This is not ignorance of a sophisticated kind
More from Paul Cliteur’s The Secular Outlook. The first chapter is an extended analysis of atheism, agnosticism and theism. At the end of his discussion of Pascal’s Wager PC says Pascal did have one strong point, which is that we cannot suspend judgment on the transcendental realm – italics his. Quite right. If there is a god and it does want us to act in certain ways and it has given us reliable and unmistakable knowledge on the subject, that does make a difference. We may well think the god is evil and that we’re not going to act in the ways it wants us to, but it would be feckless not to think about it one way or another. If there is no such god, or at least no reliable and unmistakable knowledge about it, that too makes a difference. It’s not something we can just shrug about, not if we have any sense.
The agnostic says [she] suspends judgment while in every act [she] chooses in favor of or against God…So the agnostic can be adequately defined as the [person] “who does not know,” but [her] lack of knowledge is not some superior position that goes back to the docta ignorantia of Socrates or Montaigne, but the ignorance of someone who is unable or unwilling to take intellectual responsibility for a philosophical outlook that [she] honors in [her] deeds. There surely is some ignorance here. But this is not ignorance of a sophisticated kind, as the agnostic [her]self considers it to be. This is the ignorance of the unexamined life.
I like that. I like it partly because I’m so tired of all the superior sneering from jaded non-gnu atheists who wonder why we won’t just shut up about it already. I don’t think it’s as boring as they seem to. I think the many manifestations of zealous, hostile, vituperative hatred of atheism and atheists are 1. surprising 2. interesting 3. alarming. The manifestations themselves make it clear that we can’t just shrug and say “I dunno” and keep quiet.
Yes, this. I have been arguing this for a long time now, every time a capital-A Agnostic walks into a discussion and tries to pretend that their position is more righteous than atheism. Even Agnostics have made up their mind one way or another whether to live as if there is a God, or as if there isn’t. The word “agnostic” doesn’t tell anyone which of the choices was taken.
Never mind that no atheist I have heard of claims that it is 100% certain that something that could conceivably be called “God” doesn’t exist.
The way Martin Amis walked into that discussion between Hitchens and Goldberg the other day, with that ineffable air of being the more discriminating and thoughtful party. Pfffffff.
Does anyone else remember the character “Benny” from the movie The Mummy?
He carried around various trinkets from each religion and memorized a few phrases (affirmations of belief/holy chants) in the necessary languages in case one these religions turned out to be true. Now that is something I would expect from an agnostic that was honest in thought and deeds.
Shouldn’t these “militant” agnostics be living in the accordance with the various religious traditions of the world, just in case? Where’s Martin Amis’ little star of david/crucifix/kirpan?
I wonder what John Wilkins would say about this? He’s a militant agnostic.
Poor John Wilkins. He got suckered by YNH. So sad.
I must admit that I sort of don’t mind John Wilkins, he’s been quite helpful to me when I’ve asked about philosophy. However, I’ve never understood why he supports Mooney and others when it’s obvious they’re acting in bad faith. Sometimes I think it’s because he just dislikes gnu atheism, which he terms ‘new exclusivism’ then sometimes I think it’s just because he’s an aussie, and us aussies like to be smart-arses for the sake of it. He also refers to gnu atheists as assertive atheists. I can’t get an handle on it. Perhaps he’s as irrational as the rest of us?
Bertrand Russell:
That sounds about right. If you ask what’s annoying about self-righteous agnostics, it’s that they focus on how they are not closed-minded about the possible presence of the God of Abraham. They need also to be reminded that they are FSM-agnostic.
I agree that “the many manifestations of zealous, hostile, vituperative hatred of atheism and atheists are 1. surprising 2. interesting 3. alarming”. But I do not like your quote from Paul Cliteur. It quite unfairly misrepresents both the positions taken by some who call themselves agnostic and the position in which they find themselves; and so it represents just one more log to feed the flames of silly argument. When will you philosophical types ever realize that a phrase such as “all wombats think blah” cannot be made unless you have read the mind of not just one wombat but all of them. And not only that, as pointed out by Russell (per Ken Pidcock above), you need to also know whom you are talking to in order to know what is being conveyed by the term ‘wombat’. (Indeed, HD was wrong. The words I speak don’t mean what I *choose* them to mean; they mean what you the listener *take* them to mean)
When I say that there is no Santa Clause, I don’t get an argument. When I say there is no Easter Bunny, I don’t get an argument. When I say old, out-of-fashion deities, like Thor, Odin, Macha, Hel, etc., don’t exist, I get no argument. In fact, in all areas mythology — griffins, elves, fairies, kraken, Pegasus, hydras, dragons, etc. — I get no argument when I say they do not exist.
Yet when I, correctly, say there is no God, suddenly people piss on themselves to discount that possibility and play some of most childish games imaginable to preserve the “reasonable” face of opinion. “There probably is no God” — piffle-farts, that’s the arrogance of false humility.
There is absolutely NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER for a God or Gods. There is no logical reason to believe in a God or Gods. And, further, the burden of proof is not on me to dispel any sort of weenie-weaseling someone else may choose to do.
As far as I’m concerned, any fool can imagine some sort of possible god. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are millions of permutations and combinations of possible God-concepts. Yet, despite all if, there is not one shred of evidence.
So, until someone puts on proof — there is no God. And the mere fact that someone can imagine one… Well, I’ve got a pretty good imagination and I could, I suppose, imagine having sex with a harem of supermodels or some other such puerile fantasy. But the reality of it ain’t gonna happen.
My bottom-line is: I was born an atheist, indoctrinated into the cultural delusion of Christianity and, fortunately, I managed to over-throw that debilitating crap aside. I have, for virtually all of my adult life lived, and will die, as an atheist. And I will correctly believe, unless dementia or insanity takes control of me, there is NO God or Gods of any stripe, any where.
