Tony’s been teasing Chuck. Excellent.

Tony Blair attacked the “anti-science brigade” yesterday for threatening Britain’s path to the future. He condemned the “outrageous distortion” of campaigners against pioneering technologies, insisting that they had to be defeated. His remarks at the King’s Centre, Oxford, will be taken as a thinly-veiled swipe at the Prince of Wales. Prince Charles has dismissed GM-food trials as unethical…Scientists would have a role in all the “big questions of our time – climate change, the spread of infectious diseases, water supply, biodiversity, terrorism,” said Mr Blair who confessed that he was a science “refusenik” at school. But he stressed the need to win the “irrational public debate” often surrounding scientific research. Without referring to Prince Charles or other campaigners by name, Mr Blair condemned the “powerful and vocal lobby, with access to all the media channels” that opposed technological breakthrough.

Exactly – with access to all the media channels. That’s the part about P. Charles that is so annoying. (Applies to P. Bush, too, as a matter of fact.) He has, because of an accident of birth, access to media channels that scientists (and architects and other assorted victims of P.C.’s whims) can only dream of. If he had any sense, it would occur to him that therefore he ought to take massive care not to abuse the privilege, instead of which he abuses it up one side and down the other. He makes the world a present of his uninformed opinions on technical subjects, instead of realizing that his influence and ability to mouth off are out of all proportion to his merit, his knowledge, his expertise, his insight, his ability to judge – and he does it on subjects with life and death consequences. It’s really quite revolting (as it is in the case of P. Bush, who also has every reason to be modest and careful).

Charming.

In a startling warning to the Government, senior church and political figures have backed a report advocating force to protest against policies that are “unbiblical” and “inimical to the Christian faith”.

The Telegraph cites the ‘menacing language’ of the report and says ‘Lord Mawhinney, the Tory peer, Andy Reed, the Labour MP, and the Rt Rev Peter Forster, the Bishop of Chester, helped to produce’ it.

The report from the Evangelical Alliance says “violent revolution” should be regarded as a viable response if government legislation encroaches further on basic religious rights. The church is urged to come to a consensus that “at some point there is not only the right but the duty to disobey the state”…Proposals to ban proselytising in publicly-funded Christian projects could ultimately lead to Christians being prevented from teaching others about the Bible. This would “be unambiguously recognised by Christians as perpetrating evil that has to be resisted by deliberate acts of defiance”, the report says.

Interesting, the idea that a ban on proselytizing in publicly-funded Christian projects would be unambiguously recognized by Christians as perpetrating evil. Christians unambiguously recognize it as evil for governments to refuse to fund Christian proselytizing? So Christians think governments are absolutely obliged to fund Christian proselytizing? That’s intriguing, isn’t it? It’s almost American in its presumptuous aggressiveness.

Significantly, it comes from the Evangelical Alliance – a mainstream organisation representing 1.2 million Christians…”If, as most Christians accept, they should be politically involved in democratic processes, many believe this may, where necessary, take the form of active resistance to the state. This may encompass disobedience to law, civil disobedience, involving selective, non-violent resistance or, ultimately, violent revolution.” Mike Morris, the executive director of the Evangelical Alliance, said that the report reflected the breadth of submissions they had received. “It is not as if Christians are going to take to the streets, but we need to be able to stand up to things that are challenging the Christian conscience, regardless of the consequences.”

And the things that are challenging ‘the Christian conscience’ are things like…oh, civil rights for gays, and legal abortion, and female equality. So if people who want those things don’t submit to people in the Evangelical Alliance, well, maybe they’ll start to kill us. Jolly good; something to look forward to. And then people wonder why some of us think secularism is a good idea!

More pondering on this question of what is good and for whom. Compassion is an important human virtue, but would it be an important virtue, or a virtue at all, if humans were different kinds of entities? If we were conscious but immortal and perfect, if we never suffered, if we had no vulnerability of any kind (and didn’t know of any entities that did), would compassion be a virtue? Would we see it as a good thing? I tend to doubt it.

I had similar doubts and questions about some things Keith Ward said in a discussion with Anthony Grayling in Prospect last year.

The scientific perception of the cosmos is that it is an intelligible, law-like, mathematically complex structure, which produces intelligent moral agents by a process of increasingly integrated complexity from an initial state of extreme simplicity (the big bang).

Um – is it? I don’t think so, I think Ward stacked the deck a little there, sneaking in that ‘intelligent moral agents’ – I don’t think that is a particularly scientific perception. It’s not a terribly precise description, frankly, and it’s certainly not a complete one. Bipedal language-using primates would be a more precise description – which is not to disagree with Ward that our (inadequate) intelligence and (frighteningly inadequate) moral agency are much the most interesting (at least to us) things about us, but it is to say that’s more a moral perception than a scientific one.

Contemporary religious thought sees the purpose of creating such a cosmos as the production of finite minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another, take partial responsibility for the world and be fulfilled by knowing the supreme mind of the creator…Is this the best of possible worlds? It is the only one that could have us in it, and while we are not the best of possible beings, we are perhaps – each one of us – of great intrinsic worth.

Well, perhaps, but perhaps not. But I have to say that it strikes me as unpersuasive. Why would the purpose of creating the cosmos be the production of finite minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another? If it were, why would it take a cosmos like this to do that? Wouldn’t something smaller, simpler, and less expensive have done the job? And also if it were, are we the best, or a very good, example of minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another? If it is, why do we do so much entering into hating relationships with one another?

