I didn’t find much objectionable in Ian Murphy’s article, at least once I got past the subheading:
Many notable atheists believe in some powerfully stupid stuff, thereby eroding the credibility of all atheists.
To be fair, maybe an editor inserted that line. Okay, now that I’ve been fair; regardless of who wrote it, what kind of a twit starts off an article bemoaning faulty thinking with such a logical howler? Vanquishing a tribal desert god doesn’t entail inheriting that fabled omniscience.
The only thing that reasonably follows from a profession of atheism is the assumption that here, we have a person who either successfully coped with the loss of a psychological center of gravity that often accompanies breaking the emotional and cultural bonds of faith, or one who was never raised to consider religious belief an essential piece of personal identity to begin with. Atheism doesn’t actually require Herculean feats of logic, and as such, says nothing meaningful about one’s imperviousness to “lesser” irrationalities like pride, fear, anger, or groupthink.
Secularism’s philosophical roots may run as deep as the writings of the Hebrew Bible, Paul and Augustine. Yet for our purposes we should understand modern Secularism as a development whose major architects were Martin Luther, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
A blog post is not the proper place to develop such an argument and I have, fortuitously, written an entire book about this subject. But to put it as pithily as possible, let me note that each of these (religious) men was deeply skeptical of any sort of contact between the State and the Church.
A secularist, then, dwells not in the atheist realm of theology or anti-theology, but in the domain of politics. A secularist asks: how can we get this here Church/Mosque/Synagogue to be treated justly by government? How can we make sure that this here Church/Mosque/ Synagogue doesn’t take over the government? How can we keep this religious group from trying to exterminate that one? How can we assure religious freedom and freedom from religion for all? How can we make it so that Christians and Atheists, Muslims and Agnostics live in peace and order?
You see? You see? The man’s sayin’ what I’ve been sayin‘! But I also agree with the other theme here: balance. Balance is the key. But it’s also a more conservative principle than progressivism. Balance accepts the existence of whatever sort of “negative” principle you define yourself against without seeking to obliterate it.
In this context, that means I’m only interested in making sure that my atheism is legally protected. I have no desire to convince other people to share it with me in the belief that a world full of atheists would necessarily be a better, more rational one. Would the world be “better” without religion? In some ways, probably; but it also verges on being an incoherent question, since we have no perspective from which to judge, and no way to anticipate the ripple effect that such a fundamental change in the world would create. Crusaders for a cause tend to convince themselves that such changes are a simple matter of adding this or subtracting that, while the countless variables that they overlook in their tunnel vision continue to multiply exponentially.
And though I give mainstream Christians a hard time for their intellectual squishiness, it’s also true that a Christian who accepts the idea of different religions all being valid paths to more or less the same goal has, as far as I’m concerned, become thoroughly secularized. If they’re willing to relinquish the very exclusivity that defines their faith, the belief that there was one-and-only-one son of God, and he brought the one-and-only-one path to salvation, well, then, by all means, they can continue to go through the motions with their churches and holidays and empty rituals! How greedy would I have to be to want to take even that from them?
Why so many people are so convinced of this, and not only in the “first world,” is not entirely clear. Obviously, part of the explanation is the penumbral hold that the Christian progress narrative still maintains over our thinking. On this account, for all the bumps and glitches that humanity is bound to face along the way, history, too, is a progress toward a global society. One does not have to be a person of faith to adhere to this view. To the contrary, it was that stern non-believer Raymond Aron who proposed that what made modern times unique was that they were the era of universal history.
…In other words, almost anywhere on the squishy bog that is the contemporary intellectual landscape—right or left, technocratic or legalistic, unilateralist or post-national—we will most likely find ourselves sinking into the muck of one modern iteration or another of Hegel’s ideas about universal history and the theodicy that accompanied it. That the Greeks, or, indeed, great Renaissance political thinkers like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, who essentially believed that history was a series of cycles, not a progress, would have laughed at such a crude account is worth pointing out, if only as an at least partial vindication of the intuition of educated pagans, like Celsus in the late Roman empire, that Christianity was not going to be an intellectual improvement over Greek philosophy. But as a faith, Christianity can hold that we are progressing toward a day of final judgment and the end of history without having to provide empirical grounds for its claims. The adherents of secular progress narratives, however, can plead no such justification.