So, now you’ve heard an Atheist categorically state: There is no God and the concept of God is a meaningless, illogical and impossible fairy tale/hoax perpetrated on the young by the old, fearful and ignorant.
Agnosticism seems to hang on a confusion between epistemology and self knowledge. What does it mean when you answer the question “Do you believe in God?” with the answer “I don’t know.” You don’t know whether you believe in God? Because this is not the same as saying that you don’t know if there is a God. To say that you don’t know whether you believe is not a profession of epistemological limitation, but a failure of self knowledge at the very best, and at worst, a slippery attempt to evade the question.
All agnostics actually fall on one side or the other of the belief debate. Martin Gardner, for example, was an agnostic believer who admitted that the atheists had all the best arguments and he couldn’t prove the existence of any transcendent being, but he still preferred to believe. Most agnostics are effectively atheists, holding out for proof before making any commitment, and living their lives as atheists. But to be an atheist, and claim to be an agnostic, is simply a cowardly attempt to have it both ways. You can be smart and sophisticated and laugh at the follies of religion when in secular company, but you never need to risk offending anyone by taking a stand against those follies.
I suspect that the reason that atheists get on so well with deists is that deists understand that their beliefs are grounded on emotional preference and bear no epistemological authority. They at least know themselves and what they want, and why they believe what they do. Agnostics don’t even seem to know that.
Mark Fournier:
To say that you don’t know whether you believe is not a profession of epistemological limitation, but a failure of self knowledge at the very best, and at worst, a slippery attempt to evade the question.
Is that what agnostics say? I thought it was that without even entertaining what god concept you’re rejecting, how can you know that it doesn’t exist? I don’t know if ribittons exist if I have never heard or considered such things. I’m trying to remember what Wilkins told me once, and that was something like, he’s atheist about the god of Abraham, but is agnostic about god concepts he’s not considered. He said something like you index the god claim. You can’t claim outright you know that all gods don’t exist unless you have considered each god. I don’t know if that works or not, or even if I’ve done Wilkin’s views justice. Anyway….
I’d add that a transcendental argument against the existence of any god would also do the job.
I’ve “met” (discussed with online) some very vociferous New Agnostics and I have to say their reasoning didn’t impress me too much.
Generally, they would swear up and down that they don’t not definitely believe in the possibility that there may or may not be a god which is called Yahweh by some…but that they’re convinced that the Greek gods and the Norse gods definitely don’t exist.
…and I haven’t had a satisfactory answer why the difference.
It usually comes down to “you can’t prove a negative”, and yet they don’t understand why I then expect them to remain agnostic on the easter bunny, santa claus, the monster under my bed, the dragon in my closet, fairies at the bottom of the garden and the invisible pink unicorn.
Mark Fournier describes a certain position of agnosticism quite well in his first paragraph. He’s right to think that it can be the position of someone who does not know what exactly they believe. And it’s right to suggest that this kind of position, of being a full-stop agnostic, can be both intellectually cowardly and unsophisticated. Some people just use the word “agnostic” as a way of shutting down the conversation, brandishing it like a cross to ward against hordes of the loathsome undead.
However, I don’t think that position must be so terrible. If a person doesn’t believe that they’ve properly considered the question, and they don’t believe they’ve been exposed to serious arguments that would make their intuitions and doubts worthy of conscious commitment, then it’s perfectly right to refuse to answer the question “Is there a God?” directly. And I think that’s an intellectually respectable decision.
And I also think this category is genuinely distinct from atheism and theism. There is a useful sense in which these kinds of people qualify as a full-stop agnostic. We’re not rationally entitled to foist the labels of “atheism” or “theism” upon them except in trivial ways, because they’re not “effectively atheists” any more than babies or rocks are.
But there’s presumably an expiry date on this. Given enough time, people ought to consider the question and come to some kind of verdict.
But there’s presumably an expiry date on this. Given enough time, people ought to consider the question and come to some kind of verdict.
But if the question has never occurred to you? I’m not talking about the Abrahamic god, but some god you’ve never heard of. To declare you’re atheist about it, without considering it’s properties is a bit dogmatic. If I’ve never heard of the deistic god and declare I’m atheist toward it, not just in stance, but I know that it doesn’t exist. Haven’t I gone beyond what I know? I reckon a position of don’t know, don’t care is acceptable without expiry date.
Do’h, that should’ve been If I’ve never considered the deistic god and
Theists and atheists believe/don’t believe sufficiently strongly in gods to worship/not worship them. Likewise agnostics: whatever they might say about their beliefs, they also either worship or don’t worship gods.
I got a question.
Is there value in defining “secular” in relationship to a political philosophy concerning the limits of state involvement in the affairs of conscience and religious belief?
Or is it simply the case that “secular” means “non religious” – a thing that “opposes” religion.
There seems to be two kinds of “secular” impulse, that which agrees that there is a kind of thought, and commitment that is by definition in need of special classification and special recognition – and does this by declaring it outside the scope of state authority and regulation.
There is also this idea that Secular means open season on the religious – a licence to create a system that is by definition outside of their authority and appeals to their claims to knowledge.
It seems to me that we have a choice as gnu’s to pursue a politics of “incompatibility” which holds that the incompatibility is a form of “open season” … of refusing the rabbits their holes to free the hounds (to quote Wendell Berry out of context), or to essentially agree that it is part of human freedom to live in a place where burrows of faith are not only accepted but affirmed.
I think the rancor over ground zero mosque is an example. The “freedom” to associate and practice the Muslim religion – is protected in a secular state.
Does this this freedom impose anything at all on the “gnu atheism” … are we not in effect stuck with accepting that our political system does require us to protect faith?
Is there a need for “secular” to mean something other than “not religious”?
