Something I’ve experienced myself.
Archive for the 'Religion and Agnosticism' Category
Here’s just another example of why the term “anti-Semitism” has increasingly come to mean “mild criticism of Israeli government policies,” rather than “hostility to or prejudice against Jews.”
A teenager in the UK faced prosecution recently for holding a sign up in the street with words on it.
The words? “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.”
He’s wrong of course. It’s both. Other cults like Christianity and Islam have just been around for longer, so they get to be called Religions.
The teen was arrested by a City of London police officer; the same police force that was found to have members accepting “gifts” from the Church of Scientology.
He was arrested on 10 May at a demonstration outside the headquarters of the Church of Scientology in London, under section 5 of the Public Order Act, which states, “A person is guilty of an offence if he … displays any writing … which is … insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.”
This seems like a stupid law but it also goes onto say that the accused has a defence if their “conduct was reasonable.” I don’t know what this means exactly but it certainly seems reasonable to criticise religion and accuse it of being dangerous. Why should religion get a free ride?
Justice Latey of London appears to have agreed. In a 1984 ruling in London he said, “Scientology is both immoral and socially obnoxious … it is corrupt, sinister and dangerous. It is corrupt because it is based on lies and deceit and has as its real objective money and power for Mr. Hubbard, his wife and those close to him at the top.”
You could say the same about most religions so I can see why some people who aren’t members of a particular religion might want to protect others from religious criticism. Once you accept criticism of the Church of Scientology, for being a childish superstition for instance, you open your own religion up to the same criticism.
It would be interesting to know if the officer who made the arrest is religious, or, for that matter, if she has had any involvement or contact with the Church of Scientology.
Sam Harris is undertaking what is apparently a first: the study of religious faith at the level of the brain.
If you’re interested he’s put out a request for volunteers—particularly Christians—to take part in a survey to help refine their experimental stimuli:
We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain. By responding to the four surveys I have posted online, you can make an enormous contribution to this work.
Please answer as many of the surveys as you can. If you only have time to answer one, please choose at random (otherwise, we will have many more responses to the first than to the others).
Feel free to post this message to your blog or to forward the relevant links to your friends. I especially need Christians to respond, as one of the goals of these surveys is to design stimuli that a majority of Christians will find doctrinally sound.
I will, of course, pass along the results of this work the moment I have something to report.
Many thanks for your help.
All the best,
Sam
samharris.org
Note: Each survey starts with the same first page of questions.
Belief Survey A
Belief Survey B
Belief Survey C
Belief Survey D
External links:
- What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith | 14 December, 2007
There is but one way to demonstrate the existence of a power independent of and superior to nature, and that is by breaking, if only for one moment, the continuity of cause and effect. Pluck from the endless chain of existence one little link; stop for one instant the grand procession and you have shown beyond all contradiction that nature has a master. Change the fact, just for one second, that matter attracts matter, and a god appears. The rudest savage has always known this fact, and for that reason always demanded the evidence of miracle. The founder of a religion must be able to turn water into wine—cure with a word the blind and lame, and raise with a simple touch the dead to life. It was necessary for him to demonstrate to the satisfaction of his barbarian disciple, that he was superior to nature. In times of ignorance this was easy to do. The credulity of the savage was almost boundless. To him the marvelous was the beautiful, the mysterious was the sublime. Consequently, every religion has for its foundation a miracle—that is to say, a violation of nature—that is to say, a falsehood. No one, in the world’s whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature. The church wishes us to believe. Let the church, or one of its intellectual saints, perform a miracle, and we will believe. We are told that nature has a superior. Let this superior, for one single instant, control nature, and we will admit the truth of your assertions.
—Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
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