Earthquake

[liv]

rho explains (at a basic level) how nuclear power stations work and enumerates the likely consequences of earthquake damage. It's probably not news to most of you, but I'm linking as an example of impressive popular science writing.

Meanwhile there is a really stupid Twitterfight going on about whether prayer is an appropriate response to the disaster. azurelunatic wrote a really thoughtful response to this non-controversy. It's in the middle of a long post about her response to the tsunami warning in force on the Pacific coast of the US, so I'll quote the relevant section:

Making law that flies in the face of science is just stupid; not taking practical action but trusting in a supernatural force to bail one out is likewise stupid. But, in the middle of all the twitterchaos, someone said "Prayer is a way to focus will & intent", just as someone else mentioned that they knew they needed to be doing things other than being glued to the news, but they didn't know what.

All of those things came together in my head just then. Just as funerals are for the living, prayer in times of disaster is for the people who are not dealing with it. (The people who are dealing with it, maybe they're also praying while they're dealing, but that's their thing.) Regardless of whether one believes in good vibes or supernatural involvement, prayer is a clearing and focusing of the mind upon the topic at hand. Ideally it is a form of meditation, with a twofold benefit. First, it sets the mind in the direction of helpful action, such that when disparate items are presented later, maybe they will come together in the head in a helpful way. This could take the form of innovation, charity, volunteerism, or what-have-you. Second, after it is done, it clears the mind of the immediate all-consuming worry, the obsession, about the catastrophe, and prepares the person for actually going about their life. A student glued to the news cannot study. A worker glued to the news cannot work. (Well, unless the study or work involves being glued to the news.) A body suffers when it's under tension and strain, even when the tension comes from situations thousands of miles away, when one's already given blood, given money, given time and attention, signal-boosted. Even if the prayers do nothing directly for the people suffering, as long as prayers are not used as excuses to avoid other forms of contribution, they can be generally helpful.

My theological stance is somewhat different from Azz', but I did like that explanation of what prayer is "good for". She also quotes rm to the following effect: Using disasters to proselytize is tacky. Atheists, this includes you. Believe as you wish; help if you can.. Also, I don't think posting a Tweet saying "My heart goes out to all those poor Japanese people!" is particularly superior to including them in your prayers; either can be smug slactivism and either can be a way to emotionally prepare yourself to actually do something positive.

More annoying than the people who are Tweeting Don't #prayforJapan are the ones who are Tweeting Earthquakes are an act of science, not an act of God. Really, people! Science doesn't "act", science is a method of studying the world! It doesn't cause earthquakes, srsly.

FWIW I chose to read out Ps 99 in synagogue on Friday. (We read it anyway as part of the normal Friday night liturgy, but I drew attention to it rather than just letting the congregation run through it on autopilot.) I didn't do this because I think reading a Psalm about earthquakes is "magically" going to make God help the earthquake survivors or reduce the level of devastation. I did it because I consider that religion which is completely insulated from events in the real world is bankrupt. I assume that people who disapprove of religion will anyway think that I shouldn't be leading religious services at all, but if I do lead a service, am I doing any harm by referring to the earthquake and its victims and survivors?

Comments

[lavendersparkle]

The explanation of how nuclear power stations work was useful for me. I vaguely remember some of it from GCSE dual award but a) that was over a decade ago and b) it was GCSE duel award.

[liv]

That's cool! I just felt a little defensive because there are a lot of very scientifically educated people on my d-roll and I didn't want them to go to rho's post expecting a highly technical explanation of the physics or engineering issues.

[tig_b]

"Using disasters to proselytize is tacky. Atheists, this includes you. Believe as you wish; help if you can.".

I will be quoting this!

[monanotlisa]

That IS awesome.

[nameandnature]

Using disasters to proselytize is tacky

Tell that to Voltaire.

There was some kerfuffle on the Facebook page for Newsthump when they did this spoof story about people either thanking God for survival or saying God did it because Japan had been bad. Some people thought the article was in bad taste, even though it's pretty obviously not about mocking the victims. I don't really understand that point of view. The discussion on the disaster is not owned by the victims and their loved ones, and I'd prefer "help and advance rationality" to "help and shut up to avoid hurting religious sensibilities".

