The lyrics
In case you want the lyrics to the pope song, here they are.
This is my favorite stanza, because it’s what I’m always thinking and what I keep saying and what was a big part of the argument of Does God Hate Women?
But if you build a church on claims of fucking moral authority
And with threats of hell impose it on others in society
Then you, you motherfuckers, could expect some fucking wrath
When it turns out you’ve been fucking us in our motherfucking asses.
That’s exactly it. Here’s the pope telling us we can’t be good without his god, but he and his priests aren’t good with his god, so I don’t think he knows a damn thing about being good, so I think he should stop acting like Global Boss of Morality. Or as Richard Dawkins put it more succinctly at the “We dislike the pope” rally,
Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity.
Hey, I got parts of it, but the lyrics are great! And you have to admit that the ending is right up there with your favourite:
I wish this allowed me to use html breaks, so that the lines follow one after the other like a poem.
The way I see it, various religious leaders have and still continue to insist that they all be painted with the same brush when it comes to positive things. That’s a sword that’s pretty double-edged.
OB
Over at ScienceBlogs’s ‘Stoat’, Wiliam Connolley has an interesting post noting something the pope said which (seems to) contradict this:
I’m not sure exactly what the Pope means by that latter part, but it does seem like an admission that we can in fact be good without his god.
This doesn’t change the fact that the CC has actually a rather chequered record in the area of right action; and it doesn’t change the other nonsense he spouts. But it’s interesting that he seems to make this rather significant philosophical concession, laden with provisos about the ‘purifying’ light of faith though it may be (WHWSTWH).
Thoughts?
First of all, I don’t think that the first part is an accurate description of “catholic tradition” at all.
The latter part is merely saying, ‘Well, yes – non-believers might well come to know objective moral truth by other means than revelation, but they can’t be trusted to act upon those without guidance from the church.’
The natural law tradition, which is reflected in the pope’s comments about the idea that “the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation”, is far more complex and intertwined with theology than this suggests. Ratzi certainly does not think that we can be good without god. What he is saying is that, given the use of (what the church calls) reason, we can come to the same conclusions that the church would come to depending solely on revelation. It is, in other words, a deliberately misleading use of the word ‘reason’. Of course, Roman catholics think that the results are the same, no matter how you approach it, but this is simply because their concept of reason is infected with dogmatic certainties to start off with. In these terms, if, by the use of reason, we arrive at conclusions that are not confirmed by revelation, then our use of reason is faulty. It is an outworking of Paul’s argument in Romans 1, where he argues that both Jews and pagans are without excuse, because the pagans have all the evidence they need in reason, and the Jews have all the evidence they need in revelation. But it is, like all religious arguments, programmatic. They already know, beforehand, the conclusions that we must come to, because this is already determined by God, both in revelation and (redeemed) reason. The use of the word ‘reason’ is always equivocal in religious contexts, since it must be impossible to come to any other conclusion that revelation alone would have led you to. Thus the appearance of reason in theological argument is usually superficial, since the task is not one of finding out where reason leads. The conclusion is known from the beginning, and reason is made to serve revelation. This is something that is often not clearly seen by those who come upon theology from the outside, and are accustomed to the use of reason to discover truth, rather than merely to ratifiy it.
Thanks, Eric; that gives a meaningful context to the Pope’s comments. I’ll have to go off and do some reading around that now…:)
Wonderfully put, Eric.
And by now Tim Minchin must surely be the unofficial laureate of rationalists.
That is a classic song. Hits the nail on the head.
Thanks too to Eric for his insight into what ‘reason’ means from the perspective of theology.
I use the song to respond to The Telegraph’s usual level of ethics here:
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/expensive/2010/09/19/dawkins-speech-at-protest-the-pope-march/
Actually, Eric has it backwards. The church’s position is one wherein faith/revelation cannot contradict human reason. Where there is a conflict between faith and reason, reason must therefore prevail. Eric is attempting to assert that ‘reason’ is stacked a-priori in favour of certain Catholic principles when that just isn’t the case.
