I’m not much the fan of Q&A these days. I can’t remember whether it was ever any good, but little good can come from a show where the audience is selected for their partisan position according to weighting done on the basis of polls, the panel are too often boring pollies with the odd random thrown in, and the questions mostly reinscribe the media talking points of the day. When it’s good, it’s normally an exception to one of those rules; some of the themed shows sometimes associated with events like Writers Festivals can be quite worthwhile.
And so it was last night – an interesting range of panelists, no pollies, and a discussion about faith and ethics.
It was refreshing to listen to a focused discussion between people of faith and those with no religion (and the excellent point Eva Cox made about non-religious people having faith was one of the many sharp insights she and Susan Carland brought to the table). Cox’s disavowal of the Angry Atheists, and the general tone of the chat, showed that it’s possible to discuss religion, faith and ethics outside a frame characterised by biffo from fundamentalists on both sides of the equation.
One of the topics canvassed was the “brainwashing” of kids in schools. Virginia Trioli might have done better to clarify the difference between the role of chaplains (a program I oppose in the state system) and that of religious education, but, again, it was refreshing to see religious and non-religious interlocutors agree that classes which cover comparative religion and ethics teaching as an alternative to religious instruction are *a good thing*.
That’s an option that exists in New South Wales, for now. Coincidentally, Fred Nile today is threatening to torpedo Barry O’Farrell’s public sector wages squeeze if ethics classes aren’t abolished. I can’t even begin to list the ironies. But I’ll try.
If, for once, Qanda showed something of the free wheeling and rational debate that approaches the norm of Enlightenment discourse, and since that was once tied closely to the notion of open debate in Parliament, this sort of unethical horse trading shows the tendencies working against it at their starkest.
That it leads Fred Nile to (de facto) support for wage justice is only one of the strange results of fundamentalist passions overwhelming rationality.
“and the excellent point Eva Cox made about non-religious people having faith was one of the many sharp insights she and Susan Carland brought to the table”
I didn’t catch much of the show, including this part. Was she making a point about other areas of life in which atheists might have “faith” (spouses, stock markets, reliability of Holden utes etc), or that it requires some kind of faith to maintain a position of non-belief? If the former, I’d argue that the word is being used in a different sense; if the latter, I see that as far from an excellent point, but rather a trite one, often expressed.
From what I saw last night, there was:
- A fair bit of non-confrontational but woolly opinion on God (mathematician: “I don’t think God’s stopped talking to us; I think we’ve stopped listening.” My smug-o-meter went berko at that.)
- Some basic “you go, girl” responses to Muslim dress codes that was a missed opportunity to discuss how much choice Muslim women might have on the matter, and how this might vary by country/culture
- A subdued John Saffran, replete with props, making a few safe comments just for the yucks
The show seemed to be played mainly for tolerance and tone. I’m all for avoiding nastiness and unnecessary confrontation, but I just found this particular panel to be plain _dull_. It felt a little self-consciously inclusive and right-on, with some applause-fishing in evidence. Perhaps that’s the holy grail of Q&A: People just ask the Q’s and the panelists just give their A’s, but I’d prefer more of a robust discussion on what were some potentially very interesting topics.
Somewhere between an infantile shoutfest and a tolerant but tedious nod-a-thon would be good. Inciteful vs insightful?
Here’s the bit from the transcript:
“It was refreshing to listen to a focused discussion between people of faith and those with no religion (and the excellent point Eva Cox made about non-religious people having faith was one of the many sharp insights she and Susan Carland brought to the table). Cox’s disavowal of the Angry Atheists, and the general tone of the chat, showed that it’s possible to discuss religion, faith and ethics outside a frame characterised by biffo from fundamentalists on both sides of the equation.”
That’s not a sharp insight at all. You’ve both missed the point entirely. One of the goals of New Atheism is to disentangle ethics from the traditional domain of religion. In what way is ethics contingent on faith? You assume that it is desirable to “discuss religion, faith and ethics” together, but I see no reason why that is so. We want our ethical discussions to be as sharp and clear as possible. Introducing revelation, faith and supernatural claims will, without fail, result in muddy and soft-headed ethical arguments.
I love Eva Cox so much, her respectful, eminently sensible replies were a god-send (heh!), especially in response to Burkas etc.
More broadly, on another forum I frequent, a religious person asked a question the other day trying to understand atheism, and a commenter pointed out the gulf is not so fast. The commenter pointed out that – as a Christian – the questioner had also chosen not to believe in many hundreds of other religions; the atheist merely extended this one religion further to Christianity. He asked the Christian to consider their feelings about other faiths for perspective on what an atheist might think.
Not an especially deep point, I grant, but I had never thought it that way and found it quite an interesting perspective.
@3 – Lachlan, the issue there is that discussions of ethics often come wrapped up with a lot of preconceptions which are *not* rational. It might be easier to sort that out with reference to religious claims in such debates (though it’s important to emphasise, as is implicit in the post, that rationality is not absent from religious thought). Secular debates on ethics rarely, imho, have the degree of reflexivity and self-criticism needed to expose the irrational grounds which are part of ethical claims.
One can take this another step further and recognise that emotion, affect, and empathy are present, or should be present, in all ethical judgements, and that those elements are not primarily reducible to reason.
In other words, it’s not a simple dichotomy of “religion = unreason, ethics = reason” and we ourselves a severe injustice by proceeding as if it were.
By way of example, the form of Kantian rational ethics which produces universal statements such as “never lie”, allegedly derived from reason, has the obvious failing that its extension by reason alone leads to ridiculous outcomes where the answer to the question from someone knocking at your door “Is Susie here? I’ve come to kill her” is “Yes, she’s in the third bedroom on the right, but killing is wrong”.
Talking of muddy-headed claims, Lachlan, you’ve made a whole lot of un-substantiated ones yourself.
I’m sure Kant, St Augustine, etc etc would be fascinated to hear that religion or faith precludes sharp and clear discussion of ethics. It’s a totally false dichotomy, refuted not only by last night’s discussion but by centuries of religious and moral thought.
New Atheism, indeed. Same old same old to me – and I say this as an atheist myself.
We crossed, patrickg!
You might throw into the mix Stoicism, Epicureanism, and a host of other classical foundations for ethics which were derivations of Platonic and Aristotelian thought… the latter being not separable in principle in its own context from ‘religion’. Or, for that matter, ethics deriving from Buddhism, Daoism, and so on.
It’s neatly summed up in a few classic skeptiquotes, in fact, patrickg:
As Hume argued,
It may be possible to have discussions of ethics that are “sharp and clear”, but the bit before that, where we decide the values…
Yes, exactly, Anna.
Attempts to ground values in reason are either trite or circular, a lot of the time.
I found Eva Cox to be very good on the subject of non-militant Atheism. It is unfortunate that she does apply the same attitude towards her interpretations of sexism in Australian society.
I disagree with her interpretation of Atheists having “faith” in things. Faith is the belief in something unprovable. If you have faith in something then you are not an Atheist. For example – Human society exists and it’s outcomes are provable, therefore we don’t have faith in society, we have hope.
While I have found John Saffran very entertaining in the past – he was a flop last night – not really th right medium for his style.
The lovely Muslim aderhant was a voice of reason. I just wonder how reflective she is of the wider Muslim community – especially in relation to gender issues.
The Christian Maths guy really gave me the shiites. While I am not a huge fan of the militant Atheism style of Hitchens/Dawkins I’d really like to seem them put him to the metaphorical sword.
hear, hear! to Ms Cox’s last quote @2
@2 and @13 – if eva Cox had read Dawkins she would know that he admits that even he is an Agnostic in that there is an extemely small chance that there is a God, however the evidence strongly suggests that there isn’t, so for the sake of definition he is an Atheist.
I found it a releif.. such a contrast from liars and shouters, just a civilised conversation between adults and a situation where the issues are more important than the rancour, for once.
Mark et al. I agree with you that ethics cannot be reduced to reason, and that ethics is linked to intuition and emotion. But I don’t see how this makes “religious thought” any more useful. By “religious thought”, I do not mean “ideas expressed by people who are religious”, I mean “ideas that are uniquely religious”. In other words, ideas that require a faith-based world-view, or divine revelation for support.
When a person who happens to belong to a religious faith makes a valuable ethical contribution, they invariably are saying something that a person of a different faith or no faith would not be prohibited from agreeing with. In other words, an argument unsupported by faith that is at least comprehensible to anyone.
Contrast this with an idea like “burning witches is a moral good”, which was once widely accepted. This is a specifically religious morality, as the argument for it is nonsense to someone who does not share the faith.
I do not contend that religious people have not or could not in future make valuable ethical contributions. But I do contend that the religious mode of thought is, at best, useless; and at worst, very harmful. The sooner ethics is permanently divorced from religion, the better.
P.S. I often disagree with what’s posted on LP, but you post some thought-provoking stuff. It’s a good site. I just didn’t want to come across as a perennial curmudgeon
I wish I’d watched, now.
@16 – Lachlan, but I’m not sure there *are* too many ethical principles of religious origin which are lacking in a rational basis. Where they don’t have a rational basis, they’re very often from a cultural or social value position which is relatively independent of religion. Hence you see the same deleterious practices in particular cultures where there is difference in religious adherence.
Burning witches isn’t a good example, because the forces which led people to think it was a good thing were far more pervasive than religion. In a lot of instances, religion acted as a break or a catalyst against what was often folk violence. Not in all, but it’s not a good analogy.
Well of course the classic quote on the social role of religion is Gibbon’s:
Gibbon contended that Christianity was spasmodically persecuted as being the best use for it by the magistrates (ie as a scapegoat), until Constantine found a better use.
I’m afraid I can’t but disagree with Eva Cox’s definition of ‘faith’ as held by atheists. To my mind religious faith necessarily involves belief in and devotion to that which is unknown and unseen and which is not quantifiable. Kierkegaard’s work on this issue is a fine example of this kind of thought process. However I must agree with other posters that when i say i have ‘faith’ in human progress, science and the Bronco’s coaching staff, i am not applying the Either/Or dialectic. Rather I am saying, based on past evidence and the very visible achievements of science/humanity/Anthony Griffen, I believe in their ability to achieve certain outcomes. This is a very different kind of faith from a sincere belief in the unseen and unknowable. I appreciate the notion that just because I am an atheist doesn’t mean I am incapable of awe, or wonder or ‘non-rational’ thinking but ‘faith’ is not a term I would apply tonthose who lack a belief in God.
@19 – DD, Gibbon was, of course, talking in code a bit as a contemporary of the philosophes. It’s actually more about the 18th century intellectual elite projecting their attitudes back on the past.
You wouldn’t find too many scholars of Christianity in late antiquity or of Roman religion who’d agree with him these days.
He’s still a damn good read, though!
@20 – Paul, I’d put it to you, and this is the stock in trade of first year social science lectures everywhere, that “society” and “culture” are “the unseen and (to some degree) the unknowable”. Yet we believe in them, and that belief has effects.
It went up on iView yesterday.
http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/801628
@18 – If this is so, then the religious connection is purely a historical matter and in no way essential. What is gained by trying to maintain this unnecessary connection in the future? (I am not saying we should erase the historic context).
I’m dubious that Christians would have thought that systematically killing witches was morally good without a divine commandment to do so, whatever the other contributing factors may have been. And it is beyond my imagination to construct a justification that does not rest on divine revelation. Things would definitely have gone better without faith, is what I’m saying.
I also agree that the development of religion did count as progress at the time. So perhaps I can further specify my position as “religion is not useful in our post-enlightenment era”.
Well, Lachlan, the majority of people who’ve ever lived have been religious. So it’s probably only been in a few epochs that it’s been possible to make ethical arguments which don’t partake in religion. But that doesn’t mean that religion, or “divine commandment” was the sole or prime cause for particular practices (which are distinct from arguments, anyway). So it’s possible to argue that Enlightenment reason enables ethical arguments to be made without reference to religion, but that takes us right back to the points I made above about values and the dispositions that underpin ethical arguments and behaviours not being rational.
In other words, faith in rationality alone is rationally unsustainable!
A supernatural worldview where they believe that magic works, and that the neighbours might directly cause them harm by casting magic spells, is sufficient for persecution and execution of accused witches without any “divine commandment”. Throw in a legal system where property belonging to a convicted witch was auctioned off to the natural advantage of the richest people in the area, and you don’t need much else for a wave of accusations.