The article as a whole is great, but I have my doubts over whether it’s really fair to describe modern political progressivism as a direct descendant of Christian teleology. I mean, yes, Christianity envisioned an obvious end point to human existence, located in time, but in practice, “progressing toward a day of final judgment” typically meant sitting around in cultural stasis, watching the unspooling of the world’s thread—a state of affairs that endured for much longer than our post-Enlightenment progressivism has yet existed. The Middle Ages (frequently used as shorthand for a representative summary of a thoroughly Christian culture in action, of course) were content with the understanding that since divine truth had been revealed centuries earlier, there was no need for radical social change or technological innovation while awaiting the Parousia, and the Christian view of human nature itself had of course always been pessimistic. Until the empirical fruits of scientific advances began to appear, I don’t know that a truly modern sense of progress can be said to have existed.
I’ve said many times over the years, to any who would listen, that Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin & Hobbes is one of the keystones of my intellectual development. And I’ve put idiots on notice that I will not stand by passively while they desecrate Calvin’s sacred image in service of NASCAR and bible-thumping.
But after seeing yet another rear-window decal today, I’ve decided it’s time to take the fight to the enemy on their own turf. I’m going to get both a “Pissing Calvin” and a “Praying Calvin” sticker and use an x-acto knife to creatively combine the two in a more accurate reflection of the strip’s iconoclastic spirit. A variation on Serrano’s Piss Christ, if you will. Honestly, I’m ashamed it took me this long to think of it.
Setting aside matters of truth and falsehood, are we not better off believing? Broadly speaking, atheists seem to fall into two camps on this matter. There are disappointed disbelievers, those who would like to believe in God but find themselves unable. Then there are those who find the very idea of such a being to be an outrage. Among the latter camp, Christopher Hitchens famously compared God to Kim Jong Il, ruling the universe like his own North Korea. We ought to count ourselves lucky, Hitchens said, that such an entity does not exist outside the human imagination, because the only appropriate response to it would be fury and rebellion.
I happen to count myself among the disappointed disbelievers, which is why I was interested in the attempts of Harris and Botton to salvage some religious splendor for the secularists. So I was only more disappointed to find Rosenberg’s insistence that such efforts were hopeless far more convincing than the efforts themselves. During an email exchange with Rosenberg, I asked him which camp of atheists he fell into. His response acknowledged my impulse: “There is . . . in us all the hankering for a satisfactory narrative to make ‘life, the universe and everything’ (in Douglas Adams’s words) hang together in a meaningful way. When people disbelieve in God and see no alternative, they often find themselves wishing they could believe, since now they have an itch and no way to scratch it.”
This post on kishōtenketsu, an Asian style of plot structure that doesn’t require conflict, is interesting enough in its own right to be worth checking out, but in this context, I would also recommend it as a parallel illustration of how, in a similar way, the meta-narrative we’re all accustomed to, the one that situates meaning out there somewhere, external to us, created and validated by a cosmic authority, is itself a limited, and limiting, way to conceptualize existence.
The German court ruling “is an attack on one of the fundamental principles of Judaism,” wrote Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, founder and dean and associate dean of the Center in a letter to Merkel.
“For 3,500 years, every male child has entered the Jewish people through the rite of circumcision. We are not talking about a mere custom, but a biblical principle that has defined the Jewish people from time immemorial.”
My mom has been a longtime reader of Zecharia Sitchin’s books; you know, about how the deities of Mesopotamian mythology were actually astronauts from another planet, the Annunaki, who came here for minerals and created humans through genetic experiments on apes, etc. Anyway, that theory sounds a lot more plausible when you think about it in this context. I could imagine some drunk extraterrestrials coming up with this: “Oh, wait! I know! Tell them—giggle, snort—tell them to cut the ends of their dongs off! Tell them the Lord demands it, and if they don’t, they’ll be—mmph!— cut off from their people! Pun intended! Bwahahahaha!”
“Hahaha, no way, man! No one’s gonna be that stupid!”
Speaking of people who value statistical abstractions over particular experience, I think the pattern-recognition software in Jesse Bering’s brain has gone a bit haywire. In his newest post, which reminded me of an equally strange one last year, face-value expressions of piety and their statistical significance are somehow paramount when choosing a cab driver (or hypothetical mate). Leaving aside his apparent conviction that fear of punishment seems to be the driving force in ethical choices, he seems to think that trust and love are sentiments we feel for social groups rather than individuals.
