Recent Activities
Just in case anyone runs away with the idea that I’m being too kind to religion here – let’s take a quick look at some of its recent cavortings.
There are the nice people who burn down new schools in one of the world’s poorest countries.
Militants in southern Afghanistan are reported to have burned down three schools in their latest move against the government’s education system. Officials blamed the former ruling Taleban for burning down the newly-built schools in Helmand province which serve some 1,000 boys and girls.
There are the fun guys who want to prevent women from running in races.
Some 500 women took part in three races in Lahore, although 2,000 due to run had backed out over fears of violence. Islamic protesters had demanded women be barred from taking part, arguing their presence ran counter to Islam…The six-party Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) alliance had opposed the mixing of men and women in such public events and had urged protesters to disrupt the race. They insisted that women runners should race separately, and indoors.
And that women should be confined and prevented and deprived in every way possible. Of course they did. Men and women mustn’t mix, therefore women must have their lives made as small and empty as possible. Naturally.
And there are the lovable fellas who line up to call women foul names for the crime of – learning to drive a car.
“I’m a broad-minded person,” declared the Afghan driving instructor. “But I was shocked by her behaviour.” “Really?” I asked. His female student had laughed. Was that really so bad? “It was shameful and embarrassing,” he replied. “Her character is no better than that of an animal.”…One of the women who was learning to drive had been beaten by the Taleban for removing her burqa in a shop, even though the only male present at the time was a twelve-year-old boy…I watched as Roya walked towards the test car. A long line of men had gathered by the side of the road. As she walked slowly along the line, her head bowed down, she heard the whispers of invective and abuse. She refused to tell me exactly what they had said, but I later found out she had been called a “prostitute”, a “bitch” and an “un-Islamic whore.” She failed the test. “We have freedom now,” she said. “But we are not free to enjoy it.”
There are the heroic enthusiasts who threaten Scandinavians because a Danish newspaper published cartoons mocking a guy they admire.
And so on and so on. People with mistaken ideas about reality and disgusting ideas about morality, bullying and punishing and tormenting people for the sake of those very mistaken or disgusting ideas. If religion is not the root of all evil, a lot of people spend an awful lot of energy trying to convince the rest of us that that’s exactly what it is.
I hope I don’t get seven years for saying that.
One thought that crossed my mind reading about the latest on the Danish cartoon case: the offended people were Muslims of all nationalities, but the threats were directed at Danes and other Scandinavians, not at those belonging to any religion. Is this going to go down in history as “the weirdest clash of civilisations:” the one between Islam and Scandinavian-ness? Of course, the really important lesson we’ve now learned is that freedom of speech in Denmark is inextricably linked to the fortunes of its dairy industry…
This is what really pisses me off about the political world we discover ourselves in at the moment. Western govts are prepared to engage in an armed conflict with islamists; but those same govts grovel before the idea that we mustn’t offend Islam ‘as a religion’. I still don’t know what it is that Blair, Bush et al think motivates Al Qaeda, it sure looks like Islam to me…
Or is it just that they are incapable of understanding that millions of people are actually, in the western frame of reference, fanatics prepared to kill over an insult to someone who’s been dead for 1400 years?
The very act of writing this makes me sound like some kind of right-wing ‘nuke Mecca’ lunatic, and that pisses me off even more. How dare the world be so insane that there is no rational route out?!?!
How dare people be threatened with death for speaking rationally! Where is the end?
[pause for incoherent scream of rage…]
The problem seems to be that a particular meme-trope (do I get a prize for that?) has positioned itself as both political ideology and religion; and assumed the armour and benefits of both. Personally I think that all twelve year olds should be forced to read (in translation or otherwise) Candide, and to reflect upon it at some length. Here endeth the rant.
“and assumed the armour and benefits of both.”
And added violent and very genuine threats for good measure. A winning combo.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4664398.stm
Ministers lose religious bill bid:
“The government has suffered two shock defeats over attempts to overturn Lords changes to the controversial Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.
In a blow to Tony Blair’s authority MPs voted by 288 votes to 278 to back a key Lords amendment to the bill.
Analysis of the division list showed the prime minister voted in the first division but not in the second, which was lost by one vote.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke told MPs that the bill would now become law…”
Bah. Better than the original though..
Yeah. Bad about law, good that they failed to get that terrible language in.
In Jerusalem, last Summer:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Israeli_man_faces_attempted_murder_charges_for_stabbing_three_gay_pride_marchers
I don’t understand the puprose of this post.
Isn’t this the kind of trial by anecdote that a rational, science-baded approach would seek to move past?
Brendan (fka Whaa?)
P.S. I’ve been travelling but I hope to return to the earlier more fruitful discussions tonight
Brendan – anecdote ? There are plenty of links there to actual reportage…
“Religion really is blackmail, with both “Moral” and physical threats.”
No, this is a compostional fallacy. Religion may involve blackmail, but they are not the same thing. Blackmail is threatening someone in order to coerce them into doing something. Religion involves ideology, myth, supernatural and indeed blackmail as you say. However a wheel is not a car, notwithstanding that cars have wheels, and religion is not blackmail even though it involves blackmail. If someone from Mars asked what religion was, and was told it was blackmail, that martian would not really be any better informed on what religion is.
