Choice in Dying

I have decided to raise one of my comments on my last post to the status of a post. I paste it here without comment, though with a couple spelling corrections.

RJH. I’m not quite sure I’m not trying to have a conversation in a calm way. Indeed, I am surprised that you should think otherwise just because I disagreed with you. I don’t think there is any evidence in Ibn Warraq’s book that he is a religious pilgrim. It is a root-and-branch rejection of religious ways of looking at the world, and a repudiation of his childhood faith. There is no evidence in the book for anything else, not a smidgeon of doubt, not an indication of sorrow at leaving faith behind. It takes some ambivalence in order to pass from faith to unfaith, if there is a pilgrimage. I do not read this is Ibn Warraq’s book. Whereas my life has been a religious pilgrimage from start to finish, never seeming able, quite, to rid myself of childhood indoctrination, Warraq seemed to make the transition with relative ease (I say relative ease, because he does not make us privy to the personal aspects of this transition).

I still think that, while what you say in the Foreward Foreword (I’m not sure what the niggling point you are trying to make about that is all about. I am quite aware of what a foreward foreword in a book is, even though I continue to misspell it! — just as my fingers tend to spell ‘saint’ as ‘satin’ every time), about the assumption made by the reformers is correct, it does not seem to me to be correct in the way that you say. The reformers believed that scripture in fact gave them access to human knowledge of God, and they were wrong. That may have come to them as a surprise, though in fact there are still many prominent Christians who still believe that this is true. So it did not come as a surprise to some that knowledge of scripture and knowledge of the world are in fact different, because they still treat scripture as a source of such knowledge. McGrath writes a scientific theology, after all, and uses the Bible unproblematically as a source of knowledge, still working assiduously at the reformation paradigm, and Biologos thinks of Christianity as fully compatible with scientific knowledge, despite the fact that the critical study of the Bible has really brought such illusions to an end.

You seem to think that the conclusions reached in university departments of religious studies have had a significant effect on the way religious believers believe, but for many (and perhaps for most) this is simply not true. Most Christians that I know read the Bible in a fairly straightforward way (if they read it at all) as revealing truths about God’s work amongst us, and indeed many clergy, in my experience, after trying to speak from what they learned at university or theological school, revert to a fairly conservative view of the scriptures and what they tell us. Telling them that scripture is to be read figuratively still comes as quite a surprise to them, even though they have been taught to read scripture in that way. For the most part, clergy do not find that this learning is helpful in dealing with lay Christians, many of whom share the reformers zeal and belief that the scripture is a fairly straightforward account of God’s dealings with us.

This is why, as it seems to me, it is hard to speak of Why I am not a Muslim as a religious pilgrimage. It is simply too wide awake to the fact that the religious categories in which Warraq was made to think as a child simply lost any reasonable sense or application once the period of his indoctrination was safely in the past. I think here of people like Ayan Hirsi Ali, who also made a rapid and what seems to be a total transition from Islam to secular humanism. No religious pilgrimage for her, simply a repudiation of something that belonged to her years of tutelage, and was then cast aside. This is a very different experience to the experience of a protestant Christian making the same transition, for in this case the assumption of compatibility is always there dogging one’s footsteps, and then it does indeed become a religious pilgrimage, with hesitations and backslidings, until some major obstacle pushes them out of the tradition altogether (and even then it is not quite gone). Islam, never having accommodated to secular knowledge, seems to present only two options, faithfulness or apostacy, and it is not surprising, therefore, to see a very different kind of movement from faith to unfaith in the case of those brought up within the confining boundaries of Islam.

You say that the point is niggling, but I think it is very important, indicating as it does the very different relationship that Muslims have as they make a transition away from faith. It also indicates why it is so very much more difficult a transition for them to make. Protestant Christians, by the very presuppositions upon which reformation theology is based, are half out of the church already. They can make the transition through various degrees of liberalism to full unbelief, or they can maintain a kind of non-realist attachment to the traditions of faith, something in the manner of Don Cupitt or Richard Holloway, while being in fact, for all intents and purposes, completely secular unbelievers.

As to your parting shot:

Shame that we can’t have this conversation in a calmer way: you strike me as someone who might have been a sensible conversation partner. Perhaps we are too far into insult hurling and silliness P Z style for any such conversation to take place. It is a shame that that’s what it’s come to.

