Wednesday, January 09, 2008

The real story of God, Abraham and Isaac

And God called out, "Abraham!" "Here I am," he replied. And God said, "Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there for a burnt offering on the mountain."

So Abraham gathered wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac, and he took the fire and the knife in his hand; and the two of them went to the mountain. Isaac said to Abraham, "My father." And he replied, "What is it, my son?" And he said, "Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" And Abraham said, "God will provide, my son."

When they came to the place that God had told him about, Abraham built the altar and arranged the wood. Then he bound Isaac and placed him on the altar. Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. Then the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham! Stop! Stop!" But Abraham's dagger had already dug into his son. And so the Lord swoop down from heaven and knocked Abraham to the ground with the force of a gale.

As Abraham lay in the dust the Lord berated him: "Why?! Why in heaven's name were you trying to kill your son, your only son, whom you love?!" And Abraham replied, "But my Lord, you asked me to! It was your will and I was fulfilling it."

And the Lord roared, "You desert idiot! I wasn't after your loyalty; I was testing whether you had the brains to distinguish between what's crazy and what's not! Woe to you for you have failed miserably. Any father who actually went out to kill his own child just because some higher-up told him to ought to be locked up for life! And anyone who employs the Nuremberg Defense is nothing but a groveling, irresponsible, unthinking, pass-the-buck moron! You're a sick man, Abraham. Very, very sick in the head, indeed.

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And Abraham is supposed to be the father of the three "great" monotheisms?

Novelist Salman Rushdie contrasts the Abraham story with one he grew up as child, that of the Muslim emperor Barbur (1483 - 1530 CE) and his son Hamuyan. It is said that when Hamuyan fell gravely ill, Barbur prayed and cried to Allah to take him instead of his son. Soon thereafter Barbur fell ill and as his condition worsened his son recovered. Barbur eventually died. His son lived.

A father's sacrifice that his son may live is worlds apart from the Genesis myth of a father who will without question take his son's life. To say that the Abraham story is perverse is an understatement. It boggles the mind to find an ethicist who will give a thumbs up to (attempted) filicide. On the other hand, Barbur's ultimate self-giving is what any parent in his right mind would do. It is something we "know" is good and right.

Anyone who still says the bible is a perfect book of morals is as unthinking and ethically blind as Abraham.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

I was wrong ... but still I was right

Just got wind of this via Unscrewing the Inscrutable. Here's the latest failed prophecy - cognitive dissonance case. Back in 2004 a lady by the name of Shelby Corbitt published a book simply entitled 2007. It details a prophecy she allegedly received via a dream back in 1986. According to that revelation the Rapture was to occur in September 2007.

It's 2008. Yep, it was a dud. And Shelby knows all too well. In her website, in huge type, she writes:

I SAID :

THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH IS GOING TO HAPPEN, THIS YEAR
2007!!

I WAS WRONG!!!

Just to head off any possible misunderstanding, cognitive dissonance does not mean denial of the situation. One precisely experiences dissonance because one is unable to deny the disconfirming evidence. In this particular case Shelby very much knows and acknowledges that the Rapture did not occur in 2007 as she predicted. The dissonance stems from the fact that she believes she got a prophecy from her deity and from the undeniable fact that it did not come to pass.

Now Shelby can reduce the dissonance by either admitting she did not receive a prophecy--that she was mistaken in interpreting it as such--or she can stick to her belief that she had received a revelation and churn out hypotheses to explain away the failed prophecy.

