The notion Lord Rees so casually endorses
Nick Cohen is not unduly impressed by the Templeton Foundation.
Initially, it made no secret of its admiration for clerical hucksters and dispensed prizes to the evangelical showman Billy Graham and Mother Teresa, who sought to wallow in Calcuttan poverty rather than end it. Now it has moved upmarket and seeks to reward intellectuals who allow religion to scrape an acquaintance with science; who imply, however vaguely, that evidence-based research and ancient fable are compatible.
That’s the one. I point this out because the gnu-haters have been so energetically defending it in the past few days – I want to underline the fact that Nick is not an ally in that project.
Rees is not, Nick points out, actually religious.
The religious nevertheless showered him with money because he is a symptomatic figure of our tongue-biting age. Like millions who should know better, Rees is not religious himself but “respects” religion and wants it to live in “peaceful co-existence” with it.
Which is the difference between gnu atheists and the other kind – even they “respect” religion, at least in the sense that they would far rather tell rude whoppers about us every few days than say a harsh syllable about religion.
…the respect the secular give too freely involves darker concessions. It prevents an honest confrontation with radical Islam or any other variant of poor world religious extremism and a proper solidarity with extremism’s victims. “I don’t want to force Muslims to choose between God and Darwin,” Rees says, forgetting that scientists “force” no one to choose Darwin, while theocracies force whole populations to bow to their gods. So cloying is the deference that few notice how the demand for “respect” gives away the shallowness of contemporary religious thought.
In the past, the faithful did not accuse their critics of mere bad manners. Charges of blasphemy and heresy were once like accusations of libel. The sinner had sought to spread falsehoods against the true religion, which his prosecutors exposed in court.
And truth was no defense.
…the notion Lord Rees so casually endorses – that you must respect the privacy of ideologies that mandate violence, the subjugation of women and the persecution of homosexuals and treat them as if they were beyond criticism and scientific refutation – is the most cowardly evasion of intellectual duty of our day.
Damn right.
I’m reading a draft of Nick’s next book, by the way. It’s way good.
It is real discouraging to see such intelligent people keep propping up this false idea that ‘non-extremist religious people give license to religious extremists’. It’s a vicious attempt to provide cause for critiquing all religious followers and manifestations by suggesting that there are no such thing as benign/benevolent/moderate religious people. It’s an unwillingness to accept that a lot of religions are OK or even GOOD, and that they are just as vehemently opposed to extremist manifestations as we. It’s a laziness to discern what specific aspects of some religions that are reprehensible and what aspects are commendable.
When Lord Rees reportedly said he didn’t want to force Muslims to decide between believing in Darwin rather than God, it seems to me that all he meant was that it is not his business whether they believe in creation versus evolution. Then Nick Cohen goes on to accuse Lord Rees of condoning all the worst manifestations of Islam. Um, now how did Nick conclude all those things? Oh, based on that false notion of respecting any religion = respecting all religion.
What are you quoting? The phrase in quotation marks does not appear anywhere else on this page. It also does not resemble anything quoted from Nick’s article. You’re creating your own over-simplified version of what Nick wrote, and then pouncing on that. Pounce on what’s really there, not a phantom.
No, Andrew, that won’t do – you can’t just paste in big chunks and say that’s it. You have to make your own claim in your own words without using quotation marks on things that no one said.
You don’t read for comprehension, do you Andrew?
“It’s an unwillingness to accept that a lot of religions are OK or even GOOD…”
Don’t you mean “lots of people who believe in religions are OK or even GOOD?” Because the religions themselves are shite, and religious people who are good are good in spite of what their religions condone. That’s the problem with moderates: they’re whitewashing or lying about what their books actually say.
Which ones, and how?
When I said ” ‘non-extremist religious people give license to religious extremists’ ” I was using single quotation marks to refer to the idea behind the words, not the words themselves as said by someone else. The idea is that which was brought up in Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, I believe, that religious moderates preclude the ability to sufficiently address / critique religious extremists. Nick Cohen’s accusations toward Lord Rees for casually endorsing the notion “that you must respect the privacy of ideologies that mandate violence, the subjugation of women and the persecution of homosexuals” all because Lord Rees said that he was not interested in forcing Muslims to believe in Darwin, seem to be an example of that kind of thinking that Sam Harris put forth.
Anyone who wants a claim like that taken seriously ought to be able to advance a list that’s none too short of religions whose foundational texts lack elements of hostility towards outsiders (hint: the three monotheisms don’t come close to cutting it).
Have any of you attended a Unitarian Universalist church, for example? It is a church that explicitly endorses social justice activism, strength, wonder, searching, love and compassion. The people that leave that church and they engage in social justice work are not doing so in spite of their church, but partly because they were inspired by their church. Obviously the UU church is not the only one that promotes this kind of thinking and activity. Not all churches are backwards, bound up in dogma, more interested in prosyletization than in actual helping, wanting to impose a social conservative agenda upon all of us. To think so is to believe in a caricature of religion.
But I don’t think ‘the idea behind the words’ is what you think it is. Cohen is clear that he is criticizing the idea that religious beliefs qua religious beliefs should be “respected.” He points out the logical consequences of that idea. It’s not all so benign as not believing in evolution – that relatively harmless outcome and the more egregious manifestations of privileging faith are different only in degree, not in kind. Both the benign and the malignant outcomes are a consequence of the notion that religion should be “respected.”
So you’re saying you read this post through the lens of your dislike of something Sam Harris said. That explains your confusion, but it doesn’t make your point more germane.
It is equally discouraging to see supposedly intelligent people holding on to the notion that because non-extremist and moderately religious people are decidedly preferable to their fundamentalist brethrens, that somehow that feature alone makes moderate religious opinions impervious to criticism. It also misses the point completely. The validity of religious dogmas, extremist or otherwise, do not rest on how they make their followers behave. There are certainly many liberal Christians who reject a literal reading of the Bible and eschew creationism. But that hardly makes the ideas they adhere to (God has a plan (and it sucks), He loves you (I don’t want him to), Everything happens for a reason (sure, like tsunamis)) any more valid. Your ideas may be OK, or even GOOD but it’s still WRONG. Just because your beliefs manifest themselves in a benign, half-hearted way does’t win it any favour. Extremists have the earnestness and the sheer conviction of their beliefs. Moderates have none, which makes it easier for them to constantly shift and shuffle their faith.
And who exactly decides that religious books and texts must not be taken literally but merely metaphorically as and when they find convenient? That is naive at best and dishonest at worst. Religious dictums are not strawberries that everyone gets to pick and choose. It is no coincidence either that the parts of any religion that is mostly left out during such pickings almost always turn out to be the ones that define it’s core (resurrection etc.). Are we to believe, as Sam Harris does, that the true representatives of any faith are the very people who are actively in the process of losing it?
This is not a responsible way to judge religions. You must know that many if not most religious people consider much of their foundational texts to be metaphorical. Notice you didn’t request a list of religions or churches that lack hostility toward outsiders… You insisted that I base that list on the texts, as if all religions and churches interpreted the texts literally.
Of course we’re all familiar with the UUs. The example doesn’t help you as much as you think – you’re highly likely to find a large number of atheists and agnostics in a UU church. The extent to which it promotes social justice is commensurate with how secular UU thinking actually is.
But you know, Andrew, that UUism is not representative of mainstream religion. Nor does that one example flesh out your claim that A LOT of religions are GOOD. You also won’t find many of us complaining about UUism, because we’re obviously not troubled by a group of people who believe in doing good and fostering human rights. I don’t know where you got this idea that we’re so bound up in anti-religiosity that we find criticizing any form of religion – even a humanistic one like UUism – more important than any other goal. You just make shit up about people.
Fine; but those are all secular things, so there is no need to link them with religion. Doing so helps to perpetuate the idea that religion is the only place to get such things. I would like to see that idea fade away; that’s one reason I’m not a fan even of liberal churches.
I think you’re doing the same thing, by the way. I don’t know if you’re doing it knowingly or not, but I think you are doing it, with all this insistence on the wonderfulness of some religion when what you mean is the wonderfulness of the things some religions endorse.
I know no such thing, and neither do you. “Moderates” just love to exaggerate the numerical dominance of liberal religion. Liberal denominations are few and declining in the US. In most of the world they’re barely shadows.
Uh-oh, Ophelia. Does this mean B and W is now an echo chamber. . . chamber. . . chamber?
When Lord Rees reportedly said he didn’t want to force Muslims to decide between believing in Darwin rather than God, it seems to me that all he meant was that it is not his business whether they believe in creation versus evolution.
If that’s what Rees meant, it makes it even worst. He should absolutely make it his business. Evolution by natural selection is the very antithesis of creation in every sense of the term. You cannot have it both ways.
I think I see the problem:
You’re confusing churches with religions. There are lots of churches embracing many different versions of christianity, for example. It’s the christianity that sucks. No matter how hard they try to pretty it up, it’s still a homophobic, misogynistic belief system. To say otherwise it to throw out the book, and without the book, what’s the point?
No, Andrew, you made the original, rather sweeping, claim. There seems to be no shortage of people out there who take very little metaphorically. I’m familiar with the polls giving pretty frightening percentages of Americans taking biblical texts literally. Do you have anything with which to back up ” many if not most religious people consider much of their foundational texts to be metaphorical”?
We both know what it is in all those texts and in your eagerness to give religion a largely clean bill of moral health, you’re quick to distance the religions from those texts. But what would they really be without them?
I think we should care a hell of a lot more on how people interpret the texts and are inspired to act, than what the actual texts say. It’s pragmatic in the sense that if someone wants to go work in a hospital and heal the sick, because the Bible inspired them to, then I see absolute no reason to pester the person about what their inspiration rested on. Your right, the actions of religious people, no matter what form they come in, do not lend any validity to their religious dogmas, but they add practical value that I believe is far more important.
The people decide! If the people do not want to be dogmatic, then why must they be criticized for it rather than commended? It seems as though some of the harshest critics of all religion want so dearly for religious people to be dogmatic just so they can continue believing that all religion is bad.
There are no true representatives of any faith, all are representatives of their faith. And I do not think that they are simply losing all their faith if they no longer believe in certain parts of their religious texts, they are just more narrowly defining it.
Stop doing that. Who? Who?
You’ve got to love Nick Cohen. What is an “honest confrontation“? Or, for that matter, “proper solidarity“? We have endless columns bitching – sometimes fairly – about X and Y not doing Z but one can’t help but wonder why the columnist doesn’t lead the way.
