Bunting
And there’s always dear Madeleine Bunting. How fondly I look back on her musings about how much happier ‘African’ lives are than those in the creepy dreary alienated consumerist West. How the people in the Democratic Republic of Congo must have chuckled if any of them were in a position – what with being so busy starving and being ill and dying and all – to find a Guardian and read her essay.
Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is killing 38,000 people each month, says the Lancet medical journal. Most of the deaths are not caused by violence but by malnutrition and preventable diseases after the collapse of health services, the study said. Since the war began in 1998, some 4m people have died, making it the world’s most deadly war since 1945, it said.
Yes but at least they’re not all trivial and consumerist, and that’s what counts. Anyway, she has a stupid piece on religion and ‘atheism’ (her version), taking off from Richard Dawkins’s Channel 4 show on religion as the root of all evil. I haven’t seen the show, so can’t (and won’t! not if it was ever so) comment on Bunting’s take on that. But that still leaves lots to comment on.
His voice is one of the loudest in an increasingly shrill chorus of atheist humanists; something has got them badly rattled…Behind unsubstantiated assertions, sweeping generalisations and random anecdotal evidence, there’s the unmistakable whiff of panic; they fear religion is on the march again.
Well gee, why would we think that, do you suppose? Are we all crazy and delusional and dribbling with paranoia? How could anyone possibly fear that religion is on the march again right now, and how could anyone object if it were?
That lack of empathy also lies behind Dawkins’s reference to a “process of non-thinking called faith”. For thousands of years, religious belief has been accompanied by thought and intellectual discovery, whether Islamic astronomy or the Renaissance. But his contempt is so profound that he can’t be bothered to even find out (in an interview he dismissed Christian theology in exactly these terms).
Yes but the fact that religious belief has been accompanied by thought and intellectual discovery (Bunting accidentally put that well) doesn’t mean that religious belief was useful or helpful or (certainly) causative of that thought and intellectual discovery, it just means it was there at the same time. It could be a correlation rather than a cause. So the fact that the two ways of thinking were sometimes in the same room doesn’t in the least contradict what Dawkins said. And after all, he’s right – ‘faith’ is by definition a process of non-thinking. That’s what the word means. Religious believers will say as much when their guard is down – that faith is not about believing things that are supported by evidence, anyone can do that; faith is about believing without evidence. In other words, non-thinking.
It’s also right for religion to concede ground to science to explain natural processes; but at the same time, science has to concede that despite its huge advances it still cannot answer questions about the nature of the universe – such as whether we are freak chances of evolution in an indifferent cosmos (Dawkins does finally acknowledge this point in the programmes).
Boy I get sick of that trope. It’s not clear that science can’t at least offer a plausible answer to that particular question, and in any case, religion can’t answer it any more than science or anything else can – and probably less. It can’t ‘answer’ such questions because all it does is say what it wants to say, and let it go at that. Excuse me, but that’s not an answer. Religion doesn’t have to check its answers against anything, it doesn’t have to have them peer-reviewed, it doesn’t have to do the maths, it doesn’t have to present them to audiences of restless ambitious rivals eager to show them wrong. It just says. That’s not an answer, that doesn’t count. Whenever people say that, with such an air of bovine triumph, we have some serious non-thinking going on. Because what they mean when they say ‘science can’t and religion can’ is that science can’t because it does have to check, it does have to meet certain criteria, and religion can because it doesn’t – because it doesn’t have to do anything at all other than run off at the mouth. Science ‘can’t’ because reality provides constraints and limitations and requires work, religion ‘can’ because fantasy doesn’t do any of that. So what is so impressive about this ridiculous idea that religion can answer all these deep questions?
Nothing. It’s an imbecilic line of argument, it’s sheer naked emperor. Must try harder, Madders.
Thus Bunting: “His conclusion is that no children should be exposed to religion until they are old enough to make a choice . . .”
I disagree. Consider the possibility that it is a parent’s duty to give her children something harmless to rebel against.
I fear thaat G Tingey will dissent from this opinion. :)
‘it is a parent’s duty to give her children something harmless to rebel against’
Sure. A fondness for Marvell comics or the music of Blodwen Pig. Works for me.
Madeleine Murray O’Bunting is soooo predictable…
Maybe she needs to be personally introduced to some of those straw men she claims Dawkins is attacking. Never know, it could be a match (then all we’d need is the side of a matchbox…).