Her admission of error is laudable. But what in fact is she admitting? That she was wrong in interpreting the dream as a prophecy? The following statements from Shelby tell us that she merely is stating an incontrovertible fact--that the Rapture did not take place as predicted. But she still believes she had been given a prophecy.
I STILL BELIEVE THE PROPHETIC DREAM I HAD WAS FROM GOD. I HAVE TOLD THE DREAM JUST AS GOD GAVE IT TO ME. THE ONLY THING I CAN THINK OF IS THAT I RELEASED THE DREAM AT THE WRONG TIME AND GOT THE BOOK PUBLISHED TOO EARLY. MAYBE THE DREAM HAD SOME KIND OF SYMBOLIC MEANING INSTEAD OF A LITERAL MEANING THAT I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO FIGURE OUT YET. I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHAT I HAVE DONE WRONG AND WHY THE PROPHECY FAILED. I PROMISE ALL OF YOU THAT I DID NOT INTENTIONALLY MEAN TO HURT OR MISLEAD ANYBODY. I PROMISE I DID NOT MAKE UP THE DREAM. I KNOW MANY OF YOU ARE VERY DISAPPOINTED, BUT I ASSURE YOU NO ONE IS AS DISAPPOINTED AS I AM. PLEASE FORGIVE ME IF I HAVE SHAKENED ANYONE'S FAITH WITH THIS PROPHECY. I KNEW I WAS GOING TO GET MUCH OPPOSITION TO THE PROPHECY SO I WAS PREPARED FOR IT AND WAS DETERMINED NO ONE WOULD CHANGE MY MIND. THE CRITICISM REALLY DID NOT BOTHER ME ANY. I STILL BELIEVE IN A RAPTURE OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD BEFORE THE TRIBULATION BEGINS. I STILL BELIEVE IT HAS TO BE SOON BECAUSE OF ALL THE WARS AND FIGHTING AROUND THE WORLD AND THE HATEFULLNESS AGAINST ISRAEL, GOD'S CHOSEN PEOPLE!! I STILL BELIEVE THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH WILL BE IN MY LIFETIME AND IT WILL HAPPEN THE WAY GOD SHOWED ME IN THE DREAM. I STILL BELIEVE GOD WILL SEND A VERBAL VOICE TO WARN THE NATION BEFORE HE COMES BACK. MY TIMING WAS WRONG AND FOR THAT I DO APOLOGIZE. I SHOULD NOT HAVE RELEASED THE PROPHECY WHEN I DID.

(Her use of all caps is quite disturbing. When I see all caps I see crank.)

You can clearly see that even with total failure of the prophecy she does not for a moment doubt that she had a revelation from some supernatural entity. Her core belief is untouched. What she has done is to offer a host of rationalizations (wrong timing, symbolic instead of literal meanings, etc.). The one thing she won't consider is that the dream was simply a dream and nothing more. What she won't entertain is that she's been under the spell of a delusion for the past 21 years.

Back in the 1950s psychologist Leon Festinger infiltrated and studied a group of believers led by a Marian Keech. This group believed that the world was about to end. But for those who were part of their group a spaceship would arrive and fly them off to safety. In anticipation of this event, the die-hard believers among them quit their jobs and sold their property. When the appointed time came and went and no destruction occurred and no aliens arrived, what do you think Mrs. Keech and her group did? Abandon their belief in doomsday and aliens altogether and admitted delusion? As dissonance theory predicts, they kept their core belief intact and rationalized away the failed prophecy. After mulling the situation for a few moments Mrs. Keech came out saying that she had received a new vision: that because of the faith of their small band of believers, the end of world had been averted. Hallelujah, their group had saved the world! Reinvigorated, her followers went out to the streets and proselytized with a renewed zeal. [Mistakes Were Made, p. 12-13]

According to Shelby "I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHAT I HAVE DONE WRONG AND WHY THE PROPHECY FAILED." Oh, don't worry Shelby, you'll think of something. Dissonance theory prophesies just that. You've been at it for 21 years and made your prediction public via your book and website. You're just too heavily invested to quit. You're not going to admit delusion anytime soon. Probably not in your lifetime.

Cognitive dissonance and self-justification

Just finished reading Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Harcourt 2007) written by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. I highly recommend it. You can also listen to an interview on Point of Inquiry where Tavris discusses this book.

When confronted with evidence contrary to one's belief the gut reaction of those who've already invested their hearts and minds in the belief and/or who stand to experience humiliation/embarrassment if they are mistaken, is to justify their belief. They resort to an arsenal of excuses and psychological tricks to defend their belief:

They downplay or dismiss contrary evidence. This is the famous confirmation bias, wherein the person only looks for or at the evidence that supports his/her position, while turning a blind eye to or being hypercritical of those that don't. In one experiment, for instance, a report detailing the pros and cons of capital punishment was given to a group of subjects. It was found that those in favor of capital punishment emphasized the evidence that supported their position. Likewise for those who were not in favor. And both sides downplayed anything in the report that did not support their view. In the end, regardless of the fact that the report contained disconfirming evidence, instead of being overcome with doubt, both camps came out even more convinced of their position! [p.19-20] Confirmation bias is at work whenever our beliefs are challenged. And the more one is entrenched in one's beliefs the more it is employed

