PZ Myers has a more visceral response to the rioting in Afghanistan, entitled “Shades of gray.” I won’t quote it, because it really should be read in full. What I appreciate most is that he identifies motivations such as honor and vengeance that obscure the fact that humans are murdering other humans in cold blood. It’s what disturbs me about seeing a New York Times headline that reads “Afghans Avenge Florida Koran Burning.” No, they’re not. To avenge is to retaliate for harm done to oneself or to loved ones by striking back against those who caused it. Myers would not consider even that acceptable, but it is not what is happening here.

The rioting continues in Afghanistan. The estimated toll is now 20 dead and more than 80 injured.

Two suicide attackers disguised as women blew themselves up and a third was gunned down Saturday when they used force to try to enter a NATO base on the outskirts of Kabul, NATO and Afghan police said. Earlier in the week, six U.S. soldiers died during an operation against insurgents in eastern Afghanistan near Pakistan, where the Taliban retain safe havens. President Hamid Karzai expressed regret for the 20 protest deaths, but he also further stoked possible anti-foreign sentiment by again demanding that the United States and United Nations bring to justice the pastor of the Dove Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, where the Quran was burned March 20. Many Afghans did not know about the Quran-burning until Karzai condemned it four days after it happened. The pastor, the Rev. Terry Jones, had threatened to destroy a copy of Islam’s holy book last year but initially backed down. On Friday he said Islam and its followers were responsible for the killings. U.S. President Barack Obama extended his condolences to the families of those killed by the protesters and said desecration of the Quran “is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry.” But he said that does not justify attacking and killing innocent people, calling it “outrageous and an affront to human decency and dignity.”

While I would guess that Terry Jones and his congregation are almost certainly intolerant bigots, that doesn’t mean that any desecration of a Qur’an is inherently a bigoted act. Intentions are what make bigotry. I also wonder if Karzai has contemplated for even a second whether all of this destruction would have taken place if he had not publicly condemned a stupid ritual conducted by a few dozen people in a Florida church.

ETA:  Being fiercely opposed to the initial invasion as well as our current occupation of Afghanistan, I’m certainly not overlooking the possibility that this rioting is simply a sign of the camel’s back having been broken and general anti-American sentiment having come to a head. That very well might be the case. Nevertheless, it’s still horrifying that the Qur’an burning has been taken as endorsed by the entirety of the U.S. and that it legitimizes this kind of reaction. Terry Jones’s congregation is not occupying Afghanistan.

And considering the fallout from the Danish cartoons in 2007, I can’t imagine that hatred of America due to the occupation is the only reason for the rioting. The Danes have troops in Afghanistan, too– about 700 of them. That wasn’t why Muslims throughout the Middle East were burning embassies.

I submitted a version of my “Helping vs. blaming in Japan” post to State of Formation, modified to include more commentary on the psychology of seeing supernatural agency in disasters.

Cross-posted from State of Formation.

Over at Religion Dispatches Levi McLaughlin, a professor of religion who specializes in East Asian traditions, writes about Tokyo’s governor Shintaro Ishihara describing the tsunami that struck Japan as “divine punishment”:

Ishihara, a prize-winning novelist, stage and screen actor, and a populist hero of the Japanese right, has gained notoriety for his willingness to court controversy, but his take on the tragedy in northeastern Japan offended even his staunchest supporters. On March 14, just three days into the crisis, Ishihara told reporters that he saw the tsunami as “divine punishment,” or tenbatsu, a term usually employed in Japanese to describe a righteous and inevitable punishment of the wicked. For Ishihara, the tsunami produced by Japan’s largest-ever recorded earthquake was a means of washing away the “egoism” (gayoku in Japanese) afflicting the Japanese people.

While the Tokyo Governor said that he felt sorry for the victims, he concluded that “We need a tsunami to wipe out egoism, which has rusted onto the mentality of Japanese over a long period of time.”

Ishihara, who will seek a fourth term as Tokyo Governor in a 2013 election, apologizedpublicly the next day, following comments by Miyagi Prefecture Governor Yoshihiro Murai, leader of the prefecture closest to the quake epicenter. Murai condemned Ishihara and urged sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of victims suffering in northern Japan. Despite Ishihara’s expression of regret, his “divine punishment” comment lingers as the most widely known religious sentiment yet expressed by a high-profile Japanese public figure in reaction to the current crisis. It resonates with similar remarks made in the United States following disasters, such as those by Pat Robertson in 2005, who described Hurricane Katrina as divine retribution for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts upholding Roe vs. Wade, or the televised conversation between Robertson and Jerry Falwell on September 13, 2001 in which they characterized the attack on the Twin Towers as God’s punishment for American tolerance of “abortionists,” gays, feminists and the ACLU.

