Metatalk
What about Paul Sims’s question? Should atheists be talking to believers? Well sure. But should atheists be talking to Catholic Voices? That’s a different question.
Around the time of the Pope’s visit to the UK, I wrote a couple of posts on here (notably this and this) in which I questioned the tone of the Protest the Pope campaign and the debate around Catholicism and the Pope…An unexpected outcome of my posts was an invitation from the Central London Humanist Group to take part in a small round table discussion with representatives of Catholic Voices, an organisation set up to argue the Catholic case during the Papal Visit.
I had a look at Catholic Voices. Until I looked, I was thinking it was just another friendly woolly group o’ believers and reacher-outers, and thus quite a reasonable outfit to have a nice chat with. But it’s not.
CATHOLIC VOICES is a bureau of Catholic speakers able to articulate with conviction the Church’s positions on major contentious issues in the media.
It’s a self-appointed PR outfit for the Vatican. Its mission is to defend existing positions. That means it’s pretty much exactly the kind of group or grouplet it is entirely pointless to have a nice chat with if what you want from a nice chat is some kind of rapprochement or ecumenical understanding or outreach or can’t we all get alonging. That’s a group that’s in the business of peddling dogma, so it’s hardly going to sit down with the editor of the New Humanist for the sake of genuine dialogue.
Paul Sims thought there might be some common ground.
There is agreement among secularists that change in the Catholic Church must come from within, and there can be no doubt that many moderate Catholics share secularist concerns on condoms, gay rights and child abuse (see the contributions of liberal Catholics Conor Gearty and Tina Beattie to our “An audience with the Pope” feature). If the Pope’s recent pronouncement on condom use was prompted by any kind of pressure, it seems more likely that it was from his own flock rather than his secular opponents. Is it not, therefore, useful to cultivate any common ground we might share with believers?
Yes, probably, but Catholic Voices isn’t “believers”; Catholic Voices is dogma-defenders, which is quite a different thing. I also don’t really think we should let people get away with claiming to be liberal Catholics. The term is an oxymoron. The Catholicism diminishes the liberalism, necessarily. The Catholic church is an emphatic, energetic, active enemy of liberalism, so liberals who stick with it are thereby compromising their liberalism. The Catholic church is an active enemy of secularism, of women’s rights, of gay rights, of non-theocratic morality, so liberals have no business supporting it.
“If the Pope’s recent pronouncement on condom use was prompted by any kind of pressure, it seems more likely that it was from his own flock rather than his secular opponents.”
Okay, but which contributed more to lay Catholics being pro condom?:
1) Condemnation of stupid Catholic policy and pointing to all the deaths that the Popes and Catholics have caused.
2) Pretending that the Catholic condom policy is only a little matter, and that in no way should we think Catholics are stupid or evil for attempting to convince people with aids to not use condoms.
Why I love this blog! I amuse myself all day thinking up witty quips (hey, you know, everyone needs a hobby), but I can never come up with anything quite as pointed and as pithy as this fine example.
@ Kaelic: I’d vote “neither.” Rather, I think that enough Catholics finally clued in, and started complaining to their priests that the policy was stupid and inane, and then the priests mentioned that the “flock” was grumbling and threatening to leave, and then the bishops realized that they weren’t going to meet the membership quotas at this rate, and then the cardinals realized that advising a “minor adjustment to an unimportant policy” was worth the net savings in revenue.
Yes! This is exactly what I was saying to my father one time when he brought up “Christian principles” or whatever. The only reason that Catholicism can masquerade as a liberal religion is because 1st world Catholics don’t really believe Catholic doctrine. If they did, it would be much more obvious that the Catholic church is still the medieval, lawless, unaccountable, authoritarian organization it’s always been.
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@Kirth
“I’d vote “neither.” Rather, I think that enough Catholics finally clued in, and started complaining to their priests that the policy was stupid and inane, and then the priests mentioned that the “flock” was grumbling and threatening to leave, and then the bishops realized that they weren’t going to meet the membership quotas at this rate, and then the cardinals realized that advising a “minor adjustment to an unimportant policy” was worth the net savings in revenue.”
Apparently you missed my point. Why did all those Catholics clue in? Was it because a bunch of very nice and gentle atheists kept quiet and didn’t ever say anything other than how much they respect the Pope?