I don’t mean to keep picking on PZ lately, but man, he just keeps serving ’em up:
This is why, even when we’re saddled with a moderate conservative jerk for a president, I have to hold my nose in November and pull the lever for the asshole with a (D) after his name. I don’t like him, I think he betrays our values at every turn, but I like the people of the Democratic party far more than I do the people of the Republican party. I’m not going to vote for Obama, ever; I’m going to vote for that guy at the Minnesota caucus who suggested that we cut the defense budget in half and spend the money on universal health care instead, and I’m going to vote against the guy in the Texas caucuses who thinks our most pressing concern is preventing gay couples from having a happy life.
By this impeccable logic, the Pope and the rest of the Vatican leadership are irrelevant, because many lay Catholics are wonderful people, and there are some selfless nuns devoting their lives to progressive principles, so we might as well all convert to Catholicism in solidarity with them because, hey, the Islamists are even worse, and whaddayagonnado, waste your support on some tiny little atheist group that doesn’t have a chance in hell of influencing policy? The line forms behind the professor. No pushing, please.
The world is still turning, and as distant and dreamlike as it seems from our vantage point, I believe that there will be a more peaceful, free and rational future whose people will look back on our era and wonder how anyone ever tolerated the kinds of injustices that afflict us.
We can bring that future into being, if we choose. We have all the tools we need. A rational, humanist understanding of morality is the map. Science and reason are the boots that carry us forward. And righteous, passionate, peaceful anger is both sword and shield, spurring us to take action and giving us passion for the fight. As always, there will be adversaries standing athwart the trail, trying to block our way, but when we recognize them for what they are, we can defeat them.
How much longer this dry spell will last, I don’t know. But all deserts end somewhere if you keep walking, and all dark clouds blow themselves out eventually. Progress comes slowly at first, and sometimes it advances and then recedes, but it leaves a high-water mark for next time.
I have never been concerned about all the people moaning about how the fundies and Muslims are outbreeding us — I see them as busily making minds that will be ripe for reason and knowledge.
Humanism can mean many things, but for us it means belief in progress. To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of nearly everybody nowadays, but it is groundless. For though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive. Darwin showed that humans are like other animals, humanists claim they are not. Humanists insist that by using our knowledge we can control our environment and flourish as never before. In affirming this, they renew one of Christianity’s most dubious promises – that salvation is open to all. The humanist belief in progress is only a secular version of this Christian faith.
Cupitt is a Christian, of sorts: at least, he’s an ordained Anglican priest. But he believes almost nothing of traditional Christianity. “The whole system of Christian doctrine is a somewhat haphazard human construct with an all-too-human history, and … the Bible, when read closely, does not actually teach – nor even support – orthodox doctrine.”
Batchelor, similarly, trained for 10 years as a Buddhist monk in Dharamsala, the headquarters of the exiled Dalai Lama, but believes few of the central doctrines of traditional Buddhism. “The kind of secular Buddhism I am interested in … entails a rethinking of Buddhism from the ground up. And what emerges from this reconfiguration of core values and ideas might not look anything like the Buddhism we are familiar with today.”
Both men believe in the finality of death. They suppose that this life is the only one we have or can have, and that it is absurd to suppose that personality, in any form, survives the collapse of the body. The doctrine of karma is here reduced to a simple statement of faith that the world is made of braided causal chains: every effect has a cause, and is itself a cause of other effects. There’s nothing there about reincarnation.
Speaking of lugging too much stuff around with you… I can’t help but feel that it’s just too much trouble to try to renovate from within a well-established framework that has existed for centuries. It’s too likely to end up as an argument over linguistic minutiae and appeals to authority. The -ism suffix is like a conceptual climbing vine; it slowly suffocates a way of life, renders a body of thought immobile.
Over dinner with Tony Blair, Gould confessed to feeling lost. He had done everything required of him. Why had the cancer returned? Blair’s response was remarkable: “The cancer is not done with you, it wanted more. You may have changed but not by enough, now you have to go on to a higher spiritual level. You have to use this recurrence to find your real purpose in life.”
