Author: Ophelia Benson

Pootergeek has a harsh word or two to say about Antony Flew on the god question.

It takes a professional philosopher to choose, of all the arguments for the existence of some kind of god, the most exquisitely wrong.

Brian Leiter is also somewhat ungentle.

His understanding of the putative “science” is not, shall we say, robust, and old age, as we know, takes its toll on people in many different ways. This is more an embarrassment for Flew than some triumph for creationism.

And The Secular Web attempts to clear up the confusion about exactly what Flew’s position is right now as opposed to last October or a year ago or August 2001.

At any rate Leiter and some of his correspondents ask an apposite question, the same one I asked with the sarky stuff about Bush and Osama and Billy all changing their minds one of these days:

Gilbert Harman (Philosophy, Princeton) observes: “What’s interesting is that there are no headlines about famous believers who become atheists, or anyway I don’t remember such headlines…” Nor do I…[W]hy is it that an alleged embrace of theism by an atheist is deemed so newsworthy, while the converse (which must surely happen) is not?

Well we know why of course. Because the hurrah-religion position has (for some godunknown reason) become the default position in the ‘mainstream’ media and discourse, therefore atheists who recant are News while theists who recant are dropped down the memory hole. Anthony Cox of Black Triangle makes the connection in a comment at Pootergeek:

The Today programme had one of these intelligent design people vs Steve Jones on this morning. You could sense his annoyance that it is even necessary to counter such rubbish these days. The reporter finished with some throw away line like “I’m sure the controversy will go on”. Controversy? 99.99% of biologists think intelligent design is nuts and the BBC managed to make it into a controversy because they “intelligently design” a 50/50 split on the Today programme?

Too right. And the ID prat (Stephen Meyer) does the vast majority of the talking, too. Why’s that? Why is Today so eager to ask him to talk and so slow to ask Jones? Why does Today keep returning to Meyer after Jones has said about twenty words, and then let Meyer go on and on? Why does Today start and end with Meyer leaving Jones only a few short replies in between? Maddening.

Okay, you wanted more from the Wicca book. Yes you did. Yes you did. Well, one of you did. So here is a little more for your Friday entertainment.

Part of the paradigm shift frequently required of many people who become Wiccan is to take it for granted that ghosts, spirits, and psychic abilities exist, that they frequently are a normal part of everyday life, and that the skills associated with these phenomena are controllable, usable, and subject to development and improvement…Remember that at one time both flight and the ability of a human being to breathe while moving at speeds greater than thirty miles an hour were commonly declared impossible.

Ah yes. Do remember that, and then draw the appropriate conclusion. Good idea. And let’s not stop there, shall we? No. Let’s see. At one time the ability of a human being to go from Akron, Ohio to Alpha Centauri in .3 second by taking thought was commonly declared impossible (people talked of nothing else for awhile). Therefore, ghosts exist and are a normal part of everyday life. Yup – that follows all right. Thus we see what belief in Wicca does to people’s ability to think straight. (No, I know – correlation not causation – it could well be that our authors were bat-loony from infancy and that’s why they were drawn to Wicca. But still. If they make a virtue and a practice of this kind of ‘thinking’ it’s hard to believe that doesn’t affect their ratiocinative powers a little.)

When something happens that looks, feels, sounds, or smells ‘funny,’ don’t just automatically dismiss it. Acknowledging unusual phenomena will help you become psychically aware. Allow yourself to explore the possibility that it is a ‘supernatural’ event. Once you have recognized one psychic event, it is easier to recognize another. As you recognize more and more impossible psychic events (no matter what they are), your Conscious Mind will begin to believe and then know that these impossible events are real.

Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that just brilliant?

[pause to mop eyes and generally calm down]

Oh, gawd. Where to begin. The looks feels sounds or smells ‘funny’ would be one place. Dang, these people must be busy! I mean…I see stuff that looks funny all the time; doesn’t everyone? My face in the mirror when I accidentally get a glimpse of it, that neighbour, that other neighbour, that person whose trousers end six inches above her shoes, that ridiculous ‘nativity’ scene outside that church – they all look funny. And as for sounding and smelling – ! Dogs smell funny, garbage smells funny, that guy smells funny – what doesn’t smell funny?! And I sound funny whenever I shriek with laughter while reading Wicca book. But we’re supposed to explore the possibility that all these things are supernatural events – and then after that we’re supposed to move with no transition at all (and apparently without deciding to reject the possibility after exploring it) to ‘recognizing’ that ‘unusual phenomena’ (i.e. anything that looks or smells funny) are indeed psychic events. Well, that’s easy.

And then, as the authors sagely point out, once you’ve done that once, it’s easier to do it another time, and as you do that more and more, why, your Conscious Mind starts to believe absolutely anything and everything is supernatural and psychic and an impossible event that is nevertheless real – and you have become a raving imbecile. Congratulations.

There are risks though. In their usual caring, careful, concerned way, the authors give due warning.

