religion

Where the Fleshless Abide

By in atheism, identity, religion, science

Ed Yong:

The goggles I wore displayed the view from a camera pointing at my back. Ehrsson tapped my chest with one plastic rod while using a second one to synchronously prod at the camera. I saw and felt my chest being prodded at the same time as I saw a picture of myself from behind. Within ten seconds, I felt as if I was being pulled out of my real body and was floating several feet behind it.
A year after removing his subjects from their own bodies, Ehrsson learned how to trick them into acquiring new ones. This time, the volunteers’ goggles showed them the view from a camera on the head of a mannequin looking at its own plastic torso. Simultaneously poking the arm or stomach of the mannequin and the volunteer a few times was enough to convince the subjects that they were the dummy. They could even stare at their old bodies from their new ones and shake hands with their old self, all without breaking the spell. “It really is very intense and incredibly fast,” says Mark Hallett, a neurologist from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who experienced it first hand.
In his latest trick, published in May, Ehrsson convinced people that they had jumped into a tiny Barbie doll. When he prodded the doll’s legs, the volunteers thought they were being prodded by giant objects. And when Ehrsson tested the illusion on himself and a colleague touched his cheek, he says, he looked up and “felt as if I was back in my childhood and looking at my mother”.
…He also occasionally gets angry letters from people who have had out-of-body experiences themselves. “They believe that their souls have left their bodies, and they feel threatened that a similar experience can be induced in a lab,” says Ehrsson. He offers a diplomatic response, saying that he has “no way of disproving their ideas”. Metzinger is more forthright. “Henrik’s work speaks to the idea that there is no such thing as a soul or a self that’s independent of the brain,” he says.
Hee hee. It’s like Schopenhauer said — if forced to choose between a personal deity and personal immortality, people would turn atheist in a heartbeat. Who cares about arguing over God’s nonexistence? It’s far easier to disprove the idea of an immaterial soul, and far more devastating to traditional religious conceptual frameworks. Even most theodicy has to rely on some invocation of God’s mysterious ways, which aren’t readily apparent to the untrained eye. Few believers would be willing to allow an average life on Earth, bounded by the physical events of birth and death, to stand as proud affirmation of the inherent worth of existence.

You Cannot Trust a Single Thing I Say

By in atheism, religion

Religious people distrust the world’s estimated 500 million atheists as much as rapists, a study found Friday in the wake of a poll that said less than half of Americans would vote for an atheist president.
“Where there are religious majorities — that is, in most of the world — atheists are among the least trusted people,” said lead author Will Gervais, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
…“While atheists may see their disbelief as a private matter on a metaphysical issue, believers may consider atheists’ absence of belief as a public threat to cooperation and honesty.”
Not to tie the faith-minded up in logical Gordian knots, but who would a believer consider more trustworthy, then: an atheist who tells you so up front, or one who publicly makes a minimal gesture toward piety while privately rolling their eyes at what they need to do to appease the simpletons? Doesn’t matter, I suppose; they’re both equally flammable.

If You Wish to Strive for Peace of Soul and Happiness, Then Believe; If You Wish to be a Disciple of Truth, Then Inquire

By in nietzsche, religion, science

Some Western Buddhists have argued that principles such as reincarnation, anatta, and enlightenment are not essential to Buddhism. In Buddhism Without Beliefs and The Faith To Doubt, the British teacher Stephen Batchelor eloquently describes his practice as a method for confronting—rather than transcending—the often painful mystery of life. But Batchelor seems to have arrived at what he calls an “agnostic” perspective in spite of his Buddhist training—not because of it. When I asked him why he didn’t just call himself an agnostic, Batchelor shrugged and said he sometimes wondered himself.
All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d’être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science’s disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.
Yeah, the article is almost nine years old, but it’s new to me. And since I was just going on about the same topic, I had to excerpt it.

