I’m reading Decoding the Language of God: Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer? by George Cunningham, a retired geneticist. It’s an extended response to Francis Collins’s The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. It’s good stuff.

Cunningham asks some telling questions on page 65:

Collins finally gives up any claim of being a reasonable scientist when he says, “we may never fully understand the reasons” for suffering as part of God’s plan. What kind of God expects us to live according to a plan that makes no sense to us and is beyond our comprehension? What kind of God would give us a brain that can reason and follow logic then expect us to believe in and worship an irrational, unintelligible, or evil God?

Quite – that’s just about exactly what I said in my essay for 50 Voices of Disbelief. I said it at more length, because I think it’s absolutely crucial, and central.

God shouldn’t be testing our faith. If it wants to test something it should be testing our ability to detect frauds and cheats and liars – not our gormless credulity and docility and willingness to be conned. God should know the difference between good qualities and bad ones, and not be encouraging the latter at the expense of the former.

But then (we are told) “faith” would be too easy; in fact, it would be compelled, and that won’t do. Faith is a kind of heroic discipline, like yoga or playing the violin. Faith has to overcome resistance, or it doesn’t count. If God just comes right out and tells us, beyond possibility of doubt, that God exists, that’s an unworthy shortcut, like a sprinter taking steroids. No, we have to earn faith by our own efforts, which means by believing God exists despite all the evidence indicating it doesn’t and the complete lack of evidence indicating it does.

In other words, God wants us to veto all our best reasoning faculties and methods of inquiry, and to believe in God for no real reason. God wants us not to do what we do in all the rest of life when we really do want to find something out – where the food is, when the storm is going to hit, whether the water is safe to drink, what medication to take for our illness – and simply decide God exists, like tossing a coin.

I refuse. I refuse to consider a God “good” that expects us to ignore our own best judgment and reasoning faculties. That’s a deal-breaker. That’s nothing but a nasty trick. This God is supposed to have made us, after all, so it made us with these reasoning faculties, which, when functioning properly, can detect mistakes and obvious lies – so what business would it have expecting us to contradict all that for no good reason? As a test? None. It would have no business doing that.

A God that permanently hides, and gives us no real evidence of its existence – yet considers it a virtue to have faith that it does exist despite the lack of evidence – is a God that’s just plain cheating, and I want nothing to do with it. It has no right to blame us for not believing it exists, given the evidence and our reasoning capacities, so if it did exist and did blame us, it would be a nasty piece of work.

The tone is somewhat jokey, and I do think the whole idea is funny, but I’m also dead serious. That is exactly what I think and I also think it’s a killer objection – in the sense that a decent God just can’t be rescued from that observation. The whole set-up really is a cheat, and it can’t be seen as anything else. We do have faculties that work, and it is beneficial for us that they work, yet when it comes to God we are supposed to do the opposite of what we do the rest of the time. We are supposed to veto our own cognitive abilities and just believe things for no good reason. That’s backward. A decent God shouldn’t expect that kind of reversal. It’s a cheat and it’s also an insult – which is probably why we argumentative atheists get so riled at people like Collins. He’s a scientist himself, yet he endorses this reversal – this cheat and insult.

If you checked News today you may have noticed that I did a Q&A at Science and Religion. This is faintly interesting or amusing or both because back at the beginning of the month, a mere couple of weeks ago, I was pointing out the different language used there for three men on the one hand and one woman on the other hand. Well they’re good sports at Science and Religion; Heather Wax thanked me for my comments and invited me to do this Q and A. So I did.

I enjoyed doing it, because this question interests me. I’m interested in social pressure and expectations and how they can become internalized and taken for granted so that we don’t know they’re operating and we think we’re making up our own minds when in fact we’re influenced by what other people think we should be doing and saying and wearing, along with a thousand other things. Don’t go thinking I think I’m immune to that kind of thing, because I don’t at all. I know very well I’m not.

I also don’t object to that, given that the alternative is just to be completely random, and what good would that be? We’re all influenced by a million things, and most of that we wouldn’t be without – that’s why we read books and talk to each other, after all. We operate in a context and at a particular time, we admire some things and despise others, we do things and say things for reasons. It all has to come from somewhere. But – it’s as well to be aware that influence is influence, as opposed to thinking it’s just How Things Are and How They Have to Be.

The thing about women and aggression is that it may or may not be the case that women as such are averse to aggression, but it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people want women to be averse to aggression, in the sense of compliant, complaisant, not argumentative. That level of aversion to perceived aggression would be a huge handicap for women, so if we are in fact by nature that turned off by argument and disagreement, we should train ourselves to get over it. We shouldn’t embrace claims that we are so ‘nice’ and conflict-averse that we react to a few brisk words from Dawkins or Hitchens with squeals of horror. We should be tougher than that. That doesn’t mean we should be brutal or sadistic, it just means we should be able to play with the big kids without bursting into tears all the time. It means we should be grown ups.

