Julian Baggini on secularism

Julian Baggini in the Guardian makes a valid point that secularism shouldn't ultimately be about stamping out religion, it's about moving it from the public, political sphere into the private. However since this  often requires the displacement of one particular religion from a priviledged position then this can make those of the related sect feel persecuted (with no sense of irony in the case of the catholic church, but then I guess no one expects the Spanish Inquisition :-). But preventing the views of one section of society from dominating the whole is not persecution, it is democratic tolerance, especially when most of the people labelled as belonging to that section don't seem to actually fully agree or take seriously the official beliefs ascribed to them. Which is why as he says "in theory, if not in practice, the United States is both culturally the most religious country in the developed west and constitutionally the most secular."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/14/is-religion-really-under-threat

In addition Baggini makes the importance case (originally fromJohn Rawls) that preventing religious beliefs from being grounds for action in modern democratic societies does not mean that they can't be acknowledged as motivations. People should be allowed believe what they want, but as in all areas, when it comes to the interaction with others (e.g. via the laws of that society) then other justifications are needed "If we're debating the ethics of abortion, for example, we'd get nowhere if some insisted their views rested on their Catholic faith whereas others took theirs to flow inexorably from their atheism. What we all need to do is provide reasons that have some purchase for other people in their capacity as fellow citizens, whatever their world-views. That doesn't mean denying or even covering up the fact that we have religious or other motivations for believing what we do. It is simply to acknowledge that we can't expect these to carry any weight with others."

(update 2012-02-19)
Related to this is the letter exchanged between Richard Dawkins and Will Hutton in this weeks Observer, sparked by the survey conducted by Dawkins' foundation which showed most people who would have registered themselves as 'Christian' in the latest UK senses, do so only on a very loose basis, and hence that it is unfair to use the census figure of 72% self-identified Christians to support the notion that the UK is an 'actively' Christian country.

debatable disgnoses...the new DSM

While I'm all for quantitative measuring methods, I too have serious concerns about the DSM, and while it is hard to generalize, would think that there can be too much 'medicalization' of mental problems.The dangers are (a) that some kind of amazing level of balanced happiness is then considered both normal and achievable and that (b) those who can't achieve it are then considered 'sick', which generally implies external remedies are necessary. This is I think detrimental to both the 'well' and the truly 'sick'.
But, it is a complicated area, since of course as a materialist I am fully convinced that all behaviours originate from the chemical/neuronal status of the brain, and from this perspective, any mood can be changed. The problem is to manually force a change is to intervene in an amazingly complex and normally efficiently self-regulating system, and while sometimes the situation merits this, until the techniques are more developed (and their mechanisms properly understood) then I think it is not appropriate unless the person involved has serious problems coping with daily life. Life shouldn't be hell,but there's no reason to think it should be all rosy either...

"Hundreds of thousands of people will be labelled mentally ill because of behaviour most people would consider normal, if a new edition of what has been termed the psychiatrists' diagnostic bible goes ahead, experts are warning."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/09/us-mental-health-manual

• Psychiatrists and psychologists in the UK are speaking out against the publishing of DSM-5, an updated version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that categorises every type of mental disorder, including some that the psychologists say should not exist. 
• Under the DSM-4, last revised 12 years ago, children who argue and refuse to obey parents can be classified as having oppositional defiant disorder."
•  "Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology at Kings College London, said: "The proposals in DSM-5 are likely to shrink the pool of normality to a puddle with more and more people being given a diagnosis of mental illness." "

John Gray on Alain de Botton's atheist temple

An interesting article by John Gray on de Botton's new Atheism, which provides some historical insight into the quest for something to capture what religion inspires, without accepting what it implies.

Alain de Botton's atheist temple is a nice idea, but a defunct one
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/02/alain-de-botton-atheist-temple-defunct

but as always the enduring role of religious art and structures as a focal point for human thoughts about existence was I think best put by Larkin in his poem Churchgoing :
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

SciAm : Thinking About Mortality Changes How We Act

"Psychological scientists Laura E. R. Blackie and Philip J. Cozzolino of the University of Essex in England have been exploring the idea that we are all governed by two disparate existential systems, each with its own distinct method of processing the idea of death. Both existential minds have the power to meaningfully change our attitudes and actions, but they work in very different—almost opposite—ways."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=two-faces-of-death&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120206

Socialists and conservatives may be born not made

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jan/31/socialists-conservatives-born-not-made

This is not the first study I've read about which correlates political leanings to certain dispositions, but it's one that fits into a pet (and half in jest!) stereotyping of mine that people on the right worry more about the undeserving being treated too fairly, and people on the left worry more about the deserving being treated unfairly.

Both of these concerns are valid, since the drives to support and help those we feel as part of our society, and the drives to punish those who we feel act against it, are both I think equally important (and necessary) strands in a moral community. Doing good is not enough, for the system to work we need to also act against 'the bad', and there seems to be a lot of evidence that we have been hard wired by evolution for both these dispositions. While most people will agree about the former (that some people will and should help others despite cost to themselves), it is perhaps less widely known that studies show people will also accept a cost to themselves just to punish other people, and from similar righteous reasons (the classic example of this is the 'ultimatum' game ).

For me it's a bit like worrying which is worse - that nine guilty men go free, or one innocent man goes to jail. My view is that a lot of right wing politics is focused most on the travesty of the nine guilty escaping punishment, or as is more likely the case, nine welfare cheats  getting away with excessive benefits. Of course no one can disagree with being angry about this, and these are real problems which society has to work on, but the question is how important they are. In contrast, I would think it a more left-wing approach to focus most instead on what happens the one innocent, or the deserving welfare recipient who might lose out due to new 'tough' policies.  Of course no one on the right disagrees with this either, the point is not that one side is 'nasty' or the other 'soft' , both agree in principle, but disagree in priority.

The study mentioned in this article seem to indicate that right-leaning/left-leaning people differ in the magnitude of their responses to negative and positive stimuli, and I think this fits in with the theory above, namely that if one gets more charged up about negative things, e.g. moral outrage about cheats, one is more likely to favour a conservative platform, since these issues provoke a deeper response, and hence raise their relative priority. The converse is harder to show, since it's not clear absence of unfair punishment is really a sort of 'positive' stimulus, but my impression is there is something valid in this direction as well.

Given how passionate people can be about politics then the more psychological information we can gather the better, and studies such as this provide promising initial insights.

extract:

"The results showed those with right-wing beliefs had a relatively increased response to disgust and threat, whereas those who vote left-of-centre had a relatively increased response to pleasurable images.

This suggests that left-wing people are relatively more responsive to appetitive than aversive stimuli and that people who are right-of-centre are more responsive to aversive stimuli. Put another way, conservatives are more responsive to negative stimuli whereas those on the left are more responsive to positive stimuli.
The implication is that the same stimuli will evoke polarised responses depending on where you are on the aversive-appetitive spectrum. These different reactions to shared experiences will mean those of politically opposing viewpoints will automatically judge the other as wrong, and no amount of arguing in the House of Commons can change that."