For the 4th Sunday in Lent, a roundup of the previous Atheism for Lent posts on Derren Brown’ critique of religion as trickery. Tomorrow posts start on Ricky Gervais’ critique of religion as a lie!

Atheism for Lent: Religion as Trickery (Derren Brown 1)

Atheism for Lent: Religion as Trickery (Derren Brown 2)

Atheism for Lent: Religion as Trickery (Derren Brown 3)

Atheism for Lent: Religion as Trickery (Derren Brown 4)

Derren Brown interview, “Magic and Being Human”

Derren Brown interview, “Appearance and Reality”

Atheism for Lent: Religion as Trickery (Derren Brown 5)

When I ran this Atheism for Lent with a church group last year, we met up to watch “Messiah”, a documentary made by Derren Brown in 2005, in light of the preparatory reading material I produced (and reproduced here, here, here, and here). The Channel4 blurb for “Messiah” reads,

Derren Brown takes his debunking mission to America. In a country where his mind control skills are unknown, he sets out once again to demonstrate just how easy it is to dupe people in believing five impossible things (almost) before breakfast.

He tries to convince five leading figures that he has powers in their particular field of expertise: Christian evangelism, alien abduction, psychic powers, New Age theories and contacting the dead.

Can he succeed in convincing the five “experts” of his powers? And will they go further and openly endorse him as a true practitioner?

Here’s the entire documentary on Channel4’s YouTube Channel (embedding disabled), but it can also be downloaded from iTunes.

Derren Brown interview with Nigel Warburton, “Appearance and Reality”.

Derren Brown interview with Nigel Warburton, “Magic and Being Human”.

Discussing Brown’s perspectives on magic (see here, here and here) made me think about Slavoj Zizek’s reflections on Jesus, in The Monstrosity of Christ, where he links the sequence of a magic trick in Christopher Nolan’s (2006) movie The Prestige to the crucifixion.

In The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek summarises a particular sequence from The Prestige:

…when a magician performs a trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage on the table, a little boy in the audience starts to cry, claiming that the bird was killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the trick, gently producing a living bird out of his hand - but the boy is not satisfied, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead one’s brother. After the show, we see the magician in the room behind the stage, bringing in a flattened cage and throwing a squashed bird into a trash bin - the boy was right.

Slavoj Zizek, The Monstrosity of Christ, p.286.

Yesterday I wrote that Derren Brown suggests that as ‘intelligent human beings we should be prepared to question our beliefs and [to question] the people who encourage us to make life decisions  based on the information they give us’ (“Messiah”).

Knowledge about what he calls the ‘false logic’ involved in religious, spiritual, magical, psychical and other paranormal practices can help in this process of questioning.

Thus Brown’s work often hinges on exhibitions and explanations of the human ability to anticipate and manipulate the actions of others, demonstrating powers that condition and convince, transform and convert, as well as revealing luck, fate or destiny to be intricately linked to aptitudes for working with predictability and probability.

The elements of illusion involved here come, therefore, from the performer’s adeptness at misdirection and misinformation, rather than from the subject’s gullibility – though what Brown sees as a ‘hard-wired’ susceptibility to make patterns and tell stories that make sense of our experiences of impossibility plays a part as well.

Derren Brown is a performer who ‘combines magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship in order to seemingly predict and control human behaviour’ (website). Behind his performances lie both an atheistic scepticism and a form of suspicion which ask questions about ‘why we believe things’ (Brown, “Messiah”). His study of religion, psychology, magic, hypnosis, psychic ability, spiritualism, and New Age beliefs such as crystal energy and alien abduction leads him to debunk as delusions and deceptions contemporary religious, spiritual, or paranormal beliefs and practices, as well as the ‘mind tricks’ of entertainment, alternative medicine, and other everyday “bad sciences” (Brown, Tricks of the Mind; see also recommended reading list on his website).

His books and TV shows therefore encourage a suspicion of appearances that presupposes the distinctions made by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche between manifest and latent motives. Brown’s conscious manipulation of human behaviour, including performances in which he converts people to Christianity ‘with a single touch’ (“Messiah”), acts as a mirror to aid reflection upon some of the operative yet unconscious motivations involved in all systems of belief and practice.

This week, posts in this Atheism for Lent series will focus on sceptic illusionist Derren Brown. This interview with Richard Dawkins for Dawkins’ Channel4 programme, “The Enemies of Reason”, provides some background on Brown’s scepticism for those unfamiliar with him.

Richard Dawkins: Where does your scepticism come from?

Derren Brown: Well, in terms of my history, I used to be a very devout Christian when I was younger, but didn’t have a Christian family, didn’t have Christian friends… but it came from a Bible reading class when I was young; it was an unpleasant childhood indoctrination. But because I grew up without a Christian peer group, when I got to university it was relatively easy for me to kind of think my way out of it, to start to challenge it and not feel too much guilt…

At the same time I was getting into magic and, through magic, realising how things like tarot cards and psychics really work and that there’s nothing mystical about it that could therefore be seen as dangerous, but it’s just simply sort of rubbish and charlatanism and psychology at work…