Finally, were this to become reality, there would, in my view, be one major and positive consequence for faith itself. It would allow those of us of faith to discuss and proclaim what our faith means to us, why Faith and Reason go hand in hand and how Faith enriches our lives and guides them, however that might be obscured by our human frailty. It would open up the potential of Faith to many who search for meaning, who are trapped in the present, but have come to regard the faith traditions as the anachronistic preserve of the irrational, the superstitious and the prejudiced. It would allow a true and rational belief in God to direct the path of the 21st Century. That is where Faith belongs. And why the world needs it.
Even post-industrial Western democracies are run by madmen. You just gotta laugh.
Even contemporary philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, who think there is something real and uncanny to the concept of nothingness, are unperturbed by it. In his 1971 essay “The Absurd,” Mr. Nagel admits that nihilism “attempts to express something that is difficult to state, but fundamentally correct.” This sentiment reflects something true and enduring about our lives: the shock we feel, when stepping outside ourselves and adopting the “view from nowhere,” when we suddenly confront the dissonance between the great importance we devote to our daily activities and their ultimate inconsequentiality.
Yet this state of affairs, as Mr. Nagel adds, is hardly reason for the romantic and heroic posturing of a Bazarov or Nietzsche—or, for that matter, a Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus. Instead, he says, an ironic “What? Me, worry?” is the proper response to the cosmic unimportance of our situation. My life, in short, is little more than a cosmic episode of Seinfeld: rather than watching a show about nothing, I’m a walk-on in a life about nothing. Laugh tracks are optional.
Nietzsche warned that our dignity is the first casualty of nihilism. On the 150th anniversary of Bazarov’s birth and death, we might wonder about the strange career of this view from nowhere. Is it possible that our age’s ironic response is a symptom of the disease that pretends to be the cure—a disease grown so familiar that we take it as a sign of health? Or perhaps, like Bazarov’s parents, we simply need to attend to what we have lost and seek to maintain its memory.
We (at least we in the West, the children of monotheism) used to believe that meaning was “out there”, defined by an ultimate authority, God. People and their actions were only meaningful in relation to these supposed external, eternal values; they had no worth of their own, only as symbols pointing to something else. As belief in monotheism waned, some people made one last desperate, panicked lunge to hang on to the validity of universal meaning. They replaced their outdated God with capital-N Nothingness in order to avoid taking responsibility for creating meaning themselves while accepting its inherent contingency.
Others have outgrown the desire to find preexisting truth revealed and are content with the temporary joy of building sand castles of our lives despite the omnipresent encroachment of the tide. Fuck it, dude, let’s go bowling.
The researchers divided issues into those concerned with fellowship (wealth distribution, immigration), and those concerned with morality (gay rights, abortion). Conservatives envisaged a Jesus with views close to their own on morality issues; but they recognised that the man who gave all his possessions to the poor would probably have advocated more progressive taxation policies than those of the Republican party. Conversely, liberals saw Jesus as having similar views as themselves on fellowship issues but they believed his views on gay rights would be to the right of their own.
The social psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term “cognitive dissonance” for the discomfort felt when we recognise conflict between our ideas and perceptions. He proposed that we tend to reduce conflict by altering our view of reality. This process of “dissonance reduction” (“I didn’t want that job anyway”) has been used down the centuries to reduce the conflict between a person’s religious convictions and their actions.
…Ross and his colleagues suggest that dissonance reduction takes place not only within the individual, but as a collective enterprise. Preachers, politicians and co-believers tend to emphasise and de-emphasise different aspects of the Christian canon; so conservative Americans study the Old Testament with its homophobic rhetoric and eye-for-an-eye morality, whereas liberals look to the New Testament Jesus who was sympathetic to the poor and the meek.
When the majority of us who are not apocalyptics (i.e. stark, raving mad) talk about ethics, we make a number of presuppositions. When we discuss what we think is the best way to live, we take for granted the idea of a world with a future; a stable, enduring society requiring maintenance; human flourishing within the course of a normal lifespan. These things are both expected and desired, so much so that, when presented with an alternative ethical vision that neither desires nor expects such things, we simply refuse to believe our lying eyes while ignoring the little twinge of conscience that warns us how something doesn’t feel right here.
