Yesterday I took the ninety minutes or so that it would take to listen to the debate on the afterlife by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Rabbi Wolpe and Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson (linked by Stewart over at Butterflies and Wheels). It’s well worth the time. You don’t have to watch it in order to understand the following, but it will help.
One interesting feature of the presentation is precisely the way the names appear on the screen, like so:
Christopher Hitchens
Rabbi David Wolpe
Sam Harris
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson
moderated by
Rob Eshman
Notice how the clergy get listed with their titles. Had they been Christian, they would have been called Rev or Father, if Muslim, Imam, if Hindu, Pandit, etc., but Sam would have still been plain ‘Sam’ and Christopher would have been plain ‘Christopher’. In other words, it’s professionals against amateurs, officialdom vs. interlopers, insiders and outsiders. That is already to privilege the religious voice, and to give it a sense of presence that is lacking for unbelief. This sense is profoundly deceptive.
The next thing to notice is that the question of the afterlife is never really faced. Oh, yes, the afterlife is mentioned, and there is some vague gesturing in the direction of what comes after, but both of the religious experts agree with the atheists, except that they want to reserve that little space in which they can still say weird things.
The most noticeable feature of the whole “debate” is that it was impossible for the atheists to pin the religious down, so the debate never seemed get going, although at one point Rabbi Wolpe imagined a possible world in which he and Rabbi Artson were winning. The two religious believers kept repeating that they agreed almost entirely with the two atheists, except for one thing — and here followed a series (at different points during the debate) of different “one things”. The way the atheists characterised God was, Rabbi Wolpe said, “very limited and partial.” This is not how any religious tradition conceptualises God. The afterlife cannot be thought of in a literal way. The Jewish tradition doesn’t have the idea of predestination, as, for example, Calvinism does. And if there had been a Calvinist in the debate, he’d have doubtless ducked and dived over what ‘predestination’ meant. And so on.
However, the two religious experts never tell us how they do conceptualise God; nor do they explain what they think religion is, or how the way the world goes is related to God as creator, and so on. God is not, in the Jewish tradition, we are told, all-powerful. But what is God, and how is God? This they never say. They do play a kind of “bait and switch” trick from time to time. Here’s just one example. Not having a concept of God, we are told at one point, communists thought they had to provide the ideal — which the religious push into the afterlife — right here and now, and this led to horrendous suffering and cruelty. But they still don’t tell us what the afterlife ideal is like, nor why it is important to religion. In fact, it is arguable that this can’t be done. Imagination is simply not up to the task of creating anything that could plausibly be tolerable for an eternity; and while we’re never told why the afterlife is important to religion, we are told how the concept can be misused.
At one point the moderator asks Christopher Hitchens:
Do you really believe that dead is dead?
This doesn’t seem to be a very hard question to answer. He should have said yes. But just here Christopher waffles, and speaks of the possibility of the survival of consciousness independently of the brain — about which, he tells us, Sam knows quite a lot more than he does. Which shows admirable epistemological modesty, no doubt, but ends up being simply misleading. This, he suggests, is very different from the idea of survival of the individual after death about which nothing very interesting has ever been said. But could there be consciousness without selfhood? This is simply too complex a question to deal with, but the suggestion is left hanging in the air, and Sam picks up on it talks about Nick Bostrom’s strange idea that we might be digitised ”entities” on a superbeing’s hard drive, and Rabbi Wolpe goes on to mention Galen Strawson’s rather strange pan-psychism, the idea that “the hard problem” — that is, explaining how “stuff” can give rise to consciousness — is really dependent on an inadequate idea of what “stuff” (matter) is, which may be, in some sense, already incipiently conscious — which really runs the debate off the rails for a few minutes.
Strawson’s pan-psychism is simply not a satisfactory answer to the hard problem, since it fails to take into consideration that living tissue, living stuff, is different, in some fundamental respects, from non-living stuff — and we have the DNA to prove it. This may not solve the hard problem, but it does suggest that the answer to the question, “What is consciousness?”, does not, after all, capture something that is somehow latent in all the stuff that is out there, but is, at least, dependent on the kind of stuff in which life is encoded. And Sam’s idea that consciousness may not be dependent upon brains seems to be a bit of mysterian obfuscation unworthy of someone who counts himself a scientist, but raises all the questions that Meera Nanda raises in her essay, “Trading Faith for Spirituality: The Mystifications of Sam Harris.” Harris thinks there is a philosophically acceptable way of postulating that consciousness may survive the death of the brain, and here, I think, he is taking a hike through Never Never Land, and perhaps provides all the purchase that religion needs in order to continue saying weird things and playing odd word games.