I despise Joe Lieberman. I always have, but every time I hear about him again, I despise him more. Treacherous, self-satisfied, self-aggrandizing, self-admiring – happy to make millions of fellow-citizens worse off than they would otherwise be, just for the sake of his own preening smirking ego. What a sack of shit.

Jerry Coyne’s post on Francis Collins versus Primo Levi on theodicy prompted me to read Survival in Auschwitz again. So I am. I read this passage earlier today, on p 41, in which Levi reports something another prisoner told him:

…precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.

A couple of days ago I read a passage in Lauren Slater’s Inside Skinner’s Box. The book is about various famous experiments in psychology, and it starts with probably the most famous of all, the Milgram experiment. Slater talks to two men who took part in the experiment in the early 60s, one who didn’t fully obey but stopped at 150 volts, and one who went all the way to the end. The latter, when he was debriefed at the end of the experiment, was horrified. “You thought you were really giving shocks, and nothing can take away from you the knowledge of how you acted. There’s no turning back.”

So Slater asks him, “I would guess you think the experiments were essentially unethical, that they caused you harm.”

No, he replies. No. “Not at all. If anything, just the opposite.”

She stares at him.

“The experiments,” he continues, “caused me to reevalute my life. They caused me to confront my own compliance and really struggle with it. I began to see closeted homosexuality, which is just another form of compliance, as a moral issue. I came out. I saw how important it was to develop a strong moral center. I felt my own moral weakness and I was appalled…I saw how pathetically vulnerable I was to authority, so I kept a strict eye on myself and learned to buck expectations.” [p 60]

Those two passages seem to me to be saying essentially the same thing, and a very important thing it is.

Poor bishop. He may have just meant something like ‘Take the Taliban seriously,’ but he said more than that.

There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the west could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it’s not honest really. The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.”

Yes but…pretty much everything they do that is relevant to this discussion is bad. They probably manage to sleep and scratch itches in ways that are not bad, but their public activities are bad. They do bad things. They treat people badly. Life under them is harsh and deprived and subject to violence.

And they cannot and should not be admired for their conviction to their faith, because their faith is narrow and cruel and misogynist, and because it motivates them to treat people like so much dust for a god to sweep. They cannot and should not be admired for their loyalty to each other because that is simply the obverse of their muderous hatred of everyone else. It’s slightly bizarre to see a bishop failing to understand this – it seems so obvious and elementary and essential to understand.

“To blanket them all as evil and paint them as black is not helpful in a very complex situation.” Bishop Venner said that everyone in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, would have to be included in discussions to find a solution to the conflict. “Afghanistan is going we hope in the end to find a way to live together with justice and prosperity for all. In order to do that we have to involve all the people of Afghanistan to find it.”

Yes, we hope, but if the Taliban are part of that, ‘justice’ will be ruled out, so pious hopes are worth nothing. Maybe some or many or most current Taliban can be turned, can become reasonable and fair and peaceable – but they have to be turned. A Taliban that remains the Taliban is not going to lead to a way to live together with justice and prosperity for all. That would be like (as many people have been telling the bishop) like expecting Nazis to do that. It’s not a question of painting people as black, it’s a question of understanding what a particular ideology is. An ideology that is centrally about coercion and bullying and death-for-the-noncompliant isn’t one that is going to become its own opposite merely because the bombing stops.

Sad.

[T]he Qur’an’s message of equality resonated in the teaching that women and men have been created from a single self and are each other’s guides who have the mutual obligation to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong. But, then, there are those other verses that Muslims read as saying that men are better than women and their guardians and giving men the right to unfettered polygyny and even to beat a recalcitrant wife. To read the Qur’an in my youth was thus to be caught up in a seemingly irresolvable and agonizing dilemma of how to reconcile these two sets of verses not just with one another but also with a view of God as just, consistent, merciful, and above sexual partisanship.

Right. And the solution is to realize that the Qur’an is a book like other books, and that one is free to take from it what one admires and ignore or dispute the rest; that, indeed, one is free to ignore all of it. That is the only real solution, because anything short of that commits one to paltering with bad harmful unjust ideas.

It has taken the better part of my life to resolve this dilemma and it has involved learning (from the discipline of hermeneutics) that language–hence interpretation—is not fixed or transparent and that the meanings of a text change depending on who interprets it and how.

It’s too bad that it took so long, and that so much effort was wasted, but anyway, yes, of course. Language and interpretation are human, and therefore fallible and subject to change, and there is no requirement to take any of it as sacred and beyond criticism or alteration. That’s all there is to it – so there’s really no need to fret about how to interpret the Qur’an, or any other book.

