I could have told him that
In his latest installment of “heathen’s progress,” Julian Baggini has come to the conclusion, on the basis of his own research, ”that the vast majority of Christians appear to take the orthodox doctrine at face value” — as the subtitle of his new piece — “The myth that religion is more about practice than belief” – puts it. Having spent a lifetime amongst religious believers, and having, towards the end of that time, tried to introduce — as gently as possible — new, more figurative, ways of looking at Christian faith, à la Sea of Faith, Jack Spong, etc. — which was, not to put it at all exaggeratedly, a hazardous business — Christianity for most believers is about belief, and if practical things come into it, they are thought of as a secondary effect of belief, a way that faith is put into practice, and not otherwise. Anyone who lives and works with believers cannot come to a different conclusion.
Baggini acknowledges that his survey was not scientificly randomised, but represented a self-selected sample of churchgoers, but he argues with considerable justice that:
We can then be fairly confident that the surveys would not overstate the extent to which people held conventional, some might say more simplistic, versions of Christian doctrine.
With that caveat, what did he find?
It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value.
That, at any rate, is consistent with my own experience over the years living amongst priests and other believers. While practice is, for a minority of Christians, an essential aspect of faith, it is not at the heart of it, it is, in fact, the spin-off of faith. At the heart of faith are beliefs about God and Jesus as divine, the miracles and the resurrection of Jesus, and our modelling our lives on the example of Jesus and the saints.
Here is a summation of Baggini’s findings:
They believe that Jesus is divine, not simply an exceptional human being; that his resurrection was a real, bodily one; that he performed miracles no human being ever could; that he needed to die on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven; and that Jesus is the only way to eternal life. On many of these issues, a significant minority are uncertain but in all cases it is only a small minority who actively disagree, or even just tend to disagree. As for the main reason they go to church, it is not for reflection, spiritual guidance or to be part of a community, but overwhelmingly in order to worship God.
I have said it often enough already, but this is how, in my experience, most Christians understand faith. My own attempts to move away from this into more liberal, indeed, more radical revisions of faith in order to make sense of faith in the modern world, while to some degree successful, and actually more attractive to some people’s more radical understandings of faith, the place of the Bible in determining faith, and the obvious marginalisation of some “believers” because of their inability to accept orthodox ways of understanding both Bible and creed, was of central importance to the core membership of the parish in which I worked. One of these put it quite succinctly when she said that I would not be there forever, and she was prepared to tolerate my radical take on faith, but she knew what she believed, and was quite confident that the next Rector would be more on her side than on mine.
Baggini’s conclusions from his research are as predictable as they are sound:
This is, I think, a firm riposte to those who dismiss atheists, especially the “new” variety, as being fixated on the literal beliefs associated with religion rather than ethos or practice. It suggests that they are not attacking straw men when they criticise religion for promoting superstitious and supernatural beliefs.
Atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, to take only the Four Horsemen, who take religion as centring in belief, not in practice and metaphor, are spot on the money for most religious believers. Academic theology, as I have reason to know, having for years tried to convince people that they didn’t need to believe that the Bible is the unspotted word of God, or that things like the resurrection or the other miracles of Jesus must be taken as supernatural events, simply has no purchase at the level of the ordinary believer. Jack Spong and Don Cupitt have fairly large followings — though still only, for the most part, amongst the educated who are willing to read and find out about things — but they do not even touch those at the heart of the religions who are ordinary believers, and do expect answers to prayer, and consequently have every reason to believe in the miracles of Jesus.
I can remember once speaking with a mother whose son was very ill — in fact, it looked very likely that he would die. When she asked for a prayer for her son I of course obliged, but I told her not to expect miracles. Death comes to all of us, and many children die very young, and many of them die in misery. However, her son recovered, and she attributed the fact that he did survive to the fact, as she saw it, that God had some purpose for her son still unfulfilled. Indeed, when I worked in Bermuda, I became known as one whose prayers were often answered, and people would bring the names of their relatives to be prayed for in church, and, according to many, those prayers were answered. We know from research that there is no indication at all that prayer can influence events, even though, in the Roman Catholic Church, no one can be made a saint unless there are document miracles that are supposed to derive from having prayed to the “person” concerned. That someone miraculously recovers is taken as evidence that this person, now a saint on the strength of such “evidence”, has special influence with God — a holdover from the days of supreme rulership, whether of emperor or king, when those clients with mentors who had influence at court could benefit from their relationship.
