Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m reading Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death by our own dear Joshua Slocum and Lisa Carlson. It’s very good and very infuriating.

The situation is the totally familiar one of an industry straining every nerve and pulling every string to winkle more dollars out of other people’s pockets into its own, but in a context where doing so allows a lot of really nasty forms of manipulation – like creating a bogus “requirement” to view the body and then saying “wouldn’t you prefer to see her in an upgraded” vastly more expensive box?

There’s a weird strain of hilarity behind the whole thing – the basic idea of buying an expensive box that’s going to be buried in the ground. There’s one quoted item of PR-speak that refers to the body “nestling” in whatever it is. Nestling?

One thing I didn’t know is that in most places there are a lot more funeral outfits than are needed, and given that there’s no legitimate way to expand the market, the only way to survive is to inflate the prices. With shoes or hamburgers or phones, you can just market the bejeezis out of them and sell more and more and more, but there’s no way to sell more and more and more burials.

Maybe they should consider that. Reburial every few years, just like getting new appliances and granite counter tops. The living room looks a little dull and drab, time for new curtains and a lick of paint. Same thing with the ancestors.

Exctract here.

Catherine Bennett isn’t fooled or wowed or befuddled or rendered absent-minded by the archbishop.

After a great success with Jemima Khan, the New Statesman had made the archbishop guest editor. Why? Why not?…As it turned out, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s internship proved equally inspired, exposing a public tolerance of episcopal power that, even as it dismays reformers, can only encourage undimmed Anglican ambition.

What was that all about? It seemed more like a Monty Python joke than anything else. Who’s the next guest editor, the queen? Could they have found anyone less appropriate for a putative left-wing magazine?

The response to his provocation could hardly have been more satisfactory. Clearly, everyone had forgotten his flirtation with sharia and that other time, with Labour’s equality bill, when Williams won his church a special bigotry exemption.

Well why? If so, why?

Even rightwing Anglicans, who recoil from Williams’s politics, relish the spectacle of the established church being recognised, unlike their competitors, as a prominent and respected meddler in sublunary affairs.

Yes of course they damn well do, but what is the Staggers doing helping them?

Next up was the Rev Michael Banner, on Thought for the Day, exulting in the bravery of his spiritual brother – and boss – Rowan. “The voice of prophecy – the voice of what Christians have called the Spirit of God – ought never to be silenced and ought never to go unheeded,” said Banner. What, never? some listeners must have thought as they sprinted for the off-switch. How about Rasputin?

Or Savonarola, or Jerry Falwell, or Fred Phelps, or Terry Jones (of the Florida clan), or all the various “spiritual leaders” of Hizbollah, Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Shabab and all the other “spiritual” gangs – how about them?

It is this “voice”, Banner continued, presumably alluding to the established church, speaking through him on the BBC, “which constantly challenges a complacent satisfaction with the existing social order, which dreams of a better society” etc etc.

Ah yes, the established church and the BBC joining hands to challenge complacent satisfaction with the existing social order. Makes the eyes mist up, don’t it.

But don’t non-prophetic voices also do that, without recourse to a contested spiritual authority? That’s the great thing about pulpits: they don’t take questions. And Banner was right in thinking that his superhuman case for being “heeded”, over inferior, secular voices emanating from, say, charities or academies, is often accepted as blindingly obvious.

Pulpits don’t take questions because god doesn’t take questions. A great deal too convenient, if you ask me.

Last week, the media response to Terry Pratchett’s intensely troubling investigation of assisted dying was, similarly, a deferential search for the nearest bishop, even though a bishop’s moral insight on this question, whatever he may add about palliative care, represents not so much superior expertise as an immutable faith requirement. Defying an overwhelming lay majority that supports assistance for dying people who want to control their deaths, Rowan Williams has called the proposal, flatly, “immoral”.

He’s the immoral one.

Trevor Phillips of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission talks a lot of sinister crap to the Telegraph.

“The thing I’ve become anxious about in recent times is this – there is   certainly a feeling amongst some people of belief that they are under siege,   that they are often disadvantaged, that they are looked at and considered in   some way different and their faith makes them less worthy of regard,”   he said.