Or did it happen because a bunch of cruel mean assholes went around talking about how the condom policy is terrible so much that the public conception amongst all non Catholics became that it was obviously stupid, and then Catholics, who regularly have to deal with the non Catholic world, at least when they aren’t in the Vatican, realized that everyone else thought they were psychotic, and were convinced by the condemnation of their behavior that they should try another path?
If Secularists influence public conception, which influences lay catholics, which influences priests, which influences bishops, which influences cardinals, which influences the Pope, that’s still secularists influencing the Pope, and not evidence that we should write the Pope letters about how much we respect him, and should instead, I don’t know, write blogs about how the Pope is completely wrong in an effort to influence the public conception.
Not sure I agree. There are many liberals who identify as Catholics, and who do not see that as oxymoronic at all. I question whether it’s productive to demand that they renounce the Church before I recognize them as liberal.
Well I’m not demanding that they renounce the church (and how would I enforce my demand if I were?). Not letting them get away with can mean just confronting them with it – just pointing out the tension. I certainly think Tony Blair should be confronted with that tension, every fifteen minutes or so for preference. I don’t think cradle Catholics should have an automatic out. I think most people just don’t really fully grasp how reactionary and authoritarian and horrible the Catholic church is, and that’s because there’s this polite habit of not pointing it out.
There are no liberal Catholics or liberal Christians, it’s a contradiction. What you have is ‘compartmentalization’ so that when a Catholic is in the company of liberals, they turn on their liberal head, and have the appearance of being a liberal. The same thing happens in science, and normally intelligent educated people can switch off that part of the brain and become ignorant and dumb when they turn on their religious head.
Religion makes smart people stupid, it makes educated people ignorant, it makes moral people immoral.
It’s not all about us, Kaelic — as much as we like to feel important. Some of those people who attend Catholic churches (because they were raised that way) nevertheless still retain some semblance of a moral compass, and still use it on occasion. A lot of them don’t need you to tell them that banning condoms is bad; they can figure that out for themselves, if you give them long enough. I think that after years of that policy, enough of them got annoyed enough that the guys in the funny hats were forced to notice.
I was actually at the debate Simms mentioned in passing between Catholic Voices and AC Grayling and Peter Tatchell and there’s a point I found interesting about their argument when it came to condoms actually, in particular the comment by Mr Ivereigh. When he did raise the issue, he essentially made the argument that the Catholic position on condoms was that the certain unspecified evidence shows that condoms are harmful. Now we <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_education#Scientific_studies”> all know that’s bullshit </a> but I’ll point out that’s still a significant climb down from the official Church position which is a Thomist Natural Law position which doesn’t actually care a whiff about actual human suffering, just about whether we, and our bits, are following gods plan.
So the question is, was it a strictly cynical argument in a place where believers were outnumbered explicitlty by their critics or a genuine misunderstanding of the church position which suggest that his actual view should really be closer to that of the secularists? Maybe it’s a trivial point, but if it’s the latter then that suggests believers already are more closely aligned to atheists than their religion, they just don’t understand that fact yet. I don’t know about you, but that strikes me, as a self-described New Atheist, as somewhat suggestive.
I think the problem here is “if you give them long enough”. We are not talking about some intellectual exercise here, we are talking about a policy that is killing people. Time is not something we should be willing to grant.
@Kirth
“It’s not all about us, Kaelic — as much as we like to feel important. Some of those people who attend Catholic churches (because they were raised that way) nevertheless still retain some semblance of a moral compass, and still use it on occasion. A lot of them don’t need you to tell them that banning condoms is bad; they can figure that out for themselves, if you give them long enough. I think that after years of that policy, enough of them got annoyed enough that the guys in the funny hats were forced to notice.”
First. It ends in a k. I don’t misspell your name, you don’t misspell mine.
Second, just don’t use the words moral compass. No one has a moral compass, because morality doesn’t exist.
Thirdly, they couldn’t figure it out for themselves from the invention of condoms till now. And coincidentally, right now lots of people are criticizing the Catholic Church for the Aids crisis in Africa. It’s almost like condemning them somehow causes them to recognize things they would not otherwise notice if people didn’t go around criticizing the Pope.
Thanks for the witness testimony, Montag! Very interesting. We heard the same thing from for instance Iqbal Sacranie (I think…maybe it was Bunglawala) talking about gay rights on Radio 4 a few years ago. He floundered desperately for some sort of secular reason, and “it’s not healthy” was all he could come up with. His floundering and desperation were very obvious.