There are plenty of people who think prayer is more than meditation, and plenty of people who think that God is both omnipotent, omniscient and good. Events like these make the wrongness of those beliefs obvious. It's easier to point to something concrete rather than abstract and say "look, those people in Lisbon died while they were at prayer on All Saints Day. While I'm sceptic enough to admit that it's possible your beliefs are correct, isn't that pretty strong evidence that you're wrong?"

[liv]

I think part of my problem is that I'm against proselytizing in general, even for causes I believe in. Responding to massive devastation by saying "haha, that proves I'm right to be a rational atheist" or "haha, that proves my theology is right and everybody who believes differently from me deserves to lose their home and family" is tacky, not because it offends religious sensibilities, but because proving a philosophical / theological point is a long way from the most important thing here. I mean, if your killer argument to convert people to atheism is that good people sometimes die in natural disasters, that was true last week and it will still be true next. You don't need to bring it out while the earthquake is still in progress and many people don't yet know whether the people they care about made it through or not.

I don't see posting Tweets saying "don't pray, do something useful" as doing much to advance rationality. I understand it's a response to the equally tacky and unpleasant Twitter hashtag #prayforJapan, but two wrongs don't make a right. Sure, the religious people who feel moved to pray about this should do so within their own communities and not boast to the whole world about how great they are for praying. But it's also wrong for atheists to assume that anyone who is praying at the moment believes against all the evidence that God never lets any good person suffer, or is planning to sit around praying instead of donating or mobilizing.

[nameandnature]

I think there are two threads of criticism of theists here, one relating to prayer and action, and the other to the bankruptcy of all theodicies in the face of this sort of thing.

I agree that the assumption that anyone who's praying is not also acting is unwarranted, and in fact there's some evidence in nanaya's comment that the reverse is true (though I'd quite like to see a study which addressed the question specifically: it's hard to believe no-one has done one).

The rest of the objections to mentioning that this sort of event is a problem for theists' theodicies seems to be a fairly standard tone argument and "why aren't you worrying about the really important stuff?" argument. I found this page useful.

People find it easier to think about concrete instances rather than abstractions like "people die in natural disasters". Saying that those concrete instances are a problem for theodicies seems just fine to me, unless your argument is that people who say that are less likely to also help.

[liv]

OK, so you're deliberately presenting your argument about theodicy in the middle of a disaster because you think it's likely to have more emotional impact. Fair enough; that says to me that you care more about being right than being compassionate, which is a priority ordering that many people share, but I still reserve the right to regard it as tacky. That statement is a tone argument in as far as one accepts that people upset about the earthquake are relatively more privileged than people who are excited about rationality and atheism. *shrug* Some things are in fact important enough that it's worth being tacky or even offensive to get your point across, and if you've made that judgement call, well, up to you.

I think atheist theodicy is somewhat incoherent, myself. If you don't believe that God exists, it follows that God has nothing to do with earthquakes, and indeed you can't really ask any meaningful questions about whether earthquakes are moral or just. Still, I've never tried to convert anyone to atheism so I don't have any real opinions about whether saying: God doesn't exist, but if God did exist He would be evil for causing earthquakes, is likely to be an effective argument. Maybe it will work for some, and maybe that's more important than disrupting people's emotional coping strategies.

[nameandnature]

OK, so you're deliberately presenting your argument about theodicy in the middle of a disaster because you think it's likely to have more emotional impact.

I'm not (yet) presenting an argument about theodicy except in response to this post (and, I suppose, I "liked" that Newsthump thing on Facebook), but I'm defending the notion that there's nothing wrong with doing so. I may yet do a post of my own on the question of whether I'm right in that notion.

The abstract/concrete thing may be about emotional impact, or it may be another form of cognitive bias, so I may be indulging in the Dart Arts. I think that'd worry me most if I was perpetuating the bias or if I was using my powers for evil, but I don't think I'm doing either of those.

Derailing for Dummies is annoying in that it takes a bunch of stuff we ought to regard as fallacies from anyone (including oppressed minorities) and then seems to imply that it's all about whether someone has privilege. I could make an argument that atheists lack privilege in some countries, I suppose (parts of the USA, for example, or anywhere where Islam holds sway), but I'd prefer just to say that in general we don't let the existence of worse things stop us worrying about bad things.

