Pope’s letter protects church, not its victims

The Pope’s letter on child sexual abuse holds lessons for civic society.

What he writes to Catholics about religion is a matter between him and them. But the Catholic church also operates within civic society, acts as a quasi-State at the United Nations, and sends ambassadors to real States.

And the Pope’s letter includes assertions about secular society that are factually wrong.

Having read the full letter, the following seems clear:

1. The Pope’s main priority is to protect the church, not its victims
2. The Pope wrongly blames secularism for priests raping children
3. The Pope’s apologies are incomplete and his appeals are self-serving
4. The Pope’s “concrete initiatives” are a distraction not a solution
5. The Pope is evading the church’s responsibilities to civic society

1. The Pope’s main priority is to protect the church, not its victims

In a letter of close to five thousand words, the phrase “sexual abuse” appears only three times, and nowhere is it used as an active verb describing an action that Catholic priests have done to children. Instead it is twice described abstractly as “the problem of child sexual abuse”, and once passively as “the victims of child sexual abuse.” By contrast, the word “church” appears more than fifty times. Needless to say, the words “rape” and “cover-up” do not appear anywhere in the letter.

One of the three uses of the phrase “sexual abuse” is: “Since the time when the gravity and extent of the problem of child sexual abuse in Catholic institutions first began to be fully grasped, the church has done an immense amount of work in many parts of the world in order to address and remedy it.” This assertion is simply untrue. The Catholic church has known for centuries that some priests have been raping children, and they have known for centuries that raping children is gravely wrong, both as a sin in their religion and a crime in civic society.

The Pope does not even acknowledge (never mind apologise for) the Catholic church policy of bishops covering up the repeated rape of children by priests. Instead he refers euphemistically to “mistakes” made by bishops in responding to allegations, and he does not even include the Vatican or himself as making any of these “mistakes”. In using this evasive language, he is actually moving the church backwards from last December, when the Irish bishops admitted that the Murphy report indicated a widespread culture in the church of covering up child sexual abuse by priests.

In a statement issued during their December 2009 meeting in Maynooth, the Irish bishops said: “We are deeply shocked by the scale and depravity of abuse as described in the report. We are shamed by the extent to which child sexual abuse was covered up in the archdiocese of Dublin and recognise that this indicates a culture that was widespread in the church. The avoidance of scandal, the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the church, took precedence over the safety and welfare of children. This should never have happened and must never be allowed to happen again. We humbly ask for forgiveness.”

Despite this explicit admission last December by the Irish bishops, the Pope’s pastoral letter begins with some subliminal hints of what concerns him most about this issue. In Section 1, the Pope writes: “I have been deeply disturbed by the information which has come to light regarding the abuse of children…” How much stronger that opening sentence would be if it simply read: “I have been deeply disturbed by the abuse of children…” How much stronger it would have been if he had then used the same type of language as the Irish bishops did last December.

Instead, in Section 2, the Pope writes that: “In order to recover from this grievous wound, the church in Ireland must first acknowledge before the Lord and before others the serious sins committed against defenceless children. Such an acknowledgement, accompanied by sincere sorrow for the damage caused to these victims and their families, must lead to a concerted effort to ensure the protection of children from similar crimes in the future.”

On the face if it, this looks commendable. But read it again for its nuances. The reason that sins against children must be acknowledged is to allow the church (not the victims) to recover from “this grievous wound”. It is only as a follow-up point that this must be accompanied by sorrow for the damage caused to the victims. If you parse the language throughout this letter, these same priorities are repeated again and again. The priority of this letter is to revitalise the Catholic church, not to pursue justice for or make reparation to its victims.

2. The Pope wrongly blames secularism for priests raping children

Section 3 is a brief potted history, from the Pope’s perspective, of Irish Catholicism and the impact of Irish Catholic missionaries on Europe and other continents. As an overview, he suggests that, for centuries, Irish clerics “dedicated their lives to Christ, sharing the gift of faith with others, and putting that faith into action in loving service of God and neighbour.”

In Section 4, the Pope asserts that this has all changed in recent decades, because of “new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society.” He writes that “fast-paced social change” has led to Irish Catholics going to confession less often and praying less often, and Irish priests “assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel.” This included “a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations.”

This, the Pope writes, is the “overall context” in which “we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the church and her teachings.” Look again at the nuances of this language. The pope is suggesting that secularization of society is the context in which we must understand priests raping children, which in turn weakens faith and respect for the church. This is self-serving nonsense. The reality is almost the exact opposite.

Catholic priests were raping children, and Catholic bishops and the Vatican were covering up these crimes, long before Irish society became more secular. What secularisation has done is empower the victims of these crimes to speak out about their experiences, and more importantly be heard and believed. And secularisation has helped to reveal the traditional methods used by the Catholic hierarchy to cover up these crimes, such as swearing children to secrecy and moving the criminals to another parish, diocese or country where they could rape more children.

The Pope then lists four specific factors that he says contributed to the problem. Three are within the control of the church: procedures for selecting priests; training in seminaries, and a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church and the avoidance of scandal, resulting in failure to apply existing canonical penalties. Notably, he does not include as a factor the failure by bishops to report serious crimes to the police. And the Pope’s fourth contributory factor is “a tendency in society to favour the clergy and other authority figures”. But how could secularism possibly cause this tendency? In fact, it has done almost the exact opposite.

The Pope’s muddled and manifestly false claim about secularism is part of a pattern of the Catholic church denying responsibility for its own actions. Earlier this month the Vatican’s official exorcist (!) blamed “Satan at work in the Vatican” for priests raping children. And last September, the Vatican’s representative at the UN argued that child sexual abuse was common among Jews; that fewer than 5% of Catholic clergy were sex abusers; and that most of them are actually ephebophiles and not paedophiles, because they are attracted to adolescent males. This evasion has to stop. It is time the Catholic church stopped blaming others for its own crimes.

3. The Pope’s apologies are incomplete and his appeals are self-serving

In Section 5, the Pope writes that he has met with victims of sexual abuse, and is ready to do so again. He says that he has already asked the Irish bishops to establish the truth of what happened in the past, to prevent it from happening again, and to bring justice and healing to the victims of these crimes. He then introduces a series of paragraphs aimed directly at victims, their abusers, parents, children and young people, priests and religious, bishops and all the faithful in Ireland. None of these serves the purpose of bringing justice and healing to the victims of these crimes.

3(a) Victims and priests who abused them

In Section 6, the Pope finally addresses the victims of abuse and their families. He apologises for their suffering, but describes the abuse in the passive tense: “You have suffered… the wrong you have endured… your trust has been betrayed… your dignity has been violated…” He seems unable to bring himself to directly take responsibility for the church actively doing things. This would take the form of “We have caused you to suffer… we have betrayed your trust…” etc. The Pope then moves away from the real world by telling the victims that Jesus understands their pain because he too was a victim of injustice, but that the very wounds of Jesus broke the power of evil and people were reborn. He concludes that the victims can find peace “by drawing nearer to Christ and by participating in the life of his church.” Two points arise here: firstly, the Pope should have apologised to the victims at the start of the letter, not as point number 6. And secondly, the suggestion that they can best find peace, by participating in the church that is still covering up the crimes against them and other children around the world, is deeply offensive.

In Section 7, the Pope addresses priests and religious who have abused children. He says they have betrayed the trust placed in them by children, and “must answer for it before Almighty God and before properly constituted tribunals.” He does not specify what the ambiguous phrase “properly constituted tribunals” means. He tells them they have done great damage to the church and the public perception of the priesthood. He says that Christ can forgive them for the gravest of sins, but that “God’s justice” demands they conceal nothing about their actions. He urges them to “openly acknowledge your guilt, submit yourselves to the demands of justice, but do not despair of God’s mercy.” Given that the preceding sentence refers to “God’s justice” it is unclear whether or not the “submitting yourselves to the demands of justice” means handing yourself in to the police and admitting your crimes.