That comes as a bit of a surprise to me, since you have, for the last while, been the one hurling the insults. You have spent a good bit of time slandering me, and I have often wondered what I had done to deserve your focused animus and contempt. For example, you said this:

MacDonald’s blog lives up to his name: a crap diet at discounted prices with no nutritional value and volumes of waste that disintegrates slowly and pollutes the environment. I thought at first his blog was just the meandering of a senior citizen with an arthritic conscience. Now I realize it is the work of an old man who can’t read.

Ophelia Benson points out that this was undeserved, and noted that you also called me a “smeghead”. And, while it may be true that I sometimes read things at speed and sometimes answer precipitately, I don’t think I deserved that. You have also said:

Macdonald is the poster boy for angry village atheist. Having a bad religious experience is no more excuse for being obnoxious than getting faith is an excuse for religious zealotry. -And no, he doesn’t read’ he’s too busy phlegming.

But one thing I am not is an angry village atheist. I have a great deal of fondness for my years as an active priest in the church, and for the opportunity to share my life with so many others, especially in times of trouble, despair and grief. But I did find, in the circumstances of my wife’s illness and wish to die before being trapped in her body by MS, that the church was an obstacle in the way, and anything that stood in her way in the way that the church did (and still does) deserves my contempt and repudiation. The inhumanity of the church, whilst all the while protesting its humanity and compassion, is the last face of the church that I saw.

But then, to continue with your “calm” appreciation of me and my attempts to express my views, and even to argue for them, in your latest, you say:

Unfortunately MacDonald has become just another horn [drone?] in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers. His constant theme is that theology is not worth the trouble. That’s an odd enough thesis for an atheist. More troubling is the fact that MacDonald doesn’t seem to know bloody anything about the academic study of religion and pretends that there is no difference between what he read as a young priest (mainly liberal post-Tillichian pap) and what’s being taught to PhD candidates in Religion at Harvard. It’s all ignorant bravado, but unfortunately some people read him, people like…

And while I have answered, to some extent, in kind, I don’t think I have stooped quite so low. If you think I am wrong, then it seems to me that you might take the effort to say what is wrong, and not simply repeat silly remarks about my lack of academic credibility. For instance, in responding to a hasty comment made late last night before going to sleep, you make some points, but you don’t address the concerns that I express in this post, upon which that comment was made.

You are an academic student of religion, and so you know more than I do. Big deal. I must write from the well, however shallow, of my own knowledge. Religion, it seems to me, is an obstacle on the road to a better world. You think I should spend more time reading and becoming an expert on religion, but I’ve spent a lifetime in religion, at the coalface, as it were, and religious belief, in my own estimation, comes up wanting. I write about that, but you think I am unqualified to speak about it at all. I am just and old man who can’t read. That’s not an answer.

I could easily say the same kinds of thing about you, but for the most part I forbear, though I have ventured in to the same territory from time to time.When you are ready to have a reasonable conversation, I am prepared to have it, but I am not going to bow down before your gods of academe in order to begin the process. I think religion, while obviously an important cultural project at the present time, given the numbers of people involved in it, is responsible for the continuing ignorance of so many people that it is almost impossible to build a world that is sane, safe and sensible. Show me how religion might contribute to such a world and I will change my tune. But there is so much plain inhumanity practiced in the name of religion that I don’t see my tune changing any time soon.

But do, if you like, have a pleasant conversation. I’m always open to such a thing, but all I hear from you on your blog is insult and vituperation, and an unwillingness even to consider the points of view of others. Your remarks about Jason Rosenhouse, Ophelia Benson, Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers are completely off the wall. Jason Rosenhouse, for example, in his comments on the Bible and hermeneutics, has some very sound things to say, in my view, and instead of berating him, if you find what he says wrong, the least you could do is to offer your own view of the same matters. Failing to do that, and indulging in abuse instead, is not, in my own experience anyway, the way that experts are supposed to behave. You have your echo Stephanie Fisher, but she is so full of hot air that it is hard to believe that you find her kind of sycophancy genuinely rewarding. But I have read some of the things you have done for Butterflies and Wheels, so I know you are capable of better than you now do. If you want to address the issues that interest me in a reasonable tone of voice, without the obvious animus, and without the continuing patronising tone, then we might get somewhere. Failing that, we will continue this online duel which accomplishes so little.