Let me count the ways
What’s the problem with J J Ramsey’s last comment on Un-der-stan-ding met-a-phor?
I am trying to find a way to say this in a way that avoids sounding too accusatory, but for now I can’t: Don’t even try to use the murder of a little girl to shield your own ideas from scrutiny. I’m sorry to put it so harshly.
That is, why does it seem not just wrong, and obnoxious in the usual routine internetty way, and beside the point, and belligerent? Why does it seem even more than that?
Let’s see…Partly it’s the absurdity of saying he is trying to find a better way of saying it, but can’t. Of course he can. He said it the way he did because he wanted to say it the way he did. (Just as we said what we did in the final pages of Does God Hate Women? because that was what we wanted to say.) That kind of pseudo-regret is just a way of saying ‘Your offense is so foul that there simply is no other way to say this.’ It’s a way of underlining the aggression rather than diminishing it, but at the same time it’s a way of pretending to be attempting to be decent but being simply too overcome by outrage. It’s a bit of rhetoric embedded in a prolonged (for days and days, and thousands of words) attack on my use of rhetoric. It’s also a self-administered pat on the back.
Then the ‘Don’t even try’ – as if he’s the cop on the beat, shoving my arm up behind my back until my shoulder breaks. The bossy note. That adds an extra level of deliberate offensiveness, as if he’d caught me picking his pocket or molesting his child.
Then there’s the ‘use’ and the ‘murder of a little girl’ – which of course pisses me off more than all the rest combined and cubed, as no doubt it was meant to. I’m not using anything; I’m calling attention to a horrible outrage, and there is nothing wrong with doing that. The murder of a little girl indeed – would he even be aware of that murder if I hadn’t called it to his attention? Who is using what here? Where does he get off telling me not to ‘use’ it?
Then there’s the ‘to shield your own ideas from scrutiny.’ The brazen insultingness of that is obvious enough without my spelling it out – but it is worth noting that I wasn’t doing that; I wasn’t saying don’t scrutinize my ideas; I was saying that Madeleine Bunting has a warped sense of priorities because she gets in a fury at my use of language while skipping right over the incident that prompted it. It has to do with proportion, not with non-scrutiny. Bunting strains at a gnat and swallows a camel.
Then finally there’s the ‘I’m sorry to put it so harshly.’ That’s just more self-flattering having it both ways – saying the most grossly offensive thing you can think of, then pretending to be sorry for saying it. What nonsense – what mealy-mouthed, devious, self-serving nonsense.
I don’t know who this guy is, but he’s been at this, unbelievably, since last Saturday. Five days! Would you credit it? It’s so important that it’s worth five days of repeated lengthy posts, all to quarrel with some deliberately emotive metaphors. What was I just saying about proportion? Oh yes: that some people could use a better sense of it.
His claim appears to be that you shouldn’t use the murder of a little girl to shield your idea that murdering little girls is wrong from scrutiny, which is a little odd.
Then again, this is a common sort of reaction from people who do actually hold appalling views, or views which entail appalling results, when the appalling nature of those views is made explicit. It may be true, but how rude to actually say it as if it were.
And thus religious apologists show their true allegiances – to religion and not to common humanity. The idea of religion is so important to this fellow that even the murder of a little girl in the name of religion cannot shake his belief; indeed, you must be doing something wrong or offensive if you point out that this little girl would be alive today were it not for religion. mark’s got it right – Mr. Ramsey has simply revealed his own appalling views in his remarks.
It’d be more pathetic if it weren’t such a widely held belief.
My guess is that Mr. Ramsey doesn’t have any idea what he really thinks. Like freshmen everywhere, he can go on with this until the crack of doom (as my Latin teacher used to say, when we got bogged down in a particularly marshy spot in Caesar’s Gallic Wars). The guy’s a goon – not Goon Squad type of goon, just your ordinary, dark alley, type of goon. You’ll find them growing like weeds on a wet day in places like the Vatican, Lambeth, Mecca and Medina.
Not at my place he can’t! He’s outta here.
:- )
JJ was banned on Pharyngula for “slagging”. As PZ put it in his dungeon file:
“…chose to insult my daughter here, several times, after being warned. If you must insult my family, do it to their faces so they can kick your ass; it’s cowardly to try and do it in front of me.”
