Regarding the relationship between atheism, rationality and religious belief

An article at OnlySky by social science researcher Will Gervais examines the state of the science. The article, The treasured atheist idea that reason undercuts faith just doesn’t hold up, looks at recent research on the science of atheism and religious belief. Current data sets indicate that (i) a person’s rationality is not a source of atheism, and (ii) applying reason-based arguments against religion does not convert religious people to atheism. 

In 2012, Gervais and fellow researcher Ara Norenzayan published a paper in the prestigious journal Science, Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief. That paper got significant public and researcher attention. That paper, plus another with similar results, sparked further research to confirm or deny and further explore relationships, if any, between atheism, rationality and religious faith.

Long story short, Gervais’ original data did not hold up to more rigorous experimentation with larger groups of subjects. He and his research partner disavowed their 2012 paper and its conclusions. The results were a false positive based on too small a sample size and a sloppy research protocol. Recent research data also indicates that instead of appeals to reason (the conscious mind), when one appeals to intuition, emotion and bias (the unconscious mind), that also does not nudge people toward religious beliefs and/or away from atheism.

Science still does not know what factors lead people into atheism or religious belief. Most atheists claim that reason led them to atheism, but the data suggests there is self-delusion in that for most. I thought that reason reinforced my own pre-existing atheism** decades ago, but maybe that is more false than true. Among Americans, there is a small correlation between people who score high on tests of rationality and atheism, but among humans everywhere, the correlation drops from small to negligible. 

** Pre-existing atheism means I think I was an atheist from early childhood (before my rationality kicked in), but maybe that is a personal illusion.

Gervais makes some useful observations. He writes:

Maxine Najle, Nava Caluori, and I recently published a study in which we tested various predictors of atheism against each other in a nationally representative sample of US Americans. We were able to conduct a statistical analysis to specifically pinpoint the relationship between rationality and atheism among those who were most strongly exposed to religion while they were growing up. And among these people most culturally brought up to be religious, the correlation between rationality and religious disbelief dropped to zero.

 
That’s right: among those folks with the most exposure to religion, there’s no reliable correlation between rationality and atheism. This means that among those with strong religious upbringings, the ones who are most rational are no more likely to end up as atheists than are those who are most inclined to trust their intuitions. Far from rationality being a key factor that leads people away from strongly religious upbringings and towards atheism, it turns out that rationality isn’t even modestly correlated with atheism among this subset of people. There is no relation whatsoever.

Rational atheism is (more or less) a myth.

What does it mean that rational atheism is largely a myth? Should freethinkers stop promoting rationality? Hardly! The promotion of rationality may intrinsically bring its own rewards and should be pursued on its own merits without any pseudoscientific pretensions that it will convert believers to atheism. I also firmly believe that abandoning the rational atheist myth may pay secondary dividends if it leads New Atheist allied thinkers to stop trying to use science and rationality to undermine religious faith. These efforts are incredibly unlikely to succeed. Worse still, they have substantial potential to backfire. Dawkins and others have long tried to use science and rationality to pry people away from religion, but they’ve misdiagnosed the source of atheism in the first place. Their efforts in all likelihood do more to drive believers away from science than they do to attract anyone to atheism.

That stuff is good to know. It helps keep atheists from getting too arrogant for their own britches. Two take-home points come to mind:

• Social science research is incredibly complex and difficult because humans are incredibly complex and messy. Scientific results on humans need to be replicated, and data needs to be obtained in well-controlled protocols and analyzed by rigorous statistical analyses. Unconscious human bias must always be kept in mind as a potential confounding factor that gives rise to false positive and false negative data interpretations. Reasonable humility is a good thing to have when doing science, especially science on humans.

• Once again, larger sample sizes show that positive results often melt away into small or non-existent cause and effect outcomes. The positives are an illusion. That has recently been shown for brain scan data, rendering many or most of those research findings suspect. I interpret this to mean that the human brain operates diffusely with thoughts, emotional impulses and biases operating not just unconsciously, but also in large areas of the brain. That makes it tricky to pinpoint small regions of the brain that are believed to cause or at least correlate with behaviors under study.

