Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh dear, the poor psychics are worried.

[N]ow psychics must add a few riders before they invoke the voices of the dead, thanks to new consumer laws due to come into force…Promises to raise the dead, secure good fortune or heal through the laying on of hands are all at risk of legal action from disgruntled customers. Spiritualists say they will be forced to issue disclaimers, such as ‘this is a scientific experiment, the results of which cannot be guaranteed’. They claim the new regulations will leave them open to malicious civil action by sceptics.

Uh…yeah; and? If you promise to raise the dead or secure good fortune or heal via magic, why shouldn’t you be at risk of legal action from disgruntled customers? What should you be – immune? Say you promise to raise the dead, five hundred bucks a try. You fail, the customer tries again, you fail again, customer tries again – and this keeps up until the customer has given you her life savings of fifty thousand dollars. To what are we supposed to attribute all these failures? Bad luck? The weather? The collapse of the housing market? Isn’t there something to be said for the idea that you never actually had a workable plan for raising the dead in the first place, and therefore shouldn’t have been charging a non-refundable fee for the service? I would argue there is quite a lot to be said for that idea.

For the past half-century, ‘genuine’ mediums have been protected by the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act, under which prosecutors had to prove fraud and dishonest intent to secure a criminal conviction, which was difficult. There have been fewer than 10 convictions in the past 20 years.

That’s quite funny. So everyone had to pretend to believe that ‘mediums’ genuinely believed they could raise the dead in spite of a long history of never actually doing so? In spite in fact of a historical record in which there are no (0) cases of people raised from the dead? Mediums could safely offer (for a fee) to raise the dead as matter-of-factly as a grocer selling a dozen eggs or a bus driver accepting a fare for taking you from Putney to Chelsea, undisturbed by the (one would think troubling) fact that the promised service was never forthcoming?

Didn’t anyone ever notice? Didn’t anyone ever stop and say ‘Wait, though – does this actually work? All those people I know of who’ve died – I haven’t seen a single one of them since. If this worked, wouldn’t someone have paid the fee to bring them back? Why don’t we ever see the ones who return? There’s something fishy here’?

Carole McEntee-Taylor, a spiritualist healer in Essex, said having to stand up and describe the invoking of spirits as an ‘experiment’ was forcing spiritualists to ‘lie and deny our beliefs’. She added: ‘No other religion has to do that.’

True, but they ought to. But also relevant is the fact that other religions don’t charge fees on the same basis – they pass the plate, but they don’t make their services conditional on a fee. But most relevant of all is the fact that you have no right to believe you can raise the dead – not in your line of work. A belief like that in your line of work is equivalent to an oncologist believing she can cure cancer by singing the Ode to Joy. You can’t charge people money for raising the dead merely because you (claim to) believe that you can in fact raise the dead when you never have in fact raised the dead. It’s unethical, to put it very mildly indeed.

I went to a talk by Austin Dacey yesterday to the Secular Students’ Union at the University of Washington. He’s a philosopher, he has a new book out, The Secular Conscience, and he’s a United Nations representative for the Center for Inquiry. It seems quite a good thing that CFI should have a UN representative, especially now. I’m looking forward to reading The Secular Conscience. Austin mentioned during his talk how reliably predictable it was that new students would be moral relativists, and the secular students lived up to the advance billing: all their questions were about how to ground morality. After about the fifth or sixth such question Austin wondered why people expect the answers to such questions to be quick and easy and definite, when we don’t expect that about any other kinds of difficult questions. I suggested that one reason is the desire to be able to match the quick and definite way believers can explain how they ground their morality by saying ‘I know X is wrong because God said so/it’s in the Scripture.’ Austin pointed out that thoughtful believers realize that that doesn’t do them any good (for the Euthyphro reason, which he started with). Yes; how unfortunate it is that there are so many unthoughtful believers.

This is related to my questions about what Blair said at the cathedral. If religion isn’t strange convictions, then what is it? What does religion bring to efforts to end global poverty that secular institutions and ways of thinking can’t bring? What does religion add that nothing else can add, other than the strange convictions? I can’t see anything. I can see lots of common ground, but it’s common ground; it’s as open to secularists as it is to believers.

Liberal believers can ignore the nasty parts of the bible and keep only the good bits – but if they do that, they are doing it for reasons that are independent of the bible and of religion. They are using secular moral judgment to do that – but giving religion the credit. That’s the sneaky part, and it’s why liberal religion is not such a beneficent arrangement as people think. It gives religion more credit for human morality, and it gives human judgment less credit. This means it encourages people to think that morality depends on religion when it really doesn’t, and it encourages them to distrust human moral judgment. That just sets them up to be subject to the authority of clerics, which at best stunts their own ability to think about morality and at worst turns them into arbitrary bullies and meddlers.

After the talk I asked Austin if as CFI’s representative to the UN he’d had a chance to protest the Human Rights Council’s ‘no jokes about religion’ declaration. He said there was no channel for doing that, and that creating one is the top priority. Yeah.

Austin is at the Green Lake library tomorrow at 1, and a lot of places after that. Go if you have a chance.

What’s Blair talking about?

“For religion to be a force for good, it must be rescued not simply from extremism, faith as a means of exclusion; but also from irrelevance, an interesting part of our history but not of our future.” Too many people saw religious faith as stark dogmatism and empty ritual, he added. “Faith is reduced to a system of strange convictions and actions that, to some, can appear far removed from the necessities and anxieties of ordinary life,” Blair said. “It is this face that gives militant secularism an easy target.”

Militant secularism yourself. We’re not the ones who resort to violence when people don’t agree with us, so don’t be so free with your adjectives, not to mention your mindless clichés. But leaving that aside – if religion is not a system of strange convictions, then what is it? I realize it has other attributes, of course (though it’s hard to specify any that universally belong to religion as such), but which ones are inherent in religion and part of its definition? If you remove all the strange convictions from a given religion, what is religious about what is left? I realize there will be something left, but what I don’t see is what is religious about that residue. It seems to me that what is left is simply a lot of stuff that can just as easily be secular, and often is – belonging, meaning, motivation, community. That appears to be the kind of thing Blair has in mind (though who knows for sure, since as always religion gets the benefit of vagueness when we are being told how wonderful it is), but he has no real right to assume that kind of thing is religious and therefore on the credit side of the ledger for religion.

He went on to argue that religion could help to advance humanity and end global poverty. One of his foundation’s aims is to bring people of faith together in pursuit of the UN’s millennium development goals, which include the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, promoting gender equality and combating diseases.

Well sure, religion could do that. But what could it do to do those things that is religious? What is it about what religion could do to help advance humanity and end global poverty that secular or non-theist groups or organizations could not do? What particular, special, irreplaceable quality of religion is Blair talking about here? The article doesn’t say – and I have a strong suspicion that Blair didn’t either.