Not all of Bunting’s piece is complete rubbish, but I was struck by:
“how can they ever have knowledge without running into Dawkins’s allegation of indoctrination?”
Um, pretty easily no? The difference between RE and Sunday school surely?
“That lack of empathy also lies behind Dawkins’s reference to a “process of non-thinking called faith”. For thousands of years, religious belief has been accompanied by thought and intellectual discovery”
As you say, so what? Faith -is- non-thinking, it is believing in something you don’t really have any evidence for, that is why it is -faith-, not just plain old rational belief. That some people have, in the past, when we believed all kinds of shit, also thought somewhat rationally in this framework does not make faith somehow super rational in and of itself. There must be a name for this new historico-romantic move, the idea that because people in the past were religious and also came up with some good ideas, or that some religious ideas inspired good art, somehow this makes believing in something you have no evidence for a good idea, and in fact such a good idea that pointing out there is no reason to believe it should be considered somehow silly and mean spirited.
“when we believed all kinds of shit”
It’s like the “scaffolding” that Irreducible Complexity has to pretend can’t exist. You know nothing so you make something up. People believe what you make up and, best of all, it gives you power. Whole civilisations grow up steeped in this and hardly any learning can take place without institutional support, with religious power always in the background. Eventually you know so much that you realise how unnecessary to understanding yourself and your surroundings the original beliefs are and – voila – you’re in conflict with the scaffolding, that refuses just to fade away.
Pesky scaffolding!
What a shame they didn’t think to make it of something biodegradable.
Memes – they’re hardy little blighters. But take heart, we’re still evolving. The millennia that religion has existed is still just a blip on the geological timescale and for all that we are distressed by it now, the whole damn thing may end up as a novel curio within the development of the species, whether or not what it looks like by then is something that we can recognise.
Oh yeah right like I really care what happens in the long term. I care what happens now, while I’m alive to watch! Jeez – you think I’m some kind of big thinker or something? Anything that happens after I’m compost – pffffffff, I couldn’t care less.
Hey, that wasn’t a call not to keep on doing what we’re doing, for right now, things like reducing the number of beheadings for teaching females etc. It was a suggestion that it may not be crazy to think that not every generation will always have to fight this. Ignorance has always been one of religion’s greatest allies, practically its secret weapon (why was there such resistance to the idea of exposing people to religious texts in a language they could understand?), and it’s becoming harder than ever before to keep masses of people completely in the dark, like the Taliban have to do with women. They know very well that more educated women means extinction for their kind; there’s a significant element of fear in their actions, in addition to the insane fanatical bloodlust. I applaud Judge Jones in the here and now, while also appreciating that the judgement could be cited another 80 years down the line if a “Scopes III” ever rears its ugly head.
I’ll be more careful in future, I promise. I think I can’t think of anything more confusing than for you to think I thought you were a thinker.
At least, I think so.
I can’t decide which is worse – the new Rocky “fill in #” sequel or a “Scopes III” trial.
Keep on Thinkin’.
“Keep on Thinkin’.”
Bad idea. I thought of a movie poster with Judge Jones instead of Stallone. He was exuding “attitude” and I think the subtitle was “The Designer Strikes Back.”
OB,
Congratulations, nice chunky quote in the Observer.
Bunting speaks of the ‘increasingly shrill chorus of atheist humanists’. Surely it would not be wholly surprising if discussion of religion occasionally became a little shrill at a time when it is used to justify beheading teachers, bombing polling stations, stoning gays, etc. It is better to be a little shrill in response to such matters than to be completely unconcerned.
Shrill? Personally, I have a pleasant light baritone.
I’m surprised she doesn’t complain about the gurgling noises Zarqawi’s victims made. When did the most vicious non-theist regime ever claim it was killing people “because there’s no god”?
On the other hand, it is absolutely appropriate to mention the religion of a terrorist if he himself is claiming it as his motivation.