In his willingness to attribute this current natural disaster to divine influence, Ishihara joins the esteemed ranks of Glenn Beck, who was equally sure that a message was being sent but a bit less specific about what it was:
What God does is God’s business, I have no idea. But I’ll tell you this — whether you call it Gaia or whether you call it Jesus, there’s a message being sent. And that is, “Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.”

The need to believe that everything happens for a reason and that good will be rewarded with good while bad is punished by bad is called just-world bias, and it’s on full display here.  You could point out to Ishihara or Beck that the cause of earthquakes is actually plate tectonics which were set in place long before Japan was Japan, but the answer would almost certainly be “I know– and why do you think that was?  Why did it happen now?”

Well, for reasons someone with more geological knowledge than I could doubtless explain, but that simply pushes the question back another notch.  There has to be an ultimate explanation in this thinking, and “That’s the way the world is” isn’t good enough.  It’s not hard to sympathize with this desire to find reasons behind it all, because having reasons makes it easier for us to cope — or at least, it seems like it does. Psychologist Jesse Bering discusses in his new book The Belief Instinct how when life is uncertain and threats loom, people are not necessarily inclined to set aside supernatural reasoning simply because scientific reasons have been provided.  They can’t “turn off” the notion that events are the result of a cosmic will, especially when those events are special because of their rarity and enormous impact for the positive or negative.  Our means of conceiving of the thoughts and motivations of other people by taking their perspective is called Theory of Mind, and once it fully develops (for most people at about four years of age), it’s such a useful thing to have that we tend to, as Bering puts it, over-attribute agency.  We see it everywhere.  And when an unexpected tragedy happens, we scrabble for meaning and intention because that’s what we are so used to doing as a species.

For some of us, that translates into a literal belief that a specific agent–God– had a purpose in causing this particular catastrophe.  For others, that idea seems repellent.  We might be swayed by the idea that the event is all part of God’s plan, however, even if we don’t think he deliberately caused this disaster for a particular reason. Others have a vague sense of karma or of the universe testing us in some way.  As a non-believer I’m not immune to this sort of thinking.  I still think “Why me?” whenever something unusually positive or negative happens, as if there’s a reason aside from all of the physical events that led up to it.   But though most people are willing to reconcile things in their heads by interpreting something like an earthquake as part of the general workings of the world in some way (theistic or otherwise), attributing such a horrible thing to the deliberate machinations of God in response to human behavior is viewed by most of us as abhorrent.  And that, I would say frankly, is a good thing.

Cross-posted from State of Formation.

Sue Blackmore is one of the go-to voices in the UK on matters of religious thinking and consciousness. She is, believe it or not, an atheist with a PhD in parapsychology.  Originally a firm believer in the paranormal, she reached the conclusion in the course of her study that it doesn’t in fact have any scientific basis.  At that point, she decided to find out what the mind really is capable of doing, which resulted in a number of books including the excellent Consciousness: An Introduction.

Blackmore is probably most famous for The Meme Machine, however, a book in which she takes the idea of the meme which Richard Dawkins proposed in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene (yes, it really was that long ago) and ran with it.  I don’t think most people who use the word “meme” these days really have any idea where the term originally came from and how it was formulated.  Some people don’t even know how to pronounce it, because they don’t realize it was intended to sound similar to “gene” in order to convey a similar means of propagation.  Genes, Dawkins wrote, have their own metaphorical interests which can be viewed as independent from ours in that they “desire” to be perpetuated  into the next generation.  In the same way, memes are ideas which “desire” to be spread as far and widely as possible.  Blackmore expressed this epidemiologically, comparing memes to viruses which need hosts that are most conducive to spreading them.  A memeplex is a conglomerate of ideas which are transmitted together because they are mutually supporting, such as a philosophical outlook or a religion.

