Monthly Archives: October 2011

Vernon on Bellah on Evolution, Religion and our Pre-Hominid Ancestors

Standard

In today’s Guardian Mark Vernon has an article on Robert Bellah’s new book Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age to Modernity, published by Harvard University Press, funded, in part at least, by the Templeton Foundation. The relation to Templeton raises some questions about the book itself. The following is a fairly unrehearsed response to the news of Bellah’s new book about religion and evolution, but without firsthand acquaintance with the text itself.

The strange thing is that it repeats, again, what people insist on saying, over and over again, that religion has nothing to do with propositional beliefs. But what is even more disturbing is that Bellah, if Vernon has got him anywhere near right, tells us that Bellah urges us to make the following very speculative journey:

Go back deep into evolutionary time, long before hominids, Bellah invites his readers, because here can be found the basic capacity required for religion to emerge. It is mimesis or imitative action, when animals communicate their intentions, often sexual or aggressive, by standard behaviours. Often such signals seem to be genetically determined, though some animals, like mammals, are freer and more creative. It can then be called play, meant in a straightforward sense of “not work”, work being activity that is necessary for survival.

Now, that strikes me, on the face of it, not to make a great deal of sense, but it would certainly be useful if we could push the origins of religion back to a time that is, so far as I can understand, strictly inaccessible to us. I daresay that Bellah thinks that he has found evidence of this in contemporary religious practices, but I guess my question would be: what has this to do with these dim evolutionary origins of religion? Evolutionary psychology is, as I understand it, a bit chancy at the best of times, but to suppose that we can actually press back to the origins of religion in pre-hominid ancestors of humans seems to be a bit more chancy than most attempts at providing evolutionary credentials for contemporary religious experiences and expressions.

Certainly, it seems that aspects of religion may have to do with play. Ritual, for one thing, since it seems to have so little to do with the workaday world, seems likely to share some of the characteristics of play. Children’s play often includes ritualistic types of movements and and sequences of actions. And that may be where Bellah’s Episcopalian (Anglican) idea of ritual comes in, because there is an element of make-believe in Anglican ritual, since Anglican ritual is largely created on the basis of theories about the structure of the liturgy. In other words, it is not an organic tradition within Anglicanism, but derives from a later construction which issued from the Oxford Movement — a movement that, in some sense, created a catholic tradition within the Church of England from whole cloth. That’s why it seems natural to think of Sunday School as “holy play,” which seems a bit cuckoo to Bellah, but, as he says in an interview published in the Atlantic, “there’s some sense to it; in a sense what we’re doing in the liturgy is a kind of play, a profound play.”

Continue reading →

About these ads

John Gray’s Pessimism, the Long Peace, and Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels”

Standard

I’ve been meaning to write something about John Gray and his response to Pinker for a few days now, and though I’m still in the middle of reading Pinker’s book, I’ll make a stab at it now, and come back to it again when I’m better informed. John Gray, though, has always seemed a bit of a mystery to me. I bought his book Straw Dogs in 2002 (I think) while I was on vacation driving across Canada with Elizabeth from sea to sea — our first trip: we did the same thing the next year, when I bought and read for the first time Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained. After I had finished Straw Dogs I wondered why, given that Gray doesn’t seem to believe that anything that humans “cognise” is in any respect true, he would bother to write anything at all, since given the underlying epistemology, he apparently doesn’t think that anything he is writing could be true either. Why would someone try to show that everything is falling to pieces if he doesn’t think he can say truly that everything is falling to pieces?!

So when he comes to criticise Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of our Nature, it’s hard to see how he could agree with the thesis, simply because he can’t really agree with any thesis at all, even his own – which must be a bit restrictive for a writer, especially one who writes discursive books about the appalling nature of the human world and its rather grim prospects. Of course, given that point of view, anyone who is trying to show, as Pinker is, that there is some basis for the claim that human beings are becoming less and less violent and more humane, and that this process has now been ongoing for some time, but certainly since the 17th century revolution in science and the 18th century Enlightenment, is obviously going to deserve Gray’s scarcely concealed contempt, even as he pretends — and what, given Gray’s nihilism, could it be but pretence? — to provide a reasoned refutation.

Continue reading →

Religion is a Sick and Cruel Joke

Standard

Thanks to Questionable Motives (Tildeb) for the link to the Windsor Star report on the death of Baby Joseph. Remember him? Remember the Canadian hospital that refused to do a tracheotomy — and a Canadian judge agreed – because all it would do would be to prolong the baby’s suffering? And so in marched the virtuous “Priests for Life” superheroes — you know, the gang that Dr. Pereira addresses on “pro-life” issues – took Baby Joseph to a Roman Catholic hospital in the United States, and enabled the baby to suffer for five months more. But that’s not the way these Roman Catholic zealots look at it. No, not at all. A baby, whose understanding of what was happening around him was minimal, and growing less every day, since he had a neurodegenerative condition, was taken home so that he could be surrounded by the love of his family, and so that the Roman Catholic Church could make as much publicity mileage as possible out of a child’s suffering and a family’s grief.