The Question Is Which Is to be Master—That’s All

By in books, language, religion, science

More from that same Owen Flanagan piece:

The first half of my book, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized is devoted to the question of whether Buddhism is science friendly. The current Dalai Lama is personally very interested in science. He says that the belief in rebirth would have to go if science proved it impossible. The trouble is however, the standard of proof and disproof he recommends makes it impossible to prove or disprove the existence of anything. All the empirical evidence in the world can’t disprove the claim that I am a reincarnation and that I will have a rebirth nor can it prove that you are reading these words. There is truth and there is proof. Only mathematics trades in proof and disproof. Proof to one side, the 14th Dalai Lama is very interested in and enthusiastic about establishing neuroscientifically that Buddhist practices, and in particular meditation, can make one happy. I examine the question of whether happiness is something in the head that can be assessed by MRI. Before that though, I need to address the question of whether Buddhism promises happiness. If so, what kind? My answer to this is that there is no good evidence that Buddhists are happier than anyone else. The second half of the book takes up the question of what Buddhism would look like if one subtracted the hocus pocus about karma and rebirth. Can there be such a thing this is “Buddhism Naturalized”? My answer to this is that Buddhism can be naturalized, and that what is left is a deep, credible philosophy for our time.

Whether Buddhism contains a philosophy that really could be attractive to 21st century secular humanists means that it would require at a minimum, that Buddhist theory was consistent with science and thus broadly naturalistic, and so beliefs in karma, rebirth and nirvana would have to go. Can there be Buddhism without these beliefs?

There can be meaningful existence without those beliefs, but I, for one, would not want to wade into the tar pit of argumentation over who rightly gets to claim the Buddhist label for themselves, any more than I wanted to over what constitutes zazen. I agree that the thing he’s referring to, the crucible of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics he names “Buddhism naturalized” is a fine guide to living and one that deserves to have attention called to it, but I’m not the least bit interested in the bitter fights over copyright and branding that are sure to follow. In the tug of war over language, I offer no resistance. You can have whatever words you want. I’ll stick with the experience, which I don’t really need to talk about anyway.

My Life Did and Does Smack Sweet

By in foolosophy, meditation, psychology, religion, spiritual-not-religious

Owen Flanagan:

Does Buddhism promise happiness, and if so, what kind? Presumably it is not the familiar “happy-happy-joy-joy kick your heels” kind of happiness, not the Hugh Hefner kind of happiness, and it is not the ephemeral happiness that comes from winning the lottery. Instead, some say that Buddhism offers no kind of happiness, but it offers an end to suffering, which is very different. You have a headache. I give you aspirin. You are not suffering. But are you happy?

There is much hype in recent years about the good effects of Buddhist meditation on health, well-being, and happiness. This, plus the fact that in Buddhism there is no creator God, makes Buddhism especially attractive to liberal post-Abrahamic folk who think of themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” But is happiness important? Were Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, or Martin Luther King Jr. happy? It seems an odd question. They each lived great lives. They mattered. Aristotle said that happiness is not the most important thing, but meaning, purpose and fulfillment are. A malevolent person could be happy, but the meaning and significance of his life are worthless and evil. According to Aristotle, one cannot tell whether an individual flourished or lived in a fulfilled and fulfilling way, until after he is dead and gone, one sees how the grandchildren turn out. This means that flourishing, purpose and meaning are not completely subjective, not located solely in the head, and thus not to be seen there on brain scans. It became clear to me that although American culture hypes happiness, it is generally of a shallow type and that no great spiritual tradition ever promises anything like that sort of happiness.

I maintain that it makes more sense to think of happiness as a point around which we travel in an elliptical orbit, sometimes closer than others, but never a point to be occupied, possessed. The harmony and symmetry of the orbit are the sublime parts.