Eh. I’m not particularly persuaded by Cliteur’s claim (or Pascal’s before him) because of the slippery nature of this living as if talk. The claim is far too strong, relying as it does on the notion that simply living one’s life commits one to some sort of performative self-contradiction if one does not decide one way or t’other. After all, nearly every action taken every day by believers and nonbelievers and damned-if-I-know-ers has bugger all to do with “the transcendental realm.” Except for an hour of pro forma religious display on Sundays and checking the proper box on forms and surveys when it comes up, how many people who self-identify as Christians actually “lead a Christian life” and shape any significant fraction of their daily activity with attention to what they perceive as the will of God? Some do, I’ll grant — but I doubt that this group constitutes a majority of Christians, or even a very large minority.
If much of the daily activity of believers isn’t really all that shaped by their conception (or anyone else’s conception) of the transcendental realm, it seems overreaching at best to claim that the actions of someone who has decided that he or she just doesn’t know (or doesn’t care) involves any important level or kind of performative commitment — necessarily either living as if there is a god or living as if there isn’t one. What do such phrases even mean without specific content? There is no way for someone to live as if there is or is not some generic spiritual entity: The many times many mutually contradictory specific beliefs of various religious traditions — the same religious multiplicity that render Pascal’s Wager a bad joke of an argument — mean that everyone everywhere lives as if they do not believe in thousands of gods, and in fact as if they do not believe the overwhelming majority of all religious convictions and associated metaphysical claims.
Since there is nothing coherent to be made out of any “living as if” there is or isn’t a generic god, it’s hard to see why an agnostic is put into some either/or position on the matter by doubting the existence of all of those thousands of god, but not feeling quite confident enough in that doubt to reject the plausibility of all of them outright. (I also see no reason why an agnostic cannot find some claims less plausible than others, contra the Santa and fairies line of argument expressed by a few people above.) And I don’t see how it even matters whether that professed lack of confidence results from a principled epistemological position, evasive cowardice, sheer lack of interest in the question, or outright ignorance.
None of which is to disagree that some agnostics are cowardly and evasive, and others are smugly superior (as XKCD and Jesus & Mo have both skewered recently), and some real prize-winners manage to be all at once. I’m just not convinced at all by the argument that agnostics are really committed one way or another (whether they know or admit it or not) by the way they live their lives. At least not today.
In essence “secular” just means “worldly” or “temporal” or “relating to the age” (as opposed to relating to an otherworldly order of things or to eternity). When we say we want the government to be secular, we mean that we want it to be motivated solely by worldly or temporal considerations. On this view it is not up to the government to provide for our spiritual salvation or our rightness in the eyes of a god, or anything of the sort. It is there merely to look after certain of our worldly or temporal interests (exactly which ones it should look after, and how, is a matter for political debate, e.g. socialists will have a different view from that of libertarians and various sorts of liberals will take yet other views).
But the word secular and its cognates don’t just relate to government. Individuals can be “secular” in being driven only by worldly considerations. A society may show a trend towards being more secular, not only in the sense that the government is increasingly driven only by worldly considerations but also in the sense that otherworldly beliefs may be dying out among the general populace. The latter phenomenon is often called “secularization”. Support of the government being motivated only by worldly considerations is often called “secularism”.
All these words have a bit of scope for shades of meaning in different contexts. In addition to all the above there is an attitude of wanting the society as a whole (not just the government) to be more focused on purely worldly considerations. We don’t really have a special word for that, so maybe “secularism” has to do for that as well, even though it causes confusion. But the most usual meaning of “secularism” relates to what considerations we want governments to take into account, i.e. worldly considerations only, and it’s closely related to the idea of a functional separation of church and state.
And while I see what George is saying, it’s also true that we’re either motivated by otherworldly concerns (in addition to worldly ones) or we’re not. There are differences of degree, of course, but many religious people whom I’ve known really have been motivated to a greater or lesser extent by such things as wanting to be “right with God” or not wanting to put their spiritual salvation in jeopardy. Whether or not you’ll let such things motivate you isn’t really something on which you suspend judgment. Maybe we need a more technical vocabulary before we can get this exactly right, but there’s a sense in which many agnostics are kidding themselves. They may purport to lack knowledge of otherworldly things and to suspend judgment on whether those things exist. But they can’t suspend judgment on whether or not to motivated in their conduct by such things as a desire to be “right with God”.
“The agnostic says [she] suspends judgment while in every act [she] chooses in favor of or against God…So the agnostic can be adequately defined as the [person] “who does not know,” but [her] lack of knowledge is not some superior position that goes back to the docta ignorantia of Socrates or Montaigne, but the ignorance of someone who is unable or unwilling to take intellectual responsibility for a philosophical outlook that [she] honors in [her] deeds. There surely is some ignorance here. But this is not ignorance of a sophisticated kind…”
Unfortunately Cliteur gives us no evidence that he has read the mind of all agnostics clearly and accurately and so can make this totally unsupported generalization. As such it is no more than his own ill-considered opinion.
Perhaps a true agnostic,in the absence of a religiously-inspired moral code (if indeed one can find such a thing), lives life and makes ethical choices on the basis of their own beliefs, whatever they may be, and experience. This is perhaps a definition of “great big grownup person” which we should all be striving to become
“There is also this idea that Secular means open season on the religious”
Yes, the religious often straw-man it as that. But it doesn’t mean that at all, it just means, as you say, that the state does not force religion on anyone.
“I think the rancor over ground zero mosque is an example. The “freedom” to associate and practice the Muslim religion – is protected in a secular state. ”
You are absolutely right that the Ground Zero Mosque (sic) is a good example of freedom of conscience and assembly. It is also an example of how religious “sensitivity” and “respect” are one-way streets. Ostentatious identity politics are the stuff of soft power, not reconciliation.
“Does this this freedom impose anything at all on the “gnu atheism” … are we not in effect stuck with accepting that our political system does require us to protect faith?”