Andrew, your version of “good” religion is like homeopathic botulin toxin. Botulin toxin itself is a deadly poison, but if you dilute it until it isn’t there anymore you can experience a placebo effect. I still think it’s a good idea to try to persuade people that any ingestion of botulin toxin is a bad thing.
Okay, “you must know” was uncalled for. What I should have said is that I suspect that many if not most religious people consider much of their foundational texts to be metaphorical, based on my own experiences and observations.
In other words, very anecdotal and at odds with a lot of other information.
What other information?
That’s a very different claim, isn’t it? How much experience do you have outside of liberal religious circles?
I’d still like to know whom you’re referring to.
Which people? The ones who decide not to be dogmatic, or the ones who decide otherwise? What do each base their decisions upon? Ask yourself this, if some people do want to be dogmatic within the ambit of the very same faith within which somebody else do not want to be dogmatic, why must the former be criticized while the latter commended?
For the record, what I do like to say very categorically is that all religion is wrong (even when they inspire good). Religions give bad reasons to do good things and very good reasons to do very bad things. But I do confess to be a harsh critic of all religion, based on what they actually say and claim. In particular, what matters to me are the truth of the diversely contradicting claims found among all religions. Even if the behavior of the faithful were the only criteria to judge their faith, the sheer dominance of extremists across the spectrum of faith-systems is more than enough to invalidate them.
A few seconds of googling, first relevant thing I found, from 2007 (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/may/29/20070529-111815-7952r/):
What you said is very much at odds with that.
Is the site under a DoS attack? Loading pages has been difficult and slow over the last couple of days.
Except of course that those who espouse extremism must not be taken to represent their faith, right?
So can I still be called a Christian if The Sermon on the Mount is all that I believe in and reject everything else? I mean EVERYTHING – god, original sin, resurrection, redemption. Is that possible?
Following up on what Saikat said, how exactly do preachers not count as repsentatives of their faith? These are the theologians contemplating the ‘big questions’, determining church policy and administering to the ‘spiritual needs’ of their ‘flock.’ Hell, these are the people who generally interpret texts for their community and the first ones people go to when they need this or that justification for life.
@Andrew:
“You must know that many if not most religious people consider much of their foundational texts to be metaphorical”
The old Karen Armstrong argument again! If the texts are metaphorical and do not describe actual events then the metaphorical meaning ascribed to them can be anything at all that you want it to be. If that were the case then there would be no religions, and no “need” for any, because everybody would have their own personal metaphor set meaning whatever took their own fancy. You could even deny two thousand years of history and claim that religion has always just been about compassion and commitment and forget about all that dogma and doctrine. Sadly this is not the case. I know of no religions that encompass complete individual interpretation. On the contrary they usually consist of hierarchies of very rule-bound and dogmatic people. Just try telling the pope that yeshue bar yussef was just a metaphor or that the consecrated communion wafer is just a symbol.
And yes I have been a UU member years ago. A lot of nice pople just spinning wheels and unable to take that last step by giving up going to church altogether.
Yeah, that’s one I think ought to be brought up more often. I was watching one of the Craig debates recently and the guy started distancing Christianity from ancient religions that sacrificed children to their gods. Yet, child sacrifice is at the heart of Christianity where their god’s own child is sacrificed. So, Christians aren’t all that far removed from what they like to think of as barbaric ancient religions. I was happy to see Sam Harris bring that up during his debate with Craig.
I’m sure there were some nice Nazis too, doesn’t make Nazism something I want to jump into bed with. I find appeasers for religion a symptom of our general western weakness against religion as a political entity. Such appeasers are both naive and foolish to disassociate religion from its political agenda.
Nice to see Nick Cohen back on form, and when he’s on form he’s aligned very much with gnu atheist sensibilities.
i think mr. Lovley haven’t read much real church history. I don’t deny that many religious people are kind as long as they are not forced by the clergy to do otherwise, in that case the masks are coming down, and they get pretty dangerous. Look at the biblebelt in southern USA. Instead of reading his own propaganda and warmup his own delusions he should for example get a view at the site “jezusneverexisted.com” or read the books of Karlheinz Deschner (i don’t know if they are translated in english). But my experience tell me that argue with a believer is borderless. Like Dawkins said even if they don’t interpret the bible literally where they seek the reference to judge between the “words of god” and the bullshit.
Thank you Stewart (# 31).
There’s also this survey
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_poll3.htm
Majority believes in heaven, hell, afterlife, etc.
Neil – I don’t know, but I couldn’t get access at all for a few minutes just now. I hope not!
I couldn’t get through at all for maybe half an hour.
I do hope that Andrew will relate to the explicit rebuttal of what he said.
Why is Lord Rees receiving so much criticism? He’s also a citizen of a liberal democratic society and he’s simply facing reality– non-religious people have to co-exist with the faithful. Some commentators don’t seem to be able to distinguish between the different roles people play, in any society. I have no idea just what Lord Rees “so casually endorses” as I’ve never heard him comment on the subject of the limits of religious tolerance, perhaps someone’s building a straw man.
In-fighting amongst atheists is a rather squalid spectacle,I’m amazed how people have made an ideology out of atheism.
Well, in most liberal democratic societies, criticism is permitted and quite a number of people feel that this acceptance, which could be seen as some kind of endorsement of the Templeton Foundation, is problematic, due to what is known about some of Templeton’s activities. So, I would say that the freedom to criticise stems from the same source as Templeton’s freedom to offer very large cash awards to those prepared to be associated with its name, reputation and known policy regarding the existence or non-existence of an inherent conflict between two fields that make claims based on very different criteria. I don’t think anybody, even among the most vocal critics, was suggesting that Templeton ought to be prevented from offering the money or that anyone should be prevented from accepting it. Those voicing the criticism come from the camp that does not think anyone or anything should have immunity from criticism. Was RJW suggesting it should be otherwise in this case?
Since when does it imply that co-existence with the faithful is synonymous with refraining from criticism of their faith?
Well, something else struck me there. If the intention was to state that they have co-exist with each other, it could have been phrased like that. The implication of the phrasing is that the non-religious must accept that the religious are not going to go away and not vice versa. Was the implied non-equality intentional?
Stewart #31
I do not think so. The sentences right below the one you mentioned note that:
Only one-third of respondents claimed to interpret the Bible as literally, almost half of respondents said the Bible is the “inspired word of God”. Inspired word of God? First of all, none of us can be so sure what each respondent meant by Inspired word of God. However, since they did not respond that the Bible needs to be interpreted literally as the word of God, I am willing to venture to say that they believed that at least some of the Bible is metaphor. If you combine the ‘inspired word of God’ group with the ‘myths and legends’ group, you would also get a majority of people who believe that the Bible is more or less metaphorical. The story can be spun a number of ways, but it is not an effective rebuttal of what I have asserted earlier.
Oy.
“Since when does it imply that co-existence with the faithful is synonymous with refraining from criticism of their faith?”
Because as “religions of peace” if you keep criticizing them they will be forced to kill you, to maintain the “peace”
I agree there can be spinning. Very little further search necessary for this: http://www.newsweek.com/2009/04/06/one-nation-under-god.html
It includes:
Are spiritual beings metaphorical? What do those 78% think they are doing when they are praying?
Andrew, if you don’t like talk of religious texts, maybe we can try to pin down just what it is that makes religious people different from non-religious people. The key concept at the heart of even liberal religions is the idea that “faith” is a virtue — i.e., that it is a good thing to believe certain ideas in the absence of evidence, or even in the face of overwhelming evidence. But once such a concept is made a virtue, some people will inevitably try to shelter their nastiest and most vile impulses under its umbrella. The only way to put a stop to it is to say that no, faith is not a virtue under any circumstances.
Spiritual beings is so vague, it could include belief in ghosts, which I do not think should bother us so much.
What do those people think they are doing when they’re praying? Perhaps talking to someone/something that cares. Perhaps making a plea to a being that they believe to be in control of things when they have no control over it. Either way, our initial disagreement was over how many people interpret the Bible to be metaphor or not, and belief in spiritual beings and use of prayer has nothing to do with that. And the reason we brought up the ‘Bible as metaphor’ question is because you challenged me to point to religious texts that do not promote hostility toward outsiders, and I suggested that we should care more about how people interpret the texts than the actual words of the texts. Besides, I’m not aware of any Eastern religious texts promoting hostility toward outsiders.
Many do appear to do just that, and it also appears that metaphorical understanding of ‘kill them all and keep the women for yourselves’ is less useful for suppressing the literal version of “kill them all and keep the women for yourselves’ than one might hope. The thesis that good religion drives out bad stands in need of confirmation given massive evidence to the contrary.
How does the frequent interreligious violence around the world help us understand the effectiveness of good religion? I think the best case to make is that secular government that respects human rights is needed. That means that reform must come from both within and outside religion. Good religion alone can’t do the job. It needs support from us outsiders. The accomodationist model of blaming outspoken atheists for conflict ignores where aggression comes from. I mean real aggression, not mockery of foolish spinmeisters.
No – we got into this nonsense because you brought up the old “most believers are liberal” canard.
And, er, Andrew, what about the figures Ophelia gave? Or do you mean that believing some of the bible may be metaphor somehow invalidates a literal belief in heaven and hell? Which bits would be preferable to view as metaphor, while we’re at it?
Can you at least concede how difficult this becomes for the side you seem to represent if you’re not permitted to separate all the beliefs, texts and the spiritual beings originating (or not?) in the texts from each other? Can we not lose sight of your claim that kicked off this bit of the discussion that lots or most religions are ok or even good? If it’s only the individual goodness of the people that counts here, why even mention religion? And if it isn’t and it has nothing to do with texts, then what is it?
First of all I never said that… who are you quoting?Second of all, I think Stewart’s link substantiated my claim that many if not most people interpret much of their foundational texts to be metaphorical.
Agreed. And the disconcerting truth is that those who interpret their holy texts literally far exceed those who don’t in numbers as well as in influence. The world would be a very different place from what it is now if the dominant form of Christianity were the one practiced by Unitarians or Quakers, or if Muslims embraced Sufi Islam in hordes. You know as well as anybody that that isn’t the case.
‘moderate religious people give license to extremists’ is not at all the same as ‘there is no such thing as moderate religious people’. Do you understand the difference? For example, think about a political party that you oppose.
Ophelia: Should there be a link to Nick’s post somewhere?
I understand. I should have worded it differently. What I meant to say is that by claiming that benign/benevolent/moderate religious people give license to religious extremists, it suggests that even the ethical religious people are indirectly at fault for religious extremism by enabling it to happen.