I sit here this morning, amply fed and sufficiently warm. I’m enjoying the look of frost on the ground outside my window and the sound of choral Christmas music on the stereo. I’m fretful over whether or not my financial goals for this week will be met, and if not, what that will bode for the next couple months. I’m eagerly anticipating the next batch of library sales, both as a salve for those financial worries as well as the pure joy of the hunt for new books. I’m wistful and slightly melancholic as I recall that today marks two years since my closest canine companion died from cancer, and I spent a few minutes in sober contemplation as I held the bag of his ashes and relived that day. I have an indescribable mix of thoughts and feelings left over from yesterday after visiting my childhood home, encountering the usual spurs to reminiscence, and listening to my parents talk about health and aging, which prompted a slightly more vivid awareness of mortality, both theirs and mine. I’m excited to be able to spend the day at home cleaning and decorating and even playing video games if I want. I’m fearing for Liverpool’s chances against Manchester City on Sunday, but glad to be able to sit and watch soccer games this weekend. And I’m contented by the steady, comforting presence of my girlfriend.

In other words, a typical day. What does it even mean to try to sum it all up by saying yes or no to the question of happiness? I’m alive, that’s good enough.

Eisegesis

By in atheism, books, history, religion

Jessa Crispin:

…I had a hard time finding any sympathy for Teofilo Ruiz while reading The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization. Ruiz follows Frazer’s model pretty well, offering up a historical document with a helping of his own personal problems on the side. The book ostensibly explores how men and women throughout time have dealt with the immense weight of living in a world with incredible suffering and pain — through religious belief, through art and aesthetics, through decadence and hedonism. Like Frazer, he tracks particular behaviors to find their universality. For example, some of the citizenry responded to the Black Death that killed half the population around them by imagining they were being punished by God and tried to make amends. Others decided to eat, drink and screw until the end came for them. And then others wrote a collection of tales about a society trying to function amid the backdrop of plague and terror and called it the Decameron.

If Ruiz is writing about humans’ avoidance behavior, looking for all the ways we manage not to take responsibility for the state of the world, he is doing so with a significant amount of judgment. The word “avoidance” does not have a positive connotation, nor does “removal” or “ahistorical,” other words he uses instead of “coping strategy.” For Ruiz, there is something shameful about these methods of distracting ourselves from what he sees as the “meaninglessness” of existence. The religious are particularly scorned, as Ruiz believes they use the promise of an afterlife to check out from the here and now. He somehow forgets that throughout history, Christianity was the one reason not to check out.

…Frazer held the religious as superior over the magical. Magic was superstitious, but religion was a higher state. Ruiz takes that further — religion is an emotional crutch, an “attempt to step out of historical processes, to escape the crushing reality of everyday expectations,” and pure rational atheism is not only a more honest belief system, but also a more ethical way to go through life.

…Agnosticism is at least an open, fluid, humane state of being. Pessimism, rigid disbelief, and a view of life as essentially meaningless is its own avoidance behavior. Frazer wrote that there is no true religious belief without action. Religion is (supposed to be) about engagement, not hiding or twisting away from life. Believing that we’re all fucked no matter what, as Ruiz appears to think, is a way of avoiding reality, or at the very least, of refusing to be a part of the rehabilitation process.

It might be churlish of me to point out that Crispin has already shown herself to be highly defensive over this topic and therefore sure is one to talk about authors letting their prejudices spill into the story they’re telling, but I’ll do it anyway, because I am an ornery li’l cuss, after all.

Not having read Ruiz’s book (though it is on my wish list, hint hint), I can’t say whether he is indeed being unfair. I will say that Crispin is overreaching in trying to define religion according to her sensibilities, in suggesting that clearly seeing the fiction of inherent, universal meaning is just another form of avoidance, and in implying that only a progressive, teleological view of human nature and history allows one to act compassionately and morally. Some of us just do the right thing for its own sake, tautologies be damned, even if human history is cyclical, even if the earth will one day be swallowed up by the sun and render this all moot. But arriving at that point does indeed mean letting go of comforting old fables.

Dry Bones

By in moralizing, nietzsche, philosophy, religion, science, unintended consequences

Brian Leiter:

Why does Nietzsche write in such an unusual, more aphoristic style?

The explanation really comes in the first chapter of the book where Nietzsche tells us that the great philosophers are basically fakers when they tell you that they arrived at their views because there were good rational arguments in support of them. That’s nonsense, says Nietzsche. Great philosophers, he thinks, are driven by a particular moral or ethical vision. Their philosophy is really a post-hoc rationalisation for the values they want to promote. And then he says that the values they want to promote are to be explained psychologically, in terms of the type of person that that philosopher is.

