Something I've seen quite a bit on Mumsnet is confusing me slightly

[GeorgianMumto5]

...I often read statements along the lines of, 'I'm an atheist because I there is no God,' and, 'I don't want my child to be taught about your fairy stories [religious teachings],' which is all fair enough but what's confusing me is, aren't these just people's opinions? One person can't provide definitive proof of the absence of a deity, anymore than another can provide definitive proof of the existence of a deity, surely? Or am I missing something?

This is a genuine query - I'm interested to know. I'm not trying to stir up arguments, although I'm happy to be argued with and told that I'm wrong.

As a person with a faith, I'd say it's all a matter of faith - either you believe it, or you don't. If I was without faith, I guess I'd say it's a matter of opinion. In any case, I don't get the absolute confidence people have that there is no God. I think there is, but I couldn't prove it and wouldn't think to tell another peson that I'm right on that topic and they're wrong. Where does all the certainty come from?

I fully accept that secular ideas have given rise to atrocities and I don't claim that secular beliefs are any better or worse than religious beliefs. That is kind of the point. There is no difference. They are both just the beliefs of people. Where they differ is that a harmful secular idea can at least be challenged with logic and reason but there is no real way of challenging someone who maintains they believe something because a big invisible being will be cross of they don't, and moreover their belief should be protected for that reason.

Sadly, I am not creating 'invisible enemies' with my examples but am currently dealing with a near relative who has recently told me that I will be going to hell. Even more sadly, she is spending dwindling time with an elderly relative telling him the same rather than paying any attention to the views and experiences he could share with her. Who knows, maybe she would be just as selfish and self absorbed even if she did recognise that she was choosing this belief for herself, but I like to think that her thinking would be a little less skewed if she was not receiving the message that this is what she has to believe.

My gay friend does attend a church that would be happy to marry him and his partner, it is the wider church that influences the laws in this country to prevent him from living according to his beliefs.

As for the abortion and school worship examples- my Irish relatives are very much affected by the latter, and all children in the UK by the latter.

But Grimma, Vienna had a very good, very modern, very enlightened and tolerant legal system before the anschluss. It just proved frangible in the event.

And yes, of course modern evolutionary biologists aren't eugenicists, but the Stolen Generation wasn't very long ago. Less time ago than, say, the RC church's Crusade or involvement in wars in general, and that's cited often. I'm not condemning them especially; I'm saying all movements are apt to have murky pasts, without necessarily being invalidated by that.

SG, we're in agreement here; not all xtians are homophobic. Freely confess I found it pretty funny at the end of the dreadful Da Vinci Code, when they get to the last Supper, and John the Evangelist leaning on Jesus was misdescribed as a woman. (The picture might contain a secret about Jesus, but Brown picked the wrong one.) NB - this does not make any difference to my views about Christ. Whyever should it? He always seems strikingly tolerant about sexual matters, and not especially interested in them.

Leonardo was almost certainly gay... so too was Christopher Marlowe, who said that Christ loved St John 'as the sinners of Sodoma'. Not a novel idea, then...

Sieg - as a non-Aus, it does seem to me that the church had a great deal to do with the Stolen Generation, given that missionaries were one of the primary actors in taking and housing the children. Also the process of baptising children and giving them a Christian name was a deliberate ploy to divorce them from their families and cultural identities.

Vienna had a very good, very modern, very enlightened and tolerant legal system before the anschluss.
And it wasn't exactly devoid of religion either. If that was less frangible perhaps it was because (from what I've read) there were Catholic and protestant leaders who initially welcomed the Germans. So I wouldn't put my faith in religion either as a garantor of ethical behaviour.

The same thing was done to Native American children in the US, but by the Bureau of Indian Affairs acting without surrogates of any kind, based on the Carlisle Indian Industrial school model. There were Christian boarding school on reservations that had largely disappeared by the time the BIA started the wholesale forcible re-education/'assimilation' of Native American youth.