But I'm not sure I "care more about being right than compassionate": it's not clear to me how the victims needing compassion are negatively effected by arguments about theodicy. I think you might be saying that it'd upset not just the immediate victims but people who generally care about the quake victims to see an argument about theodicy on the basis of the quake. I guess it's sad when I upset people, but I'm not sure what they'd be upset about: if they're upset on behalf of the victims, I think it'd be valid to say that theodicy arguments don't hurt them.

If you don't believe that God exists, it follows that God has nothing to do with earthquakes, and indeed you can't really ask any meaningful questions about whether earthquakes are moral or just.

The atheist isn't claiming that God has anything to do with earthquakes, they're pointing out an internal problem with theism by showing evidence which lends weight to the idea that at least one plank of classical theism is false. I can point out internal problems with views I don't myself share, by phrasing them as hypotheticals: "if your view were true, I'd expect to see this, but I don't".

disrupting people's emotional coping strategies

I'm not sure about this one. Should I let wrong beliefs go by if they're making someone feel better? I think I do that sometimes, but I don't think arguing about theodicy online in the wake of the quake is going to disrupt anyone's coping strategy very much, because I don't think my own postings have that much influence.

[cleverthylacine]

I definitely think it's harmful forcefully to tell someone who's just lost half their family in a disaster or is worrying about whether they're still alive that there is no life but this one, if there's even the slightest chance that the belief in an afterlife reunion is part of what's holding that person together in the moment.

But mostly I think you're being tremendously arrogant about deciding what someone who is in immediate pain needs. Deciding that someone in crisis 'needs' to have their religious belief extinguished as much or more than they need the crisis to be addressed is exactly the same as deciding that someone in crisis 'needs' Jesus before they get help.

See, what matters isn't whether or not you are 'right' (especially since we can't prove it either way); what matters is that you're ignoring the person's more immediate need for emotional comfort/food/shelter/help connecting with loved ones (i.e. what they asked for) in favour of their current 'belief system' (i.e. what you think they need).

And yes, initially we were talking about arguments online, but part of the problem with that is that you don't actually know who you are arguing with. I'm pretty sure the person I got into it with about 'prayer' online the other day doesn't know that I am worried about a number of people I know who live around the Tokyo area that I have lost touch with but was once close to.

[nameandnature]

I definitely think it's harmful forcefully to tell someone who's just lost half their family in a disaster or is worrying about whether they're still alive that there is no life but this one, if there's even the slightest chance that the belief in an afterlife reunion is part of what's holding that person together in the moment.

I agree one should not forcefully tell someone, although if asked what I thought about life after death, I'd tell the truth. In general, if someone in that situation wants comfort, it's best to provide comfort without wishful thinking, I reckon, and I one cannot provide comfort (because you're not in any sort of relationship with the person), to shut up. I was reminded a bit of this question to Ask Richard (the atheist advice columnist) from a father asking whether to tell the kids that granny was looking down from heaven.

but part of the problem with that is that you don't actually know who you are arguing with.

True, but I expect that people who don't want to see such discussions will bow out of them or scroll on by. Discussion forums are a broadcast medium, so the answer to stuff you don't like is to change the channel.

[nameandnature]

Post script: but, while I agree with you about priorities, in general, the idea that one should promote a false belief that leads to a desireable outcome is not Groovy: "promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires, because they’re Nazis or whatever."

[cleverthylacine]

I'm not an atheist, so by that logic, I'd have to go about trying to convince people of my beliefs, too.

I'd rather not. It's a boundary violation. I'm not going to encourage or discourage an upset person to believe their loved ones are waiting for them, but if somebody tries to either discourage me from believing in the human soul and its survival when I'm upset about a death or convince me that my loved one is burning in hell, I'd probably react the same way.

See, the point where we are NOT in violent agreement is that you believe there's not a G-d. I think there is. To me it seems that you've rid yourself of your erroneous and self-destructive beliefs of Christian origin without ridding yourself of the fundamentalist compulsion to get up in people's business about what they believe.

I think one of the problems I'm having in this discussion is that you conflate Christian interpretations of appropriated Jewish teaching (we didn't say they could have it nor did we ever tell them it was okay to do some of the things they do with it) with actual Jewish teaching and call them 'theism'.

