Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Supreme Court declines to hear Vatican’s appeal

    So the clergy sex abuse case will go to trial in an Oregon district court.

  • Belgium: church-backed “commission” resigns

    Members are angry that Belgian police are investigating crimes against Belgian children.

  • Where are the atheist women?

    Busy? Too nice to argue? Poor? Not invited?

  • Farmworkers challenge: take our jobs!

    United Farm Workers urges unemployed Americans to sign up for backbreaking jobs at low pay in dangerous conditions.

  • Ron Rosenbaum presents his offering

    Well, Templeton got its money’s worth out of overpaid Ron Rosenbaum. He’s already hard at work saying how horrible “new” atheists are. Man, $15,000 and two weeks in Cambridge all expenses paid and a library’s worth of new books, all to kick the “new” atheists, when so many people are willing to do it for fifty bucks! Templeton is nothing if not generous.

    I think it’s time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

    Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

    Isn’t it sad? He could have said that without setting foot in Cambridge. One wonders exactly what Templeton is paying for.

    Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing.

    And so on and so on and so on – the usual boilerplate. It’s all like that, and it’s a long piece. Ho hum.

  • Reasons for reasons for reasons

    I was looking for something else, and stumbled on a blog post commenting on my post on atheism and reasons.

    It’s one thing to have reasons to be an atheist (I do) and a Jew (I do), another thing altogether to adopt some level of “observance.” You can have good reasons to be an atheist, and other good reasons not to be observant–i.e. not to focus on it, talk about it a lot, promote it.

    Yes but I wasn’t talking about being observant, I was talking about not pretending not to have reasons. I was talking about treating one’s atheism as if it were accidental, for the purpose of othering atheists. I wasn’t saying or suggesting that one should focus on it, talk about it a lot, promote it; I was saying that when one is an atheist one ought not to play accidental-atheist in order to suck up to the majority and throw non-accidental-atheists under the bus.

    Maybe you have other goals that would be thwarted, if you got on the “religion, baaaad” bandwagon.  For example, maybe what really matters to you is the environment, or poverty, or animals, and you think you can advance progress in those areas if you reach out non-divisively to both religious and non-religious people.

    Which of course implies, as Mooney always does, that atheism – including atheism-for-reasons – somehow prevents “reach[ing out] non-divisively to both religious and non-religious people.” It doesn’t.

    Finally, it’s a very bad idea to use the term “anti-atheist” for unobservant atheists who criticize “the new atheists.”  It echoes “anti-semite” and thus misleads badly.

    No it doesn’t. It’s just a shortcut, not an echo.

    There are people who really do despise atheists in the way that anti-semites despise Jews. Unfortunately, I come into contact with such people, and they upset me.  Critics of the new atheists (like Chris Mooney, like me once in a while) are nothing like them. The critics have reasoned complaints about a subset of atheists; they don’t despise or fear or denigrate atheists just for being atheists.  They’re not “anti-atheists.” So much for that.

    I disagree; I think Chris Mooney is very much like that. His complaints are not all that reasoned (he never explains why atheism prevents “reaching out non-divisively to both religious and non-religious people,” for instance), and they are very insistent and repetitive, as well as often inaccurate. Not all that reasoned. And as for “so much for that” – and as for the “Duh” in comments – well, that’s not all that reasoned either.

  • Ron Rosenbaum is back from the Templeton gig

    And he has ever such a good idea about how to be not one of those pesky atheists but something much nicer.

  • Vatican fuming

    More Vatican rage at being treated like people as opposed to quasi-gods.

    On the same day that Belgian police raided church offices to seize documents in a sex abuse probe, the Vatican found itself in the courts of another country, this time the United States, trying to fend off attempts to interrogate the pope and other senior Vatican officials in another case involving clerical sexual abuse.

    Vatican attorneys filed a brief on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Kentucky in the case of O’Bryan v. Holy See, opposing requests from lawyers representing three sex abuse victims for depositions of four figures at the very top of the church’s power structure…

    Ratzinger, “the Vatican’s Secretary of State” (whatever the hell that means), the Inquisitor, and the ambassador to the US.