And they really are word games. There is never a point at which either of the religious experts in the debate offer us a plausible idea of what eternity would be like. Rabbi Artson hopes that he won’t be resurrected with the flat feet and fat thighs that he has been plagued with in this life, but he certainly doesn’t offer a plausible conception of what an afterlife might consist in, or even why it seems religiously important, whether it consists in a resurrected or reconstituted body or merely in the existence of a disembodied soul — which, as Sam Harris points out, is not the canonical idea of the afterlife in any of the great monotheisms.
However, the response of the religious is that religious belief in the afterlife or in the world to come is not to be taken literally (a word that hides a multitude of sins). Religion is more nuanced than that. Sam Harris points out that Maimonides said that belief in the resurrection is required; but Maimonides also says, Rabbi Artson tells us, that we can be in eternity now. This is, I suppose, what Buddhists would call enlightenment, or (the achievement of) nirvana, which is not a place so much as a state of mind beyond all the cares and illusory self-absorption of life — something like Julian of Norwich’s idea of holding eternity in a grain of sand. But what does this mean except perhaps that we can achieve remarkable states of consciousness? In what way is this particularly religious?
It’s at this point that Christopher Hitchens joins in with the question of justice, and the manifold evils that some people have to endure in life. In what way can there ever be a compensation for these injustices? Religions have devised ideas of how we can be called to account, and how some will be punished and others rewarded in the life to come. But in what way is this a compensation for the suffering that we endure now?
This reminds me that my wife Elizabeth kept a journal for some of the years during which she suffered so badly from MS. At one point she asked herself the question about the afterlife, though she had been, since 17, a nonbeliever. Here are her words:
I have found myself wishing for something very strange; it would be so comforting to think that heaven did actually exist. I find that it would be nice to think that in some strange realm, Eric and I could be reunited. We have only been together for such a short time; we deserve more. (Thankfully, these thoughts are very brief. The thought of all the other nasty trappings that go along with the ‘heaven’ concept positively repulse me. God is dead.)
She spoke to me about this, so I know what she meant by the “nasty trappings”. Her point was that, if there were to be a life beyond this one, then everything about this one must have been intended. And nothing, she believed, could then compensate her for all that she had suffered. If all that suffering was genuinely intended and purposeful, then it would be meaningless. And this is precisely Christopher Hitchens’ point. He thinks that this would make the suffering obscene, and I agree. And this was precisely Elizabeth’s point. There is no way in which an afterlife can compensate for the evils of this one.
You can see shades of this problem in Job. At the beginning Job is a wealthy man with a large family. All his daughters are beautiful, we are told, and his sons dutiful. But part of Job’s suffering lies in their being killed, and then, after undergoing loss and dreadful affliction, all is restored to him. He is granted more children, daughters even more beautiful than before! And yet the writer seems to be unaware of the irony. How are different daughters a replacement for the ones Job had lost? No compensation is really possible, because the replacement life is not a compensation for the lost one. It’s just a different life, the loss is still real, the suffering unredeemed.
The religious response is that religion doesn’t work that way. Religion doesn’t think of life as something that is planned. We have free will. And so many things that happen, happen as a result of the free choices of individuals. Hitler wasn’t part of a plan. He was simply an individual in a world in which individuals can make choices, and the consequences of those choices are sometimes appalling. We have the freedom to do horrendous things, but that freedom also allows us to wonderful things. Thus far Rabbi Wolpe. But Rabbi Artson responds by saying that everyone has great clarity about the god they don’t believe in, and he doesn’t believe in that god either. He doesn’t believe in the nonsense of an Aristotelian unmoved mover who determines how things will unfold. God is a persuasive power, who teaches us to be the best by giving us the vision that we can rise to.
But, basically, what this comes down to is a kind of religion as humanism, a kind of open, free discussion about what it is like to be human within a particular “religious” tradition. The religious participants in the debate keep waffling, agreeing entirely with the non-religious participants, except for … And that’s where we arrive the enigma of what believers believe and why they believe it. In a very real sense they don’t believe anything, because as soon as they’re pinned down to a specific expression of belief, unlike butterflies in a display case they get up from the pins and fly away, and begin to talk about nuance and imagination and the pious agnosticism that religions teach.
And this is just the point. Religions don’t know anything, and in one sense they don’t believe anything either, because they can shape-shift through a whole sequence of transitions from belief to belief as their beliefs are challenged. They will even say, as Rabbi Artson several times says, that they agree with the atheist point of view, except that … — and at this point he says something cute and irrelevant, because there’s nothing definite or relevant that can be said.