Only a little off-topic, I read back on some older stuff about Dawkins that had appeared while the programmes were being planned and there’s one interview where he calls it abuse to label a four-year-child as belonging to a religion. I agree with that, but then he adds that it would be also be abuse to label a four-year-child as an atheist. I don’t often disagree with Dawkins, and maybe this is pure semantics, but it seems that here he’s needlessly bowing to people’s perception of atheism as an ideology or, worse still, a belief. A four-year-child may not have made a decision to reject belief in god, but as OB has justly hammered and hammered to insufficient effect, atheism is an absence of theism, nothing more. Yes, it is wrong to label a four-year-old child as an unbeliever in the sense that he’s taken a stand, but in the proper sense of the word every single one of us, without exception, was an atheist from birth until such time as something untoward may have altered that state of affairs. I don’t think Dawkins meant anything other than the labelling, but he sounded too soft on the fact that atheism is, without any ifs or buts, the default position.
I’m not convinced that Bunting’s piece wasn’t commissioned for rather shady reasons, – the Guardian really is going for that ‘the contoversy is the story’ bag that Murdoch has plastered all over the planet. I mean, no-one’s seen the tv show, so there was nothing to argue aginst for the reader. She doesn’t even factor this in to her risible sixth-form strop. ‘There’s a tv show coming and its all lies, lies, lies I tell you, she (utters in beuatifully modulated non-shrill tones).
A snide move if you ask me. Arrogant too. She is snide in much of her argument, when she’s not being a fucking moron that is. She accuses humanists of not using evidence based argument. Fucking beauty that one. Thick but sly. Still, the Grauniad was a terific read yesterday apart from that. Especially the cover story about Gorgeous George’s utter unavalability to his constituents. I wonder if GG and Madders have met. In a Knightsbridge restaurant, candle-lit all suits, cigars, and strapless dresses, the desert shaped like the delta of venus…
I wonder if they have a love child. Scurrulous. But just imagine…
GT – go figure.
I particularly like the way she excoriates atheists for all the things they haven’t done; not generating ‘a compelling popular narrative and ethic of what it is to be human and our place in the cosmos’, not preventing the spread of new age crystal botherers, not creating peace on Earth. Sorry, was that in the job description?
Well of course that was in the job description. That’s why it’s one of those arguments for the existence of God – along with: look at that flower; therefore, God exists. It goes: atheists can’t fix everything, therefore God exists.
Maybe I’m out-Dawkinsing Dawkins now, but I also had a problem with his “badly designed combination lock” analogy in the Science & Theology News piece you linked to. The last paragraph (“That’s what natural selection is about. It’s not a sudden all-or-nothing hitting of the jackpot. It’s gradually getting warmer toward the jackpot, and that is the key to the entire problem.”) is a clear attempt to find something as snappy as Hoyle’s Boeing 707 to lob back at it. The problem is the word “jackpot,” which way too many people will understand as an admission that evolution is somehow working its way to a climax, which most of them will understand as meaning “us.” The jackpot in its normal sense is already there, waiting for someone to hit it. There’s no way you can say that about us. A few degrees up or down in global temperature a couple of million years ago and we might have been a very different species today.
Different thought, but belongs most here: I’ve been fascinated by wondering about the line the religious have to draw to separate their “faith” beliefs from the essential reality they have to recognise in order to function, and where precisely they draw it. Someone brought it up nicely a while back: the business about if Bush claimed god spoke to him through a hair dryer, people would think he’d flipped, but it’s fine without the hair dryer. It strikes me that one of the things required to prevent being judged a fruitcake is a lack of specificity (e.g. Bush is never cross-questioned on the details of his dialogues with god). How would people react if he nominated someone for a post and absolutely insisted nobody else would do because god had specifically mentioned that name? What he gets away with is, essentially, the claim that all his decisions are inspired by god in a general sense, a kind of American version of the divine right of kings. Which is pretty scary.
But also, below that level, what would a devout follower of Pat Robertson do if Pat contacted him (great honour, huh?) and explained that god needed the guy’s son for a sacrifice (a la Isaac)? It’s not just a test of faith, it’s a repeat of the classic test of faith.
I’m merely throwing this stuff out because so many people couldn’t get through a single day if they applied the same standards to everyday life as to their religious beliefs. OB has said plenty about the fact that the lines get drawn; I’m intensely curious about the “where” part of it.
Or, just to elaborate slightly on that last bit, if people displayed the same trust without evidence in their daily affairs that they give to priests and the like in the matter of their continued existence into eternity, well, con-man would be the only profession worth pursuing.
And… all religion is blackmail. I beat you to it, Tingey… (gotta keep your hand on the buzzer in this joint).
