That’s cold
Something Eric said in his latest post struck me. The subject is again Wilkinson at BioLogos, this time on his raised eyebrow at Eric’s moral arguments. Eric wonders why the eyebrow is raised.
But why, I wonder, does Wilkinson think that my moral arguments are quaintly old-fashioned? Is this just an example of theological scatter-shot, or did he have something specific in mind? My belief is that religion has completely disastrous moral consequences…
My own central moral concern, at least as this is exemplified in the name of this blog, is the religious insistence that people suffer intolerably as they die, and that they should be denied help in bringing their dying more quickly to an end.
I stopped reading there, because I wanted to think about that. It suggested something…
What it suggested is that religions of this type don’t love us. We’re not their cherished children or the objects of their concern or even empathy. They don’t give a rat’s ass about us, not us – not as we are, not our real fleshy mortal vulnerable selves. They may care, or think they care, about some abstract perfected us that lives on after we’re dead, but they don’t care about us as we are here and now. We know this because they want us to suffer. They are willing and indeed eager to force us to suffer if the only alternative is our deciding for ourselves. They are willing and eager to force us to suffer if the only alternative is our breaking one of their rules. They love their rules, and they don’t love us.
The bishop of Phoenix is angry because that mother of four young children is not now dead. He is morally indignant because she is not dead. It is his considered opinion that she should be dead now.
They want us to suffer when we would prefer not to, and die when we would prefer to live, for the sake of their rules.
They’re a cold-hearted lot.
That’s not quite right. We care very deeply about your immortal souls, which may actually require indifference toward your corporeal selves. The good bishop wanted that earthly woman dead only because he didn’t want the true person, known only to God, to be complicit in the murder of her baby, whom he had already received.
This is the ultimate love, and I can’t understand why you all can’t see it.
Oh, fuck. I messed up the He.
I didn’t read it that way at all. I thought Wilk was saying it a bit ironically. He seemed to want to suggest that the new-fangled Rortian postmodernists were very fashionable, while Eric and a great deal many other ethical and rational people seem like relics from fuddy-town. And he pictures himself and BioLogos standing alongside Eric and Coyne in that respect.
We have no love for them either.
But we have bucketfuls of sympathy. Sympathy for the Pheonix mother who needed an abortion to save her life. Sympathy for the brave but wreckless Salman Taseer and his family that suffer death-threats. For all those victims of female genital mutilation, for all victims of suicide attacks, for child abuse victims. For Gabrielle Giffords, for oppressed muslim women, and on and on and on.
Our sympathy extends to the very people who hold contrary opinions, when they are victims of injustice and violence.
Christianity as a moral crusade to change humanity into loving beings failed miserably. And yet modern secularism and human rights have succeeded in spreading the notion that humans will support each other and fight against injustice for no other reason than it being part of our human nature.
And I think that is why we’re moral, because we’re human. Religion has no more to do with morality than it had to do with science. Religion tyrannises over everything, including our emotions. It commands you to love, not give it freely.
And so why does the bishop and others fail so miserably in terms of compassion or sympathy? It is because their compassion is twisted and misplaced. The bishop’s sympathy (if he ever had any) was with an eleven week fetus but apparently absent for the baby’s mother. Perhaps it is the sympathy for the eternal soul, over the temporal body. Who knows? But it’s not the natural sympathy of one human to another human. Something has blocked and interfered with it.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Wayne de Villiers, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: That’s cold http://dlvr.it/Dthvh […]
May I also add that Biologos has no love whatsoever for science. I am willing to see evidence on the contrary, but their love for science is like the bishop of Phoenix’s love for the dying mother.
Catholocism (and much of conservative Protestant Christianity) cares about Human Dignity rather than the dignity of individual humans; about Family rather than the material welfare of actual parents and their children; ie. about grand abstractions rather than the concrete realities they are taken to represent. I blame it on the Neo-Platonism at the heart of Catholic thought.
In fairness, I must note that Fred Clark (a.k.a. slacktivist), a moderate Baptist, has also railed against this moral abstractionism.
Oh, I think BioLogos adores science. They love it the way so many people love science, for its wonder and extraordinary explanatory power. It’s just that they’re evangelical Christians, so they want to integrate their love of science with their faith. Hey, it’s their mission.
