Does Religion Cause Violence?

“Does religion cause violence? Yes!” This is the starting point of the atheist narrative that seeks to indict religion on the ground of its (allegedly) great potential to harm. It has been repeated by atheists so many times that the so-called New Atheists who claim to put reason, logic and evidence before all else have abandoned reason, logic and evidence in order to make their accusation about religion. But as I have said in the past and have to say again because I actually care about reason, logic and evidence, it is not religion that causes violence.

In order to determine if religion actually causes violence, it is worth asking if there are ever instances in which religion has nothing to do with violence. Well, yes, such examples would be too numerous to mention. But, let’s mention some anyway: Does a man ever attack another man over an insult? Yes. Does a man ever hit a woman in order to have power over her? Yes. Do people ever trample each other on Black Friday in order to be the first to get a deal? Yes. Do sports fans ever riot after their team wins a championship? Yes. Do neighboring territories or countries ever go to war over land or some other resource? Yes. And most importantly, has any atheist ever harmed another atheist? I’m betting on ‘yes.’

Even if New Atheists want to assert that religion is the cause of most harm in the world, they are still wrong. Many of the armed conflicts in the world today have nothing to do with religion; while Boko Haram and the Islamic State (ISIS) may be making headline news, any number of ethnic and civil wars are actually piling up more bodies than the Islamic extremists. Even historically, 87 of the world’s greatest atrocities had little to nothing to do with religion (according to scholar Matthew White). In the 20^th Century, WWI and WWII racked up a higher body count than any religious war and both wars had nothing to do with religion. So why aren’t New Atheists acknowledging the evidence contrary to their claims? Is it because they have an agenda? Probably. How can we tell?

For one thing, you’ll never hear a New Atheist assert that religion makes people commit decent acts, like feed the homeless. If you then ask a New Atheist why a religious person would feed the homeless, you’ll be given an answer that has anything to do with it BUT religion, most likely that the given person is a decent person to begin with. Hmm, okay, but if that’s the case isn’t it possible that a religious person could act indecently or even violently for reasons that actually have nothing to do with their religious beliefs? And, even in cases where people claim God told them to kill other people, isn’t it at all possible that such people are indecent or have violent tendencies to begin with? Because if not, what New Atheists are asserting is that religion can compel someone who is otherwise a pacifist to commit terrible deeds. Problem is, there is no evidence whatsoever to back up this claim. Even the famous Stanford prison experiment, if pointed to by New Atheists as evidence – which would be ridiculous – merely implies that when people are given the chance to have power over others, they take it. Why? Because this desire is ingrained in our biology (at least, this appears to be the case, generally speaking). Human beings are still ‘wired’ for violence as well, as the billions worldwide viewing the Super Bowl and Hollywood shoot-em-ups every year can attest to.

When religious people become violent, it seems to me (and this is admittedly armchair psychology) that what is actually taking place is this: They are trying to control or suppress another person or group for the sake of their own survival, even if such a threat is incorrectly perceived, this is not a behavior unique to the religiously inclined. Religion then simply becomes a social acceptable excuse to commit violence (socially acceptable to members of the perpetrator’s group). If religion were abolished, then some other excuse for violence would take its place.

Claiming religion causes violence is akin to claiming that something like alcohol can turn a happy-go-lucky average Joe into an angry drunk. Only, angry drunks are already angry people to begin with who suppress their anger in order to operate within the confines of the prevailing social contract.

In much the same way that guns don’t kill people, religion doesn’t cause violence. People cause violence. Granted, some tools make it easier to rise to violence, but indecent people will always find a way to act indecently. Religion isn’t the problem; biology is.

Not Another Comic Reboot!

I just read the news that Marvel, the comic book company, is planning to end the Marvel Universe (all of them) as we know it in 2015 with their Secret Wars mini-series. I admit that I have long loved the idea of superheroes as they provide a particular means for telling fantastic stories. I have long loved characters like Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, the Hulk and Iron Man because I identify with them on some level (notice there are no DC comic book characters on my short list, which is not to say I’ve never enjoyed DC comics). But I stopped reading comic books years ago as comic book writers and other story tellers started going in for reboots more often as they apparently became displeased with what they’ve tried to give readers. As I lamented some time ago, why can’t the story ever be the story? I became particularly enraged by these storytelling misfires when the movie Spider-Man 3 re-wrote the story of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben’s death for absolutely no good reason. With Marvel’s latest news – which DC Comics has already tried with mixed results several times – I am enraged again.

