I was desperately trying to come up with a witty play on the word Pope for the title of this blog. Something like Pope Goes The Weasel. As you can tell, i failed.
So i'm pretty tired of people covering Facebook with anti-Pope remarks. In general i'm pretty tired of this wave of atheism. It's not so much the common observation; that atheists shove their atheism in your face as much as a Jehova's Witness knocking on your door, it's that people seem to mistake atheism for intelligence. It's like you can't possibly be intelligent if you believe in God. Einstein believed in God. He made reference to him many times, 'God doesn't play dice with the universe' was his retort when trying to dispel the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics. Who wants to lock intellectual horns with Einstein? It's a crap argument, but it holds up here.
If you don't believe a higher power made the universe, that's fine. You carry on. I'm not convinced by the Big Bang either. It's a better theory scientifically, but it still doesn't hold up. If you consider the size of the universe (and there's some lovely web sites you can visit that take you on a virtual tour of the known universe), i expect that if someone did create this thing, they couldn't give a rat's rear what you think of it. You are so tiny and insignificant it's a wonder you bother to breathe. If someone else wants to believe there was a master mind behind it all, you leave them alone. If it doesn't affect you, why are you bothered with it? If someone believes in God, or Allah, or that Scientology crap, it doesn't mean they are stupid. It means their beliefs differ to yours. What's the big deal about that? No-one is right or wrong, because nobody knows what happens when you die. Feels like i'm stating the painfully obvious here.
As a budding Psychology student, i'm stupidly interested in the way the mind affects the body. Good mental health equals good health generally. There's a number of things that happen, chemically, when you're down that can drag your immune system down too and result in any number of cold or flu viruses that can make you feel a whole lot worse. It's unfair but goes hand in hand.
If i'm inaccurate here you'll have to forgive me, but if memory serves placebos were first used in World War One. The medics had run out of morphine but had seriously injured and dying soldiers screaming all around them for some kind of relief from the pain of a severed limb. Some bright spark - either on purpose or accidentally, i can't remember now - hooked up a saline solution either claiming or believing it to be morphine. It worked just the same. This is simply the power of suggestion. An idea was planted in the patient's mind, that the drug is a drug that will work, and the patient's mind did the rest. Social Psychologists use the same kind of idea with Priming, which is a very frightening way of getting someone to behave in a certain manner. It's basically suggestion, and people are so busy on auto-pilot, they fail to fight it off mentally.
This was taken a bit further in 1955, when a cardiologist from Seattle decided to fool patients into believing they'd been opened up and had surgery carried out on their heart. He really did do the surgery for some, but on others just made incisions around the heart area to give the impression they'd been opened up. And yes, both groups reported the same relief from their symptoms. Of course the medical fraternity went mental. What this guy was proving was that the operation didn't need to be done. That the chest pains were all in the mind, or at least, the pains are real but can be cured by the mind. Kind of puts a few of them out of work doesn't it?
There's plenty of remarkable stories about the placebo effect. In this day and age, Homeopathy is a shining example of the placebo effect being bottled and sold. Homeopathy is basically water. Yet people take it, and it has a positive effect on them. I don't agree with it. Someone rightly labelled it Snake Oil. But it works for some. It makes them better. Who am i to get in their face and call it bullshit? I don't want anyone to be ill, so if it works for them then i should be happy about it. It goes against every scientific bone in my aching body, but it works.
Back to the Pope then. And religion. For many, the Lord is a source of comfort. I too have felt very at ease and at peace when sat in a church. There's just something about it. To the believers, the peace i feel is the Lord. He's channelled through the steeple and straight into my heart. It's quite flattering but i don't buy it. It's quiet in a church. It's completely unthreatening. It's like sitting in a library. You don't have to do anything, just exist. Unless you work there of course. It's subjective and it works in the same way psychics and mediums do. If you want it to be real, it will be. If you're looking for the holes in a theory, you'll find them. There are no facts, only interpretations. And Nietzsche said that, so ner. I'll interpret it my way, and a God botherer will interpret it in theirs. Live. Let live.
If the presence of a God makes someone feel better mentally, if it makes them a happier, altruistic person more likely to inflict their good mood and altruism on everyone else, then in no way can believing in God be a bad thing. It's a mental placebo, but placebos work. Faith, for this is the crux of it all, is so powerful it should not be ignored. Regardless of whether this faith is drilled into a person from a young age or if they find Jesus in a jail cell in Arizona, the strength of it can do extra-ordinary things. A Christian's faith is way more powerful than any scientific evidence you can present to them. You will never win if their faith is unshakeable.
