The argument in the Sculptor’s workshop

“Guess what?” asks a stone carving of a woman. “ I hear some of us are going to come alive. Alive- like the Sculptor.”

“There is no Sculptor,” answers a stone rhinoceros. “How can something bigger than us exist? Who made him? I think these Sculptor stories just give us an inferiority complex. We thought up a Sculptor, and now we feel inferior to him. We sculptures are the best thing in this studio. Better than tables or chisels or floor tiles. Why pretend that some ‘Sculptor’ is smarter than us?”

“I don’t have an inferiority complex” protests a stone version of a St. Bernard. “On the contrary. I am proud that a maker made me special!”

The rhino hits back: “Specially made, what a joke! Wind erosion and water erosion wears down stone. You are erosion-worn, and now some idiots think the forms we have is specially designed. No Sculptor is necessary.”

“Yes,” adds the stone statue of a man, “the best evidence against a Sculptor, and for erosion, is how all of us are made from the same materials. There are small images of horses and large human statues, all from the same kind of stone. But your Sculptor ideas keep you from accepting the scientific fact of erosion.”

“We accept erosion, we just don’t accept that erosion explains everything” the stone image of a leopard chipped in.

“Oh, and if there is a Sculptor, I don’t want to know him. It often happens that carvings that used to be in this studio don’t stand here any more. What kind of Sculptor destroys his carvings?” complains a figurine of a horse.

“The world is larger than this studio,” the sculptures that believe in a Sculptor answers. “He don’t destroy sculptures, he moves them somewhere else.”

The stone horse keeps arguing: “You don’t annihilate statues, I don’t annihilate statues. How can you trust a Sculptor that annihilates his own makings- or ‘take them somewhere else’ as you believe without evidence?”

“I believe in the Sculptor, because he already enables me to move,” says the St. Bernard. “And one day, I would move as freely as he does. It’s part of the life he gives.”

“Freely? If you got to move as the Sculptor enables you, what is freely about it? In any case, we statues and figurines got no way to see that so-called “movement.” It’s just one of your superstitions” exploded the frustrated male statue.

“And another thing about this so-called movement,” complains a monkey figurine. (Actually he is one third of a figurine, being the one with hands in front of his eyes in one of those knick-knacks where one monkey has hands before eyes, the next hands before ears, and the last hands before mouth.) “I hear it was movement that made a large marble giraffe fall over a few clown figurines of a weaker type of stone last week, and it broke them all. You believers in movement only cause trouble.”

“Monkey, you don’t care about the weaker sculptures any way. Why this tantrum?” asks a quick-tempered elephant figure.

It quickly descends into a shouting match in which no carving hears the views of any other carving any more. They lose interest in talking without listeners, and go on with other activities. But a few carvings keep thinking about the wonder of sharing, one day, in the kind of life the Sculptor has…

—————-

Inspired by this CS Lewis quote: “… And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”

Save the planet- why?

The cheapest and easiest way to combat climate change, according to a report by the London School of Economics and Political Science, is by sterilisation and abortion. Humans, they say, is the planet’s worst enemy: We are destroying our earth.

 

Which brings me to a question:

Are we trying to save the planet for our children?

Or are we trying to save the planet from our children?

Sex a sin?

Elsewhere on the Internet, on a topic irrelevant right now, I find this sentence:

He was utterly interested in sex, partly for the usual reasons, strengthened by a religious upbringing telling him sex was a sin, ….

And while researching this little article, I find this:

….web sites purporting to advocate … matrimony over the various other alternatives. The trouble is, most of these web sites are heavily slanted towards Christianity…
It seems clear that the purpose behind many of these sites is to prevent people from having sex, from “sinning”.

Yeah, yeah, the old story. The church is, once again, the big villain. But the Christian view is, unlike many believe, NOT that “sex is a sin.” The Christian view is that sex is a very beautiful and special thing designed to keep for someone special in marriage. And, interestingly enough, people who live by that idea, and keep sex for marriage, have happier sex lives and happier marriages, according to statisticians. They and their children are also a lot less likely to be a drain on state welfare agencies (and thus tax payers).

Michael Jackson “not a pedophile”? The most misleading statement made by Michael Jackson fans

(I accidently made my previous post on this topic on my Afrikaans blog.)

