Month: July 2009

Well Sarah Palin is fer sher comedy gold, right? (Provided nobody ever lets her get anywhere near real power ever ever again.) I’m sure I speak for many Americans when I say I couldn’t believe what I was hearing yesterday – Tina Fey and all the writers at SNL coked to the gills couldn’t have done it better. ‘I’m doing what’s best for Alaska’ by by stopping being its governor. Well that’s always been my view, certainly! And then all the dynamic thrusting energetic plucky metaphors and stories to say why she was dumping an elected office a year and a half before her term expires. Yes indeedy you betcha, you can’t get much more plucky and determined than that! That’s the grit that made this country great. When you get restless any time – when setting up the first Ford factory, when fiddling around with this here telephone thing, when tooling up to build bombers and tanks for Dubya Dubya Two – the iron-jawed two-fisted spirit-of-Paul-Bunyan thing to do is just drop it and go wander off elsewhere for a space of time and regroup, or change the way you do your hair, or something.

Life is too short to compromise time and resources and though it may be tempting and more comfortable to just kind of keep your head down and plod along and appease those who are demanding, hey, just sit down and shut up. But that’s a worthless, easy path out. That’s a quitter’s way out. And I think a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just kind of hunker down and go with the flow. We’re fishermen and we know that only dead fish go with the flow.

Yeah…so what you do, to be not apathetic and not like a dead fish and not go with the flow, is you stop being governor of Alaska.

And so as I thought about this announcement, that I wouldn’t run for re-election and what that means for Alaska, I thought about, well, how much fun some governors have as lame ducks…I promised efficiencies and effectiveness. That’s not how I’m wired. I’m not wired to operate under the same old politics as usual. I promised that four years ago and I meant it. That’s not what is best for Alaska at this time. I’m determined to take the right path for Alaska, even though it is unconventional and it’s not so comfortable.

So it’s the same old politics as usual to stay in the office you were elected to until the end of your term – the getting all mavericky up in there thing to do is to stop dead, right there in the middle, and get out a year and a half early. That’ll show that old politics as usual! That’ll be unconventional and uncomfortable. Good strategy for running for president, too.

Comedy gold, I tell ya. Happy 4th of July.

Udo and Russell did an interview about 50 Voices of Disbelief recently.

Part of the first question was why this book, and what Udo said certainly resonated:

I guess my main motive was some kind of frustration (that’s putting it mildly) about religious people’s published musings about how they “struggled to find God” only to eventually succumb to the delusions we all know too well. It seemed only fair game to me to let reality-based people explain why they did better.

Quite. For all the screeching about the dreaded ‘newatheism’ the default position is still that there’s something impressive about ‘struggling’ with ‘faith’ and then collapsing into the old nonsense again.

The candle on the cover and what it means:

Udo: The flickering candle is normally understood as a symbol of believers’ connection with their imaginary God. Our intention, of course, is to sever that link and accordingly we blew the candle out on our cover. I am curious whether people who see the cover will see it that way…

Russell: I don’t “read” the symbolism in the way that Udo describes. I expect that that will be how most people see it initially, but I hope they’ll then do a cognitive shift to seeing it as the candle of reason or Enlightenment, which is blown out in so many places and circumstances by religious nonsense. As we say in the book’s introduction, it is very difficult to keep the candle of reason alight at a time when unreason in many forms is resurgent. But each essay is one small effort on behalf of the candle of reason, one contribution to keeping it alight. That reinterpretation is reinforced by the interior design: when you open the book, you see one lit candle for each essay, on the essay’s first page!

Ah, I didn’t know that; that’s nice. We could call it ‘Fifty Candles’…

Is it ‘part of the New Atheism movement’?

Russell: Well, what’s the New Atheism movement? I think the expression is often used pejoratively to attack anyone who argues against religion. The best sense that I can make of “the New Atheism” is that it is a return of normal transmission – a return of perfectly normal and proper criticism of religion in the public sphere, after this seemed to become taboo during the 1980s and 1990s. We have to thank Dawkins and others for breaking the taboo, so in that sense I suppose the book can be seen as part of the so-called New Atheism.

And then, there’s the familiar issue…

All too often, religion demands and receives deference in the political sphere. And yet, over recent decades it became taboo to criticize religion strongly in public.

And that’s a bad, and coercive, and dangerous situation.

Even funnier than Sarah Palin.

A Turkish game show is challenging atheists to reassess their views and win “the biggest prize ever”. Penitents Compete will bring together an Islamic imam, a Jewish rabbi, a Buddhist monk and a Greek Orthodox priest seeking to convert the atheists. The prize for any converted contestants is an expenses-paid pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen faith.

But that’s not a prize unless you do in fact convert, so it’s not going to function as a prize for the people who are supposed to convert because they won’t want the thing offered – it won’t appeal to them – in fact it will repel them. It’s like saying the prize is a bowl of shit, or a week in Evin Prison, or two tickets to a wrestling match. It’s like the old W C Fields joke – first prize is a week in Philly, second prize is two weeks in Philly.

A free ‘piligrimage’ to a ‘holy site’ of one’s ‘chosen faith’ – if you’ve converted that could be enough to convert you right back again, don’t you think? You have to be gentle with these things! Someone who’s just converted from atheism to Islam or Greek Orthodox Christianity on a tv game show is in a fragile state in the ‘faith’ department – I don’t think instantly thrusting a ‘piligrimage’ to a ‘holy site’ on such a convert is a very sensible idea! You want to take things step by step, not shove people off the diving board and watch them sink. To an atheist, or to someone who was an atheist until five minutes ago, a ‘piligrimage’ to a ‘holy site’ sounds like being locked in a ship’s cabin with a few thousand people all of whom you detest. It doesn’t sound like a nice holiday – or a prize. It sounds like…you know…torture.