How many times does Jesus have to talk about the kingdom of heaven, not earthly society, being the place where the poor and the meek will finally receive their due? How many times does he have to tell his audience that they will live to see the Son of Man coming in all his glory? Your attempts to ferret out his likely position on city zoning laws and office etiquette are doomed to be stillborn. You were speaking a different language from the very start. He did not care about the things you care about. He did not want the things you want. He looked forward to the violent end of the world, and all his values were informed by that desire. There is no further conversation to be had with him. Some men you just can’t reach.
Nearly 15 percent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime and 10 percent think the Mayan calendar could signify it will happen in 2012, according to a new poll.
The end of the Mayan calendar, which spans about 5,125 years, on December 21, 2012 has sparked interpretations and suggestions that it marks the end of the world. “Whether they think it will come to an end through the hands of God, or a natural disaster or a political event, whatever the reason, one in seven thinks the end of the world is coming,” said Keren Gottfried, research manager at Ipsos Global Public Affairs which conducted the poll for Reuters.
Who says that moderns have forgotten how to embody the spirit of the Gospels?
Jesus was a Hebrew rabbi. Unusually, he was unmarried. The idea that he had a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene is the stuff of fiction, based on no biblical evidence. The evidence, on the other hand, that he may have been what we today call gay is very strong. But even gay rights campaigners in the church have been reluctant to suggest it. A significant exception was Hugh Montefiore, bishop of Birmingham and a convert from a prominent Jewish family. He dared to suggest that possibility and was met with disdain, as though he were simply out to shock.
After much reflection and with certainly no wish to shock, I felt I was left with no option but to suggest, for the first time in half a century of my Anglican priesthood, that Jesus may well have been homosexual. Had he been devoid of sexuality, he would not have been truly human. To believe that would be heretical.
Heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual: Jesus could have been any of these. There can be no certainty which. The homosexual option simply seems the most likely. The intimate relationship with the beloved disciple points in that direction. It would be so interpreted in any person today.
The Sermon on the Mount, however, does not offer a clear view of what makes for a good life. Many seem to think Jesus is saying little more than be nice to everybody. Others see a call to a heroic life of total non-resistance or self-sacrifice. Still others hear him as requiring little more than an enhanced version of the Ten Commandments (e.g., avoiding not only murder but also anger, not only adultery but also lustful desires).
Almost all Christians ignore many of the things Jesus said on the Mount. Who literally takes no thought for their lives or for tomorrow? Who never resists evil? Who gives to anyone who asks? Who says “Hit me again” to an unjust attack? There may be ways of integrating such injunctions into our morality without reducing them to banalities, but the bare text of Jesus’ sermon doesn’t tell us how to do this.
Yeah, it’s true; a literal belief in the imminent end of the world does tend to render the advice you offer people a bit short on nuance and practicality. Seriously, it amazes me how much effort people put into trying to salvage something inspirational from this dreck. Even if you set aside the irrelevance of his preaching once the centrality of the apocalypse is removed, there’s just nothing profound there. As J.L. Mackie said:
Richard Robinson has examined the synoptic gospels as the best evidence for Jesus’s own teaching, and he finds in them five major precepts: “love God, believe in me, love man, be pure in heart, be humble.” The reasons given for these precepts are “a plain matter of promises and threats”: they are “that the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and that “those who obey these precepts will be rewarded in heaven, while those who disobey will have weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Robinson notes that “Certain ideals that are prominent elsewhere are rather conspicuously absent from the synoptic gospels.” These include beauty, truth, knowledge and reason:
As Jesus never recommends knowledge, so he never recommends the virtue that seeks and leads to knowledge, namely reason. On the contrary, he regards certain beliefs as in themselves sinful…whereas it is an essential part of the ideal of reason to hold that no belief can be morally wrong if reached in the attempt to believe truly. Jesus again and again demands faith; and by faith he means believing certain very improbable things without considering evidence or estimating probabilities, and that is contrary to reason.
Robinson adds:
Jesus says nothing on any social question except divorce, and all ascriptions of any political doctrine to him are false. He does not pronounce about war, capital punishment, gambling, justice, the administration of law, the distribution of goods, socialism, equality of income, equality of sex, equality of colour, equality of opportunity, tyranny, freedom, slavery, self-determination, or contraception. There is nothing Christian about being for any of these things, nor about being against them, if we mean by “Christian” what Jesus taught according to the synoptic gospels.