Surely we all know that there are a whole bunch of people who buy into an astrology/crystals/magick supernatural worldview without being otherwise religious. I can easily imagine circumstances today in which that could end really badly for somebody if a believer was convinced that the person was using those supernatural tools against them.
A skeptical worldview arms us equally as well against this sort of supernatural worldview as it does against the particularly religious supernatural worldviews, of course.
… and you’ve also got the sorts of grudges that develop in small relatively closed communities, and a situation where public law was poorly established, and a culture of feud and vengeance prevailed.
We also have to be much more precise about when and where we’re talking about. The “Peace of God” movement, for instance, in the 11th century, contributed mightily to making law more normatively central to dispute resolution, and lawless violence less ubiquitous. In some instances, church authorities were – as well as encouraging law as a norm – also restraining folk violence. There were big learned disputes about whether witchcraft was real, too. If we’re talking New England puritanism, we’re talking about something quite different… So, too, sometimes religious sanctions for deviant behaviour were much milder than civil sanctions.
Too much of the image we have comes from movies or other forms of popular culture and is either antithetical to historical reality, or radically simplifies it.
Don’t forget, too, that in the Middle Ages, *everyone* was Christian in one sense, so it’s very difficult to analyse things as if there were a bunch of people wanting to do something or other, and another bunch wanting them to do it differently because of “religion”. Religion and the social field were not entirely but largely self-identical.
Re burqas:
One of the points missing from last night’s programme was that the opposition to the wearing of burqas comes from Christian conservatives like Fred Nile and Cory Bernardi. Even in France, where the wearing of the burqa is circumscribed, the movement against the burqa was initiated by conservatives posing as secular. I have never heard atheists oppose the wearing of burqas, and Eva Cox’s opinions were a welcome confirmation of my observation.
Re ethics classes:
Fred Nile may think he has some traction on this issue because Barry O’Farrell stated just before the election that he was opposed to them, but was forced to change his position because of widespread pressure. I hope that the secular education lobbies in other states take inspiration from NSW and work to bring ethics classes to schools in their states.
Re school chaplaincy programme:
There is a constitutional challenge to the school chaplaincy programme to be heard in the High Court next month. Although it has the backing of the Secular Party, it was in fact initiated by a liberal Christian.
Mark,
everyone in Europe in the middle ages was Christian? Not even in Europe… And before the christianisation of the Roman empire there were a whole bunch of different belief systems in Europe alone. I mean this claim to absolute truth that religions make, in particular the Christian religion, is so ridiculous. It’s single argument is that you can’t prove that our God doesn’t exist?! This is an incredible position. Talk about limiting free speech.
Mark burning witches may be a poor example but burning heretics, catholics or protestants is surely religious. And in all cases religion was being used to identify ‘bad’ people.
I think in many of these cases the underlying causes were political (to maintain power over organised groups) and you see similar schismatic behaviour in extreme political groups and religious sects. But religion as an identifier seems to aid in identifying people who are sufficiently different to not deserve ethical treatment.
Fortunately most extremist groups seem to spend too much time infighting over religious or ideological purity to actually achieve real power over civil society. When they manage to hijack or inherit political power they become dangerous.
While I didn’t think last night’s episode was that great the show is at least improved by the absence of politicians with their talking points, themes of the day etc.
Safran didn’t really seem like he knew what was going on and perhaps that Christian mathematician and his “evidence” could’ve been replaced by someone a bit more sensible like Father Bob.
Joe, I said “in a sense”. But the thesis that there was surviving paganism has now been pretty much discredited by historians. You can of course point to countries which came late to Christianisation, and I suppose it depends on your definition of the Middle Ages. But I think that it’s a true statement for the High Middle Ages, after the effective elimination of Cathars, etc. Of course, Christianity encompassed a wide variety of beliefs and practices (and nor was Latin Christianity a dogmatic religion in the post-Reformation or Enlightenment sense), but that is the point – Christian in a sense. Certainly, “atheists” were very few, and the word in fact did not have the meaning and signification it now has.
I don’t accept the premise of the foregoing paragraph, but that doesn’t follow, and it doesn’t make any sense to me in context.
… not quite, it was being used to identify wrongly religious people. But, yes, it’s a better analogy than witchcraft!
Note, though, that it doesn’t follow from this that such behaviour is exclusively religious, as you say. Pre-modern societies tended to execute people for dissent, no matter what type. It’s also difficult, in many instances, to separate the religious from the political – ie Elizabethan executions of Catholics for denying the Queen’s sovereignty (not that all of them did!)…
But, in general, aside from establishing that there’s not a neat causal link between religion and, say, violence, the poverty of these arguments is that they don’t stand up to reason. They wrongly leap from the particular to the general or universal, which is why Cox is right to say they’re faith based statements, not rational arguments.
Mark, I refer to the fact that even in the most fanatical of Christian kingdoms there were heathens, whether they be Muslims, Jews, Celts, etc.
Europe was never a mono-culture.
I think absolutism limits free speech. It limits discussion. In this sense, I find religious belief immutable and radical.
Aetheism is overcooked!
It’s interesting how critic of religions is always flipped. Without being an historian, I find it highly likely that most people in the middle ages were not Christians in the sense that they were unable to read Latin, had no bible, etc. and were mainly concerned with surviving for as long as they could. Were more fecund than ecclesiastical.
Well, a good analogy, taken from the Christopher Hitchens’ clip, which I linked to yesterday is the concept of genital mutilation.
Why would you want to hack away at the genitals of a child in the 21st century? I say the 21st century, because I’m pre-emptively guarding against the historical/ health arguments, which I don’t agree with, but which are always raised.
I think what Lachlan was referring to is the twisting of ideas that results from religious thinking. Even if a moral position is good, it’s justification is wrong, because it is inherently based on something which isn’t provable. It’s authority is overbearing and totalitarian.
I retract, Joe – of course, there were small minorities of adherents of other religions. Generally, the church acted to protect Jews, though the best examples of anti-Semitism are from the English and Spanish monarchies – the latter being extreme in its intolerance towards Jews and Muslims. I don’t think there were non-Christian “Celts” though…
On the last paragraph, there’s again new evidence that Latin in its spoken form was quite intelligible still later than realised – the final development of the Romance languages as separate tongues is now thought to be later than thought. But, of course, in many places, the high nobility were illiterate in the sense of not being able to write (reading is easier to learn than writing). But – I think it’s a false distinction, and redolent of old ones between high and popular culture. Almost all the evidence now of folk belief suggests that “mere survival” was highly structured by religious and other cultural patterns.
Again, obviously absolutism limits free speech, but I don’t think religious truth claims have that effect in the contemporary world, theocracies excepted.
That one has been debated to death on this blog, and again it’s very clear that it has cultural rather than religious origins. Hitchens wouldn’t have a clue – it’s just part of his anti-Islam crusade.
By “religious thought”, I do not mean “ideas expressed by people who are religious”, I mean “ideas that are uniquely religious”. In other words, ideas that require a faith-based world-view, or divine revelation for support.
I feel that shifting those goal posts is certainly a miraculous act!
I think that, again, you’re positing a somewhat false dichotomy here, and I can’t help but feel your inherent atheism is limiting how you’re approaching this discussion.
Without claiming to speak for all theists, certainly the religious people I have known and read of, do not pass a dividing line between “religious” and “non-religious”, in the way that you do, and we might deploy in a governmental setting by promoting secularism.
For someone who is religious, all ideas are religious; their religion shapes who they are, and how they think, and what they react to – both voluntarily and involuntarily, in the same way that my class, race, political alignment etc shape my own personality, thoughts, and reactions.
By trying to put a fence around the “uniquely religious”, I feel like you’re begging the question by essentially arguing that only religious ideas you disagree with are truly religious, and other ideas (that you agree with) are not religious in any meaningful sense. I refute that wholeheartedly: to a religious person, all ideas are religious. You can see this quite clearly with things like Aristotelian virtues, much of Kant, Goethe etc, and even in what you might call apostate philosophies – without religion they simply could not be.
More broadly, I have trouble with a kind of essentialism I feel is hiding behind a lot of “New Atheism”, which implies that atheists are inherently more rational and “logical” than religious people. Everybody is irrational, and institutions – be they religious, secular, governmental or familial – can help or hinder in addressing that; I’m disinclined to make blanket judgments about it. I really strive to judge arguments on their merits, and I try not to care about the beliefs, religious or otherwise, that may be informing those arguments – except insofar as they can inform me. Secular debate, if you will!
It is noble that you can be so pragmatic about religion, patrickg!
Agree wholeheartedly, patrickg!
There’s a lack of understanding of the actual lived experience of being religious. I thought some of that sense might have come through from some of the panelists on Qanda last night.
“the majority of people who’ve ever lived have been religious”
I think we ought to be careful here; classical ideas of religio would have been regarded by the later christians as mere superstitio, and vice-versa. Does an ancient Roman believe in the gods? Well, if this one here obeys this contract I’m making with it, sure. Deliver the agreed outcome and I’ll offer up a fine white bull on your alter, O Iuppiter.
Cicero seems pretty sceptical in de Divinatione, yet he’s a member of the college of augurs! And as a matter of course, as a consul and a senator, he’s bound to take the auspices before doing just about anything official, none of which really matters whether he believes in it or not, as long as it’s done with the correct form.
All of which is the sort of thing that Augustine relentlessly mocks in de Civitate Dei.
Of course, the extensive archaeological evidence shows us there must have been great reverence for the supernatural forces perceived as driving the natural world; my objection is to the conception of this as the same ‘religion’ that we talk about when we discuss e.g. Christianity (e.g. rooted in ‘faith’ and focussed as a system of belief on the everlasting life of the soul after the death of the believer) .
I didn’t see the show. I find Q&A pretty much exasperatingly stupid and typically offering nothing but stultified and pre-determined orthodoxies from all sides.
alter=altar. not a good typo for me to make.
Tyro, you’re right to suggest that religion is more complex a beast than it appears – my contrast there is with ‘atheists’ or ‘agnostics’, two categories of unbelief which, with a few pretty debatable exceptions, are pretty much only a couple of centuries old.
It’s true that there is a big difference between Roman religion and Abrahamic faiths, though obviously there’s also commonalities. As an analytic category, ideally speaking, I’d confine religion to the modern era. If I had my sociologist’s hat on.
It’s notoriously difficult to define in social science.
Sorry to have to say this, but my impression is that Mark is a Christian monoculturalist. He doesn’t discriminate against Jews, Muslims or heathens. He just fails to recognize their historical existence. He would have learnt nothing from last night’s show, and there will be no productive outcome from arguing with him.
Sorry, I posted too soon. I have just read Mark @ 36 where he retracts and acknowledges the existence of Jews and Muslims. However, he is wrong here:
My understanding of the Inquisition in Spain, France and Italy is that it was directed against Jews, while in Germany, the main object of persecution and murder were “pagan” women. As a Catholic apologist, Mark still has a blind eye to the crimes of the Catholic church, both historical and current.
Again, Mark is wrong. Currently there is a proposition on the books in California to have male circumcision made illegal. The opposition to this proposal is coming exclusively from the Jewish and Muslim lobbies.
No, silkworm, I’m not into apologetics. I do read history though.
Your understanding of the Inquisition is not right. It wasn’t one unitary body across different kingdoms. Indeed, it didn’t exist in France – some ‘inquisitions’ often run by Dominicans were around at the time of the Cathar and Joachite heresies, and the ‘Avignon captivity’. In Spain, it was certainly largely directed by concerns about “pure blood” – also against Muslims. In Italy, again, there’s no such thing as “The Inquisition”, and nor was Italy a country in the Middle Ages.
You may be thinking about the Roman Inquisition, which only after the Council of Trent (around about the same time witch trials, which were never ubiquitous anyway, and were most common in countries which later became Protestant, started to run out of steam) became a Church wide institution. Its jurisdiction, however, was not recognised by the Habsburg monarchy, or the French “most Catholic” kings (one of the most prominent of which, Henri IV of Navarre, was an ex-Calvinist).
The protection accorded to Jews by Bishops and Popes is well documented in many sources, in any case.
The notion that witch trials were directed against “pagan” women is also wrong, because there’s now accepted to be no real evidence of “pagan survival”. It appears to be a myth that started in the 19th century, and gained traction in the 20th.
I have no intention whatsoever of defending the medieval Catholic church. I do point out that you don’t know your history, and your argument is both logically flawed and based on supposition, error and bias rather than fact, and therefore is not rational.