As you can imagine, an idea’s interests that are independent from ours might well be also contrary to ours, which is what the word “virus” is intended to convey.  Viruses are not symbiotic with us– they manage to propagate at the expense of our health by making us sick.  In his 2006 book Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett compared religion to a lancet fluke which invades the mind of an ant, driving it to climb to the top of a blade of grass to be eaten by grazing animals, and didn’t seem to fully acknowledge how that analogy could be perceived as insulting to believers.  It smudged the line between being willing to die for worthy causes, of which martyrdom is perceived to be one, and being made to die pointlessly for someone/something else’s desires.  You might say “Well, that’s the entire point– the memes just make you think you’re doing something meaningful!”  Maybe so, but that’s assuming one’s conclusion.  Most of us would grant that some forms of self-sacrifices are in fact noble and not at all pointless, but both Blackmore and Dennett would say that those are caused by memes as well.  How do we determine which ones are virus- or fluke-like and which are not?

After attending an Explaining Religion conference at the University of Bristol, Blackmore says that she no longer views religions as viruses of the mind in the sense of being detrimental to their hosts. Why? Two main reasons:

1.  Michael Blume was able to show that religious people have far more children than non-religious people.

2.  Ryan McKay was able to show using experimental data that “religious people can be more generous, cheat less and co-operate more in games such as the prisoner’s dilemma, and that priming with religious concepts and belief in a ‘supernatural watcher’ increase the effects.”

To the first point a person could note that there are more important things in life than the number of one’s children.  True in a proximate sense, but not in an ultimate one.  If we’re evaluating the benevolence of a meme on an evolutionary scale, increasing reproduction is a clear advantage even if it’s not in the best interest of individuals or, indeed, the world itself.

To the second point, which is well-supported by a number of studies that have been performed over recent years, a person could dither about the degree to which being cooperative and honest should be counted as more a benefit to the individual or to the group, and then talk about whether it promotes in-group cooperation at the expense of creating inter-group hostility.

However, I’m not sure we really need to conduct either discussion.  Memetics is not the only way to examine religious ideas epidemiologically.  The advantage in looking at religion as a memeplex is that it emphasizes that religious ideas are transmitted between human minds just like any other ideas, but I think that Pascal Boyer manages to do that more effectively using his epidemiological approach because he doesn’t feel compelled to treat ideas as strict analogs to genes.  He tries to figure out first what should count as a religious idea, and then discusses which religious ideas are more likely to “stick” and which others are not, but not by attributing metaphorical interests to them.

That isn’t to say that Boyer doesn’t have his own ideas about whether religious ideas are on the whole more beneficial to us or more detrimental, but that question is not essential to his theorizing about what fundamentally makes an idea religious and likely to spread.  In fact, it’s quite irrelevant to that theorization.

I don’t think the matter of whether and when religion benefits humanity and when it harms us should be off-limits to scientific inquiry.  And even if I did, scientists are going to research those topics anyhow.  But it doesn’t seem appropriate to make a decision about the value of religion as a whole as part of your theorizing about how it works.  These studies which point out various ways in which being prompted to think religiously causes people to be better to each other are tightly circumscribed and specific.  I don’t think showing that people tend to behave better when they think they are being watched, for example, really says anything about the value of religious beliefs in general even if one function of religion is to perpetuate the idea that there is always someone watching.   This experimental data is important, but it’s also important to hold off on forming grand conclusions on the basis of a few studies.  It’s good that Blackmore has decided religion isn’t a mental virus, but that doesn’t mean it’s a mental panacea either.

Cross-posted from State of Formation.

The Supreme Court ruling on Snyder v. Phelps was issued this morning– 8-1 in favor of Phelps, saying that the First Amendment protected the WBC’s right to protest the military funeral.  I couldn’t have imagined it going any other way, but there was still a niggling worry that it might.  The opinion, authored by Roberts with Breyer concurring, notes that the protest was taking place on public land, roughly a thousand feet from the church (as instructed by police), and none of the protesters entered the cemetery.  None of them interfered in the funeral in any way, and the plaintiff was not even able to read what their signs read until that evening when he saw them on a news broadcast.  The lone dissenter to the opinion, Justice Alito, disagreed mainly on the grounds that the protest took place at a time and location geared to garner maximal attention.  Which…isn’t that what protesters always do?

I’m very glad that this case went to the Supreme Court, and that this was the decision they delivered.  That doesn’t mean I have a shred of sympathy for Westboro or their supposed cause, but I do think that delivering a $5 million dollar judgment against a group protesting on public grounds without any violence or even cursing would set a very, very bad precedent in terms of freedom of speech.  From the opinion:

Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.

Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

• Westboro Baptist’s reply to Anonymous is predictably childish.  (That link goes to the PDF, but you can see a jpeg version here.)  Short version: “Bring it!”
• Speaking of shutting down web sites, the Department of Homeland Security shuttered nearly 84,000 of them last weekend on suspicion of child porn.  People attempting to access those sites were greeted for up to six days with a banner noting the accusation but no further details.  Charges were ultimately brought against 10 of the sites.   Operators of many of the other sites are not pleased.     
• Eight years after a Savage Love reader proposed “a frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex” as a definition for Rick Santorum’s surname in response to his rabidly anti-homosexual views, the former Pennsylvania senator is finding that he now has a “Google problem.”  
• More things Bill O’Reilly can’t explain.  
• Going to be anywhere near Pasadena, CA at the end of June?  If so, go to the Science Symposium featuring Michael Shermer, Bill Nye, Brian Dalton (Mr. Deity) and James Randi.  I’ll envy you from afar.
• Susan over at Farmgirlfare has instituted a Daily Donkey feature, spreading joy and cuteness for those of us not lucky enough to have farms of our own.  A sample:

Dan and Daphne (she only looks dead) 1/9/08

Via Dr. X’s Free Associations:

Research Shows Testosterone Reduces Mind Reading Abilities, Empathy Levels New research conducted by scientists from the Utrecht and Cambridge Universities has found that an administration of testosterone under the tongue in volunteers can negatively affect a person’s ability to “mind read”, an indication of empathy. Moreover, the effects of testosterone administration are predicted by the 2D:4D foetal marker of prenatal testosterone.
The study findings bear important implications for the androgen theory of autism, as testosteron is an androgen, and confirms previous rodent research findings showing that testosterone in early brain development organizes the activation of the hormone in later life. The study was designed by Professor Jack van Honk at the University of Utrecht and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge, and was conducted in Utrecht.

Simon Baron-Cohen authored The Essential Difference, in which he proposed that autism could be characterized as having an “extreme male brain” due to the emphasis of people on the autism spectrum on systematizing rather than empathizing.  Obviously by that he doesn’t mean that autism is male-specific, though it does occur in males with a much higher frequency (about 4:1, from what I have read), but that it represents an extreme example of the traits that more often typify the brain of a man than a woman.   So this study would appear to support his theory, although it has come under fire from psychologists such as Cordelia Fine, who accuses Baron-Cohen of misrepresenting the findings of experimental research on the subject.  I haven’t read her book Delusions of Gender yet to see how well these accusations hold up, but am looking forward to it as it comes recommended by Uta Frith,* commonly regarded as one of the pre-eminent authorities on autism.  

Amanda Marcotte expresses some of her reservations about Baron-Cohen’s work toward the end of this talk, worth watching in full:

*When Uta was a visiting scholar at Aarhus I talked with her about doing a study to examine the relationship between autism and religious belief (or lack thereof), but unfortunately didn’t manage to get it off the ground before it was time for me to head back to the states.  That’s still a project that definitely needs to be done.

Cross-posted from State of Formation.

Those familiar with the Chik-Fil-A restaurant chain have known for quite a long time that the ownership is explicitly conservative Christian, which hasn’t meant much for people who like to eat there except that they must remember it’s closed on Sundays. But recently it has come out (pardon the expression) that the company also contributes significantly to anti-gay causes. The New York Times reports:

“Nicknamed ‘Jesus chicken’ by jaded secular fans and embraced by Evangelical Christians, Chick-fil-A is among only a handful of large American companies with conservative religion built into its corporate ethos. But recently its ethos has run smack into the gay rights movement. A Pennsylvania outlet’s sponsorship of a February marriage seminar by one of that state’s most outspoken groups against homosexuality lit up gay blogs around the country. Students at some universities have also begun trying to get the chain removed from campuses. . .
Over the years, the company’s operators, its WinShape Foundation and the Cathy family have given millions of dollars to a variety of causes and programs, including scholarships that require a pledge to follow Christian values, a string of Christian-based foster homes and groups working to defeat same-sex marriage initiatives.”

Hence a certain amount of outcry from gay rights groups. Change.org has created a petition asking Chik-Fil-A to stop funding anti-gay groups such as Focus on the Family which has so far received over 25,000 signatures, and many individual gay rights supporters have decided not to patronize the restaurant chain any longer. Alvin McEwen writes at Pam’s House Blend that “lgbts also have a right to decide where NOT to spend our money. Furthermore we and our allies have a right to make a stink in regards to a company who wants us to buy its product, but not afford us respect.”

