some particular aspect of religion in general, than I do. But I think that I have as broad a knowledge of world religions as almost anyone. I’ve studied the scriptures and foundational texts of the major world religions (and many minor ones), and read authors ranging from popular apologists to the philosophically inclined from each of them, from every period since the foundation of the religion until now. In addition, I’ve also undertaken a pretty thorough study of history, so I have a sense of how religions have developed and interacted with one another that most believers do not have.

Religious believers will sometimes tell me that, if I only studied their scriptures more, or read certain books or talked to certain scholars, I would find that the evidence supports their religion. I do not doubt their sincerity in their belief that the evidence, when (mis)interpreted in a favourable way, can be made compatible with their perception of reality, or that there are people who have constructed elaborate and detailed arguments supposedly demonstrating the truth of their religion (since I’ve read many of the books myself). But this is exactly like presenting a person who has flown around the world in an airplane with precise measurements showing that some small patch of land is flat, and expecting him or her to stop knowing that the Earth is roughly spherical in shape.

There are, say, some Christian preachers who are very talented at connecting events in the real world (or in earlier parts of the Bible) to Biblical prophecies, or Muslim theologians who are quite adept at arguing that a creator God must have certain essential attributes. The most that Christians and Muslims can say about the arguments of these respective groups is that they are compatible with their religion, not that they demonstrate their veracity. Predictions about the future made in the Bible which have apparently come true can be explained by means other than an omniscient God (such as that people are simply reading an unintended meaning back into the text). Similarly, Islamic theology, however extensive, might simply be about a being that does not exist in the real world. The point is that an expert in a specific geographic feature of one country or region is not in a better position to judge the shape of the Earth than a layperson who has travelled throughout the world.

It is in this context that I wish to say a few words about expertise, whether it be religious expertise or secular or scientific expertise put to the service of religion. As someone trained in science and in logic, the alleged expertise of a person by itself means nothing to me, nor should it mean anything to anyone else. In the final analysis, what matters is whether or not a person who makes an argument can back it up with evidence or reason. Whenever a religious believer has recommended an “expert” to me who is supposedly able to show that his or her religion is true, I have inevitably discovered one of two things. Either the believer does not actually understand what the expert really said or wrote, or the so-called expert is simply wrong; and quite often, both of these situations apply.

The one academic field where the clash between religion and academia has received the most attention is of course biology, with creationist rejection of the theory of evolution. But it is by no means the only one. The study of history, for example, has cast doubt on many of the stories told and believed in by Jews, Christians, and Muslims about the past, and the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of their religions. Now there are certainly historians who are also religious believers who can show how the evidence can be interpreted in a way that may not be incompatible with the evidence. Characters and episodes from the Bible can indeed be mostly matched to people and events from history. (This is true to a much lesser degree for the Qur’an, but it is also not a narrative like the Bible. The corresponding Islamic literature would be the collections of aḥādīth.)

However, the fact that the Bible refers to real world events no more proves its veracity than the existence of Baker St. proves that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, nor does it lead to the conclusion that the miracles recorded therein are also real. It is clear to anyone who has studied the actual history of Israel that many of the Biblical stories involving David and Solomon, for example, must be exaggerations and myths, no different than other ancient nations have told about their highly-regarded kings. Ironically, the relative historical unimportance of these kings meant that the authors of the Bible were able to get away with this exaggeration.

In comparison, consider the Duke of Zhou, who shaped much of subsequent Chinese culture, is roughly their contemporary, and who, like David, has many poems in a culturally influential book of poetry attributed to him. It was he who first wrote about the concept of the Mandate of Heaven (that is, the Chinese ruler’s right to govern is granted by Heaven, i.e., God, and can be revoked if the ruler is incompetent or unjust). No one ever argues that just because many aspects of the Chinese historical records about the Zhou dynasty have been subsequently confirmed by archeology, that we should therefore believe in the Mandate of Heaven, or accept as true the parts which are clearly mythological or simply reflect the religious beliefs of their composers. The Chinese historical records are attested by better evidence than the Bible, if for no reason other than the fact that the rulers of China governed far more people and a much larger geographic area than than did the rulers of Israel, but this tells us nothing about whether the religious beliefs of its composers are true (e.g., if the Chinese emperors had any actual connections to Heaven).

(Updated 2010-11-08: continued in part 17 here.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 18
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 11
3. The geographic and temporal spread argument for religion as a human creation, part 1

When a person thoroughly studies the world’s religions, the picture clearly emerges that religion is a human creation, and that no supernatural entities are required to explain them. The spread and development of religions is actually remarkably similar to the spread and development of natural languages in many ways, and this latter field has been extensively studied without recourse to anything but naturalistic explanations. (This is a topic I may return to in a future essay.)

I really do not see how anyone who has actually examined the evidence regarding religion — that is, an honest, rational person with unfettered access to as much information as humanity knows regarding the subject — can still believe in the existence of God, or at the very least accept that there must be many people who are sincere atheists. I know that the God of the Abrahamic religions does not exist, and this is the case for every god the case for whose existence I have examined.