3(b) Other Irish priests and Irish bishops

In Section 10, the Pope addresses the Irish priests and religious. He tells them that: “All of us are suffering as a result of the sins of our confreres who betrayed a sacred trust or failed to deal justly and responsibly with allegations of abuse.” Notably, the Pope does not include himself among those who “failed to deal justly and responsibly with allegations of abuse.” This is perhaps the most significant sentence in the letter, with a crucial point hidden away indirectly in the making of a different point. Because, until the Pope accepts that he bears ultimate responsibility for the cover-up of these crimes, both as Pope and in his former roles as Cardinal and Bishop, he will be unable to address this issue in the way that it needs to be addressed.

In Section 11, the Pope finally addresses his “brother bishops” in Ireland. This should really be Section 2, after the apology to the victims, which should be Section 1. In this Section, the Pope writes that some bishops “failed, at times grievously”, to apply canon law to the (presumably canon law) crime of child abuse. He adds that: “I recognize how difficult it was to grasp the extent and complexity of the problem, to obtain reliable information and to make the right decisions in the light of conflicting expert advice.” This is complete nonsense. The “problem” was not at all complex. If you are aware that a man is repeatedly raping children, and you have even a minimally functioning moral compass, you know that this is a serious crime that you must report to the police.

The Pope then tells the Irish bishops: “Besides fully implementing the norms of canon law in addressing cases of child abuse, continue to cooperate with the civil authorities in their area of competence.” We can note here the order of priority: canon law first, civil authorities second, and civil authorities is qualified by the condescending phrase “in their area of competence.” The priority of canon law appears again the next sentence: bishops are to ensure that child safety laws be applied fully and impartially “in conformity with canon law.’ There is no parallel reference to “in conformity with civic law.” The pope then asks for “decisive action carried out with complete honesty and transparency,” but the stated purpose of this decisive action is not to bring about justice or reparation, but to restore the reputation of the church.

The Pope does not repeat to the bishops the things that he said to the priests whose crimes the bishops covered up. He does not tell the bishops that they have betrayed the trust placed in them by children, and “must answer for it before Almighty God and before properly constituted tribunals.” He does not tell the bishops that “God’s justice” demands they conceal nothing about their actions. He does not tell the bishops to “openly acknowledge your guilt [and] submit yourselves to the demands of justice.” This is because the Pope sees “the problem of child sexual abuse” as being caused by individual priests, and he clearly does not accept the findings of independent inquiries that the church, on an institutional level, covered up these horrific crimes.

3(c) Parents, children and the faithful

In Sections 8 and 9, the Pope addresses parents and young people. He says that parents are in the first place responsible for bringing up their children, educating them in authentic moral values, and inspiring them with the truth of the Catholic faith. He says that parents should do this while the church “continues to implement the measures adopted in recent years to protect young people in parish and school environments.” And he tells children and young people to seek a personal relationship with Jesus within the church, because Jesus will never betray them. He concludes by asking young people to be faithful disciples in rebuilding and renewing the church.

In Section 12 and 13, the Pope addresses the Catholic faithful in Ireland. He again attacks “our increasingly secularised society, where even we Christians often find it difficult to speak of the transcendent dimension of our existence.” This is simply not true, and the Pope must know this. A secular society does not prevent people from speaking of any transcendent beliefs they may have. It simply prevents such beliefs from being the basis on which civic policy is formulated. The Pope then writes that, while “measures to deal justly with individual crimes are essential, on their own they are not enough.” as they must be augmented by a new vision based on following the commandments of the Gospel. The Pope concludes by saying that he is praying in solidarity with all of his brothers and sisters in Christ.

4. The Pope’s “concrete initiatives” are a distraction not a solution

In Section 14, by far the longest Section, the Pope proposes what he calls “some concrete initiatives to address the situation.” These initiatives turn out to be: asking all Irish Catholics to pray more often and go to confession more often for a period of one year; having an apostolic visitation of certain dioceses and seminaries in Ireland; having a Mission for Irish bishops and priests through the intercession of a 19th century French priest who preached total obedience to the hierarchy and who engaged in bodily mortification; and writing a new prayer for the church in Ireland. That is the sum total of the Pope’s “concrete initiatives”.

4(a) More prayer and more confession

The Pope’s first “concrete initiative” is to ask all Irish Catholics, for a period of one year, between now and Easter 2011, to devote their Friday penances to praying for “an outpouring of God’s mercy and the Holy Spirit’s gifts and strength” upon the church in Ireland. He asks Irish Catholics to fast, pray, read scripture and do works of mercy for this specific purpose; to go to Confession more frequently; and to worship the Holy Eucharist outside of Mass. The Pope says that, by such intense prayer, all Irish Catholics “can make reparation for the sins of abuse that have done so much harm”.

Let’s examine each aspect of this proposal. All Irish Catholics are asked to pray more often and intensely, not for the children who were raped by Catholic priests, but for a rebirth of the Catholic church in Ireland. They are asked to offer up works of mercy, not for the purpose of being merciful, but again for a rebirth of the Irish church. The Pope says that this, plus more Confession and more worship of the Eucharist, can “make reparation for the sins of abuse”. But why should all Irish Catholics be responsible for making reparation for priests raping children and bishops covering up those rapes?

This is not a concrete initiative at all, but an abstract appeal to all Irish Catholics to share the blame for the crimes of priests and the cover-ups of bishops. Scientific studies have shown that prayer does not impact on the natural world. The Pope’s proposed prayers have an arbitrary timetable of “a period of one year”, which coincidentally matches his arbitrary one-year offer of free plenary indulgences to Catholics who visited Lourdes during 2009. And the focus on worshiping the Holy Eucharist outside Mass highlights the most superstitious aspect of Catholic teaching.

4(b) An apostolic visitation and a mission

The Pope’s second “concrete initiative” is that Vatican officials will visit certain dioceses and seminaries and religious institutions in Ireland. The stated purpose is not to make reparation to children raped by priests, but “to assist the local church on her path to renewal.” The Pope’s third “concrete initiative” is that all Irish bishops, priests and religious should attend a nationwide Mission at which they could re-learn about their vocations and recent pontifical teachings. Here the Pope commends to Irish bishops and priests the example of Saint John Vianney, and says that the proposed Mission should operate through Vianney’s intercession.

So who is this model saint whose example the Pope commends to Irish bishops and priests? A Vatican encyclical by Pope John XXIII says that Vianney was “outstanding in the virtue of obedience… we are offering clerics this total obedience as a model… the effectiveness of any apostolate has constant and faithful obedience to the hierarchy as its solid foundation”. The same encyclical says that Vianney was “outstanding in a unique way in voluntary affliction of his body… this led him to abstain almost completely from food and from sleep [and] to carry out the harshest kinds of penances… he brought his body into subjection through voluntary mortification”. Is this type of fundamentalism really the foundation on which to revitalise the Irish Catholic church today?

The Pope concludes his letter with a prayer for the church in Ireland. He wants Irish Catholics to make use of this prayer in their families, parishes and communities. The prayer asks God to renew Irish Catholics in faith hope and charity. It asks Jesus to help the Catholic church in Ireland to educate young people in the way truth and goodness. It asks the Holy Spirit to inspire a new springtime of holiness and apostolic zeal in Ireland. It asks that the sorrow and tears of Irish catholics as they attempt to address past wrongs, should cause grace that will deepen the Catholic faith in Ireland. And it ends by entrusting to the Triune God “ourselves, our children, and the needs of the church in Ireland.” Nowhere in this prayer do the words victim, sexual abuse, rape, crime, cover-up or apology appear. Unsurprisingly, in tune with the overall tone of the letter, the prayer concludes by focusing on “the needs of the church”.