The damage religion has done to the human race must be addressed of course. From the Dark Ages to 9/11 and all points in between, religion has a lot to answer for. What about all the good though? What about the charity organisations and the volunteers that help to run them? If these people were spurned into action from reading the Bible, this is no bad thing. If these people believe that in doing this they will earn their cloud, halo, and harp then fine, snigger at them a bit but at least they're doing something. They're not sat there clutching A Brief History Of Time pretending they've read it, contributing nothing.
A long time ago in a galaxy that looked a lot like this one, Pope Leo the third crowned a Roman emperor. This established a link between the church and state. This meant that the Holy Roman emperors, followed by the kings of Europe, were given the glow of divinity. Crowds would gather, hoping to get a touch from one of these fellows. And guess what, in true placebo fashion, the 'royal touch' as it was known, was said to have cured thousands of people. It did this through belief.
The Pope is but a human being. However, in the minds of some he has been chosen by God. As such, one touch from him and things will be alright. There will be no scientific explanation, but the person that believes it will benefit from it. Yes, they are curing themselves from a mental problem or a physical one, but if it works then it's one less person in the NHS queue. It's one less person with a grey cloud over their heads, perhaps it's one less suicide and therefore one less person who has to walk in and discover that suicide.
This blog is simply not big enough to discuss all the pros and cons of religion and organisations like the Catholic Church. They have done bad, they have also done good. Probably a lot like you.
My beef is with the soapbox Atheists. A person of intelligence will hold out for evidence. A person of intelligence will think, discuss, evaluate, research, and then speak. They say the burden of proof isn't on them. Well, i think it it's just as much on them as it is on a priest. To say something doesn't exist....prove it. We haven't found a cure for cancer, but it doesn't mean there isn't one. I've got one odd sock, the other one is around here somewhere but i can't find it. Doesn't mean that other sock has ceased to exist.
Many years ago, Democritus came up with the idea of Atomos. It meant 'uncuttable'. It was the smallest piece of something you could possibly get to. Its where you can go down no further. This was ancient greece. It was a theory. Years later, we have atoms. We know they exist.
So, just because there's no evidence for something now, it doesn't mean there never will be.
Democritus was spot on, though he didn't know it at the time. He had no evidence, no empirical evidence, but he was right.
If i were God, i wouldn't make myself so easy as to be understood by a human. We understand so little, yet we claim to know an awful lot. The Bible claims God made man in his own image. But the Bible wasn't written by a God, it was written by a bunch of geezers. They didn't know. They had no idea. They were pissing in the wind, writing a story. The point (RB), is that their story has touched millions. In many cases for the better. In the case of a Jehova's Witness needing a blood transfusion, probably not so good. The women in my immediate family found great comfort in the church when my Dad died. Did he go to heaven? Not bloody likely! But they believed he did, they believe he has been forgiven, and they probably believe he's watching over them now.
This makes them feel better. In every way. Do i then thrust a copy of The God Delusion in their hands? Would that make me intelligent? No, it would make me someone so high on their own sense of self importance they've completely missed the point, and it would make me someone i'd rather not know.
Yes the Pope's visit is costing the taxpayer. So is the royal family. So is being in the EU. So are junkies and alcoholics. So are speed traps and Community Police Officers. So are green schemes and carbon credits. Take your pick, none of it is really an argument. Sadly we don't get to choose where our tax money goes. You are entitled to an opinion on it, but yours is no better or worse than mine, nor Abu Hamza's, nor the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor Stephen Hawking and definitely not Richard Dawkins'.
If religion inspires people to do good then of course that's a good thing. But religion definitely feels it has a right of way where scientific discussion is concerned, and I believe that every mainstream religion relies on indoctrination and an agenda to spread, even if only a little bit.
ReplyDeleteYou say above that a person's faith is more important to them than presented evidence - is that not dangerous? Surely that's tantamount to them simply not listening. Humans are clearly hardwired to work to understand where we came from and why we're here. I think that's a very important task for us to take on, and where will we get by ignoring evidence?
In the 21st century, I have no problem with saying that a bunch of shepherds from the middle east were wrong with their answer to that question. The theory of creation, of God, is not compatible with our modern day understanding of the world.
Well done for exposing the wave of 'fundamental' atheists though - those who seem every bit solely intent on winding up religious people, which is certainly a lot worse than, say, a Christian who does not enforce their beliefs on others.
My atheism, however, is not a faith. It is a conclusion I have personally come to after weighing up the material available to me. And I will change my mind the very second that creationism is proved scientifically - drawing a line between myself and my fundamental counterparts.