A god who makes no difference
HE Baber explains something but I’m not exactly sure what.
[L]ike most educated Christians, I do not believe most of the empirical claims associated with Christianity. I do not believe that the universe came into being just a few thousand years ago. I do not believe that humans or other animals were created their current form or even that God had some hand in “guiding” evolution. I do not believe that the Bible provides an accurate account of Middle Eastern history, or that any of the miracles it reports actually occurred, or that the wisdom literature it includes is a suitable guide to life. I do not believe that the existence of God makes any difference to the way the world operates or that religious belief should make any difference to the way we live.
So Baber is saying that most educated Christians don’t believe that God had some hand in “guiding” evolution or that the wisdom literature included in the bible is a suitable guide to life or that the existence of God makes any difference to the way the world operates or that religious belief should make any difference to the way we live? That’s an enormous claim, and on the face of it it looks like an absurd claim. I would think that most educated Christians do believe the last two items at the very least, and in fact that most of them probably believe all but the first two items – at least if they really are Christians as opposed to deists who attend Christian churches. That’s where ‘on the face of it’ comes in – maybe Baber has some such stipulation, or several of them, in mind when making that enormous claim. But then – if she does, she should spell it out. Making enormous claims that are actually not as enormous as they look because of various unstated stipulations is…not respectable.
But maybe she has no such stipulations in mind; maybe she really does think most educated Christians don’t believe all those claims. If that’s the case I think she’s just wrong, and overgeneralizing wildly. We’ve disagreed about this before – I think Baber overgeneralizes about hostility to theists, about what atheists say and do, about what critics of atheists say and do and want, and various other things. I see this pattern in a lot of the critics of the “New” atheists – which is interesting.
Theists, like myself, claim that there is a conscious being, who is omnipotent and omniscient, who is not a part of the natural world and not to be identified with the cosmos in toto, but is incorporeal and transcendent…[E]ven if it is not meaningless to claim that there exists a God who makes no difference to the way in which the natural world works one may ask: what is the point of believing in such a God? Why would anyone even want to believe in a God who makes no difference: a God who does not answer prayers, give our lives “meaning,” or imbue the universe with purpose, reveal moral truths, strengthen us to fight the good fight or, in some sense, ground values. I can only speak for myself, though my answer is hardly original. God is an object of contemplation. It is remarkably hard to discover by introspection what one really thinks about these matters because they are so overlain by conventional pieties. I suppose what I believe is that God is the ultimate aesthetic object, ultimate beauty, glory and power, and that the vision of God embodies the quintessence of every aesthetic experience and every sensual pleasure.
But that’s not theism, it’s deism. That’s certainly not Christianity – and it’s not even theism. So what exactly is being claimed here? I can’t quite tell.
No, I don’t get the point either. Hasn’t she just dug a big hole and buried herself in it?
Trouble is, this isn’t even deism. Deists tend to believe that, in some sense, God did make a difference, way off at the beginning of things, whenever that was, and just doesn’t any more. But in what way could Ms. Baber’s being be an object of contemplation? What is there to contemplate? How does Ms Baber know what this god is like? After all, he/she doesn’t really show up anywhere, not even in the universe, so far as we can tell.
I think you’re right, though, Ophelia. She’s wrong about what most people believe. Indeed, I wonder if this amounts to ‘belief’. It occurs to me that this is perhaps what the kenotic god is like. Not only is this god self-emptying. We don’t know what is emptied out.
This can’t be the god that Paul was talking about, when he quoted the early Christian hymn about Jesus, who, though in the form of God, did not think equality with God as something to be exploited. How could he exploit equality with God, if God is this transcendent nonentity? Very puzzling indeed. Curioser and curioser.
If God makes no difference to the way the world is then a world in which he exists is indistinguishable from one in which he doesn’t exist.
That being so, how is it possible to contemplate something Baber admits we have no access to, no knowledge of, and no good reason to suppose even exists?
