Monthly Archives: February 2012

Evolution-ism v. Creatolution

Standard

There’s a new Guardian article from the “be kind to little old ladies of faith” school, claiming that there is no incompatibility between religious faith and evolution. The same author also suggested, in a much earlier Guardian article, that, while we may want to approach religion sceptically, we should not deprive people of religious consolation. As the author, Andrew Holding, says:

Should we ignore religion altogether? No, but do not attack it for being without evidence; it is a pointless discussion. Question it, fight it even, when it is used to oppress, control or exert superiority over others. Just do not hurt the individual, the believer who does not want their hopes shattered.

The strange thing is that I used to be told the very same thing back in the days when I was an active priest in the church. I was told to take it easy on my radical theology, because we should be considerate of the old folks whose whole life and hope is tied up in the faith as traditionally understood. It’s odd to be told that unbelievers should also show the same kind of condescending consideration for the old faithful. In those days I thought that by bringing religion up to date, and trying as much as I could to make it consistent with a contemporary understanding of the world, that I was approaching more nearly to the truth, and at that time, like Denis Alexander and Karl Giberson, I’d have been a bit miffed if I had been told that faith and science were incompatible. But I did realise, for all that, that faith had to be redacted pretty radically in order to make this compatibility credible. As it stood, I believed, and still believe, traditional Christian faith is incompatible with science. Indeed, it seemed to me at the time that Don Cupitt was right, and that it was necessary to rethink faith in non-realist terms, if we were to be able to be people of faith (or of “faith”) in the modern world. In other words, we had to accept that the atheists were right, and that religious thought had to be acknowledged to be wholly a human creation, and that our concept of god was, in some sense, a moral ideal that we celebrated in the songs and stories of faith.

Continue reading →

About these ads

“Over It” – The rant of an angry, Agnostic, British, Indo-Pakistani woman of Muslim heritage

Standard

Posted on February 27, 2012 | 5 Comments | Thanks to Ophelia for the link to Opinionista’s blog

I am over Muslim communities from the same locality celebrating Eid on three different days because they believe that “sighting the moon” in Saudi Barbaria is more accurate than astronomical observatory data. I am over British employers feeling obliged to accommodate this nonsense by giving Muslims days off at short notice due to uncertainty relating to the date.

I am over conservative members of my community trying to impose religious teachings, practices and gender segregation in community gatherings, weddings etc and expecting women to cover their hair during a prayer that none of us asked them to perform.

I am over the complete ignorance by Muslims and non Muslims (particularly UK politicians and media) alike of the fact that “Muslim communities” contain non religious, spiritual people like me, as well as Atheist people and Agnostic people.

I am over my community b*tching about “The Satanic Verses”, even though most of them have never read it.

I am over UK politicians like Ken Livingstone kissing the arses of Islamist anti-human rights fundamentalists like Yusuf al Qaradawi and pretending to know what non religious cultural Muslims [like me] need and want from life in the UK.

Read more ….

Did the Bible get it Wrong? The Hermeneutic Auction

Standard

The Christian response to the Bible is so diverse it’s really quite hard to say how Christians, in general, receive the writings that compose their holy book, whether they think of it as inspired, and in what way, or whether they acknowledge it as a human work, providing a glimpse of how people in a particular tradition gradually developed their own perception of god and god’s doings. Of course, it makes an enormous difference to the way others should regard believers. If, like some fundamentalists, you take it that the Bible is not only inspired, but is inspired in a plenary way, so that every last word in it is suffused with divine significance, no matter how peripheral it seems to what might be thought of as its central message, then the Bible imposes immense challenges to rational thought about Christian belief. However, if, on the other hand, you take the Bible to be the work of inspired authors, who, while conveying something of their god’s message for believers, who did not in any way subvert their humanity in the course of inspiring them to write as they did, you will have a completely different understanding of how the Bible conveys god’s word. Indeed, you might fairly think the problem insoluble, since, in order to dig down to the sedimented thoughts of god expressed in human words, you will have to play fast and loose with some parts of the Bible while you take other parts of the Bible with intense and even reverent seriousness.