I think what I’m missing here is whether the book actually seeks to demonstrate a strong causal link between religion and misogyny or does it just catalogue a list of doctrinal statements and religious abuses and infer a general association?
Kharin,
In such cases I generally recommend reading the book.
From my impressions, the book (very explicitly) does not seek to demonstrate a causal link between religion and misogyny, it just shows how religion has been perfectly suited to the role of enshrining and codifying ancient injustices such as misogyny, because of the particular nature of religion. If “god” is both invisible and absolutely right, how can we argue with him / her / it to overturn these injustices?
Seen in this light, religion is clearly a pernicious social force, and therefore portraying it as the “heart of a heartless world” is a case of Orwellian doublespeak writ large. “Warthogs in party dresses” and “lipstick on pigs” are visual evocations of the concept of doublespeak. Particularly fruity and entertaining ones, in my opinion.
Ohhhhhhhh – Michael Fugate’s information sheds a whole new light on things. I had no idea. I’ve been much too civil.
That’s all out of him then.
The causal thing is complicated. I could explain but it would take a book.
Cf. Don.
Off-Topic, but perhaps peripherally relevant (?)
Religious apologists can be very painful to deal with, especially when they are trying to excuse cruelty and murder; one only has to remember Arnold Amoury here, never mind JJ Ramsey’s ramblings.
( So here are my possibly-pertinent ramblings instead )
At the same time, Ophelia has pointed us to a thoughtful piece in the Grauniad about replacing religion, and what comes to mind is a paraphrased quote from a very unlikely author, who was well-known as a Roman Catholic: “He sees amongst us dissent, and expects one of us to set themselves up as a new Lord and take his place. That we should desire to cast him down, and have NO-ONE in his place has not occurred to him”
Thus an altered version of Gandalf’s speech, somewhere in LoTR.
This is especially apparent in the USA, where “atheism” is often seen as another form of religion (usually communism).
The idea that we truly wish to have “no-one in their place” does not really seem to have penetrated their mindset, at all.
Well, there in ‘No Substitute’, lately, for OB at the Guardian. Keep up the good work!
OB, I pictured you having longer hair… For no reason at all, of course, but I shall probably still read your posts as if you did. [?!?] Always funny how one puts a face to words, I think. I’m usually way wrong, which should probably tell me something…
First, this Ramsey is no relation of mine.
Second, anyone who studies conversation or discourse knows that hedges like “trying to find a way to say this that avoids sounding too accusatory” introduce something highly accusatory that the speaker is simply delighted to utter.
So, as much as I hate to say this, J J Ramsey is a poorly educated ass.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Tingey, you seem not to have noticed who wrote the ‘thoughtful piece in the Grauniad about replacing religion.’ Which is funny.
Dave – well I had long hair in my yoof. I got sick of it at age 23 and have been cropped ever since.
Yeah, and there is another classy brilliant humorous piece of OB’s over at tpm Thread section, which is really well worth reading!
Claire – quite – not the least of J J Ramsey’s distastefulness is his sullying of the fine name of Ramsey.
“I think what I’m missing here is whether the book actually seeks to demonstrate a strong causal link between religion and misogyny or does it just catalogue a list of doctrinal statements and religious abuses and infer a general association?”
If a religion were not defined either by its doctrines or the actual practice of its adherents, what’s left? What would it mean to say, “Religion X is not misogynistic, but its doctrinal statements are, and so are the actions of its members”?
“In such cases I generally recommend reading the book.”
Considering the answer would have determined whether I want to bother with the book or not, that’s not especially helpful. I haven’t any great wish to read through a catalogue of exercises in guilt by association (were that to be the case) and it’s hardly unreasonable to want to understand more about a book before parting with cash to buy it.
“If a religion were not defined either by its doctrines or the actual practice of its adherents, what’s left? What would it mean to say, “Religion X is not misogynistic, but its doctrinal statements are, and so are the actions of its members”?”