The relevance of this is that if this were your view of the rational argumentation of philosophers, it would be quite bizarre to write a traditional book of philosophy giving a set of arguments in support of your view. Because in Nietzsche’s view consciousness and reasoning are fairly superficial aspects of human beings. What really gets us to change our views about things are the non-rational, emotional, affective aspects of our psyche. One of the reasons he writes aphoristically and so provocatively – and this, of course, is why he’s the teenager’s favourite philosopher – is connected to his view of the human psyche. He has to arouse the passions and feelings and emotions of his readers if he’s actually going to transform their views. There’d be no point in giving them a systematic set of arguments like in Spinoza’s Ethics – in fact he ridicules the ‘geometric form’ of Spinoza’s Ethics in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil.

The longer I live, the more convinced I am of the truth of this idea. It’s not impossible for rational arguments to persuade someone to change a course of action, of course, but even I, as far-seeing and judicious as I am, can struggle to present such a change to myself in a way that doesn’t make me feel diminished or threatened by it. How much more difficult, then, for ordinary mortals to face up to the crushing awareness that they are wrong, wrong, wrong!

This also reminded me of a passage from Thomas Levenson’s Newton and the Counterfeiter:

As Newton developed his thinking, his new physics grew ever more hospitable to his vision of an omnipresent, omnipotent, all-knowing, and above all, an active deity, fully present in the material cosmos of space and time. He explicitly offered the Principia as testimony to the existence and glory of all-creating divinity: “When I wrote my treatise upon our System, I had an eye on such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe of a Deity,” he wrote to Richard Bentley, an ambitious young clergyman preparing the first of the series of lectures Robert Boyle had endowed in defense of Christian religion. “Nothing can rejoice me more,” Newton added, than that his work would prove “useful for that purpose.”

…Newton’s God existed everywhere, “substantially”—really, materially there, able to impinge on matter instantly, through all of space and time. The observed fact of cosmic order, combined with Newton’s demonstration that human mathematical reason could penetrate that order, implied (necessarily, to Newton) the existence of that perfect being from whom both order and intelligence derived. Newton’s natural philosophy was thus, as he told Bentley, explicitly an inquiry into what could be discovered through the properties of nature about the divine source of all material existence.

Newton was convinced. Nonetheless, some uncharitable louts remained unpersuaded, disdainful. Leibniz, for one, ridiculed the notion of a divine sensorium and what he saw as Newton’s flight to an occult explanation for gravity. What was wanted, what Newton sought, was an eyewitness demonstration of divine action in nature. Hence, alchemy. Alchemy seemed to offer a way for him to rescue his God from the threat of irrelevance—salvation through the ancient alchemical idea of a vital agent or spirit.

…He knew that all the theorizing, all the theological argument, all the indirect evidence from the perfect design of the solar system could not match the value of one actual, material demonstration of the divine spirit transforming one metal into another in the here and now. If Newton could discover the method God used to produce gold from base mixtures, then he would know—and not just believe— that the King of Kings would indeed remain triumphant, forever and ever.

Moreover, Kant, one of Nietzsche’s favorite targets, was startled into the thinking that would result in his Critique of Pure Reason by David Hume’s radical skepticism, thinking that was explicitly enlisted to “beat back reason to make room for faith.” It didn’t honestly work, of course; the fact that so many people took, and continue to take, seriously Kant’s idea of a noumenal realm existing outside our apprehension or comprehension (which can somehow magically still be asserted to exist at all) simply speaks to the yearning so many have felt these last few centuries to keep finding a way to believe in the personal God of monotheism — a God, it greatly amuses me to point out, who was apparently done away with by the rigorous search for pure, objective truth engendered by monotheism to begin with.