Is it in the same way I can contemplate an imaginary unicorn?
Clearly, it’s a culturally accepted form navel-staring.
Really, all she’s done is try and find a way to not have to believe all the clearly silly stuff that most Christians believe, while not having to be an evil atheist. She can still claim that she’s “spiritual” and she can still benefit from the social protection of having something akin to religion.
This is clearly not the god of the Nicene and Apostles’ creed, nor of church hymns and public prayers. How many Christian claims and actions can you deny yet still call yourself a Christian?
And as Jakob asks above, can any meaningful knowledge claims be made about such a god?
Or to put it differently, Baber’s trying to have her cake and eat it too.
As I tried to make sense of this piece, all I could grasp was that God is something like the short term total emptiness of the mind that comes from a lovely dose of IV Valium. . . some kind of brain/mind vacation.
Well, that’s how it struck me, all right all right. But the odd thing is that Baber is very, um, emphatic about the fact that she is a Christian and that believers like her are a minority in the academy and get looked at funny. I find it very very very hard to believe that Baber or anyone is really looked at funny for believing what she says she believes in this piece – so I think she’s up to something – but I don’t know what. (Maybe just, as Deen said, eating cake and still having cake – complaining about atheists in one piece and then saying how unexceptionable her beliefs actually are in another piece.)
“So what exactly is being claimed here? I can’t quite tell.”
I don’t think it’s so much a “claim” as it is just another form of dodge–a way to keep the god-concept viable and taken seriously by “educated” people–for no other reason than that they have been told their whole lives that “god” is an Important Word that needs to be attached to a Transcendent Something.
Perhaps Baber is just expecting us to be dazzled by the verbal smoke and mirrors and stop asking annoying questions that don’t, and can’t, have satisfying answers. The three-god monte all over again–keep your eye on the Nicene Creed and win big money!
Well it’s some kind of claim! It’s full of assertions – it’s not just what one might call a “contemplation” -but I can’t figure out what we’re supposed to conclude from it. That…theists don’t believe anything that isn’t quite reasonable and sensible, I guess. But who on earth is going to be convinced by her description of what theists believe?
Meanwhile the consensus that “the new atheists” are cruel vicious sneering mockers is growing more solidified and unarguable every day. It gets on my nerves.
Actually, I think she owns up here.
“As a religious believer my bogey is verificationism”
She’s an a-verificationist. Fair enough, but she then makes a false dichotomy between that and theism. She just needs to understand that theism isn’t the alternative. And indeed, she should be comforted to realise that, despite her claims, she isn’t, in fact, a theist. No need to keep haranguing atheists, then, because she is clearly one herself. Time to come out of the closet.
“If there’s one thing that I do not believe it’s that God cares whether we believe in him or not.”
But surely that makes the whole ‘project’ purposeless, at bottom. Which is what atheists think, not theists.
“Which is what atheists think, not theists.” One would think so!
I’m confused. Is she implying that belief (f this is belief) is necessary for contemplation?
I was confused about the article as well, though my confusion travels in a different direction.
That is, against Hume, it seems like she’s telling us that this is an issue that is open to rational discussion. But she isn’t quite explicit about what it is we’re talking about, and indicates that she’s working with a fuzzy intuition. Since I don’t know what I can infer from another person’s isolated intuition, we can’t be having a rational conversation about it.
When I asked, she seemed on the one hand to be talking about the facts of the world (there is a single numerical god), and she wants to endorse her claims just for fun. That’s clear enough, I guess. But I don’t know what it would mean to be justified in talking about a fact about the the world without grounding it in the observable, or in inferences to the observable. (Rather, she seems to endorse a fact about the world on the basis of what she can imagine: specifically, by stretching our idea of consciousness to the uber-level; hence the awkward zombie-talk in the middle of the essay.) So then I can plausibly read her as saying, “I believe in this just for fun” — i.e., the desire is actually grounds for the belief — which would mean that she’s not asserting a fact, but rather is engaged in personal therapy.