Sometimes when people start picking up on large amounts of psychic information they can become overloaded with the data.

Yes, I bet they can. I was just commenting on that myself. Their lives must just become one big whirl of incoming psychic events.

This is one reason for the ‘Psychic War Syndrome’ experienced by many newly aware people. This syndrome can occur when someone who is newly psychically awake misinterprets anything (and frequently everything) [what did I tell you? {ed.}] that they now pick up as a ‘psychic attack.’ There are such things as psychic attack and psychic war that can occur when someone is either praying or casting spells against someone else…Once you open yourself up psychically, you will open yourself up to bad things, but once you’ve experienced it, you won’t have too much trouble distinguishing a ‘psychic vampire’ from a ‘faery.’

Ah. Won’t I. Well that is reassuring.

It’s the same thing I noted last time. First, put the dangerous bait out there, then, give a warning of the danger. Draw a pentagram, then say don’t use it or the debbil will gitcha. Tell people to ‘recognize’ psychic events whenever something smells funny, then warn of data overload and psychic attack panic and general freakout and mental meltdown. They don’t always give the warning though. They don’t first say ‘be credulous and believe everything you can possibly believe’ and then follow up with the warning ‘this procedure is pretty much guaranteed to turn you into an idiot.’ Caveat emptor, I guess.

Chris has a good post at CT on some of the omissions and blind spots in the ‘standard blog critique’ (cf. ‘Standard Social Science Model’) of the proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. We’ve been talking past each other for some time, B&W and CT, but in this post I at least see Chris’ point, or rather points. The part about media ownership and access to the airwaves as a crucial part of free speech I completely agree with and always have. It’s always irritated me when free speech is defined in an such an impoverished way that it just means a cop doesn’t handcuff you for saying something. The next part, about hate speech and intimidation, I’m not so sure about, because the law itself seems like such a form of intimidation.

But then in item 2, I think he does point out some genuine problems for the SBC (not that I necessarily agree that B&W’s critique is a ‘standard’ one, on account of I’m far too vain and conceited to think I’m standard and predictable – but never mind that).

Many advocates of the SBC write about religion being a matter of choice, or religion consisting of a body of doctrine which ought to be open to critique etc. I basically agree, though I think people sometimes overstate the chosenness of religion. But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious identity may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question…

I think that’s a fair point about overestimating how chosen religion is. I’ve been discussing religion (and its chosenness) as a system of ideas that adults can rationally consider and accept or reject – which of course it is, but equally of course that’s not all it is. It’s also what your parents teach you (or don’t), what you grow up in, your history and past and memory bank. And looked at in that way, it’s obvious enough how extremely difficult it can be to choose to reject it. Just for one thing it’s bound to be all tangled up with issues of class and education and upward mobility, with abandonment and loyalty and love. Especially for people from marginalised or underprivileged or impoverished or excluded groups – immigrants, the poor, the working class. The parents work and slave to get the children an education, and then the educated children become alienated from the parents: it’s a familiar pattern, and a heart-breaker. How can the children reject the religion of the parents without implying that the parents are stupid and just don’t know any better? Not easily. So that is one factor that makes the chosenness of religion a lot less easy or automatic than I’ve been saying. I needed brackets or something, or an automatic ceteris paribus or some such stipulation. Religion is chosen considered in the abstract as a set of ideas independent of family history and affective ties. (The argument applies to football, as well. A guy I used to work with once informed me that one can’t choose not to support a football team one has always supported, from earliest childhood; it’s simply impossible. Thus so is free will, I think he added, but I could be misremembering.)

The point about religious identity is also true, I think, but there are complications. For instance there’s a difference between our internal ideas of our own identity, and what other people take to be our identity (though of course the one can reinforce or even create the other: one may not think about one’s own identity in such terms at all until other people make an issue of it). Yugoslavians used to think of themselves as Yugoslavians, and then they started (or reverted to or revealed that they always had been) thinking of themselves as Serbs or Bosnians, and look what good came of that. It seems to me at least possible that the proposed law would reinforce the conflation of race with religion that’s already prevalent, and that that would just promote a sort of Bosniazation. That’s going on anyway, but the law and the way it’s being viewed and discussed could help that process along, and make it more entrenched and hard to counter. At least I think so.

And now for another little trip to la-la land. This time not an angel book, but Essential Wicca. Like the angel book, it is packed full of opportunities to squeal with undignified uncontrollable laughter. As in the angel book, they simply leap off the page. Here’s a bit in a chapter called ‘Working the Sacred’ where we are being told how to do a Working (here’s a hint: it takes place in a Circle, which is Sacred Space, and capital letters appear quite a lot):

It’s good to remember that little children and cats are generally much more sensitive to the psychic/spiritual world than most adults, so they may be a rough gauge of how things are going. If, for instance, your previously content sleeping pussy-cat takes off at a dead run for parts unknown, or every baby within earshot starts screaming, you might want to check what’s going on.

