Year: 2010

In answering the last question in the debate with Hitchens, Blair tried to sum up his defense of religion. He said you have to find “the essence.” Yes there are bad parts, but you have to explain those away, and keep the essence, that is, what you take to be the essence.

I see how people look at certain parts of scripture and draw those conclusions from it, but it’s not what it means to me, it’s not the essence of it. The essence of it is through the life of Jesus Christ, a life of love, selflessness and sacrifice and that’s what it means to me.

Yes but. 1) That’s what it means to you but that’s not what it means to other people, and because it is not based on anything universalizable, there is no way to adjudicate between you. There is no way to say definitively that you are right and the woman-stoners are wrong. So saying “that’s what it means to me” is worthless, and worse than worthless, because it endorses religion instead of saying this inability to adjudicate between versions makes it dangerous. And 2) a life of love, selflessness and sacrifice is not inherently religious or unavailable to atheists.

The second point wouldn’t matter all that much, provided theists could stop assuming and saying that only theists are capable of demanding forms of goodness, if it weren’t for the first one. But the first one is a killer.

How is this helping? When will people learn that all this aggression and shouting won’t change anyone’s mind and that it’s much better to just calm down and bite your tongue and think about peace and a sunlit meadow rather than go around saying things and handing out leaflets? Nobody’s mind was ever changed by someone saying something, so why won’t they take their clothes off and pose for photographs instead?

Christians who believe their faith is “under attack” in Britain have launched a “Not Ashamed Day” campaign.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey claimed Christians of “deep faith” faced discrimination.

Campaigners say a mounting number of cases of workers being disciplined over their beliefs show Christianity is being “airbrushed” from UK society.

What strident shrill nonsense, and divisive, too. It’s shocking that these people refuse to work with secularists and atheists to achieve common goals, and instead stubbornly insist on saying what they think. Well, no good deed goes unpunished.

Christian Concern has also highlighted the fact that Catholic adoption agencies no longer have the right to refuse gay couples as prospective adoptive parents.

And they no longer have the right to own slaves, or burn witches, or invade the Holy Land. Times change. But they mustn’t rock the boat, because we all have to work together, so they should please please please stop talking and let someone who is an expert in communication do it. Otherwise everything will fall apart tomorrow at the latest.

One interesting item in the Banks chapter of The Age of Wonder is Banks’s account of witnessing a girl get a tattoo. Happily, his journal is online; it was July 5 1969 1769.

This morn I saw the operation of Tattowing the buttocks performd upon a girl of about 12 years old, it provd as I have always suspected a most painfull one. It was done with a large instrument about 2 inches long containing about 30 teeth, every stroke of this hundreds of which were made in a minute drew blood. The patient bore this for about ¼ of an hour with most stoical resolution; by that time however the pain began to operate too stron[g]ly to be peacably endurd, she began to complain and soon burst out into loud lamentations and would fain have persuaded the operator to cease; she was however held down by two women who sometimes scolded, sometimes beat, and at others coaxd her. I was setting in the adjacent house with Tomio for an hour, all which time it lasted and was not finishd when I went away tho very near. This was one side only of her buttocks for the other had been done some time before. The arches upon the loins upon which they value themselves much were not yet done, the doing of which they told causd more pain than what I had seen.

Familiar, isn’t it, right down to the women holding her down.

It’s much less gruesome than genital mutilation, because it’s not harmful in the same way (unless, it belatedly occurs to me, there is infection, which there must have been at least sometimes)…but it’s gruesome enough. Holmes quotes Banks writing several years later, in a letter:

For this Custom, they give no reason, but that they were taught it by their forefathers…So essential is it esteemed to Beauty, and so disgraceful is the want of it deemed, that every one submits to it.

Quite – just like FGM, just like bound feet. The girl tried to bear it, but it got too bad, and she wanted it to stop – but the two women held her down.

It’s funny…I  went to a very small very academic girls’ school. At some point most of my classmates got their ears pierced, but I didn’t. It was kind of esteemed essential to Beauty, also sort of hip and new (our  mothers wore clip-on earrings), which I liked to be…but I never wanted pierced ears. I never wanted even such a minor mutilation – I remember really just not liking the idea of a hole in my ear lobes. It’s just as well I didn’t grow up in Tahiti in the 18th century.

Hitchens explained various things to Jeremy Paxman for Newsnight. The best part was where he talked about the virtues of division. He’s been saying this for years, and I’ve been squawking my approval and agreement for years. If you say you’re a uniter not a divider, he noted dryly, you expect and get approval. “I’m a divider.”

Division is inseparable from politics, he went on. If everyone agrees, there is no politics, there’s nothing to say. “Without division there is no progress.”

The alternative is dictatorship, and this is relevant to religion and the rebellion against it.  “The first rebellion against mental slavery comes from saying this is man-made, it’s not divine.”

“To be clear,” Paxman said in prissy shock,  “you’re talking about the Koran and the Bible.” And the Torah, yes, Hitchens said.

“They’re fiction.”

“Yes. All of these are depraved works of man-made fiction.”

“Saying you find the Koran laughable – in what way does that help the spread of reason?”

“Oh well I think mockery of religion is one of the most essential things. One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at things.”

I’m reading Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder. I read the first chapter, on Joseph Banks in Tahiti, this morning – it’s enthralling, and rather inspiring.

I was struck by something Holmes said in the prologue.

Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so. In effect there is Romantic science in the same sense there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons.

Yes exactly – and the scientists I’m familiar with are of that kind.