Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Statistical Errors in a Serial Murder Case

    If you multiply p-values together, then harmless incidents rapidly become dangerously unlikely.

  • Ben Goldacre on What to Do With the Articles

    With real evidence, we are all better placed to communicate the truth behind the news.

  • Madrassa Students Busy in Islamabad

    Burning CDs and DVDs, loitering at traffic lights to tell women to stop driving.

  • The New Humanism Yet Again

    At the end of April 2007 a “gala celebration” is being staged at America’s oldest University – the one in Cambridge, Massachusetts – to honor thirty years of the Harvard Humanist chaplaincy. The event designs to bring together friendly but competitive visions of the unruly congeries of ideas we call, for simplicity’s sake, “humanism.” To spice things up, the Harvard organizers have decided to use the sexy phrase “New Humanism” to describe the agenda. and while I do not know at the time of this writing precisely what will be said by the wise and wizened who attend the conference, I can guess, and I can guess I’ll be right.

    The new humanism will be called a bright and bold vision of the future. It will put an end to the rancorous disagreements of the old humanism concerning what humanism really is, or ought to be. We will hear that humanism is not the same as atheism, but not (of course) unfriendly to atheists, unless the atheists are “fundamentalist” about their unbelief. We will hear that humanism is more than science because while science might answer the riddle of life question it does not really address the meaning of life question. And we will hear that the era of non-cooperation is at an end. The new humanism will be all about healing, while the old humanism seemed to thrive on bad feeling and schism. Above all, it will be about building a table at which everyone can sit, no matter what their inclination, no matter how hard or soft their unbelief, no matter how high or low their tax bracket. The new humanism will be customized to have sales appeal to the seekers among us, people out there “officially” described as unchurched, unaffiliated, or just looking for cheaper gas prices, a virtual ingathering of lost and lingering tribes to create the New Un-Jerusalem.

    I have no trouble with vision. In fact, I wrote an article in the lateish-nineties called “The Old Humanism and the New” as the inaugural editorial for the a then- new CFI periodical, The Journal for Critical Studies In Religion, charting what I took to be a way forward in the wilderness of an over-defined and fissiparous movement – which remains over-defined and fissiparous. But visions should be anchored in reality and history, and the notions (a notion is a quart short of an idea) I see coming out the humanist chaplaincy in Cambridge are anchored in neither.

    Take atheism. As a label I habitually decline it. But the debate about the role of unbelief in the humanist movement is significant, formative, and imperative. Paul Kurtz has persistently reminded secularists that atheism doesn’t define humanism; but it’s a topic – whatever intellectual bruises its discussion may incur – we will never be able to avoid. As long as untried and untested adherence to belief systems exists (and I am not looking at my watch), the question of Unbelief will hound us. If it hounds different ones of us in different ways, ranging from those who find believers naïve and intellectually challenged to those who think ‘demythologized’ religious views are humanism wearing a different coat, that’s to be expected. It’s the price of unfettered intelligence – something most humanists qua humanists do believe in, just as we believe that the way to settle ideological differences is through spirited debate, not by reconciliation, forgiveness, or violence. But if we begin with the dogma that unfettered intelligence trends just as easily toward tolerance of naïve opinion and beliefs that cannot be squared with the demands of critical thought – and this is what I see the New Humanism doing – then I say show me the door.

    I reject the idea that humanism is about bridging differences. Or that the way to do this, even if it were desirable, is to build the world’s largest dining room table. The difference between humanism and other life-philosophies is real and sometimes intense, and never tends toward intellectual detente with philosophies and beliefs it finds unworthy of the human spirit. That may sound a bit abstract, metaphysical even. But we shouldn’t fear the phrase, any more than we should fear words like “virtue,” “happiness, and “truth.” The humanist quest for those ponderables does not necessarily make for a life of intellectual comfort. But as Mill said, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their side of the question.” The payoff of intellectual discomfort for humanism is science. Not being satisfied with religious explanation explains why science emerges within the humanist tradition as the agreed paradigm for understanding humanity and its role in nature and the cosmos. And it is why humanists anguish over the temptation to glorify the paradigm in a way that looks suspiciously like deification – a debate that for all its slings and arrows does not constitute a “split” in the movement. Science is not virtue. It is not happiness. And it is a way to only one kind of truth. Humanists should welcome the life disdainful of intellectual tranquility because it’s precisely this that keeps us on guard against the false comfort of the unexamined life, the life of faith.