That could be so, but it could also be inevitable given that their beliefs are not well supported. The conspiracy of silence about that incovenient fact has been broken lately. That’s as it should be.

I understand why a lot of people in faith groups feel a bit under siege.   They’re in a world where there are a lot of very clever people who have a lot of access to the airwaves and write endlessly in the newspapers knocking   religion and mocking God. The people who want to drive religion underground are much more active, much more vocal.

Yes, we are, and people in faith groups will just have to learn to put up with it. (And note that those people too have a lot of access to the airwaves and write endlessly in the newspapers knocking atheism and mocking atheists.) We are allowed to be both active and vocal. People in faith groups don’t get to veto us.

There is no doubt there’s quite a lot of intolerance towards people of faith   and towards belief. There’s a great deal of polemic which is anti-religious, which is quite fashionable.

And there’s quite a lot of intolerance towards people of no faith, and towards unbelief. There’s a great deal of polemic which is anti-atheism, which is quite fashionable.

Being an Anglican, being a Muslim or being a Methodist or being a Jew is   just as much part of your identity and you should not be penalised or   treated in a discriminatory way because of that. That’s part of the   settlement of a liberal democracy.

“Just as much part of your identity” as what? He doesn’t say. Either the Telegraph cut that bit, or he never did say. If he said “as race or sex” he’s wrong; he’s also wrong even if he didn’t. Religious beliefs can’t have a total, blanket protection order, because some of them are murderous or otherwise dangerous.

“It’s perfectly fair that you can’t be a Roman Catholic priest unless you’re a man,” he said.

Oh jeez. I give up.

JT Eberhard also disagrees with Chris Stedman. Actually it’s a little more than disagreement. It’s about…what it always is about: Stedman pretending to have the moral high ground when in fact he’s just being petulant because someone disagrees with him.

There’s a parallel discussion at Facebook, including Jen McCreight and James Croft, and meanwhile back at the ranch, meaning here…Chris’s mother has explained why it’s perfectly fine for her to defend him in Facebook disagreements. This is a new move in SIWOTI disputes, at least in my experience, and it’s a tad disconcerting. I’m used to adults defending themselves, not being defended by their parents. I hadn’t really thought about it before but I now realize I have always simply assumed that parents automatically recuse themselves from public disputes involving their offspring, because they are not disinterested parties. Apparently that’s wrong, so all of you who have parents living, feel free to summon them if I disagree with you. I’m squeamish about arguing with people while their parents are watching.

Joshua Knobe notes a complicated question:

How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?

The philosophical tradition says

that what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection. A person might find herself having various urges, whims or fleeting emotions, but these are not who she most fundamentally is.  If you want to know who she truly is, you would have to look to the moments when she stops to reflect and think about her deepest values.

Which sounds right, in a way. But…

But when I mention this view to people outside the world of philosophy, they often seem stunned that anyone could ever believe it.  They are immediately drawn to the very opposite view.  The true self, they suggest, lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression.  To find a moment when a person’s true self comes out, they think, one needs to look at the times when people are so drunk or overcome by passion that they are unable to suppress what is deep within them.

That’s interesting. The last bit seems slightly odd to me. Those times are extreme, and rare, so it seems odd to think they reveal the true self. Surely the duller homeostatic self that eats breakfast and picks fights on the internet is just as real as the one who is drunk.

Then again, there is another kind of being “overcome” or caught up, which is Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s flow. I used to be unsure whether I sometimes got that when concentrating on a piece of writing or not, until one day I worked on a piece for Comment is Free on a flight to San Jose and was literally incredulous to look out the window and see we were almost over San Francisco. I had thought we were maybe crossing the Oregon border. Maybe that’s the real self. But that’s the opposite of being drunk, in fact – it’s thinking in such a focused way that time gets swallowed.

Anyway; Knobe thinks neither is right.

But it seems that the matter is more complex. People’s ordinary understanding of the true self appears to involve a kind of value judgment, a judgment about what sorts of lives are really worth living.

Well yes. I choose writing over being drunk.