1. The Gullible Age: Review of 'The Enemies of Reason'

Comment #62396 by mark.breeze on August 9, 2007 at 3:04 pm

Slightly off topic, but keeping within the remit of decent TV programmes... I have just finished wathcing 'Atom', part of BBC4's 'Science You Can't See' season. Picture the scene. You're sitting in your living room and coming to the closing moments of the captivating and awe-inspiring final instalment of one of the most brilliant tributes to the scientific method you have ever had the privilege to witness, and at that very moment your mind-blowing ignorant Catholic housemate strides into the room, plonks her unwelcome butt on the sofa and declares with a tone of absolute authority, 'It's funny when you think about it just how closely science and religion are actually connected.' Oh, how I wish physicists did fatwas.

2. Richard Dawkins: Author of the Year!

Comment #28271 by mark.breeze on March 28, 2007 at 3:19 pm

The wind of change is blowing through this country. Whether the religious like it or not, this growth of rational consciousness is a literary fact and they must take account of it.

Congratulations to our glorious messiah.

3. When Religion Steps on Science's Turf

Comment #26333 by mark.breeze on March 18, 2007 at 5:50 pm

Well, I very much doubt given the age of this article that anyone is ever going to read my scribbling here, but I shall proceed nonetheless.

A few weeks back, I was in San Francisco on my way back to the UK after spending almost 5 months travelling around the world. While I was there, I came across the city's 'Church of Scientology' where I was invited to take a look inside. Out of curiosity, and feeling in the mood for an argument, I accepted this invitation and entered the Scientologists' lair. There is an account of what happened inside on my travel website (accessible at www.getjealous.com/snowy and by clicking on 'Fake Tales of San Francisco', halfway into the fourth paragraph onwards).

As a result of my experience inside, it was quite evident that not only is Scientology an example of a religion parading around all over science's turf but also of one that revels in blowing a great big trumpet to announce its presence whilst doing so.

The Scientologists, unlike the Creationists, are pursuing a target market quite distinct from the types of people who are willing to unquestioningly accept the teachings of the socially entrenched and historically successful religions.

The Scientologists correctly recognise that there are huge numbers of people out there who demand that claims about religion are backed up by scientific evidence. The tragic fact about these huge numbers of people, however, is that many of them are completely incapable of identifying what counts as 'scientific'. Indeed, the Scientologists' recruitment campaign has been specifically engineered to exploit this weakness to the full, in tandem with an arguably much more sinister exploitation of natural human emotional vulnerability.

The egregious technique adopted by the Scientologists focuses primarily on the (alleged) personalised results of a (methodologically flawed) personality test, the reliability of which the Scientologists claim has been incontrovertibly verified by Oxford University. The point of the whole exercise is to convince the victim (and that most certainly is the correct word to use) that they (the Scientologists) have scientific evidence that the victim has a serious personality disorder which if left unaddressed will lead to the destruction of their friendships and relationships and prevent them from ever finding happiness in their lives.

If the victim is at first reluctant to accept what the Scientologists are telling them, they pick up the mantel of psychotherapists, encouraging the victim to talk about breakdowns of past relationships and past periods of unhappiness before doing everything in their persuasive power to convince the victim that anything negative they have disclosed can be directly attributed to the urgent problems identified by the personality test.

In sum, these people are no different from salespeople (probably incentivised by targets, commission and bonuses) whose job is to sell the idea to potential customers, invoking an illusion of science, that they have a personality disorder tantamount to mental illness (but which will later be revealed as some kind of 'spiritual' illness) which can only be cured by the Scientologists.

What is most disturbing about Scientology is the way that it disguises itself as something that it is most certainly not – scientific. Given Professor Dawkins' estimation that in a popular UK bookshop, books on pseudo science outnumber books on proper science by at least 3 to 1, it seems that not only are atheists faced with the task of convincing people to use science and reason to inform their views on religion but also of ensuring that people actually know what science and reason are in the first place.