It would mean whether the actions were the product of the religion or whether they were attributable to other social or cultural factors. Even most fundamentalists are, in practice, highly selective in what doctrine they do or don’t emphasise, which suggests that religious doctrine isn’t necessarily the critical factor. Religion is after all as much a product of wider cultural and social factors as it is a determinant of them, which makes unthreading causal connections especially difficult. It may well be that religion codifies misogyny and makes it difficult to challenge it but in some respects that does seem a somewhat disingenuous rhetorical manoeuvre; we can’t directly infer a causal relation so we’ll go for the next best thing, which just raises the question of whether there’s any demonstrable causal link for the codification effect.
Why does everybody keep equating reading the book with buying it? Ever hear of libraries?
The issue of causation is, obviously, complicated, and we discuss it throughout the book.
“It may well be that religion codifies misogyny and makes it difficult to challenge it but in some respects that does seem a somewhat disingenuous rhetorical manoeuvre; we can’t directly infer a causal relation so we’ll go for the next best thing”
No. It’s not a rhetorical maneuver. I’m getting really tired of these veiled accusations of lying – from Bunting, from J J Ramsey, now from you. It’s not a question of the next best thing, because even if we thought there was zero causal relation (which is not the case), the extra difficulty of challenging religious norms is very important all on its own.
Kharin,
If the question is, “Does religion X cause misogyny in its adherents?”, then it would not be sufficient to just show that it codifies misogyny. After all, the religion might be so flabby that its adherents are unmoved by its codes. But if the question is, “Is religion X misogynistic?”, then it is sufficient to show that it codifies misogyny.
Ophelia, as it happens it’s not especially easy for me to get to a library. So, yes, if I want to read it then I probably would have to buy it.
“I’m getting really tired of these veiled accusations of lying – from Bunting, from J J Ramsey, now from you.”
I’ll admit disingenuous wasn’t the appropriate term; unsatisfactory might have been better. I certainly apologise if you felt I was impugning you. Judging from Jeremy’s summary you don’t seem to rule a causal element in or out, which does seem a little inadequate (if unavoidable), as if guilt is being implied rather than demonstrated. Something similar seems to apply to the codification effect; it might have an demonstrable effect in an institutional context (e.g. women priests) but whether it actually carries any greater currency with most believers than any other social or cultural factor they might be exposed to is likely to be more difficult to demonstrate.
I suspect what the above amounts to is that while the above are interesting sociological concepts, I’m a little unsure as to whether this is really the stuff polemic is made of (which is the impression I’ve had of the book, rightly or wrongly).
“If the question is, “Does religion X cause misogyny in its adherents?”, then it would not be sufficient to just show that it codifies misogyny. After all, the religion might be so flabby that its adherents are unmoved by its codes.”
Why flabby? I suspect that most believers pay scant attention to many of the precepts of their religion irrespective of whether that happens to be Catholicism, Zoroastrianism or Islam.
“But if the question is, “Is religion X misogynistic?”, then it is sufficient to show that it codifies misogyny.”
Well, yes. But I’d almost regard that as self-evident in the case of the major monotheisms.
“and it’s hardly unreasonable to want to understand more about a book before parting with cash to buy it.”
Pray tell, Kharin, do you generally seek out authors before deciding to part with cash to buy books? Curiosity killed the cat!
“Pray tell, Kharin, do you generally seek out authors before deciding to part with cash to buy books? Curiosity killed the cat!”
As I’d read this blog long before the book was published I have hardly ‘sought’ anyone out. I’d also observe that most publishers are generally quite keen to have their authors answer questions on their books, either in interviews or to public questions at book festivals; given that the whole point of blogging is supposed to be interactivity it hardly seems an unreasonable or unusual desire.
Kharin
You need to read the part I posted more closely. Here’s a further snippet from later on in the chapter.
“To make an argument for a causal link requires a different approach.”
I don’t find all this as irritating as OB finds it, mainly because I don’t take the likes of J. J. Ramsey seriously.
But I am somewhat incredulous that people want us to lay out our arguments in detail before they read the book.
The book is where you’ll find the arguments. Read it, don’t read it, I really don’t care (I’m not speaking for OB here, I’m sure she has more respect for potential readers than I do). But the idea that it is possible to criticise a book on the basis of a few quotations from the last part of the last chapter is Alice in Wonderland absurd.
