I am sitting in Caffè Nero trying to test out a new iPhone app - SpellChecker.

It has its own dictionary that it refers to as you type. However, it can also access a range of other iPhone dictionaries. I have mine linked to the very impressive (but expensive) Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Once you have finished typing in SpellChecker you simply press an icon and the program produces a list of possible words to replace the alternatives that it has previously identified. And, of course, you can tell the program to Skip or Learn your unique spelling or Undo any replacement.

Once you are happy with your text it can be directly exported to your Mail or Messaging or Twitter program, or to Facebook, or to the clipboard for use in any text application.

In one sense it may appear to be just another unremarkable text editing program. After all, the iPhone is quite capable of offering you possible words as you type. However, I find myself using this app more and more for three reasons.

First, it holds what you type in its memory. If you accidentally close the program to move to another app (reading an incoming text message in the middle of writing a blog, for example) nothing is lost. It always holds your typing on the input screen until you decide to delete it. It is reliably reassuring and reassuringly reliable.

Secondly, unlike many English language apps, it does distinguish between UK, US, and Canadian English, as well as supporting French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch.

Thirdly, the real power of the program lies in its ability to link to a range of selected iPhone dictionaries. If accurate written text is important to you, this app, linked to a good dictionary, will ease most potential difficulties.

Follow Up Then

FollowUpThen is a very flexible free service that enables you to receive a reminder that you may need to follow up a particular message that you have sent.  You simply add a time reference and @followupthen in the address of the email you wish to be reminded about, and you will then receive a reminder at the time you wish.

It is flexible in two ways.  First, it is flexible about the time and/or date information.  All of the following are acceptable:

1minute@followupthen.com, 3hours@followupthen.com, 2days@followupthen.com, 6weeks@followupthen.com, 5months@followupthen.com, 3years@followupthen.com, wednesday@followupthen.com, wed@followupthen.com, mar30@followupthen.com, 2010-03-30@followupthen.com

Secondly, it is flexible about who receives the reminder.  If you want the recipient to receive a reminder about the email as well as you, put the followupthen address in the CC address line of the original email.  Then, at the designated time, if the email hasn’t been responded to, both of you will receive a copy of the original email with a reminder.  If you only wish to receive a reminder yourself without the original recipient knowing, just put the followupthen address in the BCC address line of the original email.  If you wish to, you can also send yourself reminders about anything by putting the followupthen address in the TO address line of an email.

FollowUpThen state that they don’t share your information with 3rd parties and automatically delete your email contents once the followup has been sent, as well as your recipient’s email address.

I often receive enquiries from potential clients filling in an online form asking for a booking.  My experience is that clients who fill forms in rather than phone are less likely to actually turn up to the appointment.  For this reason I now always ask clients to confirm the booking that I offer them within a particular time period (typically 3 days).  Using FollowUpThen I can now easily remind myself if a client has failed to confirm, and free that appointment slot in the diary for others to take up.

Away Find

AwayFind is a great service that deserves serious consideration.  When I first looked at it I was tempted to dismiss it as just an email filtering service.  However, I’m glad that I took time to explore its potential and understand it, and now have it set up to help me improve my interaction with different types of email senders.  Currently the service is free.  There are plans to introduce a small (price of a bottle of beer) monthly charge at some stage when it moves out of beta - and I for one, will certainly be prepared to pay.

In essence AwayFind does three things:

• It allows you to set up filters (as many as you want) based on email addresses or key words or both so that you can send pre-configured different responses to different groups of people.  Ok most email programs would allow you to do that, but …
• It then contacts you immediately one of the filtered emails reaches your inbox using phone call, SMS, or TwitterDM, and each filter can have a unique method of contact.  You can be away from email, while at the same time be assured that you will hear about anything you don’t want to miss.
• It gives you your own web contact page (mine is HERE) where people can leave urgent messages for you.  These messages are the sent to you using phone call, SMS, or TwitterDM.

