Monthly Archives: October 2012

Harbinger of the Apocalypse?

Standard

In a recent comment Steve Oberski said:

Eric, I hope you realize that Windows 8 is a harbinger of the apocalypse.

Well, it has been for me. I have spent the last two days trying to straighten out my computer, and now, in order to save what I had not yet backed up (except as a system recovery archive) on Windows 7, I have to buy a new hard drive, so that I can restore my backed up Windows 7, which got rubbished trying to install Windows 8 as part of a dual boot system. Not only that, but I have found out that Windows 8 is less capable of multi-tasking than Windows 7, which is really a lot better at running two or three programs at the same time. And the new interface is pure hell, and possibly even uglier than hell itself, so I have installed a utility that gives me back the start button, and the familiar Windows interface. I don’t know what got into Microsoft, but the people over in Redmond seem to have taken leave of their senses. There are some things I like about Windows 8, but not enough to make it an attractive alternative to Windows 7. I’d chuck it out, except that there are some things I like, and it makes sense to try to keep up to date.

However, that’s not what I set out to write. As I went through my list of newspapers this morning, trying to keep up with at least some of the news, I noticed that there were a number of articles about gay and lesbian relationships and rights. As usual, the Guardian takes the vanguard, announcing in uncompromising tones that “There is no place for homophobia in the church, anywhere in the world” — a short op-ed (an edited version of a speech delivered in the House of Lords) by Tim Stevens, Bishop of Leicester (pronounced like the name Lester, incidentally), which shows a picture of Desmond Tutu with the caption:

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who said that persecuting LGBT people was the ultimate  blasphemy.

That can be taken as a very forward-looking point of view, or it may be thought of as simply a restatement of the church’s view that homosexuality, though a defect, is not something on account of which people should be persecuted. Even the Roman Catholic Church, given to making pretty definitive pronouncements on moral matters, holds that, while a grave disorder, homosexuals “must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2358) Well, that’s that then!

Continue reading →

About these ads

Eschaton Again

Standard

Let me remind you, once again — as if you can’t see the advertising on the side panel — of the Eschaton 2012 Conference coming up in Ottawa at the end of November. I do not hold out my own appearance there as a carrot, but there are quite enough real carrots dangling on sticks to prod you on to join us, including PZ Myers, Ophelia Benson, Udo Schuklenk, and more. Besides, if you have been following the conversations on choiceindying.com, I’d be really privileged to meet you if you can make it. So, if you have the time, inclination and the wherewithal to come, I personally would be thrilled to see you there. So, give it a though, will you? Come along and celebrate the end times — and make it a new beginning!

Ezekiel Emmanuel is wrong about assisted dying

Standard

In the New York Times this morning Ezekiel Emmanuel has a short op-ed piece entitled “Four Myths about Doctor-Assisted Suicide“. Ezekiel Emmanuel, in case you didn’t know, is the brother of Rahm Emmanuel, former White House Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago. His brother Ezekiel has been writing negative things about assisted suicide for years, and takes this opportunity — so close to the election — to keep playing his game of denial (based, I believe, largely on a misreading of the historical evidence regarding the reasons for the contemporary interest in assisted dying), because the question is being debated in New Jersey and is on the ballot in Massachusetts in the upcoming election.

So, what are the four myths about assisted suicide that Emmanuel seeks to disclose, and how valid are the points he is seeking to make? The first one has to do with pain. This is predictable, for the truth is that pain is not the only or the main reason why people seek assisted dying. Indeed, most people who opt for assisted dying have other things on their mind. This is now well-known. Emmanuel says that they are depressed, but that is not the point. Of course, when you are dying or are suffering from seriously chronic degenerative conditions, or severe disability (such as Tony Nicklinson), there is every chance that you won’t be in the best frame of mind, but to speak of depression at this point is scarcely relevant. Some opponents of assisted dying think that depression is a good reason not to provide help to die for those so afflicted, but this is a ridiculous requirement if, in fact, the decision is made in circumstances where one might reasonably be depressed, and, indeed, people who suffer from pathological forms of depression over many years, and who have had enough of life lived under a dark cloud, are reasonable candidates for assistance to die, if that is what they choose. Depression itself is not necessarily an impediment to reasonable or autonomous choice.

Continue reading →

Wouldn’t Giles Fraser simply be happier if he could stop believing?

Standard

Giles Fraser’s installation as Canon Chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral — strange to think that the disciples who were sent out two by two, according to the gospels, should have ended up in a pack of richly dressed men and women! Anglicans know how to do pomp and ceremony!