I pity them. I really do. I’d hate to be so weak and insecure in my own beliefs that a bit of criticism or even mockery would send me into a horrified defensive panic.
Maybe that’s what the incitement to religious hatred bill really was about – an act of pity for people so feeble-minded that they can’t bring themselves to defend their views, and who need to be sheltered in a tightly controlled meme pool so that their thoughts can become ever more inbred and web-toed.
If I were god, I’d be ashamed at having such a wussy bunch of supporters.
Tom – yes, I think it was Pulman who said that if something’s worth believing in it should be robust enough to be tested strongly every couple of weeks !
Exactly. This stuff is so infantilizing – it’s really extraordinary that so many people think they’re being done a favour by being protected against disagreement, as opposed to being insulted in a much more searching, corrosive way than any cartoon could manage.
Note what Barbara Forrest said at the start of her comment on the Kitzmiller decision:
“One of the greatest gestures of respect for one’s fellow Americans is to tell them the truth. To do otherwise is the height of disrespect.”
Just replace ‘Americans’ with ‘human beings’ and there you have it.
Nick –
Your reply forced me to look up the definition of ‘anecdote.’ I didn’t know that it came from the Greek for unpublished information or that it still carried this connotation. I meant it simply as isolated facts or stories meant to show a larger trend.
My point was that this is a decidedly unrational (I don’t think it’s irrational) way of looking at this question. I don’t think that anyone disputes the wide variance of human behavior, and very few claim that the mere presence of religion makes bad people holy. So the question shouldn’t be: “do religious people do bad things?” but “are they outliers or representative of the larger group?” Unfortunately, anecdotes don’t help us to answer this question.
By analogy, I could use a series of anecdotes about the recent spate of convictions for female teachers who were sleeping with their underage male students to argue that education is filled with female sexual predators. I could marshall a substantial number of anecdotes in support of my contention. I’d be wrong, of course, but I’d only know this by looking at the large datasets on crime frequency and whatnot.
The point is this:
-You say that lots of muslims in Afghanistan are oppressing women and .
– I say that lots of christians in the Caribbean are building clinics and sewage systems for poor villagers.
– You say some muslims in Scandinavia are threatening people
– I say that the Pope takes the President of the United States to task for starting a war
…
We need some larger data sets to find the answers we seek. Are religious people more or less likely to commit violent crimes? Are religious people more or less likely to give to charity? Are religious people more or less likely to defraud others? Are religious people more or less likely to oppose the use of torture?
Tom –
I don’t know you, and I assume you’re a nice reasonable guy, but your post struck me as unintentionally funny. After all, I was still in elementary school when I learned that name calling (inbred, web-toed, wussy) is usually a mark of, as you say, “weak and insecure beliefs.”
Brendan,
One of the reasons that makes us do a lot of pointing out when religious people do bad things is that religion, apart from whatever truth claims it makes, also makes moral claims. It may not be worse for you if you’re killed by an atheist or a believer, but isn’t it somehow more outrageous if the person acting in a way we agree is immoral is claiming that he is the apex of morality? So many believers have claimed non-believers must be less moral simply because they lack belief in divine and absolute morality. You expect better from people who make those claims and you’d also expect that if they were true, crime, with few exceptions, would be an entirely secular preserve.
Another reason for the pointing out is that the people doing those things think they are doing the right thing. They think they are being good, calling women whores and bitches for daring to want to live their lives. That’s not anecdotal, because the behavior and the belief is widely documented – these are just particular examples of a general phenomenon.
I think it becomes too easy to read some of these horror articles without really grasping what is going on. I’m not writing the following gratuitously as some kind of bad taste test, but the thought came to me after what OB just wrote. Imagine you’re sitting at your computer, as you probably are while reading this. Someone comes up behind you, grabs your head and smashes it down into the keyboard or into the monitor screen, breaking your nose. The pain is indescribable and you’re choking in your own blood. Let’s pretend they only do it once, not repeatedly. They don’t apologise, say you did something that made them mad. Nor do they show any fear about being chastised themselves. No, they tell you this is the least you deserve because you did – or are – something god doesn’t like.
Think about the above deeply and then attach that thought to the news items you read about things done to people that are far, far worse, but for the same reasons.
There’s nothing wrong with philosophical discussions, but let’s not let it out of our sight that some people get nothing but violence and have no chance to think and are kept deliberately ignorant and illiterate quite literally in the name of god. When they destroy a school in Afghanistan, it’s not just that a building disappears. The building disappears in order to make it easier for the people who destroyed it to victimise the children who could have learned there, by slapping them, kicking them, stoning them, shooting them and slicing into their necks till their heads come off. When none of that happens anywhere in the name of religion, some of us might not react so allergically to it.
Lots of lukewarm, nice believers and even the occasional religiously motivated hero can’t take away the revolting taste of that kind of thing.
Stewart –
Your example goes exactly to my point about anecdotes and generalizability. Nobody disputes that the Taliban are bad people or that they are empowered by some Islamic teaching.
However, OB’s post (and this site generally, I think) indicts religion. My question is whether it is fair to generalize.