Most Muslims, however, are unconvinced by this argument and it may be because viewing God’s speech (thus also God) as patriarchal allows the conservatives to justify male privilege…

Ya think? But at any rate, that is why all this hermeneutics is a waste of time and effort. Believe in a just god if you like, but don’t waste your energy trying to reconcile a centuries-old patriarchal book with your own view of sexual equality.

Pathetic that the New Statesman thinks it’s worth wasting time and effort on such an enterprise.

The archbishop is miffed. He’s irritated, he’s annoyed, he’s wounded, he’s upset. He thinks it’s all a mistake. He can’t understand, he just can’t understand.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has accused the Government of treating all religious believers as “oddities” and “eccentric”. Dr Rowan Williams said ministers were wrong to think that Christian beliefs were no longer relevant in modern Britain and he criticised Labour for looking at religious faith as a “problem” rather than valuing the contribution it made to society.

But whether religious beliefs are ‘relevant’ or not is not the only issue, nor is it necessarily the most important one. ‘Relevant’ is notoriously a weasel-word anyway – it’s really just a stand-in for majority will. Christian beliefs may or may not be ‘relevant,’ but that has nothing to do with whether or not they are true, or justified, or reasonable. Truth and reason are also still ‘relevant’ in modern Britain, and Christian beliefs are in considerable tension with both. The archbishop could pay more attention to that fact, but of course his job calls for him to conceal it rather than address it.

Dr Williams told The Daily Telegraph: “The trouble with a lot of Government initiatives about faith is that they assume it is a problem, it’s an eccentricity, it’s practised by oddities, foreigners and minorities.”

The archbishop has glimpsed a truth here, but of course it is part of his job to conceal the real nature of that truth. ‘Faith’ is an eccentricity in the sense that it is a flawed way to think and inquire. It’s not an eccentricity in the sense of being a minority practice, but it is an eccentricity in the sense of being off-center, mistaken, wrong. Naturally the archbish doesn’t want to admit that – but he could just keep quiet, instead of trying to bully the government into coddling this mistaken way of thinking.

The victims of the Catholic church also see the pope’s eyewash as self-serving and beside the point – and above all as a gross evasion of accountability.

Marie Collins, who was abused in 1960 by a priest when she was a patient at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children…pointed out the statement “doesn’t deal with the past. No one has taken responsibility for what went on in Dublin. There is no accountability.”…Andrew Madden, who was abused by Ivan Payne when he was an altar boy in Dublin’s Cabra parish…[said it was] “self-serving nonsense”…and he for one, as a survivor, hadn’t asked for prayers. “And they say they listen to survivors?” The statement was “an attempt to deflect attention away from accountability”.

That’s certainly how it looks to me. There is something more than a little sickening about the head of an organization responding to a report of that organization’s long-term systematic protection of abusive employees by making a big fuss about his own emotions while completely failing, not to say refusing, to take any real responsibility. It’s as if the pope thinks that all he has to do is make a display of his own appropriate feelings when really his feelings are entirely beside the point; what is wanted is accountability, and the feelings of one guy are no good as a substitute.

Both he and Ms Collins said what was necessary now was for the five sitting bishops named in the Murphy report to resign. “All bishops in place over the period investigated by the commission should step down,” said Ms Collins. “They are collectively responsible for what went on in the diocese. It all happened on their watch. They must take responsibility.”…Andrew Madden dismissed the pope’s intention of writing a pastoral letter to the Irish people with a “big deal!” comment. He too felt the five serving bishops named in the Murphy report must resign. They had been “responsible for covering up for paedophiles,” he said, and should “go, go, go”.

See? Emoting is no good, showy apologizing is no good, talk of prayers and pastoral letters is no good. They have to take responsibility – and, remarkably, they’re not doing it.

One in Four chief executive Maeve Lewis said she was “deeply disappointed” at the pope’s statement. “His reaction is wholly inadequate…We had hoped that the pope might apologise for the culture of secrecy and cover-up by Catholic Church authorities documented by the report and that he might accept responsibility for his role in the creation of that culture,” she said. His response echoed “that of the Irish bishops in attempting to focus blame for the destruction of countless lives on individual sex-offending priests rather than accepting accountability for the role of the Catholic Church authorities in recklessly endangering children,” she said.

It’s not just a few individual bad apples, it’s the institution. It will be a chilly day in hell before the pontiff admits that.

Really. Really. There is a limit.

After meeting Ireland’s most senior Catholic clerics in Rome, Pope Benedict said he shared the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in the country.