But since I can’t tell what she intends, I don’t know if there’s a rational conversation there to be had. Head-scratch?
Now am I wrong in reading her as saying in that last quoted paragraph that god is “the aesthetic experience”? That seems to me a fairly obvious god of the gaps play: declare something fundamentally mysterious, declare god “there”, flat out deny when someone points out either it ain’t so mysterious or it ain’t god.
There is nothing deeper to get here, this Apologetics 101 with a bit more verbage.
In the link above we had a brief exchange. I think when she endorses God she means to endorse the activity of make-believe. Either that or it’s intuition-herding, which I discussed in my usual boring way above.
Baber’s god is what I call God the Unknown. Seriously. Replace every instance of the word ‘God’ with ‘the Unknown’, and you will then be able to make some sense of her writing. Try it.
When we contemplate the Unknown, we experience awe, which is the most primal emotion. This is the experience she’s talking about. E.g.:
“I suppose what I believe is that [the Unknown] is the ultimate aesthetic object, ultimate beauty, glory and power, and that the vision of God embodies the quintessence of every aesthetic experience and every sensual pleasure.”
In other words, contemplating the Unknown triggers her sense of awe.
Seriously, God is just a code-word for the Unknown. Theists will have a hard time admitting that, however. They will try to keep even *this* knowledge unknown to themselves, and keep the Unknown shrouded behind the mysterious word ‘God’, but that’s all it is. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
All of the things that theists pretend to know about God (the Unknown) are exactly the things that make God a delusion.
The good news is that theists are wrong. You don’t have to keep the Unknown shrouded in mystery in order to experience a sense of awe about it. That’s what science has taught us.
Actually, Baber lost me at ‘verificationism.’ Her calling it a “bogey” turns out to be spot on, although unintentionally so, because I think she may have mixed American and British idiom: I think she must have meant ‘bogeyman’ rather than the hardened sinus leakage usually indicated by that word in the UK, but in my opinion she treats the concept with rather less care than something she might have picked from her nose.
Baber notes that verificationism is philosophically “out of fashion” (actually, “dead in the water for some decades now” is more like it), but utterly fails to discuss any of several post-verificationist approaches to epistemology. One can only suspect that this lapse is deliberate, because each and every approach to epistemology that gets any respect these days – in fact, any epistemology that has ever deserved the name – would ALSO evaluate her vague, have-it-both-ways “I can justifiably believe God exists without making any actual claims about the world (such as God existing in it or having any perceptible impact on it)” as nonsense on stilts.
I suppose Baber gets around this -in a way, although I doubt her honesty here – by admitting that justification has nothing to do with what she thinks about God. But that just creates another problem for her, because it moves the discussion far, far away from anything to do with epistemology – which is what SHE chose to start the essay with, mind you. By saying that her concept of God isn’t really about belief at all, bringing up verificationism or Hume OR ANY OTHER MATTER HAVING TO DO WITH EPISTEMOLOGY is just a red herring. If you’re not talking about belief claims or justifying belief claims in any way, in what sense are you talking about epistemology?
Baber tries to get all sorts of mileage out of the epistemological side issue of what constitutes an intelligible claim, but reevaluating the definition of “intelligible” (and tossing in the even more vague “meaningful”) doesn’t make any hay when you deny that you’re even making a claim: So, Hume and verificationism are wrong and the concept of God isn’t simply nonsensical and unintelligible! Goody for you, Dr. Baber! Of course, to get there you had to alter the concept of God beyond recognition (and make an extraordinarily tendentious and unsupported claim about how widely your concept of God is shared by other “educated Christians”). And now the concept of God doesn’t even involve a belief or a claim, it’s an object of aesthetic contemplation!