Some people use the right to free speech in order to burn crosses in other people’s yards. Some in order to burn flags. Some use it to flood money into the coffers of corrupt politicians. Does this mean free speech is a bad thing?
This analogy isn’t perfect (I’m dashing this comment off quickly), but I think it serves to make this point: in attempting to get a view of the big picture, are we served by looking at a few selected anecdotes?
Actually, it is interesting to note that the most religious counties and states in the United States do seem to be the most violent (and also exhibit the most behavior of the type derided by the pious as immoral). I’m not claiming causality (I think its more complicated-hard core religion is tied to poverty and, the poor areas have more violence in the US), but it is interesting, nontheless.
Well, there’s a real easy way to get us to stop making generalized attacks on religion – religion, stop doing stupid, evil things.
“religion, stop doing stupid, evil things”
Religion does nothing. Only people act.
Mmm, and guns don’t kill people….
Next!
Brendan,
You’re right, I’m a lovely guy, and lots of the stuff I write is of the wussy “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” ilk. But now and again something gets my goat and I find a little invective spewing out.
If I were to lapse into total disingenuousness for a mo, I might say that I wrote that post in the hope that some of the anti-cartoon Mohammed protestors would read it (I bet they all drop by here) and think: “Hey, I’m not weak and insecure – I’ve got god on my side, and that puts me in a much stronger position than some Danish caricaturist or some guy on the B&W comments page. I think I’ll live and let live, even though this guy does seem a bit of an idiot”. You never know…
I can’t really say I have a problem with people burning newspaper cartoons, or for that matter printing my posts out and burning them, but the notion that we ought to forbid such ridicule or name-calling (yes, I was giving an example of the sort of thing people should be able to tolerate) does strike me as a symptom of intellectual weakness.
If someone can’t stand a mild bit of yah-boo-sucks, how are they going to cope with serious, well-informed incisive criticism?
(Happy to have amused, intentionally or otherwise ;) )
Brendan
“So the question shouldn’t be: “do religious people do bad things?” but “are they outliers or representative of the larger group?” Unfortunately, anecdotes don’t help us to answer this question.!”
I’m afraid it’s my utterly subjective – anecdotal – view that many hardline religious fanatics have control of vital economic, social and military power currently, whether they be any of the Abrahamic traditions, and accross many locations in the world. Right at the centre of so much woe we have Bush, militant Islam, and Israeli fanaticists. You may disagree with their intention or capacity to harm others through their dogma; you cannot deny their centrality to global strife. Nor indeed can youe deny the relative outlying harm-to-good inneffeciuality of e.g. Catholic Missionaries building temporary school buildings for kids that will be dead from Aids by ten years old. It’s a simple numbers game. The numbers are in the oppressed and dying. If the controlling bigots can’t then take the luke-warm, tokenistic heat of satire, that’s part their – and our – problem quite clearly.
I can’t help but think that the most appropriate response of the European media to those cartoons would be to run a series mocking Christian figures (and hopefully they’d actually have been funny). It would have made the point about free speech a lot more eloquently than running the same set of crude and deliberately offensive cartoons.
PM – yes, a whole book from the back catalogues of UK’s Private Eye or the Guardian’s Steve Bell would have been an obvious and easy start…
PM – re-reading your post – that would perhaps work in parallel, but not instead of…
I just want the chance to say “Ye gods and little fishes!”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1700465,00.html
What juniper bushes?
It’s a miracle!
“Mmm, and guns don’t kill people….
Next!”
No they don’t. Bullets kill.
And guns do not cause themselves to be fired.
Dave. That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehova.
I tend not to see the religious-secular divide as simply two equal opposites. If I try to break down the different kinds of behaviours in different circumstances I find too much that seems to me an indictment of religion. I’ll try and explain without getting too long-winded about it. You won’t be able to agree unless you see atheism as lack of belief in god, pure and simple, without viewing it as a competing belief system.
Let’s take passive behaviour first. If things are going well, you could say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Fine. If things are going badly and action could help, continuing passivity in an atheist is a personal conscience issue. If a believer doesn’t help in such a situation, either the ideology is responsible, or the believer is choosing not to follow that part of it.
In active behaviour, good deeds by the religious are in evidence, frequently accompanied by propaganda for the belief in question, for the truth of which there is no evidence. Some of you may have read what Donald Sensing (link in something I wrote end of last month) wrote, sneeringly pointing to the lack of facilities with names like “Atheist Hospital,” as if that meant that atheists did no good, rather than that belief systems were advertising through such facilities. I value an individual decision to do good more than one that is part and parcel of a system to which one may belong because one was brainwashed in childhood, or joined later out of fear of hellfire.
Actively doing bad deeds is for me one of the clinchers, because an evil atheist implies nothing wrong with any belief system, but an evil believer makes a mockery of religion as a whole.
And I, personally, can never lose sight of the question “is it even true?” in all this.
I think what’s happening with the reprints of the cartoons in other countries is enormously important. Brings to mind the urban legend about all the Danish citizens wearing yellow stars to protect the Jews among them. Every country that believes in freedom of speech should reprint the cartoons and then see what happens. If all Muslim-ruled countries institute a complete boycott of all countries that stand up for freedom of speech, well, we’ll certainly know where we stand, won’t we?