But the ‘why would that be the purpose of the cosmos’ question is the most basic one, because why would that be anyone or anything’s purpose? Suppose a world (a pre-cosmos world, which is tricky) without any finite minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another, and a creating entity of some kind (of what kind, we don’t know). Why would it want them? Why would it think they ought to exist, and so have the purpose of creating them when it decided to create the cosmos? That’s not clear, to say the least. So isn’t this kind of thing just more of the same? Just more of the starting from human assumptions and wants and needs and likes, and trying to make them cosmic absolutes? We think compassion is good because we suffer so we need it; we think beings like us are good because we are us and we think we are (sort of, more or less) good. It’s all local, it’s all particular, it’s all about us. It’s intuitively appealing, of course, and it may all be true, but there doesn’t really seem to be any compelling reason to think it’s true. The localism is kind of a giveaway of that.

I’ve been pondering (off and on, mostly off) this question of suffering and compassion – this idea that you can’t have one without the other, or that the one makes the other worthwhile, or acceptable, or the world that includes it more attractive. Swinburne said, as we saw:

Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes – for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives – allows us to suffer pain and disability. Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others. My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering…Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character.

As noted before, I think that’s disgusting, but it’s also true that I see what he’s getting at, especially in the last sentence. But that’s the part I want to question, and perhaps object to. The traditional theodicy view, if you like: that god wants us to have free will and wants us to have (meaningful, free) good (or holy) characters, which will include such virtues as patience and compassion and generosity, and that therefore suffering is necessary.

But the trouble with that is that, if there were no suffering, would patience and compassion and generosity be virtues? Would they be part of a holy or good character? We think they would, of course; we think they are intrinsically good, and attractive; but if we didn’t need them, would they be? I’m not sure they would. If there were no suffering, which would include hunger and deprivation of all kinds, then what would patience and compassion and generosity even be? What would they even mean? We wouldn’t need them, we’d have no use for them, they wouldn’t even have a context that would make them meaningful. Which sounds horrible – a world where we couldn’t be good in ways that we recognize, where there would be no scope for active energetic effortful goodness, sounds like an appalling flat affectless world, a world of cardboard dolls. But then – that’s because this is the one we know, so we’re conditioned to need it and expect it. We do have suffering and deprivation, so we do consider patience and compassion and generosity to be virtues. But if we didn’t, we wouldn’t. Which amounts to saying we would be completely different kinds of entities, and can’t even really imagine what goodness and badness would be in such a world. But that’s just it. What Swinburne is talking about is a very human idea of what a good or holy character is, because it’s one that matches up with our needs and lacks and all-too-familiar miseries. But why assume that if there is a god, that is god’s idea of a good character? What if god has a quite different idea of good character, one that we wouldn’t even recognize or understand, and one that doesn’t depend on suffering to make it either meaningful or possible?

In fact most of our virtues, perhaps all of them, depend on our mortality and other limitations. They wouldn’t be virtues if we weren’t fragile and needy. Courage, kindness, dedication, loyalty – we wouldn’t need them, so wouldn’t see them as virtues.

That’s another objection I have to Swinburne’s take – it’s just too local, too limited. I think it’s more interesting to try to figure out if there are any virtues that don’t depend on our condition, that really are inherent goods, even if we don’t need them. I can’t say I’ve been able to think of any. If there aren’t, we’re left with a circle, it seems to me. We have to have suffering so that people will be compassionate, but we wouldn’t need or even like compassion if we didn’t suffer, so why do we have to have suffering so that people will be compassionate if we wouldn’t want compassion if we didn’t suffer? I can’t say I can see why.

We’ve been having this lively discussion of Swinburne on suffering, so I thought I’d temporarily re-post this old comment from last June.

Richard Swinburne is interesting. I’ve said so before. So has Mark Fournier at Tachyphrenia. And now it’s time to say it some more. Because the things Swinburne says here are truly revolting, and yet they are, of course, what you get if you try to reconcile the omnipotent omnibenevolent God with the existence and abundance of suffering in the world – just what Darwin couldn’t manage to reconcile himself to. There’s an irony of sorts in the fact that it’s Swinburne’s view that is considered by many – by surprisingly many – to be the ‘devout’ and ‘holy’ and therefore (why? why therefore?) ‘good’ one, and Darwin’s that is considered the impious and wicked one. The approval of the deliberate causing and continuance of pain and suffering to billions of sentient beings is considered good, and the disapproval and rejection of that is considered wicked. That’s interesting, and it is, if you ask me, a sign of something badly corrupt at the heart of the whole swindle.

Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes — for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives — allows us to suffer pain and disability.

Good? Good explanations? Good in what sense?

Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others. My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering.

Well why stop there? It also provides pharmaceutical companies with the opportunity to develop pain medications, and nurses with the opportunity to apologize for the fact that the pain can’t be alleviated, and vicars and priests with the opportunity to pray that it will be alleviated, and God with the opportunity to refuse to alleviate it, and the funeral people with the opportunity to dispose of the corpse after the victim has committed suicide. Lots and lots of opportunities. Good. So – we should all act accordingly? We should all rush outside with our carving knives and soldering irons and distribute injuries generously around the neighborhood so that there will be further abundance of such opportunities? Suffering is a good thing because it creates these good opportunities so there should be lots more of it so we should all bend every nerve to create more of it?

No. We don’t actually think that’s the case. So why does Swinburne get to claim that it is the case, and that that’s a ‘good’ explanation? Why doesn’t everybody for miles around just tell him ‘That’s disgusting’ until he’s so embarrassed he stops saying it?

That’s a real question. I find it baffling.

Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.

