News from the world about the religions

Greece: Unprecedented prison term for conscientious objector

A Greek conscientious objector sentenced to an unprecedented prison term is a prisoner of conscience and should be immediately released, Amnesty International said.

The organization has written to the Greek authorities stating that the right to conscientious objection is a legitimate exercise of the fundamental rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, enshrined in international human rights treaties to which Greece is a party.

Earlier this week, a military court in Xanti sentenced Boris Sotiriadis to three and a half years' imprisonment without suspension even pending appeal, after he refused to serve in the army on the grounds that it conflicted with his religious belief.

Boris Sotiriadis is a Georgian national of Greek origin who became naturalized upon returning to Greece. He had served his military service in the former Soviet Union and later became a Jehovah's Witness. When the Greek army summoned him to report for military service, he refused to serve citing religious conscientious objection and asked to serve alternative civilian service instead. However, Greek law does not permit this for those who have already served in the armed forces.

"Greece continues to treat conscientious objectors as criminals, imprisoning them for exercising their human right to conscientious objection," Olga Demetriou, Amnesty International's researcher on Greece, said.

"Not only was Boris Sotiriadis convicted, but he was also given an extremely heavy sentence. His sentence is especially harsh as Greece is now at peace and disobedience is considered a misdemeanour instead of a criminal offence."

The military court rejected the defence's argument that Boris Sotiriadis had a "conflict of legal duties" between the army and his religion. However, the Military Court of Athens has accepted similar arguments to those made by Boris Sotiriadis and acquitted cases of conscientious objectors such as Sergey Gutarov in 2005, Alexandros Evtousenko and Guram Almanidis in 2004.

"Such discrepancies in the application of the law highlight the inadequacy of provisions for alternative civilian service in Greece, both in law and in practice. Existing law and practice needs to be reviewed and brought into accordance with international standards," Olga Demetriou said.

Every person has the right to refuse to perform military service on the grounds of conscience or profound personal conviction, without suffering any legal or physical penalty. Amnesty International calls on the Greek government to end the persecution of conscientious objectors, and for all conscientious objectors, including Boris Sotiriadis, to be treated in the same way, without discrimination.

The organization reminds the Greek authorities that as recently as March 2005, the UN Human Rights Committee called on Greece to improve the situation of conscientious objectors. The Committee expressed concern that the length of alternative service for conscientious objectors is much longer than military service, and that the assessment of applications for such service is solely under the control of the Ministry of Defence.

Amnesty International urges the Greek authorities to stop immediately the prosecutions of all conscientious objectors and to bring the provisions for conscientious objection in line with European and international standards and recommendations as well as in line with the recommendations of the Greek Ombudsman and the Greek National Commission for Human Rights.

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Tests of faith

Religion may be a survival mechanism. So are we born to believe? Ian Sample reports

Thursday February 24, 2005
The Guardian

First for some figures. Last year, an ICM poll found 85% of Americans believe that God created the universe. In Nigeria, 98% claimed always to have believed in God, while nine out of 10 Indonesians said they would die for their God or religious beliefs. Last month, a survey by the market research bureau of Ireland found 87% of the population believe in God. Rather than rocking their faith, 19% said tragedies such as the Asian tsunami, which killed 300,000 people, bolstered their belief. Polls have their faults, but if the figures are even remotely right they illustrate the prevalence of faith in the modern world.
Faith has long been a puzzle for science, and it's no surprise why. By definition, faith demands belief without a need for supporting evidence, a concept that could not be more opposed to the principles of scientific inquiry. In the eyes of the scientist, an absence of evidence reduces belief to a hunch. It places the assumptions at the heart of many religions on the rockiest of ground.

So why do so many people believe? And why has belief proved so resilient as scientific progress unravels the mysteries of plagues, floods, earthquakes and our understanding of the universe? By injecting nuns with radioactive chemicals, by scanning the brains of people with epilepsy and studying naughty children, scientists are now working out why. When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe.

One factor in the development of religious belief was the rapid expansion of our brains as we emerged as a species, says Todd Murphy, a behavioural neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada. As the frontal and temporal lobes grew larger, our ability to extrapolate into the future and form memories developed. "When this happened, we acquired some very new and dramatic cognitive skills. For example, we could see a dead body and see ourselves in that position one day. We could think 'That's going to be me,'" he says. That awareness of impending death prompted questions: why are we here? What happens when we die? Answers were needed.

As well as providing succour for those troubled by the existential dilemma, religion, or at least a primitive spirituality, would have played another important role as human societies developed. By providing contexts for a moral code, religious beliefs encouraged bonding within groups, which in turn bolstered the group's chances of survival, says Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist turned psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Some believe that religion was so successful in improving group survival that a tendency to believe was positively selected for in our evolutionary history. Others maintain that religious belief is too modern to have made any difference.