    Is it now heresy to say that humanism has never been about getting along, overlooking error, polite tolerance of all opinions, equal appreciation of all cultures, all faiths, all ideas? Do we now pretend that obscurity is clarity of thought, or that the gospel of social liberalism is the humanist agenda, or the stammering axioms of postmodernism are compatible with the examined life? I hope that is not what’s being said at Harvard, because if it is, the old humanism will need to reject it.

    R. Joseph Hoffmann
    Chair
    Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion
    Center for Inquiry
    Amherst, New York

  • Human Rights Activists Rally in Islamabad

    Protesters urged authorities to curb the rise of extremist forces promoting intolerance and violence.

  • Sharia Gangs Bully and Threaten in Islamabad

    Creeping campaign to Talebanise Pakistan has spread from the Afghan border to the capital.

  • Jesus and Mo Test Dawkins’s Truth Claim

    And triumphantly falsify it, so ha.

  • PrayerFlight

    What a special weekend for our airplanes to be in the air, interceding on behalf of the people of Ohio.

  • The universal enemy

    Oh good. What a relief. How kind of Walter Isaacson to reassure us all on this very material point – Einstein hated atheists! Oh, whew! Hooray hoorah kaloo kalay, I was so afraid he might have thought atheists were okay but no, no, no, hallelujah, he made sure to say otherwise so that we in 2007 would not be put off our feed with worry.

    But throughout his life, Einstein was consistent in rejecting the charge that he was an atheist…And unlike Sigmund Freud or Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw, Einstein never felt the urge to denigrate those who believed in God; instead, he tended to denigrate atheists…In fact, Einstein tended to be more critical of debunkers, who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful.

    Yay! Yay, yay, yay. That’s so good. Because the US is so teeming with atheists who are always denigrating theists while there are no theists at all who ever say a harsh word about atheists (or what they choose to call ‘Darwinists’ either). There is such a massive disproportion in US discourse between atheist denigration of theists or theism and theist denigration of atheists or atheism that it is 1) a miracle and 2) a very good thing that Time has published this gobbet of phlegm just in time for Easter.

  • Just the questions, ma’am

    And, not for the first time, there’s Howard Gardner.

    ‘In his new book Five Minds for the Future, he argues that the 21st century will belong to people who can think in certain ways.’ One of the five is ‘the respectful mind, which shows an appreciation of different cultures.’ Why is that called the respectful mind? Why isn’t it called the appreciative mind? Or why isn’t the explanatory phrase ‘which shows respect for different cultures’? (Because minds can’t show things, for one reason. Okay but besides that.) I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that it’s because unconditional respect for (undefined, unspecified) different cultures is slowly but steadily being made mandatory. Which is stupid, in a way – if it’s mandatory, it’s not really respect, is it, it’s just obedience or obeisance or slavishness. Extorted or required respect isn’t respect. It’s also not a kind of mind. It may be an idea or a way of behaving, but it’s not a mind.

    Gardner believes that the education policies of today, which still revere rote-learning, are preparing children for the world of yesterday. He points to my digital recorder, the size of a cigarette lighter: “Something that small can contain every fact that you ever need to know. So what a waste of time it is to sit around learning facts! All the premium in the future is for people who can do things that machines can’t do yet. So, the capacity to ask a good question, rather than getting the right answer from a machine, becomes so much more important.”

    Really. How can people ask good questions if they don’t know anything? What can their good questions be about? How can they even dig facts out of ‘machines’ if they don’t know anything?

  • Parting of the ways

    Matthew Parris is amusing.