Who is disrespecting and threatening whom?

A complaint that defenders of the rising neo-fascist Republican Party cite as justification to hate political opposition and targeted out-groups is that the feelings of conservatives have been disrespected and insulted. Yeah, in these days of vulgarity and disrespectful political discourse, that happens occasionally or maybe often. Manners and adult restraint are falling away. Sacred radical right ends morally justify all means. Hillary called some conservatives “deplorable.” What an outrage and emotional hurt. Lock her up!

Obama pointed to guns, bibles and personal frustrations in his comments: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” That caused a mega backlash among conservatives. Their fee-fees were hurt. Lock him up!

That’s the kind of rhetorical horrors usually coming from the Dems. Nasty business indeed, even though there is some truth in some of it.

But waddabout the nasty business coming from the radical right? There is some viciousness and bitterness in some of it. For example:

Christian hate-preacher Greg Locke told the people in his Tennessee tent church today, "You cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat in this nation!"

He later threatened Democrats watching him, "You ain't seen [an] insurrection yet." pic.twitter.com/UDlqYVAEDF

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) May 16, 2022

One does not hear any complaints from Republican elites about publicly stated death threats like those coming from the gentle preacher, Mr. Locke. His flock cheers, not boos, his incitement to a bloody American civil war against Democrats. And, our wussified, useless IRS lets him keep his tax exempt status. What an effing insult and moral outrage. The only thing the IRS is good for is taxing the crap out of the middle income classes and letting the wealthy sail their mega yachts serenely through massive tax loopholes that rich bought and wrote to benefit themselves. 

To be honest and transparent, my fee-fees are hurt. And they are very angry and resentful. As an atheist, the gentle Mr. Locke insulted me and my morality. I’ve been bigly disrespected. If there was a hell, Locke would go there and burn eternally in screaming agony for his hate, bigotry and lies. The real God isn’t a rage and hate factory. God is very much unlike Locke and his evil ilk. That ilk is evil, not just immoral because there is real malice in the death threats. 

Or, am I over-reacting? After all, this is just one deranged crackpot preacher spreading divisive lies and slanders while fomenting his lunatic rage, hate and bigotry. It’s all legal. So are his tax exemptions. In the eyes of the law and justice, he is a good boy. 

Question: Which side is generally more disrespectful of political opposition, radical right Republicans, Christian nationalists and their propagandists, or everyone else?

Be careful, the blind watery tart with the sword 

sometimes pokes the wrong person

Is America’s military headed down the same path as Russia’s?

 By Lt. Gen. David Deptula (ret.)

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2022/05/17/is-americas-military-headed-down-the-same-path-as-russias/

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s failure to rapidly defeat a much smaller foe is not just a failure of strategy, but an overestimation of his military’s capability, training and prowess. U.S. leaders need to take a hard look in the mirror and question whether we are treading similar ground with a set of military capabilities too small and too old given current threats.

American leaders are fond of saying ours is the best military in the world. They fail to realize that key elements of our forces have shrunk by half since our last clear-cut victory: 1991′s Operation Desert Storm. Furthermore, the U.S. has been unfocused on great power competition for over three decades as it overprioritized and overspent on counterinsurgency operations.

This means the United States is less able to deter conflict and fight to win if necessary. That is one reason why Putin felt emboldened to invade Ukraine. He sensed weakness in U.S. and NATO forces, and pressed forward with his aggression. We see the Chinese making similar calculations in the Pacific by seizing and militarizing neutral territory and flaunting international norms without an adequate U.S. response; freedom of navigation missions won’t cut it.

This should be a wake-up call to rebuild the U.S. military.

The threat of sanctions did not deter Putin, nor did Europe’s newfound unity change his mind. Diplomacy that is not backed by military might will fail. It all comes down to credibility behind the words. The U.S. has lost its edge in that regard from both a military capability and capacity perspective.

