Asymmetry
Some more Pharyngula.
He’s exactly right about one thing: all the people on his little enemies list say terrible things about religion. Speaking for just myself, I don’t like it at all—I think it’s a bad idea to afflict a society with an institution dedicated to opposing critical thinking, the acceptance of dogma, and belief in unsupported and frankly, ludicrous claims. I’m going to express my detestation often and without reservation here, as the others in that list have done in their own venues. So? Is this an opinion we are not allowed to have? Does it make us unfit to speak on science or philosophy? Is it more offensive than the frequently stated and rarely questioned Christian opinion that we unbelievers are damned to spend all of eternity suffering in agonizing torment?
Well, yes, of course this is an opinion we’re not allowed to have. We know that. We also know that it’s less legitimately offensive than the opinion that we’re all going to fry, and that that’s just too damn bad, because it’s Be Kind To Theists century. Get used to it, as the saying goes.
I was talking yesterday in ‘Abdication not the Way to Go’ about this asymmetry between religion and non-religion. It’s a real problem, you know, because it handicaps one side and gives a boost to the other. Quite unreasonably. The inhibition or taboo on challenging religion – ‘other people’s cherished beliefs,’ you know – doesn’t operate at all in the other direction. No one ever has the smallest hesitation in challenging rational, secular, non-theist beliefs on grounds of tolerance or sensitivity or kindness or respect or diversity. The presumed touchiness and ‘sensitivity’ of believers is not matched by presumed anything of non-believers. (And nor should it be. Who wants to be such a delicate flower that she can’t stand to hear her ideas or beliefs challenged? Yet apparently believers are perfectly happy to be thought of that way – in fact they get very indignant and outraged if you don’t think of them that way. Odd.) This means that one side has an immense advantage and the other side has an immense handicap. One side is awarded a large shield or wall, and the other side has its weapons taken away.
And the joke is that this is precisely backward, in the sense that the first party has the weaker case – that is, the worse case, qualitatively. It’s not that it’s disabled or handicapped, injured or damaged, so that we ought to give it an advantage out of fairness – it’s that it has no standing, no warrant, no evidence, no good argument. It ought not to be given extra compensatory help – but it is. This second problem is rooted in the first, which is nonsensical. It amounts to: because the ‘faith’ team has no evidence and no good arguments, it feels stupid when challenged, therefore the reason team is required not to challenge it – so the faith team gets to make its unwarranted assertions unimpeded.
Do a thought experiment: put that in other contexts, and see how ridiculous it is. X declares that aliens from another galaxy are living among us and that the income tax and national health are alien inventions, and that we should execute all the aliens immediately to save ourselves. The rest of us are strongly discouraged from challenging this assertion, because X has no evidence, these are X’s personal subjective opinions.
If it doesn’t fly in normal everyday contexts – in courtrooms, laboratories, newsrooms, police stations – why does it fly anywhere? Especially given the fact that these supposedly personal subjective beliefs and opinions are allowed to influence, shape, determine public policy and law? Why are religious beliefs exempt from challenge? What is the justification?
Religion is psychologically very, very powerful. Hey, eternal life! Joy Evergreen! A place where there is no sickness, disease, aging, death, pain…blah blah blah. And Power. Can’t forget that. The power to make an entire society cohere. At last, I know what’s right and wrong without question because I have Big Daddy in the sky, that which there is no greater, telling me so. To hell with ambiguity. And boy will it be pissed if I screw up: it’s either hell, or the asian version of that advanced through the giddy idea of reincarnation. People want to be told what to do! They will surrender freedom and happiness for security, and then, content, call it Truth.
To what end all? That’s a question they profoundly dislike.
Until secularists create programs that solve existential problems of meaning, hope, and time (contentment now, not the unfulfilled hope for it.) we are lost. I am not saying they do not exist, but whatever they are, they are not catching on too well. Pardon my ignorance of them, as no programs come to mind as I write. They cannot fall into the trap of being a secular religion ala Marxism. And we must be practical: religion will be around for a VERY LONG time. We will have to advance our cause with civility, kindness, example, education, and not oppose their rights to worship as they want—so long as they stay out of the state and leave me be if I request it. The first amendment of the US constitution is clear and balanced on that. Except they have a hard time leaving me be.
