Archive for the ‘religion’ Category
reflections on the video ‘Why I am no longer a Christian’ – part 1
funny but not entirely relevant
Why I am no longer a Christian
I ‘m on the mailing list for an atheist meet-up group which, sadly, I rarely attend, but recently an email was sent around recommending a video called ‘Why I am no longer a Christian’. The author has been adding snippets to the video over the years and it’s now over 3 hours long, but you can watch it in chunks. I’ve found it thoroughly compelling viewing so far. The author narrates the story of his deconversion in great detail, in soft-spoken, measured style, conveying the atmosphere and the feel of US pentecostal religiosity from the inside. To me, this was important because it’s easy, coming from a very different background, to be dismissive and contemptuous of that world – as Dawkins is often accused of being (I note that he’s been keen to promote his loving, caring side lately).
Even so, and even though I was certainly not put off by the measured treatment of his faith days, his faith community, and the sacred music that accompanies these early sections (much sacred music is, of course, very beautiful and soothing), my interest really grew with his encounter with the ex-Christian academic, and his increasingly skeptical/curious readings of the Bible.
There are many outrageous passages in the Bible, so many in fact that the more subtle infelicities may easily go unheeded. And most of them aren’t so subtle when we decide to pause and examine them. For example, the author discusses Abraham, in Egypt, telling Sarah to lie to Pharaoh about his relationship with her (Genesis 12:10-20). The reason for the lie was that, finding Sarah very attractive, they might take her from him and kill him, if they thought she was his wife. If, on the other hand, they thought she was his sister, they would still take her, but would treat Abraham well, as the bearer of a gift of such a beauty into Egypt.
The author is struck by the passage because he believes (or believed at the time of reading it) that lying is never right, and he believed that this was a fundamental moral principle of the Bible, one of the Commandments. Interestingly, as a lifelong non-believer, I might’ve been struck by this lie (and I do recall being struck by it on first reading it) because it so contradicted the Commandment, but I doubt if I’d have been struck by its immorality. Abraham wanted to survive, first and foremost, and he considered that Sarah was doomed to be ‘looted’ from him anyway. Better to benefit from it than to die because of it. On the other hand, of course, he may have been wrong in his consideration that the Pharaoh and the Egyptians wouldn’t respect his ‘right of possession’ of Sarah. So we have a genuine moral dilemma here. In any case his decision to ask Sarah to lie doesn’t seem outrageous to me, given the patriarchal brutality of the era.
But it is the consequence of all this that the author is even more struck by, and rightly so. For Yahweh strikes Pharaoh down with illness because he takes the apparently single Sarah, rather than punishing the couple whose lies placed Sarah in such a compromising position. It doesn’t make sense to modern western morality, yet it makes perfect sense to those family honour-based societies that still exist today. The married Sarah’s honour has been besmirched, and Pharoah did it. Lying is as nothing beside having your way with a woman who is some other man’s possession, even if you didn’t know she was. It’s primitive and brutish, but that’s the Bible.
The author points out other questionable passages, including two contradictory ones about Judas that I hadn’t noticed before. In Acts 1:18-19, the unrepentant Judas is depicted as having his guts suddenly burst open in a field (bought by the proceeds of his betrayal), an Act of a wrathful Yahweh, but in Matthew 27: 3-8 , Judas, clearly guilt-ridden, tosses away his blood money and hangs himself from a tree. Completely incompatible stories, shocking to a discriminating, questing sensibility trying to understand this god’s book.
Later the author goes into aspects of the Bible’s production which I didn’t know about or the details of which I’ve read but forgotten, as an atheist who, knowing the books of the Bible are full of propaganda, fabrication and rescension, isn’t interested in the precise details the way many apologists are. Still they’re worth setting down here, to solidify them in my mind.
Some of this comes from Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, which I’ve actually read, but rather somnolently, probably because, like the video’s author, I was bored by the multifarious inventions of gods, or the qualities of gods, which she presents in the book, none of them based on anything but subjective speculation, albeit ingenious at times. It all started, from a historical perspective (rather than a pre-historic one) with the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian epic poem which presents, in a deliberately mythic way, a creation event, not out of nothing, but out of an eternal ‘raw material’. Armstrong claims that the creation of something out of nothing ‘was an idea that was alien to the ancient world’, including the writers of the Bible’s creation myths. An examination of the very first words of Genesis, however – at least in English – uncovers, at the very least, a vagueness about the issue. I quote from the KJV:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
What we seem to have here is a beginning in which only the single supernatural agent exists. This agent (whose maleness isn’t revealed until verse 5, though it’s likely that in highly gendered Hebrew it was clear from the start) apparently created two things, at least initially, out of what we don’t know (magic happens!), and one of them was formless and void, whatever that may mean. In fact there’s enough ambiguity in these opening lines to keep theologians going for centuries. Ah, such is the inscrutability of brevity.