No, true; it’s not as if I keep myself distant and aloof. On the other hand, I really can’t give a detailed version of the argument/arguments of the book – because the detailed version is in the book.
‘Sokay about impugning. Unsatisfactory would have been better than disingenuous, yes!
I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t think it’s possible to divine what the book is like without reading it.
Kharin,
I, like you, have a hell of a time getting the books, because my local book stores are awful. Full of Jonas Brothers stuff and the like.
I’m not convinced that we lack evidence that core religious doctrines affect their believers in fundamental ways. So long as we’re not occupying ourselves with trivia like who begat who in the Bible (who cares?), and are instead concerned with (say) the purported role of the prototypical Christian female according to this or that legend, we have reason to believe that it will carry an influence. One of the latent functions of religion is to create a division of sexual labor, so to speak, so you can bet that people will pay attention to the doctrines or role models that bear directly on that.
I crossed with Jerry there.
I have bags of respect for potential readers, but I can’t say that I care either whether any particular person reads the book or not. I’m certainly not going to try to persuade anyone to read it – but I’m also not going to be impressed by criticism of the book coming from people who haven’t read the book.
The book is indeed where you’ll find the arguments. We can’t give a pocket version here (or anywhere).
(I don’t take the likes of J J Ramsey seriously! But he irritates me without my taking him seriously. So it goes.)
Jerry,
All I can say is that I was asking an honest question and I was certainly not trying to criticise the book (and if I did stray into doing that, I can only ask forgiveness for that and assure you that wasn’t where I was coming from). If you feel you can’t summarise it, that’s fair enough but it doesn’t make me feel that it was unreasonable to ask (after all, it’s a question OB could have been asked on Nightwaves when presumably some sort of answer would have been unavoidable). To me at least, the answer makes quite a lot of difference as to whether I think the book will be worth reading. There are quite a lot of books that simply catalogue religious abuses and extrapolate a general form of guilt by association. It’s not unreasonable as a polemical point but, to me at least, I wouldn’t have said it’s desperately interesting.
Kharin, pardon me, but I think you’re missing the point. Suppose that the book didn’t make a causal connexion between acts of violence or misogyny and religion. Still, the connexion between religion and the prettification of acts of violence and misogyny is fairly clear, and a bit more in depth understanding of the way that religion functions in that respect would be helpful.
Christopher Hitchens says rather boldly that ‘religion poisons everything,’ and he goes some way towards showing that this is so. In the end, however, it still sounds a bit like hyperbole, though the journey was worthwhile.
Ophelia and Jeremy simply ask a question, and then set off the provide an answer (or answers). While the concluding chapter (from which the quotations we have seen come) clearly sums up some of the points they make in bold terms, it is reasonable for the authors to say, ‘Hey, this is a complex issue, and, while the question of causation and priority is one we address in the book, there are issues involved here are far more subtle than anything that we could say in a sentence or two could possible do justice to. That is why we wrote a book rather than just a short paper. Of course, read the book or not, that’s your affair, but please don’t criticise the book based on a couple paragraphs taken out of context by someone desperately trying to defend religion.”
The asking of the question is, however, a fascinating way to proceed. What are the implications of saying that God loves, likes, dislikes or hates? What does it mean to speak of knowing what God does or does not want? What would you have to know in order to know that? And what effects would believing that you know that have on personal life and soceity?
Since religion is such a vast amorphous thing, answering causal questions about religion is not particularly helpful. All someone needs to say is that this is not religion itself, but tribal custom. (Thus, many people believed that the church’s treatment of the bodies of suicides was merely pagan custom, and not part of Christianity itself, or that FGM is tribal, not part of Islam, etc.)
How could we possibly say? Religion is at once a system of beliefs, a shelter from existential storms, where what look like metaphysical beliefs are simply mythical ways of speaking about human life, a vague sense that certain patterns of behaviour are rooted in the nature of things, and so on. Philip Ball can take Sam Harris to task for thinking that it makes sense to speak of religious beliefs. But Christians argue about what it means to believe that Jesus rose (or was raised) from the dead (where the difference between the active or the passive voice is deemed to be crucial to the belief itself).
