Rachel’s Musings

Crimes committed against women because they are not following religious doctrines are increasing at an alarming rate in Iraq, reports AlterNet: “Violence against women is rampant, rising every day with the power of the militias. Beheadings, rapes, beatings, suicides through self-immolation, genital mutilation, trafficking and child abuse masquerading as marriage of girls as young as nine are all on the increase.” The voices inside Iraq who are speaking out against this violence are themselves threatened with death.      Continue reading this post » » »

I have been fascinated by Ken Miller, the evolutionary biologist who was one of the key witnesses at the Dover trial. Here is this brilliant defender of evolution. And then he’s a Catholic. I just don’t get it! I could maybe understand some New Age mumbo jumbo, but Catholic? Well, the Pew Forum interviewed another great scientist: Francis Collins who is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. The people who brought use the DNA evidence for evolution. Collins is an evangelical Christian. The interview reflects my suspicion that combining Christian faith with science requires quite some mental acrobatics. And a good magic wand: the mystery wand.

Already as a child I had a visceral reaction to that wand. It seemed like whenever I asked too many detailed questions about contradictory things in the bible, I was told “well, God’s ways are mysterious.” Why didn’t God intervene in the Holocaust? Mystery wand waving: he probably had a good reason but as lowly humans can’t understand it. How can he let all this cruel stuff happen? More wand waving. I finally decided that God is either a total jerk or died in anguish over the horrible stuff we’re doing to his creation. Or, well, he just doesn’t exist.

Collins uses the wand when he talks about trying to figure out what the bible means. He rejects simple literal interpretation (at least that!) pointing out that the two creation stories, for example, contradict each other. Both of them are also contradicted by scientific evidence. But, no fear, we got the wand. We just don’t understand the meaning of Genesis! In Collins’ words: “why should we today insist that we know what it means, particularly when the interpretation chosen contradicts a wide variety of data that God has given us the chance to discover through science.” Phew! That was a close one: God gave us data that contradicts the story we think he also gave us. Both can’t be true, so we must just not get the story. Maybe a “day” means a few million years. Maybe. Or maybe it just doesn’t make sense because it was written by human beings several thousand years ago who had no clue about how it really happened. Now we have lots of data that helps us explain how things happened, so we don’t need that outdated story anymore. No God is needed for that explanation and the contradiction is resolved without causing a headache.

Yet, the puzzle remains: Why do these scientists, who I consider smarter than I am, cling to their Christian faith? It just doesn’t make any sense to me (and I don’t think that is a matter of intelligence)! I could understand if they’d say something like “I know it’s all made up. There isn’t really a god but there’s just something about going to church, about the rituals and the community, that I find very helpful in my life.” I can understand that. I get lost with those mental acrobatics that seem just such obvious self-deceptions that I cannot comprehend how someone can make those somersaults and keep a straight face. Maybe it’s an evolutionary adaptation of biologists…

I thought Barack Obama’s speech on race, racism, Rev. Wright, and hope was very well thought-out and very moving. Yet, every time he mentioned his strong ties to religion I cringed. Sam Harris has done a great job of commenting on Obama’s speech from a religious standpoint.

Some excerpts:

Obama did not say that religion’s effect on our society, and on the black community especially, has been destructive–and where it has seemed constructive it has generally taken the place of better things. Religion unites, motivates, and consoles beleaguered people not with knowledge, but with superstition and false promises. Surely there is a better way to bring people together in the 21st century. The truth is, despite the toothsomeness of his campaign slogan, we are not yet the people we have been waiting for. And if we don’t start talking sense to our children, they won’t be the ones we are waiting for either.

Harris also points out Christianity’s support of slavery, which Obama did not mention. Or how Christian churches in the South kept racism and hatred alive.

Harris poignantly ends his post with these thoughts:

Despite all that he does not and cannot say, Obama’s candidacy is genuinely thrilling: his heart is clearly in the right place; he is an order of magnitude more intelligent than the current occupant of the Oval Office; and he still stands a decent chance of becoming the next President of the United States. His election in November really would be a triumph of hope.

But Obama’s candidacy is also depressing, for it demonstrates that even a person of the greatest candor and eloquence must still claim to believe the unbelievable in order to have a political career in this country. We may be ready for the audacity of hope. Will we ever be ready for the audacity of reason?

We still have a long way to go despite the hope that Obama brings to the table.

While leaving Buddhism behind, I thought that at least meditation might be something useful to keep. Jon Kabat-Zinn developed a secular version of meditation with his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. MBSR seemed to be based on clinical evidence. Yet, while paging through Mind Myths, I came across a section written by Barry L. Beyerstein entitled “Is Meditation Good for You?” (You can read the whole chapter online.) Although, he focuses on Transcendental Meditation - simply because it is billed as scientifically grounded - Beyerstein makes the point that meditation as a relaxation technique is no more beneficial than simply relaxing. He writes:

Reviewing the literature on the alleged psycho-therapeutic benefits of meditation, Delmonte and Kenny agreed that meditation can help induce relaxation and alleviate mild anxiety, but they concluded that “there is no compelling evidence that meditation is associated with unique state effects compared with other relaxation procedures.”