“I’m merely throwing this stuff out because so many people couldn’t get through a single day if they applied the same standards to everyday life as to their religious beliefs…I’m intensely curious about the “where” part of it.”
Just so. Similes about that oddity occur to me often. If you can’t find your car keys, do you pray instead of looking? If your tooth hurts, do you pray instead of going to the dentist? Some people in fact do, but most don’t. So – if it works here why doesn’t it work there? And so on.
Me, I’m intensely curious about the ‘how’ part of it – how people doublethink without being troubled by it.
(The fact that you beat Tingey to it doesn’t mean he won’t say it too, I suspect. He beats himself to it all the time, and that doesn’t stop him.)
The “how” is fascinating, too. The reason the “where” is getting under my skin is because I more than suspect that one can apply either faith or reason to the same areas under different circumstances, or at different times, meaning, I suppose, that we actually also have a “when” question on our hands.
“how people doublethink without being troubled by it”
I suspect they don’t at all realise it’s doublethink because they think they’ve separated it out into different areas, which is why the precise boundaries are so curious. We could probably do a very funny sketch on someone with a rare medical condition that makes him do it all the other way round, e.g. getting into furious arguments with a cleric over lack of proof of an afterlife yet believes any old shit people on the street tell him (“… and what time will the Bridge be delivered to my apartment?”).
snorting
That would be funny!
I’d write it, if I were you, quick like a bunny, before somebody steals it.
“The problem is the word “jackpot,” which way too many people will understand as an admission that evolution is somehow working its way to a climax, which most of them will understand as meaning “us.””
You think? It seems to me pretty clear that what he’s talking about is explanation, not ‘us’. The crane is one great metaphor for getting to the explanation, and a combination lock is another.
I will, but I trust you to keep a proper archived and dated version of this page as evidence when the plagiarism lawsuit comes up. It’ll be good practice for the full-length play.
Maybe I was inserting my knowledge of other writings of his into my reading of the piece (in one of the books he explains what’s so silly about Hoyle’s 707). I had no problem with the crane. The safe itself wasn’t bad and, no, I didn’t think he was talking about “us;” I was concerned that using the word “jackpot” might suggest it to those already that way inclined, which is not the direction needs going in. I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. It probably helps that “those already that way inclined” are unlikely to trust or even listen to any argument that has his name attached to it.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. That anyone likely to read the article would be likely to get it.
Hokay – I’ll keep archive and guard it with due diligence.
Say, anyone know what happened to Karl?
I see why you brought that up. I’ve been wondering ever since he vanished. Everyone seems to have just assumed that the joke about him sacrificing his life to save B&W means he’s dead. I really don’t get it. Should one get worried just because someone stops contributing to an internet discussion? A couple of times I also wondered whether a new contributor with any similarities of style might be him under a new identity, which would be easy, if that’s what he wanted.
Sure as shit wan’t me. He was original.
And he could tell the difference between different kinds of wine and the different parts of the body they tasted best with.
What happened to Halasz? Is anyone enough into the Marx Brothers (pre-movies) to get it if I ask “Whatever happened to Rhinelander?”
No, I don’t know what happened to Karl. I emailed him once and got no answer – but then, he has an AOL address, and messages to AOL addresses often go astray. I’ve been meaning to try again – I’ll do that. It’s a bit worrying. He went quiet once before, but not for anywhere near this long.
I really don’t think he’d do the new identity thing – if only because he used to email a lot. No, I didn’t assume the joke thing was real, but I didn’t worry at first, because he’d gone and then come back before – I thought it was like that.
Nothing happened to Halasz, except that he was banned. For storage reasons.
No! Don’t get Rhinelander. I wasn’t allowed to go to vaudeville shows – too busy practicing the ukelele.
“At any rate, God’s never been notably accused of being a logician, just adept at talking through whirlwinds…”
john c. halasz 2005-03-08 – 17:44:46
“Personally, I’ve never believed that God is dead. That’s far too comforting a belief. That God is senile provides a much better explanatory fit for providential history.”
john c. halasz 2005-03-06 – 10:21:05
err . . . /That/ Halasz?
Yes, that halasz. He had his moments – but they came wrapped in torrents and avalanches of unpunctuated ramblings. After a year and a half, I’d had enough. Sorry! I get bored easily. I got bored.
