Rigidity and Religiosity

In a 2002 study, researchers at the University of Nijmegen examined the relationship between moral attitudes and religiosity. Individual educational attainment also affects moral attitudes, typically resulting in more liberal and tolerant attitudes. These results are nothing new because many studies have demonstrated moral rigidity in the religious and the less educated.

However, the researchers also observed variation in the moralism-religiosity relationship within different countries. They found that the correlation between individual religiosity and moral attitudes was stronger in the more religious countries compared to the more secularized countries. The liberalizing impact of education was stronger in more religiously heterogeneous countries compared to religiously homogeneous countries, and stronger in long-standing democracies compared to short- standing democracies. [s]

When compared to other Western nations, including neighbouring Canada, religiosity and moral rigidity in the United States ranks alongside the developing nations. Contrary to its self-congratulatory hubris, the US has very little to brag about because its citizens display a level of ignorance that places it at the bottom of the Western intellectual totem pole.

The image at top left is from David Wark Griffith's 1916 movie "Intolerance". In ironic contrast, the image at right is a scene from Griffith's 1915 movie "The Birth of a Nation", which epitomizes American intolerance toward blacks and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. I doubt that Griffith ever saw the irony.

Quo Vadis?
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Spirituality, Religiosity, and Madness

Spirituality has been defined as the experience of an inner sense of something greater than oneself, or as sensing a meaning to existence that transcends one's immediate circumstances.

Despite being a confirmed atheist, I am not immune to such experiences. Obviously I am cognitively aware that the world of nature is greater than myself. To believe otherwise would make me a megalomaniac! Besides, how could a part be greater than the whole?

However, the wonderful, euphoric feeling that nature is greater than I comes upon me less often. Sensing a transcendent meaning has come to me only in dreams or under the influence of certain psychoactive chemicals – both being altered states of consciousness. Shamans know all about this phenomenon when they use mood altering drugs to induce spiritual hallucinations during religious ceremonies. Even those who have never taken a hallucinogen have probably experienced dreams that convey a strong sense of having uncovered a deeper meaning to life – only to have the answer to the mystery dissipate rapidly upon awakening!

We have numerous different understandings of religion. Religion deals with the same subject matter as spirituality, yet it is not equivalent. On this blog, religion is taken to mean the system of dogmatic teachings that have arisen out of an assumption that the supernatural actually exists. That is, religious systems are built upon superstitious beliefs in magical powers.

Religious rites, like any rites, can induce a sense of peace or invoke passion. This emotional evocation speaks more of our communal attachment to symbols than it does to any valid existence of the supernatural. To understand what I mean, think of your reaction to hearing your national anthem played when one of your countrymen has won Olympic gold.

Reliogiosity is not equivalent to spirituality, though both can coexist in one individual. Atheists can have spiritual experience and religious individuals can lack spiritual experiences.

The psychology of religiosity is intriguing, as are the psychopathologies, such as schizophrenia that appear to be related to religiosity. Why do some individuals seems so prone to spiritual and/or religious convictions?

V.S. Ramachandran and his team studied the increased religiosity of sufferers of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). The results of the study showed a greater arousal in the temporal lobe epilepsy sufferers in response to religious words as compared to the non-religious. The non-religious were more aroused by sexual words, while religious control groups were aroused by religious and sexual words [w]. The medial temporal lobe sits very close to the amygdala, which is our primitive 'emotional' nucleus that mediates emotional reactions and modulates emotional memories. Ramachandran conducted the study because he had observed a strong correlation between TLE and obsessive religious convictions.

Of course, this is not to say that all who hold strong religious convictions are suffering temporal lobe epilepsy or taking hallucinogens. Ramachandran's research merely points to a possible mechanism for the observation that a higher percentage of those with TLE than of the population at large are hyper-religious. It is to say that humans both seek to comprehend patterns and are emotional beings. In the absence of knowledge to explain phenomena in the natural world, it is scarcely surprising that our various ancestors invented mythologies.

That humans have continued to cling to religious beliefs despite vast advances in understanding of natural phenomena merely underlines the emotionality that humans invest in magic-thinking. At least we have stopped blood sacrifices to make the sun continue to shine and no longer believe that horse-drawn chariots drag the sun across the sky!