This question arose in a fairly general way in the discussion between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams in the Sheldonian Theatre the other day, so looking at what the archbishop had to say on the subject is as good a way into the subject as any. The question arose as to why the writers of sacred scripture, being inspired by god to write as they did, should have got the whole business of the origins of the universe and human life so completely wrong, if, indeed, it was god who inspired them. After all, if god did inspire them, and if, in fact, it would have been possible for god to reveal the secrets of the origin of the universe and life to the sacred writers, why did the writings inspired by god not achieve something that more nearly approximated to what we know from science about the origins of the universe and human beings?  Here is the archbishop’s response:

Error
This video doesn’t exist

Now, this sounds to me particularly unsatisfactory as an answer. The sacred writers, we are to suppose, didn’t get it wrong; they told us what god wanted us to know — and at this point the archbishop gets all theological and speaks about the free creation, human beings and their dominion (although he doesn’t say this), and how human beings got it wrong. The point about dominion is this: If in fact the origin stories constitute a summary of what god wanted us to know, then one of the vital things that we needed to know was how it came about that human beings became responsible for sinfulness. The archbishop cleverly avoids the issue of sin and the fall, but this is basically what is at the heart of the story as he expresses it — the way human beings have made such a mess of things.

Continue reading →

Not a right hook in sight

Standard

This is going to be quite a short post, since I have to go see the doctor this morning. Before reading further, first listen to Giles Fraser’s “Thinking out loud” from the Guardian for this morning, 27th February 2012.

Giles Fraser on the Dawkins – Williams “debate”

Now that you’ve done so, you can see, I hope, how hopelessly adrift Fraser is. It’s not because he says something outré, or anything like that. The problem is that he didn’t listen to the so-called “debate”, which was about as far as you get from what he calls a boxing match style set-piece debate, and the misperception that the truth lies in some sort of ”intellectual muscularity”.  Even more difficult, Fraser suggests, is the idea that faith and unfaith exist in some sort of binary opposition, for he cannot see how faith can exist without doubt.

Now, there’s some good sense here, because, for a thoughtful faith, at any rate, is always coupled with doubt, the kind of doubt, for example, expressed by Job, or even, as Fraser suggests, by Jesus on the cross. This sense of having been betrayed, that at least one of the Passion narratives in the gospel expresses in the famous words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” shows, suggests, as Fraser claims, that doubt not only is the constant accompaniment of faith, but is an integral part of it.

Continue reading →

The Blind leading the Sighted. The Deaf listening for a Sign.

Standard

The blind leading the blind. Won’t they all fall into the ditch? A good lesson to learn from Jesus, but they’re still doing it. But what if they’re deaf too and those they lead can both hear and see? That’s an even bigger problem, that Jesus didn’t even consider. And Catholic leaders are like that. They can neither hear nor see. They simply won’t listen to people sometimes — especially if you’re suffering or dying; it’s as though the suffering and the dying are mute and invisible. The last pope actually said that when people ask for help to die, they are not really asking for help to die! He wasn’t listening. He could not hear. And what he said was a lie. He knew, just as you and I know, that people do choose to die, and that sometimes that decision can be rational and consistent with the life of the person who makes that decision. Which brings to mind the terrible story in the Daily Mail the other day. A woman suffering from MS asked her sister to help her get to Dignitas in Switzerland. According to the report:

When her sister refused to pay for her flight to the Zurich clinic, Carol Hutchins rode in her wheelchair for two miles to throw herself in a canal.

The paper is likely to have got this part wrong — journalists almost always do. The issue is complicated, and fraught with nuances and qualifications that newspapers are unlikely to reflect. Nevertheless, Carol was desperate. According to her father, who testified at the coroner’s inquest:

Carol was a very courageous woman but at the end of the day she has demonstrated a need for euthanasia in this country.

People say life is precious but there comes a point when life is not precious and it becomes torture for those that are living.

Carol had thought about going to Dignitas in Switzerland but it is very expensive and it puts other people in a difficult position.

It showed tremendous courage for her to do what she did all alone and I believe that she had planned it after having enough of being a prisoner in her own home.

She knew one more setback could leave her totally immobilised and she wouldn’t be able to do anything for herself and she would just be washed, dressed and stuck in front of the television. [my italics]

Continue reading →

Holy Books and the Value of Human Life

Standard

For another look at this issue, see Lauryn Oates’ article: Killing for a Book, or at Butterflies and Wheels.

________________________________________________________

Two or three days ago Jerry Coyne did a post on his website Why Evolution is True, about burning Qu’rans and killing people. The title gives us a clue as to the question to which he was seeking an answer: “Eight dead because four Qur’ans burned.” He begins by asking this pointed question:

How many lives does it take to expiate four charred books?

The answer should be – None! Books are made of paper. They neither feel nor see nor make plans for the future. They are human artifacts. And whether they are considered holy by some does not change this fact. They may, of course, be very valuable works of art, and their destruction might be considered an act or acts of wanton vandalism. Their destruction could, in some cases, amount to acts of incitement to violence. But in themselves books are inert things, and can be disposed of without reverence or ceremony. Certainly, those who burned the four Qu’rans in Afghanistan did not do so from any sense of malice or irreverence, and yet the discovery of some scorched pages led to hysterical protests which led to a mounting death toll which now, I think, stands at 20 or more. Some twenty lives lost because, without intending to offend, some books were burned! Is that a fair trade?