But it’s really not worth arguing the toss with you, because I’ll just run up against your New Atheist fundamentalism.
Last response, silkworm. I don’t think male circumcision is usually referred to as “genital mutilation”, and I assumed Joe was making the usual FGM argument.
I am not surprised that “Jewish and Muslim lobbies” are opposing such a Californian law as it’s a religious requirement in Judaism, and a religious practice among Muslims, though not a requirement of the Q’uran.
What the law has to do with the post, or anything much else, is unclear to me, however.
Like Mark, I’ve by and large avoided QANDA on the basis that it is almost always a vacuous RW echochamber.
From the descriptions above, it seems that last night it was a vacuous religious echochamber.
I had always had a great deal of respect for Eva Cox, but it seems it was misplaced.
That’s modernism for you! How fortunate that you have rejected the Enlightenment!
Silkworm, the point of this thread is not to argue about the standard New Atheist talking points, it’s to discuss the post.
@12 – what does that mean?
patrickg @38 – In my defence on the charge of goal post shifting, we’re all making arguments by firing off short blog comments. I think it’s fair for me to clarify my earlier shorthand.
You say you view all ideas as religious. But obviously many ideas can be accepted by the non-religious without difficulty. Is a non-religious person less able to assert that murder is wrong than a believer? Then consider the idea “the creator of the universe deeply cares about me and how I live my life, and has a personal relationship with me.” When I say uniquely religious, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Take away faith and the idea no longer makes sense. So I think that counts as a distinctly religious mode of thought. The criteria for this is not whether I agree with the idea, but whether it is supported by faith or some combination of evidence and argument. I would further assert that ideas supported by faith have not served us well.
‘More broadly, I have trouble with a kind of essentialism I feel is hiding behind a lot of “New Atheism”, which implies that atheists are inherently more rational and “logical” than religious people.’ – I would certainly not assert this, and I’m not sure it’s as common amongst New Atheists as you believe. At least I hope not. And I would not claim that I am perfectly rational and completely immune to making faith-based appeals. I try to avoid it, rather than encourage it, however. I would say that when a religious person makes a rational argument that marshals supporting evidence, they are doing so in spite of their faith rather than because of it.
“I really strive to judge arguments on their merits, and I try not to care about the beliefs, religious or otherwise, that may be informing those arguments” – I’m in complete agreement with you on this, so it seems I’m not communicating well at all here. Say a Christian believes as a matter of faith that an embryo has an immortal soul, and therefore abortion is murder. If that person prevents a well-reasoned argument that does not rely on faith, an argument that a non-believer could also possibly make, then no problem. I would not categorise that as a uniquely religious ethical position. Which is basically my point. Religion and ethics have been linked historically, as religion was for a long time the only game in town; but if you take religion away you lose absolutely nothing. Ethics works fine without it. I would argue it works better, in fact.
Anyway, fun discussion peeps.
Yep an enjoyable debate on the whole.
Speaking as an atheist, I find a lot to dislike in the ‘new atheism’. For example, the rejection of all theological reasoning. Well, if reasoned discourse (λόγος) about god (θεός), is not theological (even if your reasoning is to reject the concept and necessity of all gods, as atheists do), then what is it? Because it’s not scientific. Science is an empiricist explanation of the natural world. Science neither requires, but nor can empirically reason, de natura deorum. So a reasoned discourse about the non-existence of god, is by definition, a theological one.
As a 21st century atheist, I find the “religion” of the Romans highly anachronistic. As a Romanist, however, my detailed understanding of it is essential to much of what my field does (such as anyone can understand it from this distance in time). Clearly it forms a central part of Roman identity, politically and socially. Therefore a blanket rejection of any idea that one can locate nuance and rationality in religious systems of thought, as new atheism repeatedly does, I find rather poor reasoning at best, and quite hysterical at its worst.
Mark, thanks, and also apologies.
I’ll be buggered if I can work out any link between faith and ethics.
There’s a really clear solution to the Nileists, get religion the hell out of schools whether public or private. That way even the kids of superstitious sect members can go to ethics classes.
Actually I’ll be buggered anyway.
Speaking as a scientist I find a lot to dislike in the “new theologism”.
I don’t regject ‘theological “reasoning”‘, I’ve just never seen any of it supported by scientific enuiry. It’s harmless if it’s kept between consenting adults, but foisted on children it’s abusive.
Strictly speaking, I would not call myself an atheist or agnostic, but rather a theological noncognitivist or “ignostic.” I maintain that there is no coherent definition of God, and that therefore the question of the existence of God cannot be meaningfully discussed.
I think the point about the comparative study of religion is a useful one in the context of forming an empirical base to support atheism.
A broad survey of religious belief leads one to the conclusion that given that each religion makes the claim that it exclusively describes the correct way to approach the godhead and that these precepts, when removed of their adornments, can be reduced to archetypes that are almost indistinguishable, one is led to the conclusion that religious belief is indeed the product of psychological phenomena. We may not fully understand what the cause is be I think we have some fairly strong evidence for a species wide effect. It’s a bit Proppian but it’ll do me.
@56, no worries, silkworm. Always happy to have a yarn if we can make a reciprocal assumption of good faith and argue fact and logic, not apologetics, either Christian or Atheist!
Well, rhetorically this is aimed at me; so I’ll answer.
I agree with that; it’s not meant to be supported by scientific ‘enuiry’- didn’t I just say that? However, your use of the scare quotes around the word “reasoning” actually tells me, despite any scientific credentials, you haven’t actually fully thought through what “reason” actually is and its relationship to scientific thought (hint: science brings an empiricist method to pair with reason). But this is far from saying that science is the only form of “reason” – and to claim that it is is an arrogant untruth.
As for always being abusive if “foisted on children”; I don’t think that this is an a priori true statement. Abusive forms of it are abusive. As a child, I was exposed to the usual mild form of non-committal Protestantism that many Australians nominally grow up with. I did not feel it was abusive at the time, and by about age 13 had worked out for myself it was a load of old cobblers. I would not expose my own children to it, but I’m not going to sit in judgement on others unless there’s clear evidence of abuse, not just blanket assertions of it.
This is where I depart from Dawkins et al. Their reasoning to me [that religion is universally bad always] seems to travel from the particular to the universal rather rapidly and without rigorous critical reasoning. Every time I question this point among his fellow travellers I get vague handwavy statements about ‘theological “reasoning”‘ and then blanket condemnations about child abuse and similar sorts of statements.
At age 13 I worked out that god is crap because in my home encyclopaedia I read about other religions and I quickly realised claims to such universal truth appear to be everywhere, and many appeared to be in logical conflict with other (i.e. exclusionary). Only one of them could logically be right, and all the others wrong. This meant to me, they are probably all wrong, why believe one claim over another?. All of this is not ‘scientific’ reasoning, it is a theological argument whether you like it or not (although I did not realise it at the time). Later when I was slightly older and I realised that humans did not require a creator to explain the Universe scientifically it only confirmed to me my already reasoned conclusion.
It’s strange that people ascribe witch burning and FGM primarily to religion because I think they spring from misogyny and the desire to control and punish women. Both the persecution of solitary noncomformist women (and to a lesser extent, men) and the ritual mutilation of their bodies (Graham Reeves ) happen outside of the religious context, what religion brings is the efficient systematization of both.
Religious people express their misogyny in religious ways, they use religion to justify the persecution of enemies, in each case religion may be a justification but it is not the cause, which I suspect is the human frailty we all share. Similarly, you would have to say that rigid thinking, extreme intolerance verging on eliminationism, and putting one’s values to work in the service of a holy war are human, not religious faults since they describe the New Atheists, at least as embodied by Hitchens and Dawkins,very well. Hitchens’ recent statements on Islam are unequivocably eliminationist, his New Atheism comes with its own New Crusade.
Initially I was pleased to see a bolshie atheism that would combat the blatant attacks on reason and science by the religious right, but not any more, and it leaves me wondering whether any kind of organising around shared values is inevitably beset by problems of absolutism and fundamentalism, not to mention the elevation of flawed (and frakking sexist) men to the status of oracles.
su and lachlan: Do you think that perhaps a lot of the problems surronding faith come from a conflation of the term faith as understood apophatically (a la Armstrong) with dogma and creduilty?
Many liberal christians would say that your statement about a personal god is not true Lachlan, but they would still argue that they have faith, and that faith is an important part of who they are, and informs everything that they do.
My worry is that the new atheists just aren’t talking about interesting theology – and instead by setting themselves up diametrically opposite to the fundies they just provide oxygen for a debate which should be non-existent. Nothing like a shared enemy to promote groupthink.
I guess I agree with Mark, that it is difficult to have a discussion about ethics without at least considering what makes people behave the way they do. Identity seems to be a big part of that.
Well said, Tyro.
I think the basic response to this is the one made on Qanda – everyone brings up kids with a set of values and a set of propositions about how the world is. And as implied by Cox’s point, it could be turned around to be just as critical of kids being brought up as New Atheists.
The general statement takes its force from the particular:
(a) it implies that any form of religious upbringing is opposed to teaching science (whereas a lot isn’t);
(b) rhetorically, using the term “abuse” is deliberately supposed to conflate religious upbringing with clergy sexual abuse;
(c) it implies that controversies about chaplains in schools, etc, are the same thing as kids being brought up with a particular faith.
It’s therefore both deceptive (unethical) and illogical (argumentatively flawed).
Mark@48: I am not surprised that “Jewish and Muslim lobbies” are opposing such a Californian law as it’s a religious requirement in Judaism, and a religious practice among Muslims, though not a requirement of the Q’uran.
To me, and I suspect to many others, “our religion requires it” is not a reason that should have weight in law. For example, I don’t care what your religion says about the desirability of killing adulterers, doing so is wrong and the law should not permit it. If cosmetic surgery on infant genitals is required by some religions, we need to look only at the evidence. Then carefully consider the benefits and costs of this to the child before making the law reflect observable reality.
The ethical problem is clear. On one side you have people claiming the right to perform a risky surgical intervention on their children for religious reasons. On the other people saying that surgery should only be carried out on children for the benefit of the child. The concession made by religous people that “we should look for measurable benefits that follow from this religious practice” would not be considered worth talking about if it was not their religious practice. The fact that we’re even having the debate suggests to me that religion has overwhelmed reason.
If you want a less-personal argument, look at the s59 debate in NZ. On the one hand you had a bunch of Christians claiming that their god required them to beat their children. On the other, a bunch of human rights types talking about how violence against children is both unnecessary and wrong. In this case reason triumphed over religion, but the child-beaters are still complaining about that.
Oh, with the exception that “I break the law because my religion requires it” should be considered when sentencing someone. Viz, indefinite detention should be an option for the criminally religious.
moz, I don’t know the background to the proposed California legislation, but I’d be a little suspicious that its prime motivation really is child protection.
Mark, it’s being pushed by anti-circumcision zealots, many of whom have been circumcised and are not happy about it. I don’t know about the financial backers, but they have only just barely made it out of crank status in the last few years. I can’t actually think of a body that might support them for bad reasons, mostly because they happily offend the J/C/M triumverate as well as many doctors and parents. My parents are appalled that I might not be happy about their decision in that regard, and that does seem to be the dominant reaction.
Which is not to say that there are no Christian morons who see supporting them as a good way to get at Jews and Muslims. But those Christian morons will discover that there’s no “if your god is the one true god you get to break the law” exemption.
Well, that’s kinda what I suspected, moz. I imagine it doesn’t have much chance of passing into law.
I really like what Tyro has had to say on this thread. Thanks for a very clear explanation of why I, too am suspicious of the “New Atheists.” I agree with su too, that religion may well be just a mode for systematizing misogyny and racism rather than related to its cause – though I think it’s also a very good lens through which to concentrate the negative impulses of a culture.
Another way I dislike the “New Atheists” is their movement from a specific, angry criticism of christianity (common in christian societies) to a blanket condemnation of all religion in the same terms. This is really unreasonable because a lot of religions have very different qualities and very different historical experiences of religiously-derived oppression. This, I have read, is one reason why Islamic cultures don’t care so much about separation of church and state – because historically the combination of the two was the high point of muslim culture, not its low point.
I look at the attacks of people like Dawkins on religion, and compare what they say with the quiet paganism of Shinto, and think they don’t really know much about religion at all, they’re just very angry at their experience of christianity.