Oh, godalmighty. That is such crap, and such transparent crap – so carefully arranged to get the conclusion he wants (God is okay really even though it seems to be an awful shit) with that last little escape hatch – for other people, illness not so useful. Give me a break. Swinburne looks at the world: sees that some people get ill and suffer, others don’t; needs to make this harmonize with ‘a good God’; explains that suffering is good for some people and not for others; job done.

An analogy will show that what I have written is not an ad hoc hypothesis postulated to save theism from disconfirmation.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Oh, that’s a good one. He’s not only interesting, he’s also a comedian. A sadistic comedian, but a comedian.

Oh yes – this sounds familiar.

Richard Dawkins once took part in a debate with the distinguished theologian and philosopher Richard Swinburne. The Holocaust, Swinburne suggested, had a positive element because it gave Jews an opportunity to be noble and courageous. Swinburne’s ‘grotesque piece of reasoning’, Dawkins writes in his new book, is ‘damningly typical of the theological mind’, and an attitude that reveals not just the redundancy of religion but also its immorality.

We’ve had a look at Swinburne’s grotesque reasoning before, more than once. Stuff like that gives philosophy of religion a bad name, I should think. David Attenborough is a useful counter to that kind of thing.

People sometimes say to me, “Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?” And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm.

It’s the devil’s chaplain. Darwin to Hooker: ‘What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of Nature!’

Kenan disagrees with Dawkins about religion as abusive to children though. But I in turn disagree with Kenan.

Parents indoctrinate their children with all manner of odious beliefs. That is the nature of parenting. And the nature of growing up is that young people decide for themselves, often rejecting the views of their parents. Dawkins’s argument seems to reveal less about the nature of religion than about his own pessimistic view of the human capacity for change and independent thought.

Well, no, not all parents, not necessarily, and to the extent that they do, that’s not desirable. One could make a similar sort of generalizing reply – parents beat their children, parents abuse their children, parents deny their children education, parents neglect their children. Some do, but when they do the state sometimes intervenes, and that’s a good thing. That’s not to say the state ought to intervene when parents pass on their odious beliefs, it’s just to say that it’s not necessarily desirable or okay or tolerable simply because it happens. Some children reject the views of their parents, but some don’t; the world is full of people who have odious beliefs, and the rest of us have to live with them. That’s not to say we should all zoom around indoctrinating one another and creeping into one another’s basement windows in order to murmur into the ears of one another’s children – it’s just to say the problem is not so easily dismissed.

Kenan’s amusing though.

Dawkins steamrollers over such complexities. The result, ironically, is that he ends up sounding as naive and unworldly as any happy clappy believer. ‘Imagine with John Lennon a world with no religion,’ he writes.

Hmmm I think I’ll start smaller. A world with no SUVs. That will do for a beginning.

What I keep saying! But Sean Carrol says it a lot better in a review of Eagleton’s review of Dawkins.

Okay, very good. God, in this conception, is not some thing out there in the world (or even outside the world), available to be poked and prodded and have his beard tugged upon…The previous excerpt, which defined God as “the condition of possibility,” seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves…But – inevitably – Eagleton does go ahead and burden this innocent-seeming concept with all sorts of anthropomorphic baggage. God created the universe “out of love,” is capable of “regret,” and “is an artist.” That’s crazy talk. What could it possibly mean to say that “The condition of possibility is an artist, capable of regret”? Nothing at all…And once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women’s faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.

This is (she enunciated with quiet intensity) what I keep saying. You can’t do both.

The problematic nature of this transition – from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth – is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.” It’s a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism. Attempts to fit this square peg into a manifestly round hole lead us smack into all of the classical theological dilemmas: “Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?” The reason why problems such as this are so vexing is not because our limited human capacities fail to measure up when confronted with the divine; it’s because they are legitimately unanswerable questions, arising from a set of mutually inconsistent assumptions.

That’s exactly it. Takes a cosmologist to say it so clearly. It’s not just a minor bump, it’s a deal-breaker. So Eagleton’s blithe one minute having God be ineffable and not like Gore or an octopus or his foot and the next minute having it be all kinds of specific and particular and just so and not otherwise – won’t work, and makes him look silly. Pick one and stick to it, but don’t pretend it can be both.

A very interesting discussion last week at the Valve. Similar to many discussions we have, but also different, on account of different people conducting it. It’s about Dawkins and what the Valve poster, Bill Benzon, finds ‘bothersome’ about him. He puts it this way:

As far as I can tell, my target is a certain kind of discourse, a kind which Dawkins exemplifies particularly well, but others participate in it as well. And what bothers me about this discourse is not that it is against religious belief, but that it is against the religious as well.

That’s not as clear as it might be, but I think what he’s saying is, people who are sharply critical of religious belief are ‘against’ (attacking, hostile to, unfair to, aggressive toward, offensive to, unkind to) religious believers themselves. In other words it’s yet another voice swelling the already deafening chorus saying ‘shut up about religion because it is offensive to be critical about it because it’s not possible to be critical about it without attacking the people who believe in it.’ It’s saying that it’s not morally respectable to discuss religion in frank terms because there is no way to do that without insulting – without ‘being against’ – religious believers. I dislike that chorus, for several reasons, which I’ve referred to now and then: among them are the fact that that doesn’t apply to other beliefs, and the fact that it simply adds to the already very heavy social pressure to be extra extra extra-special kind about religion.

Most commenters, I’m happy to say, share my dislike, and do an excellent job of arguing. A biggish chunk of the morning flew away while I read the comments; I recommend them. John Horgan – the ‘end of science’ guy – drops in; so does PZ; so do other interesting people. Dan Green (a Valve author who is also a B&W author) notes:

It’s puzzling to me that otherwise smart, non-mystical people like Bill Benzon, Jonathan Derbyshire, and, indeed, Thomas Nagel have come down so hard on Dawkins’s book and its “deperate arrogance.” It suggests that atheism is still far from acceptable even in “intellectual” circles.