Baggini concludes from his study that those who take religion to be not about believe, but more about practice, have some explaining to do:
It seems to me that these results, if truly indicative of what people actually believe, are highly significant for the present debate about religion. The challenge to the likes of Karen Armstrong – which I’d love to hear her response to – is to accept that when they claim religion isn’t really about literal belief, they are advocating a view about how religion ought to be in its best form which just doesn’t describe the reality on the ground.
Karen Armstrong is perhaps the worst person to ask. Not only is her witness on these matters extremely unreliable, her concept of religion is simply a romantic extrapolation from an almost total misunderstanding of positive religion (that is, of religion as it actually exists). On the basis of this Baggini concludes (wisely, I think):
Therefore when responding to atheist criticisms, the accusation cannot be that they misrepresent religion. The best that can be said is that atheists focus too much on religion as it is most usually found and should pay more attention to the better forms. Whether that is a good enough reply is the subject for another argument.
The point might be put a bit clearer. Academic theologians, to be at all credible in the academic community, cannot speak or write about their subject as ordinary, simple believers. Theology, as an academic discipline, must at least be intelligible to others in the academy. That it fails even in this is neither here nor there. People like John Haught and Keith Ward are trying very hard to place their “discipline” in the context of other academic disciplines, and so they must adhere to some, at least, of the canons of scholarship.
Academic imperatives, however, have no locus standi at the level of ordinary belief, which is why so many who emerge from theological schools find their own understanding of faith at complete variance with the understanding of the people they go out into the parishes to serve. They either adapt to that circumstance, and learn to temper their academic learning with the faith as the people they serve understand it, or they try to introduce new ways of looking at faith to the people. The latter is often the path not taken, because it requires a deftness and a fairly quick reason that many people simply do not possess, and if you cannot make it seem as though, with all the revisions you are proposing, there is still something recognisable as the faith of old, you will get nowhere, and will end up in conflict with the very people on whose goodwill you depend for your daily bread.
The young priest who said to me, only a short time after being ordained priest, that if he told the people in his parish what he really believed they would think that he was not a Christian, has now comfortably settled in to the more straightforward, orthodox understanding of the faith. It is a matter of self-preservation. And this is bound to remain the norm, because, as I keep saying, at the heart of most religions, though especially religions of the book, like Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the sacred texts are there as a corrective to anything that religious experts might try to say, and the people will revert very quickly to the text itself in its straightforward meaning if they find their faith being challenged. That too is a matter of self-preservation. People hold religious beliefs for any number of reasons, but chief amongst them is the fact that faith gives order to people’s lives, includes some promise to those who are dying, and overall allows people, despite all appearances, to live in a world where even they are the focus of attention, so that they need not feel alone or afraid. These benefits are jealously protected, and anyone who chooses to undermine such faith will find little sympathy and less kindness than they might have expected from people who worship a God who is said to be love itself.
In short, Baggini found what I was sure he would find, that people’s faith is much more straightforward about orthodox belief than it is about practice. And while it is possible to use biblical texts in order to support movements of social justice and peace, the energy behind those movements comes from fairly straightforward, literal belief in the words of the creeds, and in the stories and claims that are made about God or about Allah or about Yahweh (however elided out of respect for the name of G_d), and without the latter, the former make no sense at all. The gnu atheists are right to continue to drive their wedges between belief and practice, for, while moral practice — concern for justice and the relief of suffering — can stand on its own, belief is now, with all the challenges of science and the obvious benefits of secularity, an orphan, with no visible means of support.
