'The unequal power sharing situation that a "Biblical Marriage" involves is basically a 24/7 re-ennactment of the Stanford Prison experiment. I'm not saying that every or even most unequal relationships are abusive, but the potential is very much there. Frankly, when one person has socially recognized power over another, the first person tends to turn into a jerk, and the second person quickly stops resisting. The latter is probably part of why abuse is chronically under-reported in the Christian community.
And of course, even in a healthy, non-abusive relationship, there's still the fact that women are pressured to "stay in the kitchen" while men are pressured to become the primary or sole breadwinner, with no real consideration for the fact that maybe either partner isn't suited for that job.' - Miles Teg
On the subject of abuse:
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
Thursday, 20 May 2010
Religious prejudice
I attended some talks at an international conference on science and religious conflict. What surprised me was the lack of scientific rigour in studies of this subject.
I was less interested in conflicts with a religious nature and more interested in religious conflict with science, and whether religion leads to conflict. The theologians and philosophers can talk all they like about religious doctrine, but what matters is the feeling of religiosity in the believers.
Religiosity is an accepted term in this field, it seems, but is hard to measure. It's easy to get weighed down by academic disagreements over pet theories about whether religious feeling can be divided into different classes (questing religion, for example, hardly follows the Western concept of a religion having unquestionable doctrine at all).
I would be happy with questionnaires about how often a person attends divine worship combined with a linear scale of religious fervour on which a participant must mark a cross.
The biggest problem with the research about religion and prejudice is the definition of prejudice, a point made by a philosopher (Ingmar Persson), but in a rambling and extensive way, in which he concluded that all opinion could be prejudice.
I agree with him to an extent, that the work has not identified prejudice well, but I wouldn't be so kind as to suggest that this is because prejudice is a vague, indefinable term. Measuring the effect of religious sentiment on an individual example of prejudice gives no meaningful results (despite the authors' conclusions). The study of which I am thinking concluded that religion can both create and dissipate prejudice, as was made clear in the different attitudes of religious respondents to homosexuality and Muslims.
This sort of conclusion is almost a truism. If something in which one deeply believes tells you that certain desires are sinful, you will be prejudiced against those with such desires.
What we really need to know is whether religion increases the general (or average) level of prejudice, if we can imagine such a thing. In animals the equivalent would be the level of defensive posture in response to strangers. In humans it is harder to conceive of an unbiased indicator because in-group and out-group sentiments are more complex, and so a 'stranger' might not necessarily be regarded as fully 'out-group', thereby destroying the usefulness of any experiments trying to measure attitudes towards out-groups.
If some behavioural measure could be used, without the volunteers' direct knowledge, that would truly tell us something about how religion influences people.
In order to find such a behavioural measure, we would need to assess how religion affects people's perceptions of who is 'in-group' and who is 'out-group'. Only then can we accurately provide each participant with behavioural cues that allow us to determine his responses to each type of category.
The other aspect of the study was the use of mortality salience testing, in which people were reminded of their mortality in order to make them more uncomfortable. Mortality and existential dread affect all humans, and religion certainly offers one way of coping with these inevitable aspects of intelligence. Hence religious people were less fazed by mortality salience.
An interesting counterpoint would be to examine whether religious people could be fazed (and therefore have their behaviour negatively affected) by other cues that do not affect atheists. For example, many scientific discoveries and theories directly contradict religious doctrines. Where atheists might be comfortable with such knowledge, religious people might be uncomfortable because the source of their comfort in situations including mortality salience is undermined.
The use of false comforts and the psychological conflict between knowledge and comfort therefore helps retard the progress of science.
This issue is now returning to previous, more philosophical, musings on this subject. It is the human need for comfort and familiarity, and the subordination of reason to emotions (such as this happiness with comfort, certainty, false purpose and familiarity) that is the flaw in our species.
Religion gives us purpose and absolute certainty in a world where these things do not truly exist. The need to have bedrocks on which to build our lives ruins our species.
Even in science we cannot do things properly. Instead of probabilities or likelihoods of truth we state a result as absolute truth if the result obtained passes a specific, arbitrary boundary of improbability if the conclusion were false. This arbitrary boundary allows us to state whether a conclusion is, or is not, justified in a binary manner. We should be stating probabilities of truth.
We need to accept the way science builds truth from 'truth density clouds' of results in the same field, just as physicists accept the use of probability density functions for small particles.
Science offers us accuracy, when used correctly, with increasing precision the more we use it. Religion offers us perfect precision but with completely ungovernable accuracy. And we as a species, with remarkable disregard for the truth, choose precision of knowledge over accuracy. We choose comfort over truth, emotion over sense, familiarity over curiosity and stability over progress: we choose religion.