Getting back on the topic of the thread – isn’t there now some fear coming from Nile et al that the ethics classes in schools will replace “religion” classes and thus actually reduce the religious content of the school system? I saw a headline to that effect a few days ago.
Tyro Rex @62:
That makes two of us. In fact it probably makes quite a lot of us.
sg @71:
I think there’s an important point to be made here. Self-analysing my own journey away from the eclectic Protestantism of my childhood, I have realised that it definitely did not begin with questioning the existence of God, much less the primary Christian virtues which I continue to have great respect for, but absurd aspects of my Sunday School experience such as its preaching of creationism, and the morbid obsession of many self-described Christians with the secondary “virtues” of Christianity (especially those to do with sexuality) whilst failing to live up to the primary virtues. I think it behoves all of us agnostics, atheists, freethinkers, etc., to conduct such a self-analysis.
Do you know of any such kids, or is it just a supposition on your part?
There is evidence chaplains are proselytising in NSW public schools and students are being encouraged to join religious activities and prayer meetings. Scripture Union is even more direct about their intentions. In the forward to a book on school chaplains, Scripture Union’s CEO, Tim Mander admits “To have a full-time Christian presence in government schools in this ever-increasing secular world is an unbelievable privilege. Here is the church’s opportunity to make a connection with the one place through which every young person must attend: our schools.” And from SU (Qld) News, June 2006, “School chaplaincy, camps and missions are exposing thousands of young people and children to the good news of Jesus every year.”
Evidence is evidence, and rationalism teaches us how to use it. Faith on the other hand teaches us how to disregard evidence.
That is religiously motivated moralizing. You have provided an excellent example of the very problem of intellectual and moral blindness that we are talking about.
Yes, I’m aware of that, silkworm, and I’m opposed to federal support for chaplains in government schools.
My point is that the particular argument does not support a generalised and universal claim that “teaching religion is abusive”.
That’s just a matter of logic and the protocols of reasoning. Your inductive leap here is faith-based, rather than evidence-based
Here we go again. The implication here is that the movement to prevent this form of physical abuse on children is an exercise in religion-bashing. Here is another case of how religious defensiveness overwhelms clear moral reasoning.
Anyone for a beer?
Yes, sg, that is the case, but unlike you, I regard both the increase in ethics education and the decrease in scriptural education as positive steps.
Mark@70: I imagine it doesn’t have much chance of passing into law.
FFS, we frown on people piercing the ears of their infants, but we’re fine with cosmetic surgery that requires anaesthetic?
As I said, it goes against the beliefs of many religious nutcases and it makes an awful lot of people feel uncomfortable. Circumcision rates are dropping rapidly and once we have parents who don’t have to look back and wonder if they mutilated their own children it will get easier to discuss. I predict it will take a generation or so until those people die off and we can start having a rational debate about whether it’s a good idea.
I think it’s an excellent example of religious dogma making a rational discussion impossible. Which was, I recall, what you originally wanted examples of.
No, I don’t think so, moz, because it doesn’t take into account the view of the people who would see it as an attack on their religious beliefs. Remember – liberal societies are supposed to offer protections to minorities. A rational calculus would need to assess benefit and perceived harm, and to take account of values which are not derived from rationality per se.
It seems to me very provocative to describe Jews and Muslims in this context as “religious nutcases”. It’s most unlikely that Jews will stop circumcising kids after a couple of millennia. That way of framing this custom also suggests to me that there are prejudicious assumptions underlying it, just as silkworm displays when he is unable to argue the points actually made, and has to resort to labeling people and distorting what they say (as has started to happen again).
It doesn’t seem to me that what is being put forward here constitutes a “rational debate”.
Make that a sencha razor, and we may discuss the line IRC Eva Cox was offering to the first question, on taking the high moral ground, in that Q&A episode:
” The scandal sheets, the magazines and the various other things. I think we need to ask questions about why but I don’t think we can just blame everybody and say that if it wasn’t there they wouldn’t read it. So I think we just need to be a little bit more controlled about the fact that we have to blame everybody and we blame the journalists or we blame the people. Maybe it’s just bad taste. “
Btw. I was thinking precisely of circumcision when I raised the genital mutilation point above– see the Hitchens clip for more information.
And describing Hitchens as being an anti-muslim fascist is also a bit superficial.
I think the step back from rationality will end in tears. What is it based on?
This seems like a strange type of rationalism that you’re describing Mark. Rationalism for me means reasoned– which also includes political reason, for example (or human thought, in general). And it’s possible to reflect on the limits of human reason.
So, I guess, maybe we’re talking about Modern notions like “progress”?
Maybe not though. (This is, btw. a flaw in our modern society that we are unable to discuss this kind of issue in a meaningful way.)
A concrete example: It really annoys me when religious people believe in fate, as if we’re on some pre-ordained train ride to heaven/hell. This whole notion of God’s will is for me, an example of delusional thinking.
Joe, public or political reason needs to take into account the beliefs and desires of citizens, including those of minorities, even if such beliefs and desires may not be ‘rational’. This is my central point, though – in this instance, there are a stack of unexamined value judgements being made which are unreflected on. Rather, they are masked by a claim to objectivity. But the rhetorical nature of that claim is itself highly differential and, indeed, partisan.
That’s right. We don’t take irrational feelings and unethical beliefs into account.
I’d also point out that the cultural belief in fate is much wider than religious culture. I’d argue that religious belief, at least of a certain stripe, actually has a liberatory effect, freeing people from notions of fate or fatalism.
Again, various things that you think are wrong, distasteful, delusional, whatever, are wrongly being conflated with the category ‘religion’.
I’d go back to what I said above – as an analytical category, it’s almost too broad to bear the weight of what is included in it. I suspect in these contexts, it’s being used in an affective, emotive and value-laden manner.
Certainly, there are tons of invalid generalisations from particulars to a universal being made.
Rational calculus? That’s a joke, right? Enough of your sophistry.
My contempt for you is rising exponentially.
silkworm, you consistently avoid engaging with actual arguments which contradict your position, and engage in personal polemics and name calling, which is *not* a rational mode of argumentation. So I choose not to continue to regard you as an interlocutor in this conversation.
I don’t care whether or not you have contempt for me, but you are certainly radically undermining your own claim to be engaging in rational argumentation by constantly impugning my motives.
Kim,
“…classes which cover comparative religion and ethics teaching as an alternative to religious instruction are ‘a good thing’. That’s an option that exists in New South Wales, for now…”
Is that right? My understanding is that kids will have the choice between “scripture” and secular ethics classes. I didn’t think that the “ethics” classes discussed religion.
I would agree that teaching of comparative religion would be a good thing, but I’m not sure that it is happening, or proposed, in NSW.
Silkworm you are way outside the bounds of the comments policy.
Incurious you are right that it’s not on the agenda in NSW but it was an idea mentioned in the Qanda discussion.
Silkworm, you are not covering yourself in glory here. Who is this royal “we” you refer to when you say that “we” dismiss “irrational feelings and unethical beliefs”? You certainly don’t speak for *this* atheist. I find your arguments decidedly non-rational, myself.
And then you go and basically prove Mark’s point in your last two comments.
I’m going to raise a potentially sensitive issue here; all this is coming from someone who felt insecure enough about a mildly offensive religious sign outside a church to smear dogshit on it . With their bare hands. (see Saturday Salon for anyone who missed that little gem on the weekend). I’ve tried my best to ignore that comment thread on Saturday/Sunday and in here too – but seriously? You want people to really believe that you speak for all “rationality” and then you readily admite that you behave like that? And then you get all high and mighty with the fascist labels?
Amateur psychologising is not really my thing but I’m sensing some deep emotional pain here and I suspect that it is actually preventing you from rationally engaging in debate. As far as I can tell from your comments.
I’ve written two posts above that attempt to address from the perspective of an atheist the decoupling of ‘the rational’ from ‘the scientific’ and why I think the ‘new atheism’ often fails at the former. They are not the same thing and the latter does not have complete claim on the former. You have chosen to not engage with any of these points nor have you as far as I can tell engaged in any compelling way with the points that Mark raises.
Tyro you didn’t see two further comments we deleted.
But let’s not make this a discussion about silkworm.
My comment is in moderation?!
It was automoderated and quickly released. Check again.
Kim, yeah I definitely saw those comments. That’s what tipped me over the edge to engage with it. Anyway I agree, it’s not worth propagating any further.
Yes, the concept of Progress for example. BUT– this isn’t the proposition! All religions describe a fate, this is a necessary condition and just because it’s possible to find examples of other world views which also describe the goal of history, that doesn’t get religion off the hook. Anyway, this debate was more or less had and done with things like the US constitution. Religious belief is anathema to political will. Religion has no place in public reason.
Well, this is not how many people understand religion or religious belief. You now have me arguing against something which is so abstract as to not exist or totally idiosyncratic. I don’t think that’s an entirely honest position to take.
I’m not at all clear about what the point is now. Are you speaking about tolerance? How would you, for example, prioritise the requirements of tolerance for another’s belief and the rule of law? And to make it interesting let’s invert the current historical situation in Australia and imagine that we’re living in Afghanistan under sharia law? (Or, if you will, in East Germany.)
Sorry, Joe, I find this intensely confusing.
Not all religions have the category of fate, as I’ve stated. It’s an invalid generalisation.
If you read my comment carefully, my point was that public or political reason has to take into account the values of citizens, some of which may be religious. That doesn’t make public decision making religious.
Tyro Rex said:
Tyro Rex, I don’t see how this is relevant– I mean, it’s a beautiful rhetorical trick, isn’t it, ‘smearing a religious sign with dogpoo using your bare hands.’ But just maybe, we’re no longer in Kansas, so I think it’s best to stick to the main ideas and not indulge in discussing the original act lest it sally the pure waters of the LP river even more
Let me take a concrete example.
And I’m not going to “imagine that we’re living in Afghanistan under sharia law” or in “East Germany” because what we are discussing is public reason in a free society, and as a thought experiment, it makes little sense.
If we go to the example of circumcision, any government *must* take into account the fact that some citizens, for religious and cultural reasons, have a strong belief that circumcision of males is central to their group identity.
Note that not all cultural Jews are religious Jews.
What the state needs to weigh up, here, is the relative force or merit of the claim of harm to any children who undergo circumcision that is not medically necessary or advised with the claims of those for whom it is constitutive to their sense of tradition and identity. (Whether or not it is inspired by faith seems to me to be a side issue.)
There needs to be a calculus, and I don’t predetermine how that process would be determined.
I would suggest that the harm done by FGM is very clearly greater than that done by male circumcision.
But it would be totally wrong to think:
(a) There are no extra-rational value judgements made on the ‘ban it’ side of the equation;
(b) It is a legitimate act by the state to over-ride actions taken motivated by deeply held conscientious beliefs unless with grave cause.
There is also the consideration that attempts to ban something may be (a) unenforceable; (b) discriminatory or hateful in their impact.
I want to posit a thought experiment.
What if there was some empirical evidence that was discovered which suggested that a society which had some mild form of superstition about a metaphysical creator imbued into some proportion of that society, was a happier more productive society. We can take “happier more productive” to mean whatever *your* version of “happier and more productive” is; for example, in mine, one in which talents are rewarded with opportunity equally to all members of that society, there is little violence, discrimination or gross inequality, people are free to have sex with or marry whatever other consenting adults they desire, etc.
What if this was the case (remember, thought experiment, not saying it actually *is* the case, or even possible, I don’t if it is, this is not the question)?
Is this society justified in creating institutions which ensure that the correct amount of superstition is created in the correct proportion of its citizens, lets say with balancing institutions to ensure that the aim of all of these institutions is the maintenance, if not the increase, of this empirically measured happiness and productivity effect? Is that ethical? Is it justified?
Or is the only ethical solution the complete eradication of the superstition on the grounds of its totally unscientific basis, even if that results in an empirical increase in general misery? Is that rational? Is it justified?
Well reasoned Mark.
The hateful effect in this instance woul.d be to say you can’t be a Jew in California
Sorry – typing on my phone!
This is probably too much information but… I’m circumcised and my father is neither Jewish nor religious. He describes himself as an agnostic, and is pretty militantly anti-religious, but it was his decision to beautify my (enormous, i can assure you) willy, taken back in the 70s, well before I had any choice over what cosmetic improvements my (vast, powerful) willy might require.
