Toddler preacher

I found this on Greg Laden's blog at Science Blogs. I had a much different reaction than the commenters did. I won't embed the video, because this link also leads to a funny version with subtitles.

In general, I like Greg's blog. I enjoy dissing religion as much as anybody this side of Robert G. Ingersoll, and he talks about other interesting subjects. Greg's headline for this was "Yes, folks, it isn't just the priests engaged in the whole child abuse in the name of religion thing," and the entire commentary was "First, the horrific, over the top, original video:," and "Then, the funny version:."

The second one was funny, and the first one was over the top, but it was not horrific. It shows a toddler on stage in a church pretending to be a preacher. He has the moves down. He looks and sounds like a 2-year-old preacher bringing them home to Jesus. You can't make out many words (which makes the funny subtitles possible), but he has the intonations, so you could believe it was just poor sound quality making you miss words. He held the microphone to his mouth and stomped around the stage, doing a little James Brown stutter step as he passed behind the piano. He waved, he shouted, he hopped around, he twisted his little body. Adults shadowing him were feeding him lines, which he tried to repeat. People cheered and shouted, and at the end, he got a big hug from the preacher before he left the stage.

Commenters on the blog agreed with Greg.

• "It takes a good bit of abusive conditioning to reduce little kids and babies to this."
• "That's just child abuse. How could they believe that baby is saying anything meaningful. They are delusional."
• "They also believe that the most important knowledge humanity would ever need was given to a bunch of superstitious goat-herders over two and a half thousand years ago - I can't say I'm all that surprised."
• "It takes only minutes for a toddler to become a popular theologian. It takes decades for a dedicated student to become a respected scientist. This shows the fundamental difference between religion and science: one is making shit up, the other if finding things out."

I think they miss the entire point. I think the people in the church weren't looking at this kid as a preacher but as a toddler showing off for his parents' friends, and they were helping him pretend. I believe that these people's religious views are as false as the Greeks', but I believe they can't help it. It doesn't seem to hurt them personally much, though when it influences public policy it's always in the wrong direction, so we have to keep them away from policy, but they make enough money, have stable enough marriages (though not as stable as as atheists, on average), raise kids not to steal and kill any more than any other group, and are by and large happier in their ignorance than we are in our incremental knowledge system that approaches the Truth. (Do I need to put irony brackets around that? I thought not.)

Maybe I'm giving the parishioners too much credit, but I doubt very much that any of them believed the kid knew what he was saying. They were laughing at  him.

So while I think teaching this kind of religion to the kids is harmful in the general sense that knowing the truth is a Good and in the particular sense of creating voters with false ideas about, well, everything, it's not child abuse. It's giving a kid a chance to show off for the grown-ups, and that's cool.

Of course, if I'm wrong about this, and it turns out they regularly have him preach, because they think he's filled with the near-words of god, then I'll have to reevaluate my views of the parishioners. It's still not child abuse, but it would be dumber on their part.

Another prayer study

An associate professor in the religious studies department at Indiana University Bloomington went to Mozambique, to a Pentecostal faith healing group specializing in healing the blind and deaf. They tested the hearing and vision of some people, watched as the faith healer put his hands on them and made their ears hear and their eyes see. Then they published this in a journal as finding that proximity of the prayer is key to having it work.

I think it shows some people are susceptible to being gulled by faith healers. The people they tested were shills, and the people doing the "healing" were frauds who put one over on the "researchers."

Superstitions can be good for you

About 35 years ago, I had a friend who was interested in astrology, and he got me to take an astrology class with him. I read books and cast horoscopes and came to the conclusion that astrology works. That is, you can go to a competent astrologer and learn true things about yourself that you did not know.

Of course, it has nothing to do with the stars. Their random position in the sky is a mandala to structure the conversation, a coach's list of plays one might call  in a given circumstance. A "competent astrologer" is a cold reader. It's a carnie trick. A skilled cold reader can, indeed, direct a conversation about you that will give you new insight into your character. I suspect this is the basis of psychoanalysis.