Ah, but maybe belief itself does not require a visible means of support? Is not susceptible to reasoned argument. It doesn’t seem to be. It seems it will always be with us; like the poor.
Yes, Clod, that may be so. However, the point that many defenders of religion make, that religion is not about belief but about praxis, is shown to be simply false for most religious believers. If religious believers thought, in the academic way, that their beliefs are derivative from what are called “true” myths, that is myths that speak truly in mythical form about the nature of human experience, then they would simply give up their belief. And the majority are ready to defend with their lives the truth of the beliefs that they hold to be true in reality.
Eric
Poor Hitch is not dead yet. I`m all in favour of seeing Jerry promoted but let`s wait until the blunderbus has fired its last shot.
Nice swipe. And what Brian said.
I hope you’re right Eric. I depressed myself earlier listening to some Ray Comfort and there you see complete and total resistance to even the tiniest shift in thinking, and there’s millions of them, and more. So the road feels really, really long. It’ll be interesting, amongst other things, to see if Julian’s tone towards us gnus changes as a result of his bit of research.
I do apologise. I don’t know what made me put Jerry Coyne in place of Christopher Hitchens. Writing too fast, I exepect, as usual, and not paying enough attention. All correct now, however.
No surprises there. What’s the point of a belief, after all, unless it confirms your expectation that the people you like will be rewarded — preferably by someone else — and the people you dislike will burn in liquid fire forever and suffer boils on embarrassing parts of their anatomy? You don’t have to look very closely to see the naked wish-fulfillment behind most theist’s beliefs.
Hardly scientific. Selected ‘churchgoers’, his own selected questions religiously directed. Even Julian concedes some of his survey’s limitations. Do you? This hardly corresponds with the majority of people in England who identify as ‘Christian’ or believing in ‘god’, whatever that means, and don’t go all go to church. In fact the majority don’t. Your own experience too is ethnocentric and church oriented and from the beginning of the survey, yes of course the ‘results’ were predictable. This group bases it’s research on more scientific methodology and some of the authors of these papers have published worthwhile books. http://www.thearda.com/rrh/papers/guidingpapers.asp
Well, Delilah, of course you are right, but to suggest ARDA as a source for the scientific understanding of religion may be right so far as the statistics go — I have not had time to look at them; but so far as some of the authors highlighted on the page you link, there are at least some there whose biases are so obvious and pervasive that they have become bywords for inaccurate reporting about religion. I am thinking in particular of Philip Jenkins and John Esposito. The former has written some highly questionable stuff about Christianity in the Third World, and Esposito is an unashamed and incredibly unreliable apologist for Islam. I am not familiar with the others, but if Esposito and Jenkins are representative of the company they keep, their bias probably also shows.
That remark is, no doubt, unscientific and biased, and I do acknowledge the limitations of Baggini’s survey results, of course. In fact, I very early on say that he acknowledges that the survey was not scientifically randomised, but I still think, withall, that the results give a pretty accurate picture of easily the majority of religious believers. Religion may be related to practice, but practice is based on beliefs about reality, usually supernatural reality. The attempt by religious scholars to deny this simply defies reason.
Why else do Christian scholars emphasise the resurrection? Why do Muslims emphasise the prophetic and divine character of the Qu’ran? Because they believe these things to be true. The attempt to mislead by suggesting that sophisticated religion is not about the supernatural, or not about belief, is deeply misleading. If it is not, then the religious should be as ready to use the myths of Greece and Rome, the myths of the Vikings, or the incredilby elaborate myths of Hindu texts such as the Mahabharata, in the pursuit of their understanding of the religious dimension of the human. But you will find, I think, that their veneration for their own holy books is rooted in the belief that they provide windows into another and more important world than this one — towards which they believe that their own lives, and the order of society itself, should be devoted.
Significantly, the ARDA page you refer us to makes no mention of those who are leaders in the scientific study of religion, like Scott Atran, Todd Tremlin, Pascal Boyer, etc. Why is that?