Anyway, moving along. The Enuma Elish is dated to around 1750 BCE, and is, importantly, a tale of polytheism. It was doubtless a highly selective representation of the polytheistic myths circulating around Mesopotamia at the time and previously. It speaks of a power struggle between gods and then a creation out of a primordial world that’s also formless and void, with a sequence including light, the firmament, land, the sun, the moon, and finally humanity. It’s believed that the first verses of Genesis, written most likely at the time of the Babylonian exile, more than a thousand years after the Enuma Elish was set down, were inspired by and derived from this ancient epic.
In my next post I’ll look at the emergence of Judaeo-Christian monotheism out of polytheism, with reference to this video.
revisiting that old chestnut, the separate spheres of science and religion
In any case, a most excellent book
It always surprises me when I hear scientists who are otherwise extremely stimulating and admirable taking up the old S J Gouldian position on religion. I have in mind here V S Ramachandran, in his recent book The tell-tale brain:
When I make remarks of this nature about God… I do not wish to imply that God doesn’t exist; the fact that some patients develop such delusions doesn’t disprove God – certainly not the abstract God of Spinoza or Shankara [an Indian mystic philosopher of the eighth century]. Science has to remain silent on such matters. I would argue, like Erwin Schrodinger and Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion (in the nondoctrinaire philosophical sense) belong to different realms of discourse and one cannot negate the other.
Mmmm. Always a bit of a problem when science is told what it ‘has to’ do. Or is it just me that doesn’t like being told that? I do, though, take Ramachandran’s point that science has nothing directly to say about the supernatural, the realm of the ‘non-evidential’. To say that there’s no evidence for the non-evidential seems rather beside the point. And yet…
The whole point of religion is supernatural agency, and this, it seems to me, involves these other-worldly agents acting in this world; answering prayers, performing miracles and so forth. After all, a god who does nothing is, arguably, not worth worshipping. Worshipping a god is, it seems to me, a quid pro quo sort of thing, though this is rarely made explicit. We expect something from these gods, they made us for a purpose, hence their obsession with us, their fatal flaw, it might seem. I’m talking about monotheistic gods of course, the ones without siblings or goddy communities to distract them from being our eternal lords and masters.
How these issues can be claimed to belong to different orders of discourse is beyond me. To me, as I’ve written, science is born of relentless questioning, with two aspects, curiosity and scepticism. And one of the biggest questions, obviously, is – how did we come to be here? It’s a question that science relentlessly explores – the origin of life, the origin of matter, the origin of universal laws and forces. It’s also a question that religion, particularly monotheistic religion, purports to answer. The answer being, a deity is responsible. A deity far too complex and ineffable for us to be capable of understanding or even beginning to explore.
I don’t see any difficulty in treating this as a theory, or more accurately a hypothesis, like any other, to be treated with the same sceptico-curious questioning as any other claim about our world and our experience.
I note that Ramachandran isolates religion ‘in the nondoctrinaire philosophical sense’ as the only religious ‘type’ that’s beyond the realm of scientific inquiry. Or perhaps he means beyond scientific proof, as I’m sure he agrees that the areas and pathways of the brain associated with religious or spiritual feeling are well worth probing. In fact, quite a bit of headway has been made in recent years in neurophysiology and in experimental psychology, in teasing out the forces contributing to religious belief. So such belief does fall within the scientific ‘realm of discourse’ or purview. When I first encountered the concept of a god in Sunday School as a seven or eight year old, the first thing that came to me was a whole heap of questions. Questions in which, as always, you can’t disentangle curiosity from scepticism. Who? What? Where? Says who? Can you really be serious? What are you getting out of this? How can this idea be possible? Where did it come from? Why is he male? What do you mean that he’s our father – isn’t one more than enough?
I believe these to be scientific questions, but then maybe I have a broader definition of science than most. I certainly hope so. And maybe these questions can’t negate gods, or belief in them, but they can certainly make it hot for this whole bizarro world of ‘faith’.
The other side of Ramachandran’s argument, though, I certainly agree with. Whatever religious discourse is, it has no hope of negating science.
a harem-scarem of heretics and heresies: Marcion
That’s Marcion on the left, with John the Apostle, apparently
Christianity’s a funny religion, custom-built for ‘heresy’, heresy which will never be resolved because of the massive and, to a non-believer, frankly hilarious conundrum at its inception, the creation of a new supernatural being, who’s the son of another supernatural being, while at the same time being the same supernatural being, and also at the same time, or for a tiny part of the time, being completely human, or natural. Thus we have a monotheism with two heads, and a supernatural and also natural object of worship at the same time, not to mention some abstruse entity called a holy spirit or ‘Paraclete’. This mess will never ever have a chance of being resolved, because of course nobody can ever prove anything where the supernatural is concerned. Precisely for this reason, the only ‘resolution’ to this conundrum, now as throughout Christian history, is one involving power and violence – which isn’t always so hilarious.
Of course, there are many theological bones of contention, and sources of heresy, within Christianity apart from the status of Jesus (an area of dispute called ‘Christology’), such as the status of Mary, the meaning of sainthood, predestination and other eschatological matters.