Some Michael Jackson fans are absolutely adamnant: “Michael. Would. Never. Have. Harmed. Any. Kid.” Some people are completelely convinced of the opposite.

If I meet one of the former, I want to tell them some kinds of behavior of MJ’s (like having a children’s playland where you often invite children, as a home, and inviting kids into his bed) can be understood as grooming a kid for abuse. And that it is very unlikely that an innocent man will twice be criminally investigated for child molestation (J. Chandler in 1993 and G. Arvizo in 2003); and twice pay boys millions not to make (molestation) lawsuits against him(J. Chandler and Jason Francia). But some Jackson fans can, at least, give alternative explanations for this behavior.

If I meet someone who is sure of his guilt, I want to tell them how the parents of both accusers were obviously money-grabbers (as explained in the post linked to above), and Evan Chandler either allowed Jacko to spend time with his kid while already strongly suspecting molestation (someting good parents won’t do) or convinced Jordan to tell a lie. And it is very unlikely that any child molester will regularly share a bed with a kid for years, without ever trying anything wrong with that child. . Macauley Culkin and others claimed just that, about themselves. Assuming Michael did molest boys, I never heard any satisfactory explanation for why several young men claimed how, as boys, they often shared a bed with him – innocuously.

And the most misleading statement I ever heard about his guilt or innocence in the molestation cases? It is the oft-repeated “Even Dr. Stanley Katz, the psycologist for the Arvizo brothers, claimed Michael Jackson was “not a pedophile, but a regressed 10-year old.”

What Dr. Katz actually said, after making it clear that he believed the Arvizo brothers story (A story of being shown pornography and made drunk by MJ, of Michael once touching the clothed younger brother, and more seriously and more often molesting the older boy, with his younger brother being an eyewitness once) , was:

Michael … “is a guy that’s like a 10-year-old child. And, you know, he’s doing what a 10-year-old would do with his little buddies. You know, they’re gonna jack off, watch movies, drink wine, you know. And, you know, he doesn’t even really qualify as a pedophile. He’s really just this regressed 10-year-old.”

In other words, Dr. Stanley Katz believed the boys about the pornography, the alcohol and the sexual acts. His statement “not a pedophile … a regressed 10-year-old” only meant that Jackson’s motivation and modus operandi was, in his opinion, not that of a typical pedophile. (But then, most men who live with an adult woman and secretly molest her 11 or 14-year old daughter do not “really qualify as a pedophile” either. Many people molest children without being pedophiles.) But Dr. Katz reported to the authorities what the brothers told him- because he suspected sexual molestation.

Scandinavia most atheistic? One more reason to doubt Zuckerman

“Theory without data is myth: data without theory is madness.” – Phil Zuckerman

Phil Zuckerman wrote a book about his experiences in Sweden and Denmark, painting it as probably the least religious countries in the world, yet with low crime rates, high standards of living and social equality. A previous post of mine questioned (very much) the accuracy of painting the Scandinivians as the world’s most atheistic countries, and (a bit) if their societies are really all that healthy, and sustainable. And is correlation (many people who don’t believe in God/gods/spirits, and a prosperous society) causality here?
A survey of the European commission collected these statistics of religious (un)belief in Europe. (I do not know what DK stand for.)

According to these, France (33%) has the most unbelievers (People who claim “I don’t belief there is any spirit, God, or life force”) of all European countries, with the Czech Republic (30%) second. (Would Zuckerman study the Czechs as an example of irreligious people next? Or perhaps the Cubans, who are, of course, not part of this European study?) Sweden is 6th and Denmark joint 9th.

In Iceland (11%), Finland, (16%) and Norway (17%), there are, in fact, a less than average unbeliever percentage for the countries surveyed – the European average was 18%. Even if there are a lot of unbelievers in Scandinavia, they are, by all statistics I ever read outside of Zuckerman’s work, a minority. Those who believe in God, a spirit or life force, still outnumber the unbelievers by at least 3 to 1.