BioLogos can certainly be exasperating. The mendacity is infuriating, but I’m not part of their world, where lying is a virtue. However, I have no doubt that they see their mission as bringing science to Christianity, not the other way around. Uncle Karl’s bewilderment that Jerry doesn’t realize that they’re on the same side is sincere.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books often oppose villains who are motivated by grand abstractions like religion and small-scale heroes who are pragmatically trying to do their best in a hostile world. Pratchett is obviously strongly opposed to group-think.
For the record, I don’t think there is anything wrong with abstract principles as such, provided you have some evidence to abstract them from. It’s when abstract principles are manufactured from expedience and wishful thinking that people suffer.
“That’s not quite right. We care very deeply about your immortal souls, which may actually require indifference toward your corporeal selves. The good bishop wanted that earthly woman dead only because he didn’t want the true person, known only to God, to be complicit in the murder of her baby, whom he had already received.
This is the ultimate love, and I can’t understand why you all can’t see it.”
We can see that you’re saying it. We can understand the concepts you’re putting forth. But the fact is that, in all likelihood, there is no such thing as an “immortal soul.” No real evidence (and by this, I mean scientifically valid, tested evidence) has ever supported it. So to us, what you love is a idea. Not us.
Just to make it clear how we see this concept of yours, I want you to imagine a ‘stage parent.’ In particular, one who drags their children into sports and beauty pageants, calls their children fat or lazy, undermines them, insults them, risking deep, psychological damage; all in the name of eventually making them better at baseball, or ballet, or looking pretty for judges.
To most of us, this parent is a monstrous figure. And that’s despite the fact that we understand the possible benefits of becoming a great dancer, ball player, actor, etc, and despite the fact that they are the child’s parent. In her mind, she is doing the best thing for her child.
That Bishop wanted a complete stranger to commit suicide for his beliefs.
The point, sir, isn’t that your beliefs are internally evil. It’s only when taken into the context of reality that they become so. You live in a frame of reference where such beliefs are good, and moral. Similarly, when a crazy person commits murder, we don’t hold them responsible in the same way as when a sane person does so. But it’s still murder. And there are still consequences. And the world would still be better off if billions of its denizens didn’t think life on it was relatively unimportant.
I’ve been told that seeing people as hateful sacks of sin that inevitably fall short of the abstract ideal of perfection and purity is being humble and merciful. Atheists are the ones who are cold because we think we don’t need redemption. And they do love us, just hate sin.
Hating sin of course means hating everything that makes us human, and loving us means loving the pure and perfect part of us. And if you hate sin (i.e. humans), it makes sense to ban condoms, abortions and divorce. People who don’t sin don’t need them.
Of course the religious don’t love us. Religion is founded not on love of others but on fear of God. If Christians love their neighbours (a big if, of course) it’s because they believe God has told them they’ll be blasted to hell if they don’t.
It’s not our immortal souls they’re worried about, but their own.
K. Taylor, I think Ken Pidcock was being sarcastic.
It took me forever to figure out that the religious and I do not have the same moral map. I was genuinely bewildered that someone would not want to save a woman’s life over a fetus, or support welfare, universal healthcare and job training. My exposure is not so much with Catholic doctrine as with fundamentalist Christianity. With them it seems not only to be about saving the soul but also a sort of debit/credit transaction with their god. If you have it good then god is rewarding you and if you don’t you are not only being punished, but those god smiles on should decide when you eat, if you have healthcare and so forth. Now that I type this it does seem to dovetail with the Catholic church interfering in medical procedures.
It’s a tad depressing.
they have learned many things about human nature the centuries they torture. They like the moment the sufferer blows. Then he or she confess. And they like that because then their sick idea of their idol tortured for us has their jistification. I don’t think normal people can imagine the sick brain of a believer. After 17 centuries of repeating the same lies it’s hardwired in millions of brains. The base is fear and they like it. it’s ultimate gain for power. 1984 you know.
Religious ideologues have no love for anything they don’t control. They will love science if they can control it, and they will love people who obey them. What they love most is the absolutist vision which says it’s proper for them to control others for their own good.
Eamon Knight wrote:
Yes, it appears that one strand of Greek philosophy was taken up by Christians who then suppressed the rest of the tradition. Charles Freeman as written two books (The Closing of the Western Mind and A.D. 381) that give the particulars of this story. I’ve read both and strongly recommend them.