The choices Putin made with respect to his military’s force structure left him with the wrong force design and poor readiness for the war he chose to fight. Likewise, the choices the U.S. has made in recent years — and the ones it makes today — are inadequate to the challenges posed by its competitors.

Nor will we be able to build needed military power once the enemy triggers a tripwire. Today’s world moves too fast and is too complex to allow for a reactive buildup. F-35 fighter jets, B-21 bombers and Virginia-class submarines, plus their highly trained crews, do not manifest overnight. Unless we make the right defense choices today, there will be no time to recover when an adversary requires us to fight.

President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2023 defense budget plan steers America down the wrong path. Rather than reversing America’s 30-year decline in defense capability and capacity, it accelerates that decline. With inflation properly included, defense funding goes down from last year.

The effects of the proposed defense budget are corrosive. Consider that the Air Force is currently the oldest, smallest and least ready in its history. The FY23 budget plan calls for it to retire roughly 1,500 aircraft over the next five years while buying only 500 replacements. That reduces it a further 25%.

The Navy is set to shed 24 ships over the same period. In FY23 alone, the armed services combined are reducing personnel by 25,000. This is a recipe for disaster, not only for the United States but for Western democracies in general.

Unless the United States and its allies can achieve the strength necessary to defeat both Chinese aggression in Asia and Russian aggression in Europe in near simultaneous time frames, we cannot hope to deter our rivals.

However, defense leaders across multiple administrations, driven by budget concerns and nondefense priorities, have abandoned this approach. They now plan for wars to occur one at a time. Reality likely will not work like they expect. The only thing we will 100% achieve is not accurately forecasting the future. The ability to only handle one war at a time incentivizes our opponents — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and a broad range of nonstate actors — to strike when we are consumed by the first crisis.

War is always more costly and devastating than maintaining the peace; witness the devastation in Ukraine. The cost of weakness is a bill we cannot afford to pay.

Germany and Japan get this. They understand the threats on their doorsteps, and that is why they both declared their intent to double their defense budgets. Their resolve to reinvest in their own defense reflects the pragmatic realization that only through investment and preparation can they hope to ward off those threats.

The United States does not need to double its defense budget, but it does need to reverse the decline in its capacity and capabilities to credibly deter and, if necessary, defeat both China and Russia simultaneously. Only then will we be able to deter those fights from occurring.

Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula is dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a senior scholar at the Air Force Academy. He helped plan the Desert Storm air campaign, commanded no-fly zone operations over Iraq and orchestrated air operations over Afghanistan.

Great replacements in American history

An interesting opinion piece in the New York Times raises an interesting point. Radical right Republican propaganda is demagoguing and fear mongering the rise of minorities and the fall of White people in a narrative called the Great Placement. One commentator argues that great replacements have happened before in American history. The NYT writes:

In the broadest sense, what goes by the name “replacement theory” — the idea that American elites are conspiring to replace so-called real Americans with immigrants from poor countries — is merely a description of the American way, enshrined in tradition, codified by law, promoted by successive generations of American leaders from Washington and Lincoln to Kennedy and Reagan.

There have been four, arguably five, great replacements in American history.

The first was the worst and the cruelest: the destruction — through war, slaughter, ill-dealing and wholesale expulsion — of Native Americans by European migrants. The same far-right true believers who now scream about their own purported replacement by the non-indigenous tend to be the most indignant when reminded that at least some of their ancestors were once the replacements themselves.

The fifth is the most contentious but also the most routine and unexceptional: the alleged replacement of the native-born white working class with a foreign-born nonwhite working class. In this telling, Washington policy, from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement to current enforcement failures at the border, are part of a broad conspiracy to give American businesses cheap labor and Democratic politicians ready votes.

This is both nothing new and nothing at all. The United States has, from its earliest days, repeatedly “replaced” its working class with migrants, not as an act of substitution, much less as a sinister conspiracy, but as the natural result of upward mobility, the demands of a growing economy and the benefits of a growing population. The idea that NAFTA simply caused jobs to flee the United States sits at odds with the fact that the labor-force participation rate in the United States grew to its peak in the years immediately after the signing of the agreement.