He tries to compare religion and science, and falls back on the idea that much of science was motivated by the urge to read God’s book of nature, which, in a world beginning to liberate itself from the Gängelwagen (or child’s walker) of religion (to use Kant’s term), was undoubtedly the case. Artson wants to say that both science and religion have been guilty of egregious mistakes, but this doesn’t discredit science, and should not discredit religion either. But the trouble is, while we can say what science is about, and what constitutes a mistake in science, he can’t say what religion is about (although everything that atheists object to in religion are obviously errors in religion), other than about seeking meaning in the human world — and this is simply to retreat from making religious claims.
At this point Sam Harris makes a very telling point. The rabbis have just said, basically, that religion is an imaginative, creative enterprise. If people read Shakespeare literally says Artson, Shakespeare would appear to be a dunce. (I’m not sure that’s true, but let’s assume it for the time being. It’s simply not clear what could be meant by reading Shakespeare literally.) Sam’s point is simply that, if the Bible is just literature which helps us to understand what human life is all about, then what he and “Hitch” are doing would be unrecognisable, because there would be nothing to oppose. It would be simply to have a discussion about what makes for a meaningful human life. It would no longer be a question of religion at all. If there were not people who made propositional claims, religious propositional claims about the world and about the way human life goes — if it were all just metaphorical and literary — then “debating” religion would make no sense.
And that’s just the problem. When religions do make propositional claims — as when Islam claims that Muhammad was a prophet and recited in the Qu’ran God’s actual words — then religion is claiming things for which there is not a shred of evidence. But when they stop making propositional claims — as happens when they are put on the hot seat — then they are no longer being “religious” in any meaningful sense, and religion becomes something very vague and mysterian, or, otherwise, simply a kind of humanism. So when believers tell us what they believe and why they believe it, they can no longer be taken seriously; but when they back away from belief, it’s hard to distinguish them from atheists. And this, by the way, is inevitable, because there is simply no reason to take religious believing seriously as being about anything at all.
So the answer to my questions? Religious believers don’t believe anything determinate, so no reasons need be given. Religious believers believe what they can, given the context. When they are studying the Talmud, they believe in terms that are available to them in that context. But in another context, what they can say may be entirely different, with a different set of assumptions, and for different reasons. And this, it occurs to me, is just what people do say. They say things like, ”I couldn’t believe in a god like that.” And this just means that belief is a function of what they can believe, what makes sense for them to believe, and not of what exists in any sense ”out there,” independently, which must be simply accepted. And that is why “debates” between believers and unbelievers can go nowhere, because there is nothing for the debate to be about …, unless, of course, the believer is willing to pin himself down, and then, as even believers know, they simply sound ridiculous.
I saw the link to the debate in a comment at Butterflies and Wheels, and by a strange coincidence, I listened to most of the debate early this morning as I inserted track markers so that I could burn an audio CD to play in my car on my long daily commute. I assure the debate sponsors that I will make no further copies.
Bait-and-switch, indeed. I was exasperated by the continued use of the waffle-weasel words “nuanced” and “nuance” by the aptly named Rabbi B. S. Artson.
I wished that Sam or Hitch had pointed out that it was one hour and 2 minutes into the discussion before the moderator or anyone else deigned to ask directly what evidence there was / is to support a claim that some sort of existence continues for the individual human being after his or her death.
And it was unfortunate that no one distinguished the past mistakes of “science” from the discarded, discredited, or now unfashionable claims of religion by emphasizing modern science’s dependence on empiricism, skepticism, and testing, in contrast to the “make up whatever you want, throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks” of theology and apologetics.
Fegh, Harris is still going on about that psychic bullshit? I wish the skeptical movement would hold his feet to the fire a bit more on that. IMHO his mysterianism gets way too much of a free ride in the movement, just because he talks a good strong line against theism. So thanks for the pointer to that Meera Nanda essay: she hits on everything I disliked about EoF, only she does it much better (especially her dissection his Hindu meditiation theme — my eyes simply glazed over during that chapter).
This is all pretty hilarious considering it took two weeks of badgering before you coughed up a description of how you conceptualize God yourself. And, you pulled a “bait and switch” to redefine several of the world’s major religions, eg. Buddhism, as some unspecified something else. Your last paragraph could be mirrored—
“Atheists don’t disbelieve anything very determinate. In the context of Christianity they disbelieve in the Christian concept, but in another context they say things like “I don’t call that religion”. And that is why “debates” … can go nowhere, because there is nothing for the debate to be about …, unless, of course, the atheist is willing to pin himself down, and then, his arguments are mainly just terminology.”
—and it might help you see why some of us find you so aggravating at times.