Don’t insult us. Don’t insult everyone over the age of two. Don’t insult the victims of your horrible tyrannical authoritarian unaccountable church. Don’t talk self-serving self-flattering nonsense. Don’t pretend you’re all shocked and upset and distraught now when this crap has been going on for decades upon decades! Don’t pretend you’ve only just found out about it. Come on, Ben – you know we know that’s ridiculous – so don’t insult us.

The Vatican said ‘the Holy Father was deeply disturbed and distressed.’ Well poor baby, but why was he not deeply disturbed and distressed before? Why did he not give a rat’s ass while the report was in progress and the Vatican ignored all its questions? To say nothing of while the abuse and the cover-up of the abuse and the perpetuation of the abuse via refusal to do anything about it, were going on? Why is his distress so god damn late? Why is he bothering to do a Bernie Madoff, pretending to be all sorry and repentant after it is no longer possible to conceal and deny and hide?

”He wishes once more to express his profound regret at the actions of some members of the clergy who have betrayed their solemn promises to God, as well as the trust placed in them by the victims and their families, and by society at large.” The Vatican said the Holy Father shared the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in Ireland, and that he was united with them in prayer at this difficult time in the life of the Church.

No he doesn’t! [jumps up and down in fury until the windows rattle] He doesn’t, he doesn’t, he doesn’t! It’s all soothing oil, it’s all sleazy self-exculpation. He does not share the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in Ireland because he and his Vatican are what the outrage, betrayal and shame are all about. He doesn’t get to make himself another subject; he’s the object. He’s not one of the victims, he’s the top perpetrator. He has an unbelievable gall claiming to feel all this sorrowful emotion when he is the head of an institution that did everything it could to protect itself and did nothing to protect children who were assaulted by its priests. He shouldn’t be talking eyewash about his emotions, he should be saying the Vatican behaved like a criminal organization. He should resign. They should all resign. They should fold up their tents and go do something useful.

And knock off the ‘Holy Father’ crap, too. With a father like that, who needs enemies?

Just to be thorough about it, I also disagree with Hemant Mehta. (I’m not crazy about his title, for one thing – it implies that atheists in general are not ‘friendly’ and perhaps that they are hostile and mean and crabby.) He starts out well, pointing out that ‘aggressive’ and ‘friendly’ atheists actually want the same things and aren’t as distinct as Stephen Prothero claims. But then…

The difference is that the “aggressive” types don’t care who they offend. They’ll go after religion in all its forms — it doesn’t matter if they criticize the Vatican or the local church down the street or your sweet neighbor who happens to be religious.

That just isn’t true. It just isn’t true that we ‘go after’ sweet people who happen to be religious. We do go after people who do horrible things for religious reasons – but that can’t be what Mehta meant by people who are sweet and happen to be religious. He has to have meant sweet people who are not made cruel by their religion. Well we don’t ‘go after’ people like that! We don’t refrain from disputing religious truth claims on the grounds that people like that exist – but that is not the same thing as ‘going after’ them. It does get pretty tiresome to have people constantly accusing us of being more sadistic than we in fact are.

The “friendly” types are willing to do some triage here. They’re not going to spend the same amount of energy going after a local pastor or national politician who happens to espouse a personal belief in a god. There are more important battles to fight.

But what has the local pastor done? It depends, doesn’t it. If the local pastor is just the local pastor, most ‘new’ atheists also don’t spend much energy going after her. The national politician is another matter – national politicians in a secular democracy really shouldn’t be ‘espousing’ a personal belief in a god, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of energy to say so. Of course there are more important battles to fight, but so what? We can multi-task.

I would much rather keep as allies those religious people who do things like support sound science, fight for equal rights for the GLBT community, and believe in separation of church and state.

But why is it one or the other? Why would religious people who support sound science, fight for equal rights for the GLBT community, and believe in separation of church and state stop doing those things merely because some atheists (or all atheists for that matter) are explicit about their atheism? I don’t believe for a second that they would. Who is that stupid and petty? People who support sound science, fight for equal rights for the GLBT community, and believe in separation of church and state are probably already not the kind of people to change all their views and actions because they’re in a snit. They might even be so reasonable and fair-minded and sensible that they really think atheists have every right to be public about their atheism. They might even be interested in the arguments!

I know others prefer a no-holds-barred approach, but I think that’s counterproductive when dealing with the people we want to reach out to the most — those who are on the fence.

What fence? Which fence are we talking about? And who’s ‘we’? What is this imaginary ‘we’ that accommodationists always have in mind? The always-right secular but friendly but atheist but civil but liberal but soft-spoken…Everyliberal? Or what? Why is there a ‘we’ who wants to reach out to people on the fence – why aren’t the people on the fence a ‘we’ who want to reach out to us, but find us too boring and anxious and timid to bother with? There’s something weirdly patronizing and de haut en bas about all this grand strategizing and we-invoking, as if all accommodationists were best buddies with David Axelrod or something. Why do the ‘friendly’ atheists think they have some heavy responsibility for what they perhaps think of as ‘the atheist community’ and how it appears to everyone else? I don’t know – but it makes me so huffy that I think I will become a conservative evangelical Republican, just to punish them.