Secularism protects faith (and disbelief) against *action* by *the state*. Within a secular state the religious and the non-religious can argue about philosophy as much as they like. They don’t have to defer to each other. That’s the advantage of secularism: no-one gets executed, disappeared or re-educated because they have the wrong theological views.
Brian @ 6 – yes, Wilkins has his good points, but he can be annoying. There was some post shortly before YNH melted down where he linked to it approvingly and Russell said “what’s up with that?” and Wilkins said yes it’s probably a bit unfair but I think Mooney has been unfairly criticized so I feel like being unfair. Something along those lines. It annoys me, that kind of thing. The “unfairness” to Mooney compared to the unfairness of YNH to a number of people is rather…hard to detect.
That’s how it seems to me, contra George. I think if you really do believe it, then it does affect how you live. I’ve wondered about this for instance in connection with Jane Austen – for the most part her novels, in spite of all the clerics, are entirely worldly. She was a conventional Christian, yet her characters almost never (Fanny Price is the partial exception) think about morality in goddy terms, and that seems odd. Or rather, seeing it the way George does, it’s not odd, it’s what people do. But I think I see it the way Russell does – it’s not what real believers do. It’s what pro forma, social believers do. The ones who probably distort the statistics on theism and atheism in the US.
To be fair to the divine Jane, her books are comedies of manners, not comedies of beliefs. But I think you’re right that, in her time and social stratum, religion was mainly a matter of social custom and in-group identification, rather than something that had a day-to-day impact on action. (And, apart from Edward in S&S, most of the officially religious people in Austen’s work come off as pompous, and a source of broad comedy.)
…..No not really. Austen’s books are comedies of manners on the surface, but that’s not all they are. Even on the surface, really, they’re more than that. MP isn’t even really a comedy.
They are about how to live and what kind of person to be and what kind of mind to have. They’re quite harsh and uncompromising about it.
(Edward isn’t the only exception; there’s Henry Tilney, and Edmund Bertram, who is rather repellent but not a source of broad comedy.)
Well, OK, you are definitely correct that her books are far more than just “comedies of manners” — I agree that capsule declaration sells her far too short, and I was only intending it in opposition to a comedy of “belief”. But you are absolutely right that the books are also deeply about what kind of person one should be, and that such moral cogitations seem well-removed from religious considerations. I think it’s noteworthy, however, that the work where she makes the moral focus the most explicit, and most explicitly religious, it is at the expense of any real comedy, and is also by far her most uninteresting work (MP). Austen is indeed about how to live one’s life and what kind of person to be, but it is also about humour and warmth.
And you’re also right about the additional number of “sympathetic” clergy in her books (although to be fair Edward and even Edmund aren’t clergy until the very end of their books). It is telling, though, that none of them profess any great religious passion, and with the exception of Henry, all of them engage in behaviour that might be considered less-than-honourable (even Edward and Edmund).
(And my apologies to everyone else for derailing the thread into a Austen geek-out.)
That “but” could be an “and” or a “so” – because how to live and what kind of person to be, when Austen is at her best, include humour, and wit and the accompanying sense of proportion. That gives a hint as to why MP is such an unsatisfactory version of how to live and what kind of person to be. Fanny and Edmund are supposed to be the models but they’re both so humourless, so worried about trivia, so ruthless, and in Fanny’s case so self-pitying, that they’re not models at all.
Her moral compass was better when it was all worldly, and it went wrong when she tried to be (as she said) “evangelical.”
And so I confirm my own prejudices yet again: secular morality is better than goddy morality.
So the Austen geek-out is not a derailment after all. :- )
Agnosticism, to my mind, is a position most often adopted by people who want to sound like they are on a higher intellectual level, without having to do any of the hard work involved in getting there.
They do this in general, with a nice blend of golden mean fallacy in order to cultivate the appearance of being reasonable, while abandoning all reason.
I have to agree with the people saying that Cliteur is overgeneralizing. Most people are seriously ignorant about the basic nature of reality, especially the relationships of minds—their own, or some conceivable God’s—to matter.
They just don’t understand how profoundly hokey their soul concepts and god concepts really are.
They may think that JWJH or Thor or Zeus is hokey, but not some Deistic God or Eastern or New Agey universal mind/soul thing. They don’t understand how implausible even the latter sort of thing is, because they just don’t know the relevant information and arguments. They lack basic knowledge of what kind of thing a mind is, and what kind of thing the universe is, and how the rubber just doesn’t plausibly meet the road when it comes to immortal and/or disembodied or “supernatural” minds.
This isn’t just a matter of intellectually lazy people failing to be rational.
It’s largely a matter of people being systematically misled by pervasive accommodationism.
For example, you often hear scientists who study the mind/brain talking about how this or that particular aspect of the mind is profoundly influenced by the brain—e.g., brain damage causing personality changes. What you rarely hear is what those scientists think the big picture is, e.g., that the mind is just the functioning of the brain, and there’s nothing left for a traditional soul to do.
It is inevitable that most people who hear the former will fail to infer the latter, because they intuitively assume that if the former really implied the latter, the experts would point that out. It’s just too important and interesting to go unsaid, so most people will infer that it’s not true, even if the information presented would make it seem likely.
That’s how human discourse generally works—we assume that people will tell us the most interesting and important things about the subject at hand.
For example, if you get a call from your spouse saying that your child didn’t make it to school today, you’re going to be shocked if you later find out that they already knew that your child missed school because they’d been hit by a car and killed. The latter is just way more interesting and important than the former, so its the obvious thing to say up front. You’d expect your spouse to lead with that, or at least get around to that point very quickly; you certainly wouldn’t expect them to omit that point from the conversation.