Oops! Yes; thanks windy.
That is precisely correct, and that is what I was addressing in #49 above.
No, Andrew, you shouldn’t have “worded it differently.” You shouldn’t have said it at all. You were putting words and thoughts in Nick Cohen’s mouth, things he didn’t say. To grind your axe. As you do all the time, every time you come here.
I have always wondered this, how do you turn specific commands to kill certain types of people into a metaphor? How exactly does that work?
I realize most Christians today do not want to follow those commands from the bible, although I do wonder if if thats more because they don’t want to or because they no longer can in a secular society, but how does one reconcile a specific command to end someones life into a metaphor?
Hamilton, Windy and now David beat me to what I was about to say in earlier comments, but David’s question about metaphor needs amplifying even more, I think. What does it mean if not everything is taken literally? Aren’t we then saying that certain stories need not be assumed to have taken place or at least not quite as told? Saying that they can be taken metaphorically does not mean that the apparent message or moral they deliver is less valid merely because there may have been invention going on in details of plot. And, to return to David’s point, when what is left after the metaphors have been accounted for is a preaching of hatred or of a call for actions that are not today considered compatible with civilised society, does it really matter if some of the illustrative material was metaphorical? Can one be moderate if one claims “only” that it is divinely inspired?
One of the main reasons why many believers choose to reject the more violent aspects of their faith and take recourse to interpretations as well as cherry-picking is because they no longer have the power to impose their beliefs on others. I do not discount those who proclaim themselves to be moderates out of a genuinely innate sense of decency and fairness, but one simply cannot disregard the influence and efficacy of secular ideas. No wonder then that many of the ideals professed by religious moderates have strongly secular foundations. But give them the mandate of the majority and see for yourself what happens. It is undeniable that a considerable part of religious moderation has more to do with the loss of religious power and the triumph of secular thought than faith-based inspirations. I must say that I have never quite believed in the chastity of impotent men.
Andrew,
Going right back to your opening sentence at #1:
The problem is that any religion which promotes the belief in an afterlife, particularly as a reward-punishment system for behaviour in this life, inevitably finishes up dividing humanity into the saved and the damned, God’s Chosen People and God’s Rejected People, the ummatude and the dhimmitude (or whatever the Islamic terms are) and so on. It is consistent with any religion’s function as a super-tribe, giving identity through membership of an insider group, which for its existence as a mental category necessitates an outsider group.
‘Non-extremists’ still have to subscribe to and support that fundamental perceptual dichotomy, and it is the dichotomy that gives rise to and sustains the extremists. The instant the idea of goodness is created, so is the idea of evil. Such opposites exist in pairs, or not at all.
Such ideas as salvation and of being elect is thus rather dangerous ones.
That is the crux of the matter. So long as it is the case that belief in supernatural agency is understood as a virtue, we are expected to understand that religious extremism is a matter of misinterpretation rather than an especially dangerous form of irrationalism. I know well enough not to worry about the more benign forms of irrationalism, but I still understand that irrationalism is the problem.
And such ideas as salvation and of being elect ARE thus rather dangerous ones as well. ;-)
I guess you have to ignore it. But that’s why liberal religion is so ineffective on it’s own. Someone must not just ignore but oppose these injunctions, which necessarily means opposing the grounds for considering them true and right. That means attacking the irrational basis not of bad religion but all irrational beliefs. Enabling the irrational enables the evil uses of it. How is that an unreasonable thesis?
Coming back to this issue, perhaps a mathematical analogy would help. When a fundamentalist says that pi = 3 because that’s what it says in the bible, a moderate religious person will say no no no no no, that’s not right, that part is a metaphor, and anyone with any sense can see it’s not right. You’re doing it wrong.
But if you look at the first line of the homework papers they turn in to the math teacher, they both have stamped in bold letters:
When the math teacher gives the fundamentalist an F for invoking Rule A, the fundamentalist squawks loudly, but so does the religious moderate. He says, there’s nothing wrong with Rule A — he was only using it in the wrong way. He should use it in the right way.
But I think the math teacher was right. When you let Rule A into the mathematics classroom, there’s nothing you can do to stop the endless flood of people claiming that the square root of 5 is 2, or that homosexuals should be burned at the stake, or whatever else they happen to fancy at the moment.
On what grounds could a Humanist criticize the actions of an atheistic anarchic nihilist? Since the Humanist concedes that there is no divine arbiter, do they not enable even the worst possible consequences of atheism (i.e. moral nihilism / egoism)? If you believe the answer to this to be an emphatic “no,” then it should follow that it is just as ridiculous to suggest that religious humanists enable / cover / preclude criticism of religious extremists. Extremists are likely to always exist, but can be marginalized to the point of ineffectualness if humanists of both the religious and secular stripes work together in making that happen.
@69 : Moral nihilism and egoism are possible consequences of atheism? Really? So moral certitude itself is divinely inspired? And the belief that god created humans in his image is what? Dissolution of the ego?
@ 70
Yes.
Except for the belief that god created humans in his image somehow leads to dissolution of the ego. Rather, I think the alleged teachings of Jesus Christ are what encourage dissolution of the ego, should the individual / church care to pay much attention to them.
On the grounds that certain actions by people and certain policies by governments cause real harm in this world to real people, while other actions and policies help people rather than harming them. The case against anarchy is easy to make on evidentiary grounds (e.g., riots and looting during previous power blackouts or police strikes). I don’t know what specific actions and policies you are attributing to nihilism, but these can be countered on evidentiary grounds as well, if and when the need arises.
If you think we’re all mounting a tribal defense of atheism, that’s not the case. An atheist who believes that anarchy would be a state of utopia is living in a fantasy world just as much as a fundamentalist preacher. To such a person I would say: Get in the fookin sack.
OK, that’s a fair challenge. Is there a rational expectation that atheism leads to anarchic nihilism as surely as irrationalism frequently leads to violence and tyranny? What does history tell us? I suggest the answer is that the atheistic rationalism advocated here and by NAs generally does not enable anarchist tyranny. To believe otherwise is to say that reason leads to nihilism as unreason leads to the consequences we see in the world. But that’s just it. As empiricists we decide based on evidence. If evidence suggested that using rational mean to decide values questions was anywhere near as dangerous as the use of irrational means we would know that. The answer is decisively no. The question of which paths lead to the worst results is decided by reasoning about what the evidence shows, not by some kind of balancing act.
One rarely hears from nihilists here at Atheism Central, home of the bad, bad GNUs. Why not? Do you think Sam Harris is a nihilist hero? No, I don’t think so. Dawkins? Hitchens? The idea is a little bit ridiculous. These people are all stone cold rational moralists, whatever else you may think about them.
@71
Let me make sure I’m getting this right. You really are suggesting that our ability to distinguish right from wrong is a natural consequence of belief in the divine?
Quite right. For example, many liberal Christians probably don’t think Adam and Eve were real people, but they might still think that humans are God’s special creation above all other life on Earth. Some of the metaphors are thought to convey and/or hold deeper truths; they are only metaphors on their face.
There is also the issue of Hell that was brought up, which, even if dismissed as a metaphor, still remains as a sort of cosmically divine justice system that supports a whole bunch of hideous ideas like rape culture (e.g., “She deserved it for dressing like a whore.”). Believing there is a Hell, of course, renders any other metaphorical dealings moot because you are fine with endless torture of your fellow humans; might as well join the Westboro Baptists in my opinion.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization since we don’t have any doctrine or dogma as atheists. And how different would a violent atheist anarchist nihilist be from your average Muslim suicide bomber or homegrown Christian terrorist? We can criticize each just as well. In fact, we are doing our part by criticizing other people who believe that gods are real. We are doing what we wish the liberal theists would do, too. But of course, liberal theists are still theists and their faith is a stumbling block for them when it comes to criticizing the faith of other people even when those people do harmful things (up to a point) based on their beliefs. And, if you want to see something funny, ask a Protestant fundamentalist what she or he thinks of Mormons. The two have essentially the same harmful dogmas (anti-pleasure, anti-female, etc.) but the fundamentalist will probably laugh about those “crazy” Mormon beliefs.
I’m way too late to this party, but I note that lovley Andrew (at #9) has cited Unitarian Universalism as a religion that is “OK or even GOOD.” As an ex-UU (I was an atheist UU for seven years) who maintained an (albeit sporadic) blog devoted to this very issue for quite a while, I feel uncommonly qualified to comment on this notion.
The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that it is anything but self-evident that Unitarian Universalism even is a “religion.” It’s frequently treated that way by (generally uninformed) outsiders, but within UUism the widely held notion is that there are no belief requirements whatsoever. Supernaturalism is not only not required, it is a decidedly minority perspective.
The word “religion” is defined in many different ways by different people, but it’s at least worth noting that some very common conceptions of religion fit poorly with an organization of people whose outlooks are predominantly naturalistic.
There is a contrary trend, though, in many local UU congregations and in the national UU Association (“UUA”): extremely strong religious privilege and (largely as a consequence) severe distaste for open atheism and criticism of religion. Very few UUs believe in “God” as that term is broadly understood by theists (and atheists) the word over, but lots of UUs believe in “religion,” “faith,” “prayer,” “church,” and (indeed) “God” as terms and systems that deserve support and defense. Gnu-bashing is overwhelmingly common and accepted among UUs, especially clergy and denominational administrators, as I have documented repeatedly (several selected examples here).
So no, Andrew, it is not self-evident that UUism is a religion at all, much less one that is “OK or even GOOD.” In a huge proportion of its institutions, it is overtly committed to preserving “religion,” “faith,” “God,” and numerous other ideas whose cultural salience keeps fundamentalism alive—while at the same time the UU hierarchy brutally attacks anyone who dares to criticize any such ideas.
Those of us who think that religious faith and authority are pernicious notions that badly need to be discredited and marginalized in society have every reason to oppose all institutions that shore up religious privilege, and—though there are unquestionably a number of UU congregations and individuals who are fighting the good fight on these and many other issues—the Unitarian Universalist Association is very seriously susceptible to legitimate criticism on that score.
For me personally, it was my several years in Unitarian Universalism that convinced me that liberally religious people cannot be counted on as serious allies in any attempt to reduce the influence that pernicious religious ideas have on society. As long as religious faith and authority retain cachet in society, fundamentalism is inevitable; and no one who considers himself religious is going to go in for meaningful attempts to marginalize and discredit said faith and authority. Liberal or conservative, religion grows from the same roots—and those roots are what need to be chopped away at.
