Oh, no one, it’s just God
There’s some funny stuff in this piece by Anthony Gottlieb on the new atheist books.
In some religious research, it is not necessarily the respondents who are credulous. Harris has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps…Harris takes at face value a Gallup poll suggesting that eighty-three per cent of Americans regard it as the Word of God, and he, like Dawkins and Hitchens, uses up plenty of ink establishing the wickedness of many tales in the Old Testament. Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.
Cool. Bible is Word of God, but who cares what’s in it? That’s the spirit! So if God actually dropped in for a beer and a handful of Doritos, nobody would look up from Maximum Exposure to say ‘how do’ and ask what the divine plan actually is? If God parted the heavens and announced in a loud voice that it was time to listen up and take heed, everybody would just say ‘yeah, yeah’ and take no further notice? If there were a CD with what eighty-three per cent of Americans regarded as the actual voice of God singing ‘It Had to Be You,’ would they not bother to listen? What a very pleasing thought.
And there’s a dreamy incoherence in their conviction that moderate forms of religion somehow enable fundamentalist zeal and violence to survive. Are we really going to tame the fervor of an extremist imam’s mosque in Waziristan by weakening the plush-toy creed of a nondenominational church in Chappaqua?
Well if you put it that way…
“Are we really going to tame the fervor of an extremist imam’s mosque in Waziristan . . .”
Dare I suggest that there will be peace in this violent old world when the last charismatic has been strangled with the guts of the last ayatollah?
It doesn’t really matter what God is actually saying when you have faith in your inner voices…
Don’t you understand, folks? That’s why catholicism IS the one true religion: the more layers you put between you and the “divinity”, the better it is!
(Did I read somewhere that our new Roman overlord wants to bring back Latin in church?)
“Are we really going to tame the fervor of an extremist imam’s mosque in Waziristan . . .”
So, if we find one very improbable case of moderate religion being an enabling link to extremist religion, then the postulate of any link in general has been refuted?
I can’t recall the name for this sort of trashy fallacy, but I’m sure Ophelia can tell us.
So Christians don’t know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, Mormons don’t know that their “Heavenly Father” is a man who became a god just like they can become, and Scientologists don’t know that Xenu blew up aliens with H-bombs. So what? Religion is all about feeling good. As for me, I prefer alcohol. And living in a world full of people whose epistemology centers on the Mind of God, I really rely on the juice.
Hmm. Seems to me that I’ve read lots and lots and lots of feminists criticizing the oppression of women in Islam. Although a few rather obvious facts might also account for a dearth of leading feminists speaking out against Islam in any great detail, insofar as (1) most feminist writers focus for the most part on the oppressive politics and culture of the writer herself rather than the oppression of some other women somewhere else entirely, and (2) feminist writers in Muslim countries are notoriously subject to unfortunate fatal incidents. The combination of the two prior points makes me suspect without even reading the article (I’ll follow the link later and get back to this) that Cristina Hoff Summers is doing more of her usual anti-feminist backlash cherry-picking pseudo-scholarship.
More seriously, I’ve read what Summers has to say about feminism on enough prior occasions not to expect much. And frankly, at this hour of the night I just don’t have the stomach for it. But I’ll read it tomorrow, out of sheer cantankerousness if nothing else.
“(Did I read somewhere that our new Roman overlord wants to bring back Latin in church?)”
YAWOHL, BBC NEWS ON LINE 27th APRIL 2007
“Pope Benedict’s plans to revive the Latin Mass is causing concern among Catholic and Jewish groups about relations between their faiths.
Religious commentators predict that Pope Benedict will issue authorisation for wider use of the Mass – known as the Tridentine Mass – soon. It is thought that publishers in Rome are already preparing new editions of the Latin missal. The problem, however, is that traditional texts include prayers for the conversion of Jews.
The Tridentine Mass was celebrated for hundreds of years before being replaced by a liturgy celebrated in local languages, as part of reforms instigated after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s”.
I wonder if and when the Tridentine mass is once again introduced who is going to cough up/take responsibility for the alter rails/alters of all the Catholic Churches throughout the world. Some Churches have never recovered from extensive renovations that had to take place to suit the whims of the Vatican. Talk about desecration of minds…ICH VERSTEHE GAR NICHT!
Rorate Caeli Blog 2006
The Cardinal who constantly blamed this liturgical revolution of the 1960s and 1970s is now the reigning pope. Those who are claiming this revolutionary destruction of the sacred is one cause of the Church crisis are not only the Traditionalists. By the way, cardinal Ratzinger made it perfectly clear he was not a Traditionalist himself.