Catholic theology is an open work in progress, with every generation addding its grain of salt. Cardinal Newman, for instance, brought some insights to the whole enterprise and it is, at least in part, for that reason he is being beatified.
The “song” everyone is praising is an insult to this blog. Lyrics that use the “F” word countless times are the product of a mind so immature that NO reason could ever penetrate it.
But we’re not interested right now in fucking scriptural debate.
Probably shouldn’t have pressed Post, but I’ve got the song in my head.
@Shifter.
Yes we know that argument, in practice of course the RCC does nothing of the sort, allowing faith to override reason is an everyday occurrence. Even if your assertion was true isn’t it a cop out ? If faith can’t contradict reason and each generation adds it’s “grain of salt” then aren’t you just admitting that the church is forever playing catch-up ? Science and reason lead, the church follows on and pretends it was all its idea in the first place.
If you don’t like the swearing, well I’m sorry Tim Minchin is a demi-god, I’ve no proof of that but it’s my faith so you have to fucking respect it.
Shifter wrote:
This position is unstable unless it’s rendered clear what must give way when they conflict, or even appear to. So the ambiguity must be resolved, and I do it like this:
What does “faith/revelation cannot contradict human reason” mean? Does it mean that what is revealed is a priori reasonable, or that revelations that contradict reason and evidence are not revelations? In both cases reason prevails. In the first case, though, reason prevails only by an understanding that annihilates its usual meaning and corrupts its usefulness as a guide. It no longer guides anything but follows something else, the a priori that will not be abandoned regardless.
I don’t think you can square these ideas. Either the truth is what you can discover or it’s what’s revealed. It’s better to explain what’s unknown in terms of what’s known than the other way around. That’s how explanation works, as a process of discovery. Revelation has a role as intuition, but it’s subordinated to what’s discovered. So a double helix can be a dream or a wild guess, and then be discovered as the structure of DNA. The discovery of DNA’s structure can’t be made subordinate to the contents of the revelation that might have inspired the investigation.
Shifter
Does that mean you reject Eric’s thesis that the Pope’s statement was rooted in the tadition of natural law? If so, could you offer a more substantive accounting of the tradition to which the old chap was referring?
Reading around I see these ideas were discussed and ensconced in dogma under the Vatican Council:
This looks to me like a reinforcement (in practice, anyway) of what Eric wrote; that (theoretically) reason must perforce arrive at conclusions that are consistent with the truth of enlightened faith because reason investigates God’s world and thus cannot – by definition, not by proscription – rightly lead to conclusions that contradict such revealed truth.
To people like us, who reject the premises of a God-ordered world and of the existence of revealed truth – that seems ass-backwards. It certainly doesn’t sound like anyone’s saying ‘well, if reason leads you to conclusions that contradict the Faith then ok, we’ll concede.’
Clearly you disagree. But could you offer support for your assertions, please? Or explain where I am going wrong here? I’m genuinely curious about what the Pope meant; so far, Eric’s explanation is the sole convincing one I’ve seen. And although it’s obviously phrased from an atheist perspective, it seems to be Good Catholic Doctrine.
Wait – I thought you said change should be fought against in your previous comments. Now you are telling me it is inevitable and progressive. I am so confused.
They would argue- like Evelyn Waugh- that they would be even worse without their god.
In fact, the most powerful moral argument against christianity is that it persuades normally good people who believe it to do evil and believe they are doing good. Benny the Bish may well be an example.
Regardless of what kind of balancing-act the RCC does between what it calls ‘faith’ and ‘reason’, underlying the performance is an asssertion of unquestionable authority, which is the fundamental problem.
I watched Dawkins’ speech on YouTube yesterday, expecting the usual dry, rational argument. What a surprise when he dropped that bomb! My wife came running in from the other room to see what all the hooting and cheering was about.