As is ever the case, story tellers often begin a story with no ending in mind and this is perhaps the most cardinal sin in all of writing, regardless of the medium. As it pertains to comic books, it’s as if writers take on a hero, change a few of their previously essential plot points in order to get readers interested enough to buy the hero’s latest adventures and coast until the hero’s readership dies off (again). This is the essence of what Marvel is trying to do this year, but on a grand scale. Their hopes for destroying all their comic universes and combining all those universe’s best elements are ambitious to say the least, only you can’t help but wonder what is going to happen as soon as the editors decide, you know, we don’t like what we’ve done. Cue the reboot and find a way to undo what we did with Secret Wars back in 2015! You don’t need a crystal ball to figure this one’s a’ comin’. It’s like placing a bet on whether Wolverine, Marvel’s most popular character who was killed off in 2014, will ever be seen again. I’m sure Secret Wars will rectify that mistake.

I am quite sick of it. You don’t see anyone re-writing The Lord of the Rings or see Peter Jackson deviating too much from the original book’s lore in his LOTR movies because the story was written right the first time. (Which immediately makes me wonder how long before 50 Shades of Grey gets rebooted. Oh, wait, that was already a reboot of Twilight. Sigh.) I am seriously pleading with comic book writers to decide on what they want to do with a character, from start to finish, and be proud of what they’ve written, so proud that they don’t want their stories altered. Constantly altering characters deprives their stories of any impact, as demonstrated by Peter Parker regaining his secret identity despite the events of Marvel’s Civil War mini-series. I want to be able to feel that the things that happen to a character, although I know they are fictional, are real and that it matters and will be remembered. Am I asking too much?

The current state of comic books would be enough to make the government in Orson Welles’ 1984 proud.

Are Human Beings Intelligent?

“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.” Bertrand Russell     

Human beings arrogantly assume they are intelligent creatures having compared themselves to "lower" life forms that haven't invented wheels, money, or TV. Well, birds don't need wheels, monkeys barter sex for food, and lizards didn't write those awful final seasons of "Friends.” To be sure, humans do have a knack for turning abstract thoughts into inventions and for synthesizing information to predict the future. But if that’s all our definition of intelligence* entails, then I will retract what I’m about to say about human intelligence; um, that is, that humans are not intelligent. Sure, on occasion, humans do display an ability to reason, which is the other common requisite for intelligence and is the link between abstract thought and invention. But if we’re talking about how often we collectively exercise the ability to reason, especially in our day to day lives, then we don’t seem all that intelligent as a species. It seems that a number of other so-called intelligences take precedence as we go about our lives; interpersonal intelligence and bodily kinesthetic intelligence, for example. While using reason to create tools and predict the future is great, rare is the person who takes reasoning seriously as a tool for running their lives, much less the lives of anyone else.  

[* - I’m discounting our ability to communicate in a variety of ways as a facet of intelligence as many animals can do as much, though not with the same complexity. But I discount the complexity of human language as well because that complexity also drives misunderstandings.]

We are all aware of the headlines that alert us to common acts of stupidity, such as the man who calls police to report the theft of the marijuana he was illegally growing in his attic; as commonly reported by sources such as News of the Weird and the Darwin Awards. More examples of human stupidity include building huge cities in earthquake prone areas. Stupid. Living in a trailer home in Tornado Alley? Stupid. Giving teachers paychecks that are dwarfed by multi-million dollar high school drop-out athletes and rappers because the human need to be entertained is greater than the human need to be skilled or educated? Stupid. Oh, and have you ever heard Celion Dion cover AC/DC? I’m not even kidding! The average human is about as smart as a box of rocks, and that’s probably giving people too much credit as well as being an insult to rocks.