So have any of the many good epistemological reasons to reject claims about God of the more ordinary sort been called into question by any of this noisome verbiage? No. Does an object of aesthetic contemplation in any sense fall into the category of what Hume clearly meant by “objects of human reason”? No. Even in the little snippet Baber quotes, Hume is very clearly talking about evaluation and justification and such – the things reason does with ideas – and those are clearly different from aesthetic contemplation (whatever the hell that is). So why does Baber bring up epistemology at all? I can only conclude that she wishes to confuse the matter deliberately. She avoids admitting that she’s just another believer who has a conviction that God exists as a matter of faith, rejecting reason and evidence to the contrary. She avoids this admission by saying that reason and evidence don’t even apply to what she means when she says “God,” yet she goes on says all sorts of things about God that sound very familiar – glory this, power that, “Oh gosh, You really are just super” the other. It’s all very tiresome and dodgy and intellectually dishonest.
*sigh*
I intensely dislike it when philosophers give philosophy a bad name by substituting cheap rhetoric and deliberate obfuscation for genuine argumentation. Such behavior dishonors my chosen profession.
Following Benjamin Nelson’s link (above) I found more of Baber’s ‘reasoning’. She simply assumes what she’s supposed to prove:
“Given that theism is a live option…” means what exactly? She mixes up the fact theists exist with a completely different concept of it being a (philosophical?) ‘live option’.
HE Baber is a doctor of philophy? Tell me you’re kidding. Please.
I wonder if she’s got Karen Armstrong’s number in her mobile phone. Or maybe if those two got together the spiritual woo would become too much and the universe would implode.
It’s having the brass neck to assert that every other kind of woo is ‘unreasonable’ that’s so impressive… If it weren’t the same trick pulled by the clergy so regularly…
Baber’s piece is a very strange thing to throw into the midst of the culture wars of science and religion. What she is saying, when you come down to it, is that the scientists are right. Religion has nothing to do with science, or with our understanding of the world. Yet there is a little space for religion still, locked away in our subjectivity, where we can be silent and know that God is God, for God is nothing more than the object of contemplation.
The trouble is, when you’ve pared God down to this rather exiguous ‘object’, how can you be sure you aren’t just contemplating yourself? And then what becomes of all the trappings of religion, the stories, told and retold, of God’s presence in the world, the wonderful liturgies that not only acknowledge, but wreath the deity in clouds of incense, the song which rises to pitches of pious Frömmelei, the prayers that plead for God’s help and presence, the dutiful submission after having missed the mark? Very curious.
But surely she needs to think just a bit more about verificationism. Possibly meaning does not depend upon the means of verification. Perhaps just a word’s presence in a language game will do. But where there is no conceiveable way in which something can be confirmed, nothing that would be different if one’s beliefs were true, except that one held them: surely verification and meaning are a little more closely linked than that. (And verificationism, remember, was no so much an epistemology as a theory of meaning.)
For the truth is not, as Deen suggested, that she wants to have her cake and eat it too. She wants to pretend to have eaten her cake, while looking longingly at her empty lunch box, imagining the feast that she will have later too.
“So what exactly is being claimed here? I can’t quite tell.”
In that case, her work is done.
Here’s a response to Robert Wright’s recent godbothery, not entirely on topic for Baber, but you all might enjoy it.
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2009/08/valis.html
“my withered affiliations with that religion prompt me to reply abruptly to the sheer … presumptuousness of Wright’s argument and others like it: a god that is not God is not god.”
“I am not troubled by some sense that I lack purpose. And yet I find myself vestigially insulted by the suggestion that there neither is nor is not a god (or gods, I suppose), but, take comfort!, there is some or other kind of bullshit, half-assed, insubstantial, wafting demiurge that is the equivalent of the sum total of natural law and can be revised without end as soon as our descriptive, scientific powers render one more non-aspect of this non-entity transparent and explicable. How dull, boring, and unnecessary.”
Mike, that occurred to me as well, but I don’t think she meant to prove God’s existence so it doesn’t beg the question.
