Un-der-stan-ding met-a-phor
Here’s a stupid remark. On a post of Russell Blackford’s on Bunting’s encounter with the hostile commenters there’s a guy defending Bunting’s reading of the book (despite not having read the book himself, but never mind). He said some really point-missing stuff about the whited sepulchre etc, and I tried yet again to explain it, saying that
The point is that religion is ugly because it is used to dress up ugly things. Is that not obvious? The white tie and tails on an executioner are themselves ugly because of what they are doing. This is vastly more true of religion precisely because religion is supposed to be the heart of a heartless world, the fount of compassion, etc etc. Religion is made ugly by the many people who use it to justify cruelty.
He replied, astonishingly
Oh, please. Cruelty can be justified in the name of love, science, freedom, and so on. That hardly makes any of the latter ugly.
Are you kidding me? Of course it fucking does! If someone is being cruel and justifies it by talking of love – that’s a very ugly version of ‘love.’ It’s not unknown, either. OJ Simpson made a career out of it. That love is another wart hog in a party dress.
It’s so hard to abandon internet arguments when people are being obstinately stupid, you know? I’m hopeless at it.
I feel your pain. It’s hard to find places where people will argue in good faith on the net.
Sigh. As the prototypical victim/perpetrator of Someone’s Wrong On The Internet (SIWOTI) Syndrome, I know all too well how impossible it is to abandon an argument. I can tell myself I’m tilting at windmills, but it doesn’t work. You can always hope you’ll get so tired, you simply crawl off to your bed and then feel refreshed in the morning, ready for more productive things. I’m sorry to tell you that often doesn’t work.
All I can offer you is a cup of coffee and a sympathetic grimace. Cream and sugar?
Or can I offer you an argument? The five-minute argument is excellent value.
No it isn’t.
I’m afraid JJ will never be satisfied. He’s right, after all! Which is why I left the field a day or two since. It’s hard to do, but the alternative is the feeling of being sunk, but not being able to find the holes.
Sorry, I was wrong. I just checked. I stayed at it longer than you did!! I thought it had kept going after I left, but no….. And my last post is so full of spelling errors (and I previewed it!) that I must have been getting a bit agitated by that point! Ah, well, such are the ways of the internet.
I disagree. Let’s face it, the SS uniforms were pretty cool. They were designed by Hugo Boss, you know.
Jokes aside: your arguments are not too strong here. Just because someone tries to use love as a justification for a crime, it doesn’t make love itself ugly.
The problem with religion is not that it can be used to justify hatred and violence. The problem is, that claiming absolute authority over morals, it creates the _illusion_ of _absolute_ justification, while bearing no connection to reality.
I think some circumstances justify violence. E.g.: if you have to protect your loved ones from getting killed, it can justify the use of violence. ‘Because God said so’ shouldn’t be allowed to justify anything, because it’s nothing more than fiction.
Wice
I agree that the specific comparison is a bit more complicated, but your rebettal is off target.
Firstlty, OB has helpfully posted the context for her ‘whited sepulchre’ comments, and that makes it clear that the religion which is ugly is the religion which justifies evil – she does not claim that all religion is evil because some religion justifies evil. Hence her comment that any kind of love that justifies evil is also a pretty ugly kind of love.
Secondly, i think that your argument that ‘”Because God said so” shouldn’t be allowed to justify anything, because it’s nothing more than fiction’ is question-begging. OB’s arguments here are independent of the truth claims of the religions she criticizes (though naturally they are unpalatable to those who actually do think the claims of those religions are true).
Thirdly, I think you’re being a bit coy in saying tries to use: the argument (I think) is not over whether religion – or love – can be cynically and deceptively used to justify violence (that’s not in dispute but is irrelevant to any judgement of religion), but (a) whether it can sincerely be used thus and (b) whether it can honestly be used thus.
Religion is certainly used sincerely to justify cruelty and injustice, though many of the faithful argue it is then used mistakenly. But (most?) religious texts etc can also be used honestly to justify cruelty – commandments to stone people for adultery are not cut from whole cloth by patriarchal bastards.
I think the biggest flaw to the list ‘love, science, freedom, and so on’ is that it is made up of things that are neither like each other nor like religion. Science, for example, makes no ethical claims – so yes, evil can be done in the name of science, and it can even generate socially positive results (think Nazi experiments). But our ethics over what we will and will not use science for are not dictated by science itself but are derived from culture, philosophy – even religion. The other items are equally but differently different.