I’ll Try Being Nicer if You Try Being Smarter

By in atheism, extraordinary popular delusions, religion

Julian Baggini:

So there are three factors at work with how we believe: the clarity and comprehensiveness of the belief; the conviction we currently have of its truth, and our willingness to contemplate its potential falsity. And it’s the third factor that is most important when it comes to identifying what constitutes militant or aggressive belief. People are often accused of being aggressive if they criticise opponents directly and strongly. But it seems to me there is no virtue in itself in being either intellectually pugnacious or accommodating. What matters is not how strong and clear own our views are, nor how vigorously we defend them, but how much we really engage with our critics. It’s about taking seriously the best case for the opponent being right and the strongest case that you might be wrong. What is really objectionable is not conviction and clarity, but the abuse, mockery and refusal to acknowledge any weakness that signals a lack of openness to the possibility of being wrong, and sadly, this is all too common.
That’s why the fluffy brigade can be as guilty as engaging in pointless argument as their supposedly more aggressive peers. It may appear respectful and polite not to challenge your opponent at all, but in reality, all that means is a refusal to engage with the deep differences between you. As Frank Furedi puts it in his latest book, “instead of serving as a way of responding to differences in views, tolerance has become a way of not taking them seriously.”
I readily admit that I can be irritable, impatient and generally prickly in close quarters. That can carry over into my attitude toward metaphysical beliefs. It’s not that I’m unwilling to contemplate the possibility of something like the traditional concepts of God and the soul being true, it’s just that I have been around the block a few times, I have spent a lot of time following painstakingly pedantic debates and arguments about those topics, and I feel it’s a safe bet that you’re not going to be the one to finally advance the same old “proofs” that have been around since the Scholastics. I did my homework, and I don’t feel like starting from square one each new day. I apologize for any bruising to your self-esteem, but your feelings, whether agreeable toward the possibility of a happy afterlife or disagreeable toward me for being crotchety, do not constitute an argument.

Girl, I Oughta Warn Yuh, My Reputation’s Unkind

By in atheism, nihilism, religion

Adam Lee:

Looking at the religious aspects of many intergroup conflicts, at the violence carried out by zealots in the name of religion, some people conclude that the world would be safer “religion-free.” They may even try living this way themselves. But too often they only practice a form of self-delusion. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the human spirit. As C.S. Lewis said, the opposite of a belief in God is not a belief in nothing; it is a belief in anything. Sweep the demon of religion out the door and, like the story in the Gospels, you may only succeed in making room for an evil spirit worse than the first — this one accompanied by seven friends (Luke 11:24-26; Matt. 12:43-45). Zealous atheism can perform this role of demonic pseudoreligion.

This language could have come straight out of a Christian gospel tract: saying that atheists are in the grip of self-delusion, that we’re worse than the violent zealots we condemn, or that we’re practicing a “demonic pseudoreligion”. And, lest I overlook it, this passage clearly implies that it’s necessary to believe in God to be a UU – or even just to be a good person. I expect this kind of hostile, sneering denunciation from Bible-thumping fundamentalists, but to hear it from the mouth of a Unitarian Universalist minister was an awful shock.

I don’t really care what the official UU stance is on atheism; as a doctrinaire grouchomarxist, I likewise declare that I wouldn’t want to belong to any group that would have me as a member. No, my eye was caught by the other excerpt. With all due disrespect to C.S. Lewis, he’s so full of shit, I’m surprised he wasn’t covered in flies when he wrote that.

I was recently called a nihilist in all innocence; no insult intended. It’s just one of those things we take for granted — you don’t believe in God, so you must believe in nothing, right? Well, no. Now, bear with me here. I’m not splitting hairs to be difficult; this is just a fine but very important distinction. A nihilist is someone who is still desperate to believe in something, anything. Nihilists take the concept of nothingness and reify it, raise it to the level of Absolute Truth where their God used to reside. They still want to believe in the sort of one-size-fits-all universal truth common to Platonic philosophy and Christianity, but if they can’t believe anymore in some kind of eternal meaning, they’ll settle for believing that nothing ever means anything. The enveloping, inescapable rule of Nothingness becomes the blanket they cover up with to keep out any existential drafts. It’s what allows them the security of being able to shrug off responsibility and say “I was just following orders.” The poor melodramatic fellow we had such fun laughing at last month is a nihilist; he’s just frantically trying to cover up the sour stink of his fear with some Jesus-scented air freshener, and probably not even fooling himself. Nihilism is quite literally the shadow of God.