“So since April 2005, what has been done? In terms of decisions, in terms of real achievements, the answer is very easy: nothing! Everybody in the Church was waiting for a move on the Liturgical field, whether freedom for the Traditional Latin Rites (the Roman rite 1962 missal, and all the other Latin rites like the Ambrosian…) or some first steps in the “reform of the reform” (revising N.O.M.); at least, a clear orientation but the initial encyclical Deus caritas est is addressing another topic”.
Chrisper – maybe the Dixie Chicks will go after Tom Cruise’ buddies when they start getting death threats from scientologists?
And what, exactly, is “the progressive concensus”?
I thought most folk round here were pretty even-handed in their condemnation of supernaturalism and its attendant idiotic dogmas…but then why shouldn’t we expect people to start with the dominant oppressive belief-system that is closest to home first, before starting on down the list?
There are some cracking Hindu texts regarding women as being literal sacks of sh*t, if yer interested…
:-)
I think Dennett explained it well in Breaking the Spell. The content of peoples belief doesn’t matter, it is thier belief in blief itself that seems to knit them together. Almost to say “you can believe anything you want as long as your reasons are as bad as mine”?
I liked that chapter – the belief in belief chapter. There are parts of the book I don’t like, I’m sorry to say, but I did like that one.
I could speculate on why so few Americans are very conversant with the Bible they revere so much. (It’s only speculation, but hey, you have to get your fun somehow in this subject.)
The Bible contains long stretches of very dreary, not to say repellent (to contemporary people) material, so most people, once they discover it, don’t bother to go through it thoroughly. It’s a very big book, and most Americans get so turned off to reading in school that they wouldn’t even consider reading such a tome. Look at the functional literacy rate in the U.S. at this point; a lot of Americans don’t really read much of anything any more. TV is good enough.
Most of all, however, the Bible is simply a totemic object; a lot of Americans who consider themselves Christian (and even some who don’t) are just comforted by the fact that it exists, whether they know what’s in it or not. It represents what they take to be the fact that “God has spoken to humanity,” which means that there is a God, which means that the universe is somehow in good hands. Whew! That’s a load off their minds.
A lot of Americans who are enraged that the courts won’t allow the 10 commandments to be exhibited in public places probably couldn’t tell you what they say. They just want the comfort of such a holy object being located in places representing the country — pure superstition, like ancient animal sacrifices in the temple.
Andy: ” maybe the Dixie Chicks will go after Tom Cruise’ buddies when they start getting death threats from scientologists?”
Good point Andy. I think the scientologists actually deliver on their threats to a far greater extent than whichever blowhard wrote to the Dixie Chicks.
What is the progressive consensus? A dreadful symptom of the lack of a really good pejorative which catches the people who use political correctness moral cudgeon to their own self-glorification, while throwing out actual liberal values.
“There are some cracking Hindu texts regarding women as being literal sacks of sh*t, if yer interested…”
Why thanks, us right-wing sacks of sh*t are always glad to find new ways to meet similar others. ;-)
ChrisPer,
I think the most extreme thing an atheist can say to a believer (maugre provactive phrasing borne of annoyance) is, ‘I believe you to be either a fool or a knave and hope that one day you will achieve wisdom or honesty so we can converse sensibly.’
The reverse of the coin (shorn of platitudes) is ‘I believe you are damned to eternal and unspeakable agony, which I eagerly anticipate watching as an amusing diversion while I enjoy paradise.’
I wouldn’t dream of saying the former to you, as I’m sure you would never dream of saying the latter to me. But when it come down to talking about rhetorical cudgels, I think it worth bearing in mind.
Don, ouch that hurt! Of course you have nailed it, its all a front for a long, extended group gloat.
Two terrific rhetorical cudgels, and I consider myself very lightly cudged.
But of course, we may have a misunderstanding here. I have grown up in a society where Christians are the ones who have to explain themselves as oddities, atheism is the norm, and the major constraint on Christians proselytising is their own fear of giving offense to good, and normal, people who don’t happen to believe.
Some on this forum must have spent a lot of time at the ducking-stool, being burnt at the stake and enduring the rigours of religous Inquisition on their private thoughts, so they naturally dont appreciate how that ‘plush-toy creed’ resonates where the theocracy is less militant.