This hardly corresponds with the majority of people in England who identify as ‘Christian’ or believing in ‘god’, whatever that means, and don’t go all go to church. In fact the majority don’t.
Actually, delilah, I don’t think I can agree with what you say. People can “identify” with all sorts of words, without having the slightest idea of what the words actually mean. For example, many people who “identify” as christian seem to imagine that “christian” means “decent human being, as I understand it”. This is readily comprehensible as the result of hundreds of generations of popular teaching and centuries of lowest-common-denominator-adjustment (how to get on with milking the cows, despite the amazing big words of learned priests who can actually read etc etc). But the point at issue is the attitudes of people who do something about their beliefs, such as — for example — going to church and taking Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour and behaving within their families and communities as they believe their lord and saviour requires. Some people I know said things like “you don’t have to go to church to believe in God” and reacted with incomprehension and incredulity when I explained basic christian beliefs; but they got very indignant when I said they weren’t christians. There’s no point in relativising it. Either “Christian” means “holding to certain definable beliefs” or it’s just a synonym for “people like me”. You might see only the latter, but people like me are concerned with the former.
How ironic: “there are at least some there whose biases are so obvious and pervasive that they have become bywords for inaccurate reporting about religion” – in your fantasy world no doubt. Julian should know at least a little about real world surveys of religious knowledge before he writes an anecdotal piece on belief, wouldn’t you think? It wouldn’t even see the light of day in an American newspaper of the calibre of the Guardian, despite other aspects of American culture generally. Julian’s little piece has become butter in your hands so to speak. It not only isn’t scientific, it isn’t even newsworthy or globally significant. Frankly, anyone who bothers to go to church in Bristol would need to be committed to a few ideas, not just the sweet tea and stale cakes afterwards, or they wouldn’t go. So maybe this has some local relevance, but what’s the point in that. However many do go for the refreshments after the show and the community spirit and the knitting group and effective group contributions to issues of social justice. Maybe not the denomination Julian chose. Not only is a question such as ‘do you believe in the divinity of Jesus’ directed to a yes or no answer – it hardly leaves the respondent open to explain what he knows or means about the idea. You can’t take anything at face value especially if you don’t even know the ‘face value’ http://ncronline.org/news/catholics-america/knowledge-and-belief-about-real-presence
The evidence is that belief is eroding, disappearing or lacking is right across the board. If you ask, Do you agree with X, they may say yes, but the studies show that even a rigid system like Catholicism with a lot more doctrine than most protestants have, is not at all sure what they’re supposed to believe when the specifics are put to them. As usual you try to relate everything to your own embittered experience as a priest simultaneously berating people like Keith Ward and Don Cuppitt. Next stop, read this: from the University of Sussex, anthropologist Abby Day. http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199577873.do
I’m sorry, Delilah, I have never said that my experience as a priest was embittered. It wasn’t. I enjoyed and will always look back fondly upon my years spent as a priest. I enjoyed the community, the intellectual stimulation, and many other things besides. And I do not berate Don Cupitt, though I think that Keith Ward spends too much time obfuscating the truth about religion. Cupitt, on the other hand, has almost always been wide awake to the fact that religion has been, to a large extent, a confidence game, and he has tried, very hard, to transform religion from being a form of believing into being simply a form of life that says an exuberant “Yes!” to life. As to Baggini’s survey, of course I know it was not scientific, but that does not make it any the less interesting as a discussion point. As to your comments about what would or would not appear in an American newspaper of record, have you really read what is to be found in them?! Come, come, you want to cross swords with me, go ahead, but to what end? What is it that you really want to say? And, finally, as to my fantasy world about John Esposito, just look at the record. Of course, he is an expert on Islam, no doubt, but that he is also an apologist bought and paid for by the Saudis is in little doubt. Again, what is it that you are really saying, and why do you take the expression of my thoughts about things that I read and think so personally?