Theology is, IMHO, the most inane pursuit humans have ever invented for themselves, but of course when it’s the only game in town, its political implications are explosive. It’s entirely about power. It’s the power that’s of interest, historically, and the political machinations. So let’s have a little look at Christianity’s battles and brutality in trying to enforce an orthodoxy amongst all the equally valid, or invalid, interpretations of Jesus’s true identity.
Marcion and Marcionism
Marcion, an apparently wealthy bishop’s son from near the Black Sea in what is now Turkey, who landed up in Rome around 140CE, seems to have been one of the first early Christians smart enough to realize that the new religion needed a thorough rethink, and one of the first Christians prominent enough to make an impact with his thinking.
Marcion clearly had a problem with Christianity’s intimate connection with Judaism, and their sharing of the same god. His solution was a pretty radical one; noting that the essentially absent but much talked-about god of the New Testament writings bore little resemblance to the thundering, partisan dictator-type of the Old Testament, he declared that they were in fact separate beings, with the New Testament one being vastly superior. It was a mad gamble, which was never likely to come off, but it certainly stirred things up, and kept them stirred for a long time after his excommunication in 144. Marcionism as an official heresy lasted into the 5th century, and his ideas still have currency today, and why not? His criticisms of the Old Testament’s brutalities and its nasty god have a distinctly modern feel to them. He also argued, cogently enough, that the description in Genesis of the god walking through the garden and discovering Adam being naughty proved that this god was an embodied, and therefore minor, god, who couldn’t possibly possess universal knowledge.
Marcion’s views on the identity of Jesus were obviously influenced by his conception of the New Testament god. In Judaism, Yahweh or God is often spoken of as ‘the father’, or ‘our heavenly father’, because he is the creator of humans – and everything else, but humans were his ‘special creation’. So we are his ‘children’, made in his likeness. But in the New Testament, and especially in the writings of Paul, God the father is contrasted with Jesus the son, a different tweak on the father idea. Marcion, a great supporter and admirer of Pauline thought, with its more abstract and ahistorical god, took those ideas a step or two further, severing the Pauline god from the Old Testament god as a separate entity. In other words he was a kind of religious dualist. Not content with that dangerous innovation, he considered Jesus’s physical existence to be a kind of mirage, a phantom – no doubting in keeping with his view of the New Testament god as non-embodied. This view of Jesus, as essentially a being too important to have ever had something so lowly as mere physical or natural existence, came to be known as Docetism, and it was roundly rejected as heretical at the first council of Nicaea in 325. Marcion’s excommunication turned him into one of Christianity’s first heresiarchs, or founders of a heretical movement or tradition, but his writing and thinking profoundly influenced the orthodoxy. For example, he proposed the first New Testament canon. Though the canon finally agreed upon centuries later differed greatly from the one proposed by Marcion (his canon was notably short – an edited version of Luke, and the letters of Paul), it was Marcion who first saw the need for regulating on what was ‘in’ and what was ‘out’, among the enormously proliferating gospels.
Marcion considered the Old Testament god to be a ‘demiurge’ – something close to a devil. It’s a maltheistic view shared by more than a few modern secular readers (Mark Twain for example), though they would usually replace the theistic term ‘devil’ with ‘dictator’, ‘tyrant’ or ‘mass-murderer’. Interestingly, this god’s inflexibility and capriciousness led Marcion and others to be more rather than less convinced of his reality as the world’s creator. He felt the god’s activity pretty well explained the suffering and injustice of the world. With Jesus, a new god was introduced, superior to the demiurge, ethically if not in terms of power. Marcion’s emphasis on the non-Jewish text of Luke, and his suppression of genealogies linking Jesus to ‘King David’, was part of an anti-Judaic agenda which denied the idea of a Jewish messiah and emphasised the idea of a redeemer. He also highlighted Paul as the ‘one true apostle’ of Jesus, the only one who really ‘got it’ about Jesus’s universality, and the new hope he brought. However – and this is where Marcion leads us down the path into gnosticism, other-worldliness and the sort of contempt for physical reality that the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge were into – redemption could not be attained within the massively flawed world of the demiurge. This was a view in keeping with the apocalyptic eschatology that dominated the early Christian movement.
Marcion, one of Christianity’s first heretics, also seems to have been one of the most influential and enduring. He himself managed to avoid the fate of many heretics of the early Christian era, perhaps because his heresies were promulgated well before a well-attested orthodoxy was established (the Emperor Theodosius first promulgated a law declaring heresy a capital crime in 382), but also no doubt due to his wealth, prominence and popularity. He returned to Asia Minor after being ex-communicated, and apparently established a flourishing teaching and an alternative church in the area. He was a prolific writer, but almost all of his writings appear to have been destroyed by the control and power merchants of Catholic orthodoxy, along with the writings of many other heretics, probably in the fourth century. So we largely know about his thinking through the writings that have survived from that era – that’s to say the writers later accepted as orthodox, and so unsympathetic to Marcion. In fact most of what we know about Marcion derives from Tertullian’s work Adversus Marcionem.