And that’s the end of the paragraph, and the next one changes the subject. One is left wondering (with the sweat beading on one’s brow) what kind of thing might be going on. But the book doesn’t say. It’s like that. It drops hints but then doesn’t go into detail.

Not to mention of course the other hilarities. Especially the cat thing. Notice the absence of dogs. Well fair enough. Dogs would just lie there happily snoring and farting while six kinds of devils turned up and started peeling everyone present with a very blunt carrot peeler. But what about parrots? Eh? The parrots I’ve known have been very god damn sensitive to the psychic/spiritual world. But they just get ignored in favour of those histrionic fakers, cats. I blame Andrew Lloyd Webber.

There’s more scary stuff. Really scary. It gets just a little more specific. This is on the next page (59) where we’re learning about pentagrams and elemental crosses.

You might not want to use a pentagram, because a pentagram can create a strong resonating signal on the astral plane. It calls attention to you for anything or anyone who cares to come and investigate.

Oh my god! Oh jeezis! Did you get that? Anyone or [shudder] anything! Ow, ow, ow, I’m really scared now. I won’t sleep for a month. I mean – damn – so there are anyones and anythings out there, all the time, and the reason they haven’t come in and yanked our heads off and eaten the rest of us on rye bread with mustard is because we haven’t called attention to ourselves? Yet? But we could anytime? Just by using a pentagram? Well hell on wheels. Life is even more precarious than I’ve always thought. (So what are these stupid people doing drawing pentagrams on the pages of their book then? Huh? I mean, brilliant! Tell us how to draw pentagrams and then in the next breath casually remark that if we use them we might call attention to ourselves for the benefit of who knows what ravenous dribbling Thing that’s lounging around in the munchosphere. Do these people have no sense of responsibility? Or is it that they’re actually working for the hungry creatures. That’s probably it. The warning is just a bluff, of course, as well as a way of protecting themselves against lawsuits by the very distant relations of the gobbled-ups. They know damn well that half the people reading this book will be using those pentagrams the very instant they see the warning. Oh well, maybe that’s good. If the gobblers are eating the pentagram users, that means they’re leaving the rest of us alone, at least for now.)

Polly Toynbee has a very good column today on the religious hatred law.

The natural allies of the rationalists have decamped. The left embraces Islam for its anti-Americanism. Liberals and progressives have had a collective softening of the brain and weakening of the knees. While they have a sympathetic instinct to defend harassed minorities, they prefer to abandon some fundamental principles and prevaricate over some basic freedoms than to face up to the damage religions do, the wars they fuel and the rights they deny.

Exactly. What I keep saying – to the point of tedium. Mushy language about ‘the right to lead a life in which one can peacefully practise one’s own religion without fear’ is designed to do exactly that – to overlook and skirt around and pretend out of existence, ‘the damage religions do, the wars they fuel and the rights they deny.’ Peacefully practicing one’s own religion to some people means peacefully bullying women into wearing the hijab, staying home, always being in the possession and control of a man. To others it means keeping lower castes in their place. To others it means an invisible guarantee that all their instincts are sound and all their decisions are right because God wants them to do what they take God to want them to do.

Iqbal Sacranie of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain said that linking the Prophet’s name with this crime “will have shocked Muslim readers” who are “calling for safeguards against vilification of dearly cherished beliefs”. And there it is. He expects the new law to protect “cherished beliefs”, while David Blunkett in the Commons assured his critics it would do no such thing. Dead prophets and holy books would be as open to criticism and ridicule as ever. The law will protect the believers, not their beliefs.

And there it is indeed. That’s one problem with a law like this, even if it really is true that it might, carefully applied, prevent some incitement to group hatred that otherwise would go ahead. It reinforces the assumption of religious people that their ‘dearly cherished beliefs’ ought to have some kind of special immunity. Of course they have the assumption anyway, but the fact that the state agrees with them would just entrench it that bit more.

That’s what I keep getting at with those repeated questions about why religious ideas should have special protection or respect or tact or forebearance when other ideas don’t and shouldn’t. I’ve suspected all along that I knew what the answer was, but I wondered if other people would think so too. My suspicion is pretty much what Iqbal Sacranie said – that the beliefs are ‘dearly cherished’ and therefore they should be immune. That’s an understandable reason, but it’s also an absolutely terrible one. It’s a recipe for permanent blindness, illusion, submission to authority, and inability to think. Humans have to be able to think. It’s as simple as that. The reasons are blindingly obvious – things like nuclear weapons being only one.

And of course the ‘dearly cherished beliefs’ reason is a bad one also because it’s not consistently cited. Other dearly cherished beliefs are not respected, obviously, so it’s still not clear why some should be when others are not.

Foreign Dispatches has a post on Toynbee’s column and also on a couple of Crooked Timber’s comments on related matters.

Update: I re-worded that last sentence, since I put it clumsily.