Take the article in the National Catholic Reporter to which you refer me, and this passage in particular:
This makes Baggini’s point quite plainly. For a clear majority of Catholics (63%) belief is central to their religious belonging. Baggini’s stats may be the result of a non-scientific survey, but the results are borne out by the National Catholic Reporter survey, which, I am assuming, more closely meets your criteria for a truly randomised, scientific survey. The point that I made is still the same. Belief is central to religion.
The point in question, Mr MacDonald, is what ‘belief’ is. In any case ‘the point’ has not been established by Julian Baggini and no account has been made for the majority of self identifying Christians who don’t even go to church let alone the ones who do. Bristol… really? You’re biased and basing your conclusions on you own geocentric narrow American experience. You discount critical scholarship as ‘biased’ because it is drawing results which demonstrate that the world is changing. The National Catholic Reporter is hardly unbiased and the fact that it claims that only 46 percent are knowledgeable believers demonstrates more than half, and probably a lot more, aren’t.
Philip Jenkins has a Cambridge doctorate, and he is Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor and Professor of Humanities at Pennsylvania with expertise in the history of religions and criminal justice as well. While the fact that Baggini’s survey is supposedly investigating Christian belief it is ironic that you slam critical scholars who have also studied Islam with accusations of prejudice. This suggests their conclusions contradict your own preconceived views of Islam at least. I suspect you dislike scholarship which argues that diversity exists within Muslims in non Islamic countries where Muslims can and do assimilate with society. Once again I suspect your prejudice is based on the anti Islamic attitudes in American society especially this century consequential to events in 2001. Jenkins’ view on sexual conduct by Catholic clergy being no worse than that of other clergy is controversial, despite there being plenty of evidence for sexual misconduct in clergy of other denominations. Jenkins’ comparison of levels of violence contained in the Quranic and biblical texts is also controversial but he has arguments and evidence to support his conclusions.
I am well aware of accusations against John Esposito from Georgetown University, as being an apologist for Islam and I am also well aware from whom those accusations originate. While he has aimed to draw greater understanding between Muslims and Christians, he has been explicit in condemning terrorist violence. I’ll ignore your quoting slander about bribery and corruption, as it’s not worth responding to. In 2008 Esposito came as Firth Lecturer to Nottingham University, the Firth Lectures being a highly prestigious series of endowed lectures held every two years of which Paul Tillich was one of the first to lecture. He was well appreciated and ironically it was only two conservative Christian New Testament scholars who complained that he should never have been allowed to speak. These scholars, John Milbank and Richard Bell incidentally, have recently made dubious suggestions that a centre be opened here to convert Muslims to Christianity. I hope such an idea dies and is buried and I suspect it might have already. I suggest it is their scholarship that is questionable rather than that of Esposito. Hugh Goddard, an Islamic expert and Professor of Religions, and Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey a New Testament scholar, neither Christian but from the same faculty, declared his lecture ‘wonderful’. I quite frankly agree.
Finally, ARDA’s Guiding Papers Series is designed to allow prominent scholars to provide guidance on the study of religion, new research agendas, and/or commentaries on the current state of the study of religion. But you dismiss the research because of your opinion that some of the scholarship is biased – perhaps this suggests an anti academic attitude. Except of course when it supports your opinions.
To what end? None of great significance. You merely affirm the prejudices of your readers while my own research involves observation of attitudes to religion and religious people in atheist bloggers. And you have written a post making claims on the basis of an unscientific journalistic type survey which is not unusual in this genre it seems.
Delilah, I’m perfectly willing to have a civil conversation with you, but you have been aggressive from the very start, an aggressiveness the reason for which is now much clearer, since it seems you were looking for a fight, and so, of course, with your feisty approach, you almost got one.
The question is not what ‘belief’ is at all. This is a question that has not been raised in the ongoing contretemps between certain Christian theologians and atheists. In response to the claim that religious beliefs cannot be confirmed by evidence, people like Keith Ward and Alister McGrath and Karen Armstrong have said that religion is not about beliefs, with the clear understanding that beliefs are convictions about the constitution of reality, and, as such, in need of evidential support.