5. The Pope is evading the church’s responsibilities to civic society

Having read the full pastoral letter, the following seems clear:

1. The Pope’s main priority is to protect the church, not its victims
2. The Pope wrongly blames secularism for priests raping children
3. The Pope’s apologies are incomplete and his appeals are self-serving
4. The Pope’s “concrete initiatives” are a distraction not a solution
5. The Pope is evading the church’s responsibilities to civic society

All of the Pope’s proposed initiatives are a distraction from the types of initiatives that could really make a difference. These could include voluntarily acknowledging that the church is subject to the same democratic civic laws as the rest of us; openly accepting the findings of the various Irish enquiries; voluntarily acknowledging that the Catholic church at an institutional level has covered up crimes by priests against children; voluntarily making public all church files that victims wish to have public about these crimes and about the cover-up of these crimes; voluntarily selling church property to voluntarily compensate victims; voluntarily reporting to the police all priests who have committed crimes and all bishops who have covered up these crimes, and voluntarily pleading guilty to whatever crimes were committed.

The Pope may conclude his letter with a prayer, but his church continues to switch between being a religion when it suits them to being a State it suits them. The mechanism for this is its quasi-State in the Vatican City, which has none of the attributes of a State such as citizenry, territory and economy, but nevertheless sends ambassadors to real States and is treated almost like a real State by the United Nations. What the Catholic church does as a religion is its own business. But it is clearly still in deep denial about the impact of its behaviour on wider society, so the rest of us should recognise that in our interactions with this church.

The Irish DPP and police should take steps now to ensure that bishops who covered up serious crimes against children are brought before the law. The Irish Government should take steps to remove the influence of the Catholic church on our health and education system. In particular, the human rights of nonreligious parents to have a secular education system should be vindicated in every area of the country. The Government should review its relations with the Catholic church’s quasi-State in the Vatican City. The Government should seek to have the United Nations treat the Catholic church like any other religion, by listening to it as a nongovernmental organisation, and not by treating it as a quasi-State.

If the Catholic church will not voluntarily face up to its responsibilities within civic society, then the institutions of State must ensure that it does so. And we the people should lobby our politicians to make this happen sooner rather than later.

Photo: Pope Benedict by Roblisameehan (cc)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The false flow of the Biblical Jesus stories

Imagine you have never heard of the Bible, and you are given the 27 books of the New Testament and asked to put them in order.

You would probably come close to the order they appear in today: the four Gospels that tell the story of Jesus, then the Book of Acts that tells how the early church developed, then various letters by Paul and others, then the Book of Revelation that tells how the world will end.

If you did this, you would have created a continuous narrative, each book being a chapter, each building on the previous one, to create one grand story. You would also have created a false impression of how and why these books were written. And you would have obscured the sequence in which different writers gradually introduced the various elements of the Jesus legend.

Written in a Different Sequence

Firstly, these books were written in a very different sequence. Paul wrote his letters first, about 48-62 CE, and he wrote almost nothing about the earthly life of Jesus. Starting maybe in the 50s CE, someone compiled sayings attributed to Jesus into a text called Q, which probably became one source of two of the later Gospels. The book of Revelation, with its violent avenging Jesus, was written in stages between about 60-95 CE.

The Gospel called Mark was written about 65-70 CE, and it has no virgin birth and no detail of the resurrection. These stories first appear in the Gospels called Matthew and Luke, which were written about 80-85 CE, as was the Book of Acts, some of which contradicts what Paul earlier wrote about himself.

The Gospel called John was written about 90-95 CE, and it is the first book that suggests that Jesus was actually God, as distinct from a human being who had a special relationship with God.

Written as Standalone Books

Secondly, these books were not written as part of a grand meta-story. They were never intended to be read as continuous chapters of the same book. Their writers wrote them as standalone books, at different places and times, to convey different political and theological beliefs, for different audiences and reasons. This is one reason for the many contradictions in the New Testament.

And so, over a period of fifty or more years, these different individual writers separately created the apocalyptic apparitions of Paul, the eloquent quotations of Q, the raging ruler of Revelation, the marginalized messiah of Mark, the Moses-like messiah of Matthew, the all-inclusive leader of Luke, and the Jehovah-like Jesus of John.

The writers of those contradictory stories did not foresee that their texts would become part of a book centuries later. Indeed, many of them believed that the earthly world would have ended within their own lifetimes.

Written Alongside Rival Books

Thirdly, these books were only some among many rival Gospels that early Christians wrote and read. As well as political and practical differences, there were many theological arguments among early Christians about the nature of Jesus.

The Ebionites believed Jesus was totally human and not divine, and that the Jewish God had adopted him at his baptism. The Marcionites believed Jesus was totally divine and not human, and had come to save people from the Jewish God. The Gnostics believed that one of many Gods had used Jesus to convey special knowledge to save human souls from the material world. And the faction that eventually won out argued that Jesus was both totally human and totally divine.

This policy of Jesus being “both totally human and totally divine” enabled this faction (which evolved into today’s Christianity) to include contradictory versions of Jesus into what has become the New Testament.

How Jesus Gradually Became God

To help understand the New Testament stories better, read them in the sequence in which they were written, instead of the sequence in which they appear in the Bible. Doing this may change your beliefs about not only the Jesus of history, but also the Jesus of theology.

You will see how a human Jewish preacher gradually evolved into being part of a newly-invented Christian God, and how his relationship with this God gradually started earlier and earlier as time went on: from his resurrection in the letters of Paul, to his baptism in the Gospel called Mark, to his conception in the Gospels called Matthew and Luke, to the start of time in the Gospel called John.

For a comprehensive analysis of these and similar themes, read the work of Bart Ehrman and other academic textual critics of the New Testament.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Ethics of the Ten Commandments

The ten commandments of Judeo-Christianity are not a guide for ethical conduct. They are laws for regulating the conduct of one Bronze Age tribe.

When you read them in the context of the Bible stories from which they emanate, these are the underlying reasons and messages behind them:

1. Worship only the God who proved his power in Egypt.
2. Do not engrave or worship images of anything.
3. Do not swear by saying the word YHVH in vain.
4. Rest on the Sabbath or you will be stoned to death.
5. Honour your parents, because you will live longer.
6. Do not kill people, unless God arbitrarily allows you to.
7. Do not commit adultery, because men own their wives.
8. Do not steal things or people owned by your tribesmen.
9. Do not lie to or about members of your own tribe.
10. Do not desire things or people owned by your tribesmen.

These laws are not a guide for ethical conduct. They are not based on universal values of right and wrong, because they were never intended to apply to all people. They were designed to protect the stability and interests of one Bronze Age tribe, specifically because this tribe was set apart from all other people. The first four are arbitrary rules for how this tribe should worship its God. The next six regulate the tribe’s day-to-day conduct, mainly by protecting the position of its adult males, and also by treating members of the tribe differently than strangers. Most of these laws were enforced by the tribesmen stoning lawbreakers to death.

These laws demand unthinking obedience, based only on desire for amazing rewards and fear of horrific punishments meted out by this God. If you obey his laws, you will be his chosen people, and live in a land flowing with milk and honey (Lev 20:24), where a hundred of you will kill ten thousand enemies (Lev 26:3-9). But if you disobey his laws, he will bring upon you sudden terror and wasting diseases, send wild animals to kill your children, make you eat the flesh of your children, and make you so fearful that you will flee even when nobody is chasing you (Lev 26:14-39). He will punish not only you, but also your children, your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren (Ex 20:5).