And, since Prof. Zuckerman believe that statistics without theory is madness, I would follow it up by my theory: Denmark and Sweden are rather succesfull countries with more believers, albeit of low commitment, than unbelievers. It may even be that their Protestant heritage is partly responsible for their success. No country in Europe is an indicator of what a society of unbelievers will be like, since everywhere in Europe, believers in God, a spirit or life force outnumber unbelievers.

Atheistic countries have the most healthy societies?

The atheistic propoganda brigade is claiming it all the time: 

Atheistic countries have a very high level of societal health and success. Just look at Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden, for example!

 Their favorite source is Phil Zuckerman and this list (Table 1 on the web page) of his.  But let’s look closer at the list. (We don’t want to unquestioningly believe everything we hear, do we?)

If you look at the entry on top, Zuckerman claims that Sweden has 46-to 85% non-believers. If so, why put it above Vietnam, with 81% non-believers? Why not take the average and say “approximately 65,5%”  unbelievers? Why use the higher number? The same goes for Denmark, with (according to Zuckerman) between 43% and 80% unbelievers. (That in itself will change the top 5 unbelieving countries, even with Zuckerman’s numbers, to 1) Vietnam 2) Sweden 3)Japan  4)Denmark  5)Czech Republic.) It seems that Zuckerman’s statistics for Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland (each with about double as many unbelievers in Zuckerman’s high estimate than his low estimate) is very unreliable.

Okay. It seems Zuckerman has a rule of thumb: “When in doubt, use the highest estimate.” But is  this his rule of thumb? Not quite:

Several sources list the non-believers in China, North Korea, etc. higher* than those in Sweden, Denmark, etc. (For example, “Operation World’s 1993 handbook lists the non-religious in China at 59,1%, in North Korea at 68%, and in Cuba at 30,9%. They list the non-religious in Sweden as 34,9%, in Finland as 9,8%, in Denmark as 7,5%, and in Norway as 4% of the population.) (Another source, “The demand for Religion: Hard core atheism and Supply side theory” lists the amount of unbelievers –including those unbelievers who feel there “might be a God” and “might be a life after death” – in Norway as 16,9%- only a half to a quarter as many as Zuckerman suggests. In another peaceful, wealthy country, Austria, the page suggest that those “unbelievers” are only 8,3% – less than half, to less than a third, of what Zuckerman say. In Russia, however, the 30,8% of this page is well within Zuckerman estimates.)

Zuckerman may have had a reason to work that way, but readers should question his methodology before jumping to conclusions on his results. With his numbers instead of someone else’s, the results would be very much biased towards associating rich countries with atheism.

Another problem with using those numbers to devalue Christianity is that Christians do not claim: Religiosity, any religion, is better than non-religiosity. The Christian claim is: Actual commitment to Christ and his teachings (as opposed to merely following some religion, or even calling yourself a Christian) makes the world a better place.  You cannot counter Christian thought by showing how the Scandinavians are better off than the average “religious” nation. You would need to compare the least religious peoples (which are probably not the Scandinavians) with the nations who are most committed to Christ.

Some other problems include: Correlation is not causality. Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Norway are all countries where the Lutheran Church closely associated with the state. The statement “Unbelieving countries (like Scandinavia’s) are successful” may have no more or less cause and effect to it than “countries where even the state officially support the church (like Scandinavia’s) are successful.”

And it could be questioned whether you can really call their societies all that healthy. Is their success sustainable in the long term? Many people say no. Are their children growing up in happy, stable two-parent family environments? Very few of them are. Do their numbers on suicide, heavy drinking and depression give the impression of happy countries?

In summary, the few countries and societal indicators Zuckerman selects cannot, seriously, lead to any conclusion about societal unbelief compared to societal health in general, in all countries everywhere. To try and use it as a statement against a particular religion, for example Christianity, would be even worse. Using other statistics than Zuckerman’s, we should rather regard Vietnam, North Korea, and China as the world’s most atheistic nations. These will be better indicators of the level of societal health in non-believing countries.

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* Some of you may observe that, for example, the Chinese or North Korean governments would not be realistic sources for the amount of believers in those countries. True, but we do have at least some other information on the religious beliefs in those nations. Operation World specializes in collecting these statistics. Voice of the Martyrs makes it their job to speak to underground believers in countries where there is no religious freedom. Their conclusions about numbers of believers will be less than 100% accurate, but it is still a mathematical estimate, and not a totally uninformed “guesstimate.” Zuckerman may have unreliable statistics for these areas, but his statistics for places like Sweden and Norway is also obviously unreliable. Yet, he apparently treats his unreliable data in two opposite ways, seemingly using the highest possible number of unbelievers for successful Scandinavian countries, and the lowest ones for unsuccessful communist countries.