    The requests, the Vatican lawyers argued, are “unprecedented – akin to a foreign plaintiff seeking a foreign court order compelling the depositions of the United States President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense and ambassador.”

    No, more like akin to a foreign plaintiff seeking a foreign court order compelling the depositions of the CEO, the CFO, and two other executives of a corporation in a criminal case. Not legally, to be sure (I know, Russell!), but in reality. Corporations are a good deal more accountable than the Vatican is though.

  • Vatican fighting US criminal investigation

    Equates itself to the “United States President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense and ambassador.”

  • Flaming out

    Remember that post about anonymous blogging? Now it can be told – the blog in question was called You’re Not Helping, and it has now flamed out – though that of course does not mean that the blogger is not still blogging somewhere else, and in fact I think it is. But it has at least admitted that it was one person and not several, and that many of its “commenters” were sock puppets. It has admitted that much of what it claimed was flatly untrue, which means it has informed us that everything it claimed could be untrue. I know from personal knowledge that a lot of it is – much of what it claimed about me is untrue.

    It was weirdly obsessed with me. It called me a liar, repeatedly. I’m not a liar, as a matter of fact. It has just admitted that it is a liar. This is an improvement.

    It says it’s 23 years old. If that’s true, I doubt that it’s Kees/Bernie Ranson, because that started too long ago – it seems unlikely that someone that young would spend more than two years dogging me.

    It’s interesting that some accommodationists have taken YNH seriously in spite of obvious, not to say glaring, signs of its unreliability, to put it no more strongly. Interesting and not altogether impressive.

  • Another imponderable

    The Telegraph tells us

    In a move designed to stress a commitment to the Catholic Church, the Coalition has decided that the former Conservative MP would represent a suitably high-profile appointment.

    Why does the Coalition want to stress a commitment to the Catholic Church? Seriously – why? The Lib-Dems have no particular love for religion in general or the Catholic church in particular, that I know of, and the Tories are more likely to be friendly to the Church Established, aren’t they? And right at this current immediate now point in time, the Catholic church is not looking like a particularly respectable institution, so why does the Coalition want to stress a commitment to it? It’s a nasty child-raping law-avoiding self-protecting gang that considers itself “holy” and somehow in cahoots with “God” – so what is it about the Catholic church that the Coalition wants to stress a commitment to?

    I would love to know.

  • Widdecombe to be next UK ambassador to Vatican

    The Coalition wants ” to stress a commitment to the Catholic Church.” Why?

  • Russell Blackford on the uses and abuses of anonymity

    If you use it to defame real, identifiable people who do not possess vast political power but do have real reputations,  then be careful you’re not abusing the privilege.

  • Investigation of a complicated but clumsy fraud

    Noisy public deception gets taken apart over a period of nine days.

  • Sock puppet blog flames out

    An anonymous blog that spent most of its time misrepresenting four bloggers and writing fake comments has suddenly shut down.

  • Philosophy in the Popular Imagination

    In my life nothing good has ever come of the “what do you do” question. Once off my lips, the line “I work on moral philosophy, on ethics” can lead in only one of two directions. Either my acquaintance unschooled in philosophy will be almost preternaturally interested in what I have to say as if she’s happened upon some sublime creature only thought to exist on blanched parchment, or she’ll be absolutely dumbstruck by the stupidity of a life well-wasted. Though, chances are, her rejoinder could go either way, in this particular case she’s lighted on the latter path. “Philosophy, it doesn’t get you anywhere,” she states, reveling in a truth that she believes is as certain as the claim that now is night.

    In instances such as the one above, I’ve yet to come up with a good reply, probably because there’s no such thing. A joke, you think? “Oh, I don’t know, it certainly puts you in debt.” Or a plea for clarification? “I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘get you anywhere.’”

    The truth is that neither will do. For if my conversational partner is genuinely interested in my thoughts on philosophy, then it’s likely because she has the wrong conception of philosophy in mind or it’s for the wrong reason. If, however, she’s not at all interested in my reply, then she “can’t be bothered,” as my former English landlady was fond of saying, with listening to a full rebuttal and she won’t brook a sharp counterexample. Like many others, she has already made up her mind—or, better put, her mind has already been made up for her.