    During Holy Week we are treated to a variety of decent-sounding people in print and on the airwaves explaining that religion – or “faith” as they now prefer to call it – is basically all about shared moral values, making the world a better place and gaining a proper sense of awe at life’s mystery…Such faith sounds so reasonable. Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded. How can we be so sure?

    Beeeeecause (as Parris of course goes on to point out) that’s not in fact what religion or ‘faith’ really is all about, that’s how.

    You are living, dear reader, at a watershed in human history. This is the century during which, after 2,000 years of what has been a pretty bloody marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences. So block your ears to the cooing voices on Thought for the Day, and choose your side. “But how can you be sure?”…Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

    Moral values good (if they’re the right moral values, a question which has to be decided on secular, universalizable grounds), making the world a better place good, sense of awe more a matter of taste; but supernatural truth claims, not good; the thinking that goes into belief in supernatural truth claims, not good at all, in fact bad.

  • Dutch Philosopher Spending a Week in a Barrel

    Parts of a week anyway. Well, a few hours most days.

  • Ugandan Adultery Law Thrown Out

    Because it treated women and men unequally; sections of inheritance law also void.

  • Howard Gardner on the Need for Five Minds

    Disciplined, synthesising, creating, respectful, ethical. Respectful? Yes.

  • Block Your Ears to Cooing Voices

    After 2,000 years of a bad marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences.

  • Not Fashionable to be Christian

    Christians depicted as zealots or people who haven’t caught up.

  • Walter Isaacson on Einstein and ‘Faith’

    He did believe in God – not the usual God, but – um – er – well he had a sense of awe.

  • Happy Cruciversary

    It is the culmination of a plan set in motion at the dawn of time. And what a plan it is.

  • It’s the training

    It never ends. Drip drip drip; whine whine whine. Those mean fashionable intellectual mean people at their fashionable parties aren’t Christians and aren’t impressed by Christianity. It’s so unfair.I would never admit to any left-liberal social gathering that I sometimes go to church…Christians are likely to be depicted in my paper’s pages as zealots or people who inexplicably haven’t caught up with the modern world.

    That could be because Christians believe implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons. It’s not self-evident that there is no problem with believing implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons.

    To the average funky young columnist, Christians are as relevant as Cliff Richard, but where does that columnist think the philosophical roots of his own opinions lie?

    A number of places, probably, most or all of them secular. Christianity doesn’t provide philosophical roots, it provides theological or theistic ones. Jesus is quoted as saying quite a few good things, and some bad ones, but aphorisms don’t provide much in the way of philosophical roots; for those people must and do go elsewhere. Christianity doesn’t deserve much credit for those roots.

    Then there’s some wool about consumerism, then some wool about how claustrophobic Dawkins makes him feel. There’s no argument or even clarity, just some disconnected musing. That’s one reason some of us are not fond of religion: it doesn’t generally teach or encourage people to think clearly; all too often it teaches or encourages them to do the opposite – witness that discussion between Rick Warren and Sam Harris in which Warren says one confused or inaccurate thing after another and Harris does better than that. It is very difficult to avoid drawing the conclusion that Warren simply can’t think properly at all, and to blame his training for that.

  • A nice day out

    A pretty story.

    Naked men, women and children, some of them in chains to prevent them escaping, cower in front of the men in charge in a dimly-lit room in the church of St Mary on Mount Entoto…The church…sits above a mountain stream, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church believes the stream is holy water with the power to cure HIV/Aids…Plastic jerry cans are filled with water from a pool, and passed along a human chain to priests dressed like deep sea fishermen. The bright yellow waterproofs protect them from the drenching they administer to their congregation. They hurl the water over the mass of people kneeling in front of them who shriek and scream, either through devotion or the simple shock of the cold water hitting their naked flesh…The church claims that more than a thousand people have been cured in the past two years. And yet the head priest Father Geberemedhen admitted to me that only the newly diagnosed are likely to be helped…”We don’t allow patients to take medication if they want to receive holy water,” he told me. That means they must stop taking the antiretrovirals which prevent the disease taking hold, and prolong the life of those who carry the HIV virus.

    Jesus saves. Or not.