Author: Ophelia Benson

The disagreement between incompatibilists and accommodationists goes on. I’m on the incompatibilist side (surprise surprise). One thing in particular that Chris Mooney said stood out for me:

Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world. After all, they are not trying to force it on anybody else.

But religion is not a very private matter in the sense of being that to the exclusion of being a very public matter. It’s a private matter in the sense of being internal, personal, sometimes bashful, and the like, but that does not mean that it is always and everywhere exclusively private. That’s obvious from Chris’s Mooney’s post itself –

In a recent New Republic book review, [Jerry] Coyne took on Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, two scientists who reconcile science and religion in their own lives. Basically, [Barbara] Forrest’s point was that while Coyne may be right that there’s no good reason to believe in the supernatural, he’s very misguided about strategy. Especially when we have the religious right to worry about, why is he criticizing people like Miller and Giberson for their attempts to reconcile modern science and religion?

Why? Because they wrote books on the subject, that’s why. The New Republic commissioned him to review the books, so he reviewed them. This involved disagreeing with some of their claims. But the point is – their claims were not ‘a very private matter,’ they were a very public matter in published books that were out in public for the public to read. It’s just incoherent to claim that Jerry Coyne is being naughty to ‘criticize’ Miller and Giberson for their ‘very private’ religion when what he in fact did was dispute public claims in their published books. He didn’t go poking into their minds, he read their books and then reviewed them for a magazine. Why is anyone asking why he did that? The question is absurd.

The arrogance of Tariq Ramadan is truly breathtaking.

What we expect from the new president is effective and necessary action as well as a change in attitude. Humility is a key factor…Islam is a great civilisation and Barack Obama should bring a message of true and deep respect by announcing that we all have to learn from each other and that he will commit himself to spreading knowledge of cultural and religious diversity in the United States itself. Humility means we all have to learn from one another and America should be ready to learn from Islam and Muslims as well as from the Hindus or the Buddhists.

Islam is not a civilization at all, just as Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism are not civilizations; they are all religions, not civilizations. Treating the two as interchangeable is a typically Ramadanesque bullying tactic. The peremptory demands for humility and true and deep respect are…pathetic, if you think about the kind of true and deep respect for other religions (and civilizations) that is on offer in, say, Saudi Arabia. I would urge Tariq Ramadan to learn a little humility himself and stop barking out orders in the name of ‘Muslims’ as if he spoke for all Muslims everywhere.

Religion has nothing to offer to morality, because religion as such adds nothing to moral reasoning. Religion as such is an obstacle to moral reasoning, because it injects elements that are irrelevant and false – irrelevant because they are false. Randall Terry on abortion for instance.

George Tiller was a mass-murderer…Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name: murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the law of God.

Randall Terry has no idea what ‘the law of God’ might be, and neither does anyone else. Billions of people think they do, but in fact no one does. No one has any reliable knowledge of what the law of God might be, or if it is something human beings could and should endorse or not. For all Randall Terry knows God is a vicious sadist who loves watching animals torn apart screaming and people swept away in floods. But Terry thinks he does know, and he thinks God thinks what Terry thinks, and so Terry approves the murder of a doctor.

This is why religion is so inimical to women and to anyone else who is not born to one of the top spots in the hierarchy. Once people become convinced that they know what the holy law is, then that law becomes difficult or impossible (depending on the numbers and the ferocity) to change. If enough people are firmly enough convinced that God wants women to be the property of men and shut up and do what they’re told, then women are essentially slaves, and that’s that. If enough people are convinced that the foetus is far more important than the woman carrying it, then women of child-bearing age can never really own their own lives. That’s the law of God for you.

Clerics will say anything, and they’re allowed to; that’s their job. In some jobs you have to try to get things right and then report them truthfully; in others you’re allowed and indeed encouraged to just make things up. Archbishops are firmly in the second camp.

Many Catholics see in the dismay over MPs’ expenses and the behaviour of the financial markets, a growing public conviction that all is not well in the moral life of the nation. They believe it presents a rare opportunity for the Church to make its voice heard, and see in the archbishop a forceful and articulate spokesman…[The archbish] said the revelations about expenses and the activities of the markets showed rules alone could not make a society work. He insisted they showed that some sense of “virtue” – such as that offered by Christianity – was also needed.

From an obvious truism to a ridiculous non sequitur. Of course ‘rules alone’ can’t make a society work, but who ever said they could? What’s that got to do with anything? Nothing, apart from the automatic slandering of all things secular. ‘Those pesky unbelievers – they think rules alone can make a society work – how shallow and uninformed and clueless can you get? Typical godless.’ Nobody said rules alone can make a society work, and in any case, why is the only other option ‘some some sense of “virtue” such as that offered by Christianity’? It isn’t, of course, the archbishop just felt like saying it is, and his job description says he’s totally allowed to do that.

So – what would this ‘sense of virtue’ be? Especially this ‘sense of virtue’ offered by Christianity? Think hard now. Hmmm. Is it anything like the virtue of
the religious congregations in Ireland? No, probably not. What then? Oh…humility, turning the other cheek, loving your enemy, that kind of thing. Unless you’re in charge of an industrial school, of course, in which case humility and turning the other cheek and loving your enemy is quite the wrong kind of thing. So that must not be what’s meant by a sense of virtue then? So what is? Hmmm. Not getting hitched to someone of the same sex? Yes, perfect! But then – that’s just a rule, right?

Well, the archbishop probably did have something in mind, but I’ll be damned if I can guess what it might be.

The truth is that religion has nothing to offer to morality. It may have some utility as a morality-assistant, but it’s worthless at moral reasoning. That’s not to say that no religious people can engage in moral reasoning, it’s just to say that the religious part doesn’t add anything to the reasoning. Well it doesn’t. Moral reasoning is secular, and religion either gets it dead wrong, or muddies the issues, or simply applauds what everyone knows anyway.

This is why I won’t be applying for any archbishop jobs soon.