Marcion’s ‘church’ may have survived even into the fifth century, and his teaching, still influential today, may have inspired the Cathars, a remarkably widespread and stubborn bunch of European heretics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who held similar dualist and gnostic views. The extent of the connection, if any, will never be known, as the Catholic orthodoxy destroyed Cathar writings as comprehensively as they destroyed the Cathars themselves.
Long live secularism.
fountains of good stuff 1: introduction
Here is my first podcast in the new series, which I hope to continue with into the future, having worked out a simple format.
fountains of good stuff 1: introduction
Hi, my name is Stewart Henderson, and this is my introduction to fountains of good stuff, a series which will explore all sorts of things we’re learning about the brain, the galaxy, the past, the laws of nature, the strange behaviour of humans, and anything else that happens to take my fancy and which I think may be of interest to, well, somebody out there. In my fantasy world, I’d love to be constantly immersed in all this good stuff, learning about it, reading about it, talking to clever people about it, picking people’s brains about it, arguing about it, and just generally wallowing about in the stuff. Okay, with a dollop of sex thrown in occasionally. It’s a kind of lifelong learning thing, because you know, you’re never too old to learn, and learning is the best way to keep you young and enthusiastic, and to maintain the plasticity of your brain, apparently.
Now it just so happens that I myself am very very old, so I think it’s most appropriate that I should be presenting this ‘fountain of youth’-type series which I’m hoping will flow on and on and on unto oblivion, you know, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. And I’m hoping you can follow me along the downward spiral. Should be fun, n’est-ce pas?
So what’s the purpose of all this? Well, in my dotage, I’ve become very interested in knowledge, in finding things out, and also thinking about how we know things. Not in a philosophical way, but in a naïve, childlike way – a sense of wonder, often confusion, sometimes excitement, and sometimes skepticism. And maybe, this is philosophy, I don’t know. It seems to me that, as I get older, I become almost panic-stricken about how little I know about anything, as if I’ve wasted my life, or as if haven’t sufficiently explored and exercised this amazing thing I have inside my head.
There’s a funny story told about Pliny the Elder, a great Roman intellectual who had a servant follow him around all day, reading to him from works of natural history, the science of the time, so that when he was in his bath, sitting on the dunny, or at the dinner table, none of his time would be wasted, he’d be absorbing information during every waking hour. How he’d have loved the modern world of podcasting.
Of course, this is based on the notion of the brain as a great big bucket which you can pour contents into until it’s full up and you know everything, but the brain doesn’t work like that, and Pliny would’ve been well aware of that, he would’ve known that memory is unreliable, that we forget more than we retain and so on, but I can certainly sympathise with his hunger for more knowledge, perhaps in the hope that it would all somehow combine together in his mind, and even that his mind would transform it into more than the sum of its parts, like an oven does to the ingredients of a soufflé. Incidently Pliny, Jupiter bless him, was exactly my age when he died, overcome, so it’s said, by the fumes of Vesuvius, on the same day that it buried Pompei under its lava and ash.
Now where was I? Knowledge. I’m no scientist, in fact through most of my life I’ve been an arty-farty bludger type, but I’ve always been impressed, in fact in awe, of the achievements of science, and I’ve certainly always been interested in the questions science seeks to answer. What does it mean to be alive? Why do we sleep for so much of our lives? How did the world we live in come to be? What do we mean by ‘the world’? Is that an obsolete term or does it still have its uses? How is it that my pet cat has the same shape face as a lion, or a tiger? Exactly how is it different, and how the same? Why does my shit smell so bad, though not as bad as that of other people? Why am I so struck by the beauty of women, while noting that beauty’s infinite variety? How long will our species last? Is there life elsewhere in our solar system?
The number of questions is infinite, of course, or potentially so, and some of these questions we already have answers for, though there may turn out to be better answers, and there are some questions we’re close to finding answers for, and some questions that are unanswerable, or badly framed, or not worth worrying about, or too much of a worry. There are questions we can answer in a jiff via Wikipedia, and questions we wonder if anyone has ever asked before.
Whatever the questions, they all have something to do with knowledge, and it seems to me that science can always be let in to lend a hand. I don’t think science is anything mysterious or scary, it’s simply the way to knowledge. At least, the knowledge I’m interested in. Science is whatever generates reliable knowledge about the world. I’ve heard people say that ‘science doesn’t know everything’, as if science was a person, probably male, obsessive and slightly mad. They say this as if they think this science bloke is getting too big for his boots and needs to have a wadge of humble pie stuffed down his throat. But if you just treat science as an attempt to arrive at reliable knowledge, you’ll see how absurd this statement is. People try to arrive at reliable knowledge because they don’t know everything. And I would say that the vast majority of scientists are happy to admit that they don’t know much about anything. That’s what makes it such a challenge and so much fun, that there’s so much to learn and so much to think about. And if you can think of any other approach to knowledge that is of any use at all, please let me know, I’d be fascinated.