Ben, I find it hard to agree with you. That’s what I thought he might be saying, but then it occurred to me that he did not show obvious approval of postmodernism, in which context my point of view would look quaintly old fashioned. I think what he finds quaintly old fashioned about my moral point of view is the idea that we can establish values objectively, without divine aid, and it is this that he finds quaint. Postmodernism for Wilkinson, I think, has shown that there is no objective, rational way of establishing value. This should throw you back on religion, but, guess what?, Eric MacDonald is quaintly old fashioned in this respect, and has not noticed what a powerful demolition postmodernism has done to secular world views and belief systems.
I agree with Ophelia, I think it is quite clear that there is no basis for love in Wilkinson’s system except for those who accord to divine command theories of ethics some absolute value. Thus, Bishop Olmstead will only be satisfied when those rules, laid down by God, are respected. The woman doesn’t count, in the same way that people’s suffering doesn’t count when the question of assisted dying is raised. All that matters is the law laid down by God for all people, for all time, and everywhere. Interesting that this is also the definition of orthodoxy: what is believed always, everywhere, and by all (also known as the Vincentian canon).
As Conte so memorably said – “whatever the cost, whatever the cost, whatever the cost.”
Meanwhile Karen Armstrong is on her book tour, telling the world that compassion is central to all great religions.
Yeah, and she’s buying underwriting spots on NPR, too. There’s no place to get away from that wretched woman.
It’s difficult to know what to Wilkinson, he is just so wrong in so many places. I’ll take just three:”religious claims are only made true or false, says MacDonald, by means of authority, and he proceeds to criticize one clear example of religious authority, the Roman Catholic magisterium.Because religious claims are based either on belief or authority, and not on real “data,” as in genuine science,…..”I agree mostly with Eric, many religious claims do indeed depend purely on assertion of authority, but we must also recognize that some religious claims have been falsified by facts. Example: the coming in clouds of glory of a resurrected Yeshue bar Yussef did not happen – not in the lifetimes of his followers, as he himself is supposed to have predicted, or in the lifetime of anybody since then. Nor is it expected, even by most religious. This is a failed prophecy and one that completely undermines the whole foundation of christianity as invented by Saul of Tarsus.A little further on he writes:”(Before Edwin Hubble and the evidence of an expanding universe, the prevailing steady-state cosmology, championed by astronomers like Fred Hoyle, maintained, through faith, that the universe was eternal; but such a belief is hard to find in astronomers today.)”This is an unbelievable misrepresentation of the situation. Firstly Hubble had long before established that the galaxies in the universe were accelerating away from each other i.e. that the universe was expanding in all directions. An explanation for how this could be was lacking. One of the several hypotheses, the steady-state hypothesis, was advanced by Hoyle, Bondi and Gold in the 1940s. This hypothesis eventually lost out to the big bang hypothesis especially after 1965 when Penzias and Wilson first identified lingering cosmic radiation that tended to confirm the big bang. Since that time cosmic hypotheses are mostly about how the big bang happened – simple big bang, inflationary universe or cyclic universe. The controversy is about the first nanoseconds. Unlike religion the adherents of steady-state abandoned it in the face of the evidence against it and for a better explanation. It is utterly egregious to say that Hoyle maintained his ideas about the steady-state universe through “faith”. The belief is “hard to find among astronomers today” because there is a better explanation. If only the religious would be so amenable to reason and data – with or without their “datasets”. And let me just say that as a career-long IT professional I find this use of the technical term “dataset” nothing more than a transparent attempt to make religious pseudo-knowledge sound more impressive.At a later point Wilkinson writes:”But it would also require folks like Coyne and MacDonald to recognize that the facts of history and human experience, both of which give strong evidence of the reality of a personal and self-revealing God, form “data sets” worthy of being spoken of in the language of science—which should nevertheless always be the humble language of faith seeking understanding.”Can we have some examples of these facts of history and human experience which give any evidence whatsoever of the “reality” of a blah. blah, blah deity. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Just because Wilkinson believes it does NOT make it true – as the facts of history and human experience amply attest.Human life, human experience, facts are all irrelevant to Wilkinson’s ilk. Their minds are made up and it’s rude of us to try to confuse them with facts.
You’re giving them too much credit. It’s not some arbitrary set of rules they are in love with – it is simply themselves.
The Bishop of Phoenix wants that woman to die simply to save him from having to consider that he might be wrong. Nothing more, nothing less.
Eric, granted, it’s a matter of interpretation.