I like Giles Fraser. He sometimes has interesting things to say, and even sometimes sounds quite profound. He showed admirable loyalty to moral principle when he resigned as Canon Chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, over the “Occupy” protests last year, an act which took a considerable degree of courage, not only because he put himself out of a pretty high profile job, but also because such kinds of public criticism of the church are not welcomed by the those higher up the ladder of privilege in the church than he then was. Yet I have to admit when I read some of his columns for the Guardian, I strikes me that he has a repressed desire to go even further and simply dismiss the great religious game altogether. Of course, I may be wrong, but, given the example of his latest Guardian column — “Confusion may cause us anxiety, but it is a rational reaction to life’s mysteries” — it seems to me he’d be a lot happier in the ranks of atheists and humanists than he is in the church.

However, that’s pretty loose speculation. Let’s begin at the top, where he speaks about being a clutz at languages, and parlays being a dork into a criticism of “scientific atheism.” Trying to learn Hebrew, he says, was like being thrown in at the deep end; he was simply all at sea, and yet, he suggests, that’s a pretty rational place to be:

It feels like learning to swim by being thrown in the pool. And at the moment there is nothing to reach out and grab on to. Yet perhaps this is the only way. No one ever learnt to swim on land. Learning is doing. And yet the curious thing is, I don’t really mind the feeling of being confused. In fact, I find that confused is a pretty rational reaction to most things in life. I suspect the people who are not generally confused by life haven’t been paying attention.

It reminds me of the time when, having just begun at university, I walked into the stacks of the library, and despaired of ever coming to know all that I wanted, so much, to learn. Then, of course, I realized, having overcome my initial sense of panic, that one learned one step at a time, though the sense of confusion and sometimes even panic still assails me at times, especially now that I know the end is much nearer than it was in those far off days, when I was just beginning. And I do, very often, feel more confused, and have the sense of knowing less, than I did when I began, for I was more confident then, and not a little taken with my wit and verve, much of which has been wrung out of me by the changes and chances of life.

Continue reading →

The Hyperbole of Holiness

Standard

I am trying, though it is a great trial to do so, to read Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology. (You may be even pleased to see that this is, as a consequence, perhaps one of my shortest posts!) A lot of Method in Theology, I am afraid, strikes me as just a matter of words tacked onto each other which effectively construct hyperbolic scenarios which, because of the nature of the hyperbole, signify nothing. I offer the following in evidence:

… religious conversion goes beyond moral. Questions for intelligence, for reflection, for deliberation reveal the eros of the human spirit, its capacity and its desire for self-transcendence. But that capacity meets fulfilment, that desire turns to joy, when religious conversion transforms the existential subject into a subject in love, a subject held, grasped, possessed, owned through a total and so an other-worldly love. [224]

There is simply no justification for taking the urge to understand as a capacity, let alone a desire, for self-transcendence, whatever that means. But then, when he builds on the intellectual drive to know, and goes on to speak of moral conversion, and suggests that religious conversion does not negate the fruits of moral conversion, as though we are building on assured results, there is no reason to take the words seriously. “In no way,” he affirms confidently, “are the fruits of intellectual or moral conversion negated or diminished [by religious conversion].” [224] But by yoking mind and morality with religion by using the word ‘conversion’, Lonergan is simply being misleading. For he then he goes on to speak of the fruits of religious conversion as something which vaults far beyond intellectual or moral conversion (leave aside what these may be reasonably thought to be, even if there is a reasonable explanation for them). We are not to think that religious conversion provides only “a more efficacious ground for the pursuit of intellectual and moral ends.” In other words, intellectual and moral conversion are diminished by religious conversion. Because it is at this point that we come to the hyperbole:

Religious loving is without conditions, qualifications, reservations: it is with all one’s heart, and all one’s soul and all one’s mind and all one’s strength. This lack of limitation, though it corresponds to the unrestricted character of of human questioning, does not pertain to this world. Holiness abounds in true and moral goodness, but it has a distinct dimension of its own. It is other-worldly fulfilment, joy, peace, bliss. In Christian experience these are the fruits of being in love with a mysterious, uncomprehended God. [224]

You didn’t know that so much hyperbole could be squeezed onto one page, although in his exuberance he spills over onto the next a line or too, but this time in a negative, Manichaean exaggeration, for, immediately after the preceding, he writes:

Sinfulness similarly is distinct from moral evil; it is the privation of total loving; it is a radical dimension of lovelessness.

And all this, without a bit of evidence at all, or any obvious reason why we should think that anything is being said.

