I’m not quite sure what to say really.  But it is impressive - at least, I think so.  It has certainly cut down the typing.

I have blogged before about how various iPhone apps were available to enable a user to use voice to interact with software on his or her phone.  For some time I have been speaking to ReQall to make diary appointments and shopping lists, and Evernote to (amongst other things) record miscellaneous notes on the hop.  I also occasionally used the Google voice search software with mixed success.  And then, of course, there’s always ipadio for phlogging.

What Vlingo does it take some of the most common interactions people would want to make with their iPhones (dialing contacts, texting, emailing, web searching, finding locations on maps, and updating social networks) and enable all these functions to be executed either entirely, or almost entirely, by voice.

Voice Dialing Any Contact

I used to have a phone that enabled me to say the names of a restricted number of people (6) that it would recognise and then dial, but I never found it to be very successful and abandoned the practice after several mistaken dials.  What Vlingo does is call anyone in your address book.  You just press the Vlingo button, then say, “Call Peter Smith” and it does.  If Peter Smith has more than one number you can specify, “Call Peter Smith mobile”, “Call Peter Smith work”.  If Vlingo is confident it has the correct number it will dial automatically, inform you what it is doing, and give you time to cancel the call.  If it is unsure of the instruction it will present a list of possible numbers that you can select from.  I have found it to be very accurate indeed, and in a fortnight’s worth of usage, have only had to cancel an automatic dial once.

Entering Text for Texting, Emails, and Social Networking

The more you speak to Vlingo, the more it learns about your pronunciation.  When you speak text (and punctuation) it will quickly transcribe it for you.  A lot of the time it will be mostly accurate or perfect.  When it isn’t, there are three ways of editing what Vlingo offers.  If you click on a problem word, alternative suggestions will appear at the bottom of the screen. In many cases the suggestions will include your intended word and clicking on it will replace the problem text.  There is also a microphone button that allows you to re-record any part of the text, or make additions.  And of course, you can always manually edit the text.

I know that the above looks cumbersome, but to me, it is still proving to be quicker and easier than typing out the full message.

The commands are simple.  After you have pressed the Vlingo button you speak your commands and message:

“Twitter update - Message - Just testing Vlingo.”

“Email Peter Smith - Subject - Finance - Message - Hi Peter, please could you let me have ….”

“Text Peter Smith - Message - Hi, how are you?”

You can update Twitter and Facebook.  The messages are presented for checking and then you just press the send button.  The emails appear in the opened iPhone email programme.  Once checked, you just press send.  With texting the message appears for checking, you then press Next and this opens the iPhone SMS programme.  Your message has been copied into the phone’s memory.  Once the SMS programme opens you tap the blank message space and paste the message into it.  The recipient has already been selected. You then just press send.

Two things just for the record.  First, because it is American, it doesn’t recognise “full stop”, you have to say “period”. The email and text options are only available in the paid for version.

Find Anything

You may have been used to using the voice search function in the iPhone Google app.  Again Vlingo takes this further.  You can say, “Search iPhone Apps”.  However, you can also say, “Google the meaning of life”, “Bing San Tropez”, or “Yahoo weather in Cambridge”.  And the “Find” command will search and locate in Google Maps.  ”Find Peterborough” will present you with a map of Peterborough, and “Find cafes in Peterborough” will present you with a map of Peterborough with red pins on all the cafes, and a blue pin showing you your location.

The move from keypad to touchscreen was an important step.  Vlingo shows that the move from keypad and touchscreen to voice is already partly here.

The unacknowledged feelings of grief that people experience surround the many losses that often do not involve the literal death of a body.  There is sometimes shock, and anger, and depression surrounding the loss of a job,  the ending of a significant relationship, or the onset of a debilitating illness.  These are all accompanied by the ending of a particular status and a whole host of expectations and dreams about the future - about what might have been.  I sometimes work with people who arrive at my office in a state of shock having  recently learned that their partner of 20 or 30 years is leaving.  They are almost literally sick with grief - what they thought was the goodness of the past feels destroyed at the time, the present is unbearable, and the future has just evaporated before their eyes.

Even when jobs end for good reasons and someone moves on for promotion or change, or when relationships end on a good note but someone just has to move away (children eventually leaving home, for example) there is still an ache for what has gone and what will no longer be, despite the potential goodness of the new.  Although I changed career and left teaching over 10 years ago, and although I enjoy my present work, there are many aspects of the life and people that I have left behind (that I have ‘lost’) that I still miss and occasionally long for.  There is potential for feelings of grief surrounding any change, because change always means leaving something behind.