I know some philosophers say there’s no such thing as the scientific method, and I agree. There’s nothing you can point to, or write down, or put into a formula, and say, there’s the scientific method. I think of science as using an open-ended set of methodologies, each one more beautiful than the other, for arriving at reliable knowledge. They generally involve a lot of prior knowledge, a fair degree of creativity, and a balance of open-mindedness and skepticism. Now, I think I understand the Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection. I can’t say that I fully understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but I know enough about it to be pretty sure that the methods Einstein used to arrive at his theory have pretty well nothing in common with the methods of Darwin and Wallace. In fact I’d say that even Darwin and Wallace arrived at much the same theory using different methods, according to their different natures and experience. That’s the beauty and creativity of science, and there’s plenty of that around.
Science is essentially a way of life, and it’s the best diversion from the perils of self-absorption ever devised.
So I want to celebrate science and its achievements from my lay perspective, very much in the spirit of Bill Bryson in his wonderful book ‘A short history of nearly everything,’ and I immediately identify with Bryson when, in the beginning of his book, he recalls a text-book diagram from his school-days, which cut through the Earth’s inner layers, and the text told him that the inner core was made of molten nickel and iron, at a temperature something like the surface of the sun, and he asked himself – how did they know that? And still asks himself, as I do. How do they know that light travels at about 300,000 kms per second? How do they know that Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to us apart from the sun, is 4.24 light years away? How do they know? Well, it’s not really a mystery, and I’m hoping, as maybe old Pliny did, that it’ll all come together in my mind one day. With a bit of work.
I won’t always be talking about scientific knowledge, though, and how we come to know things. I have an interest in history, in biography, and in religion, its psychology, its history, and its claims to knowledge and influence. I’ll be talking about important and fascinating figures in intellectual history, from Hypatia to Antoni van Leeuwenhoek to Harry Hess. I’m doing it for self-education and for communication, so if you hear any of these talks, and think you’ve learned something from them or been stimulated by them to learn more, I hope you’ll recommend them to your friend. And some people, I hear, have more than one.
So that’s my introduction to these fountains of good stuff. I hope it wasn’t too discombobulating, and I’m hoping that one day, if I get rich, or meet someone who’s a techno wizard with a bit of time on their hands, that I’ll be able to add a few bells and maybe even a whistle or two, to make it all sound really cool.
Meanwhile, I hope you tune into my first fully gushing podcast, which will be about dolphins and their brains. See you then.
how to avoid insulting a prophet?
The term ‘insult’ is probably impossible to define objectively. We all know of people who have been genuinely insulted at what we thought was a valid criticism, and the sceptical and atheist movements in particular have been strong lately on the idea that religions shouldn’t be exempt from valid and robust criticism, and even mockery when it’s called for. After all, there are some quite bizarre and ludicrous claims made from time to time in the name of religion. For example, the Catholic Church’s procedures for establishing a person’s ‘sainthood’ are laughable, and their regular calls for more exorcists to cope with demonic possession are best dealt with by a mix of mockery and the bringing of criminal charges.
With Islam, though, we’re in different territory. I know quite a few Moslems – I work with them and I teach them English. I get on well with them all, and never mention the subject of religion, and neither do they, except, say, to mention Ramadan and the practicalities around that. I don’t doubt though, that my avoidance of any mention of religion has a a degree of self-preservation about it. As an atheist I don’t want to put people on the defensive, but more importantly, don’t want to make myself a target. Watching demonstrations of hatred against those who ‘insult the prophet’, though those demonstrations might take place on the other side of the globe, is an intimidating experience for those of us – and there are many – who happen to believe that all human prophecy is bunk.
And the fact is that, as communities become more mixed and mobile, Moslem demonstrations are taking place in every major western city these days. Like most demonstrations, at least in the west, the majority of participants have peaceful intent, but there is a hostile and violent, usually testosterone-driven periphery.
But demonstrations in the west in recent decades have not featured religion as a major theme, and this raises the question of whether Islam, though still a minor presence, population-wise, in Australia as in other western countries, is a potential threat to the secular state. When we look at countries where Islam is the dominant religion we find it also playing a dominant role in the political organisation of those countries, and recent calls by the President of Indonesia, the world’s largest Moslem country, to criminalise blasphemy [worldwide?], incoherent though they may be, should be a warning to us all of the dangers of religious dominance of any kind.
And I mean of any kind, for anyone familiar with European history will know how horrifically dangerous it is when political figures claim the backing of religious authorities, and, worse, supernatural creator beings, with all the righteousness that this entails.
Moderate Islamic leaders have expressed dismay that legitimate demonstrations against those who refuse to respect long-held beliefs have been hijacked by the angry few. While I sympathise to some extent, it’s clear to me that a long-held belief, or a belief system that has a long history, doesn’t automatically deserve respect on that basis. The argument from antiquity is a well-known logical fallacy. The real form of the fallacy is that a belief’s antiquity has no bearing on its truth. I’m taking the slightly different line that a belief’s antiquity has no bearing on whether or not it should be respected – though you can tie those together by arguing that only the truth is worthy of our respect.