This is a helluva task. You were right on recently, Ophelia, when you said that religion is easy, and that makes our task harder. All structure is handed to you on a platter made of heavenly clouds. Speaking of harder, we cannot back down, acquiesce, shirk from challenging them when they are aggressive and arrogant and presumptuous—and not become the same. They cannot infringe on our desire to think as we want either. That is hard. Who likes to be shouted down in public. I confess I usually lack the courage to rock the boat. The US is a hard place in this regard.
I hope I don’t seem too irrelevant to your last post, but I think these are direct to the problems that underlie it. Their perception of us, in part, is that we do not compete with religion: we are an misguided annoyance that will lead to catastrophe. They are driven by fear.
Exactly. So why did I get jumped on when I suggested that Judge Jones had done a secular society no favours by backing the possibility of divine origins in his judgement. Are we hoping to win the war by conceding some of the battles? It won’t work.
I hope you don’t consider my response a “jumping-on;” it wasn’t intended that way, in addition to which I looked specifically at the shutting-up effect I hoped his clarity would have on some of them. Please don’t get me wrong: I would love to win this battle and this war. Legal judgements are only defences on our side; they’re stop-gap victories strictly in the sense of halting the barbarian at the gates, a buying of time. Real victory in the sense of a majority espousing a common-sense view of the world is something we should aspire to without pretending it can be a short-term goal. And it absolutely cannot be achieved by coercion. This judgement may lead to less confused children in one area, but it’s hardly going to change anyone’s religious opinions, which weren’t based on anything in the real world to begin with. In addition, I believe a double-pronged approach is important. Meaning that we absolutely have to open our mouths about nonsense but, at least in some of the one-on-one situations, should keep in mind that many of the believers have grown up in situations that permitted no other results. There’s no point in gratuitously breathing fire at them if the only effect that will have is to confirm an existing prejudice about atheists. There’s a fifty-something thread somewhere a couple of months ago in which Karl and I kind of “stayed behind” to try and gently enlighten a believer type who had stumbled in here and couldn’t fathom why he was getting abused. Simply by adopting a reasonable tone of voice, we already got him to concede, no, nothing as good as that his beliefs might be wrong, but at least that his preconception of atheists, as people who had no knowledge of their own but were blindly obeying a dictate of their professors (just as he might from a priest) could not be right in all cases.
This war requires a hell of a lot more resources than merely the self-evident truth that we are the only side that has a case. It’s not only scientific knowledge that we need to be developing; it’s ways of thinking that can help us develop strategies to open more people’s eyes.
Chris,
An afterthought to clarify on the point that brought this up: we don’t disagree; we have, at most, a difference of interpretation. You, for obvious reasons, dislike the part of the ruling in which he entertains the possibility that ID might be right. I find it less problematic because he hasn’t been asked to rule on that question, which I interpret to mean that he’s only gone that route in order to say with no chance of being misunderstood, that even if ID were true, it would still have no place in a science classroom. Churches and Sunday schools already exist; he’s not establishing them with his ruling. He’s being explicit about ID, right or wrong, belonging nowhere but in those frameworks that have already rejected scientific method. You can’t ban them, but you can keep them separate and not permit them influence outside circles of believers.
>Well, yes, of course this is an opinion we’re not allowed to have.< I presume Ophelia is referring to the U.S. here. Richard Dawkins has many a time published scathing attacks on religion. Of course he has been attacked in turn – but that’s the perogative of religious folk, and there is (and has been) nothing to stop him, and his supporters, responding in kind.
Not only did I misspell prerogative, I think it is the wrong word! Anyway, the meaning is clear from the context.