I don't believe 'G-d doesn't make junk'. I do believe that there was an event that caused data corruption/breakage throughout the evolving creation early in its history, possibly before humans even existed. But I don't think that event is the cause of homosexuality. I think it's the cause of cruelty and thoughtlessness and evil. Homosexual behaviour is observed among many species and is not harmful except in toxic situations.

And I don't believe 'G-d sends earthquakes to punish people'--I believe earthquakes exist because entropy and death and other destructive forces exist, and people happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I will believe earthquakes come from G-d as a form of justice when they start killing greedy CEOS who drain their workers, union-busting politicians who think you should be grateful to have a job at all, child pornographers, serial rapists and other such beings.
Look, believing that G-d doesn't make junk isn't the same thing as believing G-d wants to punish people by sending them earthquakes (and if this is an attempt to convert me to atheism by pointing out that my beliefs about G-d can't be proven, let's stop right now because I know that already and I don't much care). I don't believe that G-d planned every aspect of the universe in detail; I believe that G-d's not going to punish people for being what they are, for instance gay, particularly when there are many many examples of non-heterosexual behaviour in the animal kingdom as well; it's clear to me that the passages in the Torah often used to condemn male homosexuality were not meant to condemn human love. (The Hebrew is ambiguous enough that non-homophobic rabbinical scholars disagree about whether it's meant to condemn anal sex, presumably because there are dangers to health, much like eating pork in the desert without refrigeration, or whether it's meant to condemn male-on-male war rape, the position of R. Greenberg.)

But that doesn't mean I think G-d plans where all the earthquakes are going to happen; it means I think that earthquakes are part of the way the planet works. As a matter of fact the idea that there are things in the world that are broken was appropriated by Christian teachers from Judaism (my religion), but we don't seem to go to the awful predestinarian places that Christians take that sometimes.

and that one of the things we are to do is fix them. I don't think of G-d in the Christian sense and most people's idea of Judaic theology is contaminated by long exposure to Christian interpretations of appropriated Jewish theology.

I personally think G-d is confused a lot and doesn't always understand us any better than we understand G-d.

sidebar re Derailing for Dummies

[liv]

Personally, I do not like the paradigm of privilege and derailing and tone argument and so on for talking about social justice issues. I don't think the concepts are entirely helpful, and the terms have the danger of creating an in-group, quasi-academic jargon used more as a badge of tribal identity than to communicate. I think I've picked up enough from the internet to be able use that paradigm (which I was doing because I was responding to your comment from within that framing), but I don't claim to be an expert on it.

That said, I do take issue with your characterization of a bunch of stuff we ought to regard as fallacies from anyone. I definitely sympathize with the inclination among rationality fans to assume that the quality of someone's argument is totally independent of their position in the social hierarchy. For one thing that's obviously true when we're talking about physically measurable facts about the material world. For another, it's desirable, because we don't want to live in a world where somebody's ethnicity or similar superficial characteristics makes a difference to how their argument is received. However, if the discussion is specifically about social power imbalances, then it is inevitable that the relative social statuses of the participants will in fact make a difference. We might not like it (I certainly don't!), but pretending it isn't the case isn't going to help.

Let me try and give you an example, because it is clear to me that this stuff is going to be hard to fit into your world-view. Suppose someone says: God, I fucking hate homophobes, they're so retarded!, then responding that you shouldn't use God's name as a curse-word because Christians might be offended is derailing. Responding that you shouldn't sound angry and use swear words because you might put off potential sympathizers is a tone argument. But responding that gay rights activists shouldn't make their point using insults which dehumanize intellectually disabled people is a valid criticism. Not saying it's completely unanswerable, but it is an argument that should be addressed, rather than dismissed as a fallacy. These criticisms are not equivalent to eachother, and the reason they're not is because of the power differentials involved.

[liv]

I was using "you" as a shorthand for "the people you're defending", which was possibly unhelpful in an emotive discussion.

This seems not really a discussion about promoting atheism as such, but another sub-branch of the ongoing debate about what counts as broadcasting in the internet age. If you post something to Twitter or LJ or Facebook, can you reasonably assume that the only people who will see it will be your immediate social circle, whom you're pretty sure aren't Japanese and don't have close relatives caught up in the disaster? Given the nature of the internet, I don't think this assumption is entirely justified, but it's not entirely stupid either.