As to the question of Baggini’s survey. The unscientific survey done by Baggini — acknowledged both by Baggini and by me as not a strictly scientific survey, but with interesting results just the same — actually came to about the same result as the one conducted the National Catholic Reporter to which you referred us, that for most “believers”, belief is central to their understanding of faith. This has got nothing specifically to do with how self-identifying Christians who don’t go to church regard faith, which is strictly irrelevant to the original question. My bet is that the results will be similar, but I am quite prepared to accept a result that is different. My own experience, which may of course not be representative, is that people who did not often go to church, when, on occasion, they did, were much more upset by radical homilies, than those for whom radical theology (of the Sea of Faith variety) was normal fare.
Nevertheless, all of this does not say a great deal about the dispute in question. Would religion without beliefs, or where the foundational stories of the religion were very generally understood, in Tilllich’s sense as, “broken myths”, survive as religion? I very much doubt it, but I am prepared to accept evidence that this kind of Sea of Faith kind of religion could survive the passing of belief. My other concern is that, for any religion so understood, it would have to be clearly understood and accepted by adherents that the sacred texts on which the religion is founded are entirely human creations, without any addition of extra-human or supernatural content, that is, as purely human stories that contribute to our understanding of being human, and that the promises of the afterlife or the threat of punishment after death are as mythical as all the rest.
As to Esposito and the Saudis, that’s fine, you may indeed be right, but the coincidence between his acceptance of Muslim claims about their religion, and the reality of that religion as it expresses itself in history or in the world today, and his relationship with professorships funded by the Saudi government is not, I suspect, something that happened by chance. And while I agree that there is a great diversity in Islam as in all religions, this does not diminish one whit my concern for the more violent aspects of Islam, nor for the fact that there are few places where Islam is a majority religion which have managed to maintain democratic governance. However, having said this, I am as suspicious about the intentions and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, and its theocratic efforts to shape law according to its own moral vision, as I am about the danger of Islam to democratic institutions.
As to John Millbank (and Richard Bell, of whom I have not heard) I have no opinion, although I did try to read Millbank’s early work, and found it turgid and unreadable; but since Muslims make as much effort to convert those around them as Christians do, a mission to Muslims makes as much sense of the Christian idea of mission, as the common Muslim idea that there will only be peace when the whole world submits to Allah.
I simply don’t see the point that you are trying to make (and I simply do not understand your repeated references to Bristol). If you want to power down a little bit on your rhetoric, perhaps this discussion could be carried out more civilly. I am not anti-intellectual or anti-academic, but I know (and you should too) that academics are as capable of bias as anyone else on the planet, and the claim that someone is a world-class scholar doesn’t change this in the slightest. Sure, I have my biases. I’m not sure sometimes what they are, for, at the same time that I oppose religion because of what I believe are its detrimental effect on human rights — Islam and Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and Hinduism, for example, for their misogyny — I also remember with a great deal of fondness my years with people I knew well and loved and served to the best of my ability, and sometimes I am concerned that what I say might hurt them. But I cannot, for all that, change who I am, and what I have come to believe about religion.
My experience of religion is not wholly negative even now, but I do have a settled disposition now to oppose it, because I believe it has the capacity to make people very cruel — as evidenced, for example, by the abortion of the 9 year old girl in Brazil and the church’s response, or the abortion of the woman in Phoenix and the bishop of Phoenix’s response. The church’s continued opposition to assisted dying is exceptionally cruel, and has the effect of enslaving, for the time of their suffering, those who would choose to die, but cannot, because they are forced to die in the way prescribed by their diseases. That is the chief reason why I am opposed to religion, but not the only one. As to the scientific study of religion, I am interested in the study of religion as a natural phenomenon. I am much less interested in the sociological study of religions and the religious. And while it may be true that religious adherents are confused as to what they are expected to believe, that is inevitable. Often people used to put it in terms of “What do we believe?” I daresay they still do. But it still seems to me a copout for people like Keith Ward to claim that religion is not about belief, and that it is really about “true” myths.