Regardless of whether you believe this to be literal truth or literary metaphor, it is no basis upon which to build an ethical moral code. This becomes even more evident when you look at the Biblical background to each of these ten laws.

1. Worship only the God who proved his power in Egypt.

The first commandment is “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Today’s Christian churches omit the part about their God bringing them out of Egypt, but in the Bible story this claim was essential to establish the credibility of this God with the tribe of Moses. People of this era worshipped many gods, including the sun, the moon and other celestial bodies, and this claim let the Israelites know they were dealing with a very powerful God, who had already intervened in earthly affairs on their behalf.

This God had repeatedly sent terrible plagues on the Egyptians (Ex 8-10) and then killed the firstborn child of every Egyptian family (Ex 11-12), in order to convince Pharoe to let the Israelites go. Of course, after each plague, this same God had also deliberately “hardened Pharoe’s heart”, specifically to ensure that Pharoe would not let the Israelites go, in order that he could move on to sending the next plague (Ex 4-11). But, to a primitive Bronze Age tribe, their God’s power was more persuasive than his morality. As a more direct incentive to worship him, they would be stoned to death if they worshipped the sun, the moon or any other gods (Deut 17:2-5).

2. Do not engrave or worship images of anything.

The second commandment is “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water below. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” The first part of this rule is absurd: it forbids nearly all visual art. Oddly, after this God announced these laws, he instructed Moses to make two cherubim out of hammered gold for the ark of the covenant (Ex 25:18-20).

Today’s Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches omit this rule from their popular versions of the ten commandments. And Roman Catholics regularly pray before images and statues of not only Jesus, but also Mary and numerous Saints. To make up for omitting the ban on graven images, the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches divide the tenth commandment, which forbids coveting, into two different rules.

3. Do not swear by saying the word YHVH in vain.

The third commandment is “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” The Bible most often calls him YHVH, which Christians pronounce as Yahweh or Jehovah. The punishment for breaking this rule was death by stoning (Lev 24:16). When the Israelis brought a blasphemer before Moses, God instructed everyone who had heard the blasphemy to put their hands on the blasphemer’s head, after which the entire congregation must stone him to death (Lev 24:11-14). But the same God blessed Jacob after he had specifically used the Lord’s name when lying to his father in order to steal his brother’s birthright (Gen 27:19-20).

Also, a prophet could curse other people in the name of this God, for even trivial reasons, with horrific results. When the prophet Elisha was going to Bethel, a group of little children mocked him by saying ‘Go up, thou bald head!’ Elisha cursed the children in the name of the Lord, and two bears came out of the wood and killed forty two of the children (2 Kings 2:23-24). Some Christians have argued that these children were actually young men, as if that would make it more justifiable to set wild animals on them for teasing a bald man. In reality, blasphemy laws are at best primitive superstition, and at worst ways of supressing free speech.

4. Rest on the Sabbath or you will be stoned to death.

The fourth commandment is “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” This means that neither you, your children, your servants, your cattle or any of your visitors could work on the Sabbath. The punishment for breaking this rule was death by stoning (Ex 31:15). When the Israelites found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath, they took him outside the camp and stoned him to death, as God had commanded Moses (Num 15:32-36). Since prehistoric times, humans have assigned days to various gods, so it was natural for a Bronze Age tribe to do likewise. But, whatever the benefits of resting on this day, they are far outweighed by the injustice of killing people for declining to rest.

5. Honour your parents because you will live longer.

The fifth commandment is “Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land that God giveth thee.” So this law is based not on respect for your parents, but on the selfish desire to live longer. But why would honouring your parents cause you to live longer? One obvious reason was that, if you were stubborn and rebellious, and you continuously refused to obey your parents, they would take you to the elders of the city, and all of the men of the city would stone you to death (Deut 21:18-21).

A more subtle reason places the emphasis on the phrase “upon the land that God giveth thee.” If the tribe’s children learn to obey their parents, the tribe will continue to obey the commandments, and in return God will allow the tribe to remain in the promised land for longer. This law does not foster loving, caring, mutually respectful family values. It commands unthinking obedience, regardless of right or wrong, under fear of being stoned to death. Should the virgin daughters of Lot have honoured their father (Gen 19:4-8) when a gang wanted to rape two of his guests, who were angels from God, and Lot offered the gang his daughters instead?

6. Do not kill people unless God arbitrarily allows you to.

The sixth commandment is “Thou shalt not kill.” But this did not apply to the man who God chose to convey this very law to the Israelites. When Moses was an adult, he saw an Egyptian hitting an Israelite. Moses checked to see if anybody was watching, then killed the Egyptian and buried his corpse in the sand (Ex 2:11-12). Moses then went into hiding, knowing that he had acted unlawfully (Ex 12:14-15). And when the Israelite God decided that he needed somebody to lead his tribe, this is who he chose (Ex 3:1-10).

The sixth commandment does not apply if you kill your slave, as long as the slave takes a day or two to die (Ex 21:20-21). Or if you stone to death a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath (Num 15:32-36). Or if you slaughter all of the adults and children of every city you attack, apart from the virgin women who you can keep for yourself (Deut 2:31-34, Num 31:12-18). Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live (Ex 22:18). Nor, indeed, a medium or a spiritist (Lev 20:27). Strangers will be killed if they approach the tabernacle (Num 18:7). There are many more examples. Ironically, on his very return from Mount Sinai with the ten comandments, Moses ordered his tribesmen to kill three thousand of their brothers, friends and neighbours (Ex 32:27-28).

In effect, the sixth commandment is really “Thou shalt not kill unless God allows you to.” But there is no ethical basis to this particular God’s arbitrary killing choices. He once drowned the entire population of the world apart from one family (Gen 7:19-23). He killed Lot’s wife for looking around (Gen 19:26). He killed Onan for not completing sexual intercourse with his dead brother’s wife (Gen 38:7-10). He killed the first-born child of every Egyptian family (Ex 12:29-30). He killed 14,000 Israelites for murmering against Moses (Num 16:41-49). He killed seventy men for looking into his Ark (1 Sam 6:19) and another man for trying to stop the Ark from falling over when an ox shook it (2 Sam 6:6-7).

As there is no ethical basis to this God’s arbitrary killing choices, there is no ethical basis behind this commandment, which is ironically enforced under the threat of being killed (Ex 21:12). It is not about universal values of right and wrong. It is about protecting the stability and interests of one tribe.

7. Do not commit adultery, because men own their wives.

The seventh commandment is “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” But why is adultery wrong? Based on the Bible, adultery is a crime committed against the husband of the woman involved, but not against the wife of the man involved. Predictably, the punishment is death (Lev 20:10). A man owns his wife from the time they become engaged. If another man has sex with an engaged virgin, he has committed a crime against her future husband, and must be stoned to death. If the woman did not scream for help, she must also be stoned to death (Deut 22:23-27).

If a newlywed man alleges that his bride was not a virgin, the bride’s father must prove her virginity. If the bride’s father can bring her blood-stained bedsheets to the elders of the city, her husband will pay him a fine for slander. If her father cannot produce the blood-stained bedsheets, the bride will be stoned to death on her father’s doorstep (Deut 22:13-21). If a man suspects his wife of adultery, he must bring her to a priest, who will make her drink bitter water that will curse her. If she has been unfaithful, this will cause her to have a miscarriage. If she has been faithful, she will be able to give birth. (Num 5:11-31).

The Bible has a lot else to say about sex generally, but its laws against adultery are based on the unethical premise that a woman is the property of her husband, and are enforced under the threat of being stoned to death.