"What I find more plausible is that rather than religion itself offering any advantage in evolutionary terms, it's a byproduct of other cognitive capacities we evolved, which did have advantages," says Boyer.

Psychological tests Boyer has run on children go some way to proving our natural tendency to believe. "If you look at three- to five-year-olds, when they do something naughty, they have an intuition that everyone knows they've been naughty, regardless of whether they have seen or heard what they've done. It's a false belief, but it's good preparation for belief in an entity that is moral and knows everything," he says. "The idea of invisible agents with a moral dimension who are watching you is highly attention-grabbing to us."

Childish belief is one thing, but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated. According to Boyer, the persistence of belief into adulthood is at least in part down to a presumption. "When you're in a belief system, it's not that you stop asking questions, it's that they become irrelevant. Why don't you ask yourself about the existence of gravity? It's because a lot of the stuff you do every day presupposes it and it seems to work, so where's the motivation to question it?" he says. "In belief systems, you tend to enter this strange state where you start thinking there must be something to it because everybody around you is committed to it. The general question of whether it's true is relegated."

While some continue to tease out the reasons for the emergence of religion and its persistent appeal, others are delving into the neuroscience of belief in the hope of finding a biological basis for religious experience. As a starting point, many studies focused on people with particular neural conditions that made them prone to experiences so intense, they considered them to be visions of God.

At the University of California in San Diego, neuroscientist VS Ramachandran noticed that a disproportionate number of patients - around a quarter - with a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy reported having deeply moving religious experiences. "They'd tell me they felt a presence or suddenly felt they got the meaning of the whole cosmos. And these could be life-changing experiences," says Ramachandran. The feelings always came during seizures, even if the seizures were so mild, they could only be detected by sensitive electroencephalograms (EEGs). Between the seizures, some patients became preoccupied with thoughts about God.

Ramachandran drew up three explanations he thought might explain why the patients with epilepsy seemed so spiritual. First, he considered that the upwelling of emotion caused by the seizure might simply overwhelm, and patients made sense of it by believing that something extremely spiritual was going on. Second, the seizure might prompt the left hemisphere to make up yarns to account for seemingly inexplicable emotions. The ability of the brain's left hemisphere to "confabulate" like this is well known to neuroscientists. Third, he wondered whether seizures disrupted the function of part of the brain called the amygdala which, among other tasks, helps us focus on what is significant while allowing us to ignore the trivial.

Ramachandran decided to test a couple of patients using what is called the galvanic skin response. Two electrodes are used to measure tiny changes in the skin's electrical conductivity, an indirect measure of sweating. In most people, conductivity goes up when they are shown violent or sexual pictures, or similarly loaded words. In the test, Ramachandran found that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy responded very differently from others. Violent words such as "beat" and sexual words produced not a flicker, but religious icons and the word "God" evoked a big response.

With only two patients involved in the study, Ramachandran says it is impossible to draw any conclusions, but if the results stand up to future testing, it might indicate that seizures in the temporal lobe strengthen certain neural pathways connected to the amygdala, meaning we attribute significance to the banal objects and occurrences. "If those pathways all strengthen indiscriminately, everything and anything acquires a deep significance, and when that happens, it starts resembling a religious experience," he says. "And if we can selectively enhance religious sentiments, then that seems to imply there is neural circuitry whose activity is conducive to religious belief. It's not that we have some God module in our brains, but we may have specialised circuits for belief."

At the University of Pennsylvania, radiologist Andrew Newberg has cast a wider net to scan the brains of people performing all manner of spiritual activities. By injecting radioactive tracers into the veins of nuns, Buddhists and others, he has constructed brain maps that show how different practices affect neural processing. "What comes out is there's a complex network in the brain and depending on what you do, it is activated in different ways," says Newberg. "If someone does Tibetan Buddhist mediation they'll activate certain parts of their brain, but if you have a nun praying they'll activate slightly different parts, with someone doing transcendental mediation activating other areas again."

Newberg uncovered the neural processing behind the religious experience of "oneness" with the universe. Blood flow drops off in the parietal lobe, a brain structure that helps us orient ourselves by giving us a sense of ourselves. "We think this latter step is critical," says Newberg. "What seems to be happening is that as you block sensory information getting into the parietal lobe, it keeps trying to give you a sense of self, but it no longer has the information to do so. If that happens completely, you might get this absolute feeling of oneness."