Now imagine a world in which everybody believes in astrology, believes the stars' and planets' positions in the sky affect our daily lives. If people saw that Mercury was in retrograde (which is supposed to hinder all types of communication), not only would they attribute any lost mail to Mercury (and ignore the mail that got through), but it is also likely that more mail would be lost than usual, because it would be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Knowing the likelihood of lost mail might make people more careless. Or people might be more expansive and loving when Jupiter is in conjunction with the Moon, because they expect to be.

In such a world, astrology would look true. It might as well be true.

Which brings me to this study on superstition. They had 28 college students who believed or did not believe in good luck (about 80% did) putt a golf ball into a hole and told some they were using a lucky ball and some that they were using the same ball everybody else had. Then 51 kids did a motor-dexterity task putting balls in holes by tilting a box. Some were told the observer would keep his fingers crossed, and others were just told to start. Then they took 41 kids who had a lucky charm and had  them do a task with or without it.

The kids with the lucky ball, or who had been told the observer had his fingers crossed, or who had their lucky charm with them did better.

So it appears that believing a superstition can make you perform better. Or worse, if you've lost your lucky charm.

This has an obvious application to religion. People who believe their god will make them strong might well be stronger than people who do not.

Copycatting is universal

You know that TV thing, maybe a Nova, where they showed some chimps and some human kids how to manipulate a box in a complicated manner to get a grape or an M&M? And then they took the covers off the sides of the box, so it was obvious that the complications were unnecessary; you could just do one thing, and the grape rolled out. Chimps then went straight for the food in the simplest way, but the human kids kept doing it the complicated way they had been shown how.

The knock on that has been that the studies involved middle-class kids in western culture. This study compared Australian kids with Kalahari Bushmen kids and got the same result.

I think we see a theory of the origin of ritual here. We keep doing things the same way we saw someone do them, even though it should be obvious that our particular process is irrelevant to the outcome. After all, what the kids were doing worked. They got the candy. Why fix it if it's not broken?

And since oral transmission is imperfect, you can see how religious rituals might evolve, or mutate, into elaborate procedures to call on god, though it should be perfectly obvious that prayer doesn't work. A high proportion of people a tornado kills in any trailer park in Mississippi had prayed to god that very day, and the prayer ritual didn't help them a bit. Maybe they got the ritual wrong that day.

Makes you wonder how much of our adult lives is taken up by performing rituals that have nothing to do with the outcomes we're trying to influence. I heard a story not long ago on NPR about a woman who prepared a roast for cooking by cutting off the tip. It turned out her mother had done so because her roasting pan was too short for the size roast she cooked. Maybe our lives consist of cutting off the tip of the roast or manipulating the box. My, what an unpleasant thought this early in the morning. I think I'll go to my happy place.

UPDATE: It was my partner, not NPR, and it was a ham, not a roast, and the oven was too small, not the roasting pan. So much for my memory.

What I wonder about child abuse in the Catholic church

What I wonder is, with all the evidence now available about Bishops and higher ecclesiastics moving child-abusing priests around from job to job, why is this a matter for civil action by the victims and not criminal investigation by the police and FBI? Isn't there probable cause to believe that church officials knew about serious crimes and not only didn't go to the cops but actually facilitated the continuation of the crimes? Why hasn't the FBI subpoenaed church personnel records? In this respect, how is the Catholic church not a criminal enterprise?

Worst foster system nominee: No Muslims allowed

In Maryland, the foster care system has refused to allow a woman to be a foster parent because she is a Muslim and therefore won't have pork in her house, which violates the kid's right to eat pork. No, really, that's what they said.

We are denying your application because of concerns raised by statements made during the home study interview, specifically your explicit request to prohibit pork products within your home environment. Although we respect your personal/religious views and practices, this agency must above all ensure that the religious, cultural and personal rights of each foster child placed in our case are upheld. Your statement indicates that there could potentially be a discrepancy between your expectations and the needs and personal views of a child placed in your care.