Meeting the Hitchens challenge? Easy!

Christopher Hitchens set out a challenge in his efforts against religion:

“Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”

The point, presumably, is to say that atheists are ethically the same as believers, at least. But his challenge can be debunked as unable to make this point (of unbelievers and believers being similar). Or his challenge can simply be met instead.

Debunking the value of the challenge:

To prove an ethical difference, you need not show an ethical action that one group has absolutely never performed. It is enough to show that one group more often performs the ethical action.
Are there statistics that show an ethical difference between believers and unbelievers? A well-documented fact, for example, is that religious believers give more money to charity, and volunteer more time (even to secular charities) than the non-religious. Other examples could also be mentioned, but this one is sufficient for now.
We can easily conclude that there is, on average, ethical differences between believers and unbelievers. And the Hitchens challenge cannot argue away that fact.
Another thing commonly pointed out on this topic is that atheists, even when doing the ethical thing, cannot logically ground why they do it. They may say “this helps rather than harm humans” but why, logically, should humans not be harmed, unless some higher power exist who say they should not? 

 

 Meeting the challenge:

Before meeting the challenge, let’s first examine what counts as an ethical statement. An ethical statement is a statement like:
“It is ethically wrong to do [x]” or “[y] is a good moral deed.”
Therefore, any ethical statement which only believers can make will have unbelievers protesting something like:
“It is not ethically wrong to do [x]” or “[y] is not a good moral deed.”
It will, for the purpose of the Hitchens challenge, be an invalid protest. In fact, it will prove that there are indeed moral statements only believers can make.

And now, for an answer: The first ethical law, according to the Christian world view, is “love the Lord your God with all your heart and your soul and all your mind.” It is an ethical statement that unbelievers cannot make. It is an ethical action which unbelievers cannot perform. Christianity thus meets the Hitchens challenge head-on: Not with an obscure side issue, but by their biggest commandment.
(Do you want to protest that unbelievers do not find loving God an issue of ethics? You can’t. As I explained in the previous paragraph, that protest is a clear sign that the challenge was indeed met.)

 The Hitchens challenge is misleading, since the only valid type of answer sounds inadmissible at first glance. (Did Hitchens set his challenge up in a misleading way on purpose, perhaps?)

Prison atheist statistics: What do the forms look like?

There is another thought that popped into my head regarding the atheists in prison statistics. What does the form look like that produce these numbers?

Suppose, for instance, that, on being admitted to a British prison, a new convict have to fill in a form with tick boxes under the heading “Religion.” There are tick boxes for “Christian”, “Muslin”, etc., and the last tick box say “None.” Below all the tick boxes, there is a line with the wording: “Other (specify)” Suppose that there is no tick box for “atheist”, and the atheist could choose whether he want to tick “Religion: None” or write in “atheist” on the last line. Most would do the simpler thing: Tick “None.” If that is the case, it would explain why the “no religion” group is so large compared to the “atheist” group in both the British and American statistics.*

This hypothesis can only be tested by knowing what the forms looked like at the spot where religious view had to be entered. So, please, if anyone has access to the forms that produced the American data in this link, or the forms that produced the British data in this link, could you please tell me: What religious possibilities did they have tick boxes for? What, exactly, is the wording and possibilities you could choose from in that section of the form?

————-

If this hypothesis is wrong, and the non-religious who do not define themselves as atheists are really and fairly concluded to be much more criminal than atheists and believers alike, it would be another reason why militant atheists should not ask for religion to be abolished. A world with no believers would not abound with “high church atheists,” actively denying God’s existence. It would be filled with “non-religious people”, who do not think about God, and are, statistically speaking, more likely to give in to their criminal proclivities.