Urban legend? Is it an urban legend – that the king and some (I assume not all) non-Jewish Danish citizens wore yellow stars? I thought it was true.
Anyway, they did defy the Nazis and they did save most Danish Jews, by ferrying them to Norway in every boat they could lay hands on.
The fish is terrific. It’s Allah giving a sign of his presence! In a fish shop in a small town called Waterfoot, near Bury. Where else, after all? A small town called Footwater, near Newark? Hardly!
I wanted to be a little surer before I posted. I should have probably gone to a good history book, but snopes is usually pretty reliable (plus they also give references for their info):
http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/denmark.htm
With the fish, we’re back to ID arguments again. The Designer is intelligent, so he needs a sophisticated way to get his message (that he exists) across. We primitives still have to rely on paper and pen, computers, SMS. Not god. He creates fish with markings he knows will do the trick. After all, if he wants to get all to accept him, he needs something as watertight as markings that look like Arabic words on the side of a fish. Admit it, OB – if he hadn’t done it that way, a sceptic like you might not have been convinced.
Well obviously the fish thing is totally convincing, Stewart – even I can see that! I mean, duh. But I don’t get the Waterfoot thing. Why Waterfoot? Why not a fish shop in Oxford Street or on Broadway or the Boule Miche?
Well I tell you what: if the designer follows up with writing its name across the face of the moon, I’ll drop the Waterfoot questions.
Ah. Too bad about yellow star – I was rather fond of that legend. I wonder where I picked it up? Wherever one does pick them up, I suppose. Not from Uris: I’ve never read a word of him.
I should have Snopes in Links. That’s an oversight.
I already did have Snopes. Putting it in a second time was the oversight. Good morning.
These stories about the king of Denmark do get around. I have one floating in the back of my mind about orders to put a Nazi flag on the king’s palace, and the king says, ‘What if a soldier takes it down’ ‘Then that soldier will be shot’, ‘Then you will need to get a new government, for the soldier will be me…’
*sigh*, everyone likes a good truth-and-justice story, shame we can’t all live up to them…
Good morning (in a few hours). I had a memory of the legend, but also a memory of it not being quite the way people like to tell it, so I checked. Yes, I agree, invaluable site, Snopes.
“But I don’t get the Waterfoot thing. Why Waterfoot? Why not a fish shop in Oxford Street or on Broadway or the Boule Miche?”
I think it is a question of taste, divine taste, that is. If you were god, of course you’d want people to know that you had an impressive CV, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to be too obvious about it. The kind of showy stuff in the bible, it’s not for the 21st century, you want a bit more sophistication and eschewing the trendy places like Oxford Street and Broadway is what it’s all about. If an autographed fish did show up somewhere so absolutely in the limelight, some people might fall for it, but the wiser among us would probably shake our heads sagely, understanding that such an in-your-face tactic could not bespeak true, modern, divinity and was probably the work of a lesser deity impersonating the real deal.
God’s ways are not so mysterious. He has a gentle way of leading us to the truth. Maybe this fish is just an indicator and as our other skills grow and we can explore more of god’s wonderful oceans on our own, we may encounter whole schools of deep sea fish with entire suras inscribed on their torsos in blinding clarity, possibly even using electric eel technology to highlight parts that will guide us to genuinely authorised interpretations.
Of course, heretics will say not only does it all smell fishy; they will trot out the old trope about enough monkeys and enough fish giving you the whole Koran, if you give them enough time. But how many of them have ever tried to get a fish into a typewriter? That’s what I want to know.
Did you look at the rest of the “god is not a thing, god is a person” piece I linked to a few days ago? It’s all horrendous crap, but there’s also a bit where the author deals with claims that god can never be experientially proved. So he posits god telling unbelievers the truth on judgement day. Then he has today’s unbelievers responding “but we need proof now.” Alright, he says and describes the world coming to a standstill while god clearly announces his existence to all. He then invents a non-believer comeback to that and rests his case, exactly as if that had actually happened and no one had believed. Of course, he claims it has happened, but non-literally. Meaning: if you can’t extrapolate father, son, holy ghost, virgin birth and resurrection from a beautiful sunset or the structure of a leaf, there’s something wrong with you.
It’s true, we are unreasonable. How could we possibly ask for more proof than that?
“Every country that believes in freedom of speech should reprint the cartoons and then see what happens.”
I think not. The whole point is that we want to separate out our stance in favour of freedom of speech from the hatred of Muslims you see in people like Nick Griffen. That’s why reprinting the cartoons (which aren’t funny, and are simply designed to be insulting) doesn’t get the message across. If we insulted another group of religious believers, that would be a much more sensitive test of freedom of speech. Currently it just looks like the Europeans are having a collective go at Muslims because we’re all latently Christian and hate Muslims.
“Meaning: if you can’t extrapolate father, son, holy ghost, virgin birth and resurrection from a beautiful sunset or the structure of a leaf, there’s something wrong with you.”
