Another irregular verb
Contradict yourself much? Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail –
The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe – which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science. Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don’t correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance. The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is “true for me”.
Right – so – religious believers have different ways of regarding Biblical miracles, good, but our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is “true for me”, bad. Hmmm.
“The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason.”
hmmm…
As a far wiser fictional character than Melanie Phillips almost said (whaddya mean she’s real? No wayyy…!), “It’s ‘truth’ Jim, but not as we know it…”
How can she get her brain to resolve such incredible internal contradictions without it imploding quietly one dull, wet Tuesday morning?
I know mine would. Guess that’s why she’s a dead famous social commentator…
I’m almost genuinely impressed.
:-)
Well, you see, there was some white space between the two sentences. They were in
separate
paragraphs.
If you say something in one paragraph, then it’s very easy to lose track by the time you climb all the way down to the next, so you find yourself saying the opposite.
Can happen to anyone.
Or maybe not.
How about this bit:
“We are living in a scientific, largely post-religious age in which faith is presented as unscientific superstition. Yet paradoxically, we have replaced such faith by belief in demonstrable nonsense.”
To whom, exactly, is it a paradox?
Have we (as a species) suddenly become less ignorant/gullible/uneducated/plain thick?
er…
Then what, exactly, did she expect?
So she’s really just in a huff because a large chunk of the suggestible dullards out there exchanged one brand of supernaturalism for another, simply because it’s got better marketing?
And she gets PAID for this?
You’d almost think she’d be glad to hear that people were turning to Islam instead…
;-)
No, she’s in a huff because a large chunk of the suggestible dullards out there exchanged perfectly rational faith for demonstrable nonsense. Different huff entirely.
This idea that faith is perfectly rational is one of the great bullshits of our time.
‘It was GK Chesterton who famously quipped…’
No it bloody wasn’t. It was Cammaerts. And even if it had been, how the hell does sticking Chesterton’s name on to a smug platitude make it true?
So if people stop believing in her woo, they might start believing in different woo, which will be the fault of people who don’t believe in woo.
So superstition is caused by sceptics?
Still, some decent telly to look forward to.
snorting with laughter
Very well put, Don.
Well, I think she put it pretty well – possibly without INTENDING to demonstrate how an intelligent person holds two totally contradictory thoughts at once. It seems to be by mis-representing the metavalues of either or both thoughts to oneself.
Works for me, anyway :-).
And I give her full marks for doing it in so few sentences. That saved you a lot of time OB – if she had been as waffly as others you wouldn’t have had such a succinct post.
I wonder how many of these foaming ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ nitwits will actually turn to Islam sooner or later. My money’s on some.
They like fighting wars against the darkies, but their _real_ enemies are the liberals who are insufficiently racist for their liking. Their social agenda is rather closer to that of conservative Islamists than they are comfortable with.
As ever, the Onion nails it: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/various_deities_still_sorting
“Various Deities Still Sorting Through Victims Of Tragic Queens Bus Accident”
“The religious triage suffered severe setbacks from the beginning because many gods serve a relatively low number of devotees and are unaccustomed to rapid response.”
‘”Ideally, I’d just take all of them in one pile, but there are about a thousand little sects and denominations and all that nonsense that I have to act like I care about,” God/Yahweh/Allah said. “Did you know there was a guy who practiced Santeria on that bus? Christ, what a nightmare.”‘
Chris Williams, you are bang on with that comment. Despite being the author of Londonistan, Philips has more in common with Islamists when it comes to enlightenment values. She’s a complete crackpot.
‘The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe’. It does no such thing! The Bible, especially the Old Testament, presents a picture of a most unreasonable deity given to irrational favouritism and lethal mood swings. I don’t expect much from Melanie Phillips, but this misrepresentation is blatant.
Thanks, Paul. That Onion article is great satire — really funny.
“Honestly, who ever heard of a Jew named Shinjoku Murikami?” the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu said. “I had that guy halfway to haunting a shrine as a kami spirit before I realized my mistake.”
Back to Phillips: “The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth…”
Kinda makes you wonder why Christians and religious Jews expend so little effort trying to find out what it is then.