While these sorts of headlines tackle the everyday stupidity of humans, there are far worse examples of humans not exercising their supposed intelligence. Take for example the eagerness of the agriculture industries (BigAg as it is known in the U.S.) who stealthily implements genetically altered foods into our food chain without studying the long term effects these foods might have on us or the environment. Here, the afore mentioned ability to synthesize information in order to predict the future goes right out the window for the sake of the short term monetary gain by a minute handful of people. In this respect, we might also take for example industries that pour their toxic wastes into rivers and oceans and endanger what is arguably our most important resource, water. Moreover, what of energy companies that intentionally suppress the advancement of clean, renewable energy? And what about cloning? International law notwithstanding, surely humans will soon be cloned with regularity. Who will control this technology and for what purposes? Sadly, our ability to create is forever outpacing our ability to philosophically deal with the ‘intelligent’ Dr. Frankenstein within us. So, are we intelligent?

That’s a good question to ask oneself, especially when one believes in a god. Meta-studies appear to indicate a correlation between intelligence levels and strength of faith, where the more education one has appears to lead to a higher percentage of agnostics and non-practicing theists, if not outright atheists. There's a reason why religion is not taught in public school and colleges; it is not compatible with reason. If a theist is to seriously think about human intelligence, they should find themselves asking exactly why any supposedly intelligent creator would create an intelligent species with such an inceredible capacity for stupidity. Why would God create something so dumb that it would proclaim itself, in the face of an entire universe, as the pinnacle of creation? We’re talking about an entire species dedicated to the Black Swan Syndrome; we don’t know of any life as intelligent as humans, so humans must be the most intelligent in all the universe! We can continue to ask these types of questions: Why would a god create humans with such poor reason, who are constantly making choices that endanger their lives or otherwise make themselves unhappy? And why, in the name of all that is holy, would God like to be worshipped by these idiotic creations? Even the robots humans build do not require that the robots worship their creator.

The reasonable answer to these types of questions is that God, were He to exist, is a moron. But we do have to give credit where credit is due, for in a single stroke of cleverness, God gets off the hook for creating such dumb things as people by the virtue of faith. That’s right, faith, the dumbest psychological position a person can commit to; this is what excuses God from having made humans as unintelligent as they are. Human being are so unintelligent that it takes something like a human to create and define the word ‘intelligence,’ assign the word great moral value, and them proclaim itself to be intelligent. In much the same way that God cannot be moral by proclaiming to be the standard of morality, humans cannot be intelligent by proclaiming to be the standard of intelligence.

Naturally, someone is going to disagree with me and say something like, “Well, other animals cannot ask themselves why they exist,” which goes to show you exactly how stupid humans are as the person making this argument obviously hasn’t first asked if their argument is even logical. Humans aren’t intelligent. For every example one could give in favor of human intelligence, ten examples of human stupidity can be given in response. By contrast, humans are far more arrogant than they are intelligent, which would explain why supposed alien abductees claim aliens use people as lab rats. But this merely shows how dumb the aliens are, too. I don’t think they’re going to learn much from us. If they were smart, they’d already know that.

I Watched It So You Don't Have To: Boyhood

The premise behind filming the movie is interesting enough: Film a movie over ten years using the same actors and hope no one dies before shooting is complete. Fustratingly, this is the only interesting thing about the movie. Clocking in at an completely unnecessary two hours and forty-five minutes, Boyhood is an achingly slow, utterly boring peek into the lives of one of the most uninteresting families in cinematic history. As the film has no plot, you begin wondering why this wasn't shot as a documentary on someone growing up over the course of twelve years. Such a documentary would have been far more interesting, that is, until you recall how much more interesting your own mundane childhood was compared to what ‘happens’ in this movie. This movie has nothing going for; least of all the characters. The film's protagonist - played by Ellar Coltrane - is a mumbling stick in the mud who is such a non-entity that bullies don't even bother to take the time to beat him up. Ethan Hawke, though at his squirrely best, can't save this experiment because he’s simply given nothing to work with. Rather, it's up to Patricia Arquette to hold your interest as you wait for the next year in the movie to pass just to see how much more weight she can pack on. The movie mercifully ends as our protagonist finally figures out what two-year olds have been trying to tell us for ever; it's always right now. THAT’S the movie’s idea of a pay-off. Or is it ’rip-off’? If this is all our director Linklater has left in the tank, his license to film should be revoked before he kills again. The accolades this movie has received from critics is exactly why no one listens to critics anymore.