8. Do not steal things or people owned by your tribesmen.

The eighth commandment is “Thou shalt not steal.” If you steal a person and sell him, you will be put to death (Ex 21:16, Deut 24:7). If you steal livestock, you must repay the owner double what you stole. If you have already sold what you stole, you must repay the owner five times. Otherwise the owner can sell you as a slave (Ex 22:1-5). Nor may you defraud your neighbour (Lev 19:13).

The first thing to note here is that you can steal a person (Ex 21:16, Deut 24:7). This may include kidnap, but this God also allowed slavery. Israelites could buy foreign slaves, and own them for ever, and pass them on to their children as inheritances (Lev 25:44-46). They could forcibly take foreign women and children after battles (Deut 20:14, Deut 21:10-14). Israelites could also buy and sell Israelite slaves, and could own the wives and their children of these slaves, but they had to release Israelite slaves after six years (Ex 21:2-6). Men could sell their daughters as slaves (Ex 21:7). A man could have sex with a female slave without being stoned to death, even if she was engaged, because she was not free (Lev 19:20).

The second thing to note is that this law only appplied internally within the Israelite tribe. Their God encouraged them to steal the treasures, animals, women and children of enemy tribes (Deut 20:14-15). After one batttle against the Midianites, they plundered about 200kg of gold, 800,000 livestock and 32,000 virgin women. As an aside, Moses and Eleazer the priest took about one percent of all of these spoils, as an offering to God (Num 31:25-54). The Israelites also stole the land of other tribes. Their God told them to drive out all of the inhabitants, take possession of the land and settle in it, and divide it up according to their clans (Num 33:50-54, Deut 2:31-34, Deut 20:16-17). Indeed, stealing the land of other tribes was the whole point of the covenant between the Israelites and their God.

This law is not about universal values of right and wrong. It is about protecting the stability and interests of one tribe.

9. Do not lie to or about members of your own tribe.

The ninth commandment is “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” You must not defraud your neighbour, or pervert justice by not judging your neighbour fairly, or spread slander among your people (Lev 19:13-16). The punishment was a fine (Deut 22:17-19) or giving a ram to a priest, who will eat it to make atonement for your sin (Lev 7:1-7).

But the ban on lying applied only to “your neighbour” or “your people” (Lev 19:16) or “your brother” (Deut 19:18). It did not apply to strangers or foreigners. And, while the Israelite God said that strangers should be given justice (Deut 27:19), he also instructed his tribe to dispense different standards of justice to strangers. Israelites could own foreign slaves for ever, but had to release Israelite slaves after six years (Lev 25:44-46, Ex 21:7). Israelites could charge interest on loans to strangers, but not to their brothers (Deut 23:20). Their neighbour or brother could sometimes keep property they had lent to them, but a foreigner still owed it (Deut 15:1-3). More seriously, strangers would be killed if they approached the tabernacle (Num 18:7).

Actually, the Biblical God allowed, rewarded and even instructed lying. All three Biblical Patriarchs told lies. The prophet Abraham repeatedly lied that his wife Sarah was his sister, in order to give her to the Pharoe and save his own life (Gen 12:11-13). His son Isaac lied that his wife Rebekah was his sister (Gen 26:6-11). Isaac’s son Jacob lied to his father to steal his brother’s birthright (Gen 27:19-20). God rewarded midwives for lying about the birth of male children (Ex 1:15-21). God told Moses to lie to the Pharoe that his tribe only wanted to leave Egypt for three days (Ex 3:18). God saved the life of Rahab for lying about Israelite spies (Josh 2, Heb 11:31). God caused four hundred prophets to lie to the King of Israel (1 Kings 22:6, :22-23). Jehu lied to the prophets of Baal to lure them into being killed (2 Kings 10:18-28).

Again, this law is not about universal values of right and wrong. It is about protecting the stability and interests of one tribe.

10. Do not desire things or people owned by your tribesmen.

The tenth commandment is “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” In the Deuteronomy version, the order of house and wife is reversed, and the neighbour’s field is also included.

In this case, it is irrelevant that the rule is restricted to property owned by members of your own tribe, and it is irrelevant that wives and servants are considered to be the property of their husbands and masters, simply because this is an absurd rule that would be impossible to keep even if you wanted to. It seeks to regulate what you think, not what you say or do, and no law can enforce what you think. Furthermore, if people did not covet things owned by other people, nobody would ever purchase anything from anybody else.

As an aside, the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches divide this commandment into two, to make up for the fact that they omit the second commandment that forbids making graven images. But there is only one sentence in the tenth commandment, and there is no justifiable reason to divide it in two.

The Other Ten Commandments

Ironically, despite their centrality to Judeo-Christianity, these are not even the same set of laws that the Bible describes as the ten commandments. In the Book of Exodus, God wrote the ten commandments on two tablets of stone and gave them to Moses, who broke them (Ex 32:15-19).

God then recalled Moses to give him the same rules again (Ex 34:1-4). And these are the rules that God told Moses: the Israelites must observe the feast of unleavened bread and the feast of weeks, sacrifice firstborn male animals except donkeys, and give the first fruits of each harvest to God. They must not worship other gods, make treaties or intermarry with other tribes, cast idols, work on the seventh day, mix blood sacrifices with leavened bread, let fat sacrifices remain overnight, or cook a baby goat in its mother’s milk (Ex 34:5-26). God then told Moses to write down these words, and Moses wrote on two new stone tablets “the words of the covenant, the ten commandments” (Ex 34:27-28).

Today’s ten commandments actually appear elsewhere in the Book of Exodus (20:1-17). The Bible does not call them the ten commandments; indeed, there are at least twelve of them, if not more. And they are not written on tablets of stone; instead, in a different incident, God speaks them directly from Mount Sinai. It seems likely that later Christian leaders chose to downplay the ritual laws, and to instead brand the other set of laws as being “the ten commandments.”

In a later story, when Moses is recalling these events, he misremembers the exact words of these laws and mistakenly says that God wrote them onto stone tablets (Deut 5:6-22). This later story contradicts the Book of Exodus, unless the tablets had twenty laws on them. It seems more likely that the writer of Deuteronomy made mistakes or alterations when transcribing, perhaps several centuries later, the Exodus story.

Summary

Whether or not the Bible stories are true, the ten commandments of Judeo-Christianity are not a guide for ethical conduct. They are not based on universal values of right and wrong, because they were never intended to apply to all people. They were designed to protect the stability and interests of one Bronze Age tribe, specifically because this tribe was set apart from all other people.

They did this mainly by regulating how the tribe worshipped its God, by protecting the position of the tribe’s adult males, and by treating members of the tribe differently than strangers. They demanded unthinking obedience, based on desire for amazing rewards and fear of horrific punishments meted out by this God, and enforced by threats of being stoned to death by other members of the tribe.

This is no basis upon which to build an ethical moral code.

Sources

• The Bible
• Skeptic’s Annotated Bible
• The Ten Commandments by Joseph Lewis, 1946
• Godless by Dan Barker, 2008
• Lies by Prophets by Yael Shemesh

Photo: The Ten Commandments by DrGBB (cc)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Cultural Map of the World

Religion and wealth are the two main factors that influence cultural values around the world. The influence of religion can be measured on a scale from traditional values to secular-rational values, and the influence of wealth can be measured on a scale from survival values to self-expression values.

Traditional values are highest in Africa and Latin America, and secular-rational values are highest in Japan and Protestant Europe. Survival values are highest in Africa and ex-communist countries, and self-expression values are highest in Protestant Europe and English-speaking countries.

