You have your perspective, and I have my perspective
It really doesn’t matter what you believe for no good reason, as long as you believe something for no good reason.
The Parliament of the World’s Religions has brought together representatives from 80 nationalities and more than 220 faith traditions for seven days of debate and dialogue…The parliament could hardly be accused of failing to account for the broadest possible range of spirituality and religious experience. Pagans, Zoroastrians, and even atheists make up the rich mix of perspectives. Organisers have faced some criticism for giving a platform to the Church of Scientology – which some accuse of being more of a business than a conventional religion. But this is an event which is prepared to given even the most unusual new religious movements a fair hearing.
Because – because – because if somebody somewhere believes it, it deserves a fair hearing. And notice how atheism becomes not a denial or rejection of theistic religion but simply one more ‘perspective.’ Even atheism gets a fair hearing. No real attention, presumably, but a fair hearing.
Concerns have been also raised about whether religious perspectives are taken seriously, particularly by secular governments in the West.
Which is a fundamentally absurd concern, since a secular government that took ‘religious perspectives’ (see? there it is again) seriously would not be a secular government any more.
Prominent American rabbi David Saperstein told delegates that religious leaders must work hard to make their voice heard, particularly concerning the moral questions facing the world…”In a world in which you can do everything, what you should do – the moral question – is the fundamental challenge facing humanity. And on that question, the religious communities have urgent, profound, indispensible wisdom to offer” he said.
No they don’t – not as religious communities they don’t. As people they do, but no more so than other people, and in some ways less so. Religion doesn’t bring anything useful to moral reasoning, and it often does impede it or misdirect it.
As one of those atheists who got a “fair hearing” at this event, I’d love to comment at length.
Unfortunately, I’m right in the middle of the chaos of shifting house interstate. But let this be a place marker. I only attended my own session (a panel of half a dozen freethinkers of one sort or another, since all the nonbelievers who offered to do stuff were crushed into one 90-minute panel by the convention organisers). Still, it was enough for me to form some conclusions and have a few observations.
Here in Melbourne, the press coverage of this event has been nauseatingly obsequious. The religious participants have been portrayed in the most glowing and hopeful terms, whereas the same old patronising misconceptions and straw men about atheists have been dusted off and trotted out AGAIN . . . it’s tiresome.
I believe you about how tiresome it is. (I heard some BBC coverage on the radio and that was tiresome enough.)
Place is marked, Russell. I’m impressed that you can manage it in the midst of shifting house!
“Prominent American rabbi David Saperstein told delegates that religious leaders must work hard to make their voice heard”
We’ve heard enough.
It’ll be interesting to hear Russell’s perspective.
A curious train of thought led me from the Parliament of Religions to ‘The Parliament of Fowls’ (poem by Chaucer) which made me think of all the birds swimming in the pool of tears in Alice in Wonderland.
They dry themselves by having a Caucus-race organized by the Dodo, in which everybody runs around aimlessly, and everybody gets a prize. I wonder if the Parliament of Religions was anything like that.
Okay, I’ve just driven the 600 miles from my old house to my new house, and am feeling rather tired. So this won’t be a full report.
One thing I should say right from the start is that it’s still not clear to me whether it was a good idea for a group of local Melbourne “freethinkers” (the word we seem to be using here in Australia to slide over our differences) to front this convention. It was a difficult decision, back in about February, and I was one who expressed misgivings at the time. There’s an argument that all we managed to do was allow them to say how nice they were even to atheists – by just having us there – while there’s no obvious upside for us.
They weren’t even all that nice, actually … since we asked for substantial time for several presentations, but they insisted that we all take part in a single 90-minute panel (which was at a fairly bad time of day and scheduled against more than 20 other items).
Still, we had an audience of 70 or 80 people, and the actual gig seemed to go quite well, marred by only one aggressive question from the audience that I think we handled fairly badly.
Overall, the team performed well, I believe, and at least we got to know each other a bit better in the lead-up, and we learned something about how to work together despite the presence of very different viewpoints amongst us (the local Humanists are very accommodating towards religion, while the Rationalist Society people seem much less so, and the couple of us who belong to neither organisation are probably less so still).
It was also a learning experience for me, and presumably the others getting an inside look, however brief, at this convention. Overall, I’m not sorry to have done the gig, because I benefited personally (in experience and so on, not in any material way). However, I doubt that it did a helluva lot for freedom and reason.
More tomorrow.
As I said, I only attended the one program item. However, some audience members made comments, either during the Q&A or afterwards privately) that made it clear that this was the item that involved the most tension and confrontation (even though there wasn’t actually all that much, as the speakers were very polite and respectful, feeling we were guests). Apparently, the “no proselytisation” rule worked so that no speaker at the conference was supposed to suggest that his/her view of the world was actually correct or, hence, that anyone else’s was incorrect. They simply reported on the beauties of their faith and its practices, or on events in their part of the world … or at least this was described to me as the norm (I can’t believe that Cardinal Pell would have been so easy-going in his session, but I have no idea what he said).
Someone said to me afterwards that there had been very little interaction with the audiences at the other sessions, and that ours had been the best in that regard. Others, however, expressed a high degree of discomfort, especially at Ian Robinson’s talk, which did involve giving some reasons to be an atheist. (My own talk merely enjoined them to try to find the resources within their respective traditions to be political liberals.)
It strikes me as odd that all these religious types have done basically nothing, throughout the conference, to defend the truth of their respective supernatural beliefs … and yet they issue proclamations to the effect that they possess moral wisdom that should be listened to in the political sphere. Where, I ask, is the source of their supposed wisdom?
If it’s from a supernaturally wise being, how do we know what this being actually says (these beings are recorded as saying all kinds of crazy things, so how do we separate what wise things they really said?)? How do we even know that such a being exists if it’s forbidden to debate the evidence for the various candidate beings?
“If it’s from a supernaturally wise being, how do we know what this being actually says…?”
Just what I always want to know!
Psalm 14 says “The fool says in his heart there is no God.” Thus atheism goes at least that far back.
It is interesting that the Parliament of the World’s Religions forbade proselytising one on another by any of its collected MPs. My last information was that Catholicism holds that all non-Catholics are bound for eternal torment in Hell. However, an excellent piece of sophistry is to be found at http://www.ancient-future.net/prots.html, which argues that this is not so. (Or perhaps no longer so?).
Understandably, conversion to any given religious belief is made a touch more compelling by the promise of eternal agony if one fails to convert. History is littered with accounts of wars fought by believers against unbelievers, with the wars justified in those terms, and the Old Testament is full of it.
Without overt and traditional competition between doctrines, the Parliament appears as an exercise in comparison of equal and equally petal-strewn paths to the same destination. However, I was not there. Perhaps Russell might have a different view.
In my view, the MPs ‘representing’ the religions can all sit down together because they do have an important feature in common. Their separate belief systems each tie their separate communities together through shared assumptions of origins and ancestral ties.
‘We will all be reunited’ is about the most powerful idea any religion can offer.
http://www.parliamentofreligions.org/news/index.php/tag/catholicism/
http://www.cam.org.au/whats-on/parliament-of-the-world-s-religions.html