Likewise, scientists generally mislead people by failing to tell them the most interesting things they know, which the audience would rightly be very interested in—e.g., that they very probably don’t have immortal souls, that their God is pretty well dead, and that their vaunted godly morality is based on really dopey misconceptions. If the experts avoid remarking on those really very remarkable things, most people will predictably assume that they’re not true—e.g., they’ll assume that while the brain does many things, there’s still a soul in there somewhere, doing something important, and it can somehow survive the death of the brain, and they can have their pie in the sky when they die.
The unconscious assumption—that people are naturally cooperative speakers who would tell you the really interesting stuff up front—is what leaves most people wide open to be taken in by people like Deepak Chopra and Francis Collins. As long as the real experts play the accommodationist game and self-censor about the most important implications, it is natural for people to believe those hucksters when they say interesting things that the majority of experts think are pretty clearly false.
It is unfortunately reasonable for most nonbelievers to be agnostic, because there’s a conspiracy of silence about how science thoroughly undermines basic tenets of all religion.
Gnu Atheism is largely about refusing to play along with this systematically miseading farce, partly so that it won’t be reasonable for most people to be so “agnostic.”
Accommodationism is largely about criticizing Gnu Atheist for refusing to self-censor in a way that predictably leads people to profoundly wrong conclusions about the most important subjects.
That’s a crucial aspect of framing that Nisbet, Mooney, et al. don’t like to discuss.
Cliteur is talking about agnostics who argue for agnosticism, here – New Agnostics, if you like. I don’t think he means that description to apply to all agnostics, but to ones who defend their position, and especially ones who tell atheists that agnosticism is superior, as so many agnostics do. His point is to explain why it’s not, rather than to say all agnostics are irresponsible. I think.
I concur absolutely. (And it was delightful to find an Austen mention here.)
I think Austen is a genius, in the most serious sense possible.
I wrote a piece on Emma for Normblog’s ‘Writer’s Choice’ a few years ago.
Ophelia
There was some post shortly before YNH melted down where he linked to it approvingly and Russell said “what’s up with that?” and Wilkins said yes it’s probably a bit unfair but I think Mooney has been unfairly criticized so I feel like being unfair.
That’s why I thought maybe he’s just being a smart-arse for the sake of it. I haven’t noticed him being an equal opportunity smart-arse to the likes of Mooney, but that could be just confirmation bias on my part combined with the fact that I don’t read the intersection. I mentioned this thread to him in a comment on his blog, in the hope that he’d give his version on agnosticism.
When it comes to Jane Austen, I fall on the side of Mark Twain:
Sure, it’s possible not to like Austen. She’s gentry, her focus is narrow, she’s harsh to certain combinations of meanness and stupidity. But she’s a genius all the same. (She knew how to construct a novel, which makes her a rarity.)
Benjamin, both you and Twain are dead to me, you damned philistines.
(And I mean that in the best possible way! :-)
Hmm. Now I too am apt to give both Ophelia and Tulse a roughing-up with a shin-bone!
At #20, Russell said:
I see your point, I suppose — and Ophelia’s as well — but here’s the thing: This motivation or lack thereof doesn’t put agnostics (not even the smugly superior ones) in a special or distinct position vis-a-vis what genuinely motivates and shapes their conduct, since a very significant minority (if not a majority) of religious believers are in exactly the same boat. Yes, they profess belief and participate in religious institutions and traditions, but in almost no measurable way do their actions reflect any serious motivation to be “right with God.” In fact, since every believer’s opinions about what’s right with God and what God frowns upon always aligns rather perfectly with their own moral opinions (and/or the opinions of their social peers), I’m not sure there’s any real behavioral content to the notion in the first place.
Given those two bits of context, I’m not sure what exactly is established or explained by talking about whether and how people are motivated by, concerned with, or behave in a manner consistent with religious belief — not only for agnostics, but for anyone. If the overwhelming majority of the internal motivations and actual behaviors of an atheist, an agnostic, and an Episcopalian aren’t readily distinguishable (unless they walk into a bar and engage in stereotypically humorous behavior), what does this “living as if there is/is not a God” stuff amount to? Not much that I can see.
Well, I struggle with this. On one hand we have a political theory, which is the basis of great progress in human affairs toward rights and freedom – which involves “setting aside” of religion – by “limiting” what an authority does.
On the other hand we see this word linked to concepts like “morality” – as in “secular morality” vs. “religious morality”. So its not about limits of power, its about sources of authority – “i reason” vs. “god has revealed”.
I guess that is just how it has to be … secularism has become an idea that doesn’t offer the religious “freedom” but stands opposed to to their fundamental interests by removing the legitimacy of their authority, not just from the affairs of state, but from the mind itself.
Secular just means “a theist” … “without god” or “not god” … what ever literal meaning the word has “of the age” or “not eternal” etc … is beside the point, the concept means “not from or according to god”.
I’m always bothered when I hear the religious use secular to mean atheist, because I want to respond, “but secularism defends faith”, it should be a precious thing to people who value faith … but they don’t see it that way, they just see it as a front for “atheism” a way to trick them into shrinking to a size where they can be drowned in a bath tub.
I guess that is just the way it is. Their cathedrals are tourist attractions and their beliefs are future anthropological relics … no wonder they feel threatened with extinction. Secularism no longer offers them anything, by making people happy, healthy and wise, secularism has destroyed the ignorance that sustained their views in the first place.
To them this looks like standing on the edge of a clearcut looking out at the tree farmers saying, “but look we are replanting and making the forest better”.
I feel for them.
No, this is important. The word really does mean something like “temporal” or “worldly”. Its core meaning in current political discourse is about governments being motivated solely by temporal/wordly concerns. That’s not just some archaic meaning; it’s central to what many of the debates are about, and it clarifies them to realise that this is the core meaning.