Here you go, Ophelia. One to print out and affix to the monitor…
http://xkcd.com/386/
Ha. Great joke, Chris.
Perhaps the intro paragraph to Hume’s Principles of Morals is pertinent here:
It’s not only the internet. When someone is wrong, well, you have to keep at it, after all! I mean WRONG!
And let’s not get our knickers in a twist because love used to justify something ugly isn’t really love. That’s why the metaphor ‘warthog in a party dress’ is so effective, after all.
For example, the surahs in the Qu’ran begin with the words, “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” and then goes on to prescribe the most vicious punishment for those who disbelieve, all in the name of beneficence and mercy. Of course, ‘the fire prepared for disbelievers, whose fuel is of men and stones,’ does not sound merciful at all, but the claim is being made. There’s the warthog in the party dress.
Thanks outeast – you saved me some typing time!
Quite right – we are not saying that all religion is the frilly warthog, we are saying “Used in this way religion is” etcetera. We don’t repeat the qualifier every time we use the word “religion” after that, simply because that would be mind-numbingly repetitive and otiose. In context it is clear that that’s what is being claimed. Bunting chose to ignore that, and JJ is following suit. Desperate.
Now Chris Schoen has rushed to JJ’s aid, eagerly warning him that I have linked to Russell’s thread from here (as if that were some kind of underhanded thing to do) and praising his thorough and patient pointing out the fallacy of saying things we didn’t say. Chris Schoen has appointed himself some kind of watchdog of Me – running hither and thither telling people ‘Oooh look at what OB has said now.’ What a goon.
My ears are burning. :)
BTW, wice, yes, you understood the point that I was making.
And outeast, I understand what you are trying to get at, but ultimately, what you are doing is pointing out reasons that religion could be considered ugly (e.g. what is in particular holy texts) aside from being used to dress ugly things up. That isn’t exactly a good defense of OB’s original claim that religion is ugly by virtue of its role in dressing things up.
(That said, I find religion so un-monolithic that questions of its moral ugliness are horribly ill-defined.)
OB: “We don’t repeat the qualifier every time we use the word “religion” after that, simply because that would be mind-numbingly repetitive and otiose.”
But that assumes that the only way to indicate to the reader that you mean certain kinds of religion would be to pepper your text with disclaimers. Indeed, parenthetical disclaimers are easy to overshadow when juxtaposed against catchier language that makes stronger statements–which is enough to explain Bunting’s indignation.
You could have indicated that you were referring to only particular kinds of religion by your choice of verbs and adjectives, avoiding the bald use of “Religion is” in favor of “Religion becomes,” “Religion can act,” etc. You could have avoided using metaphors that contradict your milder literal statements. Of course, that would have killed any subtext that would indicate that the answer to the book title “Does God Hate Women?” was a straight-up yes.
Now to be fair, maybe you do that in the body of your book. Maybe you did mostly avoid inserting such subtext until the final page or so. But when your defense of your own work hardly mentions this, and when your defense consists of a remark like “Religion is made ugly by the many people who use it to justify cruelty,” which can be refuted by simply substituting something else in place of “religion,” this doesn’t inspire confidence.
OB: “What a goon.”
What a poisonous statement. Try to keep it away from any wells. :)
Well that is at least a reasonable argument. In fact I’d even agree with it – yes, we could have done all that, and you’re right, we chose not to. Mind you, I’ve already said that here – but you probably hadn’t seen that.
I don’t agree that it’s enough to explain Bunting’s indignation though. But…I don’t care nearly enough at this point to explain why! (Have you read much Bunting? I’ve read a fair bit. She really is…sloppy at best.)
OB: “Have you read much Bunting?”
I don’t really remember if I have or not, though I think I read something or other about her doing something burning stupid. I usually prefer to read Friendly Atheist and Greta Christina (and Russell Blackford’s blog, obviously).
Wart hog in a party dress, I love it.
I protest. That is not such a good argument, especially when it ends with:
The subtext is that this is an unanswerable question, and that is a very different thing altogether, and it is a subtext which can only be included, and rightly included, I might add, by not using qualifiers with the word ‘religion’ each time it is used.