According to the Windsor Star report (published on 28 September):

Twenty-month-old Baby Joseph began having trouble breathing the last several  days, said O’Donnell, major superior at Franciscan Brothers of Peace who became a friend of the family.

“The family had a fair amount of good opportunity to be with their son,” said  Alex Schadenburg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, who visited them last  summer. “If you can’t ask for much, at least you can ask for that.”

Said O’Donnell, “I think they feel at the end of the day they did everything  they could do to love their child. Now they can be at peace. It’s always hard to  lose a child. But if he had died at the hospital against the parents’ wishes,  that would have haunted them the rest of their lives.”

The family did everything they could to love their child, including prolonging his suffering. It makes sense to them, of course. The Roman Catholic death cult at its very best, so fearful of death that anything, even five months of pointless suffering, is better than dying. The family, said Schadenburg, had a good opportunity to be with their son. What about the son? Did his suffering count? Not a word about it, so we don’t know what they think. But certainly the family’s rather selfish interests seem to have been more important than any amount of suffering caused by the superhero “rescue” of a dying child from the uncaring, unfeeling Canadian doctors and nurses who would have let Baby Joseph die with as much comfort care as possible five months ago. That would have amounted to “putting the child to death.” Thus Alex Schadenburg and his continued advocacy for religious madness and cruelty. No doubt he would have considered it another murder, just as he continues to characterise Terry Schaivo’s death!

Continue reading →

Polkinghorne: Religion, Lies and Digital Video

Standard

Jerry Coyne has a new post up about a new pro-evolution film that was announced today in the Huffington Post in an article entitled, of all things, “No Dinosaurs in Heaven.” Since there isn’t one — heaven, that is — and since heaven is reserved for ensouled beings, and animals don’t even get a bit part, the title is at best misleading; at worst it already sells half the store to religion just in the title. But then, at the end of the HuffPo article on the pro-evolution film, there’s a short video, entitled “Religion vs. Science”, and it really is just that. Religion is presented as a kind of “deeper” science — in fact, this is really said outright: “Religious experience provides more depth and complexity than scientific knowledge.” I’m going discuss a few selected ”highlights” from the video, though you might like to watch the whole thing, just to get the shape of the whole. The video itself focuses attention on the physicist turned priest John Polkinghorne, of whom Thomas D’Evelyn of the Christian Science Monitor had this to say:

Polkinghorne is a model public intellectual; he refuses to distort one body of knowledge to advance his own position on another.

But this is just wrong. In the video, entitled “Science vs. religion,” Polkinghorne deliberately distorts religion by putting it in the same context as science — just what D’Evelyn says he does not do. Indeed, he lends assistance to an attempt to say that life lived without religion is the opposite of the truth, by speaking of individualism and the separation of spirituality from religion as corrupt and dangerous, a process in which God is instrumentalised, or, in a word, idolised, where God is turned into wish-fulfilment and fantasy, when religion itself is, as Freud said, a matter of wish-fulfilment and illusion, and speaking of God’s nature as Polkinghorne does is simply fantastical wordspinning of the most prevaricating sort.

Continue reading →

My Comment on W5 Program on Assisted Dying

Standard

Clearly, I will come back to this issue, since W5 asked me to withdraw my earlier post about Dr. Pereira. His research is seriously inadequate, and does not make the point that he thinks he has made. This is largely due to the artificial restrictions imposed by the laws in the Netherlands and Belgium. Euthanasia, as Pereira defines it, includes explicit written consent, as apparently the laws also require. And he sticks to that definition despite the fact that, historically, and actually, euthanasia has also included those who are suffering terribly as they die, and are really beyond the point of making autonomous decisions. Originally, euthanasia was thought of in terms of a medical decision made by the attending physician, and autonomous choice was neither accepted as adequate nor thought to be, in normal circumstances, required. This understanding of euthanasia has not simply disappeared, just because new laws have been written which require written consent. When patients’ disease trajectories have taken sudden and precipitous (as well as unexpected) turns for the worse doctors have felt it the merciful thing to help them over the last few hours of their lives, with the minimum of suffering, often using opioids which are not thought of by most physicians now as having life-shortening effects, even though these cases are included because of the way the research defined euthanasia. The doctors themselves did not consider the cases in question as being euthanasia. More research needs to be done, but the research used by Pereira does not establish that there is a slippery slope or even a danger of one, the stats being pretty stable over several years. However, all this for another time. The following is what I wrote in a comment on the W5 website (they scrunched my paragraphs together, but this is how I wrote it — the limit was 300 words. While the whole program was worth watching, I thought, I appear in part 2):

On the whole I thought to program was well done and well presented. However….