George, what you say is true, but it’s also true that many evangelicals (and perhaps other Christians) really do worry from day to day about being right with God and that many of the ways they are tempted to act go against their ideas of what is required for such rightness. At least that’s my experience. Thus evangelicals often carry a lot of guilt around. I agree, though, that a lot of professed Chrisitians don’t take their religion seriously and don’t carry that sort of burden or feel those conflicting motivations.
Uggghhh… once more, with paragraphs…
I suspect that arguments concerning all possible gods misses the point. God is a word with a meaning rooted in a historical and cultural context. I have yet to encounter an apologist for religion–even an “atheist, but…” who does not quickly revert to some God of scripture or theology. And so the question remains, if what you are considering, or an incapable of considering, does not fall within this historical context, why are you calling It God?
I sometimes refer to God with the impersonal It to shake people’s expectations regarding the term, but this may be incorrect (though it is correct here because the other ‘gods’ will probably be impersonal.) Integral to the meaning of the word God is the conception of a being with a personality, denoted by the personal pronouns He and sometimes She. This rather narrows it down to an entity whose mind is mutable over time, a complex process, and therefore a being that must exist in some temporal manner, and furthermore shares many attributes with humans. The God of religions is a personal God, and this is the only God they care about. This is the God regarding whom all questions are raised.
Now, concerning the set of all possible ‘gods’, I can imagine: 1) a God that does not know we exist, 2) a God that does not care, 3) a God which considers us by an entirely alien aesthetic, completely orthogonal to our cognitive and moral comprehension, 4) a God who died upon creation of the universe, 5) a God locked outside of the scope of time, for whom the universe is closed either to observation or interference, or both, 6) a God who considers life an unfortunate pollutant in an otherwise pristine experiment…and so on and on.
But none of these are GOD. So the set of all possible ‘gods’ is irrelevant–never mind unknowable. The question, “Do you believe in God” pertains to a particular historical conception. The answer must also pertain to that conception. The rest is evasion.
One last note on the ground zero Mosque. If the property in question was vacated by the attack on September 11, it should be denied. Islam must not be the beneficiary of the attacks–this would be to much like “counting coup” on the secular West, and we will hear Islamicists crowing in victory. This would put everyone who enters that mosque at risk. If the property was not left vacant by the attack, I have no problem with it.
Russell (@41), I certainly concede that some religious believers do in fact shape — I would say “warp” — their lives around their conceptions of God, and are highly motivated by being “right with God.” My point was that, since some other self-identified religious believers clearly don’t live that way to any significant degree, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to think that agnostics are radically distinct from the latter sort of believer — or from atheists, for that matter — with respect to the degree they live their lives “as if there isn’t a God.” Thus, it doesn’t seem to me that agnostics are guilty of any special inauthenticity or mismatch with respect to how they live their lives and their suspension of judgment on godly matters: If anyone deserves criticism on those grounds, it would be the people who claim to believe but don’t seem to live their lives as if they actually do believe what they profess to any significant degree.
but what of this talk of “motivations” … what does that mean. Governments are human constructions, they are made of people.
How can we decide what kind of “motivation” a person has, how do motivations enter into this? How do we know when a motivation exists and what it is, hell I’m not even aware of my own motivations all the time, and I’m the one who is having them …
“I want” … is translated to “god wants”, is translated to “we want” … is translated to “the law should be _____”.
It is this translation that is subject to the principles of secularism – the motivation can very well be “it is pleasing to god”, but the justification must be in terms that are “worldly” or “temporal” … a person has rights under the law, this may be because “god makes a person”, or it may be because we ourselves in order to have rights, must give them to others … on principle.
This talk of motives, and governments having limited “motives” vs. having limited powers, or limits on the kinds of “reasons” that are accepted by the state, just seems very “totalitarian” … it seems to me that people have the motives they have – and deciding if a motive comes from “religion” or comes from tradition, or social convention, or from our biology, or from personal desire or tastes or whims is very hard.
It seems as though that the concept of “secularism” really looses its value when removed from the understanding of relations between organized entities. The “church” and the “state” … when we speak of secular individuals, and religious individuals or secular ideas vs. religious ideas … things really get murky for me.
Thanks for helping me get it … I got that it really is central, but I don’t see why the religious should value “secularism” if “secularism” holds nothing for them but antagonism of their motives.
I do think this is central – the religious want to credit religion with the “source” of values, I want values to be understood as “contestable” (by reason and evidence). I accept that values are things we decide, and are not things we must have “revealed” to us. That seems to be what is central to the public discussion.
Scott, you seem deeply confused about the difference between ‘motives’ and ‘reasons,’ which are for the most part occupying separate threads of argument going on in these comments. To say that the state is secular is simply to state that in the realm of public policy, public reasons grounded in publicly available evidence must be given to justify policy decisions — especially policy decisions that exercise control over citizens or limit their freedoms in any significant way. What makes religious convictions a poor basis for policy is not that they are religious, but simply that they do not constitute and are not based on publicly available evidence: God will not appear in any public venue to argue for His opinions and make a case for why we should follow His rules, and those who cite His opinions by hearsay can provide no real evidence. All religion is ultimately revelatory, and revelation is not publicly available.
With respect to public reasons, motives are completely irrelevant. For example, some people are motivated to argue against gay marriage by their religious convictions, but others may just have anti-gay feelings and intuitions that have nothing at all to do with religion. Either way, their motivations don’t matter. If those people cannot present any evidence of actual harm that would be done to other citizens or to some compelling state interest by allowing people of the same sex to marry, they offer no reason whatsoever for a secular state to privilege some citizens over others by granting them the right to the various benefits which accrue to marriage while denying other citizens those same rights.
scott:
Huh? Limits on the reasons/motives for state action is precisely to prevent “totalitarian” things, e.g., tyranny of the majority. (A powerful religious majority imposing its will and its standards on everyone, not just members of that majority.) Even Christians can recognize that, based on the history of Christian schisms, witch hunts, etc.