My grandfather and grandmother remembered being forced to recite a prayer of thanks in National School (state primary school) in Ireland at the turn of the 20th century:
'I thank the goodness and the grace,
That on my birth have smiled,
And made me in this Christian day,
A happy English child.'
They had not one drop of English blood in them and lived in the south east of Ireland. They were not taught Irish in their schools despite living within walking distance of one of Leinster's last surviving Irish speaking areas. This was because the Irish language had been deliberately driven to the far corners of Ireland as part of colonial policy. They grew up in an Ireland where their families were forced to pay tithes for the maintenance of the established Church of Ireland. The fact that there was a language they were interested in learning (they attended classes outside of school) and the fact that they were not interested in paying for the upkeep of the local vicar were not considered important. They were told in every way possible that their culture and religion were not valued as they went through school and as they lived out their lives on the farms they called home (paying rent to the local landlord for land their families had lived on since the days of the Normans, in stone cottages with three feet thick walls, among hedgerows and stone walls just like the Normandy model they were copied from back in the 1200s when they were first established.)

Thistledew, you can be frustrated at the pace of change (speaking as an Irish citizen here) but the fact remains that the democratic process is the only reasonable way to try to effect change.

Here in Canada the residential schools were run by Christian groups and funded by the government so they were both complicit although the actual abuse was carried out at the schools, so I think that the Churches that ran the schools carry a higher degree of culpability. It was an act of cultural imperialism, and a key part of that was the view that Christianity was superior to the beliefs of the First Nations.

As with other abuse carried out by religious groups or individuals I think that it is particularly egregious when those who profess themselves to have moral authority behave in ways that verge on evil because recourse for the victims is particularly difficult.

I don't think that in general people of faith are any worse (or better) than those without, just that us humans have the capacity to do terrible as well as fantastic things. However religion can (and has) both driven or justified some pretty cruel and callous actions which have been very very far away from 'love'.

Yes, nooka, my point exactly. I agree that not all people of faith, in any place beginning with Aus, are guilt-free, and the record of my church in the Anschluss makes particularly grim reading. I can give you some better weapons against me if you'd like them!

But all I wanted to flag is that it's not ONLY religion that has been used to justify the dreadful racist acts we are discussing; they have also been justified by secular political ideologies and by the commands of 'science'. As mathanxiety says, nationalism and sectarianism have pulled the same stuff from the knapsack of evil.

So neither NOT being religious NOR being religious are in themselves guarantees of good behaviour.

Martin Luther King speaks of the moral duty to be intelligent, to pick and choose, to think as well as pray. UNintelligent love can be ridiculously controlling and possessive and tactless and even cruel and heartless, whether it comes from soviets or catholics.

Sieglinde are you going to see them at at the Emirates Stadium? We saw them this summer in Paris and on the 21st Century Breakdown tour. Loved the child sacrifice thing they did for a East Jesus Nowhere . I hope Billy Joe gets it together.

sieg - quite so. Human nature is human nature - an evolved mix of altruism and selfishness. As I believe religions are, like political systems, purely the product of the human mind, its not suprising to me that the outcomes - for good or ill - when they hold power and influence are similar. The question for religious people is why if religions were anything other than human constructs, aren't any of them way better than the non-religious alternatives?

Also, there are no 'commands of science'. Science gives knowledge, it doesn't say what you should do with that knowledge. That requires ethics.

Hima, yes, excited too. :) Erm, yes some football ground in London... [vague]. I had tickets for the 21st Century Breakdown concert at Wembley, and I fucking broke my fucking leg 24 hours before. The dcs went, and tried hard to beam it to me in hospital over their phones. It was worse than the pain to miss it... I know I'm unusual, but I LOVED 21st century breakdown.. still do. IMHO Billy Joe is not usually what we might call together, and from thence comes his utter brilliance. I get why the green days - clearly he absolutely needs to go slower than is normal for him, or his head would explode. I used the child sacrifice vid teaching a class on the Holy Innocents and Macbeth and Medea and Rene Girard...