So his decision to do this was neither religiously based nor “rational.” He did it to me because it was done to him. That is all. It didn’t harm me and I remain a stunning example of gigolific manhood, with no deep-seated sexual problems (as should be obvious from the bracketed asides with which I have peppered this comment).
So if we’re going to argue that irrationality has no place in public discourse, I presume any such personal parenting preferences like my dad’s are also out? That leaves us in a very strange, arid place, doesn’t it? Should we also exclude any irrational decisions based on, e.g. my love for my partner?
Or is it only religious irrationality that is not allowed in public discourse?
(And incidentally, when I hear all this stuff about genital mutilation being based on religion, I think of my dad’s non-religious decision and I think “what a load of codswallop.” It’s a kind of an inverse version of the claim some religious folk make that all morality derives from religion. Neither is true.)
I’m resigned to my fate of not getting anywhere in this argument.
The world probably needs another apocalyptic moment to realise what a bunch of idiots “we” are. Religion is critical to our future as a global community.
Haven’t seen the film “The Watchmen,” but the comic is excellent!
PS. Kim, you can be a Jew in California, but you have to be a Californian Jew!
I don’t know, I think it’s some ‘symbol’ of identity, cutting off your son’s foreskin. The world is a tough place, and worse thing’s will undoubtedly happen to your boy, but sheesh…
sg says:
No, not at all. Irrationality cannot be excised from any discourse– the mechanism to limit is to have the discourse public. That’s the concept. We see what a miserable failure it is…
Joe, of course it’s a symbol of identity.
That’s what makes it contentious!
Tyro Rex,
No, that’s not what I meant. There are many symbols of identity, including getting a tattoo, smoking cigarettes. They mean all kinds of things…
Joe you said:
This paragraph pretty much describes what’s wrong with a lot of the atheist/agnostic and secular criticisms of religion, because inherent in the language is an assumption that “religion” really just refers to “christianity.” And even then to the type of puritanical witch-burning extremism that was “had and done with things like the US constitution.”
Not all religions “describe a fate,” unless in that “fate” you include death and birth. Shintoism doesn’t concern itself really with any kinds of fate, in fact it seems to have a very strong concept of the world as a malleable place with no fixed destination (except, in the end, death); and I don’t think buddhism has much concern with fate as we understand it in christianity. The concept of fate is very different across religions.
Similarly, “religious belief is anathema to political will.” The golden age for the arab world is seen as being the period when it was ruled by islamic scholars; I don’t think you can argue that Chinese civilization would have been possible without its connection to Buddhism, Taoism and especially confucianism. In Japan, it’s more the opposite: political interference was anathema to religious belief, poisoning an essentially pagan apolitical ideology into a type of war-porn. The idea that “religion has no place in public reason” is very much a western, enlightenment value because it arose from the struggle against the church’s particular brand of evil.
You can’t make comments like those you made above about religion in general. And when you start restricting them to christianity, you have to recognize the possibility that modifying the religious institutions involved could be more effective than preventing them from engaging in the public sphere at all.
(And this is me, the atheist, saying these things!)
Oh dear Fran @ 49: “on the basis that it is almost always a vacuous RW echochamber”
You haven’t watched Q&A often enough. There is usually one more lefty that there is righty.
That said, the quality is patchy. I usually tune in for the introductions to see if it looks interesting.
I had an a-ha moment– still not 100% sure if this what Mark means, but, maybe he’s talking about the current dysfunctional nature of pubic discourse (and the public realm more generally). If we think about historical precedents, tolerance is the preferred way to overcome this situation. But it doesn’t always work.
sg, now we can’t even agree about what fate is! Ah, language.
we’re doomed, Joe!
sg,
It is our fate!!
I’m with sg on “fate”
Seriously, though, it’s not just Christianity that’s being taken as a metonym for “religion”, it’s a particular variety of Protestant Christianity.
A lot of Catholics think/thought that it was the Roman and Greek world that was obsessed with fate, and the point of Christ was to liberate people from such beliefs.
There’s a bigger point here – again going back to the misunderstanding of religion by the New Atheists. They’re really mostly talking about the Low Church Anglicanism or other Calvinisms of their youth…
@104 –
Yep.
I’d also go back to what several commenters have said, and agree that it’s normally ‘Others’ who need protection by Western White Rationality, or in some sort of weird post-colonialist way, need to be liberated from their strange customs.
I also agree that pinging religion for having the sole responsibility for misogyny (for instance) is wrong. Richard Dawkins certainly demonstrated he’s far from immune to it in Elevatorgate.
One of the hallmarks of modernity has been the rooting out of various forms of illegitimate privilege, with Christian and religious privilege being among the last. Religious privilege means that people’s religious preferences count for more than those of other religions or the non-religious. Christian privilege occurs when non-Christians are told that they must be “tolerant” of Christians using the state to further their own religious interests. Gross examples of this privilege includes exemption from taxes, and increased funding for religious schools.
Some Christians in power are fighting back to reassert their privilege. Fred Nile’s call for ethics classes to be abolished is an attempt to reassert and enforce Christian privilege in modern society.
There are many arguments on this thread in support of Christian privilege: arguing that the feelings of those who support male circumcision or FGM should be respected is supporting religious privilege; arguing that whipping men or women for breaches of sharia law is supporting religious privilege; arguing that the government should subsidize Christian chaplains in public schools is supporting religious privilege.
Religious privilege in all its forms must be rooted out. The first step is identifying it and pointing it out, and the second step is for those arguing for such privilege to acknowledge that they are doing it.
Sorry, silkworm, no one has argued in favour of FGM, in favour of whipping men or women, or argued in favour of subsidising Christian chaplains in public schools on this thread.
Except in your vivid imagination.
And the argument about male circumcision isn’t about “respecting feelings”.
It’s also pretty bizarre for you to implicity support a law which would, as I said, have the actual effect of criminalising Judaism (a minority religion) as some sort of grand advance of modernity.
I must say your mentality of “rooting things out” is very bizarre to me.
It’s also a bit difficult to see how “arguing that whipping men or women for breaches of sharia law” (not that anyone has been) is one of “many arguments on this thread in support of *Christian* privilege”.
Let me just say this to the New Atheist apostolate of reason: if you’re going to proselytise for reasoning, learn how to do it first.
Kim said:
How does prohibiting foreskin removal make Judaism illegal? There are plenty of Jews who have a foreskin. I mean, would you set up a toll booth, wouldn’t be impossible with the new naked body scanner things…
Kim – “The hateful effect in this instance would be to say you can’t be a Jew in California.”
No it wouldn’t.
That’s akin to saying that an Aboriginal who hasn’t been initiated isn’t an Aboriginal.
That is very sneaky of you to mention it. However, so-called “elevatorgate” is off topic.
You are supporting Jewish privilege.
Joe and furious balancing, fortunately for you two, there’s a Judaism 101 page. Scroll down to ‘circumcision’: http://www.jewfaq.org/birth.htm
I would also remark that if you want to ban something, it might be *reasonable* to understand it and the consequences.
Just sayin’, you know.
Oh, aren’t we lucky, a link!
Maybe you should Google some more, Kim
BTW: I’m Jewish [and a pantheist].
You need to do some reading about the concept of religious privilege. It’s not that difficult to understand.
So you don’t agree that almost all Jews adhere to the custom?
Ps – I’m Jewish too [and a Catholic].
Mark, perhaps they’re just going for the low hanging fruit. Hyper calvinists in particular have an ugly theology which makes them easy to argue against. It’s kind of like focusing on people like Abetz when criticising the Libs, you can rely on them to say things which make themselves look worse. (Ok so with very few lib moderates left maybe the comparison isn’t so good)
Kim, no I don’t agree.
Just sayin’. Ya know.
It is true that a small number of Reform rabbis and others perform a Brit Shalom (a naming ceremony), but for the vast majority of Jews, it’s a central ritual which is constitutive of Jewish identity. So it’s not pertinent to the argument. Even if half of Jews didn’t hold to this custom, and the other half did strongly (which is not the case), the principle would be the same.
Not that silkworm is engaging with the argument, preferring to recite slogans about rooting out privilege.
I’m quite stunned that, as I said, so many New Atheists are not capable of engaging in reasonable debate. It’s ironic.
Nobody made you a moderator, silky.
I guess my point is that actually approximately 50% of Jews aren’t circumcised. This notion of Jewish identity being so closely tied to the ritual is problematic for me and I think it should be questioned, but I do take your point about it not being pertinent to the argument.
As an aside, I’m fairly sure that circumcisions aren’t carried out in public hospitals in South Australia anymore. I seem to recall that being announced a couple of years ago and I pondered what my fathers reaction to it might have been. I’m not in favour or private healthcare, and I remember thinking that without private providers that change in policy would have effectively been a ban.
@furious balancing, since a traditional bris is carried out nowhere near a hospital, surely circumcision can be done easily enough by a sympathetic GP.
In Australia, furious balancing?
I didn’t mean to sound flippant before, and I’m Jewish in the sense that my mum was, but don’t have any particular identification.
But, still, I have the strong impression in the States that most Jews adhere to the custom.
Anyway, I have the idea that we’re straying a little off topic, since we agree that what we’re not agreeing on isn’t pertinent to the point!
True, of course, because 50% of Jews are women.
I’m just very surprised by the claim, if you mean Jewish men, is all.
Yeah, I was talking about the women. And it probably was a bit of a smart-arse way to make a point – sorry – but this notion of circumcision being so central to ‘Jewish identity’ bugs me.
As for Jewishness – my Dad was Jewish, though not especially religious [his parents were quite religious]. My family is complicated, my Jewish relatives kinda run the gamut in terms of how they express their Jewishness – most of them live in Italy and over there the ones of my generation were very liberal and extremely anti-Orthodox and quite anti-Zionist. Heh, they have an uncle who at the time I visited was Jewish adviser to the Vatican, so it made for some interesting conversation. I have 3 brothers and a sister living in Australia. 2 of them are here via Israel – I met them for the first and last time at my fathers funeral. I mention all this because to me it is so quintessentially Jewish. That to me Jewish identity and I don’t think I really got to understanding it, or accepting it, until I spent some time around Aboriginal people.
Yeah, sorry, and it’s a fair point! I’m a bit tired today, and a bit slow on the uptake!
tigtog – I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been to a bris. Of the Jewish family I have contact with, I have two nephews – both are older than me, I’ve never inquired about their dicks. Of the two boys born of the next generation, neither were circumcised. And yeah, that choice outraged a few people, my father included, he got over it.
Weirdly, of my non-Jewish, but circumcised, brothers [did I mention my family is complicated?] 2 out of 3 of their sons were circumcised.
[Sorry for being so off topic.]
no worries, Kim.
heh – I originally wandered into this thread to talk about pantheism and ecology but now I’m too tired as well.
Pantheism and ecology can wait on rest!
Before the memories, such as they are, of my generation disappear over the horizon, I grew up in a Lutheran enclave in country Queensland in the 1940s. Our family were not circumcised, but I recall that others were. My memory is that we were in the minority.
I’m quite sure it had nothing to do with ceremony or identity. I don’t remember any discussion of reasons, but I imagine it had to do with notions of hygiene.
As I recall, it was still an open question in the 1960s as to whether you would or wouldn’t, with no religious overtones.
I didn’t see this thread earlier (alas, I haven’t become used to your fancy new front page yet), which is a pity.
For a long time, I was the resident skeptic and atheist around ozblogistan. In some respects, I still am. I started with the Australian skeptics, though; my atheism was very much ‘by default’, and my story is very similar to Tyro’s above (so I won’t repeat what he’s already said).
I also can’t watch Q&A from the UK (it’s geolocked, and I’m such a technical goose I can’t figure out a way around it).
So, with those caveats in mind, a few observations:
I studied Roman law as part of my Scots law conversion course, and part of that process involved taking Roman (pagan) religion seriously. This is because there are things (fine, sophisticated things) that are a part of modern law and economics that have their origin in Roman religion. Tyro will know this (I’m glad you mentioned contracts, Tyro), but the idea of pacta sunt servanda or that something is only worth what the parties to a contract agree to be its value – both of those concepts have their origin in the severely contractual relationship that many Romans had with their gods. If you made a promise you kept it. If you offered something for sale you did so with clear intention to create contractual relations (yes, that’s a phrase that lawyers use) and without a desire to argue that something is necessarily worth more because you’d spent more time making it. It was worth what the other party was willing to pay for it.