The recent Islamic protests, resulting in the loss of scores of lives, are supposedly caused by an apparently shoddily-made video [I’ve not seen it] which mocks the ‘prophet’ Mohammed. I say ‘supposedly’ because any of us who write about and research religion on the net will know that there are a multitude of anti-Islamic hate sites out there, sites that would certainly out-insult this particular video by a mile, as well as Islamist anti-western and anti-Christian sites of a similar nastiness. Hard to imagine that these protesters, or a proportion of them, don’t know about these sites.
Anyway, regardless of the trigger, the fact is that there are a lot of angry and intolerant Moslems out there just itching for a bit of mayhem, and we need to hold our nerve. I was happy to hear Obama speaking up for free speech, with an almost casual dismissiveness, in response to Yudhoyono’s call for blasphemy laws, just as I was disappointed that a New Zealand politician expressed approval at the arrest of the video’s maker [apparently unaware that the arrest was on unrelated charges]. As far as I can see, the only thing this individual has done wrong is to make a crappy, dishonest video. If this was a serious crime, most of Hollywood would be in jail right now. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
We live in a bitsy, complicated world, in which neuro-anatomists, paleo-anthropologists, not to mention doctors, lawyers and tribal chieftains live alongside fervent religionists who know nothing about evolution and would hate it if they did. We have children in our neighbourhoods who are sent to special schools or no schools, to avoid their being tainted with any kind of modern knowledge, while others are groomed to be cutting-edge theorists of the coming singularity. Holding all this diversity together and trying to be optimistic about it is no mean feat. It’s a diversity that we’ve created through our belief in freedom, in non-coercion, with regard to knowledge and behaviour – within obvious limits. I share this belief, together with the hope that, given all the options, we’ll find our way to the best understanding of our world and ourselves, and how that understanding can best guide our actions. It’s on this basis that I hope we can stand firm, defend and argue for the spirit of inquiry and constant questioning – of religion and science and everything else. Inquiry involves criticism – of the claims of so-called prophets, of saint-makers and the producers of crappy videos. They’re all fair game.
matters of interest
Still have a hankering for philosophy though I don’t read it much these days, so I enjoyed Jason Rosenhouse’s take on the ontological argument here. For those who don’t know, it’s a weird a priori argument for the existence of a supernatural being, an argument that refuses to go away, apparently. But I don’t need to go into detail, as Jason already does that, and I’m pretty well in agreement with him about it. The commentary’s interesting too, though occasionally providing reminders of why I lost much interest in philosophy years ago. Sometimes it seems that the more abstruse the subject matter becomes, the nastier philosophers get.
Jen McCreight, of Blag Hag, first raiser of the Atheism Plus banner, is taking a hopefully temporary break from blogging, due to blogosphere, and largely blokosphere, nastiness. Her farewell remarks are worth reading – and note the scary, but also encouraging, number of comments.
It seems to me there’s something about this medium in general that encourages thoughtless commentary – look at youtube comments for example. It’s the anonymity of it all, presumably. You might’ve expected more ‘intellectual’ or ideas-based sites to generate a better class of commentary, but that ain’t necessarily so, though of course you’re likely to get good stuff, at the top of the barrel, so to speak.
Returning to philosophy, of sorts, Jerry Coyne has been writing some stimulating stuff, first here, on attempts to suggest that the theory of natural selection is in crisis [no, not from lightweight intelligent design proponents, but from philosophical interpreters of new directions in genetic and related research], second here, on that hoary old issue of whether or not philosophy generally gives way to science in answering the Big Questions, and third here, on what could be described as a favourite theme, or target, of Coyne’s, evolutionists with a Christian bent – that’s to say, with a way of bending the evidence to support the idea of human inevitability. All very much worth keeping up with. Since I don’t have the time or energy to go into detail on these subjects, I’ll confine myself to brief comments.
Recent work on epigenetics [inter alia] has been breathlessly touted by some journalists and commentators as forcing a major rethink of traditional evolutionary theory, and it’s not always easy for a lay person to evaluate these claims. Coyne, as an evolutionary biologist with his finger on the pulse, is able to put these claims into perspective, while contributing further to our education. Conclusion: Lamarckian-type non-genetic inheritance is rare and unstable. There’s far more detail in Coyne’s analysis of course, so take a look.
The ‘philosophy inevitably gives way to science’ line was run by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape, in which he also contested the Humean claim [often misrepresented, so I’m told] that a value judgement cannot be derived from a factual proposition [no ‘ought’ from ‘is’]. Coyne examines a discussion between the physicist Lawrence Krauss and the philosopher Julian Baggini, on what is probably the most interesting topic in philosophy today – the topic of whether ethics, for so long a prized possession of philosophical discourse, will not only be informed by but more or less fully understood through scientific analysis.