Well, Uzza, I don’t think there is a god. I don’t think any conceptualisation (of god, that is) makes a lot of sense. But if people are going to believe in something, if they’re going to have a religion, and religious practices, then it behoves them at least to try to put what it is that they believe into words. If teligion is just a humanism — as in fact it often seems to be — then it is simply not clear to me what work the word ‘religion’ is doing. There are forms of Hinduism which are atheistical. Advaita Vedanta seems to be one such form of Hinduism, but, as such, it is a philosophy and not a religion. Most Hindus do not find themselves in that company, but believe in a pantheon of gods. And so it is with some forms of Buddhism, which seem to associate easily with superstitions, local spirits and ancestor worship of one kind and another. But in some form or other religions hold to beliefs in entities and powers that transcend natural explanation. As to atheism itself, it is just a general disbelief in gods and supernatural or transcendent powers. It has no positive content of its own. Some atheists, like myself, are prepared to go one step further and to state that a naturalistic world view is, other things being equal, the most epistemologically satisfactory one. While a naturalistic world view would not deny that evidence might be forthcoming of other dimensions of being, reasonable belief in the existence of any such dimension would be dependent upon that evidence. However, morality, various forms of what people call “spiritual”, artistic creativity, indeed, all human knowledge and relationship can be understood in naturalistic terms. If that is aggravating, then you’ll just have to be aggravated, unless, of course, you can find some place to insert your critical wedge. So far, Uzza, I don’t think you’ve quite managed.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but that disbelieve seems a touch indeterminate itself, as if intended to mean something beyond fail to profess belief of.
I might add to what I said by remarking that some “religions” are also in some sense general cultures, particularly Hinduism and Judaism, and to this extent, as Jerry Coyne has said with his joke — Q: What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God? A: A Jew, of course — Judaism doesn’t necessarily define a religious belief. In some ways that is true of Hinduism as well. And Oriana Fallaci said she was a Roman Catholic atheist. So, sure, you can identify yourself with a relilgious culture, and not be religious. But, if you want to claim to be religious, then presumably you have some beliefs worthy of the name, and you should be able to give some idea of what it is that you believe in. It so happens that religious belief, while it seems to be in the resurgence just now, still doesn’t have much to stand on in the way of general credibility, so religious people tend to keep their beliefs vague or simply opaque, and chop and change with criticism.
The question is, why should it be taken seriously, especially when, as so often happens, these beliefs also come along with very strongly worded moral/practical consequences? If religion were like belief in Santa Claus, without any significant implications for law or society, then we can give it all sorts of room for the sentimental amongst us, but if it’s going to spell out how I may or may not die, or whether I must (if I am a woman) have a baby, no matter what I want, then I think we are owed something a bit more substantial by way of clarity of belief, and evidence for beliefs so clearly stated. Religion cannot both claim that we must live in certain ways because that is what their god commands, and that defining their god, or showing that s/he exists is as difficult as the two good rabbis show in the debate in question.
Eric, I can easily understand from your very poetically articulated writings the sadness you’ve experienced. I am sorry for your sadness.
What do I believe and why do I believe it?
In case your question wasn’t rhetorical, here is my humble answer:
I am a believer that only some is eternal and that “some” is God’s Holy Spirit.
I believe that all of Creation is of one substance with God’s Holy Spirit.
I believe that all of Creation therefore is “One”.
I do not believe that all is eternal because “all” would include evil.
I believe evil is temporary because of God’s Grace.
I believe that evil is that which goes against reason.
I believe that God’s Holy Spirit is pure intelligence/reason.
I believe that the eternal Holy Spirit of God loved/thought/reasoned into a burst of creation/time.
I believe creation/time is evolving. I do believe in evolution. I do believe that, because of the human ability to reason, humans have free will and sometimes choose to live in a state of thoughtlessness; evil.
I think that this thoughtlessness creates moral evil and I think that moral evil creates natural evil in the world. I think that, because of human evolution, some are more vulnerable than others to natural evil in the world. Even thoughtful individuals are vulnerable to natural evil in the world that stems from human moral evil.
I think that those who suffer from human moral evil or from natural evil can, by the Grace of God, find peace in their present circumstances through meditation on the “Good”; through spiritual detachment from physical circumstance and not have to wait until death to have everlasting peace.
I think that those whose sufferings are so pronounced that they feel they cannot escape the bonds of the physical should be allowed to use their ability to reason a way out of their sufferings, without interference from others.
I believe that Jesus was fully enlightened to this understanding and therefore was God’s only righteous child of His substance who came to show us who we were and who gave us a handbook for life present so that we may know to live at peace as one with God now.
I believe this because I was born to Christian parents. If I were born to Atheist or Polytheistic or other types of parents, I’d articulate something similar to this. This articulation of belief provides me with peace now and hope for peace again when I forget to use reason or if I’m ill. And, ultimately, it provides me with peace in knowing that, after my inevitable death, I’ll be in a state of being I recognize. My belief gives me hope.