I’m late in doing a meany-atheist dance on Stephen Prothero’s sweet little valentine to the laydeez but here it is anyway.

Today, most Americans associate unbelief with the old-boys network of New Atheists, but there is a new generation of unbelievers emerging, some of them women and most of them far friendlier than Hitchens and his ilk. Although the arguments of angry men gave this movement birth, it could be the stories of women that allow it to grow up.

So men are angry and women are friendly. So angry is the opposite of friendly and vice versa. Well that’s wrong for a start – it’s perfectly possible for people to be both. Being angry about particular things does not rule out being friendly; it especially doesn’t rule out being friendly some of the time. Granted some people are friendly all of the time, but they tend to be bores or intrusive or both. Who doesn’t know this? People who are never angry about anything aren’t paying attention! You can’t have real compassion without anger. If you see the world as it is, you’re going to be angry some of the time.

That fact by itself makes Prothero’s ludicrously sexist opposition incredibly insulting. Men have the energy and passion and commitment to get angry, and women are lukewarm and permanently unthinkingly friendly. Well the hell with that – and fortunately it isn’t true.

I heard two very different arguments at this event. The first was the old line of the New Atheists: Religious people are stupid and religion is poison, so the only way forward is to educate the idiots and flush away the poison. The second was less controversial and less utopian: From this perspective, atheism is just another point of view, deserving of constitutional protection and a fair hearing. Its goal is not a world without religion but a world in which believers and nonbelievers coexist peaceably, and atheists are respected, or at least tolerated.

That’s a lot of bad stupidness in one paragraph. One, that is not ‘the old line of the New Atheists.’ Very few ‘new’ atheists say simply ‘Religious people are stupid’ – that’s a typical anti-atheist canard, meant to inflame hatred against any atheists who actually argue the case for atheism. Two – that second thing is crap. If atheism is ‘just another point of view,’ then it really is on all fours with religion (and other ‘perspectives’), where we just choose whatever we want to believe and there is no need for a reality check or an argument or evidence. But atheism of the kind that goes to meetings, as opposed to just non-theism, is based on reasons. People are active or argumentative or meeting-attending atheists for reasons, real reasons, and we don’t agree that atheism is ‘just another point of view,’ because we think it gets things right. We think theism gets things wrong, and atheism gets things (the relevant things) right. We don’t think all points of view are pretty much the same kind of thing, all mixing it up together in the great salad bowl of life.

These competing approaches could not be further apart. One is an invitation to a duel. The other is a fair-minded appeal for recognition and respect. Or, to put it in terms of the gay rights movement, one is like trying to turn everyone gay and the other is like trying to secure equal rights for gay men and lesbians.

No. Dead wrong. Wrong all the way down. Wanting to confront religion and dispute its truth claims frankly (which does not equate to having the goal of ‘a world without religion,’ which I think most of us know is a highly unrealistic goal and potentially coercive) is not an invitation to a duel, it is simply an expectation of an equal right to talk freely. It is also not the case that the ‘fair’ alternative is simply ‘a fair-minded appeal for recognition and respect,’ because that’s not the real or the only issue. We don’t want to beg for recognition and respect just because we exist, because we are another point of view; we want to be able to say why religious truth claims are mistaken. That’s part of what ‘new’ atheism is about. We are of course legally able to do that, but we’re not always socially or institutionally able to, and that’s why there is a need for campaigning and agitation and, yes, anger.

There was one female speaker, however, and she spoke in a different voice. Amanda Gulledge is a self-described “Alabama mom” who got on her first plane and took her first subway ride in order to attend this event. Although Gulledge stood up on behalf of logic and reason, she spoke from the heart. Instead of arguing, she told stories of the “natural goodness” of her two sons…

Got that? Is it clear enough? She’s ‘a mom,’ so she’s acceptable – she’s not one of those angry loudmouth aggressive women who would dream of self-describing as say a lawyer or a geneticist or an engineer – no, she’s a ‘mom,’ and bless her heart, she speaks from that cuddly organ instead of from her pesky and doubtless feeble little head, and she talks about her children. Isn’t that sweet? Don’t you feel less threatened already? Now she’s the kind of woman we can approve of, we professors in religion departments.

It really doesn’t matter what you believe for no good reason, as long as you believe something for no good reason.