Just so. That’s pretty much what it all boils down to. That’s all Keith Ward is saying, that’s all the ID crowd is saying, that’s basically the whole of their ‘argument’. Look around, and if you don’t see it, well, you’re blind. Or, as that late lamented ‘arguments for God’ site had it and I keep quoting, ‘See this flower? Therefore, God exists.’
And then if you say but we don’t see it, so your deity should have made it plain (especially if we’re supposed to be damned for not seeing it), the answer is something along the lines of the deity wanting to sneak up on us. A nice guy in New Zealand who devoted much effort to trying to argue me around to theism said he thinks God wants to seduce us. Okay, but then God ought to realize that the epistemic situation that sets up is identical to one compatible with God not existing at all at all, and consider what use we are likely to make of our god-given faculties – and decide that that’s a stupid plan.
This comes into the category of remarks that make themselves, but if God wants to seduce us, he sure has a weird line in chat-ups….
I do think the self-righteousness about the Muhammed cartoons is becoming a bore. So if we want a little international freedom of speech meme, why don’t we propose that tv networks around the world replay the Janet Jackson wardrobe disfunction that led to real government censorship. Apparently, showing boobs is something we can censor because boobs are bad for kiddies, whereas showing Muhammed the terrorist is an expression of our uplifting sense of civil liberties.
Really. There’s a nice controversy right now in the WAPO about a cartoon that made fun of Rumsfeld, showing a wounded soldier. All of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a letter reproaching the Post. How long will it take before there are efforts to boycott the Post for “degrading our soldiers?” I don’t know what would have happened if they had included a New Masses cartoon from, say, 1917.
Masses. The New Masses wasn’t the New Masses until the ’30s, when it was revived as an organ of the John Reed Club (New York branch). The original Masses was quite a different animal from the New one. (And then Philip Rahv and the others broke away and went off to start Partisan Review, confusing the picture further.)
More seriously. That’s a little point-missing, isn’t it? However silly the mad panic about Jackson’s tit was, it wasn’t really about anything very substantive. Islam, and the violence-backed fear of criticising it, is very substantive. The creeping taboo on disagreeing with religion is very substantive indeed.
OB, thanks for the Masses correction. I always get that confused.
I certainly have to disagree with you about the ridiculous Janet Jackson incident. The political effect of that was essentially to silence Howard Stern, just as he was turning against Bush. More than that though — I can’t believe that you can simply turn your back on the whole fight against sexual censorship like that. That censorship was intimately connected not only to forms of social repression, but — really — to denying a sexual freedom that is as basic as freedom of speech. The censorious impulses exist as a loosely bound set, and it is hard for me to imagine that a society that suddenly rigidly censors sexual images is going to be one protecting, say, abortion rights. That just isnt’ going to happen.
Which is a way of saying that censorship issues around religion aren’t special. There is no need for any hate speech or revived blasphemy legislation. I’m totally with you on the fight agaisnt that. But let’s cut the hypocrisy about who censors what. Fighting, say, against the murderous mindset that killed Theo Van Gogh is important; it is also important to fight the murderous mindset that killed Al Jazeera journalist Tariq Ayoub and Spanish journalist Jose Couso — the latter mindset being called the U.S. Army. The people who attack the right to sexual expression are the people who attack the right to political expression and are again the people who (selectively) attack the right to blaspheme, or express, if you feel like it, hate. And using Moslems as object lessons in how we all have to allow others the free play of criticism is truly silly — it wasn’t but six years ago that Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary caused the U.S. house of representatives to consider a bill defunding all museums who showed ‘anti-religious’ art. The Arab governments response to the cartoons is not any different than the usual U.S. government response to anti-Christian art.
I think roger does make good points, though, over at his blog, Limited, Inc. This is a true tempest in a teapot-compared to the very real crimes the West is committing (right now) or committed in the past. Not that I am a big fan of the militant protectors of “sacredness,” but there is a lot of hypocrisy underway now-particularly in the right blogsphere that rabidly supports actions like levelling entire cities to “liberate them” from “the insurgency” and that’s not even talking about torture).
That’s why I can’t support “The War,” unlike many here, in the name of mythical “frredom, when the reality, just like with religion, is so downright nasty.
Roger, yes, I agree about the virgin Mary example. And there’s also the self-censorship, that causes me to find it so extremely unlikely that Dawkins’s show will find anyone to broadcast it here.
But your claim that abortion rights
and sexual images are linked in some way – I’m not convinced. (I’m also not convinced that sexual images in general are censored here – to put it mildly.)
However – if you want me to agree that the Bush regime and its fans are not the right people to be defending freedom of expression – no problem! They’re not, by many miles.
What a curious thread this has turned into …
I don’t know about all of these strange happenings in British fish markets and Parliament and whatnot, but I did want to take up a point that Stewart made many posts ago …
Stewart says it’s not fair to compare the presence of religious hospitals to the absence of “Atheist” hospitals and declare religion the winner. Of course, he’s right.
But my point remains that it’s not fair to latch on to the bad acts (cited by OB in the original post), then not compare that to the religious hospitals and whatnot, and declare religion the loser.