First of all, Dr. Pereira’s argument about slippery slopes is simply not borne out by the facts that he adduces in his paper. He ignores the conclusions of the research done in the Netherlands and Belgium – research he uses to make his point. Pereira defines euthanasia in terms of consent, but there were cases where (i) the trajectory of the disease took a very quick nose-dive so that written consent was not possible, and yet suffering seemed great enough to physician and family members to allow pain medication that might hasten death, and (ii) many of those cases involved the use of opioids which were not considered by the doctors concerned to be cases of euthanasia, and can easily fit under the principle of double effect, but were caught by the research stats anyway.

And there are many other features of Pereira’s paper which shows that his reading of the evidence is heavily biased. But more important, Dr. Pereira is a Roman Catholic (often speaking at Catholic pro-life events) , and accepts the absolute prohibition mandated by his church. Until this is brought into the discussion the arguments are unacceptably skewed.

My second point has to do with Victor Malarek’s closing remarks to Lloyd Robertson — contradicting his own findings as presented in the documentary. He speaks of “stretching the boundaries and going after people with chronic conditions”. But this is not really stretching the boundaries at all, for the Dutch and the Belgian laws have never been restricted to terminal conditions, nor has the assisted suicide provisions of the Swiss Penal Code. Besides “going after people” is a complete misrepresentation. people themselves with chronic conditions are demanding that their suffering be recognised and their right to die be acknowledged.

Read more: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/WFive/20111014/w5-euthanasia-and-suicide-111015/#ixzz1axMJ71Od

Almost Forgot … W5 tonight at 7:00 p.m.

Standard

For those who are interested, I almost forgot. Tonight at 7 p.m. on CTV’s W5, there will be a segment on assisted dying in which I am involved. The crew spent a couple days here filming, and Victor Malarek was here for an interview. I have no idea what it will be like, but, if you have the chance, and have access, and are interested, have a look-in. Cheers!

Julian Baggini and the New Atheism Again

Standard

I know that Julian Baggini’s latest Guardian piece on the relationship between science and religion — see “Religion’s truce with science can’t hold” – is not, as such, about the new atheism. But since he began his critique of the new atheism in such a pugnacious way (see “The New Atheist Movement is destructive” in the Norwegian freethinker’s magazine Fritanke), where he set out his opposition to the new atheism after saying that their books had nothing new to teach him, so he didn’t bother to read them, it seems worthwhile interpreting what he has to say about the truce between religion and science in this context. As he said in his opening attack on the new atheism:

Not reading The God Delusion, God is Not Great, Breaking the Spell and The End of Faith is perfectly reasonable. Why on earth would I devote precious reading hours to books which largely tell me what I already believe? These books are surely mainly for agnostics and open-minded believers. In fact, I think atheists who have read these books have more of a responsibility to account for their actions than I do my inaction.

I wonder if he has changed his mind, and has bothered at least to gloss the texts whose attitude towards belief and believers he considered so retrograde that he could say things like this: “The new atheism has also, I think, created an unhelpful climate for atheism to flourish.” Let’s complete that paragraph:

The new atheism has also, I think, created an unhelpful climate for atheism to flourish. When people think of atheists now, they think about men who look only to science for answers, are dismissive of religion and over-confident in their own rightness. Richard Dawkins, for example, presented a television programme on religion called The Root of all Evil and has as his website slogan “A clear thinking oasis”. Where is the balance and modesty in such rhetoric?

But he hasn’t shown that Dawkins is immodest or over-confident, and since he hadn’t at that point read the book (by his own admission), he was scarcely qualified to say that he is. Add to this the fact that ”The Root of all Evil?” not only had a question mark, but was also a title not chosen by Dawkins himself, and that in the programme Dawkins was, while giving good reasons for thinking that religion was a problem, gentle and respectful towards believers themselves (and far more forbearing that I would have been), if not towards their beliefs; and it might justly seem that Dawkins’ balance and modesty were not so obviously lacking as Baggini suggests;  nor should Baggini’s confidence have been bought so cheaply.

Continue reading →

Original Sin, the Fall of Man, and the History of Violence

Standard

Let’s begin with a little primer. According to Christian doctrine, especially in Western Christianity, sin and death entered the world through the disobedience of Adam and Eve, the proto-parents of the human race, who defiantly ate of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and thus earned God’s enmity and attracted the brutality of the punishment — namely labour and child-bearing — that has been borne by the human race ever since. Of course, no doubt, in context, the story is a mythical-allegorical account of what it means to become human, to become conscious of the choice that we can make between good and evil, and to know that we will die. Thus the story tells us about ourselves, and how, through consciousness, we became aware of our situation in the world, how awareness grew that we can make good and bad choices, and that choices have consequences. The story of Cain and Abel which follows close on the heels of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden of delights into the stony ground of the world where life is hard, and violence reigns, and death is an ever present reality, is an allegory of the gift and curse of consciousness.