The Parliament of the World’s Religions has brought together representatives from 80 nationalities and more than 220 faith traditions for seven days of debate and dialogue…The parliament could hardly be accused of failing to account for the broadest possible range of spirituality and religious experience. Pagans, Zoroastrians, and even atheists make up the rich mix of perspectives. Organisers have faced some criticism for giving a platform to the Church of Scientology – which some accuse of being more of a business than a conventional religion. But this is an event which is prepared to given even the most unusual new religious movements a fair hearing.

Because – because – because if somebody somewhere believes it, it deserves a fair hearing. And notice how atheism becomes not a denial or rejection of theistic religion but simply one more ‘perspective.’ Even atheism gets a fair hearing. No real attention, presumably, but a fair hearing.

Concerns have been also raised about whether religious perspectives are taken seriously, particularly by secular governments in the West.

Which is a fundamentally absurd concern, since a secular government that took ‘religious perspectives’ (see? there it is again) seriously would not be a secular government any more.

Prominent American rabbi David Saperstein told delegates that religious leaders must work hard to make their voice heard, particularly concerning the moral questions facing the world…”In a world in which you can do everything, what you should do – the moral question – is the fundamental challenge facing humanity. And on that question, the religious communities have urgent, profound, indispensible wisdom to offer” he said.

No they don’t – not as religious communities they don’t. As people they do, but no more so than other people, and in some ways less so. Religion doesn’t bring anything useful to moral reasoning, and it often does impede it or misdirect it.

Quote for the day, from Oliver Kamm.

I reject – in the sense that I’m antagonistic towards them, not just that I don’t accept them – all religious claims to truth.

Precisely. That is no doubt what put the ‘new’ in ‘new atheism’ – the addition of antagonism to non-acceptance. The move from plain unbelief to unbelief plus dislike. The adoption of Kingsley Amis’s ‘Yes [I’m an atheist] but it’s more that I hate him.’ The brazen unapologetic frank hostility to all religious claims to truth, because they are religious claims to truth, and therefore not only worthless but also harmful, because religion is not the way to get at truth, and pretending it is just trains people to learn bad non-functional ways to think.

We are allowed to do that. Call it new or call it old, it makes no difference; we are still allowed to do that. Othering, shunning, name-calling, finger-pointing, ‘framing’ – none of them are going to convince us otherwise. Genuinely good arguments might, but all that other crap isn’t going to do the job.

Have a nice day.

When othering the ‘New’ atheists, there is no need to be too nice about accuracy. Robert Wright gives a demonstration of that to join the growing stack of such demonstrations from otherwise liberal commentators.

[T]he New Atheists’ main short-term goal wasn’t to turn believers into atheists, it was to turn atheists into New Atheists — fellow fire-breathing preachers of the anti-gospel. The point was to make it not just uncool to believe, but cool to ridicule believers.

The usual thing – exaggeration (to put it charitably), malicious rhetoric, sheer invention. (Who says the point was to make it cool to ridicule unbelievers?) Childish stuff – in Foreign Policy. What next, Rush Limbaugh writing for The Wilson Quarterly?

Even on the secular left, the alarming implications of the “crusade against religion” are becoming apparent: Though the New Atheists claim to be a progressive force, they often abet fundamentalists and reactionaries, from the heartland of America to the Middle East.

And then we get several paragraphs about how the ‘New’ Atheists do that sinister thing. It’s sleazy, McCarthy-like stuff, as so much of this kind of thing from the ‘we hate New atheists’ crowd is. I hear the Senator’s whining voice, I see his blue-whiskered mug.

[T]here’s a subtle but potent sense in which New Atheism can steer foreign policy to the right…Most New Atheists aren’t expressly right wing, but even so their discounting of the material causes of Islamist radicalism can be “objectively” right wing.

Uh huh. They claim to be one thing, but they ‘abet’ another; there’s a subtle but potent sense in which they can do something very sinister and creepy which I can’t quite explain; they aren’t actually right wing but in fact they are, and any Stalinist would see it the same way. (Wright quotes Orwell for ‘objectively’ but Orwell was using the Stalinist term with considerable irony.)

Then he just flops all the way over into Armstrong territory, where compassion has always been at the heart of all religion.

All the great religions have shown time and again that they’re capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don’t feel threatened or disrespected.

Bullshit. All the great religions have shown time and again that when they have unquestioned power, they use it, and they don’t use it for tolerance and civility, they use it for social control and for their own protection and well-being. Robert Wright should take a few minutes to ponder the tolerance and civility of the Irish Catholic church.

I don’t understand New Labour.

[Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor] was poised to become the first Roman Catholic bishop in the Upper House since the Reformation, as part of a drive by the Prime Minister to appoint senior leaders of all the main faiths to sit alongside Church of England bishops. Privately, Gordon Brown had told the cardinal that he was keen for him to provide leadership in the Lords once he had secured backing from the Catholic Church.