As for those like Nick S, who see no benefit or point in building schools for kids. I’m at a loss to argue. Perhaps though, he doesn’t see it as any great harm that, in other parts of the world, the Taliban are burning down schools.
Well, if the “schools,” as is true in much of the Muslim world, do nothing but drill their boys in religious texts and hatred, then…I think stewart has a point.
OK. Let’s say we make this about the religion that most of us are most familiar with: christianity.
I think (hope?) we can generally agree Christian schools (think Jesuit schools) are good schools. Christian hospitals are good hospitals. Christian missionaries do good deeds in 3rd world countries.
Certainly, many Christians are intolerant of homosexuals in the name of Christianity. Some Christians are dismissive of women in the name of Christianity. Policies by some Christian churches are undeniably harmful (I’m thinking here of the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control or some pentecostal churches opposition to evolution), and other policies are, at least, subject to debate (I’ll toss abortion in here, although I think it might be too volatile an issue).
Certainly, there are many more arguments on both sides if we consider the historical record.
However, I’m not sure that it’s fair to tar all religion with the brush of militant Islam, and I don’t think that most of us are familiar enough with Islam or central Asia to be able to present a balanced assessment of Islam in general. I know I’m not.
Religion is a package deal, which you can’t say about atheism, because atheism is an absence, not a presence. You might try to say that everyone who practices their religion faithfully is therefore moral, but you can’t say that about an atheist. He/she either acts morally or he/she doesn’t. You don’t automatically “get” anything with an absence of belief. When you get a package, it’s fair to ask on what is it predicated. I can call it a package, in the negative/positive sense, by admitting it can contain some benefits and asserting it has some pretty serious drawbacks. A “seller” of religion will never admit to any of the drawbacks, at least not in any of the scenarios of which I can conceive. Calling it a package brings us back to OB and her complaint about the price one pays for possible benefits – religion’s relationship to truth. How can that not be the very first vital question addressed to every belief? Isn’t any other approach cart-before-horse?
Just got through watching the two Dawkins programmes. Shan’t echo things already said. The person who got it for me took a look before handing it over and was unimpressed, because he found everything Dawkins said too obvious. I didn’t find Dawkins fiery at all and of course, there wasn’t much he said I hadn’t already read. I felt he should have said “I believe” less often, in order to separate his way of thinking from others’ ways of non-thinking. There’s only so much you can do in that time frame.
“I think (hope?) we can generally agree Christian schools (think Jesuit schools) are good schools. Christian hospitals are good hospitals. Christian missionaries do good deeds in 3rd world countries.”
I guess you were hoping none of those might be controversial. I don’t honestly have a basis for comparing Christian and non-Christian hospitals. Hospitals are medical facilities. Some have been established by religious organisations. Can you define a “Christian hospital” more precisely? I could not call any school “good” that taught any kind of religious dogma. Maybe you meant high in other academic standards, but we’re then back to packages. As for missionaries, you may associate them with caring in a social sense; my first association is trying to convert non-believers. That will never rate as “good” in my book. Isn’t a lot of that ultimately about “saving souls,” with the next world a higher priority than this one?
OB, my argument is really a little larger than reflex anti-Bushism. It is that it isn’t a coincidence that between the 1950s to the 1970s, second wave feminism, gay rights, civil rights and anti-censorship movements all emerged. They all hang together, to use the Wittgensteinian tone, as features of modern liberal culture. True, you can have abortion in non-liberal cultures — the Soviet Union and China come to mind – but not all the features.
Which is why I think it is as important to defend against, say, the FBI (fresh from its five years of fumbling the anthrax trail) putting together a well publicized anti-porno unit, as well as against Blair’s blasphemy laws. And to point out that the FCC censored and fined Fox tv for “inappropriate content’ based on fourteen thousand complaints that turned out to be lodged by one christian media watch group.
Strategically, exploiting the bad faith of right wing groups that are happy for their own reasons to see Muhammed caricatured isn’t a totally bad idea. But these groups have generally no credibility whatsoever as anti-censorship people.
Stewart –
I’m not saying that religious hospitals / schools / homeless shelters / housing programs etc. do any better job than corresponding secular programs. I’m just saying that the deeds that they do (caring / teaching / feeding / housing etc) are noble and since that people are better for having them done. The fact that they are provided by charity, I guess, is so much the better.
I’m just saying that let’s consider all these good things done by organized religion — not just look at the bad.
Fair enough, roger. I don’t think I disagree with any of that. (I’m not sure about the abortion-sexual expression thing – but then that could be because I think there’s probably room for disagreement about what’s meant by ‘sexual expression’. I think the moral panic was asinine, but I also think as a general thing we can have both ‘no tits on the Super Bowl’ and abortion – or ‘no tits on the Super Bowl’ and quite a lot of ‘sexual expression’.)
Right wing groups or no right wing groups, I remain somewhat fascinated by leftish and liberalish people who talk all this cant about respecting people’s religious beliefs – just as a lot of people did in February 1989. I think it’s absolute crap, and somewhat dangerous.
No, Brendan, “teaching” isn’t noble if what’s being taught is dreck. “Teaching” intelligent design is not good. Christian schools may (or may not) be well-meaning, but they are certainly not necessarily good.