Hmm…I’m not entirely referring to the US alone. I think the taboo on criticising religion operates in the UK too. Mind you, I’m saying it’s a taboo, not an actual legal, binding prohibition. Dawkins has indeed published many criticisms of religion – but the result is that even many atheists refer to him by all sorts of opprobrious terms – rabid, intolerant, extreme, etc. It is true that there is nothing physical, literal, legal stopping him and his supporters from responding in kind – but I don’t think that’s quite the same as saying there is nothing at all stopping them. I think the heavy and frequently applied social pressure not to ‘offend’ or ‘disrespect’ or ‘insult’ believers by challenging their ‘cherished beliefs’ is a Something that can stop people from responding in kind. And since it works in one direction and not the other, and works to ‘protect’ (remember Ian Mayes’s protected space in the Guardian) the side without evidence while not protecting the side with evidence – I think that social pressure is a real problem, and should be pointed out and sharply criticised.
P.S. So when I say that’s an opinion we’re not allowed to have, I mean ‘allowed’ of course the same way PZ meant it: socially, morally, by custom, etc, not literally and legally. Literally and legally of course we are allowed to have it – but PZ was speaking figuratively.
Ophelia wrote:
> I think the taboo on criticising religion operates in the UK too.< Sorry, I don’t agree. The current “taboo” is about criticising religions of ethnic minorities, not religion per se, and certainly not Christianity.
Allen
One example – the BBC refuses to allow humanists or atheists on its ‘Thought for the Day’ slot. And why are schools being forced to have prayer time? Because not doing do might imply that people do not need religion in their lives – and as the Govt has reminded them, that’s against the law – taboo. I’m waiting for a rich industrialist to announce that he wants to fund a string of ‘lack of faith’ schools.
The fact that the person in charge of the generally fatuous Radio 4 “Thought for the Day” (an agnostic, by the way) refuses to have humanists or atheists on the slot is really neither here nor there. It does not show there is a taboo against criticizing Christianity. I think most active Christians would be astonished to hear this claim. I can run off a whole list of names in recent times of people I’ve heard on BBC radio and read in newspapers in who have voiced vociferous criticisms of either religion in general or Christianity in particular.
The issue of the government’s policy of maintaining the tradition of schools having a regular religious assembly is something else, and not evidence of any taboo on *criticizing religion*, which is what we are discussing here. I think it is ridiculous in this age, but it is not only regularly flouted (not just in Wales), my impression is that what takes place is not particularly religious in many schools.
Incidentally, I can recall my experiences of regular morning assembly when I was at school many decades ago, and it was pretty harmless. The idea that, even in those more formal days, anyone who was not already religious would be influenced towards religion by their experiences in school assembly is rather absurd. That’s not to say it is a “good thing”, but let’s keep a sense of proportion about what is really important.
“I can run off a whole list of names in recent times of people I’ve heard on BBC radio and read in newspapers in who have voiced vociferous criticisms of either religion in general or Christianity in particular.”
Yes – but then they get called names a good deal, don’t they? Which as you point out is fair enough, but all the same, it seems to me the epithets that get flung at people like Toynbee and Dawkins are symptomatic of a taboo mentality. I can believe the taboo is stronger here (in the US) than it is there, but I have a hard time believing it doesn’t exist at all.
Ophelia, we’re obviously going to have to agree to disagree about this one.
