Author: Ophelia Benson

OB mentions below that Shaun Williams, aka STAMP, long-time cartoonist of The Philosophers’ Magazine, has died.

Here are a few examples of his work, including the Hume, constant-conjunction cartoon I told her about.

Cartoon 1

Cartoon 2

Cartoon 3

Cartoon 4

He really was a good cartoonist. The major academic Waterstone’s bookshop in London liked his work so much that on one occasion they decorated their front window with his TPM cartoons.

As some of you will know, at The Philosophers’ Magazine we have a number of online interactive type things which are designed to flag up some of the possible difficulties with religious belief (problem of evil, that kind of thing).

And since it is always amusing to tease the religiously afflicted, I thought I’d post an email I received yesterday about one of the activities. It kind of teases itself, so I won’t say any more.

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Your message is stupid as well as your test. There is a all loving, all caring, all knowing and all every where at one time God who truely exists. You think too much with your head and it is the wrong head. You should think about this…if there was not a God as you say there is not than why does He, not she, show you so much mercy every single day of your life. You must be one more miserable person to develope such an idiot of a test and pass it along out there into Internet space. You are not as smart as you want to think that you are and one day you will see just how dumb you really are when you ask such stupid stuff.

God is a God of mercy and total love but He is also a God of judgement. The reason there are famines and earth quakes is because people just simply refuse to serve and trust Him and it was also forewarned in the Holy Bible that such things would happen. If people obeyed the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind and strength than they would see in this world a whole lot less evil.

It was man who got us into all this mess, not God.

If you read the Word of God you will find that it states that Satan has power over the air. Which means that a whole lot of the problems with the weather has to do with his doing…a fallen angel from Heaven.

You people are duped!!!!! You are so deceived that you are the blind leading the blind with your ridduculous tests.

The reason you don’t want to believe in a Supreme being is because you want to be God and you think that you could do a much better job than what He does but if you really look over the last part of your life, you will see that you have a trail of messes that you have caused on yourself.

You are persumptious to think that there cannot be a God who can be everything to anyone who choses to live for Him. If you read the Bible, you will find that it predicts all this clamaity that is going on around us.

Oh foolishness that you, a human being will whip up to start conflict in a world already sufferring with more conflict than it truely needs.

I feel sorry for you, whoever you are on the day of God’s White Throne Judgement.

The problem with you is that you do not know how to have faith in someone you do not understand. It is painfully obvious to me as well as many others that you lack faith and are a very sad, sad person.

Sincerely,
Katie
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Well, thanks for that Katie.

I just love the “You think too much with your head and it is the wrong head” bit!

Some oddly-assorted items.

There was a terrifying item in the Village Voice today, about the cozy friendship between the Bush administration and something called the Apostolic Congress – a group of ‘rapture’ Christians – you know, those nice people who look forward to the day when Jesus comes back and boils the blood of unbelievers by the power of his gaze. Just the kind of folks you want influencing US policy toward Israel, yes indeed.

The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be “the Christian Voice in the Nation’s Capital,” the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David’s temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won’t come back to earth.

Well that’s an understandable concern, so it’s good to know that dear old Elliott A. (how fondly one remembers him from the Reagan years) put in some time soothing them. PZ Myers has a few acid words on the subject at Pharyngula. He’s right, one does indeed think of General Jack D Ripper, with his mad, staring eyes.

Chris at Crooked Timber posted a comment on Julian’s latest Bad Moves yesterday. He tells an amusing story, Jo Wolff tells another (to do with Stuart Hampshire and hypothetical questions), and old (possibly Warner Brothers) cartoons are mentioned. Plus there is an interesting little discussion of the uses of hypothetical questions and whether they strip things down too much. I tend to think, in a mushy way, that they can, but on the other hand stripping down can be useful, so…

There’s the Guardian item about a book by an astronomer, Percy Seymour: The Scientific Proof of Astrology. Proof? Proof? Proof?? Why does he call it proof? Was that a publisher’s decision? The article makes clear enough why even what Seymour considers evidence is not very convincing (to put it mildly), but as for proof – ! Must be a marketing decision, I suppose.

Normblog has a comment from a friend on verbiage and where it comes from.

I am wading through finals assignments at the moment, and so many kids write – if they can at all – in this sort of media studies verbiage dotted with ‘discourse’ this, ‘dominant ideology’ that, and phrases like ‘our ontological enrichment’

Yers. Well, I can say this – if the Fashionable Dictionary is a runaway bestseller (and why should it not be? wipe that smirk off your face) and people actually read it as opposed to merely buying it and then throwing it into the back of the closet – but they will read it of course, because they will at least open it, and once they open it, they are lost – then ‘discourse’ this and ‘dominant ideology’ that will go right out of fashion. Right out. People won’t dare say them any more for fear of the shouts of mocking laughter that will assail them if they do. What a feeling of accomplishment we will have.

And finally. This is sad. I’m proofreading the next edition of The Philosophers’ Magazine this week, and in doing so today I saw that there was an item ‘Remembering STAMP’. I didn’t know, so I thought you probably wouldn’t know either, and might like to, so I thought I would tell you. STAMP did brilliant cartoons for TPM, and he’s died of leukemia. My colleague tells me of an especially good cartoon I hadn’t seen:

It had David Hume being confronted by a pregnant woman (we were supposed to assume it was his mistress). She was saying to him: “Don’t you give me that constant conjunction doesn’t necessitate causality nonsense.”