That’s according to the World Values Surveys, which is the largest ever cross-national survey of social change. It was conducted from 1990 to 2005, in over eighty countries spanning all six inhabited continents, by a network of social scientists at leading universities around the world.

Cultural Values Map of the World

Based on these surveys, two political scientists (Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michegan and Christian Welzel of Jacobs University Bremen) have devised this Cultural Map of the World:

Religious societies typically emphasise parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values, as well as national pride. They reject divorce, abortion, euthenasia and suicide.

Wealthy societies allow young people to grow up taking survival for granted, and to focus on subjective wellbeing and quality of life, which in turn can have an influence on traditional values.

In most societies, although more slowly in Africa, cultural values have been shifting towards both secular-rational and self-expression since the first World Values Survey was conducted in 1990.

Human Constraints versus Human Choice

Here’s how Prof. Welzel analyses this trend. He says both dimensions actually measure human constraints versus human choices, on the community and personal levels. When a community has strong traditional values, it emphasises human constraints such as religion, patriotism, authority, obedience, and traditional family structures. When a person has strong self-expression values, she emphasises human choices such as freedom and self-direction, taking part in public expression, tolerating nonconformity, and trusting people.

Prof. Welzel says this shift in values is a central aspect of human development. More wealth enables younger people in particular to feel more independent in material means, intellectual skills and social connectivity. They then feel more safe and secure, and thus more able to escape from unchosen community ties. They also feel more self-directed, and thus more able to develop their creative human potentials. And all of this leads to what Prof Welzel calls postmaterialistic liberty aspirations, where people both value democracy more and are more critical of the actual performance of democracy.

Sources

• World Values Surveys
• Professor Ronald Inglehart
• Professor Christian Welzel

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Social networks spread happiness

Happiness is infectious. It spreads through social networks, infecting people that you don’t even know. And it spreads more strongly than sadness does. That’s according to a recent study that examined the happiness of almost five thousand people over twenty years from 1983 to 2003.

The study was compiled by professors James Fowler of the University of California in San Diego and Nicholas Christakis of the Harvard Medical School. They examined records from a long-established heart study that included details of the emotional states of families and friends.

They found that, when you become happy, any friend of yours who lives within a mile becomes 25% more likely to also be happy. Amazingly, they also found that a friend of that friend becomes 10% more likely to happy, and a friend of that friend’s friend has a 5% increased chance of being happy.

They also found that people at the core of a local social network are more likely to be happy than people at the periphery. And they say that  the reason seems to be that being at the core of the social network increases your happiness. It is not that being happy brings you to the core of the network.

Social networks spread happiness

The study followed the social networks of almost five thousand people over twenty years, including connections at one, two, three or more levels of separation. It found that happy people tend to be connected to each other. The clusters of happy and unhappy people are much larger than could be explainable by chance.

This takes into account several possible associations between happy people: your happiness might cause someone else to be happy; you might become connected because you are both already happy; or you might both be experiencing the same social conditions that might make you happy.

On average, you are 15% more likely to be happy if a person directly connected to you is happy. The chances increase or decrease depending on how close you are to the person. Mutual friends who live nearby have the strongest effect, and distant friends who live more than a mile away have little or no direct effect. Interestingly, neither do co-workers.

Happiness spreads more strongly through same-sex relationships. This means that your friends and neighbours might influence your happiness more than your spouse does. And your impact on a friend’s happiness gradually wears off over time, unless of course you keep in touch and stay happy.

However, there is an indirect effect that does not even depend on knowing the person. You are almost 10% more likely to be happy if a person two removes from you is happy (a friend of a friend). And you are over 5% more likely to be happy if a person three removes from you is happy (a friend of a friend of a friend).

Also, people at the core of a local social network are more likely to be happy than people at the periphery. And Christakis and Fowler say that  the reason seems to be that being at the core of the social network increases your happiness. It is not that being happy brings you to the core of the network.

So, on average, having additional social contacts will help to make you happy – but only if your extra social contacts are happy themselves. Interestingly, happy people spread happiness much more strongly than unhappy people spread unhappiness.

However, the main effect on your happiness is your previous happiness: if you were happy the last time you were asked, you are three times more likely to be happy now than if you were unhappy the last time you were asked.

How the study was conducted

The Framingham Heart Study is an ongoing study, based in Massachusetts, that has examined 14,000 people spanning three generations of people, and their spouses. The three generations enrolled in 1948, 1971 and 2002.

Christakis and Fowler study focused on the middle group, because there is information available on their relationships with both their parents and their children, as well as with their friends.

On average, each person was connected to ten family members, friends or coworkers, and an indeterminate number of neighbours. Also, because the study took place in the same area, many of the connected people were also part of the study themselves.

The study measured people’s happiness by asking them how often they experienced four specific feelings during the previous week: “I felt hopeful about the future,” “I was happy,” “I enjoyed life,” “I felt that I was just as good as other people.”

Other studies have shown that these four questions are a reliable way of measuring happiness, and that the answers to each question are highly correlated to each other. As well as examining people’s happiness, this study also examined by how much their happiness changed over time.

Conclusions of the Study

Fowler and Christakis conclude that the spread of happiness seems to reach up to three degrees of separation, just like the spread of obesity and smoking behaviour. They believe that this finding has relevance for public health. Human happiness is not merely the province of isolated individuals.

They outline the following as already being known before their study: 

• Previous work on happiness and wellbeing has focused on socioeconomic and genetic factors.
• Research on emotional contagion has shown that one person’s mood might fleetingly determine the mood of others.
• Whether happiness spreads broadly and more permanently across social networks is unknown.

They say that their study adds the following new information:

• Happiness is a network phenomenon, clustering in groups of people that extend up to three degrees of separation (for example, to one’s friends’ friends’ friends).
• Happiness spreads across a diverse array of social ties.
• Network characteristics independently predict which individuals will be happy years into the future.

Illustration

• The illustration shows happiness clusters in over a thousand people in the Framingham social network during 1996 and 2000.
• Each node represents one person. Node colour indicates mean happiness of each person and all directly connected (distance 1) people: yellow is most happy, blue is least happy and green is in between.

Sources

• The full text of the study: Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study
• Homepage of James Fowler of the University of California in San Diego
• Homepage of Nicholas Christakis at Harvard Medical School
• Happiness Is A Collective Phenomenon
• The Happiness Virus

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Is this the World’s happiest man?

When Tibetan Buddhist monks meditate for many years, they gradually change the molecular structure of their brains.

MRI scans show they experience more activity in the left pre-frontal cortex, a part of the brain that is associated with happiness, and less activity in the right-hand side, which handles negative thoughts.

And Mathieu Ricard, the 62-year-old French interpreter for Tibet’s Dalai Lama, has happiness levels that are literally off the scale of the measuring instruments. That’s the conclusion of American neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who has spent over fifteen years testing these theories.

The idea that we gradually reshape our brains is not new – taxi drivers change the parts of their brains that deal with spatial awareness, and concert musicians the parts that deal with musical pitch – but Davidson was among the first to apply the tests scientifically to an area that seemed much more abstract and subjective.

Richard Davidson’s Tests

Davidson and his team began by travelling to India to study the brain activity of monks who practiced three different types of meditation:

• Focused attention, where the monks specifically train themselves to focus on a single object for long periods of time
• Cultivating compassion, where they envision negative events that cause anger or irritability, and then transform by applying compassion
• Open presence, where they are acutely and purely aware of whatever thought, emotion or sensation is present, without reacting to it.

They soon discovered that monks who had completed more than ten thousand hours of meditation had high levels of brain activity associated with positive emotions. Then some Asian monks traveled to Davidson’s lab in the University of Wisconsin in America, where their reactions were compared to those of volunteers who had only some limited training in meditation.

