Penn Jillette's essay on NPR's 'This I Believe' show

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

This is an interesting essay.

Penn is a bit un-taddy, but I found him more thoughtful that I'd have guessed, at first glance, from his choice of titles.

Penn Jillette: There Is No God, on NPR

I highly recommend the audio over reading the essay, as you get a much, much better sense of the emotional meaning behind his words.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

And, in a more taddy-like contrast, This I Believe by Sheri White, who is an assistant scientist in the Deep Submergence Lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Seeing Beyond Our Differences: NPR

Again?  I highly recommend the audio over the written, as there are subtle nuances of emotion you'll miss otherwise.

[Aggie]

Re: Penn - my only (personal) criticism is that like many American atheists (he takes a stricter belief, but it amounts to atheism), his rejection of god is firmly based on the Christian monotheist OOO-type deity, and also in a rejection of the culture associated with worship of that god in America.  It's certainly understandable, but I always feel a bit like it's throwing the baby out with the bath water - saying you don't like beef because you don't like Big Macs and the atmosphere at McDonalds, if you will.   

I really like his points on forgiveness and suffering.  The belief that suffering is 'part of God's plan' has value for getting through a period of personal suffering, IMHO, but when used to negate or neglect the suffering of others it's toxic.  Forgiveness works the other way around; forgiving others for minor to moderate transgressions* is valuable, but using the forgiveness (or confession, for Catholics) card to do what you like and then repent leads to many great ills.

_{*I sometimes wonder if there's such a thing as too much forgiveness, or at least expectation thereof, in Western Christian culture.  It's too much to expect someone to forgive, say, a person who murdered one's family member(s), and the expectation that one should leaves the victim with an extra layer of guilt and shame.  I'm not sure it's totally healthy even if they succeed, although to temper the need for vengeance is not a terrible thing.}

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Liked Penn's essay and it is hard to criticize on a rational basis. A believer will criticize it, but then again he wouldn't be a believer if (s)he didn't.
---
On the forgiveness thing I have a few comments.

On Catholics, confession and forgiveness isn't supposed to be a get out of jail free card, even if before there were indulgences (which really defeated the purpose). The point is that if your really regret the evil you committed you can be forgiven, or more exactly, god can, which makes sense because he is supposed to know if your contrition is real. In practice it isn't so and ends up as an endorsement of bad behavior (which makes you question how good believers are those asking forgiveness).

The other comment is conceptual although related with the one above. To forgive someone is -in general terms- a good idea, that is, for the one forgiving more than the forgiven, because it lifts the emotional poison of retribution/vengeance. As for who benefits in a positive way from forgiveness you could think of those who are repentant of their actions. Think of the drunk/high idiot that kills someone in a traffic accident. The person might be guilty, reckless, and irresponsible, but his intention was never to cause harm, and sure enough a good percentage of those guilty of those kinds of crimes are genuinely repentant. You can go further, back home the drug war between cartels and the state gave birth to many hitmen who were in general terms, poor kids without an education, other options and in the middle of a violent culture. They knew that they were doing something bad, but they have seen bad all their lives, so it didn't made any difference. Not surprisingly some of them were/are repentant of the things they did, once they have the opportunity to be confronted not only with the consequences of their actions but with a different social setting.

I guess my point is that you don't need to be socio/psicopath to do terrible things and those who still have some empathy can indeed be [emotionally] forgiven for the things they did.

Where forgiveness has no place is with socio/psicopaths, because there is no guilt to begin with.

[Aggie]

Good points. 

I would agree very much that repentance by someone who has wronged another is the key to forgiveness. However, similar to repentance, forgiveness IMHO needs to come freely and whole-heartedly via empathy; I think that an expectation that this should alway occur is a dangerous cultural construct that has the potential to be emotionally damaging.  Acceptance needs to come first, and a society / religion / etc. that pushes a victim to give forgiveness too quickly may not allow them to get proper closure on the event.  Pure speculation on my part, btw - I can't say that I have much personal experience here, and admit that I am not very quick to forgive wrongs to the point of negating them (not to say I hold grudges, but I do keep significant wrongs chalked up in the grand balance of how I perceive a person - Libra, eh? If it's a minor transgression I tend to just forget). 

I personally find confession extremely bizarre and it would be (provided all other things matched my spiritual and social needs - big if) the central sticking point between me and Catholicism.  If you are truly repentant, why do you need to report to an intermediate?  Why not go directly to God for forgiveness, ask for strength not to repeat the transgression, and then go do some good work for him to make up, instead of repeating a set of words (or whatever other penance is usually prescribed).  It seems too much like writing lines after class...    Part of it is that I keep internal judgment of right and wrong, so if I do something that's wrong to me I get anguish from it and do feel repentant.  If it's not wrong to me (but breaks someone else's moral code), I will not be repentant.  Given that the CC imposes a lot of inconvenient social rules on its followers, it seems like a setup for insincere confessions, which could (speculatively) distort one's own ability to separate sins from permissible conduct.

Forgive me Father, I used a condom on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, three on Saturday and two on Sunday.  But only one was used to commit adultery*. 


_{*That's exaggerating the point a wee bit.   But one does wonder about 'gateway sins', and it seems hard to completely avoid sinning in the CC.}

[Bluenose]

Re: Penn - my only (personal) criticism is that like many American atheists (he takes a stricter belief, but it amounts to atheism), his rejection of god is firmly based on the Christian monotheist OOO-type deity, and also in a rejection of the culture associated with worship of that god in America.  It's certainly understandable, but I always feel a bit like it's throwing the baby out with the bath water - saying you don't like beef because you don't like Big Macs and the atmosphere at McDonalds, if you will.   

...