‘Simple’ grief is bad enough, but there are at least four types of ‘complicated’ grief.  There is the grief that is compounded by trauma where there are additional levels of shock and pain heaped on something that is already bad enough - for example, a death in particularly brutal circumstances, or a relationship that ends with particular nastiness and threats, or a sudden brutal sacking that feels completely unjustified.  There is grief that is compounded many times - the loss of a loved one, a home, and a job in a disaster area for example.  There is grief where people struggle to have a fixed ending for the loss - the disappearance of a loved one, for example, where there is no definite news of death and no body, or the ending of a relationship where the leaving partner refuses to explain why.  There is grief that is prolonged (sometimes for years) while you wait for the inevitable death to happen - the grieving for the loss of someone with a terminal illness that starts once the news has been revealed, or the grieving inside a relationship that you feel is irredeemable but which, for many reasons, may still have years to run.

It is often helpful for people who are grieving and who do not realize it to understand what is happening to them, and to understand the naturalness and the normality of the process.  Despite the hugeness of the pain and shock, they are not going mad and are not unusual for feeling the things they do.

I liken the grief process to a journey down a river.  Imagine you are paddling your canoe along a river on a beautiful summer’s day.  You are completely at peace and are enjoying admiring the birds and the butterflies.  You turn a bend in the river and are suddenly confronted with a waterfall that you didn’t know about and your canoe is sucked over the edge.  After a few seconds of mild panic the inevitable happens and you find yourself falling 30 feet of so into a raging whirlpool.  There is terror as you fall and try to comprehend what is happening to you.

You then spend, what seems like an eternity in the whirlpool going round and round.  Sometimes you feel trapped in there for ever, and at other times you feel near the edge of the pool and about to escape, before being dragged back to the centre again.  This is important.  Grief is not a linear process having stages that are processed in any particular order.  In grief you randomly go through many emotions several times over.

While in the whirlpool you experience:

• Shock and denial: “This isn’t happening to me.”
• Numbness and confusion: “What is happening to me?”
• Anger: “Why the £*&^”%^$ is this happening to me?”
• Self-pity: “Why me, me? This always happens to me!”
• Hurt: “This is so painful and it is unbearable!”
• Fear: “I won’t survive what is happening to me!”
• Depression: “I can’t cope with what is happening to me?”
• Bargaining: “If only I had done XYZ this wouldn’t be happening to me.”

At some point you are thrown out of the whirlpool and continue your journey down the river.  In one sense the river is the same as before, in another sense it has changed forever.  There is no time scale for how long you have to stay in the pool.  Each of us will experience the pool in our own unique way.  However, what is clear is that there is something which keeps people in the pool longer than others and it’s this - a belief that we can paddle our canoe back up the 30 foot waterfall and somehow make things return to how they were before we were propelled over the edge.  As long as we emotionally cannot accept the loss and believe that we can undo it, the energy used in paddling towards the bottom of the fall will keep us in the pool and away from the exit at the other edge.

Human beings can’t usually paddle a canoe up a vertical 30 foot fall of moving water.  That part of the river has gone forever.  Once we accept that, we are free to start to travel on the new part of the river.

Frank Wills

Routledge 2009

ISBN 978-0415439527 £9.99

This book sets out to provide a concise account of Beck’s work against a background of his personal and professional history. It is divided into two parts. There are 15 short chapters which examine Beck’s contribution to explaining psychopathology, and then 15 more looking at Beck’s suggestions for the best methods of treatment. Within each chapter the author also attempts to view each topic in the light of current research and of other relevant theoretical or pragmatic positions. He attempts a lot in a mere 166 pages.

I enjoyed this book. The author communicates well, and the combination of the lightness of his style, and the corset imposed by the series editor, mean that the chapters deliver substance without crushing with impenetrable weight. I found the first half of the book to be the most rewarding. Wills gives a clear account of Beck’s contribution to the evolution of CBT theory. Throughout this section there is a definite sense of an empirical pragmatist at work, slowly moving away from psychoanalysis, using patient statements to build hypotheses, then testing these hypotheses and refining theory, starting with depression and then moving into other areas of psychopathology. Amongst other things Wills explains the use of imagery, the development of the different levels and types of cognition, the role played by emotion (the ‘Royal Road to cognition’) and the interaction with behaviour.