The subtext, to repeat, JJ, is very simply that it is impossible to answer such a question, and that, notwithstanding, many religions act as though they know the answer to that question, as well as to many others, for which there is not a shred of evidence.
I didn’t say it was a good argument, I said it was at least a reasonable one.
:- )
I do think it’s reasonable – we could have said ‘becomes’ instead of ‘is.’ I do also think the meaning is clear enough in context (because there is some extended stuff about other possibilities for religion, and so on), but I think the verb point taken on its own is reasonable.
Yes, I noticed that after I hit ‘submit’. I need a course in reading skills. My spelling is generally quite good!
Eric MacDonald: “The subtext is that this is an unanswerable question”
If that were the subtext, then I would expect to see a lot more ambivalence than Benson has displayed so far.
(I’m presuming, of course, that the actual unanswerable question is more like “Does religion hate women?” since OB is an atheist.)
Eric MacDonald: “it is a subtext which can only be included … by not using qualifiers with the word ‘religion’ each time it is used.”
That makes no sense at all. The subtext would easily be introduced by pointing out that some believers within a religious tradition (e.g. Christianity) have more liberal beliefs about women than others within the tradition, and both use their Bible to justify their beliefs. I’ve already introduced a very unobtrusive qualifier, “some.”
‘the actual unanswerable question is more like “Does religion hate women?” since OB is an atheist.’
Not exactly. It’s more like ‘do many believers in god believe in a god who hates women?’ and the answer to that is yes.
I think this matters. It’s not just that institutions make nasty rules – it’s that people do believe in a god who punishes women for trivial actions – even for good actions, like trying to defend a daughter from being killed – in unbelievably harsh vicious ways. They believe in a god who hates women – who thinks they should be tortured to death on the smallest or no or negative pretext. This means that women are not just subject to harsh treatment, they are also subject to a god who thinks they are garbage. People like to pretty this up, or ignore it, or brush it aside, or shrug their shoulders at it.
I have zero ambivalence about this. I don’t want to have ambivalence about it.
This is the problem with Bunting – which you apparently still think is just my imagination. She spat with fury at me for saying harsh things about religion while not saying a word about the murder of Aisha Duhulow. I think Bunting has a disgusting, warped, impoverished sense of priorities.
I was willing to say pax yesterday – but if you’re going to start all over again – well I’ll conclude that you have a warped sense of priorities too.
There’s another thing. In a sense I do mean all religion, religion as such, because it is the ‘Back off, this is Sacred’ aspect of religion that makes the prettification possible. It’s good that there are liberal religions that don’t hate women, and liberalish religions that don’t hate women all that much, but it’s not good that religion as such makes it possible to shield laws and customs from ordinary secular reasoning and second guessing, and that it motivates people like Bunting to fly into rages at people who are critical of…religion as such.
But, whatever religions do or do not do, whether they are liberal or not about their ideas of their god’s attitude to women, they have no way of knowing anything about what their or any other imagined or even real god, supposing one to exist, might think. That’s what gives them a carte blanche to think what they like, and it’s all neatly covered by the prettification factor. Stoning a little girl to death for being raped, or ordaining women to the priesthood: either onoe is captured by the feel-good feature of religion. That is, of course, unless religions can provide good evidence for believing that what they say is true. I don’t give a fig for religion, but it is disturbing that there are, perhaps, thousands of gods believed in, yet no remotely plausible way of discerning what gods may think, and all sorts of convictions about what they do think.
It is intolerable that this is still tolerated amongst apparently reasonable people, since so many who believe these they know believe things that are vicious and inhuman, and they are given a license to do so by people like Bunting, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the pope. I have just finished reading a series of reports on whether the Anglican Church of Canada should accept the marriage of gay and lesbian couples, each one of them saying that, in the light of scripture and Christian tradition, this is either doctrinally acceptable or unacceptable. Not one of them offers a reasoned position, though they make much use of argument. One uses scripture to show that it is, and another that it is not, allowable, one that it is, and another that it is not, okay to discrimnate against homosexual people, all of them pretending that they only want the best for everyone, and, of course, for the church. It’s beginning to make me sick.
OB: “Not exactly. It’s more like ‘do many believers in god believe in a god who hates women?’ and the answer to that is yes.”
The catch is that the “many” part is not apparent in the original question posed in the title.