The basic idea is that it’s not fair to impose arbitrary standards on others, and that distinctively religious standards are basically arbitrary—if you can’t explain why something is bad in non-religious terms, you can’t expect people of a different religion to go along with it-. (Or even people of a different sect, or just somebody at your own church who sees things a bit differently.)
In many important cases, it’s dead easy.
For example, it’s absolutely clear that the support for teaching creationism in public schools in the U.S. is overwhelmingly grounded in specifically biblical religious beliefs, and that the opposition to the teaching of evolution is precisely to protect scriptural religious beliefs and dogma from challenge.
Likewise, as the judge recently explained so clearly in the California Proposition 8 case, the opposition to giving gays equal marriage rights is entirely religious. There is no independent, worldly rationale for thinking that gays make especially bad parents, or that gay marriage threatens straight marriage, or any of that rot. All of the arguments against gay marriage are either obviously religious and “totalitarian,” or clearly bogus and/or stunningly hypocritical. (E.g., applying procreation-centric standards to gay marriage, but not infertile straight marriage.)
That reasoning is pretty much libertarian, and the opposite of totalitarian. People have the right to want and do different things, without justifying them in somebody else’s religious terms, and without the government controlling various aspects of people’s lives it has no non-religious reason to control.
I think a basic idea is that people’s motives may be somewhat different, in deep ways, but there’s generally enough commonality at a middle level that’s useful in practice, and people can cooperate. For example, almost all people recognize the idea of harming other people—physically hurting them, inflicting psychological suffering—and that it’s generally a bad thing, if it’s done wantonly. They may disagree somewhat as to why they think harming people is a bad thing, and in fact I think that most people are more or less mistaken as to why they think bad things are bad. They may also disagree somewhat as to what constitutes harm, or the relative seriousness of different kinds of harms.
Consider walking out in the street and shooting somebody dead, or just spitting in their eye, for no good reason.
Pretty much anybody can see that that’s something you shouldn’t do—it’s making life less pleasant for somebody, and you’re not supposed to do that without a very good reason.
I personally think that we’re evolved to be able to be moral, and to agree not to do such things, and to set up enforcement mechanisms to punish people for doing them.
A religious person may think that we’re given a moral sense by a designer God, who wants us to agree not to do such things, and to set up enforcement mechanisms, etc.
We simply don’t have to agree about that underlying issue to agree that it’s bad to assault people. A religious person may recognize that I do have a moral sense similar to theirs in certain ways, and assume I’m mistaken about the evolutionary psychology—that I actually have a god-given gift that I don’t recognize as such. I may likewise assume that they’re quite mistaken about it being a god-given gift, and that their moral sense, too, is a product of evolution like mine.
And for many practical purposes, that’s fine. We can disagree at a deep level, but agree on some basic aspects of morality relevant to social customs and law, and agree to discourage things like wanton assault, murder, rape, child abuse and neglect, stealing, etc.
One thing that makes that appealing even to most religious people is that they can see that they disagree with other religious people so much that bringing religion into government doesn’t generally make things better.
For example, most Protestant Christians don’t really want to thrash out their theological differences with Catholics in court, and most Catholics aren’t up for that either. Neither thinks the government is good at fine points of Christian theology, and they’re both right.
And Christians of both those kinds, like atheists, disagree over how much the government should enforce positive social obligations—what exactly are you obligated to do to help people as opposed to refraining from actively hurting them, and which of those obligations should the government enforce?
Most non-fundamentalists recognize this phenomenon, to some extent, and many theologically liberal religious people see it pretty clearly. They recognize that moral judgments are difficult, and that getting morality from scriptures and putting it into law is generally difficult at best and fraught with potential for abuse. (E.g., the biblical justifications for slavery that were used in the U.S. Civil War. Both sides were overwhelmingly Christian, and they disagreed which side God was on.)
Quite sensibly, most people intuitively trust secular moral reasoning more than other people’s religious moral reasoning, when it comes down to it. They recognize the moral force of statements like “you shouldn’t do that to anybody because you wouldn’t like that if somebody did it to you” better than the force of random scriptural dictates about shellfish and two men having sex, even if they don’t know why. (They may mistakenly attribute it to the unique insight and authority of Jesus, as opposed to random OT prophets, and they may interpret that as Jesus correcting mistakes made by fallible prophets, or as Jesus bringing a new dispensation making old rules inapplicable… or whatever… but on some level they realize that people generally can and do make moral judgments without close readings of scripture—and that many people who do rely on close readings of scripture are often dangerous nuts, for some reason. They think the secular process more or less works, and are scared of zealots.)
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people somewhere in the middle, who think that Bible-thumpers often get things wrong, but still think the Bible is something like infallible, and the the zealots are just reading it wrong. They recognize that the “Golden Rule” is more important than random stuff dredged out of Leviticus, but not know why, and think that it was original with Jesus, and that Christianity is uniquely moral and important.
Those people are likely to think that we should marginalize the worst fundie zealots, but that religion or Christianity per se is still very important to good government—that without religion (or Christians) constantly pushing morality, we’d forget basic things like the Thou Shalt Not Kill, Thou Shalt Not Steal, and the Golden Rule, and moral chaos would result.
Those people think of religion, and maybe specifically Christianity, as serving a crucial function for government, in rather the same way that civil libertarians view a free press—it’s not officially part of the government, and is officially separate from it, but it plays a crucial role, keeping the official branches of government from going off the rails. It’s like an unofficial branch of government, with checks and balances between it and the official branches.
Most of those people more or less recognize that the secular system works, but do not understand why; they attribute too much importance to religion as a moral force. They often don’t recognize that things like the Golden Rule are not specific to Christianity, or even to religion—or that secular moral reasoning is what really works, for fundamental psychological and social reasons, and that religion is mostly just window-dressing, and often actually harmful because it obscures real moral issues.