Just so; and that’s why this kind of thing is annoying and depressing. There shouldn’t be all this pressure to closet the atheism even in ‘intellectual’ circles. It shouldn’t be a consensus. It’s a consensus even among people who claim not to like consensus. Very odd.

Muriel Gray at the Herald is not silenced.

…a nutcase Britain utterly obsessed with religion. People were threatening Jack Straw with violence; some woman (we think – for all we know it could have been Paul Gascoigne under that niquab) was claiming her right to mumble lessons at children while wearing a bag over her head, and the pope had made the hilariously Monty-Python esque declaration that he was “considering” abolishing limbo for unbaptised babies, no doubt making intelligent Catholics squirm with embarrassment at the screaming silliness of heavenly admission by human whim.

Yes, but also giving me something to write a teasing N&C about. It’s an ill wind, etc.

Let’s start with vocabulary. Let’s stop describing these tax-funded establishments as faith schools. They are superstition schools, for that is what they teach. Alongside hard facts, innocent children are hoodwinked into accepting as real the mythology of virgin births, gods who regard women with bare heads as wicked harlots, that Noah’s Ark was real and that Darwin was wrong. It’s clear that, given the rising tide of superstition sweeping our country, no politician will help end this state-funded child abuse, and so it is time to try and fight back.

But be sure to do it without being, or appearing to be, ‘against the religious.’ Thass forbidden.

Once we got our schools and started churning out multiracial youngsters free from any kind of manipulation, save that of being taught to question everything, we could start our political lobbying. Why should religious concerns be put above ours? Why shouldn’t we have the right to be appeased when we are offended by religion, the way the religious whine like toddlers when someone shakes a stick at their myths? Why shouldn’t we be consulted and treated with respect as a community? Why are the sincerely held beliefs I’ve outlined inferior to those of a Christian, Jew or a Muslim?

Why indeed. I would very much like to know.

Here’s a great listen for you – Julia Sweeney on Fresh Air. She’s got a one-woman show called ‘Letting Go of God’ at an off-off-Broadway theater, and she gives a pretty good run-through of the journey from theism to atheism in this interview. In fact it’s pretty hilarious what a lot she manages to get into thirty minutes or so – religion as consolation in despair, Bible study, Abraham and Isaac, perverse excuses for Abraham and Isaac, a wink-wink priest who explains that we sophisticated believers know better but myths are for the people, the anger and sense of treachery at being told that, withdrawal from the church, turn to New Age, in particular Deepak Chopra, being stimulated by his talk of quantum mechanics, which he cites to subvert science but she didn’t realize that at the time, reading about quantum mechanics because of Chopra-stimulus, being excited by science and the scientific way of thinking, seeing everything through that filter, that skeptical filter – that’s about the first five minutes. It’s good stuff.

There’s one bit where she talks about the way she used to have God in her head; she would talk to him, tell him about her problems, discuss things – he was very compassionate about my problems, she says with a cackle. So, Terri Gross asked, wasn’t it lonely when you didn’t have God in your head any more? I answered for Sweeney: maybe, but also freeing. Sweeney said yes but it was also liberating.

That’s exactly it, you see. It’s liberating. I think people underestimate that – people who emphasize the consolation of religion. It is consoling, of course I see that, but it is also – something the absence of which is liberating. It’s surveillance. The constant presence of someone you take to be real inside your head is (can be) consoling and companionable but it’s also relentless. Sweeney talked with some passion about realizing that her thoughts were her own, that what went on inside her head belonged to her and no one else. Well exactly.

And she explained, with some eloquence, how she finds skepticism and an interest in science themselves actually consoling. A great listen.

All this kind of thing is useful in a way. A way one wishes we didn’t need things to be useful, but useful all the same. Useful in the sense of being an extreme and conspicuous form of a pervasive bad thing that one wishes were not there at all, so not useful in any ultimate sense, not inherently desirable; quite the contrary; but useful in educational terms; useful in making clear what we’re up against. Useful, to spell it out, in making it clear how deep misogyny really does go. It goes so deep that a lot of people think women have exactly two choices: lifelong confinement to a room, or deserved rape followed by stoning to death. It goes so deep that a lot of people think that when it comes to a choice between women’s lives and the lives of their fetuses, their lives are worth precisely nothing. (Which is odd in the case of female fetuses. Highly valuable in utero, and worthless once pregnant. But then misogyny is odd.)

Under the new law, abortions will no longer be permitted for rape victims or women who risk death during childbirth. Doctors and women who try to abort for any reason will face four to eight years in jail.

But that’s not as bad as it sounds, because women who risk (or face certain) death during childbirth who try to abort and fail will often not face four to eight years in jail, because they’ll be dead. Convenient. Saves expenses.

Members of the Left-wing Sandinista party which, in the past, has campaigned to legalise abortion, joined conservatives to approve a tightening of the abortion laws to prevent rape victims and women who risk dying in childbirth from terminating pregnancies. Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader, was thought to have fallen into line to avoid alienating church leaders ahead of the election.

Dear church. Dear kind compassionate loving church.

Rights groups say the new law would be a death sentence for women who suffer ectopic pregnancies. In an ectopic pregnancy, a fertilised egg develops outside the uterus. “They are forcing women to die. They are not pro-life, they are pro-death,” said Xiomara Luna, a protester.

Yeah, but only pro-death for women, so that’s okay.