He knew he had to offer something other than “the Koran says” because of his audience – but “the Koran says” is all he himself actually had, hence desperate floundering. I suspect that was exactly Mr Ivereigh’s case. He was talking to outsiders, and that made him feel he had to offer something more than “the Church’s teachings are” – but of course he doesn’t actually have anything more. It’s interesting that he felt he had to try.
One difficulty I have (and sorry OB I can’t avoid use of the L word on this one) is how one tells the difference between liars and people so trusting of authority that they unthinkingly pass on the lies of others. In personal conversation it generally comes out, but with articles and radio interviews the right question tends not to get asked.
Oh, no apology necessary for that, Ken – that’s a very general claim, so neither legally nor morally worrying.
Yes, and how liberal of you to dictate what liberals should do, say and support.
Don’t be silly. Some things simply are incompatible with liberalism. It’s not illiberal to point them out.
Really? Do people really think that change in the Catholic Church will come from within? What sort of historical precedent do these people point to? When the Church does change, it’s almost always because of pressure from the outside world/the shifting moral zeitgeist, not because a large number of Catholic laity or leaders demanded change.
Fair enough — it’s a deal.
I figured that’s where you were headed. OK, will you grant that, in a communal society of people inhabiting a finite planet, some strategies are more conducive to success than others (depending on the definition of “success,” of course, the specific strategies may vary), and that, much as game theory would predict, not all strategies are zero-sum: some may be win-win, or win-lose less, or even lose-lose (nuking the entire planet would be an example of the latter). Okay so far? The strategies with better net success we can, for the sake of shorthand, refer to as “more moral” than the others. In that sense of the term, humans, who are evolved to live in communal groups and can reason through (even if subconsciously) some of these variances in likely success rates, can be said to have a “moral compass” of the sort just described and to which I referred, even if the term itself is offensive to you.
Of course, if all of the above is also a big “no” to you, then one would conclude you don’t care about the AIDS epidemic in Africa to begin with — but I’m assuming that’s not the case.
“(depending on the definition of “success,” of course, the specific strategies may vary)”
“The strategies with better net success we can, for the sake of shorthand, refer to as “more moral” than the others.”
So just to be clear. Hitler was more moral than the French or English, because his strategy was more successful at killing Jews.
You can’t get around the fact that their are more definitions of success than existing beings just by lumping them all together. There is no reason to expect that any given two people will have the same definition of what constitutes success, so any discussion you ever have is meaningless.
More importantly, that’s not morality. That’s called “attempting to accomplish goals as best as possible.” Morality is not used to mean “most successful strategy to accomplish a goal.” People don’t call the Nuclear attacks on Japan immoral because they were not effective, in every respect, even long term, they have proved to be the most effective strategy that could have ever been employed. People call it immoral because they have ideas of intrinsic wrongness that has nothing to do with how effective something is.
Kaelik:
The first question to deal with is your point about the meaning of morality. Now I agree on your diagnosis of what is meant by morality but I object to the idea that I need to necessarily accept any particular definition. It seems to me perfectly possible to use a term and still be hopelessly confused about what it actually means; case in point, Karen Armstrong, Terry Eagleton or pretty much any piece of theology you care to spit at. Now that still leaves more then enough scope for universal ideas that pretty much fit the bill of morality.
Let’s take stoning as an example. It’s a common trope by people who argue as you have that somehow the West with its tradition of Human Rights has no scope in which to condemn or intervene against countries engaging in the practise. I can even understand the desire behind this kind of talk given the history of colonialism and a desire to protect autonomy. The problem with the argument is quite simply that it fails to respect autonomy. Sayed Pervez Kambaksh is the example I reach for at times like this because it’s abundantly clear that this sector of the left completely refuse to acknowledge his autonomy. In fact when searching for a set of principles that actually do manage to properly respect his autonomy it’s hard to do better than human rights and secularism more generally.
Now, this obviously isn’t a general argument for morality as a whole. What I’ve shown is that in one particular kind of discussion at a particualr level it obviously is possible to find common ground between two opposing sides from which to come to real answers. The next step should you choose to press the argument is obviously to say that it would be possible to doubt this level as well though and I have two points to make in response.