I believe that the existence of special revelation (scripture of all sorts), in light of, general revelation helps to further confirm the existence of our Creator and evidence of His Grace. He has provided us a roadmap back to live with reason; to live in eternal and everlasting peace. Any human who takes another human’s reason/choice away is committing an act of evil. Therefore, any human interfering with another’s end of life choice would be committing an act of evil.
I love the words of the Nicene Creed because they say what I believe in a nutshell. I believe we were forgiven before we were born and I believe this was symbolized in the Baptism of Jesus; the one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
I believe that every word of the Bible (or any spiritual text of “the Good”) has an endless number of interpretations and all interpretations are correct.
I assume you’ve experienced in your life a sense of being at one with God, Eric. I assume this because you were once a priest. How do you now articulate that ‘at one’ experience?
There’s not much in answer to the “why?” there, Tara. Is your only basis for your belief that your parents were Christian? Yet, what you profess to believe seems rather idiosyncratic rather than canonical Christianity: So, what led you to this specific set of beliefs?
Ah, but isn’t God supposed to be ineffable?
Well, eff the ineffable!
Belief is irrelevant. A person can believe whatever they like, it doesn’t make that belief justified or true. All that matters is what justifies that belief or not. Believers ignore the idea of justification and jump straight to belief, as if some magic happened which makes justification irrelevant and only belief relevant. This is absurdity and ignorance.
Yes, belief is irrelevant to someone asking for proof. I was answering a question specifically about belief. Believe me, I wouldn’t attempt a “proof” debate
What led me to my specific set of beliefs is my use of reason to best articulate why my family’s rituals and traditions felt true and comfortable to me. Yes, my articulation allows for anything within reason to be ‘the good’.
I don’t feel a sense of threat in discussions regarding worldviews with reasonable people. Reasonable people, in my experience, behave in a civilized manner even toward those they believe to be ignorant.
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‘I believe that every word of the Bible (or any spiritual text of “the Good”) has an endless number of interpretations and all interpretations are correct.’
This sounds like something from a fable by a rather inferior Borges, entitled, perhaps, ‘The Religion of Babel’. Do you not see the implications of what you are saying, Tara Bartholomew? You are saying that nothing in the bible or other spiritual texts you happen to like has any meaning whatsoever and that these texts are, in Milton’s words, a mere ‘universal hubbub wilde of stunning sounds and voices all confus’d’ – which might seem, to your atheist adversaries, a rather good description of competing religious beliefs, and which certainly gives support to what Eric MacDonald, in his fine analysis above, is saying.
I note that in the Bible, Uzza is slain by God for his ‘error’ when he puts forth his hand and touches the Ark in order to steady it. I don’t know what infinity of interpretations can be drawn from this, but at least, with atheism, eponymous commenters don’t get slain for their misunderstandings.
Yes, you are correct, I agree. I have made Eric’s point. I knew before I answered the question that I was making Eric’s point. I felt that I should put myself in the position of first answering Eric’s question before I asked him my own. It is my choice to believe as I wish. My belief is not imposing on anyone – except the readers of this blog and, for that, I apologize for taking up space. I understand the implications of my words, yes. Though in my interpretation, I believe that only the reasonable good will rule the mind of the reasonable person. That is my rationale. I understand the Atheist desire to dismantle the basis of a law that imposes itself into individual end of life choices. I understand that, to the Atheist, in order to dismantle the law, one must declare that God doesn’t exist. If the Atheist wins the arguement, do you understand the implications of that Tim? In the more benign outcome, an innocent mind may feel no hope – imagined or not. What good is that? Thankfully, I don’t foresee the Atheist winning anytime soon. Nor do I see the other side of the arguement being proven to any better degree than has been. Laws can be dimantled and revised in other ways. The debate over the existence of God will be neverending. On the other hand, the dismantling or revising of a man-made law seems very possible. I’m on your side.
“It is my choice to believe as I want.”
Is this really true? Does truth enter into it? I ask because I can’t conceive of “choosing” to believe. I can’t choose to believe that 2+2=4. I can’t even choose to believe that if I just switch to the right brand of toothpaste/beer/car I’ll be more attractive. It is pleasant to pretend, but I just can’t choose to actually believe.
Yes, I see where you are going with your equation. My equation is in my post and I’ve admitted, it’s the best I can do: Special Revelation in light of General Revelation + my personal experience of ritual = my belief.
I answered a question. I’m not looking to convert anyone nor do I wish to be converted. I must admit that I am curious to know how Eric would articulate now what he once believed to be an experience of God. And, I think it’s a imposing curiosity on my part so, nevermind.
The dispute about God makes for interesting conversation to some and a sport for others.