For them, it’s natural to worry about secularization going too far, and the government failing to give religion a privileged place, as it does the press. (E.g., reporters can go places normal people can’t, because they serve a special role in providing normal people with information, and reporters are allowed to protect sources in a way that normal people are not, because cooperation with government investigations is weighed against the importance of a functioning press.)
To many people who see religion (or Christianity specifically) as crucial to the proper functioning of society and government, religion (or Christianity) seems to deserve special treatment because of its special role; religion, like the press, is supposed to be specially powerful and influential, even if there’s not supposed to be an official state religon. (Like there’s supposed to be a free press, but not supposed to be state-run media.)
In both cases, the idea is that you have a sort of free marketplace of ideas, in hopes that it regulates itself better than the government can be trusted to regulate it, but that marketplace as a whole is granted special privileged status and influence. Government should thus ensure that religion (or specifically Christianity) thrives, but without being too controlling because it’s too susceptible to corruption, and is bad at picking and managing particular opinions; the government should be more or less hands-off in dictating point of view, within certain reasonable bounds.
Notice that the government not only endorses the existence of the press, but does in some cases promote it, protecting its special power and influence, and it has to make some judgment calls as to who is the legitimate press—e.g., the government must sometimes decide who’s a “legitimate” reporter of the general sort that serves a valuable social function, vs. just some interfering lookie-loo with blog, or an uncooperative witness claiming to be a reporter.
Likewise, maybe the government has to decide what’s a legitimate religion, or a “real” clergyman, of the general sort that deserves special treatment because of its positive social function. That would entail some hard calls in controversial cases, but hey, we do that for the press, so why not for the clergy?
I think there’s a certain merit to that argument, if you buy the premise that religion is on the whole a good thing that serves a positive and necessary social function, and if you think the government can be expected to do a passable job of deciding what’s the right “general sort” of “legitimate” religion and clergy.
I don’t buy either of those premises—I think religion is on a whole a bad thing, obscuring real moral issues and making government work worse. I also think it has plenty of power already, and granting it special status and influence in law mostly amplifies its bad effects, not its good ones. And the I don’t trust the government to decide what even the right “general sort” of clergy is, especially given various political pressures. (Would it include satanist or radical islamists, but not atheists, or perhaps vice versa? Or just Christians and Jews, or what?)
That was pretty obvious to many of the “Founding Fathers” of the U.S., in light of European history and especially the Catholic and Anglican churches. They thought that religion and government should generally be separate, not just to protect government from illegitimate control by religion, but to protect religion from the corruption that comes with temporal power—e.g., the Catholics’ Crusades, Index, and Inquisition, and the Anglican church in practice being largely about the government gravy train, power brokering, and a bunch of upper-class fucks getting their sinecures, rather than otherworldly theology or actually doing some real good.
Thanks, I have been confused about the difference between “motives” and “reasons” … perhaps making a bigger deal out of a semantic point than I should, but the words seem to be used to mean the same thing at the beginning of Paul’s very thoughtful reply, the content of which I agree with completely.
My struggle with this point, is related to living in a country where the principles that divide church and state are not well established or understood in the same sense that they are in the USA. It seems fair for the religious here to argue that they want this nation to be a nominally Christian Nation, and it is hard to disentangle heritage from religion (the cross on the flag etc …)
The term secular, it seems to me, can be emphasized as the basis of religious freedom and tolerance (the basis of catholic protestant co-existence) or as a thing that excludes religious concerns. As a result of this, we have the strange spectacle in Australia, of Catholic leaders criticizing the secular nature of society, when they owe a debt to that same “secular society”.
In my general experience, it is not a word that people intuitively understand, even though, for instance in our state (Victoria), it is one of the cardinal principles of the education system, and a term used in the Commonwealth constituion.
Many church leaders here commonly conflate the idea of atheism with secularism – and are openly scornful of a truly neutral state, as they feel their views deserve promotion by the state. There have been agreements among the churches here for instance, to remove the term “secular” from the legislation that enables public education – and this was accomplished in some states in Australia, and the judiciary have interpreted the part of the constitution that prohibits the “establishment” of religion, to mean something far more narrow than the courts have found in the USA.
So, the idea of “secular”, as much as I would like to feel has a clear meaning seems genuinely murky.
Where in law does one find language that articulates the idea that society will decide things for “secular reasons” vs. “religious reasons” … aren’t we stuck with a legal system that has evolved and reformed out of a fundamentally “religious” nature, and have only accretion of a preference for reason, and no clearly articulated legal mandate to do so?
correction, “word used to describe the constitution”, i don’t think the word is IN the constitution.
The words secular and secularism are indeed not so monolithically defined.
See my remarks in this discussion: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/reading-the-secular-outlook/#comment-59000.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the first people to see secularism as atheistic were, er, atheists. The point being that they didn’t understand secularism narrowly as disestablishment/separation.
There’s a useful distinction in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief (2nd ed) between secularism, secularization, and secularity. Broadly: Secularism being ideological, secularization being sociological, and secularity being political.
There is an accommodationist (heh heh heh) tendency to see political secularism (i.e. secularity, i.e. disestablishment/separation) as neutral between religion and irreligion, as though the only authentic anti-religious political manifestation is repressive State Atheism.
But although there are good pure democratic arguments for disestablishment and secularism, I don’t think it is a betrayal of the idea to uphold it for anti-religious reasons. It is perfectly possible for the religious to believe that political secularism is in their interests; I don’t feel I have to agree with them in order to make common cause.
Likewise, it is perfectly possible to be a Christian and an evolutionist; plenty of people reconcile the two. Does that mean that those of us who think that evolution provides the basis of a critique of Christian doctrine should shut up and instead promote an evolution-is-neutral-towards-religion position in case we somehow damage the scientific cause? Where have I heard that before?
Dan