Chris Williams writes:
I wonder how many of these foaming ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ nitwits will actually turn to Islam sooner or later. My money’s on some.
Replacing “foaming ‘Judaeo-Christian tradition’ nitwits” by the less emotive terms “Christian traditionalists” or “old-school conservatives”, I would say that Chris has already won his bet.
For example, National Review’s poster-child person of colour Dinesh d’Souza has recently written a controversial book (‘The Enemy at Home – the Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11’) calling for an alliance between ‘moderate’ Muslims and conservatives of all stripes against a radical left that is “waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values.”
It is not so much that some traditionalists will ‘turn to Islam’ as that they may consider a moderate version of Islam to be less reprehensible than what they perceive to be a militantly secular society that celebrates sexual licence and perversions, or criminalises public manifestations of religious belief (such as the wearing of veils or crucifixes). ‘Islam-lite’ is considered to lie between the extremes of fundamentalist secularism and Sharia law – to be the lesser of two evils, so to speak, and a society in which women flaunt their hijabs is deemed preferable to a society in which they flaunt their underwear.
I’d say Chris has found a winning streak.
P.S. Paul, thanks for ‘Onion’ link, great stuff!
Mel P is always hauled up as the anti-Islamist at least on the BBC, but although I’m often on her side in the substance of what she says, I’m shouting at the presenter to chuck a bucket of cold water over her or hand out the valium as she starts out intense and ends up totally hysterical. Possibly the straightjacket is chafing her.. .
Cathal – did you not disappear for a long while?
Also, is Mel P an actually practising Christian or Jew or just someone who thinks that religion is good for us, like Camille Paglia?
“The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth”
Last time I recited the creed the heart of it was believing in God, Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. No mention of truth and reason.
What I don’t really get is why everyone seems to take her so seriously. She writes for a paper not, er, renowned for the intellectual quality of its analysis, and her main job (as for any journo, and especially tabloid ones) will be to write stuff which sells papers. If she believes have the stuff she writes, she is a raving loony. Is seems to me rather unlikely that people who read the Daily Mail will be affected in their political opinions by reading her. So why waste time on her?
Oh but surely it can’t be a waste of time to point out such a blatant contradiction as that.
Can it…?
Is Camille Paglia in the “religion is good for people” camp? I’m strangely disappointed, I quite admired some of what she had to say.
potentilla- I too have no idea why the world takes Melanie Phillips so seriously but the truth is that, sadly, her influence extends well beyond the Daily Mail.
She’s a frequent guest on the Moral Maze and various other BBC discussion programmes. I can’t help feeling that her relative eloquence sometimes blinds people to the essential weirdness and incoherence of her views. There are odd bits of Londonistan which many on here might nod and agree with, but its drowned in paranoia. This seemingly deliberate unwillingness to even consider the possibility that someone who is not antisemitic might object to aspects of Israeli foreign policy. The idea that secularists in some way *want* Islamic fundamentalism to succeed (some leftists might, in an “anyone who’s against Bush is worthy of support” way, but secularists?).
And I’m afraid I’ve never been inclined to take those who consider evolution ‘just a theory’ and advocate the teaching of creationism terribly seriously on anything. It strikes me as one of those ‘dividing line’ questions – if you’re incapable of realising the fundamental flaws of a theory such as intelligent design, then chances are, you lack the analytical abilities required to have anything useful to say on any issue. And if you support intelligent design for reasons of cynical political advantage, whilst not personally believing a word of it, then you’re too fundamentally dishonest to be trusted on any matter.
Why is she accorded such status? Personally, I suspect its because she *used* to be a liberal Guardian columnist. People are always fascinated by apostates in the political sphere.
“The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is “true for me”.
Well, gee, where could people have gotten that idea? Where could they have gotten the idea that their hearts and feelings are reliable guides?
It couldn’t have anything to do with defending faith against criticism by flatly declaring ALL beliefs to be based on “faith,” could it? Faith that your car is still in the garage when you can’t see it; faith that your mother loves you; faith that the sun will rise tomorrow; faith that you’re not just a brain in a vat. Faith that Jesus was born of a virgin; faith that God exists; faith that nobody ever dies and everything turns out okay in the end because we were all put here for a purpose in a universe that cares about us. All the same kind of belief. Faith beliefs.