The second part of the book outlines the classic CBT ‘treatments’ – case formulation, homework assignments, thought records, structured and goal-oriented activities to challenge and rebuild thinking and behaviour. The importance of the collaborative relationship is discussed at length. The strength of this section is that the author does provide snippets of recent research that either validate or question particular approaches, although the practical implementation of the strategies are barely touched on.

Another strength of the book is the sense that judgements are informed by the realism of a practising therapist. For example, in the chapter on formulation as a means of developing focus for therapeutic work, Wills spells out the need for great sensitivity to the client’s particular situation in order to avoid robotic implementation of theory (‘CBT by numbers’).

Although I enjoyed the book I have a few reservations about it. First, in some ways, I was surprised by the lack of the specifically distinctive material for Beck. If Aaron Beck is the gentle angel of cognitive therapy, Alert Ellis is the rough diamond. Of course, such descriptions are unhelpful caricatures, but as I read this book I found that, for me, Ellis was always lurking in the background, and I could hear attendees on training courses asking: “Apart from differences in personality, what are the theoretical and practical differences between Beck and Ellis?” We occasionally have a specific answer – in chapter 7, for example, where the differences between Beck’s ‘dysfunctional thinking’ and Ellis’s ‘irrational beliefs’ are discussed . We also learn the reasons why Beck was less profligate with time and depth than his erstwhile psychoanalytic colleagues. However, for a lot of the time Beck’s distinctiveness has to be implied. However ably Beck is described, the backcloth needs more substance for his distinctiveness (the title) to be more fully appreciated.

My second reservation concerns not the book’s execution, but its conception. I do hope I am wrong, but I found myself wondering if this was a book in search of a target audience. I could not quite work out who it was aimed at. The cover claims that it will appeal to both newcomers and experienced practitioners wanting a succinct guide. Readers generally interested in Beck will want far more on his life and background. Equally, hard core CBT therapists may be disappointed by its introductory nature. However, those undergoing initial training in CBT will need a much more developed and practical approach – the book Wills co-authored with Diana Sanders (Cognitive Therapy: Transforming the Image, Frank Wills & Diana Sanders, Sage 2004) would better suit their needs.

What the book does well is give a brief introduction to Beck’s development, his originality, his rigour, his pragmatism, and his relaxed attitude about the ownership of ‘his’ model. Therapists who have some experience of using CBT, and who wish to have their understanding of one of the founders of their espoused model strengthened, will probably find this an informative and enjoyable read. Equally therapists from other backgrounds who are not looking for a CBT manual, but who wish to be more informed about the work of one of the three most cited authors in the counselling and psychotherapy literature, will find this concise book very helpful.

_____________

This book review first appeared in The Independent Practitioner (AIP Journal) Summer, 2009, pp.15-16. The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) own the copyright and it is reprinted here with their permission.

Despite some £4m a year being spent on homeopathy, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said today that using public money on the highly diluted remedies could not be justified.  The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment works.

It seems reasonable that people should have the freedom to buy these remedies and pay for these alleged treatments if they wish to.  However, it also seems right that any government should examine the science behind any medical claims, direct limited funding towards remedies that have credible theory and demonstrated effectiveness, and that they should remove any government-backed badge of respectability from those that don’t.

On the World at One on Radio 4 today, Phil Willis MP (Chairman of the Commons Science and Technology Committee) and Dr Michael Dixon (a homeopathic practitioner) were debating the Committee’s findings, which can best be summed up in the words of Phil Willis:

“This was a challenging inquiry which provoked strong reactions. We were seeking to determine whether the Government’s policies on homeopathy are evidence based on current evidence. They are not.

“It sets an unfortunate precedent for the Department of Health to consider that the existence of a community which believes that homeopathy works is ‘evidence’ enough to continue spending public money on it. This also sends out a confused message, and has potentially harmful consequences. We await the Government’s response to our report with interest.”

I was interested in the two points that Dr Dixon made in response to the above devastating conclusions.

First, he tried to make out that the committee looked at the wrong evidence and suggested that evidence for the effectiveness for homeopathy was there if you could only see it. What he challenged was the committee’s requirement that evidence should be produced from randomized trials, the only sure way of measuring effectiveness.

Qualitative evidence may be useful in the human sciences where there often isn’t clear links in the physical causation chain, but in hard science (described by Dixon as ‘fundamentalist’) it is reasonable to expect credible theory and hard evidence, and the only source of hard evidence is randomized trials. Claims that people get better may be real for the people concerned, but in terms of the science, there is no credible theory why they may do so, and nothing to distinguish their improvement from chance or placebo effect. If homeopathy works, where are the randomized trials demonstrating that it does? Surely someone could have done some by now?