In the comment stream after Jerry’s post, the question arose, and was discussed in some detail, about how one might justify violence such as this, violence in which lives were traded for offended sensibilities. One commenter suggested that the justification of the protests

might take the form of seeing the protests as the outpouring of stored up anger and outrage over other things more serious than burning Qu’rans. Quoting from the New York Times article from which this picture was taken, this commenter took the view of the man who said:

“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.

“They always admit their mistakes,” he said. “They burn our Koran, and then they apologize. You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”

And that may seem to be a fair characterisation, but why did the act of disrespecting the dead and killing children not spark this level of protest? When little girls had acid thrown in their faces, why was there no comparable level of anger? Surely throwing acid and disfiguring little girls is much more horrible than burning books? When teachers were murdered and schools razed, why no protest? When Malalai Karkar was murdered, why did protestors not throng the streets of Kandahar?

One might at least try to understand it, if people’s lives were lost because they were protesting wanton disrespect shown to the dead, or what was deemed to be unnecessary collateral harm caused by military operations. But the to and fro-ing of the discussion, pointing out the harm that NATO involvement in Afghanistan has done, and countering with harms done by the Taliban, or other forces, doesn’t answer the question about the destruction of holy books and the religious offence taken thereat, and the deaths consequent upon the latter, no matter whose lives were taken, whether soldiers or protestors. We can do better than this.

Continue reading →

On not paying attention

Standard
The Sheldonian Theatre, Broad Street, Oxford

Yesterday afternoon (23 February 2012), at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford (a Christopher Wren masterpiece, built 1664-68, named after the Chancellor of Oxford University at the time, Archbishop Sheldon, onetime Archbishop of Canterbury, at whose expense the theatre was built and endowed), Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams (the Archbishop of Canterbury) had a discussion on the origins of life, human life, and the universe, the existence of god, and the nature of human beings. The discussion was moderated by the philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny. It was, everything considered, a very good discussion, very civilised and decorous, which showed both Richard Dawkins and the archbishop as thoughtful, polite, and mutually respectful. Indeed, the Richard Dawkins we regularly see and hear on television and on the net, or in any of his writings, is a very different one from the one so often depicted by (what can only be called) his enemies; for there is little or nothing about Dawkins that is shrill or strident, in the normal acceptation of those words.

Even when confronted by the most obnoxious and dim-witted of creationists he manages to keep his cool, and to address them with respect and consideration. Here he is in conversation with the American creationist Wendy Wright of “Concerned Women for America.” Dawkins is clearly frustrated, but he is courteous and restrained, and he does his best to help this irritating fundamentalist see some sense, but there is simply no way into such a closed mind. She pays no attention to Dawkins’ words, she constantly interrupts, and despite Dawkins’ very clear answers, maintains her insistently irritating manner throughout. However, with respect to Dawkins, it is a study in restraint, and puts the lie to those who speak condescendingly of Richard Dawkins as shrill and strident. You don’t need to watch the whole of it — though if you want to, go here (I warn you beforehand: it is almost impossible to watch the whole of it without having the urge to hurl things across the room): this is just a short clip from around fifty minutes of video.

Error
This video doesn’t exist

And we are to suppose that this is the shrill and strident Dawkins of legend! Could have fooled me. Name me one other person who would not have simply given up in despair when faced with such a challenge!

Continue reading →

Neither the singer nor the song

Standard

In his “progress of heathenism” series over at the Guardian Julian Baggini has gone from pillar to post and back again without once acknowledging that he’s got the whole thing wrong from the beginning. He just has to be right. The new atheists are a bunch of football hooligans, and by the Lord Harry, he’s going to persevere with this view no matter what the truth is. A few weeks ago he had all but acknowledged that religion really is about belief, and that those beliefs really had no foundation in reality. But now he’s claiming that, regardless of their contentlessness, like some song lyrics, it’s really the music (the tone) that matters, not the words at all. So, when the archbishop of Canterbury says — as he apparently did last night in his debate at the Sheldonian with Richard Dawkins (as the Independent reports) – that while he accepts the findings of science, he reserves the right to consult the Bible over other matters having to do with human meaning and purpose, he was talking about content, not tone. As the archbishop said:

“The writers of the Bible, inspired as I believe they were, were not inspired to do 21st-century physics; they were inspired to pass on to their readers what God wanted them to know,” Williams argued. “In the first book of the Bible is the basic information – the universe depends on God, humanity has a very distinctive role in that universe, and humanity has made rather a mess of it.”