Continue reading →

This tape will self-destruct in five seconds

Standard

The title is a signature expression from the TV series “Mission Impossible,” but every time I read an op-ed by Andrew Brown I think of it. There is something peculiar about Andrew Brown, something ephemeral, something that seems likely simply to self-destruct once you have read it. Whether it is the shallowness or the smugness, or, sometimes, just the sheer, unrehearsed lunacy of what he writes, what he says often seems to be expendable, even throw-away language, something like the individual ice-cream containers from which you used to eat with a wooden spoon and then throw in the garbage. His latest op-ed — or whatever his evanescent attempts at profundity are called — is perhaps the acme of this kind of irrelevance, but it is something he never tires of. Whether he is himself religious or not, it is yet another attempt to show that any alternative to religion is a religion too, and so essentially incoherent. Does he not read his stuff over again, just to make sure that it makes sense, before he sends it out naked into the world? He entitles it “Humanism is an impossible dream,” but then goes on in what is perhaps the most extended digression that he has ever indulged, and really doesn’t get to the point at all. As I have said before, it’s time the Grauniad (did you know that grauniad.co.uk directs you to the Guardian?) gave him a golden handshake and let him retire to the Home Counties, where he will still be close enough to the centres of power he conceives himself to be influencing, but not close enough to continue to embarrass himself and his newspaper.

Anyway, to the substance of this post — the impossible dream of humanism. Brown even links to the statement of purpose to which he takes such exception. Here is the impossible dream:

The British Humanist Association (BHA) is the national charity representing and supporting the non-religious and campaigning for an end to religious privilege and discrimination based on religion or belief. It exists to support and represent people who seek to live good and responsible lives without religious or superstitious beliefs.

Brown (God love him!) thinks that this is not a coherent idea. He suggests — contrary to Paul Wallace, who thinks that atheists are altogether too optimistic — that a programme defined in this way makes itself “dependent on what you are not.” It’s a bit like saying that the religious believers in a god are dependent on those who claim that there is not one. Saying that the BHA represents people who live responsibly without religious beliefs, says nothing at all that is dependent on those beliefs. But there are believers and unbelievers. Believers have possessed, for almost the entirety of history, special and privileged access to the corridors of power, something about which Brown cannot be completely oblivious. And yet that is how it seems. Unbelievers do need someone to represent them, for the religious have so many powerful voices that it is hard for the message of unbelief to be heard above the cacophony of competing religious voices.

Continue reading →

When Darkness Falls

Standard

Spring and Fall:

to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

In his book, The Choice of Hercules, A. C. Grayling includes a very necessary chapter entitled “When Darkness Falls” (Chapter 3), in which he discusses, as he must, times when we are sick or dying or grieving, for life is not always summer afternoon. Indeed, as Grayling says,

[t]o live is to contract for loss. Only if you die before the deaths of people you care about, and never separate from any of them because of a quarrel or because they move away or abroad — in short: only if every one of the thousands of exit doors that take people out of each other’s lives stay shut until our own opens out of all of theirs, will you not know loss of this kind. [53-54]

Or, as Richard Robinson said in his book, An Atheist’s Values, the

chief argument for the legitimacy of suicide is that life is a trap. We have not asked for it, and it can be terrible. [57]

When I saw the sun, this morning, shining on the trees in Maplewood cemetery where Elizabeth’s ashes are buried, it brought to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, the chapter from Grayling’s book and Robinson’s rather trenchant remark.

And this reminded me of Jerry Coyne’s comment on the Paul Wallace’s piece in HuffPo: “The Real Problem with Atheism.” And what is the real problem? That atheism is too optimistic. As he says:

Contemporary atheism is optimistic. Given its wall-to-wall phalanx of writers hell-bent on mocking everything that smells of religion, it may seem that this label is ill-applied. Yet under its bluster and iconoclasm atheism is full of good cheer and high spirits. Anyone who knows an actual atheist knows this.

And what, one would like to ask, is wrong with being full of good cheer and high spirits? But the claim is ridiculous: Where do the religious come up with their zany ideas?! Atheism is a lot of things, but it is definitely not full of good cheer and high spirits. For atheism, after all, is an “ism,” a word, the name for a point of view, a Weltanschauung, if you like, sometimes accepted by people who find that they never could or no longer can believe in a god or gods. Not all atheists are comfortable with this word, because it is simply a negative term, which makes it seem as though nonbelief in gods is dependent upon belief in gods, or, further, as though atheists have nothing besides the negation of religious belief in common, as though it is all about negation. And it isn’t.

Continue reading →

What is scepticism, why should we be sceptical, and how should we express it?