And doubtless, Dixon requires evidence from ‘fundamentalist’ science before trusting his life to an aeroplane. Why should anyone else be expected to accept a lower standard of ‘evidence’ as far as their own health is concerned?

Dixon’s second line of ‘argument’ was then to make a semi-emotional plea by describing the many patients who had come to his homeopathy clinic that morning, and asking Willis, “What should I tell them?” The implication was that it is somehow ok to tell people a lie if it makes them feel better.  Of course, many people will be hindered in seeking professional medical help by the false belief that they can be cured by homeopathy, but regardless of this, it seems immoral to con people.

Until presented with a credible theory and credible evidence to the contrary, the government should stop funding supposed health care solutions that lack efficacy and direct the money elsewhere.  If people want to buy their placebos, let them, but they shouldn’t expect the taxpayer to contribute to them, or use the government to bolster up a crumbling reputation.

And of course, similar arguments to the ones above could be used for the government ceasing to pay for hospital chaplains - but that’s another story …

On the face of it, it doesn’t seem too bad.  After all, custom is custom.  However, when you start to realize that the estimated cost of the visit runs into a number of millions - around 20, in fact - you do begin to wonder if that is the best use of community money, especially when the home for senior citizens near you was clearly having to make tough decisions about restricting care.

And then you start to think about it, and various problems start to emerge:

1. The dignitary lives in a community in his own country, but doesn’t pay much into the community fund. He claims that he is exempt from such things.  He is above them.  His business keeps most of the money that it earns, putting it at a considerable commercial advantage.  It is not really understood why this is so, but it is so. You realize that he wants to benefit from community funds, but doesn’t pay into any community funds of his own.
2. You realize that he is not short of a bob or two.  In fact, his business is one of the richest in the world.  If it followed its own principles and shed its wealth, it could make considerable inroads into alleviating third world debt.  He could well afford to meet his own travel, accommodation, and security costs, and make a considerable donation to you to cover the other expenses incurred by his trip.
3. You begin to question his actual importance to your community.  You realize that you have to look at what people actually do, rather than what they actually say when asked to fill in a form.  In the 2001 census of your community, something like eight per cent of your community claimed to follow him.  However, at Christmas in 2006, one of his biggest business gatherings of the year, only around one point five per cent of your community (861,000)  actually turned out to support his cause. Around 20 million seems an awful lot to pay for one point five percent.
4. You start to realize that this guest has a reputation for being a bit rude.  He likes to enjoy the hospitality of his hosts, but then feel he has the right to criticize the way things are run in the community he visits.  He makes representations, but certainly doesn’t have the burden of taxation.
5. You discover to your horror that in the name of morality, his organization is responsible for some extremely questionable actions.  He condemns sexual health policies in a way that encourages disease, death, and poverty throughout the world.  And his organization’s track record on basic human rights is appalling.  His organization has repeatedly failed to protect vulnerable children from unspeakable violation, condemns people with a different sexuality to his own, and continues to fail to acknowledge the equal employment rights of women.
6. You remember that he promotes extremely strange views that have no empirical justification, and have held back the intellectual progress of large parts of the world for years - that he can turn wine into blood, that his organization’s leaders can secure respite from hell, that his own views are infallible, for example.

When you realize all this you start to wonder if you are being had.  In fact, part of you really knows that his lack of reciprocity, generosity,  importance, tolerance, morality, lack of respect for all human rights, and lack of intellectual integrity all add up to the conclusion that you really are being had.

For information on the cost of Papal Visits see  Concordat Watch.

Sign the Petition.

It is interesting to contemplate why religion hasn’t disappeared.  Why, in roughly 10,000 years of history, have humans created roughly 10,000 different religions and 1000 gods?  It is well known that religion leads people to fly planes into sky scrapers, to shoot staff at abortion clinics, to fracture governments in Northern Ireland, and that it has caused endless wars. Religious societies have higher crime rates than secular ones and pay a huge economic price for their faith.  And religion in its fundamentalist form has held back cognitive evolution for thousands of year - we can only guess how much further science and technology would have advanced worldwide today without it.  (We can only dread what will happen if the current attempts to prevent the teaching of evolution in various parts of the world are successful.  See here, for example.) Why do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system that is so evidently false and self-contradictory?

I want to sketch out some possible answers below.  However, let me declare that they are not my own.  They are drawn from a book of essays (50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, eds. Russell Blackford & Udo Schuklenk) supplied by an international cast of contributors, including public intellectuals, novelists, philosophers, psychotherapists, and scientists.  The result is a stimulating mixture of rigorous, informed argument, and highly personal, even whimsical, accounts of how each of these notable thinkers have come to reject religion in their lives.

