Faith faith faith, and Slee
I’m not the only one who wasn’t impressed or convinced by that piece by Stuart Jeffries. Caspar Melville is another.
Stuart Jeffries piece on faith and unbelief is an example of a certain kind of liberal intellectual position which seeks to stand above the current debates about the place of religion in contemporary society…He quotes without challenge the preposterous assertion from Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, that “atheists like Richard Dawkins are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube” (since when is writing books and making arguments comparable to mass murder?)…Jeffries is quite right to point out that these days secularists seem exasperated. But who can blame us when the case against unaccountable and undemocratic religious privilege is so misrepresented by articles like his?
Well exactly. If people like him didn’t keep saying silly things like that, people like us would be better-tempered and sweeter and would stop blowing up tubes and buses, or rather not so much blowing them up as, well, not blowing them up. We wouldn’t stop not blowing them up – we’d – oh never mind.
David Thompson also comments.
What we’re hearing instead, and hearing very often, are statements like another quoted in Jeffries’ article, by Oxford theologian Alister McGrath: “We need to treat those who disagree with us with intellectual respect, rather than dismissing them – as Dawkins does – as liars, knaves and charlatans.” This rather presupposes that intellectual respect could in all fairness be assigned to a person who presents no credible argument to support grandiose claims regarding the origin and nature of existence, and the alleged preferences of a hypothetical deity on whose behalf he affects to speak. Well, if you want to avoid being viewed as a knave or a pompous little fraud, it helps to have the goods to back up your claims.
And it’s just asking too much to demand that we treat all those who disagree with us with intellectual respect. What if they’re not intellectually respectable? Civility is one thing, but intellectual respect is another.
David cites that comment by Colin Slee too – I daresay everyone who discussed that article cited that comment. It certainly did stand out! So much so that it caused me to lapse into a rare but sincere fantasy about violence.
Ben at Religion is Bullshit has a splendid comment. Stuart Jeffries is probably feeling pretty silly by now! One can hope so anyway.
Stephen Law has posts about the ever-popular ‘atheism is faith’ trope here and here. He also has ones on cultural relativism here and several other places – I don’t have the strength to link to all of them: you should just go explore the whole blog.
Disagree with Stephen Law. Is correct that atheism is not a ‘faith position’ – but for the wrong reasons. It is precisely because faith is not merely a matter of believing in a proposition that atheism cannot be a faith position: faith entails a certain attitude of trust, love towards the universe, God etc. – I think there could be an ‘atheist faith’ but it is not implied in the merely negative absence-of-belief meaning of atheism (from which Law, incidentally, seems to depart when he’s arguing there’s evidence for atheism).
As far as the intellectual respect thing goes. I agree with you in spirit, in that intellectual respect needs to be deserved: there’s a lot of ideas out there that deserve none, and the reflexive call for respect for other beliefs leads to tolerating some pretty despicable ones. This said, we may well disagree on who is accorded intellectual respect ;-)
“faith entails a certain attitude of trust, love towards the universe, God etc”
Does that go for a Satanist faith? Or the marquis de Sade’s conviction of a pitiless nature that demands we be cruel?
Ian Paisley is a man of great faith, but also very little love for the universe – or at least the human part of it, methinks.
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Dave: Good points – but I think Sade at least is a quite complex and contradictory figure in that regard (refusing to sign execution orders during his time as a functionary in the revolutionary gov’t etc. – also, his short text “The priest and the dying man” is a beautiful piece about an atheist being ‘at home in the universe’). I’m not sure how many Satanists actually have ‘faith’ in that most of them, as I understand, are atheists with a Randian view on society dressed up as religious doctrine. I don’t think any of the Satanists I’ve met actually believe in God or the Devil, though some of them may have an interest in occultism, Crowley etc.
Off-Topic: you might be glad to hear that the Dutch equivalent of Dawkins, the geneticist Ronald Plasterk, is our new minister of education. I expect a lot of him. Interestingly, he’s part of the most Christian government since just about forever :-)
Tingey, you are a very bad man. In fact you are despicable.
No – I very carefully did not accuse any named person or group of lying.
And, where I used already-published remarks, I was also careful to point this out.
So what has got your goat?
If necessary, please contact me direct – you have my e-mail, after all…..
“Civility is one thing, but intellectual respect is another.”
That seems to be to be true and important. Civility is a necessity for social interaction and should be taken as given but intellectual respect is something that should be earned. However, I think that when some people say they want “respect” they may mean no more than civility. Or could be fobbed off with civility. Others, when they say they want “respect” they mean they want total and abject agreement.
Strewth, Merlijn, how many Satanists do you know?
I don’t think Law was quite arguing that there is evidence for atheism, but rather that there is evidence against the hypothesis of a benevolent omnipotent deity with a plan.
In the debate in which Jeffries has engaged the ‘faith’ position is pretty much framed around that definition of a god. Of course some, when pressed, will take refuge in a god who is no more than a cosmological speculation, but an adherent of a particular religion has made the decision to be specific about the attributes of the being in question, and so it is legitimate to examine those specifics.
If it were possible to prove beyond any shred of doubt that Jaweh, Allah and Baron Samedi do not exist in any sense of the word, that would still not ‘prove’ the atheist position. But as such a proof is not possible, we are left with the balance of probabilities.
Tingey –
You have my email, so why do you keep on and on and on and on arguing about just how close you can get to accusing people of lying, here instead of via email? If you really want to know, ask me via email, not here.
But better yet, don’t; just drop it. Let it go. Forget about it. Move on. Just consider it an incomprehensible taboo, if you like. In short: SHUT UP ABOUT IT.
Ye gods, Tingey, just set up your own damn blog and fill your boots, why don’t you? Hell, I’ll set one up for you if it means you pack it in over here.
Also; thanks for the link!