Yep- Sharing the Christian faith with your children is not child abuse

I already wrote a pair of articles (here) about the (unscientific) Dawkinsian notion that religious instruction to children amounts to child abuse. But there are more evidence than I mentioned, from larger test groups. Here, Tom Gilson points out what a large study concluded. He believes this should “cast serious doubts” upon the credibility of Dawkins’s best seller, “The God Delusion.” (Another author who casts serious doubt upon Dawkins etc. is Vox Day, who’s book ”The Irrational Atheist” is downloadable free of charge here.) Gilson also asks, here, why no scientist took the Oxford “Professor for the public understanding of science” to task for his anti-science conclusion. Are scientists being consistent?

Child abuse???

Vocal atheists try, these days, to convince people that religion is bad for children. Richard Dawkins go as far as calling it “child abuse.” Obviously, these anti-religious campaigners quote no studies. They back up their prejudiced views by emotionalism, sophisticated word choices, and whatever negative anecdotes they can find.

Now the question is: Does the New Atheists claims about child abuse have any basis in reality?

To study this, I would start with the known fact that child abuse has a negative effect on children. Apart from physical pain and injury, it is likely to have a negative influence on a child’s self esteem, school work, happiness levels, ability to relate to others, etc. If teaching children about God amounts to a form of child abuse, negative results would show up in studies on the effect religious training has on children. For that reason, I attempted to compile a real list of studies that compare, statistically:

 

a1) children who believe the Christian claims, or often have to go to church,

against

a2) those who do not

and

b) measures results generally regarded as good (like improved school marks, staying away from drugs, less depression), even by unbelievers.

Studies like that conclude that religious participation, Biblical beliefs, and having parents who talk about God with their children, all contribute very positively towards a child’s emotional well-being. (To shorten this post, I put a few of those studies here.) 

 My questions and comments to people tempted to believe Richard Dawkins on this:

 

What would you call something that makes children:

a) feel safer at home?

(b) less prone to depression or suicide?

(c) believe their lives have meaning?

(d) more likely to have a happy marriage later in life?

(e) less prone to crime, drugs or alcohol?

(f) more likely to do well in school?

 

I am unsure what to call it, but the term “child abuse” seems highly unsuitable.

 

 Do the New atheists want to take children from their parents for teaching them about God? And if they take children from a loving home with a positive influence (1), where will they place them? Do Dawkins suggest prosecuting parents for their positive influence? This sentence from his book, “the God Delusion” make it sound that way: “… we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible … than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.” Since the New Atheists apparently suggest prosecuting parents for religious instruction to their children, their view of religion as child abuse seems to be dangerous hate speech. This view should not be tossed aside lightly. It should be tossed aside with great force.

 

                                                 Conclusion:

 If you are a parent, please work hard on teaching your child Christian values. Read up on how to best teach it, to a generation who might even misunderstand basic words like “truth”, “judgment”, “God’s love” etc., due to their cultural conditioning.

If you are a Sunday school teacher/ youth worker/ Good News Club (2) teacher, please be encouraged: Do even more to teach real Christian values- not watered-down-for-kids versions of Christian values! Teach it, because your children need it. They need it spiritually, but also intellectually (3) and emotionally and socially and physically. (4)

 

Whoever you are, if you meet or read the sort of bigoted campaigner who try to tell you that teaching kids about God “corrupts their innocent minds,” or “is a form of child abuse” or whatever, tell them to their faces that they are being ridiculous. Inform the readers/listeners that hears such campaigners that the charges have no substance: These loud atheists are trying to “protect” children from a world view that apparently gives purpose, lessens anger and disappointment with life, improve their school marks, protects young people from drugs and keep them away from suicide.

 ————————————————————

 (1) “Positive influence” is not just an opinion here. I statistically made my point about how positive religious training is, on average, for the child.

(2) This link is to an American article, but CEF and Good News Clubs are active worldwide.

(3) Intellectually: They will be likely to have better school marks, and concentrate better.

(4) Physically: They will be less likely to use drugs, and less likely to hurt others. The former protects themselves and others, the latter physically protects those around him. Religious people also live longer and are healthier, on average.

 Other notes:

1) Rich Deem makes a similar argument here, and MikeGene makes a similar argument here.

2) This is a reworking of a piece called “Christianity is good for kids, says the statistics” that used to be on this blog, and replaces it.