As to the charge that I merely confirm the prejudices of my readers, I’m not at all sure what to say. I hope that is not entirely true, and I think, if you go back and see some of my responses, that I do not always agree with comments that are made here. I certainly do not intend to do what you say that I do, and I wonder how much evidence, other than this one exchange, you have for the claim that you make, and how carefully you have researched it.
I think I should just add that I am a Canadian and not an American, and do not share the belief, which you apparently think characteristically American, of American exceptionalism. Americans are, by the way, a very diverse group of human beings.
Oh I concede you have the odd dissenter floating around but obviously I’m referring to your regular likers. Pick a fight? I’m an incurable pacifist. Feisty? I always love that word – feisty. It sounds a little bit wild and exciting so thank you. As for your geographical location – I erred on that and should substitute the American for Canadian. The point is that it is a limited perspective wherever it is. And research, plenty. It’s my life now, and has been for quite a number of interesting years. But your convictions are firm, I was aware of that when I first commented. I’m more annoyed with our dear Julian than I care about what you write here. I was just interested to see the reaction perhaps.
It was inevitable (“I certainly do not intend to do what you say that I do”) that you would not endeavour to read the literature I suggested let alone follow it up with further reading of critical studies – time and effort in research and the evidence might conflict with your convictions. It is much easier to take advantage of simple things such as you have discussed above, when they support your views.
Research, Deliliah. I do a lot of research, as you call it, just not in the areas you think I should, and I don’t think at the moment I am quite prepared to be mentored in this area. For your information, just at the moment I am reading and trying to understand, Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, Thomas Nagel’s View from Nowhere, Edward Feser’s Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, John Keown’s Euthanasia, Ethics and Public Policy, Alisdair McIntrye’s Whose Justice, Which Rationality. Sociology is not a strong interest of mine, and yes, some of my ideas are fairly firm, but none of them are fixed. You have made a very peremptory judgement on perhaps the slimmest of grounds, and just because I don’t want to follow up your suggestions for further research at this time (and while, based on experience, I do not hold either Esposito or Jenkins in high regard), does not put me in the category where you think I belong. You started out here in a particularly aggressive spirit, but there is in principle nothing I would not read just because it conflicts with my principles. John Keown’s book does (in spades, I might add), and yet I am trying to read and understand what he says. Edward Feser’s devotion to Aquinas seems to me to be a bit extreme, but I am trying to understand his arguments, but I am not a young man any more, and I do not have the time to follow up someone else’s interests. It was not at all inevitable that I should not read the literature you suggest, and I may eventually get to some of it, but I do have a fairly full plate. Besides the list above, I am trying slowly to read myself back into philosophy (especially moral philosophy and epistemology) after several years absence. You may not be impressed, but it is a full time job right now. I find your attitude, for someone who claims to be doing research into atheist bloggers, a bit surprising. If you really want to learn something, don’t come on like a doberman from the start. You display a pronounced prejudice — which is your own, and that is up to you — and you certainly don’t seem any more liable to change your rather hidebound position, and and you are perhaps in fact less likely to do so than I am. That’s fine. You go ahead and do your thing, but don’t imagine, that your “research” has really provided you with sound conclusions.
Meanwhile…what a funny piece (from Julian). I just left a rude comment there asking where his apology to the “new” atheists is.
This time he comes right out and says the new atheists have it right after all, but he still never says “therefore I shouldn’t have said they have it wrong in quite such a hostile manner.”
“I am well aware of accusations against John Esposito from Georgetown University, as being an apologist for Islam and I am also well aware from whom those accusations originate. While he has aimed to draw greater understanding between Muslims and Christians, he has been explicit in condemning terrorist violence.”
Swell. Has he been explicit in condemning child marriage? Forced marriage? Stoning?
Ophelia, yes, I had noticed that. No apology forthcoming at all. I think he knew what the results of his survey would be — and not only because, as Delilah says, it was skewed from the start — but he wants to be eirenical, and you can’t fault him for that alone. However, you can fault him for continuing with the belief, quite obviously, I think, simply wrong, that religion has got nothing to do with belief in something “out there”. And since TPM has been so beastly to you, he surely owes you something of an apology.