The church however did not interpret the story allegorically — or, if it did allow for allegory, also gave it a totally realistic cast as well, assuming that it was an actual historical event that took place at the very beginning, when human beings were first created, and who, in defiance of their creator, took their first halting steps towards autonomy, and sought to become as gods, who alone, knowing good and evil, can be truly autonomous. The result, according to Christian doctrine, is that, ever since their first parents sinned through disobedience, humankind has been inherently corrupt in the core of its very being and essence, a corruption that can only be healed by a creative act of God. Just as God created humanity whole and without blemish, so only a new creation will suffice to remove the corruption which, by their hubris and attempt at self-creation, the first parents of the human race bequeathed to their children and children’s children until today.

Continue reading →

Kirsopp Lake, the decline of intelligent religion, and the danger of reaction

Standard

Yesterday, as I was exercising on my treadmill, which stands next to my bookshelves, and wanting something to read, I reached over and took out an old book, published in 1925, The Religion of Yesterday and To-morrow, by Kirsopp Lake, which I hadn’t read for some time. It had to be an old book so that it would lie flat and open, without the pages wanting to curl back and obscure what I was reading as I walked. So I began somewhere in the middle. It didn’t really matter where I began, because I had read it before, but by chance I happened upon a passage which is relevant to what I have been saying, as well as to what others have been writing about, regarding fundamentalism, literalism, allegory, figurative biblical language, myth and so on, so I thought I should at least give you a small glimpse into the mind of this rather remarkable Christian theologian and teacher, who began ministry in England, taught for ten years at the University of Leiden, and then spent some years teaching at the Harvard Divinity School. He was a prolific author, though I have only read one of his books. This one.

Let me begin with this quote, since it ushers us immediately into the issues being discussed:

I do not think that any early church writer ever taught that the facts mentioned in this faith were only symbolical or allegorical. So far as I know, even Origen never doubted that the story of the creation was literally true. He did undoubtedly think that it also had an allegorical meaning, but that is typical of his school of interpretation; it added allegory, it did not substitute it for the plain historical meaning. Moreover to take Origen as typical of the early Church is a perversion of history. Would that he had been! [81-2]

This has always been my sense of the relationship of allegory to the literal meaning of the text. The agony in the garden, for example, whilst being patient of an allegorical meaning, has also been taken as a strictly literal account of what Jesus did on the night that he was  betrayed. The betrayal itself was open to allegorical and figurative meaning which could apply to each Christian, for each Christian is understood to have betrayed Jesus in just this way, and thus was to hold himself responsible for all that happened the next day, for the arrest and trial that night, and for the scourging and the crucifixion that were to follow.

Continue reading →

The Problem, in One Word, is ‘Revelation’

Standard

While the religious fuss and fulminate, and non-believers and humanists — including this one – continue their righteous assault on religious idiocy, in the end, of course, we all have a tendency to overlook or marginalise, more often than not, the problem at the very centre of the debate: the problem of revelation. For no reason at all, other than the fact that, at some point in the religious traditions in question – whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, or what-not – someone or some group of people privileged a collection of texts by deeming them a revelation from a god or gods. Holding these texts sacred, people have believed that they stand under the protection of a superhuman or supernatural realm, and that they must, therefore, punctiliously carry out the will of the being or of the truths revealed in those texts.

What else is this nonsense about Adam and Eve and the serpent all about? Where else does the question arise whether young men should blow themselves to smithereens, and take a few of their fellow humans into that dark place where, before long, all of us will follow? Where else do protests against abortion find their immovable justification? Where else the condemnation of various sexual positions and practices? Where else can we find the provenance of the conviction that any who take their lives while of sound mind cannot be buried within “consecrated” ground? Where else did the illusion arise that mere bread and wine can be turned into a sacrificial meal, and that, placed in a monstrance, the bread itself, thus transmogrified, can be used to bless and consecrate those who are minutely faithful to that revealed word? Why else should the genitals of men or women be disfigured, and where else did the myth arise that women’s bodies must be thoroughly covered against the lustful stares of men who, without such concealment, are powerless against the sexual desire stirring in their loins? Why else should a distinguished scientist abase himself before a frozen three-fold waterfall? What other reason could a bishop give for cutting off from an eternal reward those who relieved a nine-year-old girl of the burden of carrying twins in her little body? What other ground could one give for the slaughter of thousands or millions who maintain loyalty to their sacred text in defiance of the sacred words of one’s own?

Continue reading →