It couldn’t possibly be that the religious are eager to knock all beliefs down to the same level of cluelessness in order that their own “leap of faith” seems ordinary, normal, and reasonable to them. Science, religion. They’re all leaps of faith, aren’t they — all just matters of picking and choosing what you want to believe. Could there be a connection between that and postmodernist fuzziness?
Naw…. That would be too far-fetched, wouldn’t it?
Sastra:”They’re all leaps of faith, aren’t they — all just matters of picking and choosing what you want to believe. Could there be a connection between that and postmodernist fuzziness?”
Damn right, those fuzzinesses are of a kind. And since the modern and postmodern are slaves of their intellectual forebears and unable to believe anything but what their teachers believe, identity politics must be the fault of those eeeevil Christian relativists who no doubt forced their students into clone moulds one by one.
Oh wait, I was there… theists were a tiny nutty fringe at my university in the 70s and 80s and had been for decades. See, they are so evil they concealed their plans and acted through others… it MUST be their fault. To the gas ovens with them!
Seriously Sastra, what are you suggesting – some kind of guilt by implicit association? Falling for the same kind of cognitive traps as the rest of the species should not be a surprise. Rationalism is remarkable because it is successful at overcoming those traps – for those who turn from temptation to just blame their enemies, or witches or whatever.
Projection? It is NOT a river in Egypt.
patrick: “if you’re incapable of realising the fundamental flaws of a theory such as intelligent design, then chances are, you lack the analytical abilities required to have anything useful to say on any issue.”
Hear! Hear!
ChrisPer:
In some ways, postmodernism is like traditional religion’s “evil twin” – and with twins, it can get hard to tell them apart. It seems to me that both systems not only fall for similar “cognitive traps,” they’re fundamentally grounded in them.
They share a similar epistemic absolutism, in that they both agree that only Certainty really truly counts as knowledge. If we can’t be 100% sure about empirical truths in the world (which we can’t), then ignorance won’t be a matter of degree. Rational rules of thumb and working theories are not enough. It’s all or nothing.
So it plays out that all of our beliefs ultimately turn out to be *moral* beliefs. Nothing can “really” be known. We choose to believe in God – or we choose to believe in scientific results – only because we select beliefs through leaps of preference and moral commitments. In religion, God rescues us from uncertainty. In postmodernism, the ethics of the tribe does. I see a similarity.
“ALL beliefs rely on faith.”
Despite its agreement to split matters of faith and reason, religion will fall back on that the minute its own unique fact claims are threatened by reason. You cannot attack faith as a “way of knowing” superior to reason without religious people pulling that one out. You can’t attack cultural “ways of knowing” as superior to “western” science without the pomos hurling that same trope at you. Surely, this is an odd coincidence if there is no underlying connection in their approach to knowledge.
Patrick – I guess she gets on Moral Maze etc for the same reason she is employed by the Daily Mail – becases apparently controversial views, be they never so internally and temporally incoherent, boosts ratings and sells papers. (Up to the point where the contributor is literally foaming at the mouth, or maybe even past that if we’re talking radio).
Why would anyone listen to The Moral Maze anyhow, except perhaps as a background for doing something else? Does being on TMM actually give Mel “influence”? I rather doubt it.
patrick: “if you’re incapable of realising the fundamental flaws of a theory such as intelligent design, then chances are, you lack the analytical abilities required to have anything useful to say on any issue.”
Hey, that’s how I use homeopathy! I consider it the canary in the mine shaft. If anyone, at any time, recommends it as “scientific” and “well-proven,” I know that their understanding of science is dead and joined the choir invisible. Tread with extreme caution.
Either one would work.
Sastra – homeopathy is an area where I can claim one of my few personal victories for reason.
An ex-girlfriend who had been suffering from ME for some years said she had been recommended a homeopathist and I made my usual disapproving noises. She replied along the lines of
“yes, but you don’t believe in any of that. Its all very well you not believing in alternative medicine, but mainstream medicine says it doesn’t know how to cure my condition.”