“I’m just saying that let’s consider all these good things done by organized religion — not just look at the bad.”
We had that discussion, albeit in slightly different terms, over several days; it’s now pretty much over. You seem to want to start again on page one line one. Let’s not do that; it would be a waste of space.
Stewart –
I’m sorry. I somehow missed one of your earlier posts, but I’d like to make one point on it now.
I’ll readily agree that religion does some bad things (I tried to mention some in an ealier post), and these things certainly represent a cost.
However, I don’t really see how religion’s “relationship to the truth” represents a cost. From a societal perspective, it seems like a pretty sweet deal to get good deeds in exchange for having many citizens believe something that might or might not be true.
From a personal perspective, it doesn’t seem that much greater a cost. we all have to accept that there are some things that are unknowable. Whether we choose to fill that void with careful absence of conviction, rampant speculation, or total faith in one particular possibility seems to be a relatively harmless choice.
I know I’m exaggerating for effect, but the point remains: really, how high is the cost of faith?
P.S. I’m sorry that my posts are so badly typed. I’m trying to work on that.
My perspective is that the “cost of faith” is very high, in the sense that a system of thought fundamentally disconnected from the world of real things is ultimately destructive, no matter what temporary good it might do in the meantime. I compare with Soviet Communism: it modernised a backward nation, gave hope and purpose to millions, argueably provided health, education and electricity to common people better than today’s Russia. But because its worldview was totally distorted and there was (vitally) no real mechanism for self-correction, it destroyed itself. Islam is more or less in the same condition, and the only reason Western Christianity is any different is because of the agitators of the 18th century and those who’ve been fighting the same fight ever since.
OB –
I mean this with complete respect, but if Stewart and I wish to continue the discussion, I think that we should be allowed to. If you wish, I’ll drop it, but I’ll just want to register that I disagree.
On the topic of intelligent design, I grew up in Kansas and I’ve worked for the best school district in the state, so I can speak to this first-hand. The intelligent design movement is almost entirely focused on public schools and public boards of education. The jesuit schools, backed by a large well-funded private organization, are the ones most insulated from these pressures. If intelligent design is to be introduced into this discussion, I would put it as a mark in favor of the jesuit schools, at least in Kansas.
Having said that, I think it’s a minor issue. Schools (public and private), teach lots of dreck. History is always told from the side of the victors, with gender and racial biases. English classes teach literary criticism, an art that, as best I can tell, consists of making up a theory, then pulling some quotes out of context to support it. Biology classes teach whatever food theoies are in fashion (cholesterol/fat is good/bad, etc). Teachers misunderstand what they’ve learned (my physics teacher once told me that quantum mechanics said that, one time in a million, he could throw me through the chalkboard without it breaking).
I’m not going to defend the deliberate teaching of misinformation, but to cast aside all of the good work that the jesuits do by brining up the specter of intelligent design is unfair, I think.
Do note that I specifically quoted OB on the cost (price) issue; I don’t see that in identical terms – or, at least, not in identically-phrased terms. In my view, the truth is vital, in and of itself, way before the point of cost calculation. A compromise – a knowing compromise on that vitiates, in my opinion, any good that can come of it. Why am I so damn stubborn and – maybe the word is “unbribable” – on it? The shortest version I can give you is that if we don’t have truth, then what the hell can we possibly have? If we don’t have truth then we don’t have agreement on what you just said in the previous post, or how I’m replying to it. If we don’t have truth, why can’t I get away with flaming you like mad now because I claim to be insulted by something you just said about my ancestry that you don’t remember saying? If we don’t want that and worse to happen, then we proceed from a basis of reacting to what each of us really did say/write, which will match up if both of us are in reasonable mental health. It’s the same basis that enables us to look at the universe from our observation of it and not imagining it from inside a closed room. As I said before, I just looked at the Dawkins shows. He talks about the Assumption, how it wasn’t even a legend till 600 years after the event supposedly occurred, but only became mandatory for belief some 55 years ago, when the pope announced it wasn’t just a tradition, it was fact. And what did he do, Dawkins asks, to arrive at this conversion from fuzzy tradition to hard fact? Nothing. He went into a closed room and thought about it, probably invoking some kind of theological justification (I think Dawkins uses the word “tortuous”).
Maybe it’s a lot easier for you to see why I shouldn’t claim you’ve insulted my ancestry than it is to see what is wrong with a person helping another person because they believe something erroneous. They’re not a million miles apart, they both have to do with truth. We can make mistakes about truth, sure, no one has a monopoly on it. Scientists don’t claim to; they revise theories when new evidence turns up. Most religious leaders do – actively – claim that they or their texts do have a monopoly on truth. If that claim isn’t true, isn’t it also wrong? Why does that question sound so silly?
Once you’ve accepted that these issues are all related and that therefore the truth can in no context cease to be important (maybe you don’t accept it; I’ll give you my conclusion anyway, free of charge), can you then understand why I don’t accept anyone else saying “it might matter here, but it needn’t matter there” without giving me a very, very good reason why that should be so?
Michael Geissler –
You make several very interesting points. The communism analogy is very well done.