Baber’s views remind me of those of Don Cupitt, an English ‘radical theologian’ who is basically an atheist, but remains an Anglican priest and ‘philosopher of religion’. It seems like both have, by degrees, abandoned every specific belief that they originally had as Christians but, at each stage in the process, they have redefined Christianity for themselves (usually at considerable length) in order that they can continue to self-identify. At least Baber’s relatively unassuming style is a welcome change from the usual insults.
Yes but at other times Baber has gone in for the usual insults. I took issue with her over that a couple of weeks or so ago.
No, no. Don Cupitt’s ideas are toto caelo different from HE Baber’s. Cupitt takes religion to be an entirely human creation, and ‘God’ a symbol of the sum total of human ideals (or something like that). I’m not sure that it works, but it’s modestly charming. Baber, on the contrary, believes in a real, transcendent being, which is the object of (intellectual?) contemplation, but which gives absolutely no evidence for its being in the things that exist. Cupitt is, if you like, a religious humanist. It is not clear that Baber’s religion has anything to say about humanity. In fact, I am led to wonder whether in this instalment of her theology she is trying to dig herself out of the hole she buried herself in the last time. As I said, it seems to me that she’s only dug it deeper.
1. “a conscious being, who is omnipotent and omniscient, who is not a part of the natural world … but is incorporeal and transcendent”
2. “the ultimate aesthetic object, ultimate beauty, glory and power”
These are different. Please would H E Baber make her mind up?
2 is remarkably human-centred. It can’t exist without life-forms which write novels (or some such), have some concept of ‘glory’, and think power is admirable.
“the vision of God embodies the quintessence of every aesthetic experience and every sensual pleasure.”
Whose vision? This God’s, or life-forms’ that ‘contemplate’ it? How, precisely, does it extract the “quintessence” of Haydn’s Op 76 quartets, and Middlemarch, and Vigée Le Brun’s self-portrait in the National Gallery, London, and the touch of a beloved on your arm, and the first bite of a warm peach?
And how does HE Baber square all this cockamamie verbiage with what adherents of all the big religions actually do, that is, make up rules on who can enjoy what sensual pleasure when and with whom, and attribute these rules to their nasty interfering god(s)?
Well that’s the thing – she doesn’t square them, yet she says they’re the same thing.
?
I’m not sure, Nicholas, that the two things that you distinguish are different, at least in the way that traditional religion would have understood it.
The emphasis in Baber’s language has to be placed on the word ‘ultimate’. And, from this point of view, the perfect intellectual being that she describes as omniscient, omnipotent, etc., is also, from the standpoint of the finite intelligence, an object of ultimate beauty, power, glory, etc., whatever those words mean in relation to an act of intellectual contemplation.
Recall that, for Christian theologians, and even for the Westminster Catechism, the chief end of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever (in acts of rapt adoration). Presumably we can have a foretaste of that here in, say, prayer, or mystical attention. This, of course, may be cockamamie verbiage, but it is not obviously inconsistent.
Nevertheless, most people, including theologians, believed that God had a more immediate relationship to ordinary human goings on, and had at least left traces of his presence, both in the world of nature, and in the life of human beings, enough, anyway, to be getting along with. In other words, most people believed that God did make a difference. If not, how did we come to speak about a god or gods?
Eric, you of course know far more than me about what (some, particularly obscure, or in some cases I suspect wilfully obscurantist) Christian theologians have posited about glorifiable objects of contemplation. I still think thsi sort of stuff is incoherent wishful thinking.
1. Could there be a perfect string quartet? My answer is no. But for the sake of the argument, assume the answer is yes.
2. Is the perfection of this string quartet a fit object, in its own right, for adoration by humans? My answer is no: it is the surprises, the key changes, the interplay of the parts, etc etc which are individually fit for adoration, not the perfection. But, for the sake of the argument, assume the answer is yes.
3. Is anything gained by personifying this perfection? My answer is no. Is it possible to give a brief and intelligle explanation of why (some?) theologians have claimed the answer is yes?
4. Is the personified perfection of this string quartet necessarily the same being as the personified perfection of a warm peach? I say no; on what grounds might Baber say yes?