This is quite funny. It’s from an article on Alan Johnson’s U-turn on quotas for ‘faith’ schools.

The Guardian yesterday attempted unsuccessfully to contact Tahir Allam, an education spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain. Earlier he told Radio 4″s Today programme: “This assumption that faith schools are divisive is a false one because there is no evidence to support this.”

Actually I think that’s downright hilarious. The Guardian is so eager to check in with the MCB, and to be seen to check in with the MCB, that it even lets us know about its failed attempts. What – did it think we would be annoyed and ‘offended’ if it wrote a story on government policy on ‘faith’ schools without at least attempting to contact someone at the MCB? Does it think it is in some sense mandatory to check in with the MCB on pretty much all subjects that touch on ‘faith’?

Hey, yesterday I attempted to contact the Pope to ask him about ectopic pregnancies in Nicaragua, but, inexplicably, he ignored all my emails. Strange guy.

Sheik Hilali clarifies things.

Australia is a multicultural society. Whoever wants to, let them take their clothes off. Whoever wants to go naked, let them go naked. Whoever wants to get drunk, let them get drunk. Whoever wants to smoke hashish, let them smoke hashish. It’s a free country, it’s none of our business. But it is our right to tell our women (that they dress appropriately).

And, presumably, that they stay home and stay in their room, since that’s what he said the first time. So anyway – who’s the ‘our’ in that sentence? Who is the ‘we’ who get to tell ‘our’ women what to do? Men, of course. It always is. ‘We’ are people and ‘we’ own ‘our’ women and ‘we’ tell them what to do; women are not people, so they are not included in ‘we’ and ‘our’; women are objects that are owned, and men are people who own them and tell them what to do. And it is their right to do that. And it is, presumably, not the right of the women to refuse to obey – because they are a wholly owned subsidiary.

After learning the mufti would not be sacked, John Howard urged the Muslim community to act against Sheik Hilali or risk a backlash from mainstream Australians. “If they do not resolve this matter, it could do lasting damage to the perceptions of that community within the broader Australian community and that would be a tragedy,” the Prime Minister said.

Thus getting thoroughly entangled in the various communities, poor guy. What about the perceptions of that community within the broader Australian community within the broader international community within the broader galactic community within the broader cosmic community within the broader possible worlds community? Lotta communities to keep track of these days. Lotta communities and mainstreams and backlashes. It’s all a bit dizzying sometimes.

Caroline Overington thinks the mufti meant every word of it, and she’s not the only one.

Tanveer Ahmed is a Sydney-based psychiatrist who is writing a book about Islam in Australia. He says the great shame is that “many, many” Muslim men, young and old, regard women – particularly Western women – as “less than ideal”. “The mufti meant exactly what he said, and those views are widely held,” Dr Ahmed said…”It comes from households, where young Muslims get the message that white girls are different, and that women in general are a corrupting influence.” Dr Ahmed said it was “an opinion I’ve heard throughout my life, that women can tempt you into trouble. Even otherwise sophisticated people will say this, and slur white women.”…Dr Ahmed rejects the argument that women wear the veil because “it’s their choice”. “You see children aged five wearing it. Are we seriously arguing there is an element of choice, when you sexualise a child in that way?”

Some are, but we disagree with them.

For Karen Green, the debate over the status of women is both personal and philosophical. She has a sister who converted to Islam. Dr Green, whose Phd in philosophy is from Oxford, said she initially accepted her sister’s view, when she argued that women were liberated by the veil. But over time, Dr Green concluded that women were so sexualised within Islamic society “that it is assumed that any private encounter between a woman and a man will be sexual. Women are thus assumed to have two functions, and these are sex and child-bearing. “By submitting to headscarf, chador or burka, women allow men to divide and conquer. Women are either ‘good’ – which is to say obedient – or they are ‘bad’.”

And that’s the context in which some women ‘choose’ to wear it. Sure, it’s a free choice in a sense, but it’s made within a particular context – that’s not a free choice. That context is there, and it can’t be chosen away.

More on Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal and consensus, agreement, universalism, and how to think and argue about them. I basically agree with it, but there are places where I think it could use some expansion, or some further stipulation, or both. I think there are some lurking unacknowledged tensions; once they’re pointed out all will go swimmingly. Page 260:

I don’t think I’m asking for all that much in the way of intellectual conformity, consensus, or (gasp) tyranny. The version of universalism I’m proposing does suggest that it might be good and useful to say, “No matter how or what you think, you fellow human, you are entitled to food and shelter and health care and education and political representation.” You can be a Christian Scientist, a secular-humanist professor, or an avant-garde poet/sculptor/dancer, and we can let all those language games flourish. But underlying that commitment to parlogy and dissensus, let’s imagine provisional agreement about human entitlements…

Yes, let’s, but there’s a problem there, an unacknowledged tension. It’s helpful of Michael to have placed the Christian Scientist so close to health care in that passage, because that’s the tension. We can say “No matter what you think, you are entitled to health care,” because that doesn’t amount to forcing health care on the reluctant Christian Scientist. But what about the Christian Scientist’s minor daughter? That’s where the tension bites. We can tell the Christian Scientist “you are entitled to health care” without being coercive, but we can’t tell the Christian Scientist “your daughter is entitled to health care” without being at least potentially coercive. The Christian Scientist, if she is a dedicated Christian Scientist, won’t want her daughter to get health care as commonly understood – she will in fact want precisely to deny her daughter the entitlement to health care that we have in mind when we talk about entitlements to health care. And that’s a problem. That’s the problem.