So on the one hand, Wilk’s broader point is, of course, exactly what you suggest — that you and Coyne have swallowed the “poison” of positivism, and must reach for Polanyi’s “antidote”. But on the other hand, in the immediate context of that paragraph, he lays stress on the villainy of the late Dr. Rorty, and on the common ground that you (and all moral objectivists) share. That’s why it seems more natural to read him as labeling the whole lot of you as “quaint”, instead of it just being a slight against the greyness of your particular beard.
Anyway. It’s probably not important. And I won’t comment on love, since love can be consistent with cruelty and oppression.
“K. Taylor, I think Ken Pidcock was being sarcastic.”
So he was. Remind me not to comment on blog posts when I’ve been up for 36 hours.
Hmmmmmm. I don’t think so.
I think I know what you mean – that people can be cruel to people they love. Yes, but to the extent that they are cruel, to that extent they are subtracting from the “love.” If there’s enough cruelty, you don’t get to call it “love” any more. Genuine love has to be inconsistent with (at least) sustained deliberate cruelty.
Lolita is a rather compelling illustration of that thought.
And certainly it doesn’t work for the kind of “love” that punitive authoritarian religions profess for their followers. It certainly doesn’t work for the kind of “love” that the bishop of Phoenix might profess for the Catholics in his diocese. That kind of purely verbal “love” is simply a veil for cruelty, and it’s a veil that needs rending.
The issue here, though, is that it is still an open question about whether being cold hearted is, in fact, the right way to be moral.
Being Stoic leaning, I’m opposed to emotions — including sympathy — being used in determinations of what’s moral or immoral. Mostly because emotions can and often do lead you to do both horribly stupid and generally immoral things when they misfire. And they misfire. A lot. And are easily manipulated to boot. Emotions aren’t good at doing things when you want to be right.
The abortion debate is a great example of this. A lot of the pro-choice side clearly don’t think of the foetus as a baby, and so have no emotional connection to it. Thus, they have no issue with abortion because they can feel sympathy for the impact the pregnancy will have on her life, and support her having the choice. But if you can make people associate the foetus with a baby, then they’ll feel sympathy for it, and probably more than for the mother because “It’s just a little baby!”. And so they oppose abortion.
We usually try to settle that by appealing to reason — it doesn’t suffer, has no cognition, things that make something human — but once we do that we have to accept that the emotion was flawed and it’s reason riding to the rescue, by telling us what emotions we really should be feeling instead of the ones we are feeling.
So: “They want us to suffer when we would prefer not to, and die when we would prefer to live, for the sake of their rules.”
If the rules really do say that the preferences are immoral, then heck yeah. And if that’s cold-hearted, then so be it. I’d rather be right than be nice.
But you undercut what you’re claiming.
Notice you start with how people think about the fetus, and only then get to the emotion.
Emotion is never simply separate from thought. If there’s no thought there’s nothing to be emotional about.
Ophelia,
“Notice you start with how people think about the fetus, and only then get to the emotion. Emotion is never simply separate from thought. If there’s no thought there’s nothing to be emotional about.”
Isn’t this supporting my case, though? After all, isn’t it really the thought that counts here, not the emotion it spawns? The right thought spawning no emotion is still the right thought, and adding the right emotion to it doesn’t change its rightness.
I missed the first line, so let me clarify.
Yes, the wrong ideas can lead to wrong emotions. My biggest concern is over when thoughts and emotions clash, which happens quite frequently. But specifically to the post, taking the second case I’d argue that even if they’re RIGHT that the foetus is like a baby it may be right to ignore that and the natural emotional reaction and rather “cold-heartedly” allow or perform the abortion.
As I said, I’d rather be right than nice, and if it would be right to allow abortion even though the heart cries against it I’d like to be more than prepared to tell the heart to go cry in the corner and leave me alone.
Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
We are humans. We have emotions. To claim that we should not use one of the major tools in our “humanity” toolbox to make decisions is, frankly, as dunderheaded a piece of advice as I’ve heard in the past three or four decades.
A very good friend of mine has a sister who got happily pregnant, then discovered that the baby would be born anencephalic. That means without a brain. The prospects of it dying in utero were high, being stillborn even higher, surviving more than a few days impossible. Abortion was offered to spare the mother the health risks of the remainder of the pregnancy and to spare the fetus the pain of at best a few hours of ex-utero existence.