I have always had a certain amount of unease with this form of atheism.  I was brought up in the Catholic church, but came to my own atheism, not as just a simple rejection of the Catholic faith and the Christian god.  Certainly there was some element of that, for I found the explanations deeply unsatisfying.  But it went much further.  One of my thoughts at the time was along the lines of there are so many completely different religions (even lumping all Christian churces under a single banner for the point of argument) not just the Abrahamic ones, but also Budhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism, not to mention various suposedly "primitive" religions like animism and the various spiritual traditions of indigenous people from all continents to name but a very very few of a vast plethora of unrelated and disparate faiths.  All of these profess some sort of knowledge of The Truth.  Yet they all, at least for the most part, contradict each other, often about quite fundamental things about life and reality.  Contrast the Abrahamic idea of birth, life, death and an afterlife with the Budhist ideas about re-incarnation.

I could not see how these differing and contradictory ideas can possibly all be true, so I began to think about how they may have come about and felt it was far more likely that they were the product of people's understandable fears about life and death and their inability to explain many of the things about what was going on in the world around them than anything else.  That started me on a journey to discover how things really work.  A journey I have never completed and never will, for the more I learn, the more I learn I do not know.  I do not exclude any possiblity, even that I may be wrong about the lack of any gods, but in the light of the overwhelming lack of objective evidence for such a being if one or more exists it would be  a great disappointment to me that the universe turns out to be more comlex than it needs to be.  My highest item of "faith", if you will, is Occam's Razor, and that existance would mean that Universe, in the end fails it.  This is not possibility I lose a lot of sleep about, however.

Anyway, I know that mine is not the only way to look at things.  I do not criticise those who believe (except those who try to insinuate belief systems into school science classes and those I criticise very much, strongly and often), I am only talking about how I see things.  If there are those who call themselves athiests becaus of something that has happened in their lives that has caused them to "reject god" who am I to say they are wrong?  They are not the same sort of athiests as I think I am (at least I think not) and it may be that some of those may change their minds again: who knows?  Also, who am I to say that believers are wrong?  I just cannot see it their way and, in a very deep and personal way, I cannot understand how they do see it that way.  OTOH, perhaps we are all wrong and the earth really is a disc born on the back of a great sleeping turtle and you lot better stop making all this noise or you'll wake him up!

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I personally find confession extremely bizarre ...

Confession is supposed to be cathartic (hence the need for the medium) but it is indeed problematic. It depends on the individual in question, for instance I only did it once prior to my marriage during a fast track confirmation, and always considered my "sins" something that anyone but me should know. Now that I don't believe a word of it I see far less value on the whole thing (heck, the guy listening can perfectly be a far worse person than me!) but I do understand the rationale for some of it.

One of my thoughts at the time was along the lines of there are so many completely different religions (even lumping all Christian churces under a single banner for the point of argument) not just the Abrahamic ones, but also Budhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism, not to mention various suposedly "primitive" religions like animism and the various spiritual traditions of indigenous people from all continents to name but a very very few of a vast plethora of unrelated and disparate faiths.  All of these profess some sort of knowledge of The Truth.  Yet they all, at least for the most part, contradict each other, often about quite fundamental things about life and reality.  Contrast the Abrahamic idea of birth, life, death and an afterlife with the Budhist ideas about re-incarnation.

At some point I went to a place where you studied different religions and while there are a number of differences among religions (hey, they haven't been killing each other for nothing, right? ) there are also common elements to most of them not only in a commonsensical approach but on the definition of what can't be defined. The first part is (IMO) the result of our social nature, hence bound to appear not only in religion but in other social expressions, but the second is a bit more interesting, the ethereal nature, and the common definitions may point out to some specific element in the way we think*.

*I heard a story about an specific form of brain damage and a sudden spirituality in a number of patients, related to the concept of "Me" vs "All". That can add up to other studies linking religious beliefs to specific brain areas and genetic markers.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

*I heard a story about an specific form of brain damage and a sudden spirituality in a number of patients, related to the concept of "Me" vs "All". That can add up to other studies linking religious beliefs to specific brain areas and genetic markers.

http://www.livescience.com/health/spirituality-brain-link-100211.html

Links to Spirituality Found in the Brain

By LiveScience Staff

posted: 11 February 2010 10:02 pm ET

Scientists have identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, lead to greater spirituality. The findings hint at the roots of spiritual and religious attitudes, the researchers say.

The study, published in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Neuron, involves a personality trait called self-transcendence, which is a somewhat vague measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors. Self-transcendence "reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one's self as an integral part of the universe as a whole," the researchers explain.

Before and after surgery, the scientists surveyed patients who had brain tumors removed. The surveys generate self-transcendence scores.

Selective damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions of the brain induced a specific increase in self-transcendence, or ST, the surveys showed.

"Our symptom-lesion mapping study is the first demonstration of a causative link between brain functioning and ST," said Dr. Cosimo Urgesi from the University of Udine in Italy. "Damage to posterior parietal areas induced unusually fast changes of a stable personality dimension related to transcendental self-referential awareness. Thus, dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors."

Previous neuroimaging studies had linked activity within a large network in the brain that connects the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortexes with spiritual experiences, "but information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking," explains lead study author, Urgesi said.

One study, reported in 2008, suggested that the brain's right parietal lobe defines "Me," and people with less active Me-Definers are more likely to lead spiritual lives.

The finding could lead to new strategies for treating some forms of mental illness.

"If a stable personality trait like ST can undergo fast changes as a consequence of brain lesions, it would indicate that at least some personality dimensions may be modified by influencing neural activity in specific areas," said Dr. Salvatore M. Aglioti from Sapienza University of Rome. "Perhaps novel approaches aimed at modulating neural activity might ultimately pave the way to new treatments of personality disorders."