This is a clear case of a particular religious tradition having a bona fide positive social effect, particularly when you consider that some other religious traditions (at least some of the time) suggest that you can lie to people who aren’t of your religion, or that you don’t have to keep the promises you make to people who aren’t of your religion, or that objects must have an inherent value. This is where Dawkins and the New Atheists come in. They see religious traditions that engage in the later behaviours, and forget that not all religions are like that when they become very critical of ‘religion’ in an undifferentiated lump.
Like Tyro says, a lot of educated Romans were pretty ‘non-religious’, but that’s by our standards (ie, for a given value of ‘religion’). For them, religion was something you did, not something you believed. But the stuff you did could be pretty good — everything from awesome festivals to making your word your bond.
After I studied classics (back in the dim dark past when Mark and I were still at UQ roughly contemporaneously), I got into martial arts and spent some time in Japan (which is why I’m glad that sg mentioned Shinto). Roman religion started making more sense (and seemed a lot less anachronistic) to me after seeing what Shinto looked like. Like sg, I have a lot of time for Shinto.
There are other traditions. They don’t all have to be intolerant. They can have particular cultural attributes that are very positive (as well as very negative). It’s fair to argue that Christianity gave us moral universalism. The Romans rocked on the rule of law, but were moral particularists. Still, being pragmatists, they had some nice legal fictions, mainly so that non-citizens were treated as citizens for the purposes of litigation, thereby enjoying access to Rome’s excellent commercial law. To a Roman jurist, arguing that people had some basic equality qua people was a job for philosophers, not lawyers.
By contrast, Christians weren’t so great on the rule of law (‘treating like cases alike’ or pacta sunt servanda gets really difficult if the other party is a Muslim/Hindu/Pagan/whatever and you think he should be burning in Hell). So there are good things and bad things, and various traditions have a generous leavening of both. I think that’s in the nature of institutions (of whatever type), and is something we just have to grin and bear.
Apologies for the long comment.
s.l. i did not that those ideas fed into actual our actual legal systems, thanks for that interesting and informative comment.
Right on Furious, I for one am glad that this thread stepped out of dog shit and hopefully has put those willies away too. I would describe myself as an eclectic skeptic (or vice versa) and interested in Deep Ecology as an ethical reference point. Thus was hoping too that we can broaden the ‘freewheeling’ discussion with an eye on the contemporary pressing ethical challenges. Just this morning on RN Justice Kirby was making an interesting point, that we need to broaden our outlook on the universe, or some such. With the insights of the last century provided by quantum and relativity theory,, Astrophysics, Cognitive science including AI et al, combined with the unprecedented global scale moral dilemmas would it not be time to reassess our collective ethical foundations? Dare I ask do we need a new enlightenment to survive as a species?
Sorry, I realise now my Deep Ecology link is behind pay wall. Lets try this.
Ootz
“Dare I ask do we need a new enlightenment to survive as a species?”
Nicely put.
Or maybe we just need the old one to work properly?
But, yep, it’s an interesting point.
I regret to say I haven’t really had the opportunity to learn much about the values underpinning the deep ecology paradigm.
Kim, my last endeavour to venture into this area were welcomed by the resident heavy guns of ‘rationality’ with a turkey shoot, probably due to my lack of eloquence in debate and the extreme sensitivities buried in the domain of religion, ethics & value.
In reflection of the above ‘free-wheeling debate’ we need to establish directions and definitions to make it worthwhile to engage. People get quickly tired by debating the debate, see fb @142. I for one would be interested in Furious’s balanced view on Ecology and ethics as well as pantheism (eclecticism?).
And just for a stir in the cauldron and a dash of magic: “WHERE ARE YOU CASEY? I hope you have not fallen off that broomstick.”
BRING BACK CASEY!
Ootz, yes, I agree that we would need to have a more structured discussion, and I think in general it’s preferable to encourage that. We are thinking of playing around with a few plugins that might enable selective moderation on some threads, and part of that might be deleting anything that doesn’t engage with the terms of an argument, and/or argues the argument.
It seems I have been conjured forth into these mortal realms. I have been sojourning in the spirit realms drinking Spanish wine with a higher being. It is meet that I return to you now Ootsie. I too have missed you. And just in time I see. The silkette be smoking the mulberry crack and needs me. Why as soon as I reverse the little spell that turned me into batwoman I will ministrate to his needs
Beautiful work Kimberella. What a delight to see you back here!
The feeling is mutual!
Yes well, OOtz’s magicking is indeed powerful. Of course the new atheists might take their time coming round to this but nevertheless I should advise folks not to linger in the faery realms too long or you forget who you are, especially if you run into la belle fellow sans merci. And his Spanish mead.
I’d say something about the faery realms, but I fear I’d be True Blood spoiler-ish and incur bad karma!
Kim, I realise moderation policy is OT and not be discussed, so you may delete this comment at your discretion.
Let me say this, for me a large part of the attraction to LP is your ‘relaxed’ moderation. It provides a warts and all perspective onto the unfolding or evolution of the relatively new social media environment and some opportunity for reflexivity or insights there of. There in would lie my concern for changing LPs moderation policy. My suggestion would be to build onto your present attempts to make LP a ‘place’ and and features to make participants more ‘personal’. For example a ‘chill room’ or ‘sin bin’ or even ‘OT chambers’ where one could continue debate or argument. Further, many heated arguments or rough and tumble approaches appear to be based on our impersonal presence on a computer screen. Not all of us here have a personal webpage, so it is difficult to gauge who we are ‘talking’ to and there is no opportunity for immediate non-verbal personal feedback.
So yes, maybe clearer directions and definitions in certain posts would make for more ‘productive outcomes’ in important topics. However, there should always be a place for dogshit and willies or worse in the LP universe
.
I am also aware the resources and personal commitment it takes to provide a forum such LP provides, so maybe I should be looking into donating some money and become a ‘shareholder’ or is there another way to support LP?
PS. I hope this makes sense, as I am aware that my non Anglo background and health induced cognitive glitches can provide some, to use cricket parlance, spectacular wides.
mark@81: As I said, I don’t care why someone wants to surgically “correct” their child, I care about the welfare of the child. I’m happy to see evidence that surgical intervention enhances the wellbeing of the child, even the problem being corrected is “male genitals”. But I’m absolutely not willing to accept surgical intervention purely to comply with the religious beliefs of the parents. That’s not science, it’s superstition.
But yes, if the intervention proposed was without negative effects then there might be an argument for allowing it. But as I pointed out, piercing the ears of infants is frowned apon. That sets a pretty low barrier for “no harm”, and one that AFAIK male circumcision comprehensively fails (the intervention is not self-correcting, misadventure can have extremely serious consequences, and mistakes do happen).
Again, various things that you think are wrong, distasteful, delusional, whatever, are wrongly being conflated with the category ‘religion’.
Correct. You keep insisting that denying circumcision is an attack on religious people, when I don’t see it that way. Those people are being allowed complete liberty to practice their religion as they wish. What’s being denied is their ability to sacrifice the health of their children. Much as we make the children of Seventh Day Adventists wards of the state if necessary to ensure that they receive life-saving medical interventions. To be consistent you would presumably argue that that is also wrong and we should respect the religious freedom of the parents.
Look, we as a society have decided over the years that “joined into one person” doesn’t actually give the husband the right to kill, rape or even beat his wife. We did that without overturning scripture, or even removing Christianity as the de facto religion of Australia. Those were slow changes and hotly contested in the name of religious tolerance at times, but we made them. We managed to remove the death penalty, and today allow shopping on Sundays, even in churches (the law permits it, what the churches do is up to them). I fail to see why such core elements of religious belief cannot be moved beyond.
As a counterpoint to Joe@122: I accept that Rastafarianism is legal (and practiced) in Australia despite it being illegal to perform their equivalent of the communion ritual here. Technically there are no observant Rasta’s in Australia. I am more accepting of their lawbreaking because it’s mostly personal actions done by consenting adults. They’re not forcing their kids.
In another context I’d be happy to talk about whether banning religions that require their adherents to break the law is justified, but I don’t think that would fly here.
@Ootz, thanks, it is off topic, but it’s a discussion worth having, and a number of options are under active consideration by the LP collective at the moment. I will draw your suggestions to the attention of the collective!
Heya Batwoman, for you I’ll reread ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ by Thomas Nagle and say “Bugger all these reductionist sods”.
Don’t be too hard on Silky and Anthony (on saturday salon?), as La Luna was in heavy bloom and gave those of us with sensitive souls some grieve over the last few days.
Have one of those Spanish meads on me and hasta la vista.
Mention of La Luna will only get me obsessing about True Blood again:
http://www.wetpaint.com/true-blood/character/luna
It’s Papi, peeps!
Shapeshifters aye, where do I apply for a job as such?
Well yes, according to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ we are nothing but stardust. While Paul Davies even denies ‘us’ a material existence and argues in ‘The Matter Myth’ that ‘we’ are constituted by some kind of self-organising entity in a soup of cosmic energy/information bits.
‘Anything’ is possible.
Moz – isn’t it the JW’s, rather than the Adventists, who refuse blood transfusions?
Yes, though some blood products like cryosupernatant plasma and cryoprecipitate are designated “Christian to Decide”, there is also a JW reform movement advocating that all medical decisions be so designated. I have friends who are JW, they are nothing like the stereotype, thanks to them my (limited) understanding of faith is a little less cartoonish than it once was.
su,
my neighbours were JW and they were very interesting and lovely people, but their faith ultimately led them to ostracizing their daughter, who also is a lovely person. I found that very disturbing, tbh. and I judge/condemn them for that. I also judge/condemn the collective for accepting that behaviour. Are these people good neighbours? I don’t know…
It’s the Christian Scientists who oppose blood transfusions, as I recall it.
Well, the JW oppose it too, as I know a JW with HepC, who can’t have a blood transfusion.
(Blood, sperm, sh!t… potent religious symbols. Why do you think that the “Passion of Christ” is such a top-seller? Haven’t seen it personally…)
Yes, the punishment of shunning is very disturbing, Joe, it is confronting when you encounter some very admirable traits and others that are anathema to your own ethical code in the same person. I think it is a hopeful sign that there are groups advocating for reform, but it is a slow process. I also have friends of the Mormon faith, there must be some odd impulse for “balance” at work, because I have always made friends amongst people of deep and often unusual religious convictions, even though I have never been at all tempted to join them in those convictions My mother was raised in a 7th Day adventist household and my father grew up amonst Lutherans and Salvos, she was utterly silent upon religion and he was a vociferous atheist. It must be in my cultural DNA!
Bob Ellis has a background in the wackier reaches of evangelical fundamentalist protestantism. It seems to be quite a heavy cross to bear.
Thanks for confirming the blood transfusion matter su & Joe. I’ve noticed that the 7th Day Adventists are often cast as extremists & I don’t understand why. They’re biblical literalists – something they share with many other churches. AFAIK their main distinguishing feature is that they elevate the idea that the body is the temple of God, and so forgoe alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and animal products.
Mark @43: while variants of monastic Buddhism practice in ways that appeal to theistic beliefs it is genreally acknowledged that the dharma teachings of the Buddha state that (from wiki):
This gives ahteism a tradition going back 2,500 years.
The following commentary makes it very clear:
akn, I really don’t think that Theravada Buddhism is akin to modern atheism.
To explain why:
Modern atheism is three things:
(a) A complete absence of belief, normally accompanied by a lack of interest in the entire question of belief;
(b) An absence of belief heavily structured by a putatively rationalist reaction to belief;
(c) The “New Atheism” which is an absence of belief heavily structured by a putatively rationalist reaction to belief, and actively hostile to that belief; an ideological position.
(a) is really only possible when religious belief itself isn’t the default ordering principle for understanding the world, the backdrop or envelope of the social. It’s the result of a process of detraditionalisation, where people simply don’t see the purpose of reflecting on extra-natural things.
(b) and (c) both derive from the sundering of the unity of religion, the world and the social caused by the Reformation (firstly), and the Enlightenment (secondly). In the Western context, both are shaped heavily by a reaction specifically against Christianity, often heavily influenced by an anti-clericalism which was originally Protestant.
There’s also a focus on religion as an alleged system of statements about the world or the cosmos, and a tendency to see it as opposite to science. Before the emergence of science as a distinct mindset and form of knowledge in early modernity, this attitude literally failed to signify.
I would argue it’s a misunderstanding of what religion properly is, but that’s beside the present point.