The death of irony?
Has anyone read the new book from H. H. The Dalai Lama, “The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality” (Morgan Road, 2005)? In the conclusion he writes:
“My difficulty is not with reductionism as such. Indeed many of our great advances have been made by applying the reductionist approach that characterizes so much scientific experimentation and analyisis. The problem arises when reductionism, which is essentially a method, is turned into a metaphysical standpoint.” (207)
I believe that Dawkins has said that the word reductionism makes him want to reach for a revolver, but then, he didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize. On balance, though, I think it would be hard to find a major religious leader friendlier to science than the 14th D.L. Which for some reason gets me to thinking about Emerson, Thoreau, the whole line of American thought that one might justly characterize as “spiritual not religious” in spite of the New Agey abuses of the phrase.* Even better was the description from, I believe, Kenneth Rexroth: “empirical mysticism.” It would be impossible to describe these writers and thinkers as uncongenial toward science, though I suppose the same criticisms as Ms. Nanda’s on the Harris book would apply to them as well.
It seems worth noting, however, that the silent multitude who have dropped “religion” per se–often in contexts that have made them well aware of its potential for inculcating “lethally dangerous nonsense”–yet who still resist the all-or-nothing naturalistic formulation may not be uniformly weak-willed or weak-minded, but rather that some of them may be wary of substituting (what they perceive to be) one orthodoxy for another. These people would surely respond better to gentle persuasion than the usual Dawkinsesque browbeating?
* Some interesting recent reading in the vein: “Jesus without the Miracles,” by Erik Reece, in the December issue of Harper’s.
I and not the D. L. mispelled “analysis.” That’s my karmic burden, not his.
I mean, the Unitarians, for example. They ain’t hurtin’ nobody. Although Sunday morning lectures are a bit much, if you ask me. I prefer newspaper, late coffee, complacencies of the peignoir, & c.
Stephen:
I, too read the Harpers Article. At first, I found some of the ideas rather interesting. In the end, though, I’m not sure I find very appealing HIS version of Jesus, either.
It’s simply a combination of otherworldly pastoralism (we need to all live on small family farms, even though such a life is brutally hard and every population in modern history) The same aristocratic disdain for commerce and “merchants.” The same dislike for evilllllll cities. These are common beliefs for the landed gentry who have servants (or slaves) to do much of the hard work-leaving them time for the intellectual pastorales in favor of yeomanry. As for the author’s image of Jesus, he tellingly compared Him to a wandering street person. A very telling observation, as you interview the more articulate hobos, they share “Jesus'” disdain for the square world.
Also: I might refer you to the article following the Jeffersonian Jesus screed: How the Chinese are fleeing their desperately rigorous rural existance as quickly as possible. “There was nothing to eat in the village.”
Of course, one cannot deny the environmental disasters thar are brewing, either. So, in the end, we may need to collapse back into a more rural existence. I’m just not sure it’s something to celebrate.
My first post, the second paragraph’ sentence should read:
… even though such a life is brutally hard and every population in modern history seems to be eager to flee “the farm” for the evil city slum.
Point taken, Brian. I blame the Romantics, like Wordsworth:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours …”
Then again, he had a point as well. Lots of “yes, buts” in this area.
“How the Chinese are fleeing their desperately rigorous rural existance as quickly as possible”
But that’s partly due to a deliberate policy of favouring development of the cities over that of rural areas, and on the back of the labour of the rural people at that.
Told you so!
‘Which for some reason gets me to thinking about Emerson, Thoreau, the whole line of American thought that one might justly characterize as “spiritual not religious” in spite of the New Agey abuses of the phrase.* Even better was the description from, I believe, Kenneth Rexroth: “empirical mysticism.”‘
Okay so Stephen – maybe you can answer the question I always have about ideas like that. What exactly does that mean? What does ‘spiritual not religious’ mean? What does spiritual mean?
OB,
‘What does ‘spiritual not religious’ mean?’
I was struck by Neera Manda’s comment on Harris;
‘…spiritualism as means for mindful relaxation, and the delight and even ecstasy that sometimes accompany the sensation of losing one’s sense of space, time and self. Indeed “wise mystics” have long realized that the mystical experience does not confer existential status on its content. Rather than construct metaphysical systems, wise mystics have learned to simply enjoy and value the experience itself.’
