Author: Ophelia Benson

Look at this leering little pill. Look at that ineffable smirk. Well naturally, she’s got her picture in the paper, and she’s been given a chance to set up as the new fun thing to be, a Martyr for her Faith. Of course she’s smirking. She must have been beside herself with joy and excitement when a teacher told her to take off the nasty little necklace with torture-execution emblem. She’s probably been waiting to be told that for weeks, wondering what was taking everyone so long. Mind you, she was allowed to wear the same revolting thing as a lapel badge if she wanted to, the pious little creep, but no, that would interfere with the martyrdom-pose, so obviously she wasn’t about to close with that offer. Hell no. Where would be the fun in that? She would hardly get a chance to announce to the Telegraph that ‘I am determined to keep wearing the crucifix whatever the consequences – even if I get suspended or expelled’ if she settled for just swapping a necklace for a lapel badge, would she. Nor would her mother get the chance to drone to the same newspaper that ‘I was brought up to be proud of my religion and we believe it is Sam’s right to be proud of what she believes in and wear a symbol of her faith. It’s a total disgrace. I don’t want Sam’s schoolwork to suffer, but she believes in standing up for what she believes in.’

They must all be just tumbling over each other with bliss in the cross-infested sitting room of their pious devout proud spiritual faith-based religious proud courageous dwelling place. They get to be in the newspaper. Called devout. Talking about what they are determined to do even if they are tortured or killed or imprisoned, or anyway expelled from Robert Napier School, Gillingham, Kent, which is much the same thing if you look at it the right way. Everyone will admire them! Everyone will think how brave and proud and self-sacrificing and devout and brought up they are! Everyone will be so impressed! They’ll probably get to meet the queen, and Charles, and Camilla, they’ll probably get to have Julia Roberts over for dinner, they’ll probably get to make the House of Lords do something or other. It is all so exciting. Darling little cross, what fun it is.

Something W K C Guthrie said about Socrates set off a train of thought.

[S]ince no one will try to find out what constitutes right action, or what is the real meaning of freedom or justice, if he thinks he knows it already, the first task was to convince others too of their ignorance.

True enough, probably – unless she already thinks that things keep on being worth thinking about even if she does think she knows something about them already. That’s why a basic stance of skepticism, uncertainty, revisability, is a good thing. If we have it, we’re likely and predisposed to go on (and on and on) trying to find out things even if we have thought about them before. We’re never finished. There are no closed questions.

The belief or conviction that we already know all that needs to be known on a subject probably does impede further inquiry and thought about it. That’s a sensible time-saving mechanism in a world of finite time and attention, especially when it comes to simple straightforward factual information like bus timetables, but it’s also the high road to dogmatism and delusions of infallibility and lack of practice in thinking and questioning on more complicated subjects. The absence of a sense that ‘That subject is settled, closed, there is nothing to think about’ is a necessary condition of thinking about it. If you really think there is nothing to think about, then you won’t.

So, as with biases, I’ve been trying to figure out if I can think of any closed subjects – subjects that are closed for me. Subjects I just wouldn’t want to think about no matter what the new evidence or arguments. Er – I couldn’t do it. I can think of subjects that bore me into fits, and that I avoid discussing or thinking about in certain terms – US politics, for example, which is 95% campaign and only 5% substance (figures pulled out of air), and just unbelievably boring and pointless. But that’s different from closed. I can’t think of anything actually closed. I must be fooling myself! I must be, that must be sheer delusion. Tax policy. Economics. No…I feel resistance, but that’s laziness and ill-informedness, not imputed knowledge. I can’t think of anything I know so much about that there’s nothing to think about. Well that’s plausible enough! Maybe I’m not fooling myself: maybe that’s just the product of ignorance and a bad memory. I’m serious. I find it easy to get interested in subjects I’ve already learned something about, because I’ve forgotten what I learned. I can just start over. Wonderful quality, that! It leaves you pig-ignorant, but also keeps you interested. Let’s see…belief in the existence of the self. We’ve never talked about that (surely?), so let’s get down to it.

A tangential comment in this piece on why Harvard shouldn’t pretend, as Steven Pinker put it in The Crimson, “‘faith’ and ‘reason’ are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing” is pertinent to a recent discussion here of condoms and the Catholic church:

Indeed, it is not uncommon for religious leaders to advocate acting on faith in the face of reason – as when Catholic priests forbid married women to use condoms even when their husbands are infected with AIDS.

Of course, Catholic priests (and bishops and archbishops and cardinals and the pope and many theologians and Catholic thinkers and writers) forbid everyone to use condoms under any circs, but the point Lawrence Krauss is making by putting it that way is the one that gets, bizarrely, overlooked by people (and there are some) who defend the Catholic church’s position on the issue by pointing out that people already disobey the church’s teachings by not being monogamous; the condom issue, they say, is subsidiary to that fact, and therefore no reason to blame the church for its loathsome murderous policy. There are a lot of problems with that defense (such as the lack of fit between crime and punishment – adultery is not self-evidently the right sort of thing to punish with a slow unpleasant death), but one of the most glaring is the one Krauss indicates by his way of stating the policy. The ban on condoms is a blanket ban, so, obviously, it punishes monogamous partners (and children) as well as non-monogamous partners. Of course that is not to say the spread of AIDS is the church’s fault and no one else’s, but it is to say that the church (to put it as mildly as possible) ought not to do anything to hinder AIDS-prevention. The church ought not to be helping along ‘punishment’ in the form of a horrible disease – that seems simple enough. (That discussion got sidetracked in the earlier thread by an irritating eruption of sexist bullshit. I run a classy outfit here; if anyone’s going to lower the tone it will be me. Sexist bullshit is right out.)

I read a bit of Julian’s Atheism: a Very Short Guide earlier today and there was a bit I wondered about. It gave me pause. He’s comparing belief in God with belief in the existence of the self – one’s own, that is.

For many religious believers, their belief in God’s existence is of comparable strength. They feel the truth of God’s existence so strongly that they can no more doubt it than they can doubt the existence of their own selves.

Is that true? I wondered. I don’t know that it’s not – but I wonder. It seems implausible. It seems implausible because (as we all know via Descartes, of course, if not in any other way) it’s not the same kind of belief or truth-feeling or inability to doubt. We can’t (I think) even imagine not believing we ourselves exist. We can imagine believing we’re in the clutches of the evil demon, in the matrix, all that, but we can’t imagine believing we don’t exist, because if we did we would immediately wonder (unless we’re very absent-minded) who that is doing the believing then. But no other belief can have that kind of strength, or force, because no other belief has that trick up its sleeve. Unless of course I’m just wrong. I’m curious about it. I could ask Julian, but I don’t think he has time for my footling questions.

His point is interesting, and no doubt right: that arguments are beside the point for most religious believers because arguments aren’t why they believe in god to begin with. I’m sure he’s right about strong belief – but I wonder if it can be as strong as belief in the existence of one’s own self.

I suppose for people who believe in an immanent god it could. You just believe your self and god (and all selves) are the same thing – so you need to believe in just the one. I don’t think that’s really what Julian meant though, since he wasn’t talking about mysticism and inner experience and so on. But maybe it is what he meant all the same. Anyway it’s given me an interesting puzzle.

Good book, by the way.