By contrast, the teaching of the Buddha, or rather the way the teaching of the Buddha is understood in the Theravadan traditions and texts enshrined by those traditions, represents a reaction against a congeries of beliefs proper to Vedic and other Hinduisms. To focus in on a creator God is beside the point – there are many religious traditions which don’t have such a belief, or as in the case of dualistic religious traditions which were prominent from about 500BCE to 400CE, believed the creator deity (or Demiurge) to be evil.
Theravadan and other Buddhisms have a set of beliefs about the nature of life and the cosmos (including, inter alia, a belief in reincarnation and the eventual dissolution of the self after a series of incarnations) which have nothing whatever to do with modern scientific rationalism.
There’s also no ‘living tradition’ descending from the Axial Age to modern atheisms.
Mark, I’m surprised that you differentiate “modern atheism” and all forms of atheism in order to defend your claim as to the relative recency of atheism especially when atheism is one of the core principles of 2,500 years of continuous philosophical heritage within Buddhism.
As it stands there are tendencies within “modern Buddhism” that resonate with “modern atheism”. Stephen Batchelor’s books ‘Buddhism without Beliefs’ and ‘Confession of a Buddhist Atheist’ emphasise his transition away from manifestations of orthodox religiosity within Buddhism towards a revitalised, rational application of the dharma (http://www.stephenbatchelor.org/book-confession.html). This transition has apparently been praised by Christopher Hitchens as an example of ‘the kind of ethical and scientific humanism “in which lies our only real hope”‘ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/10/buddhism-atheism-hitchens).
I also suggest that distinctions between “modern atheism” and the atheism of Theravadan Buddhism are immaterial given that Theravadan Buddhism is not frozen in time but is in fact a living, contemporary philosophy and practise.
akn, I think I’ve explained why.
Clearly, the sorts of assimilations of Buddhist teaching you describe to “New Atheism” weren’t possible until the latter became a possibility in modernity.
Ah, well, and on your point:
Last week I attended a talk on this very subject in Sydney. The point of contention, as the linked flyer discusses, is the development in the West of what has been described as a type of ‘secular Buddhism’. The leading Australian proponent of this position is Prof Winton Higgins who rejects ‘rebirth’ and (it seems) also ‘the law of karma’ as manifested by rebirth into different states of existence as a form of karma (roughly understood as moral justice acquired subsequent to actions in previous existences) [http://www.buddhistlibrary.org.au/community.html].
I don’t see my own practise as anything other than legitimate enquiry firmly within the Buddhist tradition; I do see it as very much aligned with and informed by scientific rationality.
I have to agree with you here. The hostility of PZ Myers’ followers, for example, is primarily towards creationists and fundamentalists, whom they regard as easy targets. Myers also provokes Catholics by desecrating crackers, and people like the Catholic League’s Bill O’Donohue react accordingly, much to Myers’ delight.
From the Kalama Sutta:
Which seems to me a rational attitude to inquiry that could easily inform the best of scientists.
That’s very interesting, akn, but it does seem to rely on a very selective appropriation of Buddhist traditions and texts.
My question, then, would be whether it makes sense for Atheists to oppose non-theistic religion or spirituality?
If there’s a distinction between religion and theism (which there probably is). Aren’t they conflated in New Atheist discourse generally?
Funny you should mention this, akn; I was just about to bring it up. John Safran mentioned on qanda that he believed in karma. He apparently also believes in “the force” which operates in the same way as the universe or “God” does when “it” metes out karma or divine punishment; and in both cases of divine punishment, it is not clear whether that punishment is in this life or the next. In either case, it is still an uncritically accepted dogma. Therefore, Safran has no right to call himself either an atheist or a skeptic, unless, of course, Safran uses the terms “karma” and “the force” as jokes, and with Safran, you never can tell.
Hi Brian. I don’t think that there is any debate at all that the Kalama Sutta is directly attributable to the Budhha. There has of course been immense textual interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings in the intervening period which has usually operated to reinforce the authority of male monastics to the detriment of women monastics and so called ‘lay’ practitioners. So, this is not a selective use of Buddhist text so much as a direct and well known teaching. If Buddhist traditions depart from those teachings then this is the sort of ‘distortion’ that secular Buddhists are attempting to address.
Now, as to the matter of religion – I find the term very confusing and usually conflate religion and theism, perhaps incorrectly. It would be commonplace for ‘new atheism’ to conflate the terms as well, I guess. To answer your question: in my view it doesn’t make such sense for atheists to condemn non-theistic spiritual practises. However, that pretty much exhausts my interest in the views of atheists and non-atheists alike as I generally take the view that those who have a will to a practise that engages rational self apprasial in their own and other’s interests will find their way to the dharma one way or another and those who don’t won’t.
Cherers.
Silkworm: yes, karma is superstition in my view especially as applied to multiple lives across time. I do think that there is such a thing as ‘instant karma’ which is a testable state: check out your own mind state the next time you commit an act of generosity. My own habit is never to refuse money to anyone who asks me for it in the street. Cheers.
akn @ 183, I think you mean Mark.
TT @26
This is being amply demonstrated by the “child witch” hunt problem in Africa. Unfortunately, although I’m sure superstition is all that’s required to establish these terrible practices, evangelical Christians are doing their best to give them a kick along.
Mark @ 181,
I think what Dawkins (I don’t know about the other “New Atheists”) is generally concerned about is superstition and its negative impacts on people’s lives and wellbeing.
Now superstition might be associated with religion (theist or non-theist) or be non-religious, but I think Dawkins would see the large, organised and (generally) theist religions as having the most significant and widescale impact and so these are what he focuses on.
But to the extent that “spiritual” or non-theistic superstition were causing negative impacts, I think that Dawkins would be concerned about those too.
Well, this is kinda the issue I was talking about above. For the “New Atheists” religion is a moving target… everything that’s perceived as wrong, evil, irrational, etc, is made to stand in for “religion” or “theism” more generally. As I’ve commented, it’s much more of an ideological or political position than a rational one in the proper sense of that word, because it is almost always faulty induction from the particular to the general. If you want to criticise religion rationally (and go for it, I say), you need to define the concept rigorously, and consider counter-evidence to the hypothesis that it’s “bad”. When you put it in those terms, you can see how irrational it actually is – it’s like saying politics is “bad” or “evil”. It’s a value judgement, not a reasoned one.
I also find the degree to which people like Dawkins and Hitchens are invoked disturbing for something that purports to be based in rationality – pure argument from authority.
There’s also the issue of causation, which a number of people referred to above.
If Nigerian Anglicans go around exorcising people for being gay, and Anglicans in Brisbane don’t, I think you can work out what’s causally more significant.
Mark @188,
Is your comment a response to my comment @187? If so, see below. If not, ignore it.
I think you are wrong that Dawkins has an a priori, ideological (or intellectual) dislike of religion. (or, at least, if he has, I don’t think this is central to his activism) Rather he has an empirically-derived dislike of certain religions (and associated behaviour) based on the harm he sees them doing. If he is not seen as discussing (say) Buddhism or Shintoism, that is perhaps because he does not see those beliefs as causing harm.
It is true that his philosophical arguments against supernatural belief are generic, but I think that arises from the nature of the arguments themselves, rather than a starting point that all supernatural belief is harmful.
As for the “argument from authority”, it is you who constantly refers to “new atheists”, not I. Looking up the term on wikipedia (I was not previously familiar with it and think of myself simply as an “atheist”), I found it incorporates Dawkins, and also others whose ideas I am not familiar with. That is why I attempted to present what I think is Dawkins’ position.
I am not seeking to argue from authority and, if it helps, I would note that Incurious and Unread (with absolutely no authority) broadly concurs with the position stated @187.
(b) rhetorically, using the term “abuse” is deliberately supposed to conflate religious upbringing with clergy sexual abuse;
You impugn me Mark. I never mentioned, nor considered sexual abuse when I made the statement.
I believe that teaching religion to children is an abuse of a developing mind. Is that clear enough for you.
Mark @189,
The relevant causality is not whether Christian belief has made some Nigerians anti-gay, but whether the institutional power of the Anglican church in Nigeria has given those individuals the ability to persecute gays in pursuance of that bigotry.
akn@184, instant karma!? of course there’s such a thing, those leftists in the Lennon block believe in it, and it goes something like this;
Mark’s attack on me by ascribing motives to me where they did not exist and there was no evidence for them throws his entire column into disrepute.
Following someone’s blog gets you flamed by the blogger, priceless.
No. It is not necessary to define Fred Nile’s religious beliefs rigorously in order to condemn him for his stand against ethics classes. It is not necessary to define the church’s, any church’s, beliefs in order to criticize the abuse it carries out on children by threatening them with the prospect of eternal damnation if they don’t believe x, y and z. It is not necessary to define the catholic church’s doctrines in order to criticize their coverup of clerical abuse on children.
Well Mark Anglicans in Brisbane are rarely Christians.
There is no question that the ACT of homosexuality is a sin as is attested in both the O/T and N/T ( just like the act of heterosexuality is out side of marriage).
There is nothing in the bible for Christians to take actions against homosexuals or any other sinner bar not allowing them to be part of the church. Therefore persecuting homosexuals is a sin in itself.
Yeah it is. You have first establish that it *is* abuse – and in what degree. – before you move on to the part where you can start proscribing it. You are starting from the a priori view that teaching any religion is “abuse”. Some of it is abusive, yes. That’s just not the same thing as all of it being abusive! And being “wrong”, in your view, is not the same as being “abusive”.
And until you can establish that their particular instantiation is actually abusive, I’d suggest that you have no right in any sort of liberal society to tell people what beliefs they are allowed to expose their children to.
You are going straight from the particular – Fred Phelps is a child-abusing religious freak – to the universal – all religion is child abuse, by pure assertion.
As I said way up thread, as a child I was exposed to the usual Aussie Protestantism, I didn’t feel then or now that it was “abuse” and I managed to work my own answers to it out (and several people agreed with me that was their experience too).
T Rex @197,
I think Silkworm’s point is that it would be abusive if religious instruction involved persuading a child that they will go to hell unless they behave in a certain way and that, in that context, the specifics of the target behaviour are unimportant. I don’t think he/she is saying that all religious instruction is abusive irrespective of how it is undertaken.
Whether or not that is what Silkworm is actually saying, would you agree with that proposition?
I would infer from your description of your own experience that you were never so threatened or never persuaded of the credibility of the threat.
Hi Brian and Marck. Sorry about the familial conflation, must happen from time to time, eh?
Tyro Rex: of course, quite right of you to cite Lennon. I’m still a believer!
Now Mark. As to theistic religion – I think that any argument or practise based on ‘faith’ is a form of delusion and therefore in and of itself a ‘bad thing’. There is, so far as I am aware, no objective evidence to support the existence of any creator god(s) or superior being(s); there is, within theistic belief, the mere assertionof the existence of god(s) and the feelings associated with faith both of which are highly subjective.
What distinguishes Buddhism from faith based belief is precisely the possibility of testing the general thesis against one’s own experience. This means nothing less than meditation and engagament with the Five Precepts, the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. While changes in mind state are subjective experiebnces there is today significant empirical evidence of brain changes subsequent to meditative practice which lend substance and credence to the subjective reports of Buddhist practitioners. This puts those practises miles ahead in the rational credibility stakes.
As to arguments for theistic beliefs and religions on the basis of their beneficial results I think that this is a form of structural functionalism that is subject to the usual criticism. A vewry sharp criticism is that those who suffer the consequences of theistic and religious failures have rarely, if ever, been in a position to hold theistic religion to full account for those failures.
… sadly, akn, in this life, those who suffer the consequences of institutional failures rarely get a chance to hold the institutions to full account. It’s about power.
I don’t want to make a structural functionalist argument for theistic belief and religion, btw. I have no particular interest in arguing for religion as a good, because as I’ve been indicating, I think a statement of the form of “religion is bad” is literally non-sense, so it follows that the contrary proposition is too.
What I do want to do is to hold rationalists to the standard of good and sound reasoning.
Eg. Silkworm has just done his usual thing at 195. The point is not to define Fred Nile’s beliefs, or whatever, but whether Fred Nile or whatever the current target of his rhetoric can logically support a statement about “religion” being “harmful”.
Cf Tyro Rex at 197.
As Kim said above, if you want to champion reason, you have to make sure your own arguments are reasonable.
@196 – Labouring the point, there are many biblical scholars who disagree with that claim. For those who do not take a literalist reading of scripture, it is insupportable.
