Morality issues at play in picking atheists over the religious believers
Q. Are atheists as moral as religious believers? A. “Surprisingly, even atheists seem to think not,” says Bob Holmes in “New Scientist” magazine. “This belief is almost certainly wrong, but it reflects a longstanding bias that morality stems from faith.”
Suppose you are told about a man who tortured animals as a child and grew up to become a serial killer. Is it more likely that he was (A) a teacher, or (B) a teacher who did not believe in God? The correct answer is (A), since there are more teachers as a whole than teachers who are atheists. And if you change the question so that option (B) is “a teacher with religious belief,” the correct answer is, again, (A). When either version of this question was presented to more than 3,000 volunteers from 13 nations, “In almost every country polled, more people made the error when B was the atheist teacher. This suggests they found an atheist mass murderer more plausible than a religious one. Remarkably, even those who did not believe in any God showed the same pattern.”
“But this is not borne out by the facts. In both the U.S. and the UK, atheists are under-represented in the prison population and over-represented among civil rights and anti-war activists. The world’s most secular countries — notably in Scandinavia — are among the most peaceable and civic-minded.” Q. The English language is rich in words but scant in the names of their originators. The following are exceptions. Can you name the coiners of “muppet,” “mimsy,” “bafflegab” and “scare quotes,” and their meanings? A. As fans of “Sesame Street” no doubt know, Jim Henson coined “muppet” to describe the show’s iconic characters, writes Anu Garg on his “A.Word.A.Day” web site. The word, introduced in 1995, means “a stupid person” or “a fool.” “Mimsy” owes its origin to Lewis Carroll, who in 1855 incorporated it in a poem published in his periodical “Mischmasch,” later appearing as “Jabberwocky” in his novel “Through the Looking-Glass.” A blend of “miserable” and “flimsy,” it means “prim, “feeble,” “affected.”
“Bafflegab,” as the word suggests, is “obscure, pompous, or incomprehensible language,” first coined by Milton A. Smith, assistant general counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1952.
Finally, credit goes to philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe for “scare quotes,” introduced in 1956 “to indicate the writer’s disagreement or disapproval of the use of a term.” An example is “Columbus, ‘discoverer of America.’” In spoken language, the equivalent is “air quotes” (think of arms upraised, two fingers on each hand bent to suggest quotation marks). Q. If you want to meet an intelligent alien here on earth, where might you go? A. To the sea. In his book “Other Minds: The octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness” philosopher Peter GodfreySmith points out that cephalopods—especially octopuses and cuttlefish—have extensive nervous systems and complex behaviors which rival those of some pretty smart vertebrates (dolphins, primates, parrots …). Yet the last common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates was a flattened worm-like creature which lived 600 million years ago, before any organisms had made it onto land. “Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and goes so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”