The dispute about God seems to me to be a Red Herring of sorts. I thought the true dispute to be the quest to get a law changed/put in place to protect individual end of life choices from the interference of others.
Choice only comes into the picture through reason. Without reason, we’d be responding to any stimulus like any other animal. That is why belief is irrelevant. It is about what justifies belief. Unjustified beliefs are imposed not chosen.
That is why Tara and any other believer with unjustified beliefs are imposing on others. They can’t rationally justify, they only seek to find excuses, to generate emotional reactions and then of course to push their beliefs whenever they can.
Spot on, Egbert! And have you noticed how Tara’s latest posts take a predictable turn into mere evasiveness and little stabbing pinpricks from behind that veil of evasiveness? One is reminded of those proselytisers with their pale, religious smiles (‘We are so harmless!’) who come to your door or accost you in the street. Probably thirty years go now, an international crowd of Moonies descended like locusts on Tokyo. One, a young Englishman, accosted me with one of those smiles as I was walking through Shibuya on my way to work. ‘Do you want to know how to be happy?’ I asked. ‘No, I don’t,’ I replied shortly. His face changed abruptly, and: ‘You fucking cunt!’ he shouted at me in a rage (I think, both of us being English, class problems were involved). I couldn’t stop myself and burst into laughter, and to his credit he realised the humour of the situation and a wry grin came over his face. I shan’t say we parted friends, but at least we parted not wholly disliking each other.
Not ‘I asked’ but ‘HE asked’!
Why when I read Tara’s posts am I reminded of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland?
And I believe that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness through the spilling of blood from a barbaric human sacrifice is the single most revolting, disgusting, sickening, inane, evil, savage and morally bankrupt bunch of lunacy that the human mind has ever concocted in our entire history on this planet.
A religion that states that you are born with a sickness that you have with you for you entire earthly life. You may be forgiven for you sickness, but you are still sick.
What utter bullshit!
Tim, you win the interwebs with this comment!
Not eponymous though, it’s a different Uzza.
Maybe you could explain what i am misunderstanding?
Thank you, Uzza! Sorry I got that wrong. But who is the different Uzza who is an eponym? As to the misunderstanding, well, I think Eric addressed that well enough in two responses above. But can I say what I like about Eric’s writing? There is of course his trenchancy and his signal ability to seize on an important point, but something I really like about his writing is its exploratory quality, its attempts to understand difficult matters about which there is a great deal of disagreement – for instance, among anthropologists and students of religion like Whitehouse, Atran and Lawley; whether or not Eric gets things exactly right every time (and most of the time, it seems to me, he hits nails on the head), it is this exploratory approach that I admire and that I find very salutary. So that I think he may be criticised at times, I think the criticisms should be be rather more specific than yours seemed to me to be, and rather less expressive of a sort of generalised exasperation. And if you did make your criticisms more specific, then I think we – including Eric – could all learn something; at the moment, it is rather difficult to get something of value from what you say, even though one feels that you may well have something of value to contribute.
‘So that ALTHOUGH I think he may be criticised…’
“Why, sometimes I’ve prayed to as many as six impossible gods before breakfast!”
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“The dispute about God seems to me to be a Red Herring of sorts. I thought the true dispute to be the quest to get a law changed/put in place to protect individual end of life choices from the interference of others.”
Eric, in many past posts, has made clear the connection between religion and the changing of assisted dying laws. The God question is no red herring. Rather, the God question sits right at the heart of the issue.
The nebulous, contradictory, and irrational beliefs you cherish so dearly are a large part of what allows — nay, forces — legislators and policy-makers to continue to dictate how we must die. No matter if you don’t interpret the things on which you base your beliefs that way, lots do. By your own admission, those interpretations are correct, and binding. That’s how religious beliefs like yours, seemingly innocuous, actually serve to perpetuate the status quo — and that’s not a good thing. We challenge beliefs like yours, in the fight for changes in assisted dying laws, because we must; because beliefs like yours are at the root of the reluctance, at every level, to change those laws to protect those who help another to die.
I think the criticisms should be be rather more specific
All right.
Actually Eric never has described how he conceptualizes specifically God, but I gave up on trying to get a straight answer. On Jan 4, MH asked Eric how he conceptualizes religion. Three weeks and forty posts later, he finally answered her, if only by citing Scott Atran. In the interim, both MH and I continuously demanded he answer and pointed out numerous instances where he evaded the question and/or directly contradicted himself.
This behavior is exactly what he excoriates these Rabbis for in this post.
That was my point, which he spectacularly missed and did not address at all in the two responses. For the eponym, try clicking the link, it shows up as green text in my browser.