Although each essay is unique, several common themes emerged, and what I have written below is an attempt to pull together material on this topic from this wide range of views.

THREE POSSIBLE REASONS WHY RELIGION PERSISTS IN AN INCREASINGLY SECULAR WORLD

Evolution

There are at least two possible evolutionary explanations for the adoption and maintenance of religion in humanity. First, as humans, we often have a low tolerance for uncertainty.  We become cognitively dissonant with probabilistic world models.  As Michael Shermer points out (p.69), this low tolerance for uncertainty probably originated in the Paleolithic environment in which it was almost always better to assume that everything has agency and intention.

There would have been a selective advantage to adopt the default position that other people, animals, and even inanimate objects in the physical environment possess agency (capable of acting) and intention (acting in a manner that could affect you). False positives (assuming something is real when it isn’t) will not take you out of the gene pool because they only make you more cautious, but false negatives (assuming something is not real when it is) can result in you being a high risk-taker and therefore a meal for any animal that really does have agency and intention.

Second, we have evolved an emotional system that is capable of over-riding logic and reality and also capable of convincing us of the ‘truth’ of many strange things, often making even the most rational among us vulnerable and rendered practically helpless.  We have evolved this way for good reasons.  Gene proliferation depends on it (falling in love and bonding), as does maternal-infant attachment and numerous other phenomena integral to human experience.  As Kelly O’Connor argues (p.220): “It is an unfortunate by-product of this propensity for emotion to override reason that perpetuates belief in the supernatural …. Enter emotions like fear, depression, curiosity, uncertainty, and a desire to confirm the utility of seemingly meaningless despair, and the amygdala can convince the neocortex of just about anything.”

Birth, Culture

We tend to adopt the values and beliefs of the culture we were born into.  Passionate Mormons in Utah, or bible-belt Baptists never seem to understand that they would almost certainly have a different faith if they had been born in India, or even if they had been born on the same land mass thousands of years earlier.  If an accident of birth determines the particular faith we are likely to hold, it is our family that helps maintain that belief.  As Dale McGowan notes (p.196) we continue to skate on the thin ice of a evidently false system ” … by believing what we hear from those that we love, from those who wish nothing but the best: that religious faith is inherently good, and that all good people are people of faith.”  These beliefs, often gained in childhood, often persist, because as Laura Purdy (p. 211) reminds us, children are not generally taught to demand good evidence for claims, and indeed are often discouraged from making those demands.

Once religion has taken hold in a culture there are usually many pressures to maintain it in the interest of the alleged common good.  That community pressure can be strong.  In the UK at the moment the reaction to calls to remove bishops from the House of Lords, and prayers from the beginning of Parliament or from local council meetings meet with passionate resistance that feels disproportionate to the issue.  In Italy recently a judge was sacked for wanting to remove a crucifix from his courtroom.  And of course, in other parts of the world apostasy, and even mere criticism of a faith, are met with death threats and murder.  As Adele Mercier (p.43) observes:  ”Call any 50-year-old Canaanite with sexual designs of a 9-year-old a lecherous pedophile, and from those who disagree with your assessment you’ll get a disagreement; say the same about Mohammed and you’ll get a death warrant.”

Needs

It is easy to see how religion can meet various human needs, and successful religions grow, not so much by convincing new adherents of doctrinal truth, but by meeting social and psychological needs.  Religious observance provides opportunity for regular gatherings and community and the chapel, synagogue, or mosque can be a focal point in small or larger communities.  As I have argued, people who are inherently troubled by uncertainty can find a plethora of ‘certainties’ to choose from - though they are most likely to pick the ‘certainty’ from their own community.  Religion can help people create an existential meaning and purpose (as well as convincing them that religion is the only source of meaning and purpose).  As Julian Savulescu remarks (p.170): “It is difficult to confront ambiguity, uncertainty, and the unavoidable losses of human life and choice, without clutching at false truths.”  It takes a brave person to peer into the deep well of mortality and not to embrace superstition and irrationality in the face of fear.

