Stephen Law

Redraft of some points I made before (in my book Believing Bullshit). Many people insist that they have had reliable religious or psychic experiences. Yet there would appear to be good evidence that many of these experiences are delusional. Let’s focus on religious experiences. We know, for example, that:   (1) Religious experiences tend to be culturally specific . Christians experience the guiding hand of Jesus, while Muslims experience Allah. Just like experiences of alien abduction (reports of alien abduction pretty much stop at certain national borders) , the character of religious experiences often changes at national borders. In Catholic countries, the Virgin Mary is often seen, but not over the border in a predominantly Muslim country. This strongly suggests that to a significant degree religious experiences are shaped by our cultural expectations—by the power of suggestion. And once we know that a large part of what is experienced is a result of the power of sugg...

"To the West, it seems hardly imaginable that the relationship between man and man (morality) could be maintained without reference to a Supreme Being, while to the Chinese it is equally amazing that men should not, or could not, behave toward one another as decent beings without thinking of their indirect relationship through a third party." Lin, Yu Tang My Country, My People (London, Heinemann 1938) Does anyone have a page number for this quotation?

Other images c/o Tom Margrain here .

Last week....

I am doing the AHS Annual General Meeting next weekend in Birmingham.. go here . AHS AGM 2012: The Evil God Challenge with Stephen Law 01:50, Thursday, 28th of June 2012 in AGM , Events Stephen Law AHS AGM Talk at 15:00 on Sunday 8th July Those who believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing and supremely benevolent God face a very significant problem - there appears to be overwhelming empirical evidence against what they believe. The world contains so much evil seemingly pointless pain and suffering that it cannot plausibly be considered the creation of a such a God. Maybe there's some sort of cosmic intelligence behind the universe, but it is not that one. But of course, as we all know, those who believe in such a God have developed all sorts of ingenious ways of explaining away the evil - in terms of free-will, character-building, God's mysterious ways, and so on. We will look at some of the most popular explanations. and then look at a novel, and psychologically very ef...

I was particularly irritated by right-wing Christian Wintery Knight's recent post on Obamacare , in which he repeats various dubious, cherry-picked stats and conclusions from a Hoover Institute guy as evidence that the US system is much better than the NHS. Wintery Knight's posts are generally recycled right-wing dissembling, myths and apologetics. I made a quick first comment on his post on Obamacare and then followed up with various links and stats. Wintery Knight responded to first comment and refused to publish my other comments. Apparently he's got form - even editing people's comments before publishing them. I am pretty sure that's not what Jesus would do. The only other experience I have had of having my comments "disappear" was here : Mark Vernon posted on my Radio 3 talk about my Believing Bullshit book, then engaged with me up to the point where I was clearly getting under his skin, at which point my comment "disappeared" leaving Ve...

The Heavy Dexters - with myself on drums - will be playing from 8.30 - 11.00pm. Fre entry. Book if you want a table. Details here . Facebook page here . Joe's Bar and Grill 260 Banbury Road, OX2 7DX Oxford