I've also seen both theists and non-theists arguing on both sides about whether people who just happened to read about the earthquake on the internet have a "right" to be upset about it. I could definitely see an argument which says that this category of people are upset enough to be extra-receptive to your arguments, but not upset enough that it's morally wrong to hurt them further by arguing at them. I'm not at all surprised that we ended up ranking these issues differently, because I don't care at all about people holding theological beliefs I disagree with, and I do care a lot about not adding to the pain of people who are in a bad emotional state (even if they are at several degrees removed from the disaster).

[cleverthylacine]

I guess what I don't understand is why you care so much whether I believe that there is a G-d or not. (For the record, I do, and I am not interested in debating my subjective experiences to you because I could not possibly explain them nor do I think they should apply to anyone who isn't me.)

I would understand why you'd care if I voted for political candidates or measures that were anti-science, anti-environment, sexist, homophobic, &c, but I don't. And I've met a fair amount of loudly atheist Libertarians who DO, mostly because they think their personal property (and/or the privileging of their preferred family structure) is more important than a fair society, the continued health of the planet or other people's civil rights. And that also seems to me to be the main reason many so-called religious people vote that way.

[nameandnature]

I guess what I don't understand is why you care so much whether I believe that there is a G-d or not.

I'm not sure I much care whether you personally believe there's a God or not. There's a liberal minority of theists who don't do much harm other than lending some respectability to theism, and if you're in that minority, fair enough.

I do care whether people in general believe there's a God or not. I care because:

I used to be a theist. I was an evangelical Christian, which in Britain is generally less barking than in the States, from what I can tell, but still means holding to a bunch of conservative positions on sexuality, for example. It's bad for a society to take those positions, I think we both agree. It was also bad for me, since I spent a lot of time feeling guilty about trivia. I wish I had found out that there is no God earlier, so I'm doing what Jesus said and doing unto others as I would have them to do me :-)

In general, I'm in favour of people holding accurate opinions about the world. Theism is of a kind with homeopathy, astrology and all that stuff. Because of my previous experience, I know much more about theism than I do about those other things, though, so I think I'm better placed to argue against it.

I'm in favour of people holding accurate opinions at least partly because, as Wrongbot puts it, we have a moral imperative to stop being wrong, because, as C.S. Lewis puts it, sometimes it's entirely right knowledge rather than moral reform which leads to better behaviour: "surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things... You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house."

[cleverthylacine]

I don't think you need to believe that there is no G-d to stop believing things that are harmful to you or to others. All I think is needed is a bit of logic: if G-d had anything at all to do with the origins of this world, evolutionary processes or not, then G-d would have to be a pretty rotten sort to want you to believe, for instance, that gay people shouldn't exist.

I often do wonder at people who manage to believe in entirely vicious gods. (I'm Jewish, and have occasionally told believers in particularly sociopathic Christian fundamentalisms that if I believed their god existed I'd consider it a moral duty to oppose him even if it meant I went to hell.)

Actually I rather think atheism is a natural consequence of Christianity and the equation of religion with belief; Christianity was the first world religion to become deeply concerned with what people believe, and people who have grown up being taught that belief is what matters will of course become atheists once they no longer do believe. I do not know much about Islam, which seems to share some of the emphasis upon belief, but generally other religious systems do not seem to revolve upon whether you're willing to believe ten or more impossible things before breakfast and try and force other people to behave as though they were true, whether or not they even agree with you.

There are of course atheist Jews, a lot of them, don't get me wrong, but religions that are also cultural identities, or that focus more on practise than on belief, seem to have more room for people who don't think of their gods as omnipotent fairies (i.e. dangerous beings who bless people they like and must be kept appeased lest they take a whim to destroy you.)

Now homeopathy, that's scary. :) (I, ah, work in academic medicine.)

[nameandnature]

I think we're in violent agreement here: I'm not complaining here about religious culture insofar as it's divorced from attempts to describe the world. Some anthropologists, like Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer, think that it's a mistake to see any religious language as an attempt to describe the world, but I think if I were religious, I'd find that a bit patronising. Certainly, when I was both believing and observant, I thought my beliefs were attempts to describe the world, though I admit they may not have been: as philosophers and anthropologists have pointed out, those beliefs don't work in the same way as more mundane beliefs.