>Yes – but then they get called names a good deal, don’t they? Which as you point out is fair enough, but all the same, it seems to me the epithets that get flung at people like Toynbee and Dawkins are symptomatic of a taboo mentality. I can believe the taboo is stronger here (in the US) than it is there, but I have a hard time believing it doesn’t exist at all.< Yes, it is fair enough, as Toynbee and Dawkins do a lot of name-calling themselves. And no, I don’t see this is any way symptomatic of a taboo mentality. Why shouldn’t people, including those with no religious beliefs, voice criticisms when they think it is appropriate? Is there supposed to be one viewpoint to which all unbelievers adhere? For instance, one gains the impression from reading Dawkins that religion is the main source of wars and international strife, disregarding the fact that the three greatest mass murdering regimes of the twentieth century (four if you include the Khmer Rouge) were secular, and in three cases militantly anti-religion. An example of how Dawkins occasionally goes too far in his polemical pieces is indicated by his saying that “Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East”. I presume he is alluding primarily to the Israel/Palestine dispute, in which case this is a pretty superficial judgment (despite the “of course”). Certainly religion exacerbates the situation, but it is arguable (and I would argue) that this is primarily a territorial dispute, not a religious one. At root the Palestinian/Arab hostility towards Israel lies in their belief that the original (ie, pre-1948), largely European, settlers set up a state on land that belongs to the Arabs. The rights and wrongs of the dispute are not the issue here (each side has a compelling case, which is one reason why the conflict is so intractable), but for Dawkins to label religion as the underlying source of the dispute is simplistic. So I’m critical of some of the assertions of Dawkins on religion. Does this indicate a taboo mentality on my part? Of course not. It exemplifies what I presume we’re all in favour of, free debate. A rather different view of religion from an unbeliever is expressed by Anthony Campbell at
http://www.acampbell.org.uk/blog/archives/2005/12/17/the-varieties-of-irreligious-experience/#more-184
I’m not, of course, suggesting people should necessarily accept his position, only that they recognise that non-believers can take differing views without their being constrained by any supposed taboos on criticising religion. And that there is no “correct” unbelievers’ view about religion.
Hmm. Well you say we’ll have to agree to disagree, Allen, but then you go ahead and cause me to see what you mean. So I can’t agree to disagree, because I see what you mean! A dastardly trick.
snicker
It would probably be correct to characterise the roots of the Mid-East conflict as a little more complex than the single word “religion,” but almost all the reasons for the solution being so elusive do eventually boil down to it. Talk of divine title deeds has never helped and I’m reminded also of Hitchens quoting Eban about how simple the solution ought to be, with Hitchens of course dumping on religion as the culprit for its unattainability. Quite apart from that, if you look at who is making compromise so difficult on both sides, it’s the extreme fringes. And the problem with them is not that they’ve set the bar so high there’s no meeting point; those extremes really do reject the idea of peace with the other side as being completely unacceptable because it includes the idea that the other side would be allowed to do something other than vanish. And the people who talk like that and do their damndest to keep things as hot as possible do have the common denominator of religion as the thing that prevents even thought of compromise.
If Dawkins is over-simplifying, it’s not by much. Minus the religious element, an end to the conflict might be in sight.
Dawkins didn’t say the main obstacle to solving the problem was religion, he said the *source* of the problem was religion.
>If Dawkins is over-simplifying, it’s not by much. Minus the religious element, an end to the conflict might be in sight.< It is true that the ultra-religious Israeli fringe is a serious obstacle to a longterm settlement (sic), but it is pretty optimistic to suppose that, given the (understandable) siege mentality that pervades much of Israeli society, without them (and their counterparts among the Palestinians), there would be a prospect of a deal in the near future. There are too many appalling memories of tragedies on both sides for the necessary compromises to be acceptable by either the Israeli or Palestinian mainstream at present. And even to the outside observer trying to take a disinterested view, it is difficult to see what would currently constitute a just settlement acceptable to both sides.
Cessation of violence and a negotiated territorial compromise probably sound very reasonable to us. Yet over there one has (at least) one side with a powerful fringe rejecting territorial compromise on biblical grounds, while the other does its main damage to a climate conducive to negotiation with suicide attacks heavy with religious motivation (and reward). Not all, but many “appalling memories of tragedies” that make sitting down and talking so difficult are rooted in religion. Your answer disagreed with me a lot less than you might have been expecting.
I think this is the most suitable thread for this quote I just saw from the spokesman of Hizbullah (Mid-East connection to previous coincidental):
“Terrorists are not just those who set off bombs. They are also those who hurt others’ feelings.”
Hands up anyone who might not be a terrorist…