In other words, a boycott. It’s a time-honored concept– a way for people to express their disagreement with the ethics of a company by refusing to do business with it. Otherwise known as “voting with your wallet.” The idea is that financial support for an institution enables it and therefore can be construed as an endorsement of its policies, therefore revoking such support while saying “Hey everybody! I’m revoking my support!” means that you’ve both ceased enabling that institution and attempted to make others aware of your reasons and encourage them to do the same. It’s a legal and peaceful way of making your views known. Right?

Not to Michelle Malkin, apparently. In these efforts the conservative columnist sees an “ugly war” waged by a “left wing mob”:

“Progressive groups are gloating over Chick-fil-A’s public relations troubles exacerbated by the nation’s politicized paper of record. This is not because they care about winning hearts and minds over gay rights or marriage policy, but because their core objective is to marginalize political opponents and chill Christian philanthropy and activism. The fearsome ‘muscle flexing’ isn’t being done by innocent job-creators selling chicken sandwiches and waffle fries. It’s being done by the hysterical bullies trying to drive them off of college grounds and out of their neighborhoods in the name of ‘human rights.’”

Gosh, you’d think that people were crowding the streets screaming and trying to use the law to prevent Chik-Fil-A from erecting a new establishment purely out of objections to its ideology! Oh wait, that’s what people did in reaction to the proposed so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” What’s happening in this case is an objection to ideology, yes, but not just that. It’s an objection to political efforts on behalf of that ideology to oppose equal rights for a segment of the American population. And that objection is not taking place through violent means or legal enforcement– it’s taking the form of voluntary boycotts, and student efforts to encourage their universities to stop using Chik-Fil-A as a vendor. Essentially, they are asking universities to participate in the boycott as well.

During the protests in New York at Cordoba House, many of us were asking conservatives who opposed the Islamic community center why they oppose the property rights of the building’s owners. Now as gay rights advocates are boycotting Chik-Fil-A, I would ask Michelle Malkin why she doesn’t support the right of individuals to do business with whom they please. It’s one thing to say that while boycotts in general are fine, this one in particular is misguided and inappropriate because of x, y, and z. Then we could have a discussion on the merits of x, y, and z and would probably still disagree, but the basic understanding that everyone has a right to speak their mind both verbally and with their wallets would be there.

But that’s not what she wants to do. The objections Malkin is making could be applied just as easily to any boycott by conservatives of liberal businesses. The next time an organization like the American Family Association declares that it will boycott a automobile manufacturer or food producer for so much as advertising in a gay-friendly way, I wonder if she will call them “hysterical bullies,” or instead support them in speaking out against the fearsome left wing mob of…people who are okay with the idea that there are gays who want to do things like drive cars and eat soup.

Trying to decide who to do business with can be tricky for people who care about the political involvement of companies and corporations (and trust, they will go on being involved in politics whether we care or not). The most important part of minimizing that difficulty is freedom of expression. We have to be able to find out, to research, to exchange ideas, to act, to let others know of our actions, and to hear about theirs. The way to influence an entity whose primary concern is its profit margin is indisputably through our business choices– it’s the only power we as individuals have, which makes it sacred in a way. It shouldn’t be treated lightly, and it should never be denied.

I love Popehat.  They’re certainly a brash bunch, but when there’s a spade around that needs to be called a spade, they can be relied upon to do it:

 Tragedy Generates Stupidity

Tragedy makes people say, and do, stupid things. 

Let’s note just a few of the stupid things said in the last 48 hours. This is by no means an exclusive list. Nor is it even-handed. Item: David Frum thinks we should look to reefer madness as a cause of the Tucson shooting. Item: Sarah Palin aide Rebecca Mansour says that bullseyes on a map — referred to by Palin as bullseyes, and used together with “don’t retreat, RELOAD” rhetoric — were “surveyor’s symbols.” [I shouldn’t have to say it, but these days it seems that I do: this is stupid, dishonest, cowardly, and embarrassing even though there is no indication that Palin’s rhetoric had any connection whatsoever with this shooting.] Item: Representative Bob Brady of Pennsylvania wants to offer a bill banning campaign symbols like the crosshairs on the map. Item: As Patrick noted below, Rep. James Clyburn seems to think that the main lesson of the shooting should be that he ought not have to mingle with plebs at the airport. Radley Balko offers a poll about which response is the most ridiculous.
Count on the shooting to keep delivering concentrated stupid for some time.