[I]f any are genuinely convinced by a faith, they will be sent on a pilgrimage – new Muslims to Mecca, Buddhists to Tibet and Jews and Christians to Jerusalem. The TV cameras will follow the winning contestants as they go on their pilgrimage. “They can’t see this trip as a getaway, but as a religious experience,” the deputy director of Kanal T, Ahmet Ozdemir, told Hurriyet.

See? It’s not a prize.

Chris Mooney (yes, it’s not over after all) disagrees with Jerry Coyne (and by extension me, and Austin Cline, and anyone else who has made the same point) about what the Pew report tells us about the putative compatibility of science and religion.

Let me say at the outset that I find it regrettable, just as Dr. Coyne does, that people are rejecting scientific findings due to their religion. That’s not cool. It’s not acceptable. And it is of course one of the key reasons we have an “unscientific America.”

But where Coyne sees sheer science-religion incompatibility, I see something else: An opportunity. For it seems to me that if we could only dislodge the idea that evolution is contradictory to people’s belief in “Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%),” then they would have no problem with evolution.

Yes, and if we could perform other miracles we could do other great things, but alas…

My view is that if we force-science religion conflict on much of America, then for a large portion of our citizenry, science is not going to prevail as the victor. But if we demonstrate compatibility, then that should be very good for the public understanding and appreciation of science.

This, annoyingly, is just Mooney going back to that same old equivocation again, as he keeps doing, like a dog with a bone, no matter how many times people tell him that that’s what he’s doing. (And yet he’s always telling us that people who disagree with him don’t know enough philosophy!) I told him so in a comment but of course, as always, he took not a blind bit of notice. I pointed out that it is not possible to ‘demonstrate compatibility’ in the epistemic sense. The only kind of compatibility it is possible to demonstrate is this brute force kind, in which believers simply ignore the evidence whenever it threatens their religious beliefs. The brute force kind of compatibility is epistemically worthless, and worse than that if it leads to delusions about genuine (epistemic) compatibility.

I told Mooney he is still playing on this equivocation and that he’s still talking about the brute force kind of compatibility and ignoring the fact that the people who disagree with him (and I’m one) are talking about epistemic compatibility.

It’s such a basic point. Is he refusing to get it, or is he unable to? The brute force kind of compatibility is an option, it’s true, but it’s not an option that it’s reasonable or sensible to try to pressure other people – least of all scientists! – into accepting for themselves. Yes it is always possible to ignore evidence, even whole mountain ranges of evidence, and believe whatever we want to. But that is not the same thing as substantive compatibility of findings. It is unwise to ignore this distinction.

Guess who’s back – why, it’s Madeleine Bunting. ‘What’s she up to now?’ you cry in pleased surprise. She’s going out of her way to show us how silly she can be, yet again.

There is a school of thought that the new atheists have so polarised the debate about the relationship between science and religion that it’s not a conversation worth having. The “Ditchkins” – as Terry Eagleton describes them in his recent book – have developed such a crude argument about religion based on their boasted ignorance of the thinking which underpins belief that it’s hard to know how a dialogue is possible.

‘School of thought’ – she means herself saying it, and Terry Eagleton saying it, and one or two other woolly prats saying it. That’s not actually a school of thought.

So what happens when there is an attempt at a very different kind of conversation which is not around the extremes of belief and non belief but largely amongst thoughtful believers, many of whom might be scientists? That was the proposition behind Lambeth Palace’s gathering of scientists, philosophers and theologians yesterday morning.

Ooooh, doncha wish you’d attended that? No, neither do I.

[T]he Archbishop of Canterbury was brisk, and he warned, “beware of the power of nonsense”. Science’s triumphalist claim as a competitor to failed religion was dangerous. In contrast, he offered an accommodation in which science and religion were “different ways of knowing” and “what you come to know depends on the questions you start with”. Different questions lead to “different practices of learning” – for example different academic disciplines. Rather than competitors, science and religion were both needed to pursue different questions.

Uh huh. And the archbishop doesn’t believe the Nicene creed. Except of course he does.

I am genuinely a lot more conservative than [Bishop John Shelby Spong] would like me to be. Take the Resurrection. I think he has said that of course I know what all the reputable scholars think on the subject and therefore when I talk about the risen body I must mean something other than the empty tomb. But I don’t. I don’t know how to persuade him but I really don’t.

Thank you Edmund Standing.

It was science which had established the nature of global warming and science would play a role in inventing the innovations which could mitigate its impact, but religion also had a role as an agent of change of personal behaviour. It had a crucial role because religion essentially concerned itself with relationships to other people, to the rest of humanity and to the natural environment.

Because religion and religion alone concerns itself with that; there is no secular discipline or way of thinking or set of ideas that concerns itself with relationships to other people; therefore religion has a crucial role. Except that the first part isn’t true. Other than that, it hangs together a treat.

There’s other stupid crap in there – crap about consumerism, crap about Darwin leading to Goebbels – but that’s enough to clutter the place up with. Bunting did a bang-up job of showing us what she set out to show us. We’re convinced.