Hi On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, James Guinee wrote: > I just love the anti-religious bias that is so prevalent in > psychology!
There are many things that scientific psychologists are against: sloppy designs, inappropriate statistics, faulty conclusions, careless reasoning, promoting theories that are false, basing practice on intuition rather than sound evidence, and so on. Psychologists being against something is not sufficient reason to conclude that this represents a bias (if by that one means an unwarranted predilection) or that it is inappropriate. I do not think that it would be easy to determine whether being "against religion" is like the above examples or better characterized as some sort of prejudiced bias. Moreover, I think that most scientists (not necessarily me) would be quite happy to leave religion alone if religion (or more properly its supporters) did not intrude itself into places where it properly does not belong (e.g., journals on reproduction, science classrooms). I don't know of anyone who has funded an anti-religion campaign to compare with the Templeton Foundation attack on science. Science may do damage to religion, but it is largely an inadvertent consequence of developing more correct models of the world (and increasingly of human beings), models that happen to conflict with some older ideas proposed by religious groups. > Guess the ethics canon about respecting differences doesn't > apply to religion. Numerous replies inhibited (given this is the Tips list). > This is a typical criticism of God -- He is expected to stay > the heck out of our lives, our bedrooms, our classroom -- but > boy He better show up when the poop hits the fan. Do you really believe that people who do not believe in god are serious that he should have intervened? They were simply pointing out how selective appeals to god by believers tend to be. Something your response nicely demonstrates. Believers get to choose when they think that god has intervened, generally in favor of a benevolent god. I am sure that many survivors of the WTC and other disasters are grateful for divine intervention on their behalf, but there is nothing that needs to be explained. If they had not survived, others would have, and many of them too would feel grateful. Out of interest, is there a psychological literature on whether people tend to become more convinced of god when they have their mortality threatened? Best wishes Jim ============================================================================ James M. Clark (204) 786-9757 Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax University of Winnipeg 4L05D Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED] CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark ============================================================================ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
