Tag Archives: religion

Believing something is right because we’ve always believed it

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Some parts of daily life seem so natural, benign, and commonplace that we don’t consider them to be as awful as they really are. Perhaps we so easily believe something is right, just because it has always been so. Take for example, circumcision.

Circumcision as genital mutilation

To be clear, I’m referring to male circumcision here, and circumcision performed outside of a medical necessity.

For many years, I considered being circumcised, and the act of circumcision, to be relatively benign. It’s ubiquitous, it’s commonplace. I’ve not heard a man complain, nor sue his parents, because of it.

Really though, circumcision is a form of genital mutilation forced upon children.

I read words to that effect a few years ago, and it made me stop in my tracks. Oh. I’d never thought of it like that.

It’s generally children that are circumcised, babies even. It’s forced – probably by a parent or church, carried out by the scalpel of a surgeon if you’re lucky. It’s forced in the sense that the child doesn’t have a say, is not informed or asked for consent. It’s a genital mutilation – an act that removes flesh from the body – yet one that doesn’t appear to be a mutilation because it’s so commonplace.

Years ago one of my friends expressed revulsion at an interesting fellow with a nose ring. I clearly remember thinking that my friend was a little confused – could he not see all the women around him that had earrings? Somehow the one piercing of flesh had become some commonplace that he no longer saw it for what it was.

Why

Why are parents so happy to have their children circumcised? There’s no malice. Rather, it’s probably because of what everyone else was doing, it’s what because of what their culture has led them to believe was the appropriate thing; recently perhaps because they thought there was a health benefit – though even that is in serious doubt.

Primarily though, it’s probably because of what a religion has ordained, for example the Jewish brit milah or the Muslim Khitan.

The Germans

A German court has recently ruled that circumcision is grievous bodily harm. According to the ruling:

the fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighs the fundamental rights of the parents

It’s unfortunately not yet law, but it makes a lot of sense. It feels very much like the correct and moral stance to take. And it’s progressive – few countries, if any, ban circumcision because of the power of religious bodies.

Unsurprisingly, there are many religious parties that object, calling it an intrusion on religious freedom. What awful and barbaric rhetoric comes from these religious folk – believing that their culture, their beliefs, trump the bodily integrity of children.

Changing

That is malice coming from the religious groups – and you have to wonder what its source is. A vested interest in protecting their religion perhaps?

But I wonder whether the average man on the street being exposed to thinking about circumcision as bodily harm would agree, would continue to condone it? Or would they be swayed by the rhetoric of their religion – unthinkingly. Would they consider the truth, or would they simply take it as an affront on their identity, their tribe, their religion? That would be a blind belief in authority.

I wish there were epidemiological studies of the spread of ideas like this – ideas that touch on something so fundamental (body integrity and religion).

I also wonder whether it really does take the actions that are happening in Germany – the slow painful process of someone being sued, higher courts getting involved, someone thinking and lobbying, inter-lobby fighting and political gain, ruling, fighting and subsidence, wash, repeat – until there is consensus, and a wide enough spread of awareness to make the change stick. History is filled with this change – big instances being the racial and gay movements.

It’s so slow, so painful, so inter-generational.

How do you change folk from believing something is right because they always have believed it, and rather have them think about the act, and take a stance on what is right, not just what is common. How can society change more quickly, or is that an impossible pipe dream?

Confirmation Bias and Free Will

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I’ve been thinking about free will, which has in turn got me thinking about all the flaws we all have in our abilities to reason.  We all have them to a lesser or greater extent – and they’re often surprisingly subtle.  The subtly disturbs me – it leaves the door wide open for bad reasoning, and smashes at the notion of free will.

An Example: Confirmation Bias
The errors in our reasoning that I’m talking about here are not mistakes we make while doing math in our head, but rather errors we make when supposedly reasoning towards a truth.

These errors in our reasoning abilities are often called human biases. A favourite of mine is the (motivated) confirmation bias – it’s ubiquitous, subtle, and scares the living hell out of me as a result. Here’s a nice definition from Wikipedia:

Confirmation bias is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.  People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

This is unconscious, which makes it all the more pernicious. It’s “motivated” as people are motivated to defend a belief or hypothesis that they already hold, unwittingly selecting information to support it.

For example, if you believed in “alternative medicine” – your belief may be unconsciously bolstered whenever you read about the case of some poor child recovering from a dreadful disease after being dosed with a sugary homeopathic remedy.

Hypothesis-Determined Information Seeking and Interpretation

But what about the other facts: the number of people who died from the disease, the number of people who recovered without any medication whatsoever, and so on.

These hint at some of the theories scientists (see below for reference) are developing as to why we have a confirmation bias.

For example:

  • “Restriction of attention to a favoured hypothesis” (it wasn’t chance, or a different medicine that saved them – its as the homeopathic medicine)
  • “Preferential treatment of evidence supporting existing beliefs” (the people who recovered without the homeopathic medicine probably had some homeopathic trace elements in their food – and look, the ones that took it recovered.  Amazing.)
  • “Overweighting positive confirmatory instances” (ZOMG look, 50 cases of recovery!  It must be true. (Ignoring the 1000 cases that didn’t, not even seeking them out.))

See the reference below for the science behind these, and experiments which appear to indicate that these are mechanisms behind confirmation bias.

Thoughts: Consistency and Religion and Free Will

  • What scares me about the confirmation bias is that we’re all susceptible, it’s unconscious, and it leads to us draw false conclusions (such as earnestly believing in something that’s demonstrably false, such as homeopathy).  I wonder to what extent I am biased in this way.
  • The scientific method is one way in which we try and ascertain truths without bias.  That doesn’t mean scientists are not without confirmation bias. But at least science has mechanisms to avoid them.
  • This is very much related to consistency as well – as I wrote in Being Aware of Rationalising. I wonder if we have particular confirmation biases to maintain a consistent experience.
  • I wonder to what extent the confirmation bias leads to someone continuing to believe in a religion.  Restriction of attention is evident in many believers, blithely turning an eye to contradictions (or other religions), as are preferential treatment of evidence and so on.  I guess we can be lenient here on what counts as evidence.

Finally, having a bias such as a confirmation bias severely undermines our notion of free will.  I’m not the conscious author of an opinion or reason here – it’s even more of an illusion if my own brain is filtering information behind my back, so to speak.  Where’s the free will in that?

References

This paper is awesome, and the source for my second section title: Confirmation Bias; A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises”, Review of General Psychology (Educational Publishing Foundation) 2 (2): 175–220 (PDF)