Some theists contend that it is impossible to know that God does not exist, or that it is arrogant to claim so. Before I continue, I should note that it’s by no means clear that all theists even refer to the same entity when they speak of God. (That is, the names that believers in different religions use to refer to their supreme or sole deity may not necessarily have the same referent.) I am only concerned for the moment with the kind of God who is actively involved in human affairs, and is alleged to have sent both supernatural and human messengers with revelations for humanity. The evidence is overwhelming that lesser supernatural beings, such as the archangel Gabriel, do not exist. The actions attributed by humans to these supernatural beings throughout history are either figments of human imagination, or misunderstandings of natural phenomena, since the details of the descriptions of the supernatural world given by human populations not in mutual contact are inconsistent with one another. Based on this, one can conclude that even if God existed, He had nothing to do with Christianity, Islam, or any of the religions in the entire Abrahamic family. The evidence is similar for each of the other theistic religions. The only God that is compatible with the historical evidence is the non-interventionist God of Deism. As for whether this claim is arrogant, I think it is arrogant to speak for God, as many religious people do, especially when they have no evidence for their God’s existence. The charge of arrogance hinges on whether their beliefs correspond with reality, which is the only thing that matters.

I also claim to know that the Earth is not flat, and no one ever tells me that this is impossible, or that it is arrogant to claim this. A pedant may insist that I cannot know anything for a fact with absolute certainty, and this may be true. But I know it as well as I know anything, and if we agree to this pedantic definition of knowledge, then no one can be said to know anything. I use the word “know” as it is normally used, and in that sense, I know that God does not exist as well as and in exactly the same way that I know that the Earth is not flat. I may be wrong, but in my estimation I am as likely to be wrong about the non-existence of God as I am about the shape of the Earth.

This is not a mere analogy. People whose experience of the world is limited to a small geographic region may very well believe that the Earth is flat on the basis of their experience, since it is locally flat. But a person who has observed the shape of the Earth first-hand (such as by flying in an aircraft), or has been exposed to the plethora of indirect evidence (such as photos or videos taken of the Earth from space), knows the shape of the Earth. In exactly the same way, religious believers whose experiences and studies have been limited only to the scope of their own religious traditions may draw incorrect conclusions about the world which they are certain is supported by the evidence.

(Updated 2010-11-08: continued in part 16 here.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 13
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 6
3. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 3

The most successful of the world’s religions were founded long ago in the past. We cannot go back in time to examine the circumstances surrounding the creation of these religions for ourselves. But what we can do (and what I think we should do) is to carefully make observations about new and recently formed religious groups, and to use these observations to draw inferences about how the first believers in earlier religions might have behaved. The only assumption this requires us to make is that people are, in general and on average, more or less the same as they have always been when it comes to matters of religion. There is no reason to believe that this is not the case for any particular group (unless evidence is presented otherwise).

It is observably the case that people stubbornly cling to their beliefs even if they’re obviously wrong. Whatever your religious beliefs may happen to be, there are numerous people with beliefs that conflict with yours, and if your beliefs are not wrong, then theirs are. There are religions which are of recent enough genesis that we can directly check whether their claims are true or not. I mentioned a number of religions in the previous post which date from the last two centuries. Even if you are a believer in one of them (and especially if you are a believer in one of them), there is at least one other religion from among them that is obviously wrong (that is, obviously wrong to you; but not to its believers). Pick a religion that you do not believe in — it doesn’t matter which one.

What you can observe about the believers in this religion is that, rather than acknowledging their errors when they are confronted with them, they instead go to great lengths to “prove” that their beliefs are compatible with the evidence. Some of them even sacrifice their lives to attest religious beliefs which are obviously false (to outsiders). And this can be said about almost every new religion.

This observation immediately removes the force from the assertion, commonly made by religious believers, that the early followers of their religion would not have gone to such great lengths or sacrificed their lives for their beliefs unless their beliefs were true. Even if the fact that the early Christians continued to witness their faith as they were put to death by the Romans makes us sympathetic to their plight, it should do nothing to convince a rational person of the veracity of their beliefs. After all, the Romans also executed believers in other religions, such as Jews, who likewise remained firm believers until their end.

Another problem with the appeal to martyrdom is that the beliefs of the martyrs are not necessarily the same as those of the religious believers who claim them as witnesses to their religion. Some of the early Christians were martyred before the followers of Jesus were even called Christians (see Acts 7:54–60, 11:25–26), and many before the New Testament was completed or the doctrines of Christianity were formalised. So even if they died for beliefs relating to Jesus or for being his followers, it doesn’t follow that they died for Christianity (in any form of the religion that exists today). St. Stephen was killed, for example, because he had challenged and insulted the Sanhedrin (according to Acts 6:8–15 and Acts 7, which, it must be remembered, was written by Christians). It is unknown whether or not he knew, for example, about the account recorded in the Gospel of Matthew that the dead walked out of their tombs and appeared to many people in Jerusalem when Jesus died (Matt. 27:51–53), which I had referred to at the beginning of this essay. It is a non sequitur to argue that the accounts of miracles in the New Testament must be true, because people would not have died for believing in them otherwise. And if they didn’t die for what is now mainstream Christianity, they certainly didn’t die for Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or any other group who has claimed the early Christian martyrs as witnesses for their message.

(Update 2010-11-07: Continued in Part 15 here.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The geographic and temporal spread argument for religion as a human creation, part 1
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 5
3. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 10