I buck the trend of the species. I love truth. I get a little warm glow inside every time I break apart a puzzle and get the result, be it a puzzle of data, a riddle of life or analysing the foundations of a moral or political assertion. My certainty in life comes from the joy of applying logic and rigour; it comes from the truths I have so far uncovered (given the data I have) and the certainty that although the details of knowledge might change with new data, the beliefs I hold at any moment in time are the closest that I can get to the truth at that time.
As the Bible itself (almost) claims:
Magna est veritas et praevalebit
Great is truth and it shall prevail (a bit)
(I prefer the misquotation and mistranslation to the real version)
I was less interested in conflicts with a religious nature and more interested in religious conflict with science, and whether religion leads to conflict. The theologians and philosophers can talk all they like about religious doctrine, but what matters is the feeling of religiosity in the believers.
Religiosity is an accepted term in this field, it seems, but is hard to measure. It's easy to get weighed down by academic disagreements over pet theories about whether religious feeling can be divided into different classes (questing religion, for example, hardly follows the Western concept of a religion having unquestionable doctrine at all).
I would be happy with questionnaires about how often a person attends divine worship combined with a linear scale of religious fervour on which a participant must mark a cross.
The biggest problem with the research about religion and prejudice is the definition of prejudice, a point made by a philosopher (Ingmar Persson), but in a rambling and extensive way, in which he concluded that all opinion could be prejudice.
I agree with him to an extent, that the work has not identified prejudice well, but I wouldn't be so kind as to suggest that this is because prejudice is a vague, indefinable term. Measuring the effect of religious sentiment on an individual example of prejudice gives no meaningful results (despite the authors' conclusions). The study of which I am thinking concluded that religion can both create and dissipate prejudice, as was made clear in the different attitudes of religious respondents to homosexuality and Muslims.
This sort of conclusion is almost a truism. If something in which one deeply believes tells you that certain desires are sinful, you will be prejudiced against those with such desires.
What we really need to know is whether religion increases the general (or average) level of prejudice, if we can imagine such a thing. In animals the equivalent would be the level of defensive posture in response to strangers. In humans it is harder to conceive of an unbiased indicator because in-group and out-group sentiments are more complex, and so a 'stranger' might not necessarily be regarded as fully 'out-group', thereby destroying the usefulness of any experiments trying to measure attitudes towards out-groups.
If some behavioural measure could be used, without the volunteers' direct knowledge, that would truly tell us something about how religion influences people.
In order to find such a behavioural measure, we would need to assess how religion affects people's perceptions of who is 'in-group' and who is 'out-group'. Only then can we accurately provide each participant with behavioural cues that allow us to determine his responses to each type of category.
The other aspect of the study was the use of mortality salience testing, in which people were reminded of their mortality in order to make them more uncomfortable. Mortality and existential dread affect all humans, and religion certainly offers one way of coping with these inevitable aspects of intelligence. Hence religious people were less fazed by mortality salience.
An interesting counterpoint would be to examine whether religious people could be fazed (and therefore have their behaviour negatively affected) by other cues that do not affect atheists. For example, many scientific discoveries and theories directly contradict religious doctrines. Where atheists might be comfortable with such knowledge, religious people might be uncomfortable because the source of their comfort in situations including mortality salience is undermined.
The use of false comforts and the psychological conflict between knowledge and comfort therefore helps retard the progress of science.
This issue is now returning to previous, more philosophical, musings on this subject. It is the human need for comfort and familiarity, and the subordination of reason to emotions (such as this happiness with comfort, certainty, false purpose and familiarity) that is the flaw in our species.
Religion gives us purpose and absolute certainty in a world where these things do not truly exist. The need to have bedrocks on which to build our lives ruins our species.
Even in science we cannot do things properly. Instead of probabilities or likelihoods of truth we state a result as absolute truth if the result obtained passes a specific, arbitrary boundary of improbability if the conclusion were false. This arbitrary boundary allows us to state whether a conclusion is, or is not, justified in a binary manner. We should be stating probabilities of truth.
We need to accept the way science builds truth from 'truth density clouds' of results in the same field, just as physicists accept the use of probability density functions for small particles.
Science offers us accuracy, when used correctly, with increasing precision the more we use it. Religion offers us perfect precision but with completely ungovernable accuracy. And we as a species, with remarkable disregard for the truth, choose precision of knowledge over accuracy. We choose comfort over truth, emotion over sense, familiarity over curiosity and stability over progress: we choose religion.
I buck the trend of the species. I love truth. I get a little warm glow inside every time I break apart a puzzle and get the result, be it a puzzle of data, a riddle of life or analysing the foundations of a moral or political assertion. My certainty in life comes from the joy of applying logic and rigour; it comes from the truths I have so far uncovered (given the data I have) and the certainty that although the details of knowledge might change with new data, the beliefs I hold at any moment in time are the closest that I can get to the truth at that time.