However, psychotherapist Tamas Pataki (pp. 206-08) notes, religion can also satisfy and pacify other enduring human desires and dispositions.  Religion meets the needs of people with hysterical dispositions - the need to separate the lower (sexual, profane) from the higher (moral, spiritual) aspects of personality.  This is accommodated in the architecture of most religions.  It also meets the needs of people with obsessional dispositions - those with the need to attempt to control sexual and aggressive influences.  These can be satisfied with the ‘magical’ gestures of daily religious ritual and practice.  Religion also meets the needs of those with narcissistic dispositions - the need to feel special.  These needs are met by being made to feel special, one of the Chosen, of the Elect, or by having a conviction that one has an intimate relationship with an omnipotent being.

If there is any truth in the above analysis, religion is here to stay because many people will not want to risk removing themselves from their comfort zone by critically examining the basis for their faith.

Why do you think religion persists?

The first quarter of the programme started to fulfil the expectations of the title - some attempt at giving information on the history of the bible.  In this programme the subject was the creation account.  Various archaeologists and biblical scholars were wheeled out to explain the similarities between the biblical story and the Babylonian creation myths.  They then present the reasoning behind the hypothesis that the creation account was almost certainly not dictated to Moses by god, but was written by Jews in Babylon in an attempt to come to terms with their disastrous defeat and exile 500 years after the death of Moses. But at this point the discussion of history ended and the presenter, Howard Jacobson, spent the next three quarters of an hour showing his dislike of people of conviction and his desire for an almost fantasy world where things could be both true and untrue, where you could reject the creation story and believe it at the same time.

Howard Jacobson wheeled out more experts (a Cambridge Professor of Physics who was also an Anglican Priest) who said that theology and myth was not meant to be science, and that people who accepted the biblical account literally or who rejected the biblical account with certainty were both wrong.

In my view the second part of the programme had several flaws in it.

First, Jacobson accuses atheists of not realizing that the creation account is literature rather than science, and for attacking something unjustly.  This simply isn’t true.  Most atheists would recognise that the creation accounts are myth and not science.  If atheists do ridicule the creation account, it is not because they fail to recognise its mythical quality, but precisely because millions of religious believers fail to do so and take it to be literally true. For me two of the most chilling parts of the programme were when two Mancunean rabbis were asked if they believed the account to be literally true and said they did because that is what had been taught for thousands of years, and when a London clergyman, Greg Haslam, also said he believed it to be literally true and then went on to confidently proclaim that the science was on his side.

Jacobson criticizes Dara O’Brian for making jokes about the creation story implying that this is nasty and unjustified. But isn’t Jacobson guilty of the same crime that he unjustly accuses atheists of - miscategorizing something. Dara O’Brian is telling a joke for comic effect, not making a scientific or logical argument in a treatise.

Secondly, Jacobson again attacks atheists for setting up simplistic straw men to attack, but again goes and does precisely the same thing in his argument about Richard Dawkins.  He implies that atheists are harsh, and that they only go for the easy targets - the religious fundamentalists.  This may be true of a minority, but my reading and viewing of Richard Dawkins is that this is far from the truth.  Both Dawkins and Sam Harris do point out the weaknesses of the fundamentalist case, but also go on to point out the  difficulties of any religion, and despite claims that Christianity and Islam are religions of peace, point out the warlike claims and acts advocated in their sacred texts.  One other major point that both of the above author’s make is that they are living in a rational world, and if they are certain about their claims about religion, they are only as certain as the evidence.  They repeatedly invite religious people to produce counter evidence, or evidence to support their claims - and of course, this never happens.  Dawkins is far from arrogant, despite his protractors portraying him as such.  He repeatedly says that he will change his mind if given good reasons for doing so - something the believers patently will not do.

The third weakness of the programme for me was the implicit notion that certainty is wrong.  Jacobson is someone who was happy to rely on the ‘certainty’ of the laws of science to fly aeroplanes to different places to make his programme, but seems uncomfortable with atheistic certainty in rejecting the creation account.  Clearly some things are just blatantly true and others blatantly false.  What is alarming is the fact that millions of people (Christians in America, Muslims in Turkey and in the Middle East) believe the creation accounts to be literally true and are resisting science education because of this.  Such attitudes clog up cognitive evolution and hold societies back (see Opening Up).  It doesn’t seem wrong to say that things are false if the evidence about their falsehood is compelling.  If the evidence changes then the judgement can change.

Jacobson clearly doesn’t believe in a literal creation, but wants to believe something and freely admits that in the programme.  There is nothing wrong with myths as interesting cultural ideas (or even with wanting to believe something).  However, to want myths to be true so much that you try to claim that they might have the some external validity (as science and historical fact does) seems to be a leap of faith too far - especially when you are meant to be presenting a programme about history rather than about whim or fancy.