Coyne’s quotes from Simon Conway Morris are devastating, leaving me amazed yet again at how such obviously talented scientists can think such guff [well, think Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Agassiz, etc etc]. It just makes me all the more wary of theistic thinking and the way it blocks and distorts our undertanding of how things actually are.
atheism plus comes to town, perhaps
The other day I attended my first local atheist meetup here in Adelaide for quite some time. Not that I was particularly avoiding them, they’ve just been clashing with other commitments, but it turned out to be an interesting time to return, because it was posted that we might like to have a semi-formal discussion on the ‘atheism plus’ push which is causing a bit of a stir on Free Thought Blogs and elsewhere, and if and how we want to incorporate it.
Controversy! Flying Sparks! Noses out of joint! Death threats! Trolls! Witches! Indifference!
In other words I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. What I did find pleasantly surprising was that the topic got a reasonably good airing and the group came to a more or less loose consensus about behaviour at meet-ups, in order to maintain the sorts of standards that might be expected at club meetings, gabfests and the like. That’s to say, no blatant sexism, racism, intimidation or offensive behaviour, with the convenor, presumably after consultation with the respective parties, or having witnessed the abuse, making an executive decision about behaviour having crossed the line sufficiently far as to require intervention, such as politely but firmly asking the offender to desist, or to leave, or even imposing a ban. Doubtless none of this is particularly binding or enforceable, but it’s only a pub meet-up group after all, Amazing tho’ our Meetings might be.
All of this is certainly Good Progressive Stuff, and it might open up an avenue of complaint for some who have avoided meetings because of one or two blowhards who’ve behaved offensively in the past, but does it put as all in the Atheism+ camp? In other words, is Atheism+ anything more than a movement to encourage or impose civility?
This issue was discussed at the meeting, as were the origins of this movement, or proto-movement; the experiences of Jen McCreight, the elevator affair [not so much a storm in an elevator as a storm outside one], the Dawkins response, and harrassment in general, with a variety of views expressed and criticised. Also discussed was the general issue of the way men treat women, and vice versa. I detected plenty of underlying tensions between some males and some females [for the record, though I can’t recall all the conversation, I can say with some certainty that seven males and two females spoke up on this issue, which is almost more revealing than what was said], with the ‘males don’t have an easy time of it either’ line featuring heavily.
We’d just about reached a positive conclusion on the matter, despite the slightly grumbling note of one or two men, when a late male arrival was asked his opinion of the whole A+ thing. He announced to us all that he considered feminism ‘a travesty’, a remark obviously intended to create a splash. A moment later, he added ‘I mean academic feminism’. Needless to say, academic feminism, and whatever reaction one might have to it, was not at issue at the meeting. What was at issue was civility, particularly between men and women, and the creation of an atmosphere that would make everyone, but particularly women, comfortable and enthusiastic and willing to go on attending and contributing – especially given that the group, like most atheist meet-up groups – was dominated by males. To arrive late to a meetup in which he knew that Atheism+ was to be discussed [the same individual had earlier posted a response to the convenor’s announcement about the topic, which clearly mocked the whole thing], thus indicating his lack of interest, and then to state, as his first contribution to the meetup, that feminism is a travesty, was clearly a deliberate provocation, and it had the obviously desired effect of upsetting at least one of the female minority attending, who was passionately concerned to raise the issues around A+, civility and inclusiveness, precisely because she’d been avoiding meetups in which these kinds of arrogant and bombastic statements were being aired.
There are a few lessons to be drawn from this. First, that it only takes one or two insensitive males, or one or two insensitive comments, to spoil a whole evening, or even a whole movement, for those who feel targeted by them. We should all be aware of this, as we all remember the nasty comments directed at us more clearly than a thousand compliments. Second, it’s very important not to let those comments go unchallenged, as silence will feel like assent to those who feel offended by them.
And to describe feminism as a travesty is offensive. I felt personally affronted, and I’m only a male, but a male who grew up in the seventies, at the height of second-wave feminism, with its vital historical perspective on patriarchy’s distortion of female value. It profoundly influenced my intellectual development, and still does. Of course I didn’t agree with all feminist discourse, just as I disagreed with some of the discourse on black power that was prevalent at that time, but I fully agreed with the prime thrust of both these movements, equality. Equality of opportunity, equality of treatment, equality of power. How could anyone object to that?
It seems to me that a job of empowerment, in gender terms, still needs to be done within the atheist community, if we’re to call ourselves a community. That might need more than just civility, but it’s a damn good place to start.
jensen’s submissionary position
I suppose I come across in these posts as a fairly reasonable, analytical sort of bloke, but I actually have to suppress quite an upwelling of emotion, especially angry emotion, from time to time. For example when I witness bullying behaviour, even if only in a movie, I become agitated, unable to keep still. If I’m alone I’ll start pacing up and down, I’ll change the channel, but too late, I’ll remonstrate with the bully, I’ll expose him, humiliate him, perhaps even murder him, or her. And then I’ll tell myself to calm down, why do I over-react like this, where does all this anger come from, almost with the flick of a switch, is there something really wrong with me, etc etc. I’ve gone through this little cycle – the flaring up of anger, followed by the calming-down, the wondering at my semi-unhingedness, the concern about my sanity – literally a thousand times. It can be brought on by stories told to me by third or fourth or fifth persons, or by something I’ve witnessed or been subjected to, or unreliable memories, or my reading of ancient history. But no matter how much I admonish myself, like Beckett’s Krapp telling himself to stop eating bananas, I’m unlikely to change.