    To do philosophy in the public sphere today is to be immediately put on the defensive and, in most cases, to stand in the wrong. How we got to the point where philosophy has been put on all fours—either fetishized for not being a part of the real world or vilified for playing no part within it—still needs to be explained. A first, modest step would be to get straight in our minds how lay persons conceive of “philosophy,” “philosophers,” and “doing philosophy” and why this should matter to those of us who believe, somewhat antiquely, in the life of the mind.

                                                                 * * *

    The place to begin is with my interlocutor’s claim that when philosophers discuss something, they only go round in circles. By this formulation, she could mean one of three things: first, that philosophers get mired in endless debate that stymies forward progress, such debate yielding nothing in the way of concrete resolution; second, that they make something out of nothing, causing all parties involved to be brought to a state of mental confusion; or, third, that in the game of philosophy there’s no way to resolve who’s right and who’s wrong. These three doubts, individually and collectively, present considerable challenges to philosophy’s basic self-conception. The first doubt would have it that there can be no valid conclusions drawn from a set of competing claims, the second that no mental tranquility can be gained due to the endless jostling over definitions and the petty squabbling over overnice distinctions, and the third that there can be no certain judgments concerning winners and losers. Once we enter the philosopher’s world, the lay person believes, we’re bound to soon find ourselves in a muddle.

    Rather than respond to each of the three doubts in turn (we’re not going to play that game, are we?), it occurs to me that it would be wiser to ask about what assumption lies behind my interlocutor’s worries. I suspect that she feels deep within herself the loss of faith in the power of reason to help us understand ourselves and our world. She needn’t be a relativist or a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic to believe this. She may simply believe that some hodgepodge of emotions, instincts, past experiences, hunches, friends’ advice, and expectations is better than reason at determining how we should act. By contrast, the philosopher’s belief that reason has its own set of powers (as well as its own inherent limitations) requires an attitudinal shift so profound that where once there was impatience now there is humility. The light of reason can only shine after we’ve discovered how to quiet our minds and distance ourselves from our “empirical self.” There is a long education of the soul, an itinerary of sorts, that leads ultimately to this state of mind, a path that the uninitiated hasn’t known or hasn’t taken and, in consequence, can’t find value in.

    Still, my interlocutor might concede that if philosophy means anything, it means that everyone has his own personal philosophy. A personal philosophy, she might insist, is a fundamental set of beliefs that one lives by. Think of the book subtitle of the popular radio program “This I Believe,” “The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women,” as giving credence to this definition. In this vein, we would be justified in saying that a coach has her own coaching philosophy, a company its corporate philosophy, a party its governing philosophy.

    I’m not so sure that this notion of personal philosophy gets us very far, for three reasons. One is that it’s not clear to me that the person espousing a personal philosophy is ultimately committed to this set of beliefs and not to some other. How do we know that she sets her course so that it lines up with her ownmost beliefs, or that, when the chips are down, she won’t jump ship, or that—to change metaphors—it’s not sometimes better to bend like a reed, as Haemon advises his father Creon to do, than it is to remain as rooted as an oak tree? In the end, how her beliefs line up with her actions has yet to be fully investigated. Another is that we would need to know whether the beliefs she stands by are worth standing by. Merely saying “this I believe” can’t be the end of the discussion but must be the starting point to any probing inquiry. And the last, already more than hinted at in my remarks above, is that philosophy, whatever it is and however it sets about its ultimate task of self-transformation, must be more than a doctrine; it must be a certain style of thought, a way of examining one’s life with the goal of determining whether the life I’m leading amounts to anything. The question concerning whether (and why) it’s a good thing to have a personal philosophy still remains unasked and unconsidered as if it were enough just to purport to have one.

    “All right. But if you’re going to dismiss talk of personal philosophy as hopelessly ‘unphilosophical,’ then you’ll have to come round to agreeing with me that philosophy is otherwise useless. After all, it has no bearing on the real world, and it’s mostly an academic pursuit full of puzzles, word games, and the kind of thing that’s done in universities: up in the clouds, I mean, not done here on earth, and nowhere else.”