Yes, you did answer a question. And your answer was challenged on a number of fronts — and could be on many more, though I’ll not waste my breath. What did you expect on a blog that promises to do what this one promises to do? Surely, the tone of past discussions, and of Eric’s posts themselves, should have tipped you off to the fact that your comments would be challenged. Whether or not we’re trying to convert you — I speak only for myself, but I don’t think that’s the aim of the game — we are trying to have a discussion. Part of that dicsussion is being open to and offering rational criticism, esp. in the form of arguments. “Special Revelation in light of General Revelation + my personal experience of ritual” does not produce a JUSTIFIED belief — neither revelation nor personal experience is up to that task, esp. given that many of the things you believe are incompatible with one another — and that’s all that people are saying.
If you’re not open to discussion, that’s fine. Just don’t pretend you are and go off on the standard relionist “oh, but, I’m not trying to convert you so you can’t say ‘boo’ to me about my special beliefs” thing. It’s offensive in the extreme that you should think that you can paper your beliefs all over a blog like this, and get defensive at attempts to discuss them, when it’s beliefs like yours that force people to die avoidably horrible deaths.
I had a similar experience. A young woman approached me in a parking lot to say “Smile, Jesus loves you”. (My neutral look must appear angry or sad or something…) After I responded with something like “Thanks, but I’m not a believer”, her response was “Well, fuck you, then”. I chuckled. She failed to see the humour in the situation.
It is an imposition, and one that I resent.
Uzza, you continue to be unfair. You want me to tell you how I conceptualise god. How can I do that? The concept itself is a moveable feast. It won’t stay still long enough to pin it down. If I do try to conceptualise god, then someone will say, as Bradley Artson does, “Well, I don’t believe in that god either.” And it can go on like that forever.
The same goes for religion. Religion is just as moveable a feast as the concept of god. But in some way, at the heart of these human creations, is the idea that there is a dimension of being that is not accessible to science, something that transcends the empirical world that we move around in, but something which has dealings with this world, and communicates with us. And I think it’s just nonsense, and when it presumes to tell us how we should act, what laws we should make, what things are forbidden by its gods, then religion becomes a danger.
It’s okay for people to believe in pretend things so long as they don’t intrude into the lives of others in destructive ways. However, religions don’t simply think of their beliefs as personal convictions. They believe them true, not only for themselves, but for others as well. If I could conceptualise them satisfactorily, then I suppose I would have to believe, because the only way to have a satisfactory conception of either god or religion is if there is a god and there are things which must be done because of that god’s existence, which is religion. I deny both, and therefore there is no satisfactory conception of god, nor of religion. But in some way religions have to do with a dimension of being that transcends the empirical world that can be known by science. I don’t think there is such a transcendent dimension. There is no god. Of course, if you can prove that there is one, then we might have to deal with it. But, that’s going to take some doing.
Gods are imaginary beings, and religions are forms of life which purport to serve them. Will that do?
Yes, it is fine to press for a definition, but finding a definition which covers such an amorphous thing as religion (that is to say, not solely the Abrahamic religions, and particularly Christianity with its emphasis on faith, which are easier to pin down) is famously difficult, and has exercised many good minds – those of sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and historians – and I see nothing wrong whatsoever with Eric’s reluctance in this case to settle on some ready and easy definition before his tentative adoption of Atran’s. Do you have a better one? I don’t recall you offering one. MH certainly didn’t have one. She merely floundered about. And Eric’s characterisation of religion as having an intellectual (theological) element, which he advanced against MH’s vacuous assertions, constituted, it seems to me, a position, and one that Eric defended well. As for the question what conceptions of God Eric himself might entertain, he is surely concerned first of all with the conceptions of God that are apparent in, for example, the Catholic Church’s position that women should die before having abortions and Rowan Williams’s position that to allow choice in dying is an offence against that ‘sanctity’ of life that derives from what God is supposed to will or demand. I don’t see what relevance his personal conceptualisation of God has (he is, after all, an atheist), and I honestly don’t understand the reason for your dissatisfactions and objections. Anway, Eric can well defend himself. And I’m glad to learn who your eponym is!
To the extent that your belief provides moral and financial support to organized religion, you are imposing your beliefs on others, That is the nature of religion.
You abdicate personal responsibility for your ethical and moral decisions and pretend that this is a virtue by calling it faith.
It was not your choice to believe as you wish, you were indoctrinated as a child before you had the necessary intellectual tools to apply skeptical think to dogma being imposed on you by adult authority figures abusing the trust you put in them. This would be called child abuse and treated as such in any sane (i.e. not dominated by religion) world.
Uzza, how do you conceptualize a unicorn? Does it have hoofs like a horse’s or like a goat’s? Does it have a tail like a horse’s or like a lions?