Why? Why the hell? Do we really have to bother pointing out that Gordon Brown is the leader of the Labour party? Do we really have to bother pointing out that the Catholic church has not generally been seen as an ally (much less a member) of the left, and that there are many strong and compelling reasons for that? What is a Labour PM doing telling a reactionary Catholic former archbishop that he (the PM) is keen for him to provide leadership in the Lords once he had secured backing from the Catholic Church? He might as well be telling Generalissimo Francisco Franco that he is keen for him to provide leadership in the Lords once he had secured backing from the Falange party. He might as well be sucking up to Pinochet or Marcos or Mussolini. He might as well be patting Antonin Scalia on the back and saying ‘Good job Nino.’ What is the matter with them? Why have they decided they have to cozy up to reactionary religions and their putative leaders?

The cardinal’s refusal of a peerage is a setback to Mr Brown’s attempt to make the Lords chamber more representative of the nation’s religious diversity.

Sigh. It’s hopeless. Mr Brown shouldn’t be doing that, he should be attempting something in the other direction, which would be to make the Lords chamber less representative of any religions at all. He should be trying to reduce the power of the established church, not to build up the power of its rivals.

So I guess Tennessee schools must not be very good – not if the mayor of Arlington is anything to go by. He’s on Facebook, so he shared some thoughts there.

Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch ‘The Charlie Brown Christmas Special’ and our muslim president is there, what a load…..try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it….w…hen the answer should simply be ‘yes’….”

See that’s why I’m not a big fan of religion and the claims it makes – I don’t like being told (even in a newspaper story about a small town mayor’s Facebook rant) that the answer to that question should simply be yes. I also don’t like elected officials claiming that other elected officials should answer yes. We’re not supposed to have a religious test for public office.

…you obama people need to move to a muslim country…oh wait, that’s America….pitiful…you know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has stayed in there, things would be different……..

What a pinhead. What an ugly dirty squalid little mind. How sad for Tennessee.

Austin Dacey points out an interesting document.

In 2006, ISESCO [the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization] published a Guide for the Incorporation of Reproductive Health and Gender Concepts into Islamic Education Curricula, obviously a critically important subject area where some scientific facts are in order. The Guide, which can be found on ISESCO’s Web site, is addressed to curriculum developers, textbook writers, and those responsible for training instructors in formal Islamic education for students aged six to nineteen. Its introduction stresses the need “to supply, at the proper time, adolescents with appropriate health information on the biological aspects within the framework of Islamic rulings and values” and emphasizes “the fact that Sharia, whether in its original or interpretative sources, is the only source for establishing, interpreting, clarifying, and incorporating reproductive health issues, including adolescent health, in the programs of formal education.”

There’s a lot that could be said about that, but one thing in particular is quite important. Defenders of Islamism and Islam and Sharia often like to rebuke critics of same by saying that Islam and Sharia cannot be essentialized because they are not just one thing – they are rather, in some versions of this rebuke, the practices and/or beliefs of all Muslims – which in effect means they are everything and nothing, because there is no way to know what that would be, or what it would not be either.

At any rate, the rebuke and the claim are wrong, as shown by documents like this. ISESCO is an official body of some sort, and ISESCO decidedly assumes there is such a thing as Sharia, ‘whether in its original or interpretative sources.’ It assumes there is such a thing as Sharia, and then having assumed that, it assumes that everything has to be in compliance with it, and then having assumed that, it goes ahead and lays down the law about how to do that. So it’s really somewhat futile for outsiders to claim that Sharia isn’t so bad really because it isn’t any one thing, let a hundred flowers bloom, so…well so there’s just no problem, that’s all. In the real world, official bodies maintain that Sharia is one thing, ‘whether in its original or interpretative sources,’ and that all other things have to do what it says. There is a problem.

In this Guide, as in numerous other documents, ISESCO is only doing its job. Rather than seeking Muslim integration with the global research and academic communities, its stated mission is to advance science “within the framework of the civilizational reference of the Islamic world and in the light of the human Islamic values and ideals.” In this case, ISESCO does not even do students the service of setting forth the relevant empirical evidence for the purpose of beating it senseless with religious precepts.

An organization for Islamic Science is an organization for a contradiction in terms.

The Vatican is restless, and fretful, and aggrieved. The Vatican thinks it’s all most unfair.

the Vatican is concerned about the way in which human rights are being used to regulate the activities of church organisations or to restrict religious displays in public places. For example, the decision of the European Court of Human Rights to order the removal of crucifixes from the walls of state schools in Italy was greeted with dismay by Catholics.