5. Is a bundle of personified perfections of every sensual pleasure necessarily omnipotent and omniscient? I say no; on what grounds might Baber say yes?
What I want to do at this point is to write a piece in the style of Baber/Armstrong/Eagleton about the Wizard of Oz. About how Dorothy was such a shrill, militant bitch for exposing the Wizard’s humbuggery and that she should have kept her damn dog away from the curtain. And then segue into an extended explanation that the educated citizens of the Emerald City never actually believed the wizard had magic powers anyway, so Dorothy didn’t actually accomplish anything at all.
Unfortunately I don’t think my parodic chops are up to the task. Nor do I think I could keep a straight face.
Well, you see, dzd, I don’t think you need to do a parody. I think the parody is the desperate and extraordinary lengths that people like Baber and Armstrong go to keep the wizard’s disguise from slipping. I think that most people know that the wizard is just human presumption dressed up in fancy language. That’s why the response to the ‘new atheists’ is so shrill, why so much effort is put into finding ways of talking about the religious project that is immune to sceptical assault. The recent spate of articles and books trying to recreate a context in which religion can carry on undisturbed is a sure sign that the religious are very worried. You don’t attack with so much energy something that poses no risk. Religion is on the defensive. Let’s keep it that way.
The religious are very worried, and on the defensive (or the offensive-defensive, is more like it) – but they are also having a lot of success at demonizing and marginalizing their critics and also at continuing to dominate the mainstream media – the big US newspapers, the big UK newspapers, the BBC, NPR, etc etc. They are trying hard to silence us, and they are having considerable success.
Don’t give up, please, OB. You for one aren’t silenced, yet. And whenever the Guardian publishes yet another specimen of its religion-fawning slobbery, the comments skewer it, big time.
The Wizard of Oz is indeed most instructive, dzd. My hypothesis is that children fall into 2 classes: those who are delighted that the Wiz is a harmless old fraud, and those who are disappointed. Trouble is, that some of the latter never grow out of it. HE Baber wants peaches to taste marvellous not because of sugars and esters and smells and textures, but because they’re magic.
Not giving up Nicholas!
In spite of enemies all around.
Hahahahahahahaha
(1) I wasn’t arguing for the existence of God in this article. The classic arguments pro and con are familiar and you can find them in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or any standard philosophy of religion textbook. I was doing two things: (a) taking a quick look at “the verificationist challenge” according to which god-talk is literally unintelligible and so not even a candidate for truth or falsity and (b) explaining my own motivation–which was not intended as an argument or sales pitch
(2) Re what most Christians believe, I expanded upon there in my comment here–scroll down after the original article to the comment.
I know lots of educated Christians. I do not know a single one who does not believe in evolution or who believes that God had some hand in “guiding” the process. Not one. I do not know a single Christian personally, though I’m sure there are some out there, who believes that God makes a difference in the way in which the machinery of the material world operates or believes that science is in any way inadequate to explain it. Not a one.
(3) The view I am suggesting is not deism. Deists believe that God put the show in motion and subsequently had no more to do with it. A theist like myself can hold that though God makes no difference in the way the material world operates, he sustains it in existence. I did not argue for that position in my piece, and I’m not arguing for it here. I’m just saying that this is my view and it counts as theism rather than deism as I understand those terms.
(4) I do not think there is anything wrong with being an atheist. In Academia it’s the norm. Unlike atheists like Cupitt, Armstrong, et. al. I have no interest in being seen as a theist because I don’t see anything desirable in being thought to be a theist. As I said, where I come from, people look at you funny if they find out you’re a theist and, I know a number theists in Academia who are “closeted” as they themselves put it–including some who told me they intend to “come out” if and when they get tenure.