The believer may even do mental gymnastics and use the lack of any favorable evidence to convince others/themselves they're correct. During World War 2, when Pres. Roosevelt ordered Japanese-Americans to be detained in camps, General John DeWitt admitted there was no evidence whatsoever that any Japanese-American was sabotaging the war effort against Japan. But DeWitt rationalized, "The very fact that no sabotage has taken place is disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken." [p.20] So guilt is guilt and innocence is guilt. You can imagine the megaton justification necessary to convince themselves that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan and killing and irradiating hundreds of thousands of men, women and children was right and necessary.

And from an entry some time ago, after one of the latest doomsday prophecy failed, the leader of the religious sect House of Yahweh issued this statement:
We previously thought it (the world) would end on the night of September 12th [2006] but it failed to happen. We have given it the next 100 days. Within that period, he says, we're foreseeing powerful nuclear weapons which will strike the world and bring it to an end."
When after a year the vaunted nuclear war was still nowhere in sight, the sect offered the following nonsense: "What actually happened is that a ‘nuclear baby’ was conceived on September 12, 2006." People who have heavily invested themselves in a belief and who have publicly professed their belief are very unlikely to ever drop the belief even when faced with indubitable, incontrovertible disconfirming evidence. Psychologist Leon Festinger's dissonance theory is daily supported by the likes of House of Yahweh.

But why do people dig their heels in? Tavris and Aronson note that most people have a positive self-image of themselves. They consider themselves morally upright people. They see themselves as smart people. They may not think of themselves as geniuses, but they certainly don't consider themselves stupid. Thus, when they do something really bad or stupid, their reaction is not to admit that they have committed a bad or stupid thing, since that contradicts their self-image. Instead, in order to reduce or eliminate the dissonance between how they see themselves and what they have done, they resort to self-justification. They justify their actions such that they are able to convince themselves what they have done isn't really that bad or that stupid. In fact they may go to the extent of convincing themselves they actually did good. In order to get away with this, they may even blame others (the victim of their misdeed for example as in DeWitt's case). We fool ourselves in order that we may live with ourselves. Self-justification is a psychological survival mechanism. But like technology its self-preservation function cuts both ways. It cannot discern when it is warranted and when its use leads to false beliefs and unethical behavior.

In the case of theism, there is simply no evidence that any of the thousand deities of the world exist, there is good scientific evidence that prayers don't work, there is no evidence of souls, there is no evidence for virgin births, no evidence for miracles, no evidence that a realm other than the universe we live in exists. Worse, claims by different religions clash with each other, meaning they cannot all be true simultaneously.

The dogmas of the Catholic Church as enshrined in the Creed are pure fantasy. Ask any theologian how they know any of the declarations therein is true, and he will give you the runaround. He will not be able to give you any evidence whatsoever of its truth. He will not be able to provide means by which you can test its veracity/validity nor provide objective tests/studies that have been conducted. In the end and in so many words, these men ask you to believe because they say so, or because it has been believed in by men before. But then why not believe in Hinduism since those are the very same reasons Hindus believe? Or in Islam? Or in any other theistic religion?

Dissonance theory predicts that those who have invested money, time, effort, etc. in their beliefs will not suddenly deconvert when confronted with rational arguments and evidence. On the contrary. Dissonance theory predicts they will believe even more. Why? Because of their self-image. They unconsciously tell themselves: "I'm not a stupid guy. I can't possibly have wasted 10,20,30,40 years of my life in some delusion. I can't possibly have duped my children by teaching them a bunch of fairy tales. I can't possibly be wrong after having stood in front of hundreds of people and declared my belief. I can't possibly be that gullible to have fallen for flimflam and claptrap. I simply am not that stupid!" And so in order not to fall into a really major depression and face humiliation by admitting that they have been irrational and wrong, they resort to justifications.

Intellectual integrity is a most precious commodity. You will find it in science. Indeed it is sine qua non to progress in science. But you will not find it in theism, for faith is the antithesis of intellectual integrity.