Because of course it applies to a lot of cases. Not just the Christian Scientist who doesn’t want her daughter to be entitled to health care, but also the parents who don’t want their daughters to be entitled to education, the parents who don’t want their daughters to be entitled to freedom, the parents who don’t want their daughters to have the right of refusal in marriage, and so on. It also applies to men who don’t want their wives to have various entitlements; it applies to men who don’t want their wives, daughters, sisters, mothers to have any entitlements. It applies to people who have power over intimates and dependents, because such people generally do have both de facto and de jure power to deny entitlements to said intimates and dependents, a power which it can be anything from difficult to impossible to interfere with, especially without coercion – without what the people in question would indeed see as tyranny. That’s the problem. That’s the problem and it means that saying “No matter what you think, you are entitled to [various things]” won’t untie this knot between universalism and difference.

It’s a knot that keeps turning up in the newspapers day after day. It turns up in the father who wouldn’t let his daughter have surgery to drain an abscess in her head because ‘traditional healers’ advised him not to. It turns up in a new domestic violence law in India:

Every six hours, a young married woman is burned, beaten to death or driven to commit suicide, officials say. Overall, a crime against women is committed every three minutes in India, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. Despite the scale of the problem, there had been no specific legislation to deal with actual abuse or the threat of abuse at home.

Again, this is coercion – depending on which person we’re talking to. If we’re talking to women, we’re saying “No matter what you think, you are entitled not to be subject to violence.” But if we’re talking to men, we’re not saying anything parallel, we’re saying something opposite – we’re saying “No matter what you think, you are not entitled to subject your wife to violence.” And Michael says so very clearly on p. 254 – a student asks if we can’t just say denying education is wrong, and the answer is yes, it’s just that it’s not helpful to say it in a foundationalist way. All this boils down to, I think, is perhaps a small disagreement about how much we’re asking for in the way of intellectual conformity, consensus, or (gasp) tyranny. I don’t think we’re asking for too much, certainly, and I think we’re asking for it on good grounds, but I also think that some of the people we’re asking it of are indeed going to think it’s tyranny.

Okay so what’s the big deal. Everybody lighten up a little. So the guy compared women to uncovered meat, so what – it’s his sincere opinion, and that’s his culture, so take a chill pill. Anyway is he wrong? Is he?

If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside…without cover, and the cats come to eat it…whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.

Obviously he’s not wrong. Come on, be honest – you know he’s not. The analogy is watertight. If you take out a piece of chicken, and put it outside stark naked with nothing on top of it, and the cats sashay over and eat it – it is of course the piece of chicken’s fault. Who would say otherwise? No one! Not the most Eurocentric Westoxic secularized modernized colonialist heretic infidel would say otherwise. There lies the piece of chicken on its plate, swaying seductively back and forth, twitching its hips, flicking its hair, pouting its lips, goggling with its eyes, rubbing its thighs together, waving its legs in the air, showing off its cleavage – doing everything it can to seduce those innocent honest godfearing hardworking cats to come over there and nibble and suck and lick and eat. That piece of chicken is a harlot, that piece of chicken is out to ensnare and deceive cats and distract them from their duty to Allah. That piece of chicken should be beaten by its brothers and then stoned to death, not pleasantly gobbled up by cats.

So, of course, it’s exactly the same with women. Identical. Because they’re like meat. Cat smells meat, cat wants to eat it; man smells woman, man wants to fuck it. It’s exactly the same. A woman outside is exactly like a plate of chicken with nothing on top of it: wide open, smellable, unprotected, rape bait. Who can deny it? No one. So if the woman is outside and some men come along and rape her, it’s her fault – because she’s not supposed to be outside any more than the meat is, is she! Meat belongs inside the house, inside the fridge, or inside the stomach of the men who have eaten it; it’s not supposed to be outside, walking up and down and doing whatever it likes. It’s only men and cats that are allowed to be outside doing what they like. Meat and women are supposed to be locked up. Got that? Of course they are. Women are supposed to be in their rooms, at home, in their hijabs, just as Sheik Hilali said. Each woman is allotted a room, in a home, where she is supposed to spend her entire life; if she comes out, she does it to entice rapists, and she deserves everything she gets. Am I right? Okay I know it’s not popular, but you know it’s true.

Much of Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts is relevant to all this – not surprisingly: it’s about higher education (and education more broadly), Bhattacharyya’s piece is about higher education (and education more broadly), and Dawkins’s work is partly about higher education (and education more broadly).

He talks in chapter 6 – ‘Postmodernism’ – about the difficulties of grounding moral intuitions, via Lyotard’s disagreement with Habermas about consensus and difference, and via feminist epistemology and local and ‘situated’ knowledge (with a reference to Meera Nanda), and Rorty’s antifoundationalism (about morality rather than epistemology). He quotes (page 256) from an essay of Rorty’s that I’ve always liked, despite disagreeing with much of it, ‘Wild Orchids and Trotsky’:

The democratic community of Dewey’s dreams is…a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters.

I don’t buy it. I think I might have, once, but I don’t now. I’ve become too suspicious of all those words – too aware of the need to ask for further details on all of them: democratic, community, and solidarity. Democratic – well, it depends: is this a democratic community of narrow parochial authoritarian people who hate fags and independent women and ruffians and atheists and elitist intellectuals? Is it the kind of community that expects and demands that everyone fit in and conform? Is it the kind of solidarity people feel when they unite against a putative enemy who is in fact merely different in some harmless way? Perhaps it’s the kind of democratic community that finds solidarity in voting to make the public high school teach ID in its biology classes.