Video Without The ‘S’

I foolishly thought that in order to be able to record video footage I would have to upgrade to the 3GS which would have been expensive.  However an assistant in my mobile shop told me about iVideoCamera (costing a mere 59 pence via iTunes).  This will shoot video in high or standard quality and will save the clip, or post it to a variety of locations (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more).  Admittedly the video quality is higher with the 3GS.  However, for a phone that isn’t meant to have video (yes, only heaven knows what Apple were thinking about at that particular meeting), this gives me more than I want.

Professional Voice

Whereas the iVideoCamera is only adequate on quality, the HT Recorder is excellent.  It is a professional voice recorder that is extremely flexible.  The sound quality is impressive.  It has a range of settings so that you can select the microphone/recording options according to your environment (personal recording, meeting, conference).  I have actually used it on a table top to record a meeting between six of us, and used the conference settings to record a speaker in a large auditorium.  It has the facility to skip forward and backwards to markers in the recording.  What some business users will find useful is the ability to publish the recording on the web so that a wider (and possibly restricted) audience can hear it.  It can be posted to a temporary URL via WiFi, or to a more permanent site via FTP.

British Qualities

There are several news sources available for the iPhone, but I particularly like the Independent, the Telegraph, and the Guardian.  The Independent has great material, though it is a bit sluggish to load (however, it does come with a very large print option); the Telegraph allows you to see the occasional video clip as well as read; the Guardian lacks video, but has a particularly rich picture section, as well as containing podcasts to listen to, and allows you to arrange and search news material by broad category and topics, as well as by individual columnists.  If I had a long spell on a desert island, I suspect the Guardian would entertain me the longest.

Transcribed Voicemail

I understand people who say, “Because I can!” when asked, “Why?”  Ok, I can’t really justify the next one, but it does give me a great deal of unexplained satisfaction.  I went along to Ribbit and became a beta user.  I then downloaded the free Ribbit app, and now have business quality transcribed voicemail.  When someone rings and leaves a message, that message is typed into a text and sent to me straight away, and the transcription is also posted to my email.  If I want to hear the original voice message I can listen to it on my Ribbit app (as well as see the transcription) or have the file delivered to my email.  And of course, the options for sending back emails, texts, voice messages, phone calls from within the Ribbit app or from the Ribbit site are seemingly endless.  As someone who gets a lot of voice messages with important numbers and other information in them (and who occasionally needs ‘proof’ of last minute cancelled appointments for billing purposes), having a written record easily to hand is proving useful.

What got me thinking was a wonderful essay (A Deal-Breaker by Ophelia Benson in 50 Voices of Disbelief) in which the author points out that some of the supposed characteristics of god seem very strange if we applied them to normal relationships. For example, it would seem strange to talk about having a meaningful, loving relationship with a person who is continually hiding:

What business would God have hiding? What’s that about? What kind of silly game is that? God is all-powerful and benevolent but at the same time it’s hiding? Please.  We wouldn’t give that the time of day in any other context. Nobody would buy the idea of ideal, loving, concerned parents who permanently hide from their children, so why buy it of a loving God?

When you apply that kind of reasoning, several things about religious belief and practice start to appear slightly odd.

Take worship, for example.  Wouldn’t it be strange to be in a relationship with anyone else where you were commanded to tell them how great she or he was, preferably on a daily basis, and certainly at least once a week? If you managed to stick out the relationship, or had to - an inadequate, domineering employer who commanded your regular sycophancy, for example - you might suspect a narcissistic personality disorder, or a slight character defect at least.

Imagine the kind of character that expects that.  Why does god need to be told she or he is great?  Would it ever get boring?  If he is to be believed (and he probably isn’t) according to almightygod on Twitter, god actually enjoys the stuff:

It’s been fun hearing the praise music from Earth. On the agenda tonight here in Heaven: more praise music. I never get tired of the stuff.

It’s Sunday, my favorite day. I get to listen to church music all day. It’s all about me, me, me!

I suppose there could be a few arguments in favour of worship:

• Human beings can enjoy the experience.
  • When I was a believer I certainly enjoyed the singing sometimes, and on several occasions enjoyed being part of a larger group (the football crowd / pop concert atmosphere experience).  But that is a side benefit and not why believers are commanded to do it.
• It affirms faith.
  • That may be true, but that is another side benefit and not the primary purpose.
• It keeps you humble.
  • If god existed reminding yourself of your subordinate position may be arguably helpful.  However, even if god does exist, and even if humility is a worthy thing, the primary purpose of worship is not about you and your benefits, but about god.
• God is worthy of praise.
  • Of course, there are many many arguments against that, even if you allow the assumption for argument’s sake (and a big assumption) that god exists, he does cause most of the deaths in the bible, and in the last 700 years alone, there have been over 13 natural disasters (acts of god) that have killed over 1 million people on each occasion (see here).  For such a person to command praise is strange.  And even if he or she existed, and even if she or he were fully worthy of praise, it still shouldn’t be commanded of me, surely.  If your partner has to demand that you tell him or her how wonderful he or she is, isn’t there something wrong somewhere?

