“Universal love is such a drag”
Karl Giberson says tut tut, religious people aren’t cramming their beliefs down children’s throats. He illustrates this assertion by an example:
In their journals my students are reflecting on their beliefs with a new philosophical rigor. One of them wrote: “The only thing I know with clarity is that I want to love all and do whatever I can to make sure that the life I have been given does not go to waste.” What a terrible thing to have had crammed down one’s throat as a child!
But that’s not an illustration of what it purports to be, because what that student says is not religious. It’s idealistic and admirable, but there’s nothing religious about it. Religious people have this unfortunate tendency to think that all or most idealistic and admirable ideas are inherently religious, but that’s wrong. That student’s desire is as secular as you like. Granted the idea that Jesus is love is a religious idea, and wanting to “love all” could well be a Jesus-inflected idea – but it could equally well not. It’s not inherently religious. (If it’s inherently anything, it’s probably inherently young.) Ambitions for universal benevolence don’t depend on belief in a deity or command morality.
So, no, that’s not bad religious throat-cramming, but that doesn’t show that there is no such thing.
As Hitchens famously remarked, “Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”
It is genuinely frustrating when religious apologists just don’t seem to get the point. I cannot help but believe that refuting the hackneyed, ill-informed and ill-formulated arguments made by accomodationists must be one of the unending chores of enlightened discourse (with apologies to Hitchens!).
Even if it were a religious statement, this would not constitute an argument against cramming religion down children’s throats. If someone shoots ten people and one of them dies, they can’t argue they didn’t commit murder because nine people are still alive.
And like, it’s a diary entry. We don;t even know it’s true.
It may not be a religious statement but it has the other disadvantage of not actually being true. This 18 year old may like to think of herself as a little replica Jesus imbued with a depthless love of humanity but in ten years time she may well be channelling her inner serial killer. At best she will discover she’s a lot more human than angel.
Actually scratch the above. That statement is the sort of nauseating, self regarding twaddle that could only have come from a religious* mind.
*Where ‘religious’ includes, despite all protestations to the contrary, “spiritual”.
Didn’t you know that everything that is not science is automatically religion.
Within the context provided by Giberson’s article (“Most of them are from conservative Protestant traditions”), it’s not at all unlikely that the words “love all” are merely code words for “spread the Gospel of Christ.” I very much doubt that they stand for “help others unconditionally and refrain from passing judgment or proselytizing.”
Well, that totally depends on what your idea of a “wasted life” is. If you believe in hell, the ultimate wasted life would be one that they think will send you there. We, of course, think a life spent living in ignorance, guilt and fear is a wasted life.
I don’t understand why Giberson is so impressed by a line like “The only thing I know with clarity is that I want to love all and do whatever I can to make sure that the life I have been given does not go to waste.” Even the people who send their kids to Jesus Camp and the people who run it think they are doing it for the love of the children.
Puts me in mind of Emo Philips: ‘But if by religious you mean do I like coleslaw, then well, yeah…’
That’s one essay where I think that, if I were able to talk to the author, I could get him to apologize; Giberson seems like a decent fellow. The “cramming religion down the throats of its kids” narrative was from a discussion of Australia’s allowing Christian evangelists to have access to public school children. Now Giberson presents it as Jerry Coyne yelling at that nice Presbyterian couple for taking their daughter to Sunday School.
That’s mendacious, and he knows it.
Giberson is a religious shill. Let’s face it, saying that you want to love everyone is not reflecting on beliefs with a ‘new philosophical rigour.’ In fact, it’s quite clearly a sentimental generalisation that doesn’t mean anything. Loving everyone? Come, come, child, this is a meaningless remark, which you will realise the first time some jerk trys to hit on you in some particularly disgusting way.