But I don’t believe that unicorns exist. So my conception is, I suppose, a kind of quantum superposition of all these states that describe some people’s (historical?) beliefs of what a unicorn looks like.
To criticize me for not choosing any single “eigen-conception” (e.g., goat’s hoofs, lion’s tail) is largely irrelevant when unicorns don’t exist! All of them are wrong.
I don’t see atheism as about the Christian God at all, but about the existence of a nonmaterial world filled with nonmaterial entities. I can find no evidence for this world and even its hypothesized existence explains nothing that can’t be explained by ignoring it. One can function perfectly well without even imagining its existence. Gods are just not needed.
Laplace was surely wrong to say, “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”
Something like, “Mais, Monsieur, comment pouvez-vous concevoir cette hypothèse que vous identifiez comme ‘Dieu’,” might have been better…
@Tim: Actually, my eponym was the one responsible for the Satanic Verses. That’s me, stirring up trouble since 619.
If you want my personal take on stuff it’s here, but it’s irrelevant, as is all this lexicographical ruminating, since all I’ve been doing is trying to figure out what Eric means. You guys are the only group I know who invert Voltaire’s edict to, “if you want to argue, never define your terms.”
@Eric: I’m not being unfair to hold you to the same standards you hold these Rabbis to. If you believe something, it behooves you to at least to try to put what it is that you believe into words. That’s what you say, but then it is unfair when applied to you? I don’t agree. Anticipating your objection, I imagine you hold that the onus is on them as they are the ones making the claim, but that doesn’t apply here.
You say it can go on forever, and that is exactly my point. You say god doesn’t exist; I ask about Einstein’s god; you say “I don’t call that god”; I ask about Carvaka; you say “I don’t call that a religion”, and on and on. Apparently you don’t mind wasting time like that as long as you’re the one who gets to do the waffling, but you could have avoided all this with a simple sentence saying that to you, “Gods are imaginary beings, and religions are forms of life which purport to serve them.” Instead you responded with obfuscation worthy of Karen Armstrong, or evidently, those rabbis.
For many of us who define these terms differently than you, blanket statements about gods or “all religions”, or “religions do this or that”, are often demonstrably untrue, so you can hardly expect us to accept them at first brush. A simple clarification of what the terms mean, to you, removes the ambiguity and moves the discussion forward onto productive matters. Refusing to give such clarification really does give an impression that you “don’t believe anything determinate”, as you so politely put it.
Pardon me if you have answered this elsewhere, but why is there no hope without god?
There is no unnecessary guilt perhaps, no fear of hell, and no hope for an eternity of fawning, but what kind of hope is that anyway? And why is the finite so often equated with zero in religious mindsets? Why is anything less than infinite perfection considered worthless and hopeless? What a crude and unsophisticated conception of value, of life itself.
Classic answer Uzza – just what Eric said you would say if he defined god in any manner – “but that’s not my definition of god.” He knew he couldn’t win – even before he replied.
@ michael
Win what? What’s the contest?
Does this have anything to do with anything I wrote?
Tara, WHY are you putting yourself through this? I am a believer too but I have learned not to beat my head against a wall to people who are just going to attack you for your “beliefs.” It is your choice to believe or not believe. The same is true for them. Spend your time with the least, the last and the lost who want to hear what you have to say and will not try to put you down or try to discredit what you believe in.
To the non-believers–we are not trying to change your mind and you will never change ours. She was just voicing her opinion, not trying to covert you. She is entitled to her opinion without every non-believer on this site bashing her for her beliefs.
I am not looking for an argument about my faith. I am saying anyone can choose believe or not to believe if you want. Just because we don’t agree with you doesn’t make it right or wrong. It is called freedom of choice and I am thankful we all have it.
Because we don’t believe what you believe makes us ignorant and absurd? Is something only justified if it can be physically seen or proven–what, on paper? There is a justification by faith. I am not looking for an argument. I just don’t get it when non-believers think they can prove their point if they start bashing or name calling non-believers as if that means non-believers are right because they can call someone who doesn’t believe like they believe as ignorant. In other words, it’s hard for me to take anyone seriously who calls me absurd and ignorant because of what I believe.
I would be very curious to see a list of people, who I would consider intelligent who are non-believers. Please back this list up with some justification.
Who called you that, bgs?
Not Egbert. He called absurd and ignorant only the notion of ignoring the idea of justification and jumping straight to belief.
Belief is justified by faith? Then what is your faith justified by? Belief?
Now that would be absurd.
What? No evangelism?
Patently false: http://richarddawkins.net/letters/converts
Yes, anyone can. But it’s not just because you don’t agree with us that we think your belief is wrong. We think it’s wrong because there is not one shred of evidence that it’s right.