Speaking about tone in this context, I’m afraid, just won’t do. The inspired writers, we are to suppose, passed “on to their readers what God wanted them to know.” The problem here, as the problem always is when it comes to religious belief, is that others choose other books that are held to contain the revelation of what God wanted people to know, and, to use the expression from the Passion narratives, “their testimony did not agree.” The basis for claiming a revelation of what God wants us to know simply doesn’t work, and it really doesn’t matter what tone of voice you say it in. The pretence that speaking about tone at this point will make some kind of substantial difference is just a way of avoiding the issue, not of responding to questions that must be asked. The Bible is not a song lyric, where, in fact, let it be acknowledged, the tone may make all the difference. The Bible is a work which purportedly contains the revelation of a god, and this makes all the difference, we are supposed to think, with how we are required to live our lives.

Continue reading →

Déjà vu all over again. A collection of clippings. Militant what?!

Standard

It seems, almost, that history is undergoing a reprise of the struggles of the Enlightenment. It is déjà vu all over again. The thought occurred to me as I was leafing this morning through Jonathan Israel’s very big book on The Radical Enlightenment, and I had the strange sensation that the Enlightenment may never have happened in the first place. It was just that history imagined it, imagined that people had criticised religion, even abandoned it, that they had formed governments based on the critique of religion, that they made efforts to exclude religion from the realm of political decision-making. Suddenly, it almost seems as though the idea that religion should be excluded from the public square, or that decisions regarding what governments can do and what laws they can pass should be distanced from the religious convictions of those who are making them, had never occurred to anyone, and that the wall between church and state had never been built — as if Christians had never themselves pointed to this separation as being a distinctive feature Western governments influenced by Christianity.

What about all the daring things that men (and women too) had said about religion — still nervously glancing towards the executioner, who might still burn a book or a living body or two – about their desire to be freed at last from religious beliefs imposed and monitored by the state, about their desire to think for themselves, to stand on their own two feet, instead of being confined in the intellectual Gängelwagen that Kant believed we could now dispense with? What happened to them that they need now to be defended once again? How is it possible, in this year 2012 of the Common Era, long after Spinoza’s Jewish confrères excluded him from the synagogue with ponderous execrations and condemnations, and erased him from the book of life, long after religion began to seem so unessential to the common good, whatever it might do for individual believers, who would not, as Kant bade them do, let go of their self-imposed minority, and grow to adult stature, able to think their own thoughts, dream their own dreams, and rule their own lives — how is it possible, after all this, that the criticism of religion should arouse so much alarm and despondency, so much heated rhetoric and condemnation? Have today’s Christians just emerged from snorting in the seven sleepers’ den?

Continue reading →

Religion doesn’t get much more stupid than this

Standard

What is the role of religion in public life? A few days ago Baroness Warsi led a government delegation to the Vatican to warn of militant secularism, and to enlist the pope in the fight against it, a fight he has shown himself all too willing to support. Indeed, the pope has made himself ridiculous in his campaign against the supposedly militant secularism and relativism of the age, forgetting that he has been far more shrilly militant than any of the usual suspects on the side of secularism, so Baroness Warsi could be confident that her seeds were being sown in fertile ground. The pope’s warning against Hitlerism and atheism last year was so idiotically farfetched, especially coming from a former member of the Hitler Jugend, that it is surprising that his credibility did not sink like a stone. Only the exaggerated respect for the office of pope could save him — as it did.

However, the pope’s credibility notwithstanding, the fact that the Baroness cannot point to one unequivocal piece of evidence that there is anything militant about secularism, and despite the fact that the secular movement itself was initiated by Christians to keep peace amongst themselves at a time when they couldn’t convince each other by fire and sword, indicates that her mission was more in the nature of a public relations stunt than a mission of serious import. For all that the pope has said, or that his effete yet squabbling minions in the Vatican can do, and not forgetting the growing rage of evangelical Christians who are lamenting the fact that they can no longer with impunity disadvantage those whom they most despise, nothing that Warsi could say would convince a reasonable person that there is any real threat from a militant secularism on the march. Read another way, her speech could be understood as a warning that militant religiousness constituted a real threat to the Reformation settlement that has kept the peace in Britain since the Glorious Revolution, and its early glimmerings of secular democracy; and this suggests that, despite everything, despite Lord Carey’s hysterical opposition to gay marriage and in support of the public display of religious symbols and religious prejudice against gay people, that the religions are not only not suffering, but are more lively and opinionated than ever. Of course, as Dawkins has pointed out, what may be happening is that people are losing their faith, because faith itself is gradually losing its power to convince, but that is an entirely different thing.

Continue reading →