The anti-gay theists have a rationalisation against the "God didn't make no trash" argument, which is that the world is somehow broken and contains things which God doesn't want but permits for mysterious reasons (free will gets mentioned at this point, as does the Christian idea of the Fall and original sin). I think your own idea runs into the earthquakes objection if you think that God had something to do with the natural world: clearly in that case, God wants earthquakes to exist :-)

I agree that if FundieGod exists, the right thing to do is join the resistance. I suspect we both agree that luckily, he doesn't.

[cleverthylacine]

I (I'm on her feed) was the one who said 'prayer is a way to focus will & intent' and I believe that; I was responding to someone who had said that praying for Japan assumed the belief that Japan deserved to get a disaster. I still don't understand how anyone could think that!

[liv]

Thank you. I think I probably wouldn't have understood that statement without Azz' gloss, because I don't come from a Pagan background and I have only a hazy idea what "will and intent" means in that context.

I think the origin of the belief that you describe is that many people learned religion in Sunday school. Which means they get a version of theology simplified for very young children, often delivered by people who don't have much expertise in either pedagogy or religion. So they pick up the ideas like "if you're a good child, God will give you nice things" and its converse, and when they get old enough to see that this doesn't work, they get very angry with all of religion ever. I believe JD Salinger called this phenomenon something like confusing God with Santa Claus.

[cleverthylacine]

Heh.

I'm not actually a Pagan but I could play one on TV because of my ceremonial magic background :)

My feeling on the issue of praying for a pony is that G-d already knows you want one but I guess it can't hurt, given that I believe G-d is 'too big' to get angry over humans being silly.

[redbird]

What I want to say to certain people (not you!) is "don't just pray, do something." The canonical example there, of course, is the parents who pray for their sick children and don't take them to the doctor, because they think god doesn't want approve of doctors. (Someone who prays because it's all they can afford is a scandal and a shame, but the shame is my country's, not the parents'.) If it comforts a parent to pray while the doctors are seeing to their child, I see no harm in it as long as they don't intrude on the other people there by doing so.

[nanaya]

Thing is, the one doesn't suggest the other. What was so annoying - I'm with liv on this issue generally, and Tweeted to that effect - was the assumption that praying was an alternative to donating, as if people can't do both. Considering that the 2003 research on the subject of belief and donations seemed to indicate that believers (en masse) donate more to *secular* causes than non-believers, it's a bit cheeky for non-believers to imply (or even say straight out) that people who pray are somehow less likely to donate because of that.

This kind of smug wankery is precisely the reason I stopped identifying as an atheist many years ago, quite apart from any particular beliefs about the numinous.

[liv]

I agree this is a reasonable imperative to convince people of! Religious positions which insist on only prayer without action do exist, but I think they're probably the minority of religious positions.

I do think some of the people who are "just" praying for Japan but not donating significant (or perhaps any) time and money to the cause are rather in the position of the parents who pray because they can't afford healthcare. Most of us can't do much to help Japan; there are plenty of people who really don't have anything spare to give to charity, or whose charity budget is already fully committed to other causes. Even if you can afford to give $1000, that can feel like a pretty small response to billions of dollars of damage, and a nearly irrelevant response to human suffering.

Absolutely agree that people who do choose to pray shouldn't do so in an intrusive way, or imply that non-theists are morally inferior for not responding in this way.

[cleverthylacine]

This. I happen to know that the person I was arguing with about prayer vs donation is at least as well-off as I am.

And if you look at who is tweeting a lot of the twitter trending topics it quickly becomes apparent that there are a lot of people on twitter with a lot less privilege than either he or I have got and a lot less $ tends to go along with that.

Our economy is pretty bad right now and we have a fairly sociopathic corporate class arguing for protectionism and isolationism whereas most of the people who are on twitter (and I include myself and my friend in that, given that we are fairly well off but have both been badly affected by the economy at current) are facing having to do a lot more with less due to the way money and resources are flowing in this culture right now. There's a certain amount of frustration in knowing that a lot of the people who could really help will not choose to do so and wanting to help but not being able to. Prayer can ease that.