What all of this says is that the phenomenon of replacement, writ large, is America, and has been from the beginning, sometimes by force, mostly by choice. What the far right calls “replacement” is better described as renewal.  

All this is of a piece with our traditional self-understanding as a country in which a sense of common destiny bound by ideals matters more than common origins bound by blood. It’s also necessary to any form of conservatism that wants to draw a line against blood-and-soil nationalism or white-identity politics. You cannot defend the ideal of “E pluribus unum” by deleting pluribus. To subscribe to “replacement theory” — the sinister, conspiratorial kind now taking hold of parts of the right — is to weaponize America against itself.

I’m writing this in the wake of Saturday’s massacre in Buffalo, whose alleged perpetrator wrote a racist and antisemitic rant about replacement theory. It’s usually a mistake to judge an idea based on the behavior of some deranged believer. It’s also unnecessary. The danger with replacement theory in its current form isn’t that a handful of its followers are crazy but that too many of them are sane.

When it is cast in that light, the current modern day Great Replacement that the radical right is weaponizing and demagoguing does not look so planned or threatening. It is a natural progression. As long as democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law are maintained intact, the process should be fairly civilized. It is when those defenses against oppression and abuse are neutered that the Great Replacement can turn on people and hurt or kill them. In this case, those targeted for oppression and abuse are the non-Whites and out-groups that neo-fascist Republican propaganda and policy targets.

There is no law or authority in America that prevents the rise of a tyranny of the minority. It can happen today with few or no changes in existing law. A sufficient minority of American society has been propagandized into a firm belief that what Republican radical right elites are doing now and want to do is democratic, moral and God’s will. If democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law fall to Republican authoritarian radicalism, America’s minority Anti-great Replacement movement will turn on the majority opposition and crush both opposition and democracy as much as possible. 

Republican Party dogma: America is not a democracy, egalitarianism is a threat

Egalitarianism: the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities

A commentator posted an essay over at OnlySky, ‘We’re a republic, not a democracy’: The origin of a weird talking point, about how the Republican propaganda Leviathan has come up with a rationale to deny that the majority should rule or influence policy in America. That poison is seeping into the propaganda that powerful Republican politicians use to deceive and distract the public. This is more evidence of the anti-democratic neo-fascism that is tightening its grip on the minds of elite Republicans. OnlySky writes:

Starting about two years ago, any Facebook post that called the US a democracy would draw a comment from That Guy, saying, “Its a constitutional republic not a democracy you’re ignorance is embarrassing.” Even if that were true (more on that shortly), where did that very precise, suddenly scholarly phrase come from—and what on Earth is it supposed to prove?

Although this thinly-veiled argument against majority rule has re-emerged for the first in the age of social media, its history extends to the dim recesses of the early 20th century. Whenever political minorities wield outsized power, and that power leads to an outcome contrary to the desires of those who usually get their way, you can count on a pundit or a politician claiming that the United States isn’t actually a democracy. You might hear it when a Republican candidate wins the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, or after a Supreme Court decision that the majority of Americans oppose.

But who is claiming that the US is not a democracy, and where did the practice get its start?

One recent example comes from Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, who first wrote a 2020 tweet, then an essay, explaining why he believes the United States is not a democracy. Starting about two years ago, any Facebook post that called the US a democracy would draw a comment from That Guy, saying, “Its a constitutional republic not a democracy you’re ignorance is embarrassing.” Even if that were true (more on that shortly), where did that very precise, suddenly scholarly phrase come from—and what on Earth is it supposed to prove?

Although this thinly-veiled argument against majority rule has re-emerged for the first in the age of social media, its history extends to the dim recesses of the early 20th century. Whenever political minorities wield outsized power, and that power leads to an outcome contrary to the desires of those who usually get their way, you can count on a pundit or a politician claiming that the United States isn’t actually a democracy. You might hear it when a Republican candidate wins the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, or after a Supreme Court decision that the majority of Americans oppose.

But who is claiming that the US is not a democracy, and where did the practice get its start?