I’m a softee really.  When people do acts of kindness for me, I really appreciate it.  I was very tired and busy the other evening and my wife did the washing up when it was my turn.  I told her how much I appreciated her goodness.  And when people create things that impress me (art, photography, books, music), I go “Wow”, and tell them how much I admire what they have done, if possible. These expressions of appreciation are real in response to real things.  I think it is important to give praise.  And standing back from worship, it doesn’t seem odd that people should get together to affirm what they believe in song, and it doesn’t seem odd that people in a relationship should express their feelings and admiration for one another, but it does seem odd that any hidden being should command praise.  That really does seem strange, to me, at least.

What do you think?

Hey, I really, really don’t want to jump on the bandwagon and pour self-righteous scorn onto Iris Robinson.  The woman has confessed to a recent affair within a 40 year marriage.  Many commentators have been exercised by the apparent hypocrisy of the situation.  She is a Protestant Christian who has been quite outspoken on the alleged sexual immorality of others - in particular of the gay community, calling homosexuality ‘vile’.  It is not my place to judge - I, like her, am a fallible human being, capable of making big mistakes, and capable of not living up to my own standards at times.  I can empathise with the shock, anger, and pain that her family, her friends, and she are going through at the moment.  I have seen it enough in my life experience, and see it almost weekly in my work.

No, it is not the affair as such, or the apparent hypocrisy that has prompted me to write.

What has interested me is the religious and psychological overtones of the whole situation.  Again, I need another careful caveat before coming to the point.  Iris Robinson has talked about her mental illness and attempted suicide. A big part of me wants to applaud such honesty as both subjects would be considered embarrassingly taboo by many. And I am the last person to want to judge how true those claims about mental illness may or may not be.  But regardless of Iris Robinson’s particular mental state, what does concern me is the apparent link between religion, sexual non-conformity, and mental illness that is emerging.

Like many Christians, Iris has been taking a very strong line on ’sexual immorality’ as she would call it, as defined by the bible.  Part of the strength of that line may be from a genuine (if misguided or at least questionable) belief that she was speaking in the best interests of others.  However, I suspect that a major strength of the line taken would be that because her god had allegedly said it in the ‘good’ book, that was sufficient authority to state a very clear barrier that should not be crossed.

There isn’t space here to go into the problems with the authenticity and the authority of the bible, but even leaving that material aside, there are two huge fundamental problems with her attempt to draw a firm line.  The first is that it presumes that sexuality is straightforward whereas in fact it that it is much more complex than that for a number of people.  People are born gay in the same way that people are born heterosexual.  It isn’t an issue or morality but rather one of identity.  There is an argument for saying that gay people should applauded for their courage to affirm their identity in a difficult environment rather than be vilified as evil.  The second problem is that sexual attraction is an extremely powerful force and that even the ‘best’ of people fail to sometimes live up to their intentions.  To be so dogmatic in condemning a large proportion of the human race seems inherently removed from reality, lacking in compassion for the human condition, and just wrong.

Hence the need to invoke the people in white coats (interesting how even Christians can invoke science and social science when it appears to support their case).  It seemed from the reports, and from Iris Robinson’s own statement that her particular Christian background could only cope with the discrepancy between her outward position and her inner reality and subsequent actions by saying that there must have been mental illness involved.  It seemed difficult for someone from her background to accept that any person who was mentally healthy would engage in sexually non-conformist behaviour.  Again I state that I am in no position to know anything about Iris Robinson’s mental state, but I felt the need to protest against the implication that sexual non-conformity can only be accounted for by mental illness.  Gay people do not need psychologists (as stated by Iris Robinson) and neither are the majority of people (even fervent Christian believers) who engage in non-conformist sexual activity mentally ill.

I wish the Robinson’s well and hope that they are allowed some time to lick their wounds in private and to rebuild their relationship.  However, I also hope that this particular incident will cause her to reflect with more understanding and compassion on the human condition, and may help her realise that straightjacketed sexuality doesn’t work all the time for all people.