As Ed Brayton said on his blog, where I found this, "Unless they also refuse every vegetarian and every Jewish person, this is pretty clearly a matter of discrimination."

As the current expression says, I am gobsmacked by this. How could any person with normal cognitive abilities imagine that putting a foster kid in a house that does not serve pork (or coffee, or Coca Cola, or okra, or brown rice, or Skittles, or any particular food) is harmful to the kid? How can they construe the first amendment to the constitution to mean there is a religious, cultural, or personal right to eat pork?

Does it mean that a Muslim or Jewish kid cannot be put into a Christian, Buddhist, Hindi, or atheist home, because they might see other family members eat pork?

Whoever made this decision should be given a nice job somewhere where he or she* won't be forced to make constitutional judgments.

*I first wrote "he, for it must be a he," and then I remembered Michele Bachmann.

Atheist Barbie

I saw this on Greg Laden's blog.  Blag Hag designed it.
 

Smarter men are more monogamous, liberal, atheist, and nocturnal

I hope this is true, because it sure matches my prejudices. The findings of the study are that

More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence.

The claim is that dumber people are more likely to think we should do things the way we always have, and smarter people can think of and embrace new ways of doing things. This does not go so deeply that intelligence is correlated with any preferences we have had since we were, say, Australopithecines.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

More intelligent		Less intelligent
More nocturnal		Less nocturnal
Atheists		Believers
Adolescent IQ 106		Adolescent IQ 95
Very liberal		Very conservative
Adolescent IQ 103		Adolescent IQ 97
Not at all religious		Very religious
Value given to sticking to one member of the opposite sex
Smarter Men	Smarter Women	Dumber men	Dumber women
More monogamous	Same as dumber	Less monogamous	Same as smarter

One reason I like this is it fits into a general idea I have about people, following Jane Jacobs' analysis in Systems of Surval. That is, you can usefully divide people and human activities in to two broad groups. She calls these commercial and guardian. There's lots of caveats and slopping back and forth within and among people, but basically you have liberals and conservatives. It is natural that, because I am a serous liberal, I should think liberal ideas are right, and people who agree with me are smarter than those who don't.  So it is natural that this study should appeal to me.

I'll wallow around in it a bit and then step back and see what sticks, because it's too much in agreement with my prejudices to take at face value.

UPDATE: After mulling this a bit, if this is true, conservatism is the historic state of humankind, and liberalism and atheism are a new invention. I wonder how new. Presumably at some point when the occasional people born with liberal mutation didn't die off.   With language, grading back to apes' grunts? With H. sap. sap, call it 50,000 years ago or so, when art and technology also bloomed? When villages became cities big enough that nobody knew everybody, maybe 4000-3000 BC?

I wish the interesting questions were easier. No, I don't. I just wish I understood them better.

Brain damage affects spirituality

I've pointed out a number of times that the extent of one's religiosity has a large biological component. Not what religion but how deeply religious is heritable. In a recent study, researchers gave personality tests to people before and after surgery to remove a brain tumor. The tests specifically measured "the personality trait called self-transcendence," which "reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one's self as an integral part of the universe as a whole."

They found that damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions caused an increase in self-transcendence. The authors say what's important about this is that a stable personality trait can be affected by a lesion in the brain, then maybe we could find ways to affect the brain to alleviate personality disorders. (Insert obligatory praise of what science can do for us and caveat about Big Brother here.)

Ouija boards as tools of the devil

It seems Hasbro is selling a hot pink ouija board, and the religious right is unhappy, because:

"There's a spiritual reality to it and Hasbro is treating it as if it's just a game," said Stephen Phelan, communications director for Human Life International, which bills itself as the largest international pro-life organization and missionary worldwide. "It's not Monopoly. It really is a dangerous spiritual game and for [Hasbro] to treat it as just another game is quite dishonest." Phelan, who has never played the game, said the Bible explicitly states "not to mess with spirits" and that using a Ouija board will leave a person's soul vulnerable to attack.