One recent example comes from Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, who first wrote a 2020 tweet, then an essay[1], explaining why he believes the United States is not a democracy.  

“Our system of government is best described as a constitutional republic. Power is not found in mere majorities, but in carefully balanced power,” Lee wrote. “Democracy itself is not the goal. The goal is freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

This didn’t pop into Lee’s head unbidden. Earlier that same year, the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation made the same claim. Bernard Dobski, a visiting scholar at Heritage, wrote that  

America is a republic and not a pure democracy. The contemporary efforts to weaken our republican customs and institutions in the name of greater equality thus run against the efforts by America’s Founders to defend our country from the potential excesses of democratic majorities.

Dobski continued with a warning against the looming twin specters of hope and fairness: 

The careful balance produced by our mixed republic is threatened by an egalitarianism that undermines the social, familial, religious, and economic distinctions and inequalities that undergird our political liberty. Preserving the republican freedoms we cherish requires tempering egalitarian zeal and moderating the hope for a perfectly just democracy.   

Majority rule, once the comfortable mainstay of a white and Christian majority, has in recent years become a looming threat as both white and Christian (not to mention white Christian) shrink inexorably toward minority status.

Both Lee and Dobski are arguing against majoritarianism and for a form of minority rule. Such a shift requires a long-game devaluation of fairness, day by day, talking point by talking point. It seems ludicrous until we recall that Republicans have only won the popular vote for President once in nearly three decades. Republicans are a political minority. To wield power at the federal level, they have increasingly relied on anti-majoritarian strategies.  

So where did the argument originate that America is not a democracy?

According to Columbia University research scholar Nicole Hemmer, the “republic, not a democracy” argument originated with conservatives in the 1930s who wanted to prevent the country from joining the Second World War. Roosevelt’s call for America to defend democracy drew a conservative response that “we’re not a democracy, we are a republic.” Conservatives revived the argument in the mid-1960s after the codification of civil and voting rights legislation and following federal government efforts to desegregate schools.

“It goes back to the ‘republic, not a democracy’ chants from the 1964 Republican convention,” said Hemmer. “Conservatives rejected the one-person-one-vote standard of the Warren Court, a set of arguments deeply entangled with their opposition to the Black civil rights movement.”

So the argument that the United States is not a democracy originated with conservative thinkers who wanted to shrink the pool of decision-makers in the country and preserve the influence of two rapidly-shrinking majorities that just happen to form the conservative base. It has always been an argument against majority rule, against the voice of the people having an influence in political choices. As White Christians, the core of the Republican Party, continue to shrink as a percentage of the national headcount, these arguments become even more desperately attractive.  

“We’re a republic, not a democracy” is nonsensical along the lines of, “A collie is a dog, not an animal.” The United States is both a republic and a democracy. American political power ultimately rests with the people, who elect representatives to carry out their will. The system is inherently majoritarian, and the founders intended it to be. It is not a direct democracy, but that isn’t the distinction this conservative shell-game is making.

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Republican neo-fascist propaganda here is first rate. Truly first rate.

It refers to “that careful balance produced by our mixed republic.” What the hell does that mean exactly? What careful balance, government vs the people, one group of people vs another, or something else? The point of that carefully crafted poison dart is to deflect people toward a false belief that there now exists a balance of power between government and citizens that is about as good as (i) it is going to get, and (ii) should ever get. Republican neo-fascists want power to stay with the elites. 

Once again, consider the anti-egalitarian words of Paul Weyrich from 1980:

Footnote: 

1. In his essay, Of Course We're Not a Democracy, Lee writes this:

Insofar as “democracy” means “a political system in which government derives its powers from the consent of the governed,” then of course that accurately describes our system. But the word conjures far more than that. It is often used to describe rule by majority, the view that it is the prerogative of government to reflexively carry out the will of the majority of its citizens.

Our system of government is best described as a constitutional republic. Power is not found in mere majorities, but in carefully balanced power. Under our Constitution, passing a bill in the House of Representatives—the body most reflective of current majority views—isn’t enough for it to become law. Legislation must also be passed by the Senate—where each state is represented equally (regardless of population), ....