The MRI scans measured brain activity that is associated with happiness, on a scale of +0.3 at the negative end to -0.3 on the positive end. One monk, Mathieu Ricard, scored literally off the scale at -0.45. He may well be the happiest man in the world. So who is Mathieu Ricard and how did he reach this state?

Mathieu Ricard’s Life

Ricard was born in France in 1946. His father, Jean-François Revel, was a philosopher and mother, Yahne Le Toumelin, was a painter. Ricard studied classical music, ornithology and photography and in 1972 completed a Ph.D. in cellular genetics at the Institut Pasteur under Nobel Laureate François Jacob. He then moved to the Himalayas to study Tibetan Buddhism. He has lived since then as a Buddhist monk at the Shechen Monastery in Nepal, also acting as French interpreter for Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Ricard has written many books, including

• The Monk and the Philosopher, a best-seller that consisted of dialogues with his father Jean-François Revel
• The Quantum and the Lotus, a conversation with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan
• Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, written with Daniel Goleman
• Motionless Journey, a photographic record of a year-long retreat in the foothills of the Himalayas.

He gives the proceeds from his books to humanitarian projects in Tibet, Nepal, India, and Bhutan. Since 2000, he has been an active member of the Mind and Life Institute as well as participating in the scientific research on brain plasticity headed by Davidson.

Ricard’s Views on Happiness

In the video below, you can listen to Ricard discussing happiness at TED (an annual four-day conference on Technology, Entertainment and Design, that takes place in Monteray in California).

Sources:

• Results of the study: Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice, PNAS, November 16, 2004, vol. 101 no. 46 16369-16373
• Mathieu Ricard Website
• Richard Davidson Homepage
• The Happiest Man in the World? Anthony Barnes, The Independent, 21 January 2007
• Is Buddhism Good for Your Health? Stephen Hall, New York Times, 14 Sep 2003

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

But will it make you happy?

Why do people believe that living in California would make them feel happier than people who do live in California actually are?

And why do people, who are afraid of being rejected, want more drugs than people who have actually been rejected?

There are several reasons.

If you are a typical human being, you are bad at remembering why you felt happy in the past, good at knowing how happy you feel now, okay at predicting roughly what will make you feel happy in the future, but bad at predicting how happy you will feel if specific events happen. That’s the conclusion of scientists who have researched this fascinating area.

Past, Present and Future

How happy were you last year? That’s too much detail to calculate, so your mind takes a short cut. You focus mainly on your highest highs, your lowest lows, and the most recent events. However, if I had asked you, at random times during the past year, how you actually felt at that moment, and I combined your answers, they would be different – and more accurate. This has been tested by using randomly-timed buzzers to alert people to write down how they are feeling, then checking later what they remember about their feelings.

Are you happy now with your life in general? Again, your mind takes a short cut: if you’re in a good mood, you’re more likely to say yes. Nevertheless, your answer is likely to match with external ways of checking how happy you are, such as physiological signs and how happy your family and friends think you are. Are you satisfied with your work? Hobby? Marriage? Now that’s more specific. Regardless of your mood, your mind compares how things are with how things could be. Again, pretty accurately.

What will make you happy next year? You can predict most things fairly accurately. However, you are also influenced by your mistaken beliefs about what made you happy last year. And your mind over-predicts the impact that changes will bring. Lottery winners are less happy than we expect, and crippled accident victims less unhappy. When we think of these events, we focus on the change of becoming a lottery winner or accident victim, not on the ongoing reality of being one. Over time, we adapt to most changes. Millionaires face new problems. Disabled people develop new interests.

Impact Bias

Three psychologists and an economist pioneered much of the research on how we predict our feelings, and how accurate our predictions are. They are Daniel Gilbert in Harvard, Tim Wilson in Virginia, Daniel Kahneman in Princeton and George Lowenstein in Carnegie-Melon. They call this ‘affective forecasting’ (in psychology, the word ‘affect’ means feeling or emotion). Here’s some of what they found.

Broadly speaking, you can accurately predict that winning the lottery or seeing your sports team win a trophy will make you feel happy. However, you mistakenly believe that these events will make you feel happier, and for longer, than they actually do. That’s why Daniel Kahneman and others found that people believe that living in California would make them happier than people who do live in California actually are.

Also, broadly speaking, you can accurately predict that a serious illness or a death in the family will make you feel unhappy. However, you mistakenly believe that these events will make you feel unhappier, and for longer, than they actually do. That’s why Tim Wilson and others found that people, who are facing possible rejection, want more mood-enhancing drugs than people who have actually been rejected.

Daniel Gilbert calls this ‘impact bias’ or ‘miswanting’. And it gets worse. Because, when you do get the new trinket you have coveted for ages, and when it gradually dawns you that you are not as happy as you thought you would be, you often react by ‘miswanting’ something else instead, and the cycle continues. The same thing happens with bad events. When something bad happens to you, and when it gradually dawns you that you are not as unhappy as you feared you would be, you often start instead to fear a different bad event more than you should do.

Empathy Gap

Your mood when you decide what you want is also a factor. When you are calm, reflective and rational, you cannot accurately predict what you will want when you are aroused, anxious or fearful. That’s why it can be a bad idea to go food shopping when you are hungry, or to go on a date without a condom. George Lowenstein calls this ‘the empathy gap’ between being in a ‘cold state’ or a ‘hot state’.

There are many other examples of this empathy gap in action. Some are summarised by Elizabeth Dunn and others of New South Wales in their 2007 paper on what they call ‘Emotional Time Travel’.

Once you own something, you can become more attached to it than you thought that you would before you owned it. That’s why buyers (who don’t yet own an object) often think that the seller is demanding too much money, and sellers (who do own the object) often think that the buyer should be prepared to pay more.

Women often predict that, if they were sexually harassed, they would feel angry and confront the harasser, whereas women who are actually sexually harassed are more likely to feel afraid and to avoid confrontation. That’s why female jurors often give less credibility than they should to the evidence of women who have been sexually harassed.

Also, you think differently about events that are further away in the future. If you are choosing a series of videos to watch later, you are more likely to include a serious high-brow movie, but if you are choosing just one video to watch now, you are more likely to choose a low-brow entertaining movie.

Possible Solutions

Here are four ways of becoming more accurate when you are predicting how future events will make you feel.

The first is very simple – just knowing that impact bias and empathy gaps exist, can help you to counter them.

Secondly, when remembering how past events made you feel, try to remember a series of events, not just one. If you just remember one event, it is likely to be an extreme, untypical example. If you do only remember one, at least remind yourself that it may be extreme and untypical.

Thirdly, when predicting how future events will make you feel, try to put the event in context. Think of the inevitability of change. Think of many different possible outcomes. Think of bad aspects of good outcomes, and good aspects of bad outcomes. And think of other things that will also be happening in your life that will distract you from the event in question. For example, your social relationships can help to counter career problems, and vice versa.

And finally, get older. Older people are less likely to over-predict how future events will make them feel, simply because they have been through so many similar events in their lives.

Sources

• Photo: California by Scott Klettke (cc)
• On Emotionally Intelligent Time Travel: Individual Differences in Affective Forecasting. Dunn et al. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2007; 33: 85-93
• When to Fire: Anticipatory versus Postevent Reconstrual of Uncontrollable Events. Wilson et al. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2004; 30, 1-12
• The Futile Pursuit of Happiness, by John Gertner, article in New York Times Magazine, Sep 7 2003
• Well-Being: the Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, Russell Sage, 1999
• Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction. Schkade and Kahneman, Psychological Science 1998; 9, 340-46

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Why I am an atheist

I am an atheist because I reject the idea that gods exist, in the same way and for the same reasons that I reject the ideas that that the earth is balanced on the back of a sea turtle, that homeopathy is more useful than a heart transplant, that Rapunzel wove her hair into a ladder or Rumpelstiltskin wove straw into gold, that stepping on a pavement crack will break my mother’s back, that a deposed Nigerian prince wants to email me several million dollars, that Uri Geller can bend spoons with his mind, that I am in danger from vampires or zombies or broken mirrors, or that I am protected by angels or leprechauns or horseshoes.