Ah, your comment, Ophelia, about Esposito comes just as I was going to write something about him as well. I’ve been scouting around a bit on the web, and from what I can see Esposito is a very uncritical aplogist for Islam, and it is hard not to think that this has something to do with his relationship with the Saudis. For example, as Daniel Pipes (whom I do not regularly follow — in fact, this is the first time in several months) says, Esposito’s Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam has a distinctive apologetic bias. Take this, for instance:
(Source: http://www.danielpipes.org/671/the-oxford-encyclopedia-of-the-modern-islamic-world)
This is simply prevarication, especially in view of the things which are really happening to women right now in much of the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world. The repeated claim, recently, that Muslims have a right to kidnap Kuffar girls and women and make them their possessions, is just an extreme form of the subordination that Muslim women daily experience in Muslim majority parts of the world as well as in immigrant communities in Canada, Britain and the US — although I understand that conditions are better in Canada. I wonder.
Not to mention what we can see in Maryam’s latest post -
http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2011/12/12/islam-most-horrible/
You know, years ago, I used to think, “Isn’t this great? Women are now making contributions to biblical scholarship, and showing how the Bible can be read in a feminist way.” But when it comes down to it, women are just helping the spread of the misogynistic message of the Bible, because most women aren’t going to read the biblical scholars, so they’ll never hear this. What they’ll hear is Paul (or at least a pseudo-Paul) saying that women should not be allowed to teach, or Paul saying that women should consider their husbands in the same way that their husbands consider Christ. Husbands are to be as Christs to their wives. The whole thing is a put up job. Women get to become priests, but they still speak out of a misogynistic text. There is no resolution for this but to give up the idea of sacred texts, and religions aren’t about to do that, so it’s best to give up on the idea of religion.
So, what else is new? Why would so many people go to church if they didn’t believe the rot they are shovelled? I’ve been to Catholic church many times with my devout girlfriend, and there can be no mistaking the reverence that shines in the eyes of these deluded folk. My girlfriend believes in the reality of heaven and hell, that Jesus saved us, etc., and I have given up trying to persuade her otherwise; and, as far as can tell, she is a typical churchgoing Catholic.
As for John Esposito, yes, he is clearly an apologist for Islam, masquerading as a scholar. And, unfortunately, even many skeptics are completely unaware that Islam developed slowly, probably over two centuries, most likely in Syria, from its origins as a spinoff from Judaism and Christianity, and that the traditional account of how it started with Mohammed is a lie. Take a look at some of the writings of Ibn Warraq to get started, if you’re interested in the actual history of Islam, with its probably invented founder.
And I like Ophelia’s comment. If Baggini is awakening to the fact that the “new” atheists have had right all along, then I agree an apology is in order.
“Sacred texts” are the worst poison there is.
Ophelia, you’re so right. And it’s not that I didn’t know it over the years. I tried again and again to humanise the use of them. It simply does not work. In the end, the text remains, and the commentary is forgotten. Sacred texts are, as you say, the worst poison there is. You can never escape their influence. It seems to go on forever, no matter what we find out about the world or about ourselves — in the end, for the believer, everything is filtered through those ancient texts. It is demeaning and dehumanising, and we need to get beyond the ancient illusion that texts are somehow divine. It is an illusion, I think, brought about by the early reverence for language. The idea that God could create through the word, and that to be able to say God’s name was somehow to mess with occult powers: these ideas are still latent in these ancient texts.
Sophisticated theologians are in the business of replicating ancient Greek fun-with-epicycles. They had a model of the universe that served well enough for a good while, squaring with naked-eye, folk understanding, and as the observations about reality got better and better, the exceptions, special cases, and hidden layers start to multiply, until we arrive as some clanking, useless monstrosity- where God is the nonentity totality of everything that occasionally whispers via quantum ___ about Jesus.