@ #69:
Why even if I do believe there is a divine arbiter (read judge) should I behave in any other way but totally selfishly? Fear of divine punishment consequent on my belief in the divine, obviously. This is a classic argument: We need God because we need morality, for without God there will be ‘anarchist nihilism’. We need God even if he is only a character of pure fiction. Heaven and Hell are necessary for the same reason; even if they are also fiction.
(There is something wrong with all that, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. This owl sitting on my shoulder just whispered to me that it’s wrong, but somehow that’s not quite enough.)
I argued at #64 that religious extremism arises out of the core belief of the religious moderate. The atheist humanist/nihilist anarchist dichotomy is not a counterpart of the religious moderate/religious extremist one. The nihilist anarchist outlook does not arise out of the core non-belief of the atheist humanist, since the atheist humanist will inevitably have a core belief substituting for theism, which will probably promote a humanist morality and a non-Manichean outlook on life.
The anarchists who went on a spree of vandalism during the recent demonstrations against the British budget cuts were Manicheans. You can bet on it.
I see a number of other commenters beat me to my #78 point about religious faith and authority. On a quick read, I see Josh at #11, Hamilton at #49, Ken at #65, and Aratina at #77 all saying basically the same thing. (Saikat at #63 goes a cheeky step further; perhaps what (s)he says is true for some “moderate” believers, but I don’t think too many UUs fit the #63 description. Well, maybe Victoria Weinstein. And Andrea Liounis.)
But, as Hamilton notes at #59, this really describes the state of affairs most succinctly:
It does indeed suggest that, Andrew, and what it suggests also happens to be true.
Rieux, this one’s for you …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZymBti7700
John at the blog Verum Serum (http://www.verumserum.com/?p=415 — hyperlink button not working) read through a bunch of the journal entries of the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and made some startling discoveries in regards to their philosophies. They appear to have been atheist anarchist nihilists whose philosophies rationalized the massacre they would commit. For instance, here are some notable excerpts:
In his conclusion, the author offers cogent analysis:
I do not think it was appropriate for the author to liken their view of the world to Daniel Dennett:
but isn’t that kind of stretch of an association exactly what some of you are doing here? Suddenly Daniel Dennett, because he too promotes a materialistic understanding of the world, is associated with the killers at Columbine. This is a demonstration of moderates being linked to extremists but with an atheistic twist. It is just as ridiculous, but it follows the same logic as what has been agreed to in above posts (religious humanists enable religious extremists).
@44 Stewart,
“Was the implied non-equality intentional?”
Well yes, it was, “the non-religious must accept that the religious are not going to go away”, at least not, in the foreseable future. The notion that belief is necessarily vulnerable to the brilliant arguments of atheists and/or education is something of a conceit,some of the loonier religiosity might disappear in the light of reason, but not all belief. There are sound evolutionary reasons for human belief.
There are numerous articles reporting on the evolutionary basis for belief,this is in New Scientist,unfortunately access is not free.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126981.000-natural-born-belief.html
@42 Stewart,
“Those voicing the criticism come from the camp that does not think anyone or anything should have immunity from criticism. Was RJW suggesting it should be otherwise in this case?”
Of course not, so I’ll exercise my right to say that some of the criticism of Rees reported here and other places is banal and petty.
Anyone or anything should not have immunity from criticism-on any grounds? I’m intrigued.
@43 Saikat Biswas,
“Since when does it imply that co-existence with the faithful is synonymous with refraining from criticism of their faith?”
It doesn’t, and I didn’t say anything of the kind. Rees was expressing a sentiment,not relinquishing his right to free speech.
All this straw is giving me hayfever.
Andrew @ #82,
You are arguing that belief in God is a means to an end, not an end in itself; because without it, bad things allegedly happen. Believe if only because of that. Never mind if there is actually no god there.
People raised this way I should imagine will become rather confused when they find out how flimsy the theist case is.
So of interest is this: were the Columbine killers encouraged as children to believe in a particular religion?
Not that it is important either way. Societies in which most people have no religious belief or only a nominal one are still quite safe environments to live in. And plenty of religious people have committed shocking acts against those they have been encouraged to see as the ‘Other’.
I wasn’t responding to anything you said. Rees, on the other hand, sees reconciliation with the faithful as a good way of facing up to the reality of having the faithful in our midst. That’s what I responded to. He doesn’t relinquish his right to free speech (what makes you think anybody suggested he did?) but clearly believes in abstaining from those that offend religious sensibilities (note his thoughts on Islam and Darwinism). He thinks that it is imprudent of any scientist (such as Hawking) to suggest that theology is irrelevant to our scientific understanding but never elaborates upon why he believes that.
Sarcasm isn’t your thing. Try something else.
RJW, thanks for confirming, but is it possible you misunderstood one of my points? I wasn’t hammering away at the question of whether or not religion was about to go away. I was pointing out the one-sidedness in your phrasing: it’s neither that both sides must accept each other, nor that the religious must accept the continued existence of non-believers, but what sounded like a one-way obligation on the part of the non-religious to put up with the religious.
Your immunity comment was not quite clear to me. Were you saying there could be grounds for an immunity from criticism?
Andrew Lovely (#21)
The problem is that when people have an irrational basis for their actions, they’re at far greater risk of doing wrong or dangerous or unnecessary or evil things while thinking they’re doing right or safe or necessary or good things.
(#69)
Except that atheism is, for Gnus, generally itself a consequence of adopting certain, more basic, epistemic principles. We’re pretty consistent in our criticism of those, be they theist or atheist, religious or irreligious, who would reject reason and evidence in favor of the irrational and the unevidenced.
No.
Fundamentalism and its concomitant horrors are the inevitable consequence of society that protects and honors religious faith and authority. Mass murder is not the inevitable consequence of atheism or Dan Dennett’s philosophy.
Q.E.D.
Why do you refuse to deal with the actual argument your opponents have presented? Quoting blather from ignorant god-soaked atheophobes doesn’t exactly prove anything.
But if you have texts with surface messages as different as “love thy neighbour” and “kill all infidels” you can’t pretend that what the actual texts say is not of major importance. If interpretation can gloss over the differences between those two messages, then we’re getting out of theology or philosophy and into surrealism.
Not so very long ago in Europe, there were the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigades (the murderers of Aldo Moro), who felt their terrorist activities were justified not, pace Andrew Lovley, by their atheism, but by their political aims and beliefs; and when I first came to Japan the remnants of Japan’s student revolutionaries, now split into two factions, were still bludgeoning one another to death in the streets with baseball bats. One of the reasons for the difficulty the authorities had in catching up with these left-wing terrorists was the sympathy that many well-meaning, peaceable and left-inclined people had with those aims and beliefs. The two parents of a well-known Chinese pianist with whom friends of mine were acquainted and whom I once met committed suicide in the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao unleashed passionate and mis-led young people on those he took to be the enemies of the Chinese Revolution. It surely needs to be recognised that ‘religion’ (or, rather, certain institutionalised religions) is not the only source of absolutism and fanaticism of the kind that leads to murder, and that one large reason why it has come to be seen to be has been the collapse of chiliastic political movements such as Fascism and Marxism, which has left the field open for a fundamentalist and political re-interpretation of certain religions, particularly among disaffected Muslim youth (most of whom, as Scott Atran points out in his thought-provoking if not altogether satisfactory ‘Talking to the Enemy’, are not, as some seem to believe, the product of indoctrination from childhood in madrassas, but, like their earlier Marxist European and Japanese counterparts, fairly well educated young people).
There are some good reasons for the more vociferous criticism of religion: the political meddling of in particular fundamentalist Christian organisations in education where science, and in particular the theory of evolution, are concerned (this is surely why some of the strongest critics of religion are biologists – and in this connexion it surely was wrong of Lord Rees to have accepted a prize given by an organisation that is actively working to subvert science); terrorism – 9/11 certainly stimulated Sam Harris and Hitch; the continued efforts by the religious to impose their values on the whole of society in matters such as abortion, homosexuality and assisted suicide; and then of course the cruel practices – particularly with respect to women – found in some parts of the world. I sometimes feel, though, that critics of religion paint with too broad a brush and that it needs to be recognised more clearly that inhumanity is not only a function of religion and the absolutising tendencies found in religion can be found elsewhere as well. Trivial quarrels over whether atheists do or do not do bad things as well are, well, trivial; and the example of the Columbine massacre doesn’t make them less so.
Since someone (#83) has brought up the evolutionary factors that may lead to religious belief (it is not a ‘basis’ in the sense of some sort of ‘hard-wiring’ whose evolutionary purpose is to bring about belief), it is worth saying that the approach of such as Pascal Boyer leads to a dissolution of religion considered as some sort of obvious, well-formed, substantial entity. No, religious thoughts and behaviour are not going to go away, but that does not mean that the defects of institutionalised religion should not be criticised.
The point is that faith is not a good thing. It should not be respected or encouraged or taught to the young. It doesn’t matter whether the content of that faith is God or History. Tradition does not ennoble it nor ought it compel affection or allegiance.
Moral issues are political. They are bargains to be struck in the marketplace of ideas, where convenience contends with duty, desire with poverty, love with anger, and authority with freedom. Favoring faith, no matter how loving, generous, and moderate, also always privileges authority, encourages ignorance and discourages freedom.
Let’s assume that humanists regularly join and donate money to organisations that harbor atheist anarchist nihilists, and these organisations demand that anarchic nihilism should have a privileged place in society, and that politicians should consult anarchic nihilists, would it still be unfair to criticize said humanists for promoting anarchic nihilism?
Besides, in a free society people should be able to ask the questions: Does atheism lead to nihilism? Do moderate believers give cover to extremism? It’s not a priori ridiculous to suggest them. The ridiculous part is that the first idea is brought up over and over and over again despite evidence to the contrary, and yet some people argue that the second question should not even be asked.
I would say that actually religion itself leads to nihilism. Since it empties a person’s value of themselves, it makes them more prone to self-sacrifice or to commit acts of evil in the name of their God. It makes them forsake their life for the afterlife, it makes their life meaningless.
And what is wrong with egoism? Egoism is no more wrong than a stone. Unless you want to throw out the entire natural world as wrong and evil.
I’ll bite. I was a Unitarian-Universalist. I think you don’t quite get the religion. You get the social-justice cart before the horse as most UUs come from other faiths and are already social-justice oriented people.