Why? What business do ‘Catholics’ have being dismayed about such a thing? Do the state schools belong to them? No. Do they have authority over state schools? No.* So what business would they have sticking their paraphernalia on the walls of classrooms in state schools? And why, looking at the matter from a wider perspecitve, would it be a good thing for classrooms to have lethal torture machines nailed to their walls? They’re nasty, ugly, sick things if you look at them from outside the religion – yet a particular religion wants to impose them on state school classrooms. It’s a peculiar religion, too – it frets about its right to impose lethal torture devices on the attention of school children, but it’s debonair about the rights of school children to be protected from priestly rapists. It has disordered priorities, if you ask me.

*Do they? Is Italy worse than I realize?

Beautifully put:

This rejection of the theistic God, and acknowledgment that the problem of evil cannot be swept away through theodicy, might sound like music to atheists’ ears…But rather than characterizing such a position as a significant concession to the new atheists, Armstrong insists on continuing to regard them as her primary opponents. Moreover, she is unable to hold herself consistently to her own apophatic view…[O]n her understanding the apophatic position, rather than discouraging metaphysical speculation, in fact licenses and encourages it…In other words, it is precisely our lack of knowledge of God that enables us to say, well, pretty much whatever we want about God…This is mysticism and metaphysical hand-waving raised to a truly objectionable level. If you do not know what you are denying then you also do not know what you are asserting; our inability to conceptualize cannot, on the one hand, prevent skeptics from denying Christ’s divinity while at the same time allowing the faithful to assert it.

But that is of course how Armstrong attempts to use her claims about metaphors and non-literalism and apophaticism – as a stick to beat the atheists while mostly leaving the theists to their own devices. It’s a transparent ploy, and yet it works.

If the concept of “God” is genuinely empty, as it needs to be if evidence and rational criticism are to be considered irrelevant to God-talk, then in a quite literal sense people who talk about God cannot say and do not know what they are talking about.

Precisely. This is what I keep saying. I said it in the little essay I wrote for 50 Voices of Disbelief:

We’re told, in explanation of these puzzles, that we’re merely humans and we simply don’t understand. Very well, but then we don’t understand – we don’t know anything about all this, all we’re doing is guessing, or wishing or hoping. Yet we’re so often told things about God as if they were well-established facts. God is “mysterious” only when sceptics ask difficult questions. The rest of the time believers are cheerily confident of their knowledge. That’s a good deal too convenient.

Troy Jollimore goes on:

In her more radical mode, Armstrong wants to preserve religious talk from questions of truth—in our ordinary sense of “truth”—by draining them of content. But when we lose content we do not only lose truth, we lose meaning as well. The apophatic retort to the skeptic, then, seems to reduce to: “You don’t know what you’re talking about—indeed, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. So how dare you contradict me!”

Read the whole thing – it’s terrific. (Thanks to Karel De Pauw for sending the link.)

The Irish Times notes how globally the Vatican thinks and acts.

Ultimate responsibility for the way in which the safety of children was so recklessly ignored does not lie with any individual bishop. It does not lie even with the Irish hierarchy as a whole. It lies with the Vatican. We know this because the approach to allegations of child abuse was consistent, not simply between bishops or across Irish dioceses, but around the world. There was a way of doing things – keeping the crimes secret and moving the abusers on to another parish until the whole pattern began to repeat itself.

World government with a vengeance, that is – a theistic institution that has managed to make itself a state yet has global authority, and is focused on its own well-being before that of anyone else on the planet.

It is in the light of the primary role of the Vatican that we must see the unwillingness of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and of the papal nuncio to respond to requests for information from the Murphy commission. The Taoiseach, in a painfully deferential statement in the Dáil, has endorsed these refusals as acts of “good faith” consistent with diplomatic norms. This submissiveness is entirely inappropriate to the leader of a republic, some of whose most vulnerable citizens have been grievously harmed by the policies and practices of the Holy See.

Depressing, isn’t it? Once again, the powerful prosperous men of the church and the Vatican are protected and the vulnerable people are thrown to the wolves – by their own government. The prosperous men of the church and the Vatican matter, and the mere people don’t.

The Vatican does not do things lightly. When it refused to deal with the commission except through diplomatic contacts at the level of one state to another, it was not being precious. It was asserting a claim that is crucial to its efforts to avoid the consequences of its own policies. The insistence on being treated as a state rather than as a church is the key to its claim of sovereign immunity.

Which is a thing that it shouldn’t want to have. Yet it does want to have it. It wants to do bad things to people and get away with it. It wouldn’t put it that way, of course, but that’s what it wants and what it’s been doing.

It is quite disgraceful that the Taoiseach should play along with this manoeuvre by endorsing the Vatican’s behaviour towards the commission. If the Vatican is indeed to be regarded simply as a foreign state, then it is a state that has colluded in the commission of vile crimes against Irish citizens.

Quite.