There are plenty of examples of professionals using AwayFind to meet their particular needs, and to date, I am using it in three ways.  As a small business owner I am not always in my office, and spend a lot of the day in meetings with clients.  When with clients I have my phone on silent.

• I have set up a filter to respond immediately to potential new clients who fill an online form in, assuring them that I have received their mail and will reply to them as soon as I can.
• I have set up a filter to respond to agencies offering me work, explaining I have received their request and will get back to them at the earliest opportunity.  I immediately receive a text message alerting me to the possibility of new contracts.
• I have a group of colleagues that I offer professional clinical supervision to.  I have set up a filter just for them. If they email me they receive a message explaining I have received their request and will get back to them at the earliest opportunity.  However, I also give them details of my AwayFind urgent message page should then need to contact me in an emergency.  I immediately receive text messages  alerting me to their original email and any other subsequent urgent messages.

It works for me.

Read Notify

There are occasions when it is important for me to know whether something has been received and read - reports and invoices, for example.  ReadNotify is a service that enables you to receive a PGP signed notification of the precise time and date that a particular email is opened.

I recently received an email from an agency asking again for a report on some work that I had done.  Because of ReadNotify I was able to supply them with dates and times of when the email containing the report that I had already submitted had been read.  Another customer failed to pay me arguing that I had never submitted an invoice.  Again using ReadNotify I was able to detail the date the email containing the invoice had been read, and because of this, was able to get my money more quickly.

ReadNotify is so simple to use.  Once you have set up your account, you simply add readnotify.com to the end the address you are sending the targeted email to.  So, if I want to monitor an email sent to accounts@company.com, I simply address the email to accounts@company.com.readnotify.com and press send.  It’s as simple as that. ReadNotify notifies me each time the email is opened.

ReadNotify is a free service, but if you want to use it to monitor lots of emails, there is a subscription of around $24 a year.

I liked this book a lot, partly because it is straightforward and ‘does what is says on the tin’. As you would expect from arguably the UK’s most authoritative REBT practitioner and teacher, the book, like an ideal REBT session, is structured, rational, and tries to engage the reader in a persuasive way.

Although the author is Professor of Psychotherapeutic Studies at Goldsmiths College in London, the book was conceived in the Albert Ellis Institute in New York where Dryden was supervising trainee REBT practitioners. As part of the discussions, students were encouraged to think and intervene like REBT therapists (as opposed to thinking like other general therapists, or even other cognitive therapists), and the question inevitably arose: What does it mean to think and intervene like an REBT therapist? This book provides a full and authoritative answer to that question.

Each chapter is broadly structured into four sections. At the beginning of the chapter there is a brief discussion of some aspect of REBT theory. This is then followed by at least two illustrations where the interventions of an experienced REBT practitioner, and a trainee working with the same clinical vignette, are given. Their respective interventions are then analysed to illustrate how to think and intervene like an REBT therapist. Finally the differences between the trainee and the experienced practitioner are synthesised.

The core of the book is built around the traditional REBT ABC model – the activating event, beliefs about what has happened, and the emotional consequences – and methods of disputing irrational beliefs. However, there is much more besides with chapters dealing with engaging the clients, with obstacles to change, with helping clients understand the change process, as well as those covering setting homework in an REBT way, and maintaining change.

This book is primarily aimed at those training to be REBT therapists. It is likely to be of most benefit to those who have completed initial REBT theoretical training and are in the early months/years of practice. It will provide invaluable revision of REBT theory and demonstrate how to put that theory in practice in a flexible way, most likely to help the client. Other beginner REBT manuals often explain how to do it, but this book adds another layer. By showing how not to do it, the reader better understands how to practise.

The major strength of the book is the way the differences between the trainee and the experienced practitioner are illustrated and analysed. The trainee is often focused on applying a model to a situation. This book will help the trainee see the need to have a more subtle understanding of the nuances of the model, to be more concerned about building and maintaining a relationship, to be more probing in understanding what the client means rather than just hearing what she/he is saying, and to give the client time to digest the process of change. The picture of the experienced REBT practitioner that the book provides also means that even experienced REBT therapists (indeed, therapists from any tradition) would benefit from reading it and viewing themselves against this mirror. They may be encouraged, and in all probability, may be challenged as well.