Certain benighted characters, from Josef Stalin to Gordon Ramsay, can trigger this cycle in me through the mere mention of their names, and some of them, like the current Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, don’t even seem to fit the general profile of a bully. It’s a puzzlement. But while I can’t expect to cure myself, I can perhaps reduce the symptoms by a little tried-and-true analysis.
So, to Jensen.
My most recent sighting of him was on ABC-TV [I think] the other day, in relation to a quirky little piece on a recent marriage ceremony in which the female party chose to submit to her husband. This ceremonial wording, apparently deliberately chosen by the devout couple, has caused a bit of a stir, apparently. Switch to Jensen’s smiling dial as he ‘explains’ that men and women are different and need to have different roles within a marriage, because a man, you see, is a man, and a woman is a woman, and therefore, well, the conclusion is obvious, surely, and it’s so good that we’re having this debate at last.
Jensen is, of course, a staunch conservative, who’s totally opposed to the ordination of female clergy in the Anglican church, as well as gay marriage and homosexuality generally. The CNNNN team did a great job of questioning the Biblical basis of his views here, and though you could argue that the man was ambushed, he did a notably poor job of defending himself. For this reason I’m a bit uncertain of the value of this post. The fellow seems so feeble-minded, and his views so laughable, that I’m really not sure he’s worth expending energy on, or that his views should be given even the tiny piece of promotion my blog can offer.
However, for my own equanimity’s sake, I will continue. Jensen expands on his views in this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, and that’s what I’ll focus on.
Marriage really matters. Thank God we are talking about it. As Professor Patrick Parkinson said in these pages last week, marriage is ”by far the most stable, safe and nurturing relationship in which to raise children”. However, fewer people are choosing marriage as a way of relating to someone of the opposite sex and fewer people are nurturing children in a family with marriage at its heart.
I can understand that. Individualism leaves us with little reason to join our life to that of someone else. Apart from that, for many marriage has become an arena of suffering, exploitation and disappointment. We choose to bypass it. Yet I would say that we need to go back to biblical principles and understand, improve and support marriage rather than abandon it.
I freely admit that for me, the earthly title and vocation I cherish most is ”husband”. It all began with promises, and each day I try to live out the commitment I made. Marriage is not always easy and I know that for some it proves painfully impossible. But, mostly, making our promises before witnesses and trying to keep them is what works best.
Public promises make a marriage. Marriages are founded on promises of lifelong, exclusive bonding. Provided that the promises commit both man and woman in good times and in bad ”till death do us part”, and that both intend to relate only to each other, the promises are effective in creating the marriage. Husband and wife can certainly make identical promises.
But promises can reflect something even more profound. Since they unite not simply two people but a man and a woman – two different bodies for whom marriage holds different consequences, needs, expectations and emotions – the promises can express these differences, and traditionally have done so.
Many of our young people want to be ”wives and husbands” rather than simply ”partners” and in their weddings they come as ”bride and groom” rather than simply two individuals. They believe that expressing these differences, including different responsibilities, makes for a better marriage.
Both kinds of promise are provided for in the Sydney Anglican diocese’s proposed Prayer Book, which has been the subject of commentary this week.
There is nothing new in this – it is the same as the Australian Prayer Book which has been used for decades.
Where different promises are made, the man undertakes great responsibility and this is also the wording of the book, as it has always been. The biblical teaching is that the promise made voluntarily by the bride to submit to her husband is matched by the even more onerous obligation which the husband must undertake to act towards his wife as Christ has loved the church. The Bible says that this obligation is ultimately measured by the self-sacrifice of Christ in dying on the cross.
This is not an invitation to bossiness, let alone abuse. A husband who uses the wife’s promise in this way stands condemned for betraying his own sworn obligations. The husband is to take responsibility for his wife and family in a Christ-like way. Her ”submission” is her voluntary acceptance of this pattern of living together, her glad recognition that this is what he intends to bring to the marriage and that it is for her good, his good and the good of children born to them. She is going to accept him as a man who has chosen the self-discipline and commitment of marriage for her sake and for their children. At a time when women rightly complain that they cannot get men to commit, here is a pattern which demands real commitment all the way.
Secular views of marriage are driven by a destructive individualism and libertarianism. This philosophy is inconsistent with the reality of long-term relationships such as marriage and family life.
a conversational podcast
Here’s a new podcast, with my friend Petria, a discussion on the recently released 2011 Australian census data on religion. Considering the recent ridiculous remarks by the appalling Peter Jensen, Anglican Archidiot of Sydney, educated and forward-thinking Australians will be happy to bear witness to the ongoing and surely permanent decline of Anglicanism in this country.
another podcast
this sounds like my kind of podcast
Here’s another podcast, at last, this one on the census.