As Irigaray might have said
In the mood for some spiritual discipline? Have some Giles Fraser. He’s very kinky.
It’s good to do without stuff. It’s a discipline. Food, sex, hot showers, reality tv, flowers, poetry, music – whatever you like, you should give it up, so as to exercise your giving it up muscle. For those of you who like to ask questions: you should give that up. It’s good for you and it’s a pretty compliment to god.
…one of the things that we learn from earthquakes and tsunamis is precisely that such mastery is an illusion. To use Lacanian language: it is an eruption of the Real against the neat meaningfulness with which we structure our lives. Are religious believers especially bad at wanting to buy any old explanation for tragic events so long as they return their familiar symbolic order to its former integrity? Probably, yes. For too often, religion can regard the admission that one does not understand as some sort of lack of faith. And furthermore, it can regard the refusal of poor explanations as a lack of loyalty to the tribe.
Fraser seems to have given up making sense for Lent. He doesn’t mean “are religious believers especially bad at wanting to buy any old explanation” – he means are they bad about doing that. They’re all too good at it. And that “poor explanations” is just confusing – he means bad explanations.
Anyway – what he’s doing is going all around the houses in order to say “don’t ask why god did this because I have no clue.” We already knew that, and we think Fraser and other clerics should realize that that means their god is either useless or a sadist or not there. In Lacanian language that would be: dude, get over it.
But we do understand what causes earthquakes. In the case of Japan, it was the stick-and-slip of tectonic plates. God and/or Lacan have nothing to do with it.
The article demonstrates the moral scepticism that renders theism pointless. As soon as something challenges their sense of what’s right, they say, well, who can know what’s right? Clearly not theists.
Imagine that. You know, if you do feel the force of the question, your immediate response must be either What did the Japanese do to deserve this or Man, God can be such an asshole sometimes. The first is reprehensible, the second self-loathing. For Fraser, though, it must have been, Here’s another opportunity to make something up.
By the way, I wouldn’t have gotten the reference to Irigaray except that I have Trangressing the Boundaries on my computer. To me, it sounded like Irigonegaray, the lawyer left to take on the 2005 Kansas science hearings, and the one accommodationist I’m willing to forgive!
Fraser isn’t nearly as amusing as Irigaray and he hasn’t attempted to employ scientific concepts without understanding them. I also understood most of what he was saying.
Unlike Irigaray, ‘he knows what he doesn’t know’ and he has made a ignorance a virtue,like most believers.
Very true. Irigaray made it into the Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense, and Fraser did not.
if they really really wanted to exercise the giving up muscle , they should give up their religion. No sacrifice could possibly be greater than that, could it?
On a similar note, I wrote about a Mormon apologist once who called theodicy a “poisoned cup”, and said that it’s damaging to faith to dwell on why God allows evil, so believers should just stop thinking about it. It must be mentally exhausting to have whole regions of ideas that you can never allow yourself to contemplate, that you always have to keep your eyes turned resolutely away from lest you accidentally trespass onto dangerous territory and have a forbidden thought.
As Irigaray might have said
Yikes! For a moment I thought….
Ebonmuse, I wonder how you “stop thinking about it”. Is it a skill I can master? I don’t even know how I think about things I do think about. I just think about them and catch myself doing it.
Which is where the “don’t think about the elephant” joke comes in.
I’d step carefully here. As regulars of the site “platitude of the day” will attest the regular contributors to Radio 4’s thought for the day all have their characteristics, but Giles is the only one who regularly gets the response “I hope Giles is OK”.
I’ve been writing an essay on the negative effects of Iragray, Lacan and the like on media studies lately and I was kind of worried Sokal and Bricmont had rendered my criticisms obsolete – so it’s great to see I haven’t completely missed the boat.
Some crotches can’t be kicked enough.
Giles Fraser has previous form on natural disaster — see his Thought for the Day on Haiti.