So shed a tear and raise a glass to STAMP, and to wit and good cartoons and cartoonists, and to the wish that all such people should live to be 105.

Religious believers can be weird. Very, very weird. I know it’s not considered polite to say that – and that’s why I tend to avoid them rather than engage them in dialogue. Precisely because there is so much that it is not considered polite to say about religious believers, that yet becomes so glaringly obvious when one does try to engage them in dialogue. It’s kind of a You can’t win situation. You simply can’t say certain things, and yet the things you can’t say are at the center of the whole discussion – so the discussion is lamed and hobbled and disabled before it ever starts. It’s a stalemate. So the familiar and much-repeated idea that discussion on this subject is possible and desirable (and even useful and productive) seems to me to be absurd. And every time the subject comes up, fresh confirmation is offered. Religious believers like to say ‘You can say anything you like! Of course you can! Do you think we’ve never heard anyone say “There is no God” before? How naive! Go on, say whatever you like!’ So you do (if you’re very stupid and credulous, at least) – and you are immediately greeted with yells of rage, with blatant misinterpretations of what you say, and with aspersions on your capacity for moral reflection. Oh. So when you say ‘You can say anything you like!’ you mean I can say anything I like provided I don’t mind having what I say translated into something else and being called immoral. Oh, okay, that sounds good.

I suppose ‘You can say’ in that context means ‘You are physically able to say’ as opposed to ‘You can without risk of having to deal with frothing intemperate dishonest reactions say.’ Okay. But that’s not what I mean by ‘You can say.’ However, I have learned through years of irritating experience that that is often what other people mean by it, so I don’t always take it at face value. Thus I choose to avoid discussions of religion with religious believers – when I can. It’s not always possible, because sometimes they pursue me back to my secular lair, and insist on having their productive dialogue anyway. This can be a trifle dispiriting. One wants to ask them to go away, but one doesn’t like to be quite that rude – so one sighs heavily and attempts to answer – and is immediately greeted with yells of rage and blatant misinterpretations of what one says. One really can’t win. One can make firm resolutions not to get drawn into such discussions to begin with, of course, but that doesn’t always work either – because one doesn’t always know in advance that they are going to happen. It’s not as if every time an invitation arrives in the mail, there is a notice at the bottom – ‘Warning: There will be one or more religious believers present who will insist on talking about God and prayer and higher authority, whether you like it or not.’ If invitations were always so equipped, one would know what to do, but they’re not.

It’s unfortunate that they’re not, though, because one result is that once such a discussion does start, and the skeptics remember an urgent appointment elsewhere and try to sidle away – what do you suppose happens? They are accused of censorship, that’s what. They are accused of not knowing how to tolerate freedom of speech and thought, of wanting to ban religion. That’s quite a leap – a leap of faith, one might say. A similar leap, and one even more popular with religious believers, is to equate non-adherence to their belief in a deity with absolute, unequivocal, irrevocable, undiluted, without doubt certitude, and then to marvel at such a degree of certitude. One religious believer I’ve encountered here and there accused me of exactly that just today. But of course that’s stark nonsense – I don’t have that kind of certitude about anything – I don’t even have one of those adjective’s worth of certitude. It doesn’t require certitude simply to decline to believe in something. And, of course, believers often display a fair amount of certitude themselves, which is exactly what makes discussions with them so unproductive – the secularists and atheists tend to hedge their assertions while the believers say what they know. As with this remark, which came from the very same believer who attributed all that certitude to me – ‘It’s about understanding that divine authority stands in judgment on all human agency.’

So. That’s what I said – religious believers can be very weird.

So perhaps it does matter after all, what the truth is, who is telling the truth and who is lying, who has it right and who is deceived, what pictures are authentic and what are fake. Is that possible? It looks that way. It looks as if in fact we do care whether on the one hand soldiers of a certain regiment did abuse Iraqi prisoners, or whether on the other hand someone faked up some pictures that purported to show that but in fact (being faked) did not, and gave said pictures to a large newspaper. You can see where it would make a difference. We can all think of other pictures that matter – pictures that we would be shocked, outraged, disoriented to discover had been faked. Pictures of famine victims, massacres, mass graves, rivers full of bodies; pictures from wars, genocides, prisons, crime scenes, riots. Pictures of perpetrators and victims, just as in the Daily Mirror pictures. We don’t want to be deceived about such pictures. We don’t want to get outraged and demand that something be done about a war crime or a violation of the Geneva Convention or an act of stupid brutality, if it didn’t happen. Do we. No. Nor do we want to fail to get outraged and demand something be done if war crimes or acts of brutality did happen and we are deceived about that. We don’t want a tour of Theresienstadt or a Potemkin village, thank you. We don’t want either one of those. We want the truth.

We don’t want a situated truth or a perspectival truth. We don’t want a community’s truth. We don’t want US truth and UK truth and Iraqi truth. We don’t want my truth and your truth and their truth. We want the truth, period. We don’t want the truth the army is happy with, and the one the government is happy with, and the one the newspapers are happy with, and the one the prisoners of war are happy with, and the one the voters are happy with. Do we? I don’t think so. I think we want just the one. The single, general, universal, global, true-for-everyone truth about what did happen and what did not. That truth may or may not be available; that’s a separate issue. But we don’t look placidly at faked pictures and say ‘Well that was true for the people who made the pictures, no doubt, so that’s good enough.’ We don’t conclude that the pictures made something to talk about for a few days and that’s good enough. Sometimes playful irony about the truth just doesn’t butter any parsnips.