Newberg has been criticised for his investigations into the essence of spiritual experience - the most vehement attacks coming from atheists. "Some people want me to say whether God is there or not, but these experiments can't answer that. If I scan a nun and she has the experience of being in the presence of God, I can tell you what's going on in her brain, but I can't tell you whether or not God is there," he says. Religious groups point out that there is more to religion than extreme experiences. It is a criticism Newberg acknowledges. "The problem is, the people who have these experiences are so much easier to study," he says.

As neuroscientists unpick the biological mechanisms behind religious experience, others are considering what to do with the information. At Laurentian University, Todd Murphy and Michael Persinger are developing devices they think can stimulate parts of the brain to enhance spiritual experiences. Others see the possibility for drugs designed to boost spirituality. Newberg says this would be underpinning a practice that has existed for hundreds of years with scientific understanding. "If you talk to a shamen who takes a substance so they can enter into the spirit world, they don't think that diminishes the experience in any way," he says.

Intriguingly, many scientists, while stressing that they have set out to explore religion rather than disprove its basis, say that no matter what they uncover about the nature of spiritual experiences, mass religious belief will continue. The fastest growing religions in the US are the Mormon church and Scientology, both popular, according to Boyer largely because they are new. In other parts of the world, more fundamentalist religions succeed because they give a clear vision of the world.

"For two centuries, there's been competition between churches and in the free market of religion, the products get better and better as people want different things," says Boyer. "Will science be the death of religion? As neuroscience, it's interesting to see how brains can create very strange states of consciousness, but in terms of threatening religion, I think it'll have absolutely no effect."

Court told of child abuse claims
BY RODDY ASHWORTH
September 14, 2005 07:05

AN 80-year-old Jehovah's Witness lured young girls to run wild at his luxury house where he abused them, a court heard yesterday.
Grandfather John Drury, from Colchester, is accused of indecently assaulting eight girls as they played innocent children's games such as dressing up and hide and seek in his six-bedroom home during the early 1990s.
He even told one of the girls pornographic fairytales about princesses and knights having sex, it was claimed.
In another attack he also took part in perverse play acting when he made one girl, aged between four and seven, wear a nappy, it was alleged.
Drury, who was said to be a trusted and respected member of the Jehovah's Witness Church, would invite young girls to his luxury home with large garden, pond and miniature train set in Cambridge Road.
He would then allow them to do whatever th ey wanted, the court was told.
The defendant would join in the games, running around with the children, but later get them on their own before touching and kissing them, the jury was told.
Speaking at Chelmsford Crown Court, Rosalyne Mandil-Wade, prosecuting, said: The defendant had a free house where children could go anywhere they liked, make as much noise as they liked.
You can imagine what fun they had being able to run wild.
But she told the jury of six men and six women how Drury, who lived with his late wife Christine who suffered from Polio and could not get around easily, would prey on the young girls who had been left in his care.
One victim, now 22, told how she was attacked during a game of hide and seek with other children at the house, where she said there were no rules.
She told the jury: We were in the upstairs bedroom and there was a small box room which joins ont o it, which I presume was a wardrobe once.
He made us all get in there and called us out one at a time into the bedroom where there were two large beds with mattresses.
I was the first one to be called out and I remember seeing Mr Drury on the bed under a sheet. I could see his face and he said to me to get under the sheet, which I did.
He was fully clothed and I remember he started to kiss me on the lips and put his tongue in my mouth.
On another occasion between 1991 and 1995, the girl claimed Drury attacked her again during a game of dressing up.
She said: I was with another girl. He got us to take all our clothes off and get in the bed.
He did the same thing and made us all in turn walk around the bed naked. He did the same thing and got back into the bed.
Then he said to me, 'Would you like to touch me where you shouldn't?' He then grabbed my hand.
The victim told the jury the attacks left her frightened and sick.
She also claimed Drury would hang around outside her school inviting girls back to his house with the promise of freedom.
She said: He would be driving around the time we all left school and approach us and say, 'Come back to mine, it's a free house, you can have a cigarette there if you like'.
Ms Mandil-Wade also told the court Drury told one young girl, who was aged under 14, pornographic stories.
She said: Typically they would start off with a man and woman perhaps in a mythological role - a knight, a warrior or a princess having to fight each other.
That would very soon change into the man and woman kissing each other and touching each other then going on to describe to the child the man and woman having sexual intercourse.
In another bizarre assault, it was alleged he made a girl, aged at the time b etween four and seven years old, wear a nappy, even though she didn't need to.
Drury, who sat in the dock wearing a grey suit and patterned tie, used a hearing loop to listen to the proceedings.
He is charged with 12 counts of indecent assault of a girl and two of indecency with a child under 14. He denies all charges.way

[Modificato da Justee 04/10/2005 20.46]