Reasons to Believe

Like many people, you may sincerely accept some of the above ideas as being true, either because you have experienced something unexplainable that has caused your brain to generate a belief in your God or Uri Geller, or because you feel happier when you believe in heaven or homeopathy, or because you prefer your life to be guided by holy writings or horoscope readings, or because you think that people behave better when they are being scrutinised by Satan or Santa, or because life is just simpler when you seem to believe what most people seem to believe.

Absence of Evidence

However, I reject all of these ideas simply because there is no evidence that any of them are true. Of course, I might be wrong about any or all of them. And I will happily change my mind if I ever get evidence that an alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell in 1947 and that successive US Governments since then have been hiding the aliens at a military base near Groom Lake in Nevada, or that the creator of the universe visited one small planet and caused a virgin of one species to give birth to himself so that he could die, return to life, and then write his story in a book.

Atheism is a Way of Thinking

I think I am very unlikely to get such evidence, because the ideas are so improbable, but if I get it I will not resist it. And this is the key to understanding atheism. It is far more about a way of thinking than it is about the outcomes that result from that thinking. Atheism involves believing in the power of reason to pursue knowledge, accepting ideas because of evidence, rejecting ideas because of lack of evidence, and always being prepared to change your mind if you learn something new.

Photo: Unicorns by Erika Hall (cc)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Where to live a long happy life

The best six countries in which to live a long happy life are Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Austria, Sweden and Australia. If you live in one of these places, you can expect to have sixty or more ‘happy-years’ of life. ‘Happy-years’ are calculated by multiplying happiness levels by life expectancy.

Denmark, Switzerland and Austria have the happiest citizens, describing themselves as eight out of ten in satisfaction with their lives. Japanese citizens live longer than any other nation – almost 81 years on average – but have a low happiness score of six out of ten.

Top 25 Countries for Happy-Life Years

(happiness levels multiplied by life expectancy, 1995-2005)

• 63.9 Switzerland
• 62.7 Denmark
• 62.2 Iceland
• 61.0 Austria
• 60.8 Sweden
• 60.7 Australia
• 59.8 Canada, Finland
• 59.3 Norway
• 59.0 Luxembourg
• 58.7 Netherlands
• 58.3 Ireland
• 58.2 Malta
• 57.0 USA
• 56.5 Belgium
• 55.8 New Zealand
• 55.7 Germany
• 55.3 Mexico
• 55.2 Britain
• 54.2 Italy
• 54.1 Spain
• 53.7 Cyprus
• 53.0 Kuwait
• 52.9 Singapore
• 52.2 Israel

Top 25 Countries for Average Happiness

(satisfaction with life on a scale of one to ten, 1995-2005)

• 8.2 Denmark
• 8.1 Switzerland
• 8.0 Austria
• 7.8 Iceland
• 7.7 Australia, Finland, Sweden
• 7.6 Canada, Guatemala, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Norway
• 7.5 Malta, Netherlands
• 7.4 USA
• 7.3 Belgium
• 7.2 Germany, El Salvador, New Zealand
• 7.1 Britain, Honduras
• 7.0 Kuwait, Saudi Arabia
• 6.9 Italy, Spain, Cyprus

Top 25 Countries for Average Life Expectancy

(measured in years, 1995-2005)

• 80.8 Japan
• 79.5 Iceland
• 79.4 Sweden
• 79.2 Canada
• 79.0 Switzerland
• 78.9 Australia
• 78.6 Italy, France, Spain
• 78.5 Israel
• 78.4 Norway
• 78.1 Greece, Netherlands
• 78.0 Belgium, Cyprus
• 77.8 Austria, Malta
• 77.6 Britain, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore
• 77.4 Finland, Luxembourg
• 76.9 USA
• 76.6 Ireland

Sources:

• Photo: Switzerland by Francisco Antunes (cc)
• Report: Veenhoven, R., Happy Life Years in 95 nations 1995-2005, World Database of Happiness, Rank Report 2006-2b

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Why atheism is important

The idea of gods is bad for society, because it spreads irrational dogma that causes good people to do bad things. This affects three practical areas of our lives: the quest for knowledge, treating people fairly, and civic society.

Rational thinking makes the following more likely: Enquiry: an ongoing unbiased quest for knowledge and truth. Empathy: adult ethics, based on relating to other living beings. Equality: a secular society that protects everybody’s rights.

And irrational dogma makes the following more likely: Creeds: accepting, as truth, imaginary answers to big questions. Commands: childish ethics, based on orders, desire and fear. Control: unjust laws that are influenced by religious dogma.

Enquiry vs Creeds

Nearly four thousand years ago, a man gazed inquisitively at the night sky over what is today near Baghdad, and he started to record the movement of the stars. This scientific breakthrough was used to create omens, such as: ‘If in month one the Demon with the Gaping Mouth rises heliacally, for five years there will be plague, but it will not affect cattle’. Today NASA has mapped the oldest lights in the universe, the ancient Babylonian omens have evolved into vacuous horoscopes, and religions have embedded gods into seasonal celebrations of nature.

Throughout time, this is the pattern of the quest for knowledge. Inquisitive and rational thinking has steadily helped us to understand more about how nature works – the latest major breakthrough being the map of the human genome, the ‘book of life’ which will dramatically improve healthcare – while superstitious and dogmatic thinking has hindered and corrupted this quest for knowledge, by teaching imaginary answers instead of seeking the truth, with the odd stoning to death or roasting alive thrown in for people who dared to disagree.

Empathy vs Commands

When I was five, I knew that I had to be good coming up to Christmas because Santa Claus was looking down from the North Pole and judging the behaviour of every child in the world. For many adults today, an imaginary creator of the universe has taken over Santa’s job – God’s making a list, he’s checking it twice; he’s going to find out who’s naughty or nice – except this time, instead of a present or an empty stocking, you get the bliss of paradise or the torment of hell, for eternity, after you die.

Throughout time, religious belief has corrupted our morality, by extending childish thinking into adulthood. The reason that we should be fair to other people, and to all sentient beings, is because we relate to them as fellow living beings. This is known as the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. It is common to atheists, agnostics and theists alike. It requires no belief in gods, particularly gods that boast of drowning every living being in the world except the passengers on an ark.

Equality vs Control

In Ireland in 2007, an advert for slimming pills was banned because the company could not substantiate its implausible claim to ‘soak up’ fat from your food. This is how society protects vulnerable people from being conned. In the same week, the Pope announced an even more unsustainable special offer: if you visited Lourdes within a year, you would get a free ‘plenary indulgence’ and early release from Purgatory after you die, thus getting you to Heaven faster. But there was no legal mechanism to protect vulnerable people from being conned by this claim.

Throughout time, religious leaders have influenced the law and culture of civic society. Today, many States officially protect, subsidise, encourage or even enforce religious dogma at the expense of the rights of their citizens. In recent years, Islamic States have sentenced homosexuals to death and a female rape victim to be lashed. More subtly, an atheist would be almost unelectable as President of America. In a State that respects everybody’s rights, government should be secular, culture should be pluralist, and beliefs should be personal.

Image: Pantheon of Gods by Grizzli (cc)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!