Human solidarity is only as good as it is. Sometimes human solidarity can be murderous, even genocidal; often it can be coercive and limiting. And to at least some people, it is knowledge of something not merely human that really matters – cosmologists, physicists, artists, geologists, poets, musicians, mountaineers; many people. It’s of course true that grounding morality is very difficult, but recourse to solidarity is…dubious.

Michael makes a similar point himself earlier, on pp 222-3, in discussing Lyotard’s disagreement with Habermas:

Habermas imagines the “ideal speech situation” as something oriented not merely toward understanding, as I said above, but toward consensus. This…basically says, “We will all sit down and deliberate as equals – and then, when we’re done deliberating, we will agree.”…[I]n suggesting that consensus is the goal of the discussion, Habermas has left himself wide open to the charge that he does see universalism as the eradication of difference – that universalism will have done its job only when there is no one left to dissent from it. And that, Lyotard insists, puts us right back on the road to Terror.

Same thing. Consensus, too, is only as good as it is. So is agreement; so is universalism. They’re all – democracy, community, solidarity, consensus, agreement, universalism – only as good as they are. They’re all capable of being merely agreement to do bad things, consensus that outsiders are the spawn of the devil. Bertrand Russell’s grandmother was fond of the Biblical saying, ‘Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.’ I quite like that myself.

Gargi Bhattacharyya considers the relationship between education and religion.

Universities in this country broadly champion secular ideals. Whatever the circumstances of their formation, higher education institutions value their independence from state and church (and temple and mosque and synagogue and gurdwara). This is part of what we think universities are – spaces of free debate and enquiry, free from the strictures of doctrinal thought. According to this view, good education cannot belong to any one tradition. There is no benefit to being taught among people like yourself, in fact this is a disadvantage to the interrogatory processes of higher education…There may be unspoken norms, but broadly, doctrinal thought is frowned upon and is considered insufficient to a proper education.

There it is again, as with the Edwards piece, Group A and Group B, rational inquiry versus unfalsifiable dogma. (Merlijn and John M point out that there are religious people who as Merlijn put it ‘have a certain degree of critical distance between them and their beliefs’ – religious people who are not dogmatic and who do value rational inquiry and belong to Group A rather than B, or perhaps to Group C. A fair point. Not all religious people are dogmatic. But to the extent that they’re not, their allegiance isn’t really to Group B. They’re not so much an exception to Group B as they are members of Group A with some B inclinations. In short, we can consider them as part of Group A if they like, because any dogmatic beliefs they are loyal to or fond of, are safely bracketed and/or put in question. The opposition remains the same. The point is not so much how to allocate all religious people, as it is how to think about doctrinal thought as doctrinal thought.) Good education, as Bhattacharyya says, needs ‘ interrogatory processes’ rather than doctrinal thought. Just so.

[T]he ideal of the university as a place of free thought is not a bad model for understanding how people might learn things…[T]he university ideal suggests that the most important thing in relation to education is access – to learning resources, to informed and inspiring teaching, to a variety of ideas and ways of thinking and to a mixed and unpredictable bunch of others who are all curiously trying to learn as well…The catch is that all must learn to hear and consider unfamiliar and, perhaps, unpalatable views and beliefs, not because becoming educated demands adherence to any particular view, but because becoming equipped to contemplate all views is what makes you educated.

Which is why ‘faith’ education is not education but something else.

Respect and religion, remember? Grayling on respect and religion, Blackburn on respect and religion, and now Dawkins on respect and religion. He got a good reception at McGill.

I am under no illusions that I deserve these enthusiastic receptions personally, or that they reflect the quality of my own performance as a speaker. On the contrary, I am convinced that they represent an overflowing of bottled-up frustration, from masses of decent people pushed to breaking point and heartily sick of the sycophantic ‘respect’ that our society, even secular society, routinely and thoughtlessly accords religious faith. Time after time, people in the signing queues thank me for doing no more than say in public what they have, in private, long wanted to say, and probably could say more eloquently than I can. I think people are fed up to the gills with the near universal expectation that religious faith must be respected.

Exactly. And that’s what I keep saying when people rebuke or reproach or make fun of me for being rude about religion – there’s such an avalanche, such a torrent, of the other thing, and such a shortage of the blunt apology-free ‘why should I believe a word of it?’, that people feel cowed and intimidated and silenced – not of course by fear of the stocks or a whipping or decades in the slammer, but by this universal expectation of respect. Believers get to hear lots and lots and lots and lots of sycophantic respect; most non-believers fall all over themselves apologizing and stipulating before they’ll venture to admit that they’re actually not quite entirely altogether believers themselves though of course they do consider themselves spiritual – believers get to hear what they want to hear pretty much all the time, and there’s a famine of the other thing. When I be rude about religion I’m performing a service. Everyone should give me sycophantic respect for it.

Hey, Why Truth Matters has a tiny review in the TLS ‘In Brief’ section (October 20 issue). It’s not online. If anybody has an ol’ copy lying around and just longs to send it to me, don’t be shy. (Kind Nick sent one when the Dictionary was there.)

This is great stuff. One quotable line after another.

[T]here is clearly no guarantee that a state arbiter won’t cede to the most unreasonable and extreme demands of religious groups, expressed with adequate fervour and implied threats, especially as we have declared in advance that their ‘sensibilities’, however irrational, are somehow worth regarding. Thus, by abandoning a consistent first principles approach to freedom of expression in favour of some kind of dialectic between reasonable (us) and unreasonable (them) people, we may well find ourselves conceding tactical defeat ad nauseam, to the point where those who do accept the ‘fallibility of human knowledge’ must chafe under the de-facto rule of those who don’t.