Hence the question, Does God hate women?, includes, within itself, not only the complexity of the question, but it’s indeterminable, almost indecipherable, quality. For that reason alone, I should have thought, the book promises to be worthwhile, but, of course, as they say, the proof is in the pudding.
“Christopher Hitchens says rather boldly that ‘religion poisons everything,'”
Actually, when I referred to uninteresting catalogues of guilt by association, Hitchens was pretty much what I had in mind.
“Of course, read the book or not, that’s your affair, but please don’t criticise the book based on a couple paragraphs taken out of context by someone desperately trying to defend religion.”
As I said above, I wasn’t intending to criticise the book. Other than an assumption that it isn’t charitably disposed towards either religion or misogyny in general I’m not at all clear as to what its argument actually is and am hardly in any position to critique it.
Kharin
Sorry I should have been clearer in saying that I wasn’t referring to you when I said about criticising the book.
For the record, the book is more than simply a catalogue of abuses committed in the name of religion.
We address the issue of causation in Chapter 6 specifically (via a discussion of FGM), and in various places throughout the book.
We do think that religion is part of the causal story of misogyny. We do not think that it is possible to state that religion is the only causal factor involved in misogyny. Indeed, we don’t really think it would be possible to make sense of that proposition (except perhaps at a some high level of abstraction – in the same sense, maybe, that biologists talk about genes for particular behaviours, etc).
I’m sorry, Kharin, but I think you’re still missing the point. Because, of course, you did seek, originally, to critique the book in such a way that only very clear argument would make buying the book worthwhile, since you are not in a position to borrow it, and no doubt like most of us your budget for books is finite. Here is what you said (and, aside from the word ‘disingenuous’, you’re apparently sticking with it):
Now, my question still is: How would you demonstrate a causal link for a particular codification of social values, say, like the misogyny codified in the majority of the world’s religions? If you’re looking for a direct causal link, you’re probably going to be disappointed. As I said, one of the best ways of warding off attacks on particular aspects of a religion is to dump those aspects into the tray marked: Custom, Tribalism.
But you can ask far more subtle questions than that, and show a mesh of interconnectivity between tribal customs, say, and religious belief, and this is precisely what the question, Does God Hate Women?, seems to do. Whether or not it does it successfully remains to be seen (for those of us who have not read it).
On the surface, this should be an answerable question; that is, religion should be able to answer it, since most religions, anyway, claim that religion clarifies our social relationships and moral attitudes, and makes them consistent with what a god desires of us.
In the final chapter of their book, Ophelia and Jeremy use some bold metaphors to illustrate how religions seem to work. They don’t imply a causal relationship. Total body irradiation doesn’t say that religion causes people’s misogyny, for instance, but it does imply a close conceptual relationship between religious belief and the justification of very unlovely things.
Whether or not this is just a catalogue of religious abuses and an extrapolation of guilt by association may be a reasonable question, or it may not be. Guilt by association is not always an unreasonable accusation to make.
Take Aquinas, for example. He taught that heresy ought to be punished by death – not so different from some contemporary states purportedly based on Muslim principles, like Iran. Now, did Christianity cause this belief? How can we possibly say? What would be necessary in order to answer that very direct evidential question?
But we can say something about the way that religion funtioned as a comprehensive way of managing the relationship of belief, disagreement, and argument in 13th century Europe.
I suspect that, if we were to set off and say that Aquinas’ ideas about managing belief was a direct outcome of Christian belief, many Christians would dispute the claim, and shrug it off as in no way intrinsic to Christianity itself, which, many are keen to tell us, is really all about love and compassion. But it would still be an interesting question how Christianity functioned, in its 13th century incarnation, as a form of intellectual tyranny, how it transformed a belief system that also included commitment to compassion into a cruel, oppressive system of beliefs and structures that burned people alive for their beliefs. And there would be nothing disingenuous or misleading about making these observations of the way that religion functioned in respect of intellectual disagreement at that period of European history, a history that Christianity is now trying desperately to distance itself from. That Islam often functions in similar ways today may be thought reasonably to indicate that there are commonalities amongst religions that are worth exploring. It should certainly make us sceptical about the way in which religions claim to know the mind of God.
Thank you Jerry.