I feel that it’s quite apparent to anyone who looks carefully that there is no inherent meaning in anything. There are no souls, no absolutes, no guarantees. Meaning is something we create out of the contingent pieces of our shared existences, themselves contingent, and it is always an unfinished work. The absence of belief in inherent meaning is not a positive affirmation of the substance of meaninglessness. So how, then, as my interlocutor asked, does the non-nihilist person live in the absence of such active belief? Well, as Suzuki Roshi said, you do it every day.

Ah, But a Man’s Reach Should Exceed His Grasp

By in atheism, foolosophy, religion

Tim Minchin:

I, on the other hand, don’t tend to walk around with glowing atheist belt buckles. I’ve been atheist since I became aware of the term, but my material is not all about religion – not by a long shot – and when I do address the topic it is to point out where religiosity meets discrimination. Many comics write about what makes them angry, or, at least, what they observe in the world that is at odds with how they feel it ought to be. This is the case when Seinfeld talks about muffins or McIntyre talks about Argos (brilliantly, I hasten to add). I just happen to be less preoccupied by parking spots and soup nazis, and more by homophobes and creationists.

Most people don’t know I’m atheist, though I do confess to a fair collection of kitschy t-shirts advertising the fact in one way or another (though I tend to save those for times when I don’t plan to meet up with anyone I know). But here on the Internet, where I have yet to meet one more godless than myself, I like to part company with my more conciliatory brethren, who are happy with benign mistakes as long as they lead to beneficial results, and take it a little further: it’s easy to condemn religion for its ill effects; it’s a little more sporting to me to criticize it for being rooted in irrational soil to begin with. I’m glad that some people manage to be religious while embodying it in a way of life that coexists easily with mine, but I’d be happier if they took a more direct route to that understanding.

Granted, pure rationality is neither attainable nor desirable. And I honestly don’t have any desire to convert as many people as possible to my way of thinking. But I think as a general rule that you should still endeavor to see as clearly as possible, even at the cost of personal discomfort, and I like the idea of serving as a prod, a stimulus, an irritant, a gadfly to perhaps push other people in that direction.

By the way, it’s funny, that Browning quotation — when I heard it, I took it as a suggestion that heaven is actually unattainable, simply a projection. I don’t know what he meant by it, though.

Enemies Closer

By in atheism, religion

Richard Coles:

I wouldn’t argue that Dawkins and Hitchens are crypto-believers, far from it, but it interests me that religion continues to hold a fascination for them, even if it is an appalled fascination. That tells you something about religion’s persistence, endurance. When I read Hitchens’s God Is Not Great – which I found good in parts – I liked his passion, but there is something so angry and disappointed in that literature, and you think, ‘Why do you care so much?’, and then I think it must be because of the way followers of Jesus Christ fail so lamentably to follow what Jesus preached.

Well, I suppose if there’s nothing else in the philosophical pantry, we can always reheat some Freud. Perhaps Dawkins and Hitchens are like little boys shooting spitballs at a girl to show how much of a crush they have on her.

Look, I’m not sure it really needs any explication as to why people should have an interest in the Big Questions, or in those those who claim to have the final answer, and if I may get all Nietzschean about it for a moment, it’s equally natural to be concerned about a belief system which has had great power for thousands of years, especially if one considers oneself to be an ideological enemy of it. And continuing in that vein, I’ll add that outright disbelief is still enough of a novelty in our culture to provide an iconoclastic opportunity for distinguishing oneself. Oh, sure, I’ll admit it: there’s a bit of an egotistical thrill upon feeling as if you’ve seen through a venerable deception that has gulled so many important and powerful people.