"All Christians should know, well everyone should, that it's opening up a person to attack, spiritually," he said. "Christians shouldn't use it."

Asked how the game differed from magic kits or Harry Potter-themed merchandise, Phelan replied, "The difference is that the Ouija board is actually is a portal to talk to spirits and it's hard to get people to understand that until they actually do it. I don't pretend to know how it works, but it actually does."

Phelan also noted that the pink version of the game is explicitly marketed to young girls who may want to partake in "something dangerous" during a late-night sleepover.

This is just so stupid I can't even be tolerant about it. How can anybody over 7 believe that a ouija board actually lets you contact spirits? Okay, okay, I understand that the intensity of one's religiosity is biological, and that this Phelan person is just blathering out what he can't help himself from believing, so I can't really hold it against him personally, but I can ridicule him, because god, he's dumb.

And he's in charge of communications for an organization that wants to change how people in foreign countries handle abortion. He wants to affect public policy and instill Christian fervor. I wonder how he is at the administrative, non-religious-fervor parts of his job.

Now, I don't think we should do anything worse to him than point out his error and laugh at him. I certainly wouldn't want to prevent him from saying these crazy things, because then somebody might prevent me from saying my crazy things. But I think ridicule is appropriate, because really believing in ouija boards is ridiculous.

Praying makes you more forgiving

I'm sure religionists will draw the wrong conclusion from this study. It found that people who feel they were wronged by a romantic partner and pray for the partner's well being are more forgiving than people who don't pray. They compared it to people who just described the partner and others who thought nice thoughts about the person but didn't pray.

The authors say that, among people who had been praying, they found an increase in "selfless concern," which is a generalized concern for all people. They speculate that when a person feels wronged, having a high selfless concern level lets them forgive more easily.

That's the psychological explanation. If you believe in a god who hears your prayers, then if you specifically ask her to help the person who wronged you, sure it's plausible that that would make you go along with what you have asked god to do.

The biological explanation would be that asking god to be nice to someone releases some hormone in your brain that makes you like the person better. Maybe prayer releases oxytocin somewhere.

But I predict that religionists will say it proves that god hears the prayer and changes the heart of the praying person.

In the past, studies showing the effectiveness of prayer in medical cases have been flawed. This does not claim that prayer affects the person prayed for; it says it affects the person who is praying, which is much more plausible.

IQ and religion

I regularly browse Science Blogs and find all sorts of interesting things, many of which I refer to here. This morning I ran across an extremely interesting post on Gene Expression (that's a blog named Gene Expression, not a blog about gene expression) that briefly refers to a study showing that people who believe the Bible is the word of God have lower verbal skills than those who do not. The Gene Expression post also points to a series of previous posts on IQ, education levels, SAT scores, and type of religion.

Depending on the particular question, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Jews, and Atheists come out on top, and evangelicals and Pentecostals are at the bottom.

There are several immediately obvious questions:

• Does pentecostalism make you dumb, or are dumb people attracted to pentecostalism? 
• Same with education.
• Is the fact that 15% of people change religions related to this?. 
• Is the heritability of religiosity related to the heritability of IQ?
• Are there public policy implications? (It sure argues for the continued separation of church and state.)
• Why in the world would Baha'i score so low in their SATs?

I'd like to go into this more deeply, but I have to get ready for work now; all day meeting today, so no posting during the day. I'd recommend anyone interested in this stuff read the articles at the links above.

Child care as a religious ministry

Here's an interesting case in Pennsylvania, yet another case where I don't know all the facts, but that won't keep me from speculating.

In 1997 the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare closed down a Catholic church's child care operation in its basement. They had 20 kids. The state says all child care centers should follow certain developmental goals. The church says that interferes with their religious freedom. An appeals court has just agreed with the state. I don't.

Believing in Santa (and God)

This is an interview with a reasonable child development teacher at Kansas State U about how to treat Santa Claus. Should we let kids believe in Santa? Sure. "Santa Claus is a shared cultural image of benevolence and kindness and you don't want to undermine that."