Grimma, I as an RC absolutely see no reason why religions should be 'better' than other human institutions, in that they are full of sinful humans. I would go further and say that religious life offers stupendously tough temptations - to looking down on others, for instance, of which there's a LOT in the Gospels, and which Jesus is constantly rebuking. People who say, in effect, 'Lord, I thank thee that I am not as this man' abound in every religion and none. Jesus said he came NOT to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance - which means, I take it, not a lot of self-hatred, but the real sense that my actions can hurt somebody else. What then is the point of religions, you ask.. well, to me the point is NOT that they offer the only way to be 'saved'. god alone sufficeth for that, and yes, I think that all people of goodwill will find their way to him somehow, and he to them, NOT necessarily in the same way as me or in any way I can foresee or dictate. It's that they (religions) offer some help and support in the quest for love. Maybe some people are strong enough not to need them; that's none of my business, really. Personally, I'm weak as piss, and I need plenty of help.

NB - just like religion/s, science can translate itself falsely into rigid commandments - say, sterilization of the eugenically undesirable, or elimination of 'subject races', or 'removal of the socially undesirable', and it has. This isn't intrinsic to it, but it has happened quite a lot.

sieg - you forestalled my obvious question

science can translate itself falsely into rigid commandments

No, really, science can't translate itself into anything. The facts learned by the scientific method can be misinterpreted (eugenics) and misapplied (nuclear bombs) but that's down to perverted ethical thinking or politics (sometimes allied to religion). Science says you can release energy if you split an atom - period. It does not say what you should or shouldn't do with that knowledge.

I think though that the word 'science' can and has functioned to authorise such misinterpretations and misapplications, just as 'religion' has and does. It's not a coincidence that the Manhattan Project scientists thought the Los Alamos detonation might just destroy the universe, but they were so interested to find out if it would that they went ahead anyway. In this manner, 'science' can act in place of ethics, can obviate ethics though its very reluctance to acknowledge the possible ethical implications of its own acts - see also animal experimentation.

The question for religious people is why if religions were anything other than human constructs, aren't any of them way better than the non-religious alternatives?

Since Christianity starts with the notion that people are sinful, fallen, imperfect, etc., that brand of religion at least has realism going for it. The tendency to arrogance that Sieglinde refers to was anticipated for thousands of years, possibly because human nature in the raw does not evolve.

possibly because human nature in the raw does not evolve.
why not? It has in the past ... give it long enough... of course how it evolves is an open question.

Some people are raised without any kind of God/religion. I don't know there should be an expectation on them to prove something doesn't exist. The expectation shold be on those who do believe to prove it, if they are the ones who are convinced.

How has it evolved?

How has it evolved?
Not a question anyone can answer exactly of course - but do you really think it hasn't evolved along the continuum from homo habilis to where we are now? Do you think there was a sudden step change in 'human nature' to the point we're at now?

If not, then there's no reason to suppose that human nature as it is now is immutable.

I was looking for an image to go with this, <a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=evolution+of+human&start=140&hl=en&lr=&sa=X&tbo=d&as_qdr=all&biw=1269&bih=712&addh=36&tbm=isch&tbnid=pDtsf8nYDfgNZM:&imgrefurl=www.evidencebasedhr.com/mba-questions/we-haven%25E2%2580%2599t-stopped-evolving-yet/&docid=we4i8-BnGgAYeM&imgurl=www.evidencebasedhr.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Evolution-of-humanity.jpg&w=354&h=142&ei=LMbAUImSKeOSiQKSloCoAg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=165&vpy=481&dur=1050&hovh=113&hovw=283&tx=187&ty=105&sig=101384522069111236803&page=7&tbnh=74&tbnw=185&ndsp=24&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:140,i:169" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here is one I like

There is a difference between physical evolution and evolution of our nature.

Claiming we are somehow more 'evolved' or further along in our nature than previous generations were smacks of hubris. I don't see any continuum either, more of a revolving, endless repetition of evidence that our nature does not evolve. What changes is the capacity to inflict massive damage on our fellow humans -- that has been amply demonstrated, and the scale of destruction has increased exponentially as technology has improved. What does not change is our inability to resist the temptation to injure, kill, destroy. I don't see whatever improvement you see.

There is a difference between physical evolution and evolution of our nature.