As for why UUs leave their church, well, it takes some mighty-big-self-important-asshole to tell UUs why they left their church without actually giving us the exit data… I left because some of the whiny-assed titty-babies cried over the innocuous Freedom From Religion Foundation ads and the UU business manager pulled the ads.
http://www.uuworld.org/advertising/fall2009freedomfromreligionfoundationad.shtml
Really, if you fucking can’t live by the seven principles, you can piss off… And you can, obviously, live without my atheist ass wrecking your god-bothering…
I’d rant on, but I’ll just finish the obvious truth: religion ruins everything. Even the one religion that pretends to accept atheists as real humans can’t fucking live up to it as individuals or an organization…
So you can stop that preaching right now.
Christ, but you’re full of shit. When in a hole, stop digging.
I understand the Catholic bit. My wife was raised Catholic and they, as I’ve been told by her and other ex-Catholic friends, explicitly teach that the Bible is not, in all places, literally true. Yet, fifty-eight percent apparently believe otherwise. Despite what they were taught.
Now go away until you learn what is true and how to argue with facts instead of fiction.
The Templeton foundation has a goal not too dissimilar to that of the Discovery Institute – namely the inclusion of what is now considered non science (or pseudoscience) into the work and consideration of science.
The Discovery Institute are a little more upfront with their goals – to change the definition of science to include non-material explanations but is that really that different from the objectives pushed by Templeton?
Try reading the Biologos version of evolution or the various fine tuning arguments that Templeton loves so much. If one deals with either of these points using methodological naturalism (the accepted way that both theist and atheists approach the work of doing science) then there is no problem. We simply ignore most of Biologos output apart from the minority of real science it claims and we look at fine tuning as an interesting problem to be tackled the same way science has tackled other interesting problems in the past. It’s only when viewed through a Templeton or Discovery Institute glass that we find methodological naturalism wanting.
And as for Andrew Lovley, our problem is with the idea of faith in revelation. Once you agree that a creator of the universe has told humanity how to live then almost everything else becomes incidental – particularly if you accept the idea of eternal life external to our current material existence. With the promise of eternal life then this life becomes almost meaningless. Anything that God has said becomes the most important thing and however evil it may appear to us mortals it is but a necessary pinprick compared to eternity. Genocide becomes like the mild sting of a vaccination needle for a child and killing the infidel is but a gulp of some slightly bitter medicine.
By the way Andrew, I live in a majority atheist society, Sweden. There’s far less crime here than in Gods country and plenty of charities that help those in need.
These are consequences of atheism how exactly?
Freedom from religiously-claimed universal forgiveness, eschatology and anthropocentrism has made me less inclined to nihilism and egoism.
Anecdotally, of course.
And yet they used religious arguments about “atheism” to justify their actions.
The argument that the absence of God removes any basis or requirement for acting ethically is the supposition of the theist, not the atheist. It is the logical error of denying the antecedent.
While many people gave lovely and informative answers I think its actually rather simple to dismiss the concern that atheism leads to bad things too.
There is no codified book of laws to tell atheists to do bad things. Over and over again we are told that “real christians” don’t believe in the bad parts of the bible, those horrible things are only metaphor or out dated texts that only made sense thousands of years ago, and yet they keep them in the book. It would take little effort to remove all the evil in those books and just keep the “good stuff” but nobody does it.
So when a christian holds up a bible and says “this is what I believe” I take them at their word and assume they are just evil fucks held in check by secular laws.
I don’t think they believe those are metaphors. Not really. I think they say/pretend that many of the horrible and laughably-inaccurate parts of their religions are metaphors in order to stifle criticism of their religion.
Sort of a handy, and lazy, dodge to get around things they find stupid, horrible, immoral or uncomfortable. For example, here is a list of death penalties in the bible. None of which could possibly be considered a ‘metaphor’ by anyone honest:
Murder (I get this, there were no effective prisons in those days.)
Attacking or cursing a parent (Yes, this is true, that is the maximum punishment.)
Kidnapping
Failure to confine a dangerous animal, resulting in death
Witchcraft and sorcery
Sex with an animal (Really? Therapy seems so much more enlightened…)
Doing work on the Sabbath (Ah, that puts huge swaths of America under the death penalty.)
Incest
Adultery (75% of American men, 50% of American women)
Homosexual acts
Prostitution by a priest’s daughter
Blasphemy (Oh, I’m not allowed to criticize religion or differ from the priests.)
False prophecy
Perjury in capital cases
False claim of a woman’s virginity at time of marriage (Really.)
Sex between a woman pledged to be married and a man other than her betrothed.
None of those are ‘metaphor.’ Many of them shouldn’t even be censurable from a societal standpoint. Yet they are core, foundational beliefs incorporated in the Abrahamic faiths.
I don’t think so. First of all, every single one of us condemns the Columbine murders, and it doesn’t really look like the murderers actually read Dennett contrary to the insidious quotemining done to make it look like they did (find me a text where Dennett says that since there is no god, we might as well join the machines and become Terminators). Furthermore, Dennett doesn’t command atheists to murder believers, and we don’t claim that Dennett is the most powerful king in the universe or that Dennett is love, do we? I doubt they believed such a silly thing either, and I doubt they even knew who Dennett was. Neither do we have a holy text that must be read metaphorically (not sure if Grayling’s Good Book is metaphorical, but anyway it wasn’t around when that happened).
I have a question only tangentially related to this topic, Nicks article was talking about privacy laws in his article and it got me curious.
Does england really have laws against publishing secrets people might have like visiting prostitutes or having affairs if it might harm them or cause pain, even if the accusations are completely true and provable?
So there are (at least) two of us ex-UU atheists here, eh, Moses? Good to see you, too, responding to Andrew’s uninformed declaration of the “GOOD”ness of UUism.
I jumped ship several months before the UU World magazine/FFRF dust-up in fall 2009, but I remember it well; from outside, that incident made it clear to me that my decision to leave UUism was the correct one.
Obviously there are numerous UU congregations that exist within god-soaked parts of the country, and those congregations are frequently among the only secular(ish) oases for hundreds of miles. Still, it makes me heartsick to know that thousands of dollars in atheists’ money go to pay UU atheophobes to bash, censor, and marginalize nonbelievers. And, because the national Association hides behind the word “religion,” even out-and-proud atheists like Greta Christina (cringe!) frequently have trouble seeing the problem with the UUA taking atheists’ money and using it to censor our ideas.
I’m supposed to be comforted that “only” 31% of those surveyed think the bible is the literal word of god? If that survey is an accurate reflection of the American population, that’s 95 million people who believe this.
That is not a trivial number of people.
That # 78 is a humdinger of a comment, Rieux.
Anybody who missed it: don’t.
Vicki – well quite – and a terrifying 78% think it’s either the word of god itself or the “inspired” word of god (or at least say they do when asked).
Check this out while you’re at it –
http://dr-rieux.livejournal.com/1140.html
I mean, check it out.
And this –
http://dr-rieux.livejournal.com/14093.html
[…] Not all religions are literalist, we’re told. Not all religions are fundamentalist or theocratic or doctrinaire, we’re told. Unitarian Universalism, for instance, is liberal and swell, we’re told. […]
[…] upon among Unitarians. Conventional wisdom says UUs don’t have a beef with anyone, right? Thanks to Rieux, I’ve been educated: There is a contrary trend, though, in many local UU […]
Incidentally, according to Atran, it is the Internal Revenue Service that in the USA gets to decide what constitutes a religion or not – hence the Church of Scientology, among other institutions, including the believing or unbelieving Unitarians… Religion simply is not a coherent concept. Unlovely Andrew would do well to apply his mind to thinking about what religion actually is, or if it is anything, really, at all.
Tim: putting on my lawyer hat, there really isn’t anything legally questionable about UUism having the same tax exemption as other churches do. (Scientology is another matter.) The IRS can’t discriminate against groups applying for that tax exemption on the basis that they do or don’t believe in supernatural stuff; that would be a blatant violation of the Establishment Clause. I believe (though I could be mistaken) that the American Humanist Association, Ethical Culture, and the North Texas Church of Freethought all have the “religious” tax exemption despite being non-theistic organizations.
The relevant legal question is the functional similarity of an applicant organization to ordinary churches. Does UUism or Ethical Culture play a similar role in members’ lives that mainstream churches do? Fairly clearly the answer is yes, and therefore they are (or at least are allowed to be) tax-exempt.
There was an incident a few years ago with a fundy doofus in the Texas state government announcing that she was pulling the tax exemption of UU congregations in the state because they didn’t state a foundational belief in God. (I wonder if she was aware of the NTCoF.) She was sorted out in short order; legally, she very clearly didn’t have a leg to stand on.
There are no calls for violence for the Columbine killers to interpret literally or “metaphorically”.There’s no evidence that they interpret calls to violence as literal calls to violence the way liberal religionists misinterpret texts as as not calling for violence when they literally do. There is no real similarity, there is no similar stretch.
Thanks for the comment, Rieux. No, I wasn’t questioning the legal right of Unitarianism to be recognised as a religion (nor that of Scientology). All I was pointing out was that ‘religion’ is a thoroughly ambiguous and slippery concept (to put it politely: Pascal Boyer would say, rightly, I think, that it is in fact incoherent and empty), so that in the US you have the risible spectacle of the IHS deciding what does or does not constitute a religion.
Andrew Lovley,
You seem to be under the all-too-common convenient misimpression that since most Christians are not “Biblical literalists”, they are theologically liberal and don’t take the Bible literally in very important respects.
Most “non-literalists” are not theologically liberal. Many are inerrantists who think that the Bible is all true, just not all literal, which doesn’t make as big a difference as you might think.
Many more are basically orthodox, even if they think the Bible has some metaphors, or myths, or even errors in it.
Most Christians in the US are actual theists, who believe that God is a supernatural person, who is powerful and knowledgeable and intervenes in the world. They quite literally believe in an invisible magical person who is terribly important, powerful, and worthy of literal worship.
More specifically, most believe that Jesus literally was God, literally incarnated as a literal human person, who literally died on a literal cross, literally for the forgiveness of our literal sins, and literally rose from the dead, as literally witnessed by literal people and truthfully recounted in the Bible; they believe that Jesus is literally in a a literal heaven that awaits (some of) us. (Some believe that the Bible stories like the Nativity and the Passion aren’t literal historical narratives, i.e., faithfully rendering all the minor events, but the majority believes that the basic incarnation and dying for our sins and reigning in Heaven core of the story is quite literally true.)