I had no problem with my issue believing in Santa. I never told them Santa was real, but I never pointed out specifically that he was not real. As far as I'm concerned, Santa is just one of the cultural things we lay on our winter solstice celebration of the rebirth of the sun, and it's one of the happier ones, so I'm satisfied if everybody under about 6 believes in Santa and then pretends to believe until about 10.

I like to celebrate everything. At our house at Christmas, we put up a tree, strew pine boughs here and there, play Christmas music, and hang lights on the front of the house. We be festive. What I most like to celebrate are the pagan parts: Yule log, presents, tree, lights, brandy. But we also have a crèche on the mantel, a lovely woodblock set, and a dreidel, and a Santa, and a nutcracker, maybe some garden gnomes. We also have an Indonesian magic frog with wings hanging from the bedroom ceiling to ensure no birth defects in children conceived there. (It's worked so far.)

This is from as pure an atheist as you will ever meet. I know none of this stuff is real, but it's fun to play with. A friend talked me into taking an astrology course 30 years ago, and for a couple of years I read pretty deeply in mystical lore. Lots of mystical texts say pretty much the same thing, so if the basic mystical premise (that it is possible to understand the universe by direct perception and to affect it by a power of mind; that includes meditation and prayer) is correct, then we can know quite a bit about the details.

Alas, the basic mystical premise is false. But it's still fun to play with. I don't feel threatened by it. And because I think that such things as the level of one's religiosity are biologically determined, I can't even hold it against anyone that they believe what I think is claptrap. Since my beliefs are also biologically determined, there's no real reason to believe I'm right except that it just seems so clear to me.

It's like memories. Each time you recall an event, your brain reconsolidates the memory. It writes over the previous version of the memory. And if something occurs to change your thoughts about the event, you reconsolidate it as though it were a real memory.  If I ask, what color was his  hat? You might or might not know (since he was not wearing a hat), but you may now "remember" that he did, and you might even remember the color. You can't tell the difference between a "real" memory and a reconsolidated one. All you have in your head is the current version.

So the fact that you have a clear memory of something is no reason to think it's true, and the fact that it seems so clear to me that there is no god doesn't mean there isn't.

Actually, calling myself a pure atheist may be misleading. There are versions of a god that I am agnostic about. I have no reason to believe them, but I have no reason to disbelieve them. These are deist versions, such as the universe being self-aware, and the movements of the galaxies being like parts of our brain or body. Sounds weird, but I guess it's conceivable.

What is not conceivable is a god who knows and cares what we individually do. That's the part I find just crazy. 

But merry Christmas, happy solstice, happy Hanuka, happy Kwanzaa, happy Diwali, and anybody I missed, happy whatever you celebrate.

Worst initiative nominee: Mandatory Christmas music in schools

Merry Susan Hyatt and her brother David Joseph Hyatt have received permission to gather signatures for an initiative (PDF) that would require California public K-12 schools to "provide opportunities to its pupils for listening to or performing Christmas music at an appropriate time of year," with parental notification and an opt-out form.

In other words, they want to make parents fill out and return a special form if they don't want their kids hearing at school that Jesus Christ, the King, has come.

This is the sort of issue where creating the initiative indicates a severe personality disorder; signing it indicates a character defect; but circulating the petitions just means you get a buck or two per signature, and you could give a shit less what it's for.

My favorite part, where mischief might come, is Section 52711

52711. As used in this article, "Christmas music" includes, but is not necessarily limited to, carols, songs, and instrumental works whose subject matter relates to the celebration of the Christmas holiday or to the season during which that holiday is observed.

So Christmas music is music that relates to Christmas, or winter, or not. I can see other religions demanding that Christmas music include Jewish music, or Islamic music. I imagine mandatory Islamic hip-hop, rapping for the glory of Allah. And I can't wait for the Satanists to demand music by Black Sabbath.

Or an atheist principal could say the school is satisfying the regulation by playing Jingle Bells and Winter Wonderland.