Going Forward In Reverse

By in history, mythology, religion, waiting for the barbarians

Kenan Malik:

Christianity may have forged a distinct ethical tradition, but its key ideas, like those of most religions, were borrowed from the cultures out of which it developed. Early Christianity was a fusion of the Ancient Greek thought and Judaism. Few of what are often thought of as uniquely Christian ideas are in fact so. Take, for instance, the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps the most influential of all Christian ethical discourses. The moral landscape that Jesus sketched out in the sermon was already familiar. The Golden Rule – ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’ – has a long history, an idea hinted at in Babylonian and Egyptian religious codes, before fully flowering in Greek and Judaic writing (having independently already appeared in Confucianism too). The insistence on virtue as a good in itself, the resolve to turn the other cheek, the call to treat strangers as brothers, the claim that correct belief is at least as important as virtuous action – all were important themes in the Greek Stoic tradition

…If the story of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution has been rewritten in the interests of creating a mythical ‘Christian Europe’, so too has the story of the relationship between reason and faith in the Enlightenment. What are now often called ‘Western values’ – democracy, equality, toleration, freedom of speech, etc – are the products largely of the Enlightenment and of the post-Enlightenment world. Such values are, of course, not ‘Western’ in any essential sense but are universal; they are Western only through an accident of geography and history.

…To challenge the myths and misconceptions about the Christian tradition is not to deny the distinctive character of that tradition (or traditions), nor its importance in incubating what we now call ‘Western’ thought. But the Christian tradition, and Christian Europe, is far more a chimera than a pure-bred beast. The history of Christianity, its relationship to other ethical traditions, and the relationship between Christian values and those of modern, liberal, secular society is far more complex than the trite ‘Western civilization is collapsing’ arguments acknowledge. The irony is that the defenders of Christendom are riffing on the same politics of identity as Islamists, multiculturalists and many of the other ists that such defenders so loathe.

We can’t seem to help it; we’re born storytellers. But I still laugh at how pervasive it is, this need to believe in some sort of golden age when things were so much clearer, better, happier or healthier. Myths of purity and simplicity are evergreen themes, but humans have always been conflicted and confused, and it’s only the increasing distance of time that allows us to think that history was ever so neat, tidy and linear.

You Will Know Them by Their Froot Loops

By in augean stables, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, ohferfucksake, religion, science

Robert Bellah:

Religion provides answers to such questions as “How shall I live?” and “What is the meaning of the universe?” that science has no capacity to answer. But because answers to such questions are incapable of empirical testing by scientific methodology, how can we evaluate the answers that various religions give? As I have said above, the truth of religious beliefs can be seen in the lives of people who live by those truths. And if we see remarkable individuals in other traditions than our own we can accept that they have some kind of truth even if it is not completely the same as ours.

I don’t feel like batting this one around like a cat mercilessly tormenting a small rodent. Let’s just get right down to elucidating what he’s saying here.

How do we know if religious beliefs are worthy? By looking at the actions of people who claim to be inspired by them.

Whoa, hey, hold up, you say. Most of us have seen religiously inspired actions that run the full gamut of human psychology, from selfless generosity to utter depravity. How can we tell which one of these wildly varying types truly represent the “truth” of a religion?

By only accepting as evidence the actions that we describe as remarkable (leaving aside that “remarkable” is a pretty value-neutral word from where I sit).

But, you may interrupt once again (awfully rude of you, you know), take Christianity. It’s been widely accepted in biblical scholarship since Albert Schweitzer that Jesus was just another apocalyptic cultist whose central concern was what he believed to be the imminent end of the world and the day of judgement to follow, a self-styled Jewish prophet who didn’t seem all that concerned with the worth of Gentiles. Why do we favor the insipid platitudes of the Sermon on the Mount as examples of Christianity’s “truth” rather than the numerous other examples where judgement, condemnation, and retribution are shown to be integral to its worldview?

Because they comport with the values that we have come to cherish by way of rational secularism.