My motivation for being a Christian is that I JUST PLAIN LIKE RELIGION. This isn’t an argument, doesn’t provide any epistemic reason whatsoever for religious belief, and I don’t intend it as an argument. It’s just an explanation of what’s in it for me. By “religion” I mean cult–churchiness. And religion, understood in this way, is FUN. If it were up to me there would be a church or little shrine where people stopped to mumble the quick prayer every 50 feet, processions in the streets, elaborate liturgies at all hours of the day and night, bells ringing, incense swinging and 1000 little rituals and customs–the whole world as a high church grand opera. Of course there is other fun too–sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, all of which I thoroughly appreciate. Religion is just additional fun and I believe the more fun of every kind the better. Nor do I let religious fun in any way undermine my pursuit of other kinds of fun.
Now, I repeat: this is not an argument for religious belief and is not intended as such. I did not argue for religious belief in the Guardian piece and I’m not arguing for it here. That’s too much like my day job :-)
HE Baber: Thank you very much for further explaining your position here.
(2) But you must know of Christians, many Christians, probably, I think, the majority, who do think that their version of YHWH has tweaked evolution. Several prominent ones have published books claiming just that. And there are plenty, including Ratzinger and Rowan Williams and Gene Robinson for three, who profess to believe that their version of YHWH answers prayers.
(3) I note your disclaimer that you are not arguing for this position here. But I think your position is absurd. To hold that a deity ‘sustains the universe in existence’ is (a) unverifiable; and (b) not different from the position that a deity intervenes in the universe, but, on the contrary, an extreme version of that position. Of course you are free to understand the terms deist and theist in any way you wish, but your position, that your deity does everything, except anything that matters in practice to any life-forms’ day-to-day existence, is just our old friend the deus absconditus in spades.
YOU JUST PLAIN LIKE RELIGION. Well, yes, I agree that High Mass in San Marco, or evensong in a dark country church with a congregation of 3, is a pleasing spectacle. To adapt Johnson, one of the disadvantages of religions is that they make people mistake rituals for thought.
See, I can see religion as being fun – if only one didn’t have to believe anything!
(Well not ‘anything’ but anything of a religious nature.)
I was thinking that just yesterday. I was thinking (I had a reason) about all the ways humans have extras that other animals don’t have – language, extended memory, history, art, etc etc etc – and I realized with something of a jolt that in a way I thought of religion as one such extra – because of music, cathedrals, Islamic calligraphy, stories, rituals – lots of things.
So I do get that. But I can’t participate because I don’t believe. I can consume though – I can be a consumer of religious music and art and architecture. But consuming is different from participating. But then, lacking the belief, I can’t say I really want to participate. But then I miss out on that particular form of fun.
Ah well.
Eric:”For the truth is not, as Deen suggested, that she wants to have her cake and eat it too. She wants to pretend to have eaten her cake, while looking longingly at her empty lunch box, imagining the feast that she will have later too.”
Eric, my compliments. PLEASE write a book. (Or if you have, sell me a copy). Of course, your face will then be added to the personal dart boards of the columnists but it will be so good for the rest of us by adding depth support to the fireworks of Dawkins et al.
I don’t have any problem at all with HE’s sort of Christianity. I mean, I don’t for a minute think that it’s actually true, but nor is it a threat to my liberties, so I can live and let live.
The only thing I don’t understand is how she goes through life not meeting all those Christians who think that their religion gives them the authority to call for abortion to be banned, medical research to be restricted, a whole range of sexual practices that are pleasant (at least for the people who go in for them) and mostly harmless to be condemned as “sinful” (if not actually banned), etc., etc. Even in relatively secular Australia we are awash with such people, and many of them exercise great political influence. Some of them even sit in parliament and wield a scary amount of power. Here in the US, where I am at the moment, the situation is vastly worse.
Sure, there are some theologically and politically liberal Christians around, and I am friends with a good few of them, but I find it extraordinary that anyone can go through life meeting only that kind of Christian. I just have to scratch my head about this.
Especially living in southern California and with the Institute of Creation Research a mere 30km or 30 minute drive away from her University. As I said before, she needs to get out more.