Love, read in New Testament style, is a pretty restricted and restrictive kind of thing. It is not love for everyone, to start with; it’s love of the ‘brethren.’ Let’s not forget that the Paul who wrote the 13th chapter of First Corinthians, also wrote the fifth chapter of Galatians, where he wishes that those Judaising Christians who still believed in circumcision as the sign of the covenant, wished that they would slip with the knife and castrate themselves! And the Jesus who stands at the door and knocks in Revelation is quite prepared to seal up his enemies in a lake of fire. Such is the love of Jesus!
Let’s, by all means, think of religion with philosophical rigour, but when we do so, let’s also remember that rigour means just that, a refusal to let concerns like the above just slide on through because we are sentimentally attached to certain words, no matter what they really mean in the contexts where they first appear in the religious canon. What is really mendacious about Karl Giberson’s dewy-eyed effusiveness over little kids at church concerts is that he implies that this is what real Christianity is all about, when it’s not. It’s about power, it’s about dunning people for money, most of which will be used on physical plant and staff salaries and other self-regarding expenditures, and at most a very modest amount being retained to do so-called ‘good works’ which, contrary to Jesus’ own apparent injunctions, is done with as much fan fare as possible, so that people notice how good you are being.
Notice the story Giberson tells about young people raising money for Haiti, but not for Haiti kids, but for themselves, so that they can go to Haiti and be helpful, when, in all likelihood, putting more untrained feet on the ground will interfere with assistance underway. It’s downright pathetic for Giberson to claim that this is in any way about love. It’s not. It’s about self-aggrandisement, and he knows it — or he would, if he wasn’t so committed to appearances instead of reality. Love is certainly not inherently religious, but the kind of love that the religious offer very often is. Inherently religious love is the kind of love that comes with strings attached, whether those strings just amount of publicity seeking, or whether it goes even lower on the religious ladder, and is offered with the expectation of effusive gratitude from those who are being helped, even, sometimes, an expectation of shared, or newfound faith by those who are helped. If I need help, I don’t want it attached to expectations like that. I want it to be provided by people who do it because there is a human need to help those who need it, and not because it is an act of faith in an intrusively invigilating deity.
This is the classic straw man. An unsourced quote that is wide open for an easy demolition job. It is pathetic if Giberson is training his students to think and argue in this fashion. Karl, you can rewrite it from the start or content yourself with a mark of 3/10.
There is cramming down the neck and cramming down the neck. Indoctrination is the common name for the process, and it appeals to both the intellect and to emotion. For it to work the material for the subjects to mentally adopt and/or be converted to must stay within the grounds of what they consider possible or feasible, and must meet with a positive emotional response favouring their approval and adoption of it. Play can be to warm fuzzy feelings as in Christmas pantomimes, or to fear of being burned alive and forever in Hell. What works, works.
It helps if alternative ways of looking at issues and the reality about us are excluded. The subjects must be fitted with sets of blinkers. It is for this reason that all religious authorities, where they have the power to do so, run strict regimes of censorship on their subjects: forbidden books and forbidden thoughts; religious schools and universities. It helps if their conscious hours are filled to the greatest possible extent with devotional activities and if there is a prior acceptance of the notion of sin, ie going against the will of the deity.
Would Giberson be in favour of students being introduced to the widest possible range of perspectives and ideas in ‘biologos’, biology and life in general? In my experience religious people incline to reluctance on that. Theocracies are not noted for tolerance.
I hadn’t thought of that…which was rather lax of me. Which reminds me, I haven’t posted about the missionaries on the flight from Seattle to Amsterdam. Must do that.
“Universal love” sounds like some new age crap fluff.
What is the point of ‘love’ for everything? It’s just a feel good excuse for not thinking, for not having any standards.
I have a co-worker whose interpretation of Christianity centers very much on the “universal love” concept, which to him basically means the categorical imperative plus some extra charity and generosity added in. Which is just dandy with me! He’s just using rather strange words and strange logic to get there.
I have challenged him to explain how his worldview functionally differs from mine. Neither of us has really succeeded.
How many children have gone home from parochial school with their knuckles bruised and swollen because they didn’t say their catechism right and were given the traditional ruler on the back of the hand?
Isn’t this “cramming religion down their throats”?
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