Even if they think the Bible has some metaphors, myths and even errors in it, they think they can know about the most important amazing things because the Bible has a lot of important literal truth in it too—the important parts—including the idea that a literal God literally appeared in history, repeatedly, and that God literally told humans important literal things that got written down literally in the Bible, because God wanted us to know them.
But we call that not being a “literalist,” if they accept the talking snake story as metaphorical or mythical. Its not even inerrantism, if they accept that some bits of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures are just factually wrong.
That’s the sort of thing most people mean by “not being literalists” but still thinking that the Bible is the “inspired word of God.” It means that they may reject some things like talking donkeys or herds of swine possessed by demons, or even accept that some things like Genesis are fairy stories, but still quite literally believe that their super-special invisible friend has been to Earth, and done literal magic, and died for us—after telling people important literal things they wrote down and passed on to us.
When they say that Jesus became man and lived, and died for our sins, it’s just not a metaphor.
It’s literally about collective guilt and substitutional punishment: Jesus was literally sacrificed for our sins–as though that not only made sense, and was not only a literal historical event, but was literally the most important event in history.
The relevant word is orthodoxy, not literalism or even inerrantism.
Most Christians are basically orthodox. They are more like fundamentalists than like Karen Armstrong or Joseph Campbell, in that they believe that the central aspects of the central story are not a myth, and are not a metaphor, but are tremendously importantly literally true.
Worse, most people believe in an associated Divine Command Theory or something like it—they believe that morality is literally determined by the same God who demanded blood sacrifice, and sacrificed his own son to himself so that he could forgive us. They may not believe that Leviticus is inerrant, but they do believe that God is a literal person who literally knows right from wrong better than we do, and that it’s important to know aspects of God’s literal Plan for us and act in general conformity with it.
If you don’t realize that, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Full-blown “Biblical literalism” is not the problem; it’s just an extreme and easily derided instance of a much more general problem; so-called “non-literalist” orthodox believers do literally believe plenty of crap too, including much of the most important and craziest crap.
But surely, Andrew, you must know this stuff. You must.
Don’t you?
Why do you even pretend otherwise, and cite a figure like “only” 31 percent being literalist inerrantists, without acknowledging that that’s an irrelevant figure—it obviously grossly underestimates the prevalence of literal religious beliefs in important and more basic things, like dualistic souls, a personal God, miracles, substitutional sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, Divine Command Theory, Heaven, angels, and so on—which are in fact majority views, and clearly so.
Everybody seems to know that—religious people and atheists alike—except you.
I find it amazing that you’re still either sincerely clueless, or nonetheless willing to say such utter and obvious shite to us, when it’s so obvious that we know more about it than you do, or are willing to admit.
Who exactly do you think you’re kidding?
So they believe in the divinity of an alleged historical figure who died in order to save us from collective guilt, yet they dismiss silly things like talking donkeys or perhaps even the Genesis account of the origin of the universe and life. Is it not telling that they do not believe in the silly stuff that is disproved by common sense / experience? So they maintain the idea that someone long ago was divine, something that cannot be proved or disproved. That component of their belief is 1) derived from just a portion of the scripture (read: there is a lot more in the Bible to take literally or not) and 2) does not have any effect on me or science as an enterprise. So if half of the country is willing to admit that there is stuff that should not be taken literally in the Bible, it tells me that 1) they recognize that events described in the Bible do not conform with common experience and scientific discovery an probably did not happen as they are written, and 2) that these people probably employ faith more narrowly than they are suspected of doing (pertains mostly to divinity of Christ, but common sense / science is sufficient for understanding most everything else). And if people want to believe in Christ, then I have no problem, because of all the Bible his message is overall the least bit disagreeable.
I have never pretended to suggest that I know it all. Look I am aware that I can be wrong, and have easily accepted it when I was persuaded that I was wrong. When discussing, debating, disagreeing, responding, rebutting, there is no need to be condescending and plainly mean about it. It does not add to your argument. If you disagree, say so, and explain why. Are the slights on my intelligence, dignity, and motivations necessary? No.
Andrew Lovley (#117)
If you find what Paul W. said condescending, you must know it’s only because he’s turned back on you the tone you take with others here. And why would anyone take pointers on civility from someone who kicked off the comment thread by lying about both what Nick Cohen was trying to say and the core of the Gnu Atheist criticism of religion in general?
When?
@ A. Noyd #118
Unless I agree with you, civil discourse is impossible apparently. A handful of you cannot separate disagreement from hostility, both when interpreting other people’s disagreement with you and when expressing your disagreement with them. Not most of you thankfully, but a handful of you. I think it is possible to disagree with people on ideas, especially ones that do not have earth-shaking importance, without maligning each other. When I disagree with you, I am not bashing you – when people disagree with me, I do not think they are bashing me either. You say that Paul’s tone was just a reflection of my tone (as if I was condescending and mean, and as if my wrong justified his wrong), but I think you will find it very difficult to demonstrate this. I’m aware that I’ve slipped before on another thread or two, but I’ve apologized and have made a conscious effort to stick to just the exchange of ideas and not mud. I can endure a lot of it before I believe it’s necessary to be addressed, but unfortunately it derails us from the more important dialectic.
A. Noyd, I did not lie. If I was mistaken, by all means prove it, but do not accuse me of having the intention to deceive. I do not think my interpretation of what Nick said was false, so all that I have said has been honest.
Now can we please get back to the idea that moderates provide cover for extremists, and the idea that it applies to the religious but not the non-religious? Isn’t that in part what this article, and most of the discussion is about?
Be a dear and wake us up when you’re done with drama queen antics?
Andrew, people have dealt over and over again with your idea and they have refuted it. The idea that ordinary atheists necessarily provide a cover for murderous nihilism is ludicrous. Certainly, as I pointed out above, the left-wing sympathies of many Europeans assisted terrorists like the Red Brigades or the Baader-Meinhof gang (just as the nationalist sympathies of many Ulster Catholics led them to at least not disrupt the activities of the IRA, or the sympathies of the Ulster Protestants led them to at the least not oppose the injustice and lawless violence perpetrated by their side), but if you seriously suppose that Richard Dawkins (whose macho-talk about machines I’m not particularly fond of either, though otherwise I find him almost wholly admirable), Dan Dennett, A.C. Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, David Hume, Denis Diderot or Voltaire do provide or have provided cover for murderous or suicidal nihilism, then it is up to you to demonstrate precisely how they do it or have done it.
Tim:
I agree, I am not suggesting that they do. I’m saying that that stretch is just as ridiculous as believing that the faith of religious humanists provide cover for religious extremists. As the Columbine example demonstrates, skepticism / strict positivism can lead to moral nihilism, which when combined with psychological issues can lead to violent extremism. Faith can lead to fundamentalist zealoutry, which combined with psychological issues can lead to violent extremism. Please do not misunderstand me, of course neither skepticism nor faith necessarily lead to those tragic outcomes, but they can. Despite that, I do not think those who are skeptics or faithful ought to be held even partially accountable for those who violently take it to the extreme. Basically the logic I am arguing against is that which suggests all moderates of every group or persuasion should be held accountable for the extremists, which would surely encompass us all. Religious humanists or moderates supposedly provide cover for extremists because they both value the act of faith. Is ‘faith’ by itself the main vehicle behind religious extremism? Judging from how most faithful people are not violent and extreme with their religious beliefs, I’m willing to bet there are more important and operative factors in religious extremism than faith. If that is true, then the faith of the religious humanists or moderates should not be seen as complicit with extremists.
You’re going for a maximum equivalence between religious and non-religious and I think you can’t get there without distorting both sides. If you put the two worldviews in parallel columns for comparison, you don’t get equivalence and one of the biggest areas you don’t get it in is the area of texts, which you so want to play down for the religious. In the religious column you have two things completely missing from the secular one: there are no sacred texts for non-believers, and because there are none, the second thing missing is sacred texts with hostility and worse towards non-members.
Now, you’re free to make as many arguments as you want about the minimal extent to which those texts are taken literally by those I imagine you might also describe as “believers,” but are you claiming that you can somehow make those texts vanish as the historical cornerstone of the beliefs in question? I’m not even going to ask whether you can conjure up equivalent sacred secular texts, because it’s just silly, but unless you can do one of those two things you cannot make a convincing case for any equivalence between the moderates and extremists on both sides.
Need I add that in even mentioning the Columbine killers you are being forced to stretch all the way to isolated examples of craziness, because there is no equivalent in non-belief to the organised system of condemnation of non-believers that is part and parcel of all religions one could call mainstream (as well as most of the others).
You seem to be contrasting “faith” favourably with “religion.” Correct me if I’m wrong there. Can you clarify whether you are opposed to faith and, if not, can you explain what it is about faith that you find praiseworthy?
Thank you, Andrew, for your reply. In some ways I agree with your sentiments, and I certainly agree that faith is not the only cause of religious extremism, but it is surely not through simply valuing the act of faith that religious moderates provide cover for religious extremists, it is because they subscribe to an institutionalised religion whose more unpleasant and dangerous aspects (Islamic injunctions concerning apostasy or members of other religions, say, or Christian condemnations of homosexuality) – aspects that are readily seized upon by zealots – they too readily ignore, brush aside or do not stand strongly against, in just the same way that many perfectly civilised and personally kind people with left-wing views were far too complaisant where the more unpleasant aspects of Marxism-Leninism or Maoism were concerned, and all too often complaisant, too, when it came to the terror tactics of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Brigades or, in Japan, the Chukaku-ha; one left-wing acquaintance (definitely not a friend), remarked to me regarding 9/11: ‘Well, they hit the right place.’ It is that kind of complaisance, and the acquiescence in the view that religion has to be respected, that is being pointed to and criticised. And that was precisely what Nick Cohen was doing in his piece. Atheists, as atheists, do not subscribe, in consequence of their convictions, to a set of institutionalised, dogmatic and questionable tenets about their own situation and about the situation of those who are not atheists.
How on earth is the former not also “silly”?
Let’s not dismiss this idea so hastily. I think moderate atheists should accept some responsibility for militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Ophelia Benson.
I’d love to do that, but I think it’s the other way round. Not specifically with me, I was an atheist before I’d heard of either of them, but unlike with religion, a lot of people able to say openly that they’re atheists today have been encouraged to do so because of the loudest and most unashamed examples.