Isn’t that empirical mysticism?
OB, I’m sure I couldn’t come up with an exact definition that would satisfy non-woolly criteria. If I started quoting from the N.E. Transcendentalists I’d put myself in even greater jeopardy. John Horgan had a valiant go of it in “Rational Mysticism” but with inconclusive results. I must refer you to the department of hints and guesses, office of intimations.
On the other hand, it seems to me that the socio-cultural phenomenon of “spiritual versus religious” merits further explication. Just came upon a book I’d like to read by Robert C. Fuller, called “Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America” (2001). In an excerpt printed here:
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/109/story_10958_1.html
he claims that:
“Before the 20th century the terms religious and spiritual were used more or less interchangeably. But a number of modern intellectual and cultural forces have accentuated differences between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres of life. The increasing prestige of the sciences, the insights of modern biblical scholarship, and greater awareness of cultural relativism all made it more difficult for educated American to sustain unqualified loyalty to religious institutions.”
Emerson’s Divinity School Address would seem as good a primer as any on the origins of this divide:
http://www.emersoncentral.com/divaddr.htm
At any rate, given their heterodox and non-institutional proclivities, the spiritual-not-religious types are probably the humanists’ nearest allies in the battle against dogmatism and intolerance. Even if they drive you nuts.
But Stephen – if the word is undefinable – then how can we talk about it at all? And what’s the point?
“the spiritual-not-religious types are probably the humanists’ nearest allies in the battle against dogmatism and intolerance.”
I don’t know. I don’t know if they are or not, since I still don’t know what that means. And I’m not particularly looking for near allies anyway. And dogmatism and intolerance aren’t the only things I’m criticising – I’m also criticising anti-thinking. It seems to me that having words that mean everything and nothing is a sure-fire recipe for non-thinking.
Surely you must have some idea of what you mean by the word, or why bring it up at all?
“But that’s partly due to a deliberate policy of favouring development of the cities over that of rural areas, and on the back of the labour of the rural people at that.”
True, PM. This is a relatively new policy, and the article in Harpers did discuss alternative economic development efforts to encourage better development in the countryside. Part of the problem with rural China, though, is the environmental devastation created by earlier attempts (under Mao) to industrialize the countryside.
Still, as a devotee of evil cities, I would find living in a village three hours (or whatever) from modern roads surrounded by people who lived there for 15 generations and trying to grow enough food for a family of four on one acre of land-awful. Just awful.
Oh, my idea of what I mean by the word might — depending on the day and mood — go something like:
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.”
(From “Tao Te Ching: A New Translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English” [1972]).
But — and this is why I found Fuller’s sociological distinction pertinent — I would never regard my own vague intuition grounded in a sacred text as anyone else’s “exact definition,” much less as a statement of creedal belief (see also Elaine Pagels’ “Beyond Belief” on this point) or a vision of reality to be imposed on other sentient beings.
In other words, my “spirituality” such as it may be is fundamentally “private,” non-proselytizing and permanently off-limits from the “public square.” I think it was scientific writer David Diamond who maintained that a scientist’s religion (or lack thereof) is nobody’s goddamned business but his or her own, unless that religion can be shown to have skewed the research by inserting a hidden agenda.
I find that a decent rule of thumb for laypersons as well, and feel that those people — religious, atheist or somewhere in between — who can find common ground on basic secular principles of tolerance, human rights, free expression, and nonviolence should do so as often as possible in confronting the gathering stormcloud of extremism. That puts me in the non-overlapping magisteria camp, I guess. Whoops, wrong room!
David Darling, that is, not David Diamond, the composer.
‘my “spirituality” such as it may be is fundamentally “private,” non-proselytizing and permanently off-limits from the “public square.”‘
Ah. Well that’s the key difference, all right. But as soon as people start referring to ‘spirituality’ as an element in an argument, things get tricky again.
‘those people…who can find common ground on basic secular principles of tolerance, human rights, free expression, and nonviolence should do so as often as possible in confronting the gathering stormcloud of extremism.’
Hmmyes, except I would add one more basic secular principle, which is rationality – and at that point, some of those people drop out. That’s the difficulty. Extremism isn’t the only problem, it seems to me; irrationalism is also a problem. So – I see common ground as a good, but not at the price of pretending to think ‘faith’ is compatible with thinking.