And my friend’s sister was devastated. And AGONIZED over the decision, even though she was in no way highly religious. And KNEW that abortion was the only logical decision.
And the fucking bishop of Phoenix would tell this woman that she was wrong to terminate the pregnancy. And would have her ex-communicated had she been a Catholic. And would ex-communicate any priest or nun in any health facility under Catholic control that would support this woman’s dreadful decision.
You can talk about stoicism all you like, but until you’re the woman making the decision, I might suggest that you kindly shut the fuck up about what should or should not be a part of the decision-making process.
Kevin,
So, she was emotionally
impactedaffected and didn’t want to have the abortion, but decided to do it because it was, rationally, the right thing to do, right?So how did her emotions help her there? If she hadn’t been able to overcome her emotional reaction to make the logical decision, she’d have made a different decision … the wrong one.
Additionally, you’re reacting far too emotionally over an example; I haven’t said anything about what factors one should use to make the decision, just that emotion is not — in general — good. It’s not like I’m adovcating make abortions illegal or incarcerating anyone even thinking about having an abortion, you know.
Oph, I’d be willing to agree with you, since you’ve put the contrast starkly. But my aim was to refer to borderline cases of love.
According to introductory psychology, the core concept of love is something like, “compassion, commitment, and passion”. I think it’s pretty obvious that love can be consistent with cruelty (e.g., “Venus in Furs”), and it can be consistent with aloofness (e.g., Epicureanism), and it can be consistent with a platonic bearing (e.g., friendship, brotherly love) — those are peripheral or impure cases of love. But love cannot coexist with cruelty, aloofness, and platonism simultaneously. A relationship built on cruelty, detachment, and coldness is not a romantic one.
So the relationship between the Bishop of Pheonix and the rest of us is probably not a loving one. But he’s one of the special vanguard of American extremists. If you look beyond the vanguard, I think you find that religion is often better described as “sado-masochism”. For instance, the belief in God is probably the longest, saddest unrequited love story of all time.
Well, I’m all for the Bish living by his own rules. If he doesn’t want an abortion because he thinks it morally wrong then by all means he should not be forced to have one. Just as if he’s lying in terminal agony he should not be forced to end his life. It’s just that many of the rest of us don’t want to live by his rules; after all who TF is HE to get to make the rules for all the rest of us? Society has a process for rule-making called “legislation”, which nominally anyway has the common consent in our democracy.
I’m only making rules for me, not for anyone else. He should live that way too – if I made the rules for him he would.
Yes yes, I know he’s the successor of saint peter and all that but who died and left peter in charge? Oh yeah, I know that one don’t I? It’s in one of those bogus scriptures somewhere. The point is Stoic, that the only rules that you should pay attention to are your own – and the laws of the country in which you reside (because of the potential downside there), where they don’t agree with your own rules.
Once we accept that others can make rules for us without our consent, the question becomes “whose rules shall prevail?”. The world is littered with bodies of those on one or another side of that issue
sailor1031,
“If he doesn’t want an abortion because he thinks it morally wrong then by all means he should not be forced to have one.”
Let me recast that into a couple of what might be considered similar questions:
“If he doesn’t want to commit murder because he thinks it morally wrong then by all means he should not be forced to do so.”
“If he doesn’t want to keep slaves because he thinks it morally wrong then by all means he should not be forced to keep slaves.”
The issue is that for the last two statements we would react rather badly to saying that as if it should stop those things from being illegal, or if someone used that to defend their doing them. Now, abortion may be different — but it is comparable, since murder is indeed what the bishop thinks it is — and you may be right that we shouldn’t set rules for anyone else. But, right now, as I said I’d rather be right than be nice and I think there is a right answer to those questions.
If there is no right answer in general to moral questions, then I don’t see how the other two statements don’t also follow. As for abortion, I agreed with what was done and argued for it on my blog without appealing to emotions or sympathy or even to the foetus not being a person, but instead on what actions the foetus ought to take if it was capable of acting as a moral agent. It’s a quite cold analysis, but it ends up where you all ended up while still being so.
So, the question from me really is: is it really in any way bad to be cold? Could it be better to be cold?
Ben, borderline cases – ok. I was thinking of the non-borderline variety, on the grounds that that’s what liberal religionists mean by the word. A loving god is implicitly the opposite of a cruel one. Given the bish and people like him, I think it’s worth pointing out that their god is nothing like that.
I like your punchline!