As the Bible itself (almost) claims:
Magna est veritas et praevalebit
Great is truth and it shall prevail (a bit)
(I prefer the misquotation and mistranslation to the real version)
Thursday, 21 May 2009
The drive to promiscuity
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8055296.stm
This is a news story about how brain anatomy correlates with sociability. The idea that sociability is an innate characteristic is not proven, since the brain could have grown this way during development due to environmental influences. Nonetheless it's as interesting a thought that someone might have a set drive for sociability during adulthood which doesn't really change.
What I find more interesting than this, though, is the implication that these various drives might correlate with each other, such that people who crave chocolate, sex or other drugs also crave social contact. I've encountered suggestions that people substitute one of these things for another: magazines are full of articles in which people mention chocolate binges that happen as a result of being dumped, for example. I'd never encountered a neurological basis for this before though.
We also have cravings for attachment and romance, as explained here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html
Apart from the fun bits, such as 'we were made to love more than one person', I wonder if all these cravings really can substitute for each other. Can the 'satisfaction' neurons reach maximal activity just from one or two of these (such as sex and chocolate) or do we need romance, sex, attachment, chocolate and social contact?
Either way, I'm not sure that marriage is a good solution. Helen Fisher thinks that we naturally want more than just the satisfaction of one drive that marriage gives us. If one drive, satisfied enough, can satisfy us entirely, why marry at all? Why not smoke weed all day, or eat chocolate, or have a busy social life? On the other hand, if it can satisfy us, why do so many marriages fail?
It seems much more likely that some amount of substitution is possible, but that we really want all the cravings to be satisfied separately.
In this case marriage seems to fight against human satisfaction by specifically denying us the chance to satisfy lust, romance and attachment all at once. Once again it seems a less than optimal solution. Any long-term arrangement that satisfies our desire for attachment does us harm if it also forbids us from satisfying our intrinsic desire for romance or our relatively short-term lusts; people who are attached to each other should accept that what is now called cheating is a perfectly normal and acceptable human trait. We might also notice that this research gives a decent explanation for extreme variabilities in sex drive. If someone wants more sex than someone else, he's not necessarily more base and sinful, just as the other person is not necessarily more prudish.
Of course, we knew this already. It does bring us on to the complicating factor of religion. Religion is a powerful tool for convincing people that things are wrong when they're actually beneficial. Religious people tend to be far less tolerant of drug use (of any sort), promiscuity, satisfaction of urges in general and especially of lust. It does seem strange that God would have made us to be naturally unhappy if we follow His teachings. Of course, much of these teachings are not necessarily God's, but are part of church doctrine instead. Either way, we have cause to doubt organised religion.
This is a news story about how brain anatomy correlates with sociability. The idea that sociability is an innate characteristic is not proven, since the brain could have grown this way during development due to environmental influences. Nonetheless it's as interesting a thought that someone might have a set drive for sociability during adulthood which doesn't really change.
What I find more interesting than this, though, is the implication that these various drives might correlate with each other, such that people who crave chocolate, sex or other drugs also crave social contact. I've encountered suggestions that people substitute one of these things for another: magazines are full of articles in which people mention chocolate binges that happen as a result of being dumped, for example. I'd never encountered a neurological basis for this before though.
We also have cravings for attachment and romance, as explained here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html
Apart from the fun bits, such as 'we were made to love more than one person', I wonder if all these cravings really can substitute for each other. Can the 'satisfaction' neurons reach maximal activity just from one or two of these (such as sex and chocolate) or do we need romance, sex, attachment, chocolate and social contact?
Either way, I'm not sure that marriage is a good solution. Helen Fisher thinks that we naturally want more than just the satisfaction of one drive that marriage gives us. If one drive, satisfied enough, can satisfy us entirely, why marry at all? Why not smoke weed all day, or eat chocolate, or have a busy social life? On the other hand, if it can satisfy us, why do so many marriages fail?
It seems much more likely that some amount of substitution is possible, but that we really want all the cravings to be satisfied separately.
In this case marriage seems to fight against human satisfaction by specifically denying us the chance to satisfy lust, romance and attachment all at once. Once again it seems a less than optimal solution. Any long-term arrangement that satisfies our desire for attachment does us harm if it also forbids us from satisfying our intrinsic desire for romance or our relatively short-term lusts; people who are attached to each other should accept that what is now called cheating is a perfectly normal and acceptable human trait. We might also notice that this research gives a decent explanation for extreme variabilities in sex drive. If someone wants more sex than someone else, he's not necessarily more base and sinful, just as the other person is not necessarily more prudish.
Of course, we knew this already. It does bring us on to the complicating factor of religion. Religion is a powerful tool for convincing people that things are wrong when they're actually beneficial. Religious people tend to be far less tolerant of drug use (of any sort), promiscuity, satisfaction of urges in general and especially of lust. It does seem strange that God would have made us to be naturally unhappy if we follow His teachings. Of course, much of these teachings are not necessarily God's, but are part of church doctrine instead. Either way, we have cause to doubt organised religion.
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