@194 – harleymc, I didn’t write the post, and I don’t know what you’re referring to when you say that I attacked you. I had no intention of doing so, and don’t believe I have.
@192 – yes, but the state in Nigeria (and in Uganda and elsewhere) has also been attacking gay people. As I said above, it would make no sense to infer from this that an abstraction such as *the state* or *politics* is bad/evil.
I’m not referring to you here, but the thinking of New Atheists seems to be highly dualistic and fond of making absolute distinctions between good and evil.
I once got asked by a 5 year old kid what I think happens when I die. I told him that I think I would be gone, forever, in the dark, no thoughts or feelings ever again. I think he asked me if I thought I would go somewhere else and I said no (I don’t remember this clearly).
I remember then his mother (who was present for this conversation) having a fairly solid go at me for telling lies to her kid. She wanted her boy to believe in heaven, and proceeded to tell him that I was wrong and that after death he would go to heaven.
She seemed to think *I* was abusing the kid by telling him my opinions, and that the false hope of heaven (and all the earthly trouble that a belief in the afterlife leads to) was a better story to tell. I’m not in the business of telling other people how to raise their kids, so demurred, but it certainly seemed interesting to me that she wasn’t willing to allow her kid to even be exposed to debate on the matter.
I don’t think this is abuse, but it does seem unnecessarily intellectually restrictive to me. Which is one of the prime problems I have with the christian church’s general approach to child-rearing.
sg @204,
I raised my kids to believe in the Santa Claus myth. I didn’t threaten them with hell for disbelief, but I did suggest that Santa might not visit non-believers. (They didn’t take too long to work out that neither the myth nor the threat was credible.)
I might have been annoyed with you if you had told my kids that Santa does not exist. Maybe that is somewhat analogous to your story.
Mark, I think the demand that critical arguments against theism be reasonable is reasonable. It would be wonderful if theists also felt constrained by the demands of reasoned argument. I think the reason why Hitchens so irritates thiests is that he simply dismisses argument founded on unverifiable, untestable and unfalsifiable theses as irrational and not worth arguing. I’m inclined to agree. Entering into argument with those who argue from absolutely subjective grounds is, as beck once put it about entring into argument with advocates of nuclear power, like trying to arm wrestle yourself. In other words once you’ve accepted the irrational terms of your protagonist you are on their grounds and have lost the argument because their grounds are unknowable except on their terms. This means that it is not possible to establish common ground for dialogue.
My own preference would be for theist organisations to retreat from seeking public funding for their activities and give up their tax free status until such time as their irrational (in my view) beliefs can be subject to rational appraisal by commonly accepted standards of scientific and/or philosophic examination.
I see the census is coming up and urge all right thinking people to declare themsleves as Pastafarians.
akn, it strikes me that you’re engaging in something of a double standard here. Many people’s belief in a theistic deity is sustained by, among other things, a conviction that their own subjective experience is consistent with such a belief. How is this different from your own conviction that your subjective experience of meditation is consistent with your preferred flavour of Buddhism?
Scientific studies of brain states and the way they change during meditiation (or other activities) have no particular metaphysical implications. For example, a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (a practice derived from Hinduism) would be likely to claim that precisely the same scientific studies validate their own subjective meditation experiences and therefore their own metaphysical beliefs. However, those metaphysical beliefs aren’t necessarily consistent with yours.
Despite being an atheist who is generally skeptical of matters spiritual and supernatural, I find myself in general agreement with Mark on this thread.
Tim, I would be engaged in double standards if I claimed that my subjective states were proof of something outside of myself like the existence of a god which is, so far as I can tell, exactly what theists do when they argue from their exprience of ‘faith’. I don’t do that, however. I argue that meditation practises in combination with living according to Buddhist ethics create mind state changes. These changes are not because of anything outside of my own efforts and the ethical guidance – no gods, deities or gurus. Moreover, they can and have been verified using scientific techniques.
As an aside – one of the great tragedies of our times, in my view, is the loss of highly refined knoweldge of how to create very specific mind states using highly refined meditation techniques developed by the Tibetan traditions.
As to the yogic practises: undoubtedly many of them are very powerful and can create very significant but usually only temporary mind state changes. However, their minority status attests to the inferiority of their ethical teachings. In other words, over time, people have delivered them a mass lesson in irrelevance after negative experiences or only transient experiences.
Of course telling a child that they may burn in hell is wrong. How can the young child tell the difference between burning their physical body and burning their spiritual body? In the young child’s mind, such threats can only be taken physically. It is an extremely cruel thing to tell them. But who can argue with these authoritarians? They reserve the right to be cruel to their own and to other people’s children. That is why I say that the Christian superstition is evil.
akn, I think Hitchens is a sophist. He’s an extremely good writer, but a very slippery one. He has turned his considerable talents both to decrying capitalism and lauding George W. Bush. What he is not is an exemplar of rationality.
One of the reasons why we’re all talking at cross purposes is that faith is not justifiable rationally. So Tim is almost right, although I don’t think it’s just an individual subjective experience, but a collective one (ie I am a Catholic not a Protestant… and that’s one of the reasons why). But I don’t think ‘proofs of God’ are of any use.
Carl Jung summed it up when he said that he didn’t believe that God existed, he knew God.
That’s faith in a nutshell.
“Fides et Ratio” – the tradition I’m coming from argues for a harmony between faith and reason, but faith has to be that, and it’s not demonstrable from rational grounds. Nor, I think, is it refutable on reasonable grounds.
In which case, thanks Mark, I’ll stick with Pastafarianism on the same grounds that you adhere to your Catholic vision of God. Unverifiable, unfalsifiable and entirely devoid of rational grounds. Suits me if it suits you. Us Pastafarians, you’ll note however, are humble enough not to have our hands out for public funding as we believe our faith to be an entirely private concern.
While it’s interesting that AKN and Mark have reached a detente … I find this statement quoted above as disturbing and as irrational as I’ve heard come from Christians. I cannot let it pass, I want to unpick it its irrationality.
“Of course telling a child that they may burn in hell is wrong”
“Of course”, nothing. Is it? It doesn’t sound nice; wrong however is a different kettle of fish and requires at least a little offering of data in support of that claim.
“In the young child’s mind, such threats can only be taken physically”
Again, is that so? How is that so? What is the evidence (child psychology is not an area I know much about, I assume that silky is an expert in this area?) Also, apparently this is true for all children – up to what age, “small” doesn’t seem precise enough.
“They reserve the right to be cruel to their own and to other people’s children.”
They do? Call social services! Oh, you mean only if we blindly accept without evidence your previous assertions.
“That is why I say that the Christian superstition is evil.”
OK, from the highly particular straight to the sweepingly general again.
The argument In summary; Some children are told by some christians that they will “burn in hell”; this harms children (no evidence of harm offered); therefore all christian belief is evil (not just undesirable, harmful, or bad, but evil, the strongest possible category of human depravity).
Mark @210,
“Carl Jung…said that he didn’t believe that God existed, he knew God.
That’s faith in a nutshell.”
Agreed. And that is why I think suggestions in the OP and upthread that atheists also have faith is wrong. An atheist believes that God does not exist, but he does not know it.
Tyro Rex – children in primary school still tend to believe what most adults tell them. So up to about 12 most children being told that they or their parents will burn in hell will be upset by that idea even if they don’t quite believe it. Just like a belief in Santa/Easter Bunny can persist for a surprisingly long time. This is just personal experience from being a parent. I would be very angry if someone were to say something like that to my children and I would spend a lot of time to make sure that they never came back to my child’s school.
The main reason that I’ve distanced myself from mere polite acceptance of theistic beliefs and attitudes is the conduct of organised theism in the schools. My daughter’s experience in her primary school was of vicious ostracism from her peer group once she had quite unwittingly told them that her old man was a Buddhist. This was, for her, shattering and it was with very great relief that she was able to move to a selective in years 5/6. This was preceded by an almighty stoush with the school over its obligation to provide some (any) meaningful activity during the designated ‘scripture period’ to accommodate her and several other students who were similarly shunned by a cohort of local fundies.
I reckon that there are numerous theists around who don’t sufficiently engage with their own beliefs to take a pro-active position. This leaves a vacuum all too readily filled by nutters and extremists who don’t hesitate to add strong doses of intolerance to their teaching of theism. In other words it is the job of rational theists to deal with their own brothers and sisters whose behaviour is all too often deeply damaging to other people’s perceptions of what theism is about. Especially when directed at kids.
Either get involved or get out of the schools.
Mindy & AKN, I agree completely that ‘religion’ (except as a subject e.g. comparative religion) shouldn’t be taught in schools (well, not state schools most certainly).
And, yeah, not to any future children I may have.
However, I draw the line at telling other parents what they should tell their own children, which is the sense I get from silkworm’s comments in blanket labelling it as ‘abuse’ (as in, time to call social services, those people are abusing their own children). By the same principle, a non-state school should be free to have some form of religious indoctrination, as long as they otherwise teach the standard curriculum (not impose it with a ‘religious’ viewpoint) and the state doesn’t pay for the religious indoctrination component.
So, you see, it isn’t that I disagree with the general principles, or would seek to defend the teaching of religion in state schools. I am an atheist after all. The thing that gets my goat is the generalised blanket labelling, because its just not a rational method of argumentation, instead we have entirely emotive terms like ‘evil’ and ‘abuse’, devoid of evidence for it and even a disavowal of having to define what these terms are, and following this, a hypocritical (perhaps also ironic) insistence on the sole ownership of rationality.
Children are cruel, AKN. One mark I had against me at school was my dad was a WW2 veteran, and hence old, whereas most of my peers were the children of baby boomers. Plus I was smart. And knew stuff. And a nerd. And loved books. And probably a bit of a Romantic dreamer. All are weaknesses, i.e. differences. I’m not sure its all down to religion.
If you want a good read today, you can’t do much better than this article about five so-called myths atheists have about religion.
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2011/07/why-the-5-myths-atheists-have-about-religion-arent-myths.html
You’ll come to realize that all five arguments have been used on this thread. There are plenty of links to other great arguments about religion.
Here’s the only bit I disagree with.
I wrote earlier that I was an igtheist, that there was no coherent definition of God. This conflicts with what Greta Christina is saying, that when Christians or Buddhists or Pastafarians or whatever use the term “God,” we all basically know what it is that we’re talking about. I say that we don’t. I say the “God” that we think we know is so vaguely conceived that this accounts for why we are never able to express our feelings about it/him/her in precise terms, and why we are content to leave our arguments about God at the level of feeling.
T Rex @ 216,
An athiest also believes that the tooth fairy does not exist but does not know it.
What is the difference?
GregM @220,
Nothing.
Thanks for that link silkworm. As you say a good read.
Tyro Rex: yeah, kids can be cruel but so can parents. A mate of mine, Aboriginal, was fostered to parents who were members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He still calls them “mum and dad” and says they were good people and that his dad went out of his way to put him into contact with local Aboriginal people and culture. However, he also says that one day, while reading scriptures to younger kids he noted that the pictures in the book he was using showed all of the little kiddies ascending to heaven were whitefellas. As he puts he thought “wait a minute…”.
Sure, but I doubt that religion is the only one that’s guilty of such mistakes of whiteness-normativity. Lots of advertising for a start. Also, as you point out, your friend eventually saw through it.
And plenty of really stupid ideas other than just religion are transmitted parents to children. Political outlook, for example …
Incurius @213 said “An atheist believes that God does not exist, but he does not know it”
Wrong. Atheism is not a belief in opposition to theism, it is complete lack of a belief. It is a position of doubt.
On the subject of supernatural deities, I hold no beliefs.
Do you live your life actively believing that invisible pink unicorns do not exist (a supernatural creature, obviously)? No, you simply have no beliefs on that subject. There is no basis whatsoever to form a belief one way or the other. Atheism is merely the logical extension of doubt to an area where there has historically been enormous social pressure not to doubt (to put it mildly).
What I am describing is not agnosticism, which is concerned with knowledge, not belief. A theist who is honest can say “I have no knowledge (agnostic), but I believe because of faith”.
Very concise Lachlan. I’m learning here also from silkworm who has explained upthread that the best question to ask on considerations of ‘god’ is ‘what do you mean by god?’
Lachlan@224,
Well, your definition of atheism sounds more like what I would call agnosticism. But my substantive point @213 remains either way, so I don’t think we need to quibble about it.