Allow me to take stock of our new situation with reference to two hypothetical social groups, A and B. Group A is rather scientific and sceptical, curious and uncertain—at once interested in discovering ‘truths’ through rational inquiry, while remaining open to the possibility that existing knowledge can be falsified. Group B subscribes, with a famous ardour and certainty, to a bundle of unproven and unfalsifiable beliefs—a religion—and thus necessarily rejects the very premise of the ‘fallibility of human knowledge’. Clearly, as B already has The Truth, it shall be somewhat lukewarm on allowing any ‘conflicting notions’ to exist at all….[S]o long as B can bring enough rancour and enmity down on A for showing disrespect to some aspect of B’s unproven and unfalsifiable beliefs, the state may side with B against A…Incredibly, due to the philosophical nature of B’s beliefs as unfalsifiable dogma, we have also necessarily admitted that B can be morally justified in heaping massive opprobrium on A, without being asked or even being able to explain precisely why. That is to say, B may mercilessly assault the character of A without bothering to provide a credible, logical, reason—I’m afraid ‘because God says so’ is no such reason. In short, by allowing any superstition to have a role in determining the theoretical legal limits of ‘free speech’ we are inadvertently crafting a doctrine for unscientific, irrational bullies.

And behold – it shall be so.

We now observe the pitfalls of trying to adjust a scientific forum for free expression to any sensibilities arising from unfalsifiable dogma—as many religious claims are absolute and ‘unimpeachable’ by nature, it is not clear whether ‘believers’ are significantly more tolerant of a serious intellectual challenge from outside the ‘faith’, however polite, than they are of cheap abuse. Indeed, there is some evidence that the more fervent of believers may have some trouble distinguishing between the two.

And actually some may find serious intellectual challenge considerably more of an outrage than cheap abuse. Cheap abuse is not much of a threat, but serious intellectual challenge, naturally, is.

So long as the ‘contestability of ideas’ is open to any compromise with the sensibilities of religious believers, it shall almost invariably be the case that our ‘reasonable person’ test will be held to ransom by religious stonewalling—the sheer weight of numbers, and the intensity of their resolve, can too easily dictate the terms of arbitration. If serious threats to the social peace are enough to force massive concessions on the part of liberals, to the point of endorsing blasphemy laws, precisely how will any forum for the contestation of ideas withstand calls for the prohibition of vigorous religious criticism and inquiry?…To ‘compromise’ freedom of expression by erecting statutory guard-posts around a bundle of unproven and unfalsifiable assertions is to assault the very foundations of science, logic and rationality. Instead of allowing the veiled, and not-so-veiled, threats of irrational zealots to guide our notions of justice, we should resolve to protect all individuals from aggression and threats of aggression, emphasise the rights of freedom of association and conscience as they arise from the axiom of ‘non-aggression’, and redouble our commitment to a free, open and enlightened society.

Eloquent guy.

An interesting (at least in places) discussion at Pharyngula of Eagleton on Dawkins. One of the interesting bits is the one where Andrew Brown drops by to comment. He notes that he reviewed The God Delusion for Prospect with a follow-up at Comment is Free (I put both in News here, and I think commented on one or both; they’re not new). He draws a rather irrelevant analogy.

The shortest form of all these objections is this analogy: Suppose that I, knowing nothing about economics, write a book saying that the world would be better off without money: that money has led people to terrible crimes, and may even be thre root of all evil — “and besides, when you look at it money doesn’t even exist: who is this ‘I’ who promises to pay the bearer on demand? Why should we believe in dollars when no one believes in Reichsmarks or in cowrie shells?” Would this be a scientific work? Would it advance our understanding of money, or of economics?

But religion isn’t economics, and it’s not like economics. Religion is not an expert subject. That’s why I find all these questions about theology beside the point. Religion of course can be an expert subject, but it isn’t of its nature an expert subject, especially not in the form of the various Protestant denominations. Religion is public, and democratic, and inclusive, and all-embracing; furthermore, people are constantly making us a present of their religious beliefs in all sorts of public media, from newspapers to political campaigns to radio shows to tv dramas. It is a perfectly legitimate and indeed necessary undertaking to look at and dispute with that form of religion – public religion – everybody’s religion – Bush’s religion, Blair’s religion, Cristine Odone’s religion. That’s why economics is beside the point.

Brown goes on:

There are lots of us who believe that religion is primarily a social reality. The way to study social realities, and to understand them, is not to ponce around saying “Nyah nyah nyah it’s all just an illusion.”

Well, there are also lots of us who believe – for good reason, I would say – that religion is a social reality that rests on particular supernatural beliefs – to wit, that there is a personal omnipotent benevolent omniscient god who is real but out of our reach and who is transcendent but nevertheless answers our prayers and is involved in our world. One way to study and also criticize a social reality that is based on those beliefs is indeed, surely, to ask whether there is any reason to believe all that. Why wouldn’t it be? When we’re always being urged to believe all that ourselves, and urged or commanded to respect people who believe it, and told to be quiet about our opinion of it, and having plays and museum exhibits closed down before we can see them because of it. It’s our business, isn’t it; it’s everyone’s business. Economics isn’t.* I wouldn’t apply for the job of chairman of the Federal Reserve, because I quite agree that I don’t know enough about economics, but religion isn’t like that (not that I plan to apply for the job of archbishop of Canterbury either).

I can see saying that approach is not terribly interesting or challenging, I can see not wanting to bother with it, but Brown seems to be saying that it’s illegitimate, and I don’t buy that. I don’t think an approach that disputes religion as it is commonly (and often) presented is in the least illegitimate, in fact I think it needs doing.

*Well, economics is, but not in the sense of being able to criticize it cogently merely because we know how to spend money.