OB: “it’s not good that religion as such makes it possible to shield laws and customs from ordinary secular reasoning and second guessing”
Fair enough, but it is a long way from that to hazily ominous stuff about “total body irradiation.”
OB: “I have zero ambivalence about this. I don’t want to have ambivalence about it.”
And I wasn’t suggesting that you should.
OB: “She spat with fury at me for saying harsh things about religion while not saying a word about the murder of Aisha Duhulow.”
Imagine a Christian group using the murder of Aisha Duhulow to justify proselytizing the people in her village and turn them away from the religion that supposedly led to her death. Imagine the BNP using her murder to justify hate on brown-skinned people. One can use her death, or any atrocity for that matter, to heighten people’s emotions, cloud their judgment, and misdirect them into having sympathy for wrong ideas.
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.
J. J Ramsey:
Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet
…and the prize for least appropriate rhetorical use of righteous indignation goes to…
This would work so much better if the ideas being “subject to scrutiny” were ideas that OB actually holds JJ.
Ramsey, I’m not sure how to say this without seeming too damning, but, for now I can’t: You are truly beneath contempt. Calling you a goon was too charitable by half. You seem to be flailing about with a cosh in the darkness of the night.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that Christianity is a more civilised and civilising religion than Islam. In this you are mistaken. Where Christianity has had power, it has often used it, and still uses it in ruthless ways. I call your attention to the recent excommunication of a mother and medical staff who aborted, in Brazil, a small girl who was pregnant with twins as a result of sexual abuse by her step father.
Pointing out that Aisha’s death may be used in support of ideas which do not bear examination is not in itself an argument for anything, and it certainly does not legitimate your petty cavilling at Ophelia Benson’s and Jeremy Strangroom’s choice of words.
The idea that they have expressed is perfectly clear. Religion can be, and often is, used to dress up cruelty in the clothing of goodness, making it seem other than it is, and fooling otherwise perfectly reasonable people into thinking that something of substance and value has been said.
Using Aisha’s death to justify converting Muslims to the use of another ideology which puts its valuations similarly beyond question would be ridiculous. Pointing out that Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and other religions, are, pound for pound, the same in this respect, is, however, a perfectly legitimate argument. You may, in fact, not agree. It may, in fact, be wrong. But it is, nonetheless, a perfectly reasonable point to argue, and all your picking away at metaphors will not change this in any way. If you have an argument, make it. If not, for Dog’s sake!, wait until you have.
Eric MacDonald: “You seem to be under the misapprehension that Christianity is a more civilised and civilising religion than Islam.”
Why? Because I imagined a pitch that Christians would plausibly make? Bear in mind that the conclusion of my paragraph was that appealing to atrocities can be used to misdirect people into accepting bad ideas–of which the missionary trip that I mentioned was an *example*.
Eric MacDonald: “If you have an argument, make it.”
My argument is this. OB’s words up to this point cast serious doubt that she is making the case in her book with any rigor. What she has quoted from the book shows a mismatch between what she says outright–which is pretty banal and not even disputed by even the religious–and what she implies through metaphor. It’s as if she is trying in her quotes, to borrow Baggini’s words (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/badmovesprint.php?num=58), to make a “case by, in effect, not really making a case at all but creating an impression.”
When she defends herself, she responds with bad argument:
* X “is ugly because it is used to dress up ugly things,” an argument that can be trivially addressed by substituting other things for X besides religion.
* Retreating to softer claims like “many believers in god believe in a god who hates women.”
* The murder of Aisha Duhalow, which is an emotional appeal to shame arguers and shut them up.
This doesn’t give me any confidence that she argues well in her book.
JJ Ramsey, this really is pointless. You do not present a reasoned case. Benson and Strangroom, on the other hand, do, and not one thing that you have said to the contrary argues to the contrary. It is straightforwardly picayune and callow, first year bombast, at best.
Ramsey, your obsessive gnawing at this when you haven’t even read the book in question doesn’t give me any confidence that you have a genuine point to make. I really don’t care whether or not you have any speculative subjunctive potential confidence in the quality of the argument in the book, and neither does anyone else. Read it or don’t read it, but as for endlessly reading four paragraphs and trying to divine the rest of the book from them – I’m not sorry to put it so harshly: it’s stupid.
Now go away.