So… religion provides us with “truths” that science can’t, and the way we know this is by judging those supposed truths in the light of rational consideration from as objective a perspective as we can attain, which, not coincidentally, happens to be a key component of a scientific outlook? Isn’t this just an incredibly convoluted way of projecting your own capacity for making critical distinctions onto an arbitrarily-chosen external authority to avoid having to accept full responsibility for your own life? Isn’t this an example of, pun intended, bad faith, ba-dum-bum-tssh?

*Crickets.*

Credo Quia Absurdum

By in atheism, augean stables, ohferfucksake, religion

David Berreby:

But, as Scott Atran has pointed out, the whole point of religious faith is that it is contrary to what we know by material means—that is why it’s faith. In other words, it is because it’s impossible for the sun to stand still that people value their belief that God made the sun stand still for Joshua.
As Atran puts it, “religious thought is insensitive to the kind of simple-minded disconfirmation through demonstrations of incoherence that [Sam] Harris and others propose.” So when you come along and say science shows the Sun can’t stand still, you’re failing utterly to speak to the reason people believe in the miracle.
Of course, if you point out that the reason people believe in miracles is either ignorance or a narcissistic need to believe in magic, that the universe itself is favorably disposed toward them and regularly intervenes on their personal behalf for the most petty reasons, and you suggest that this is not merely a false security but an unhelpful mindset that they might do well to leave behind, you’re accused of being rude and condescending. You’re not allowed to make a case against religious belief with science, you’re not allowed to make it with logic and rationality, and you’re not allowed to make it with psychology. It’s almost like certain apologists want atheists to just shut up and go away altogether. Oh, wait…

Oh, I Have Slipped the Epistemological Bonds of Earth

By in atheism, philosophy, religion

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse:

Consider an analogy. In freethinker and atheist circles, a version of the Xenophanes correlation is often invoked to capture the contingency of religious belief. The following is exemplary.

Freethinker: If you were born in the United States of America, you are most likely to become a Christian. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you are likely to become a Muslim. If you had been born in Norway in the viking ages, you would have believed in Thor and Odin. If you were born in Athens around 500 BC, you’d worship Zeus and Athena.

The correlation here is, roughly, that the surrounding cultural milieu determines how one conceives of the divine. We may call this the sociological theory of religion. As the dominant religion of the culture varies with time and geography, the conceptions of the divine held by individuals will also vary. So far, this is only a descriptive point, but it is often deployed as a criticism of religion. The presumption seems to be that one’s conception of the divine should not be determined by simple contingencies. And so the more one’s theology is the product of time and chance, the less confident one should be that it is correct. The determining factors are sociological and historical, not rational.

However, once we make this observation about our images of the divine, we can subject the whole of our theology to the same criticism. It’s not just conceiving god with a long beard that’s in trouble; conceiving of god as rational, loving, and good may be projections as well.

Interestingly, the question of existence never arises for Xenophanes. In fact, in other fragments, Xenophanes offers positive conceptions of the greatest of the gods. But once we see the critical trajectory of Xenophanes’ challenges, we are compelled to ask the question: Isn’t god’s existence, too, a projection, the product of mere contingency?

Obviously, the analogy is only meant to cast doubt on the monotheistic conception of one true God for all people at all time. But pace their concluding question, this sentence is what I found most interesting: “It’s not just conceiving god with a long beard that’s in trouble; conceiving of god as rational, loving, and good may be projections as well.” David Hume and other philosophical heavyweights have questioned whether there’s any reason to suppose that God must necessarily be the ne plus ultra of benevolence and rational intelligence; there’s nothing new about that.

The reasoning underlying the analogy, though, is based on the assumption that rationality is the best way to know the objective truth about things, to whatever extent we can. It’s the only way to make sure you’re not allowing your emotional reactions, limited experience and confirmation bias to color your perceptions. Is that true? You often hear religious apologists argue that there are other “truths” that science doesn’t have the vocabulary to address, but they seem to feel that those truths are still capable of being rationally understood. Do they ever offer an alternative way of knowing that doesn’t depend on rationality?

(I kid, of course. Even epistemological anarchy has been done before. Nothing new under the sun, alas!)

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