I don’t think we’re limiting ourselves to Christianity and the USA in this thread, are we? I wish I knew more about the provenance of this, but it doesn’t look staged. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7KGOgBvZ8
I think its important to distinguish the type of philosophy we mean when we discuss atheists (moderates and ‘extremists’). In my opinion the sort of atheism that we are talking about is akin to philosophical naturalism. The atheism of Scandinavia is predominantly of this sort. What this means is that the basis for human behavior is that we have only one life in this natural world and we should act to make this world rather than any other, the best place we can. We therefore face choices in what particular action we do to achieve this better society. Some choices are difficult and we really want to do the correct thing and so we have developed a tool, called science, that we have found to be the best way to get correct answers (or more accurately it is the best tool to work out which ideas about the natural world are incorrect).
Followers of religion also have to make choices but they lack a tool to distinguish which ideas present in their holy books happen to be wrong. Is slavery wrong? Is it wrong to kill your daughter if it turns out she was not a virgin when married? Is is wrong to kill someone for working on Saturday? Or if they say they don’t believe in the teachings of Mohammed? If you believe that holy books are the word of God then you have no basis, other than opinion, for telling other believers that your interpretation is the correct one and theirs is wrong. That is the problem with moderate faith – there is no way to ask for evidence to back their claims.
As for Andrew’s point that moderate religion has no effect on him or on science…
I take it that he is not gay and interested in marrying his partner in the US.
I take it that he doesn’t work as a scientist in the field of stem cell research.
I could go on (family planning, work discrimination etc) but I think the point should be obvious even to Andrew.
Andrew Lovley (#120)
No, see, you just made that up. That is the sort of thing that makes civil discourse with you impossible. It’s one thing to disagree with what someone did say or what they do believe and another thing entirely to disagree with what you think they said or believe. You cannot seem to grasp what we Gnus say of ourselves, despite many people attempting, in good faith, to explain it to you.
It is a reflection of how you talk down to people. The difference is, Paul W. came up with a great deal of substance as well–something you’re chronically short on. And there you go again, making stuff up. I said nothing about who is or isn’t justified; I’m merely pointing out how you’re a hypocrite who thinks he deserves more civility than he offers to others.
It has been proven, repeatedly, and while I might give another the benefit of the doubt where intention is concerned, a truly honest person would not, after constant correction, keep on at making his interpretations match his erroneous preconceptions of his opponent’s philosophy. Clearly no amount of correction from us on what we think and say is going to wean you off the teat of your own self-righteousness.
You’re the one who wandered off the path with your whinge about Paul W.’s treatment of your delicate sensibilities.
Andrew:
No, it is very much not telling, if you look at what people do in fact believe.
You seem to think it’s a good thing that some orthodox Christians can reject the idea that a nonphysical intelligent agent can inhabit the body of a snake or donkey and make it speak. That makes no sense, right? It’s just hokey.
You apparently think it’s better if they accept the idea that an infinitely good and powerful nonphysical intelligent agent would inhabit the body of a human being, sacrifice itself to itself to allow itself to forgive others, be “dead” for a couple of days but then get all better, forgive all of humanity for its sins—on the condition that they believe this story—and proceed to rule the universe in thoroughly mysterious ways that involve staggering amounts of suffering without that reflecting at all badly on that infinitely good and powerful and knowledgeable nonphysical intelligent agent.
That’s nuts, Andrew.
The talking donkey is surely hokey, but the grandiosity of the God and salvation story doesn’t make it less hokey—it just makes it more extraordinarly grandiose, anthropocentrically paranoid, and patently incoherent.
The talking snake or donkey appears to be scientifically impossible, given what we now know about intelligent agents and material brains and so on. Freaky Friday is fiction; minds don’t work that way, for deep reasons that prescientific people understandably didn’t know.
The God and salvation story also appears to be scientifically impossible, for the same reasons, but is also flatly impossible, because it’s logically incoherent. It not only isn’t true in the real world, it can’t be true in any conceivable world—it’s self-refuting. The Euthyphro Dilemma and the Problem of Evil have always been with us, and Christianity should have been a non-starter.
Apparently you think logical incoherence isn’t a big problem, and it’s okay if people believe seven impossible things before breakfast, so long as they’re sufficiently overblown and mutually inconsistent as to disable people’s critical faculties.
No, the sort of thing most orthodox theists believe about that was disproved, by any sane standard, thousands of years ago, by ancient Greeks, among others. (Presumably by “village atheist” types everywhere; it’s really not rocket science, and never was.) The theists just refused to accept that, and have been playing the shell game of theodicy ever since, to obscure the obvious.
The modern, scientific reasons we have for disbelieving in the talking donkey and snake apply to God as well—both stories presume that minds are not material processes, or even dependent on material processes, and that mind-over-matter supernaturalism works. Those things are pretty clearly false now.
But really, orthodox theism was scientifically debunked long before science as we know it existed, by people using the same basic tools modern scientists still use.
Scientists don’t always look for data to disprove a theory—they look for gross inconsistencies in the theory first. If the theory refutes itself, there’s no need to look for data—the theory is clearly wrong, and it would be a waste of time to test it empirically. You either discard it, or try to fix it by ditching some of the mutually inconsistent premises, and come up with a theory that makes at least a lick of sense, such that it’s worth testing empirically.
That is something that apologists and accommodationists just don’t get. Science and philosophy are not distinct enterprises, and a clear philosophical refutation is a scientific refutation as well. I’ve certainly published scientific papers of that sort, showing logically that an existing theory cannot possibly be right, with no need to look at empirical data, with nary a blink from the scientist referees—nobody said “hey, that’s not science, that’s philosophy!”
That applies to things like the Euthyphro Dilemma and the Problem of Evil as well. The fact that they predate “science” as we know it—and are generally tossed in the “philosophy” bin, for reasons of tradition—doesn’t mean that they aren’t clear scientific refutations of Divine Command Theory and the orthodox three-omni God.
The orthodox theist conception of God isn’t unfalsifiable. It’s not only falsifiable but falsified, and false, but theists conveniently missed the memo thousands of years ago.
Yes, there is a lot more of the Bible to take literally, and most Christians—not just the “literalists”—do take most of it literally. It doesn’t occur to them that, for example, Joshua’s conquest of Palestine is a myth, or that that myth seems constructed not to teach useful lessons about life but to vilify an outgroup and justify denying non-Hebrews land ownership, or that most of the Gospel narratives were made up to satisfy various religious and political agendas.
Did you not know that? You really should know that by now.
You either haven’t hung out with many typical Christians, or you haven’t been asking the right questions.
And… excuse me? It doesn’t have any effect on the scientific enterprise? The majority of people in the US think that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science classes. The majority.
The only reason it’s not is because the courts are a very unpopular bulwark against that democratic desire becoming reality.
And in practice, evolution is taught very poorly, if at all, in most public schools in the US. The unifying theme of biology is treated as a minor issue in biology classes, and quite often just skipped, or presented in an “I’m not saying it’s true but it’ll be on the test” way, because of fears of backlash from the ignorant majority, and because a substantial fraction of high school biology teachers are themselves creationists.
The majority doesn’t believe in evolution, and most of the people who do don’t believe in the scientific theory of evolution by unguided natural selection—most poeple who think that evolution happened think God Did It, and not just by setting up the initial conditions and turning the crank, but by intervening in the process directly.
You may think that “moderate” religion has no effect on the scientific enterprise, but as a scientist and educator, I beg to differ. I’m painfully aware that most students don’t have a scientific worldview, in a very profound sense. They do not understand what kind of universe they live in, or what kind of thing they themselves are. Most think they’re ghosts in machines, and many are even vitalists.
Seriously, lots of people are still vitalists, who believe in a life force or vital essence or life energy or whatever–they don’t understand either of the two main facts of biology: (1) organisms are machines and (2) those machines were not designed, but evolved by unguided natural processes.
That’s a wee bit depressing, and religion has everything to do with it—including not just fundamentalism, but mainstream moderate religion and even most liberal religion. Even liberal religionists tend to believe in pseudoscientific and antiscientific woo, because they think there’s truth to religion, even if they think the Bible is riddled with error. For example, even most theologically liberal religious people, who are not biblical literalists and not even basically orthodox, still believe in substance dualism and dualistic mystical mind-over-matter spiritual insight that trumps scientific knowledge about Deep Truths.
Most people believe that, not just literalists, and not even just the orthodox majority.
Consider very theologically libera Christians, New Agers, Buddhists and various syncretistic there’s-truth-in-all-religions types. Most of them believe in souls, and that that there’s a mysterious spiritual structure to the universe, like Karma or The Force or an invisible blue glow of love and wisdom that pervades the cosmos, that you can tap into with your dualistic soul’s mystical ESP, and learn things scientists don’t know, and which science can’t study.
When they talk about other, non-scientific “ways of knowing,” that’s what they mean. They mean magic, even if they would never call it that, and wouldn’t admit to “believing in magic.” They may disbelieve in witches who can really cast spells, or talking donkeys, but nonetheless believe in distinctly magical ESP of a sort, that reveals truths Beyond Science, and unavailable to merely rational minds. (That’s what Karen Armstrong is talking about when she talks about a faculty of “intellectus” that transcends the rational mind, and spews pseudoscience about how quantum mechanics confirms it.)
About 95 percent of Americans believes in magic, and most think that philosophers and scientists who don’t are narrowminded, unwise, blinkered nerds, who just don’t get what most people throughout history have gotten—that they have souls, and that souls are where you magically get deep insight, and especially moral insight.
That’s why a typical scientist can’t be elected to public office in most places in the US, and certainly can’t be elected president, without pretending to believe in magic—e.g., making a show of going to church, and refraining from honestly saying that they don’t believe God or souls or magical spiritual and moral wisdom. If they reveal that they don’t rely on magical ESP—their own, or anyone else’s—they are perceived as being deaf to a crucial source of moral wisdom, hence morally deficient and untrustworthy. (Either seriously morally suspect, or maybe generally good-hearted but unwise because they do have souls, but don’t know they have souls and don’t heed soul wisdom enough.)
It’s not just the literalists, or even the orthodox, who not only believe in magic, but think it has everything to do with politics.
Consider the abortion issue, and embryonic stem cell researh. Where does opposition to all abortion and embryo-fiddling come from? Almost exclusively from religion, and not just from Biblical literalists, but from mainstream orthodox religion, and even from theologically liberal religion. It’s just not an issue of biblical literalism, but of basic religious metaphysics. If you think that each person has a magical soul, which make you a person and make you the person you are, it’s reasonable to think that you get them at the moment of conception, and are a person from the start.