Is there? I doubt it. Our nature is to a large degree a product of our physical self.

Claiming we are somehow more 'evolved' or further along in our nature than previous generations were smacks of hubris

I didn't claim anything of the sort - I said 'of course how it evolves is an open question.'

You're falling into a common misunderstanding of the word 'evolved'. It doesn't mean 'better' in any sense except better able to survive in whatever conditions we are in.

I think you must be thinking on a different timescale to me- hundreds or a few thousand years. I'm thinking in hundreds of thousands -millions of years. Do you think human nature is exactly the same now as the first in the line of humans? There's no reason to suppose there won't be further changes.

What may be unique about us is that we have some control over our environment - physical and more interestingly societal. If we could develop societies in which 'good' people prosper and 'bad' people don't, there would be a selective pressure which might ( just might) lead to a greater proportion of 'good' people.

No matter how you define it, our nature has not and can not evolve.

Do you read much history? Really, all that can be reasonably concluded from even a simple survey of world history is that we have got better at wiping each other out, not more concerned about the possibility of it. If we were evolving all the time then we wouldn't need ethics. Or laws.

There is no such thing as a good person or a bad person -- there are people who feel constrained by law or ethics and people who do not. When you divide people into good or bad or other categories, and when you hold out hope of perfecting human nature by some means, you stray into the sort of wasteland where utopian ideas can look attractive.

You would obviously consider yourself one of the 'good' ones, the ones entitled to control the environment, or you wouldn't be suggesting that nature can be improved or encouraged or nurtured or nudged in the 'right' direction through control. That is hubris.

No matter how you define it, our nature has not and can not evolve.

I really don't know what you base that assertion on. As you refer to 'history', as I thought we're thinking on different timescales. And you're also inferring more from what I said than I ever meant to imply. I said nothing about hoping to perfect human nature, or that I (or anyone else) was entitled to try to do so. Just that contrary to what you assert, human nature isn't immutable for all time.

You are asserting that human nature isn't immutable for all time without presenting any evidence of improvement or regression. All we have to go on to back up assertions about our nature is what we know of history (references to anything else is guesswork) so I mentioned history...

Firstly, the words 'improvement' and 'regression' are yours - I merely said 'change'.

Beyond that - assuming you're not a creationist - do you think that 'human nature' was suddenly bestowed complete on the offspring of a parent which was distinctly non-human with a non-human nature? If not then what alternative is there but to accept there has been a continuum of change from the not-human predecessors to the recognisably human[sonfused]. If that is so, there is no logical reason to suppose our nature is now immutable.

OK, so you said nothing whatsoever to do with evolution or change and I am talking through my hat?

You are mixing up nature with other things -- intellectual and physical development. For physical evolution there is plenty of evidence (no I am not a creationist). There is scant evidence for intellect so it's a challenge to draw a conclusion. And there is no evidence whatsoever for your assertion that nature (the swirl of emotion and psychology for want of a better way to define it) has changed.

OK, so you said nothing whatsoever to do with evolution or change and I am talking through my hat?

sorry, I'm not clear what you mean by that (I can read it in a couple of ways with different meanings). Blame it on the hour.

There is scant evidence for intellect so it's a challenge to draw a conclusion. And there is no evidence whatsoever for your assertion that nature (the swirl of emotion and psychology for want of a better way to define it) has changed.

There's also no evidence it hasn't changed (remember I was thinking of pre-historic timescales). As to intellect...suppose we take our thought experiment back to the last common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees. Do you think it probable they had the same intellect as us? The same 'nature'? Do you think nothing has changed since then? Our brains have changed, I'd be fairly sure many of our hormones will have mutated to various degrees - these are physical developments which surely have a profound effect on our psychology and emotions. So, at what point do you think that process of change stopped forever?

I'm puzzled, I really didn't think I was saying anything controversial when questioned your statement that 'human nature in the raw does not evolve'.

If we think about different species where we have meddled with the normal course of events (an I am not implying that we should do anything of the sort with humans!) - do you think the nature of a domesticated dog is totally unchanged from that of a wolf?