I agree that the large organized religions tend to get hidebound and out-of-touch with reality; however, I’d argue that that is true of any large bureaucracies. To me, the big difference between Islam and Christianity is that, thanks to the Protestant Reformation, competitive forces have forced Christian churches to adapt to stay relevant wheras Islam, with only one ancient division has been allowed to calcify.
Communism ultimately failed because it was a system for organizing people that relied on a flawed understanding of how people work. Alchemy failed because it was a system of manipulating chemicals that relied on a flawed understanding of the nature of chemicals. Religion is a system of beliefs in the unknown (and, usually, moral philosophy). I’m not sure what test would expose the flaw (if there is one) and cause religion to fail.
It does appear that we’re trending towards a situation where we can compare the productivity and advancements made by atheist nations (I’m thinking western europe) and religious nations. That would make for an interesting test of your theory.
Stewart –
Would you consider me a very very bad Catholic if I told you that I didn’t even know what the Assumption was? I think that I must have always confused it with the Ascension or the Annunciation whenever it was mentioned (if even it was).
The point of that, aside from buying me time to consider your very well-made argument, is to illustrate the difference between what I think of religion as asking me to accept and what you think of religion as asking me to accept.
I think of Catholicism as asking me to accept that there is a God, and that God did 3 important things:
1) made the universe;
2) made man (I interpret this to mean influencing evolution to cause us to develop conciousness)
3) sent Jesus Christ to tell people about God and how to live a holy life
I accept those three things (I know that makes many of you think that I’m stark raving mad – there was a time when I agreed), but I also know that no evidence exists with respect to the validity or falsity of those claims.
Now, there are lots of other claims in the bible and the Catechism that I guess I’m also supposed to accept as The Truth. Some of them involve events that violate the laws of science, and, in those cases, I’m guess I’m supposed to believe that God suspended the laws of science and caused a miracle to occur.
I don’t give those much thought. I do think about the Nicene Creed. I struggle with it sometimes, partly because I don’t understand all the words. I regard it as a historical accident — the product of politics — just as I do the idea of a literal infalliable bible.
But I digress. For the most part, to me, being a Catholic means believing in those three big things and inferring that there’s a reason that I’m here.
And that’s what I don’t see the harm in. I know that my friends and my family generally take the same approach, but maybe we’re not representative. If that’s the case, I’m off base. But if I’m not, then I think we should consider religion as it’s practiced, not necessarily as it’s written. And, as I practice it, I don’t really see that faith comes at a cost to truth because truth relies on evidence, and on the big questions that I mentioned, there is none.
I’m no expert on Catholicism either; my most thorough grounding came from a correspondence course I took when I was nine.
You’re a private individual, you’re entitled to your views on the importance of truth in your life. They’re obviously not like mine, but I hope I made myself clear.
At least you grant the lack of evidence. Again, if you wish to use it to accept the main points your faith asks of you, that’s your private affair. I would require some evidence for, not just none against. I don’t think we’re going to get closer than that, but I appreciate that your questioning seems to have been done with sincerity.
Without wishing to be personally insulting to Brendan, who seems like a perfectly reasonable guy, but if he can reduce ‘Catholicism’ to the three basic tenets he outlined, he isn’t really one at all. For the past 500 years, being ‘Catholic’ has meant taking, or accepting, certain specific theological positions, such as transubstantiation, and rejecting others, such as justification by faith.
Now, if it works for Brendan, that’s nice for him, but it does reflect a sort of second-order problem of religious thinking. People who are unwilling to take the step of committing themselves to the details of a doctrine are nonetheless prepared to publicly identify themselves as adherents of a ‘faith’, and in their minds may indeed accept the most grandiose and unprovable tenets of that faith, while rejecting the specifics that distinguish it, as a coherent [in its own terms] doctrine, from other [ditto] doctrines of competing churches.
So you have the worst of all possible worlds, from the point of view of intellectual coherence. People swallow the whale of a theistic definition of ‘God’, but strain at the gnat of doctrinal rigour, and yet simultaneously use the historically-associated identity that comes with that rigour to define themselves…
Brendan “As for those like Nick S, who see no benefit or point in building schools for kids. I’m at a loss to argue.”
I didn’t say building Cathiolic schools in deprived third world areas was bad per say, I said it made less impact on the world than the harm the same church has. Alas my point was perhaps lost in all the sturm und drang. To rehash it then: as long as aids increases exponentially in Africa, specifically due to the Catholic church’ stance, building the odd religious school appears to be rarranging the deck-chairs ont the titanic. It’s about the more harm than good the Vatican has on people. Now please don’t quote me out of context again. It’s irritating and unnecessary.
Brendan, there’s no should about it. This isn’t a public place. If I think any particular comments don’t enhance the discussion, then I’ll remove them.
An unexpected possible side-effect of the cartoon war has struck me. Now that the Danish dairy companies’ sales have dropped to zero in the Middle East, they no longer have anything to lose, which could lead to them doing something from which they have so far completely refrained: publishing anti-Islamic cartoons.
Nick S —
Just wanted to let you know that I attempted to apologize to you, but the comment was removed. Still, you were right and I was wrong, and I’m sorry.
Accepted !