That’s not a problem with literalism or fundamentalism, or even Christianity. It’s a problem with believing in souls, as most people do. Some can find a way to square that with treating embryos as the nonsentient objects they are, but many can’t. Many people are therefore against abortion for non-fundamentalist religious reasons, or their support for abortion rights is soft, because they don’t have a clear view that they feel confident of, or confident trying to defend. They’re not going to go out and tell the fundamentalists the most important thing—that embryos don’t have souls and are not persons, any more than a sperm and an egg are.
That fight will never end, until most people realize that dualistic souls are a myth.
Now consider gay rights. Up to about 20 or 30 years ago, the vast majority of people thought that homosexuality was wrong. Why? Religion. Many religious people think that sex is part of a divine plan for how to live, and that there are divine principles that we should behave in accordance with, and that if you’re not following the plan.
It’s not just inerrantists who think that sort of thing, or even orthodox Western theists. The oh-so-enlightened and beloved-of-liberals Dalai Lama says that too! It’s bad Karma to be queer. (The Dalai Lama also blames retarded persons for their being retarded—they must be being punished by Karma for doing something awful in a bad life. I suspect he’d say that if you’re born gay, you were asking for that too, and need to fight it in order to advance spiritually. Maybe you’ll be reborn retarded if you don’t.)
Even now, with lots of gay people coming out and demonstrating that they’re pretty normal, opposition to gay rights isn’t just from biblical inerrantists and fundamentalists. A whole lot of other orthodox theists still believe that there’s something wrong with being gay. A considerable fraction of the current support for gay rights comes from moderate and even liberal religious people who still think that, but think it’s not the government’s job to enforce that kind of morality. As with abortion rights, support for gay rights is soft among moderate religious people, because they still think that magical principles of morality are relevant, if not clear or decisive.
The same applies to many other political issues—sex education, condom distribution in Africa to limit the AIDS epidemic, support for family planning in overpopulated foreign countries.
Because of benighted religious ideas among mainstream non-fundamentalists, millions of kids will get pregnant or get STD’s, millions of kids will be born out of wedlock, tens of millions of extra people will die (and scores of millions will be orphaned in dire straits) in subsaharan Africa, overpopulated countries will overpopulate even more, etc.
Religious moderates do clearly enable the fundamentalists and conservatives on all of these issues. They don’t marginalize the conservative kooks as they should, and part of the reason is that they can’t, because they accept many of the same crucial premises—that ancient scripture and tradition and/or magical spiritual insight are sources of moral wisdom, that people have souls that are terribly important, that there’s a divine plan for human behavior, etc., etc.
It’s really hard for, say, your typical middle-of-the-road Christian to dismiss your typical fundamentalist as a religious kook, because your typical Christian believes many of the very same kooky things, and has only lame reasons for picking and choosing among the other things.
The right major reasons to reject what fundamentalists and other religious conservatives say are because (1) there is no God, (2) there are no souls, (3) the Bible is not the divinely inspired word of God, and has zero moral authority, and (4) nobody has magical ESP that makes them wiser than their rational arguments can show, so we can’t defer to religious or dualistic spiritual wisdom at all.
Moderate religious people, and even very liberal religious people, generally can’t go there. That’s a problem. That ensures that religion’s and supernaturalism’s tendrils work their way into all sorts of important issues, where they must be fought on the wrong grounds—e.g., whether a woman’s right to bodily autonomy trumps the right of a tiny “person” with no brain, or whether the Old Testament is obsoleted by the New Testament, (despite the fact that the New Testament itself clearly says it isn’t), or whether the nice Jesus messages from the Sermon on the Mount trump the Jesus who comes “not to bring peace, but a sword,” and casts people into a lake of fire forever over differences of religious opinion.
How much more obvious could it be that moderate religious people enable more extreme religious people, by failing to point out the basic truth that they’re nuts to believe any of that stuff, and should read up on the Euthyphro Dilemma and the still-unsolvable Problem of Evil. They’re all about 2400 years behind in their reading. This is the blind leading the deaf and blind.
After they catch up to the ancient Greeks on the most basic issues, they should then catch up on modern science a bit, and find out that vitalism and substance dualism are dead, and with them go magical ESP and the apparent authority of magical spiritual insight, as well as explicit Divine Revelation.
How much more obvious could it be that the problem isn’t just bad religion, but bad religious ideas, and that supposedly “good” religion does in fact enable “bad” religion, by endorsing the same crucial bad ideas.
In a democracy, that’s a bad thing, with numerous important consequences that religious privilege uses its power to obscure—we’re trained to pretend that most people aren’t crazy, and making important decisions for all of us based on patently false ideas.
Even extremely liberal religionists like Karen Armstrong tend to believe in some form of supernaturalism—e.g., the idea that there’s some magical soul-like thing that can directly perceive Deep Truths about the Universe, because the deep structure of the universe is imbued with magical soul-stuff.
No, that is just not how it works, and you should know better by now if you go around pontificating about these things. You must.
Even if we exclude the Biblical literalists and fundamentlists, the majority of religious people are kooks who believe in some form of magical spiritual insight or other—-perhaps thinly veiled, a la Karen Armstrong—and think it matters a lot, e.g., to being a good person. they think there’s such a thing as a substance dualistic soul, and that those souls give them intuitions that they should listen to, and that if we use our souls more, the world will be a better place.
Ooops, I thought I’d deleted the last 5 or 6 paragraphs there, which are pretty redundant with the stuff above it. Sorry.
Andrew,
About my being mean to you… I was indeed turning what I perceive as your lack of respect for us back on you.
I do think you show a lack of respect, by pontificating to us about stuff you’re clearly pretty naive about, and which we’ve thought and talked about quite a lot, and you haven’t been a very good listener.
It’s not just that you disagree, but how you disagree, trotting out trite, simplistic arguments, clearly misinterpreting data (like the 31 percent “literalist” figure), and revealing that you either don’t understand how religion (and politics) works in the US, or don’t want to admit to it.
It seems to me that you’ve got blinders on about religion and its effects—as most people do because the power of religion is used to filter the discussion of religion’s negatives, even to the extent of a lot of self-censorship by most atheists. (Up to a point, that’s understandable and forgivable.) It seems to me that you are prone to assuming that if we say very negative things about religion, it must be because we’re blind to the good you can see, rather than because you’re blind to much of the bad that we can see.
Naturally, if we think it’s the latter, and you come across as glibly condescending to us, we’re not going to be favorably impressed with you, or favorably disposed toward you. You need to show us that you do understand what we’re saying, and the strength of it, rather than offering just offering lame arguments the other way.
I think you may be pretty smart, and pretty sincere, but I do think that you’re fairly ignorant and somewhat intellectually lazy. (Not on purpose, mostly, but because you think these subjects are simpler than they are, and tend to falsely assume that we speak out of ignorance or thoughtlessness when we disagree with you.)
One reason I bother to respond to you at length, with serious arguments, is that I think you deserve the benefit of the doubt—you should be able to understand where we’re coming from if I lay it out clearly.
I assume that sometimes the way you respond to others’ briefer comments—giving them short shrift, IMO—is that you don’t realize that what they say to you are the tips of fairly big icebergs of serious thought. You don’t seem to realize when you’re responding to an intellligent comment by a knowledgeable, thoughtful commenter in a glib, superficial way.
I therefore try to write informatively and somewhat “defensively” in the sense of forestalling misunderstandings by making it clear that there’s an argument and evidence behind each point, much of which you seem to be unaware of. I’d rather overexplain than underexplain and perpetuate a cycle of misunderstandings.
You do seem to be unaware of what the major Gnu claims actually amount to, and of the major arguments, and the major evidence. I try to give you a chance to catch up.
That’s how gnus show respect—by taking arguments seriously, whether or not they’re accompanied by snark.
Gnus tend to be less put off by invective than a lot of more sensitive souls, if there’s a substantive argument behind it, which can be substantively addressed, with or without returning the snark in the bargain.
For us to take you as seriously as you seem to think we should, you need to show that you understand our concerns, especially
(1) the insidious and pervasive effects of the bad ideas in “good” religion I talked about in my last comment, and
(2) the importance of Overton windows in changing popular opinion. Do you know what that means? You really should, or you will NOT understand why we think our behavior is justified, and even strategically good. and why too much moderation and accommodationism is strategically bad. You’ll think we’re a bunch of assholes who like to beat up on nice religious people.
Those are the two big bones of contention between accommodationists and gnus, and we think accommodationists tend to systematically underestimate the importance of both of them, and falsely portray gnus as being blind to the good or harmlessness of moderate religion, and strategically naive to think that being so “aggressive” will actually help, rather than just gratuitiously alienating potential allies and generating backlash.
I have to suspect that you’ve drunk the accommodationist Kool-Aid to some extent, and accepted some important misrepresentations of what Gnus think about religion, and what they think about sociopolitical strategy.
Do try to show me I’m wrong, or if I’m right, to fix those misconceptions.
Paul,
Your point about souls is very, very spot on. Every religion holds this belief: that “I” exist in some other form beyond the brain. I blame the way we experience consciousness. Stupid brain.
Paul W – well done. I admire your patience and care.
Paul W. (#131)
And then there are the non-religious vitalists who, like most of my close relatives, think evolution is true and that organisms are machines, but that we still need some special force to make the picture complete–a force that science can’t measure, but that we humans can still perceive and manipulate through things like meditation and acupuncture. And while they don’t believe in god, they go on a lot about how this force is what some people call god because that’s how those other people experience or explain it. I get a lot of shit from them, like being told I’m a black and white thinker, for pointing out the incoherence.
And, for Andrew’s benefit, I have to point out that the atheism of my family members generally stems from a distrust of authority and is not the consequence of sticking to epistemic principles that weed out ideas that are incoherent or lacking in a sound empirical foundation. They might be non-believers in a literal god but they’re using the same patterns of belief to prop up other nonsense. This is why I do not see atheists as being a connected whole such that moderates could enable extremists. (And just which of us are the moderates, anyway? The others in my family think I’m an extremist for rejecting “other ways of knowing,” and I think they enable religious extremism just as much as religious moderates do.)
Paul, these comments of yours are simply outstanding.
This one is more of a question. I just happened to see this (http://unreasonablefaith.com/2011/04/13/schaap-responds-to-abc-news/) and I thought back to this thread and the numbers and percentages of who believed what literally. It seems to me that for Andrew to have been right, what one sees in the video would have to be classified as lunatic fringe. I don’t live in the States and it’s even true to say that a lot of the news I get about what goes on in America comes from atheist websites. So, U.S.-dwellers, is this lunatic fringe?