    “Granted, contemporary professional philosophy has, in general, become unhinged from the concerns common to all of us. And, yes, the worst of it has degenerated into logical puzzles and the search for ingenious counterexamples and knockdown arguments. But, beyond these worries, I can hear in your voice the more potent criticism that philosophy is worthless on the grounds that acting is more important than thinking. ‘Getting things done,’ you seem to imply, should be ranked much higher than ‘pie-in-the-sky thoughts.’”

    Suppose for a moment that my interlocutor is right. But then aren’t there times when we don’t know how to act and, what’s worse, times when we’re completely at a loss concerning how to go on and how we got to where we are, to a place we would prefer not to be? When we’re in a crisis over which we seem to have no control? When our lives seem no longer to make any sense? At such times, wouldn’t it be wise for us to try to think our way through it in order to come to some deeper, more complete understanding of ourselves and of our place in the order of things?

    It is, I want to say, at such tragic moments that the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s question concerning what we care most about and what (and who) is worthy of our care can’t but ring in our ears. At its best, philosophy asks us to be honest with ourselves. It teaches us how to look closely at the hand we’ve been dealt, to determine the extent to which we’ve helped or harmed ourselves and others, to figure out what ultimately matters to us, and to assess, in the most basic terms we can fathom, how we’ve lived.

    Reason, it turns out, is neither omnipotent nor impotent in matters of the head and heart, philosophy neither so rare as to be entirely extinct from the world we inhabit nor so common as to be readily purchasable in the marketplace. Yet thanks to our mature recognition that things aren’tas they ought to be and thanks also to our desire to reconcile ourselves with the world, self-examination will continue to have a reason for being because it promises to bring us peace of mind.

    About the Author

    Andrew Taggart writes on ethics and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

  • Capeesh?

    The pope and the Vatican are trying even harder to get the whole world outside “the Holy See” to loathe and despise them for their passionate selfishness and territorialism and their shocking, persistent, hardened inability to take the real and horrendous damage done to Other People more seriously than minor inconveniences to themselves.

    Pope Benedict has joined mounting Vatican criticism of raids by Belgian police investigating alleged child sex abuse, calling them “deplorable”…Pope Benedict’s criticism of the raids came in a message of support to Brussels Archbishop Andre Joseph Leonard, the head of the Belgian bishops’ conference. “I want to express, dear brother in the Episcopate, as well as to all the Bishops of Belgium, my closeness and solidarity in this moment of sadness, in which, with certain surprising and deplorable methods, searches were carried out.”

    Just so the stalwarts around Hitler might have described the deplorable methods of the crude and vulgar non-German soldiers who liberated the death camps.

    I mean that. Not that Ratzinger is another Hitler, but that this imbecilic and vicious loyalty combined with contempt for laws and police that are there to prevent child rape is just that – it’s imbecilic and vicious loyalty combined with contempt for secular, democratically constituted law enforcement and for laws that apply to everyone. It’s simply disgusting that Ratzinger still can’t get it right – still can’t learn to just STFU and take whatever is coming. It’s simply disgusting that he still thinks he and his gang deserve some kind of special holy immunity from investigation and prosecution.

    On Saturday Vatican officials compared the raids and investigation into allegations of child sex abuse with the treatment of the Church under communist rule.

    Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, described the detention of priests “serious and unbelievable”.

    “There are no precedents, not even under the old communist regimes,” he said.

    The cardinal alleged that the Belgian bishops were left all day without food or drink, although this was later denied by the Belgian authorities.

    The Vatican has summoned the Belgian ambassador to the Holy See to voice its anger at the incident.

    I hope the Belgian ambassador gave the Vatican an earful.

  • Pope demands impunity for self and colleagues

    Is enraged at Belgium; Vatican calls Belgian law enforcement worse than “the old communist regimes.”

  • We’re bad at making rational decisions about risk

    Should government decisions about risk reflect our irrational foibles or the rational calculations of sober risk assessment?

  • Emily Dickinson was an extraordinarily powerful woman

    An artist who was intimidated by nothing—the opposite of a fear-driven recluse or a lovelorn spinster.