One of the inconvenient things the propagandizing Senator from Utah ignores is that our federal government does not reflexively carry out the will of the majority of its citizens. If anything, it reflexively carries out the will of the rich or it melts down into gridlock. Majority public opinion has literally no impact on policy. None. 

Government completely ignores what the majority want. So when conservatives whine about disrupting the balance of power from horrors like universal voting rights, civil liberties and public opinion, they are actually concerned about power for elite people and special interests first, White people second and most everything else third, fourth or not at all.

The Senator also does not mention why or how egalitarian civil liberties including voting rights would upset the constitutional balance of power. He does not mention it because the balance would not be upset. The House of Representatives would remain the House as it is now. The same applies to the Senate and White House.

Again, the Republican concern is about power for the elites. When the masses have civil liberties under our current constitution, some power flows from the elites to the masses. Republican elites really are neo-fascists, not democrats. They want all of the power they can get away with accumulating for themselves. That is why Christian nationalism is so intensely focused on moral authority and political power for wealthy people. Rich people are rich because they are more moral. That reflects God’s will. Even atheistic laissez-faire capitalists are perfectly fine with that argument because it preserves their power and wealth. 

Supreme Court Republicans rule in favor of political corruption

Using the excuse of free speech, the court decided to allow corrupt use of campaign finance finds for political purposes. Ted Cruz had challenged the campaign finance law and won. The Republicans argued the law “burdens core political speech without proper justification,” which the said violated the First Amendment. The Democrats’ dissent explained why the law was passed in the first place. The New York Times writes:

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the law was squarely aimed at preventing corruption.

“Repaying a candidate’s loan after he has won election,” she wrote, “cannot serve the usual purposes of a contribution: The money comes too late to aid in any of his campaign activities. All the money does is enrich the candidate personally at a time when he can return the favor — by a vote, a contract, an appointment. It takes no political genius to see the heightened risk of corruption.”

The basic dispute was whether contributions to winning candidates to repay personal loans to their campaigns were a form of political speech or a kind of gift with the potential to corrupt.

The challenged law placed a $250,000 cap on the repayment of personal loans from candidates to campaigns using money from postelection donations. Seeking to test the constitutionality of the law, Mr. Cruz lent $260,000 to his 2018 re-election campaign.

A related regulation allows repayment of loans of more than $250,000 so long as campaigns use pre-election donations and repay the money within 20 days of the election. But the campaign did not repay Mr. Cruz by that deadline, so he stood to lose $10,000.

Chief Justice Roberts, noting that the 2018 Senate race in Texas was at the time the most expensive in history, wrote that it was undisputed under the court’s precedents that candidates can spend their own money without limitation on their own campaigns.

The challenged law, he wrote, “inhibits candidates from loaning money to their campaigns in the first place, burdening core speech.”

Once again, the Republican Party stands on the side of wealth and power for elites. They stand for corrupt government. That law prevented no speech by average voters. The only affected people are rich people. Ted Cruz is not going to give access to wealth to a voter who donates $200 or $800 to his campaign. 

The burden on speech for everyone was completely non-existent if one does not consider spending money in politics to be protected free speech, which I do not. I consider it to be legalized corruption. That money is usually dark. There is no accountability for that corruption.

Once again, we clearly see how Republican Party dogma supports flows of power to elite and powerful people, with no benefits for average people. The Democrats on the court dissented here, not the Republicans. In fact, average people and the public interest are usually harmed, as is the case here. Exerting political power in setting policy is a rich person's game, not an average voter's game. The only game the average voters get to play are voting, with all of smoke, mirrors, lies, deceit, slanders and crackpottery that game is shrouded in and corrupted by.

Simply put, political corruption by rich real people and people called corporations is legal in America. Republican Party elites are fully on board with corruption as their preferred means of exercising and keeping power for the benefit of the powerful, corrupt special interest called the Republican Party. This is how neo-fascism plays politics and power. It is not how democracy is supposed to play it.