On the other hand, I don't mind Christmas music at all, even in schools, maybe especially in schools. I would mind having it and it only required, but I'd just as soon routinely play the songs of every normal religion (that's pretty much all of them, but you'd want to keep out the ones that do human sacrifices or orgies, and the financial scams).

I think whether people believe in God or don't is a genetic or epigenetic accident, so we should treat belief as we treat homosexuality or left-handedness. It's one of the normal ways people are wired, and we can't hold it against them that they have a false belief. In fact, there is probably some evolutionary advantage to the group to have some theists and some atheists. And besides, listening to Joy to the World isn't going to turn somebody into a Christian. I grew up listening to it, and I'm about as serious an atheist as you're going to find.

We added Kwanza to our school celebrations; we should add Diwali and Beltane and Eid al Fitr anybody else's celebration, and play all their religious songs, and not have opt-in or opt-out, just a routine noticing of how some of us celebrate. You don't have to believe the words to like the music.

I extend this to crèches in public squares. When a big chunk of our population have a celebration of their big holiday, why not let them do part of it in the park? Or even a small chunk. Christians can have crèches on public property if I can have a maypole, and if everybody else gets to hold their celebrations there, too, Diwali, and Beltane, and whatever. We should let them have their Christian Pride event in December, and we'll have our Gay Pride event in June on the same grounds

I'd exempt from this privilege any religion that severely outrages public decency, such as child sacrifices, but I'm not sure how to make it so my view of what is outrageous prevails. I would probably be more inclusive than some people and less than others.

So my solution is to ride the pendulum. Become increasingly lenient on what we'll allow until it gets to be a problem, and then scale it back until it starts to chafe. Rinse. Repeat. That could be a general law of how to deal with social issues.

Requiring insurance companies to cover prayer treatments

Now this is crazy. Orrin Hatch, (R-Mesolithic) has slipped into one of the senate health care bills (with co-conspirators John Kerry* and Teddy Kennedy*) a provision that would require insurers to "put Christian Science prayer treatments -- which substitute for or supplement medical treatments -- on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."

We're planning to require payments to religious people for performing religious rituals. There are two big and obvious things wrong with this:

Worst parent nominee: Prayer instead of medicine

As it is in Wisconsin, so is it in Pennsylvania, except this couple will stand trial for manslaughter for choosing prayer over medicine for their dying 2-year-old.

Their defense is they didn't know the kid was that sick. They thought they were praying to cure the flu or a cold, so it's not a religious freedom issue but a dumb parent issue. Frankly, I think that's a decent defense, if true, and I have no reason to doubt it. It's not like the parents had shown intellectual leanings before. They quit school after 9th grade. They work as teachers at their church. I wonder what level.

And we can thank Mr. Darwin for giving us the insight that, to the extent that whatever made these parents do what they did is genetic, there is less of it in the gene pool because of them.

Worst parent nominee: Prayer instead of medicine

Parents in Wisconsin who prayed over their 11-year-old daughter instead of taking her to the doctor were given 6 months in jail after the girl died of treatable but undiagnosed diabetes. The judge said they were good people who made  a bad decision.

"God probably works through other people," (the judge) told the parents, "some of them doctors."

I think this family should be given a Darwin Award rather than jail time.

I'm reminded of the story about a guy whose house was flooded, and a cop car came to rescue him. "No, God will save me." The water rose, and the cops sent a boat. "No, God will save me." The water rose higher, and the cops sent a helicopter. "No, God will save me." The guy drowned, and at the judgment seat, he said to God, "I thought you were going to save me." God said, "I sent a car, I sent a boat, I sent a helicopter ..."

There is a similar story in commentary to the Koran. Ali ibn Abi Talib (husband of Fatima and son-in-law of Mohammed) was sitting outside a mosque when a man rode up on a horse and got off to walk into the mosque. Ali said, "You forgot to tie up your horse." The man said, "I trust in God to look after my horse." Ali said, "No. First tie up your horse, then trust in God."