I can only find citations of the 1985 Delmonte and Kenny study online and the only full one is in French. But trying to find their article led me to another meta analysis of research on meditation from 2007: an evidence based report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The abstract cautions:

Many uncertainties surround the practice of meditation. Scientific research on meditation practices does not appear to have a common theoretical perspective and is characterized by poor methodological quality.

In their executive summary, they write that

the results of the three highest quality trials [...] examining, respectively, Mindfulness meditation, RR [Benson's Relaxation Response], and Yoga are inconclusive with respect to the effectiveness of meditation practices. [...] The therapeutic effects of meditation practices cannot be established based on the current literature.

It looks like meditation is just another tool that can be easily packaged and therefore sold. Thus it is purported to be better for us than simply sitting in a comfy chair with a cub of hot chocolate and a good book, or listening to relaxing music, or just staring into the clouds. Now I wonder if there is anything left in Buddhism that is worth exploring in the modern world…

Update: Please see this comment to find out more about newer studies (and the follow-ups). Unfortunately, these studies were presented at a conference and are not peer-reviewed. The summaries, except for one, do not include information on sample size, so it is difficult to assess if these newer studies are indeed addressing the concerns raised in the meta-analysis cited above. Benedict Carey wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times about the increasing use of mindfulness meditation in therapy despite the lack of scientific studies supporting its usefulness.

While walking along to get some errands done, I passed an accident. Three cars had somehow collided in an intersection. One police officer was already on the scene and he was obviously calling for more help. As I was walking further, an ambulance passed, probably on it’s way to the scene of the accident (though I had not seen anything that indicated more than some severely damaged cars). On my way back home, I passed the same intersection. They were now redirecting traffic. I realized that the accident must’ve been more severe than I had originally thought after only a cursory look. Then I remembered Tom Cruise’s comments about accidents: “As you drive past an accident, it’s not like anyone else, you know you have to do something about it [...] because you know you’re the only one who can help.” No, Tom Cruise has not used the money he earned as an actor to pursue a medical career. He is talking about Scientology. Apparently, the Church of Scientology uniquely enables its members to help at sites of accidents. Don’t worry about police officers. Don’t even expect help from paramedics. Just call for a Scientologist and everything will be all right. Such outdated thinking is simply mind-boggling to me. How can anybody, especially someone with the influence of a Tom Cruise, say crap like that? The release of the Tom Cruise video has sparked a debate about Scientology (or rather reenergized that debate). More than a debate, really. A debunking of the myths they’re trying to spread with the help of spokesmen like Cruise. It looks like there is a groundswell of anti-Scientology building despite the fear of reprisals (that, I admit, I have, too). Many of us are tired of being bullied into silence by religious fundamentalists (here is an interesting video on how CoS does that, filmed in the late 1990s, about Scientology in France). It is time to take a stand by not being afraid to debunk Scientology, tell the truth about them, and, of course my favorite, come out as atheists to show that rational living is not only possible but also ethical.

(Note that Germany has moved to ban Scientology… If only they’d close day care centers by the Catholic Church or the Protestants, too, they’d really move in the direction of preventing early childhood religious indoctrination.)

Just released on DVD, Nova’s show “Intelligent Design on Trial” chronicles the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania where parents and science teachers fought the edict of a religiously driven school board to read a 1-minute statement that Intelligent Design (ID) is an alternative theory to evolution. The show explains in good-old Nova fashion the background of evolution while recreating parts of the trial. The witnesses on the side of evolution present their case first. One of their key witnesses was biologist Ken Miller who educated the judge and the journalists covering the trial about the breath-taking facts of the theory of evolution. He points out how evolution had been threatened by genetics, when that field was a science in its infancy. Instead of debunking Darwin’s theory, genetics turned out to support it remarkably. Another witness was Philosopher Barbara Forrest who probably dealt the harshest blow to ID by showing that it simply is Creationism in new clothes (which the U.S. Supreme Court only in 1987 ruled to be incompatible with teaching science). In subpoenaed drafts of the textbook the ID people were trying to force onto Dover students, she found the same definition for ID before and after the 1987 Supreme Court ruling: Before, that definition was defining creationism; after the ruling it defined ID. She even found words that had evolved from creationism to intelligent design but only imperfectly. Obviously, nobody had spell checked the draft…

From the ID side, the key witness was, of course, Michael Behe and his idea of irreducible complexity. It is almost saddening to watch how his testimony imploded: His assertions rested on ignoring evidence, which was presented to him by one of the lawyers from the evolution side. In volumes. It was difficult even for Behe to continue to ignore that evidence when it was right in front of him. In a court room. Irreducible complexity is simply bogus, especially in the example he brings up. And so the whole case for ID goes down the tube.

Judge John Jones, who was appointed by George W. Bush, ruled that ID is not a scientific theory and that teaching it in school would introduce religion. Thus it is unconstitutional for ID to be taught in public school. His ruling was greeted with insults (a former Dover School Board Member called him a “clown” who should sit on a “circus bench”) and death threats. Apparently, those people who think there is no good without God become immoral as soon as somebody points out reality to them.

Sidenote: Ken at Open Parachute has an interesting commentary on Behe’s book, “Darwin’s Black Box.” He argues that the book is rather depressing because it is lacking the usual forward moving ideas from science. “God” as the answer to science question is a depressing discussion stopper.