The first is that you should be very careful about your intuitions about what it is in fact possible to deny. Sure it might seem possible to conceive of a person who so completely lacks moral concern for others that they’re immune to all possible moral argument, but you’ll probably be startled at how much work it actually takes.
My second point is that I’m not going to pretend to have an answer for any and all possible ethical questions. What I am sure of is that I never cease to be impressed by the ability of human beings to resolve seemingly intractable problems. Science is a spectacular toolkit that has enabled us to engage with the world to spectacular effect and I have no doubt that using this powerful resource while taking due care in how we conceive of the problems that engage us, we can resolve all the genuine questions it is possible for human beings to ask.
1) Yes, people do talk about things without knowing what the hell they are talking about. It’s never useful conversation, and I don’t want to hear it, so don’t do it.
2) I would encourage you to address what I have actually said instead of what other people have once said that you disagree with.
“the West with its tradition of Human Rights has no scope in which to condemn or intervene against countries engaging in the practise.”
Here is some scope: They feel like it. That’s all the scope needed. They want to interfere with them, in some cases they have the ability, and so they will. Likewise, country X wants to resist, in some cases it has the ability, and when it does, it will.
“The problem with the argument is quite simply that it fails to respect autonomy.”
The problem with your argument is that I have no reason to care about autonomy. Once again, you care about autonomy, but that has nothing to do with anyone else whatsoever. I am not obligated to respect anyone’s autonomy because of your feelings, nor is anyone else.
3) It’s not about my intuitions denying things. It is about recognizing that something doesn’t exist. While it is unlikely to find someone who lacks “moral” concern for others (And you are taking advantage of undefined terms here to incorporate non moral concern into moral concern), it is about noticing that no two people agree about what that concern is.
You care so much about autonomy, but lots of people have no care for it at all, and find it actively morally polluting.
The fact that one man had God specifically tell him that Jesus is God, and another man had God specifically tell him that Jesus is not God, and that Mohammed is his greatest prophet is not evidence that one of them is hallucinating and the other is right, it is evidence that they are both hallucinating.
Likewise, the fact that you you believe your personal feelings about what other people should do is a moral reality and someone else believes their own personal feelings about others is a moral reality is not evidence that moral reality exists, and one of you is right. It is evidence that you are both mistaking personal feelings for moral reality.
People all want the same things. They pretend not to, and they dress it up in different clothes, but it all boils down to the same stuff. Which means that differences in definition will be surficial only.
Yes, clearly what the Pope wants is only superficially different from what I want.
Clearly your preferences for adult females or males are only superficially different from a pedophiles preferences for five year olds.
I think, and I may be going out on a limb here, you should reevaluate what constitutes a superficial difference.
Kaelik:
I’m pretty much certain that you’ve missed the argument I was making. Roughly put there are two points.
1. I’m not going to say that everyone has to be compelled by morals. I’m too much of a fan of science to think we can get away with relying on intuition. My only point will be you shouldn’t extrapolate too far because to really not care is something that we should only consider a problem, if it is in fact a problem. It’s certainly possible for the world to be threatened by marzipan asteroids; I don’t think I’m taking out that particular insurance policy any time soon. Now you may try to argue against this by saying, as you appear to, that you don’t care to act at all morally. I’m going to admit I find that doubtful and there’s every chance if pressed you’ll resort to making moral claims. If it turns out however you can consistently avoid making moral claims I can say with certainty that you far from typical and definitely not the sort of person I’m going to take seriously when we get down to the business of ethics. Arbitrary yes but no more so than your own position.
2. A completely separate point is whether there can be real moral facts. Again I’ll come back to science here. I don’t know if there are any such things as real moral facts. What I do know is that we can’t go far wrong using the tools that science provides to find out. The problem that will always get thrown here is that how people talk about morals is contradictory or confused and I agree. But we need to remember that concepts aren’t neutral. Einstein as I understand it developed both General and Special relativity by employing thought experiments; concepts were his telescope. Equally, the fact that the terms we use are really a hodge podge of contradictory intuitions and desires means that they cannot do the job of allowing us to perceive moral principles. If however we hone our concepts and make them specific enough, there’s no reason they can’t take the place of scientific instruments in a science of morals. My argument then is that a conclusion that that kind of a science comes to, has as much right as the most robust of scientific discoveries, to be seen of as real.