Quo Vadis?
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FOL-ly

We the Contributors, in order to avoid repeating ourselves, have created a section devoted to explicating the Fallacies of Logic into which all arguers fall from time to time.

The Declaration against Ignorance

When in the Course of human thought it becomes necessary for one group to deny any facts which could connect them to truth and to assume among the fantasies of religiosity, the separate and lesser cognition to which Religious Dogma and Claims of a God drive them, disrespect for the knowledge attained by mankind requires that they should deny the evidence which impels them to prevaricate.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans make errors, that they are endowed by evolution with certain unalienable propensities, that among these are Lies, Taking Liberties with Facts, and the creation of Mythologies.

...... with apologies to the Founding Fathers and to that sensible Englishman whose political philosophy they appropriated.

A Fallacy of Logic, or "FOL-ly", is, very generally, an error in reasoning. There are several very good websites that deal with fallacies.

The following fallacies, amongst many others, are commonly encountered in intelligent [sick] design theory and other peeve-topics on this website:
ɷ ad hominem
ɷ Argument from Ignorance
ɷ Argumentum ad antiquitatem
ɷ Argumentum ad nauseam
ɷ Argumentum ad numeram
ɷ Appeals to Emotion
ɷ Appeal to False Authority
ɷ Argumentum ad novitatem
ɷ Circular argument
ɷ Fallacy of Composition
ɷ Denial
ɷ Doublespeak
ɷ Fallacies of Association
ɷ Fallacy Fallacy
ɷ False Dichotomy
ɷ God of the Gaps
ɷ Irrelevance : ignoratio elenchi
ɷ Misleading Quotes
ɷ Red Herring
ɷ Shifting the Burden of Proof
ɷ Shifting Etymons
ɷ Slippery slope
ɷ Straw Man Fallacy
ɷ Sweeping generalization

Quo Vadis?
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Ex Ducare

In a scene in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", Edinburgh schoolmarm Jean Brodie is under attack from headmistress Miss MacKay.

The dialogue runs something like this:
Jean Brodie: "Education is from the Latin, ex and ducare, meaning leading out."
Miss MacKay: "I wish there were a little more putting in!"

(Maggie Smith won a well-deserved Oscar for her role in this Jay Presson Allen adaptation of the multi-layered play based on Muriel Spark's novel.)

The key point of the book/play/movie is encapsulated when Miss Brodie says, "Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life."

Proponents of religion recognize this credulity and malleability of children when they campaign to insert religious teachings into the classroom or create dinosaur lie-oramas.

Modern education is, of course, probably more about putting in than leading out, yet both seem important at the university level. Critical thinking skills certainly seem particularly vital in an electronic age of unedited-crap-bombardment.

Although the US boasts some of the highest ranked universities in the world when comparisons are based on quality of research output, American 15-year olds rank dismally low in math (25th-28th), reading (12th-23rd), and science (20th-27th). The low rankings were reported for a 2003 comparison of more than 250,000 15-year old students from 41 countries. Why the discrepancy?

I have not found a posted explanation, but the answer probably lies in the mega-buck funding of America's top research universities. Take a look at the research scientists, post-graduate fellows, and graduate students of the top science research labs and you will quickly notice that the labs are heavily weighted with foreign-trained scientists. The US is draining brains from other nations because it has the funds to attract top scientists. This does not necessarily mean, though, that the quality of American university graduates stacks as high as the standards of research publications would suggest.

Another quality comparison can be performed by examining science course materials on university websites (.edu). The better American universities do provide high quality material, but many lecture notes from lesser colleges indicate that the courses for which they are posted are low in quality and informational content. By comparison, British (.ac.uk) websites suggest much more demanding undergraduate courses.

No wonder the usual inverse relationship between science education and religiosity fails in the US. It appears that many American universities provide a less than rigorous basic education in the natural sciences. Couple inadequate educational standards with the vehement creationism and anti-science machinations of religious fundamentalists and it is little wonder that the US has not progressed far since the ludicrous Scopes "monkey trial".

ɷ Inverse Correlations

Quo Vadis?
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