Although the book does provide a description of REBT theory, it only does so briefly as a stepping stone to practice. The general reader would learn about REBT, but Albert Ellis’s beautifully crafted Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy would give a much more developed and entertaining journey into the often misunderstood world of REBT theory and practice.

Despite its focus on REBT, there is material that therapists from other traditions may find illuminating. One of the themes running throughout the chapters is the difference between what a client says, and what a client may mean. Again and again Dryden shows how the experienced therapist doesn’t take a client’s words as being necessary indicators of particular meaning, but spends time to explore and digest meaning more precisely in order to work more effectively with the client. There are also informative sections on emotion, and on reasons for resistance to effective therapy, which many non-REBT practitioners may find helpful.

A strength of this book is its rigor, but if you read too much at once, the loosely repeated structure of each chapter can make it feel a bit relentless at times. However, perhaps the readers should view it more as a textbook and take a break between chapters. Only a fool would contemplate 12 consecutive REBT sessions during a single day. And each one of these chapters does merit reflection.

_______________

This book review first appeared in The Independent Practitioner (AIP Journal) Spring, 2010, pp.12-13. The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) own the copyright and it is reprinted here with their permission.

Better Gmail

Better Gmail is a handy Google Chrome Extension that, once installed, enables the user to perform a variety of tweeks.  You install it by:

• Opening Google Chrome
• Click on the Spanner Icon (top right corner)
• Select Extensions
• Click Get More Extensions
• Search for Better Gmail and click to install it.
• Once installed
  • Click on the Spanner Icon (top right corner)
  • Select Extensions
  • Click on Better Gmail Options and select your options

For example, you can remove adds, fix page width, move print button, hide chat, hide footer, and handle mailto links with Gmail, as well as select a range of other options.  Two that I like the most are the ability to switch on a Mouse Over facility that highlights the email selected, and the ability to show attachment type icons.

Why not give it a try.  If you don’t like it you can easily switch the extension off, or uninstall it.

Etacts

Etacts promises a much more significant change in the way you use Gmail.  It transforms your Gmail account into a contact management hub.

You sign up for Etacts with your Gmail account and authorize Etacts to interact with your Gmail.  Once that is done it imports your Gmail Contacts and Email information (headers not content) into its database and then allows you performs some useful tasks and mine information in various ways.  I’m still learning to exploit its potential, but here are just some of the things that I can now do:

• When I compose a new email, I can set a reminder telling me to act if I haven’t have a reply to the email within a time frame that I set.  It helps me see who hasn’t responded to my emails and helps me find messages from important contacts that I haven’t responded to.
• When reading an email I can now easily, from within Gmail, look up the sender’s page on Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, as well as reading any recent Tweets by them from Twitter.  I can also make private notes next to the email.
• I can easily set a reminder to contact someone at a frequency determined by me.
• I can easily see data on the number of emails sent from a particular person and when the last contact was.  It helps me automatically discover who I haven’t talked to in a while, and keep track of clients, coworkers, family, and friends.
• If I have an AT&T account, Etacts also allows me to track phone conversations.
• I can also send individualized messages to multiple contacts.

Having said what Etacts can do, I need to point out that, at the time of writing, it isn’t without problems.  Many of the above things can easily be done from within the Gmail program once you have downloaded and installed the browser plugin from Etacts.  However some features can only be used by logging in to the Etacts’ site.  Since Etacts was given a major publicity boost by being featured on Mashable, the number of subscribers using the free service has soared, and the site is suffering from capacity issues, meaning that it can be slow at times.  It can take some time to initially import all your contact and email information.  However, the browser plugin features do not appear to have been adversely affected.  The company are working to overcome these initial capacity teething problems.

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!”
• Guilt: “It’s my fault this 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?