At which point I got a bit more specific and said “Alternative medicine is one thing – but in the case of homeopathy, not only is there no proof that it works, there is no way, even in principle that it could work” – and I pointed her at the relevant bit of ‘A Devil’s Chaplain’.
Thankfully – it worked – probably because she had only ever considered homeopathy because she didn’t really know what it involved (it helped that, unlike me, she was able to follow chemistry at school). I wonder how many people try homeopathy simply because they don’t really understand what it actually is. Talking of which, the NHS-funded Homeopathic hospital in Glasgow (I don’t know if there are others in the UK) probably does more to lend a veneer of false respectability to homeopathy than any number of quack medics ever could. We may as well have hospitals that treat people on the “4 humours” principle!
patrick wrote:
“An ex-girlfriend who had been suffering from ME for some years said she had been recommended a homeopathist…”
Well, if she was suffering from too much YOU, homeopathy might have worked, since the sheer silliness could have helped turn you off of her. ;)
Seriously, I think you’re right about most of the public having no idea of what homeopathy entails. They think it means herbs, folk remedies, and other gentle and natural home-like “home-ey” type things your grandmother might give you. Honey for a sore throat. A bit of mint for a tummy ache. It’s packaged just like ordinary medicine right in the drug section of Walgreens. It wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t sound science behind it: there are government agencies that protect consumers and check that. Surely there are.
Boy, that’s a good point. Homey Opathy – of course it sounds good, and of course people don’t know what it is. The bastards should be required to re-name it.
A pet psychic? Aw, how sweet – did it have its own little bowl and its chew toy and its blankie and its dear little coat for when it rains? And – above all – was it housebroken?
giggle
Just as bad as “Homey-opathy” is “Therapeutic Touch.” When they first hear of it, I bet 99% of the public thinks it just means some sort of gentle massage. Who could be against grandma making someone feel better with a comforting cuddle? Touching is very therapeutic.
Even when they find out it has nothing to do with actual touching and involves manipulating some new form of “energy,” the first impression will remain. Energy? Ok. Couldn’t we all do with having more get up ‘n go?
It’s woo riding in on the back of ambiguous spin words, in the hopes distinctions will be blurred.
Sastra writes:
I consider [homeopathy] the canary in the mine shaft. If anyone, at any time, recommends it as “scientific” and “well-proven,” I know that their understanding of science is dead …
You are a kindred spirit. Well, some good news: the NHS is, according to newpaper reports, at long last giving homeopathy the cold shoulder.
See this recent report in The Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article1826561.ece
The bad news is that most of the 31 comments on this article are IN FAVOUR OF homeopathy — almost always on the basis of anecdotal ‘evidence’. Homoeopathy has been efficaciously used for thousands of years … Homeopathy encourages holistic thinking with regard to health …. I have breast cancer and am fortunate enough to have been referred to an NHS homeopathic consultant … Homoeopathy is the only thing that helped my wife’s eczema … My 60-year old mother in law had chronic backache and after drinking 0.0000023 homeopathic molecules of valerian diluted to the power of 30 it went away and she became a trapeze artist … etc., etc. OK, I made the last one up.
These commenters are readers of ‘The Times’ — supposedly part of Britain’s cognitive elite.
Let’s call it ‘anecdotal-based medicine’.
I drank some water that was near valerian once, and my legs reach all the way to the floor.
“Well, if she was suffering from too much YOU, homeopathy might have worked, since the sheer silliness could have helped turn you off of her. ;)”
Hah. I am really quite an insufferable opinionated bastard. But she left me for a politician, so I figure that can’t have been the problem ;-)
Anyway, I wonder if there’s enough people don’t know the meaning of the word ‘placebo’ that I could open a ‘placebo medicine clinic’ and wait for all the gushing stories from people who visited me and found their problems mysteriously solved.
My, how we have wandered a long way from that awful Melanie Phillips….
Absolutely, Patrick.
Sastra: “You can’t attack cultural “ways of knowing” as superior to “western” science without the pomos hurling that same trope at you. Surely, this is an odd coincidence if there is no underlying connection in their approach to knowledge.”
Beautifully said. Count me a fan henceforth.