Standard

I begin simply by remarking on the death of Paul Kurtz, a stalwart, lifelong defender of reason and humanism. Perhaps I will get an opportunity to comment on this great humanist and his contribution to the cause of rational discourse at another time. R. Joseph Hoffmann has some thoughtful remarks here. While some of Kurtz’s last months were marked by contention with a new generation of atheists, it is unfortunate, I believe, that Hoffmann should have taken this occasion to raise his beefs (which also happen to have been Kurtz’s) with the new atheism. This was so small a part of Kurtz’s life and contribution, and can be partly explained by the unwillingness of an aging man to let go of a movement he did so much to influence, which was undergoing, as all things must, a process of growth and change, that it strikes me that it would have been better to have chosen another occasion to raise such issues, if raised they must be.

The last few days have been a real eye-opener for me. You may say that I have simply been naive, and that may be true, but I do expect a level of rationality in discussion that seems to me to have gone missing a number of times in the last couple of days while I have been rearranging and alphabetising my library — a task that I have been putting off and off for the last couple years, and finally, in search of a book which had already consumed a couple of hours, decided that I had to do now, instead of wasting more time on what was becoming ever more obviously a fruitless search. So I have just let the comments on my last post grow like Topsy — an expression, in case you wondered, straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

“Tell me where were you born, and who your father and mother were.”
“Never was born,” re-iterated the creature more emphatically.  “Never had no  father, nor mother nor nothin’”
“…Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?” The child looked bewildered, but grinned as usual.
“Do you know who made you?”
“Nobody, as I knows on,” said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added, “I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.”

Well, things just grow’d, didn’t nobody monitor how. In this post I want to do a bit of monitoring and commenting, since, it seems to me, a number of things were said that need to be discussed. I also received a comment on an earlier post about sophisticated believers which I trashed — something I seldom do — the more to honour it by bringing it right up front where it can be discussed.

The trashed comment is from someone named Gord, from Vancouver or environs, and it goes like this:

There is a lot of silliness contained in your post. Of course there are sophisticated non-fundamentalist believers. 40 percent of acting scientists have an active faith in God. One third of American philosophers are theists. The Veritas Forums host many Christian intellectuals on campuses around the world–from across the disciplines. Notre Dame University has many world-class scholars who are people of faith. You have a clear bias that misses many facts. Try again. [corrected for spelling]

I don’t think Gord was reading particularly clearly, but he was obviously incensed that I should have questioned the sophistication of the “hosts of Christian intellectuals” and “world-class scholars who are people of faith.” But, you see, I never questioned the existence of these intellectuals or scholars. Indeed, I gave two examples in the post concerned, both of them English, I’m afraid, but none the worse for that. Both N.T. Wright, a bishop and a New Testament scholar who has written several books, and, most lately, a three-volume study of the resurrection of Jesus, and Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, can scarcely be called slouches when it comes to Christian scholarship.

Continue reading →

I’ll call your comment, and raise you a post

Standard

As the title suggests, this is a comment raised to a post, one of the things that bloggers get to do, if comment streams get long, and there seems to be some need of additional detail that deserves to be placed — at least I think so — so that everyone can get to read it. The following is a comment, slightly amended, in response to this by Egbert (comment #30 under the post “Religious extremism and moderation: Are there really any sophisticated believers?”) Here is that comment:

“New Atheism not a force for good? You don’t have to believe everything they say, but how could it be a bad thing that unbelievers are banding together to assert their rights.”

Remember, I was part of this ‘movement’ before I started to get censored and banned for warning others about group thought and growing [dogmatism], and for standing up for things like free speech and secularism. I realized something very odd was going on long before elevatorgate and the atheism plus nonsense, but because the ‘movement’ is organized in a top-down fashion, by academics, bloggers, political activists, no one is actually interested in what some anonymous person says. Most atheists are not positively motivated for the good, but are bitter, angry, resentful (and now hateful) and jump on anyone with a different opinion, using insults and bullying tactics (see this thread for example) which is unacceptable to me.

The idea that atheists are by default, rational, moral, politically wise and knowledgeable is a fiction. What does history say about atheists who organize mass movements? See the French revolution or state communism for your answers.

No one was interested in the moral and philosophical foundations of this ‘movement’ it just began straight after 9/11 based on prejudice and war against the religious.

I want to say straight away that this is not a response only to this comment. Nor do I wish, by pasting it here, to suggest that Egbert, whose comment this is, deserves the contumely that has been heaped upon him. I do think we need to take people at their word. But this comment does raise questions about the uses of scepticism — which were raised more explicitly earlier in the comments — that, it seems to me, need to be raised, and that is why I thought it useful bring my comment right up front where we can discuss the issues involved.

Continue reading →

A Vile, Intolerant Man

Standard

Like my wife Elizabeth, I have deep regrets that the institution that brought us together, and provided the context within which we could have a rich and rewarding life together for nearly twenty years until her death in Switzerland, should now be one that I find it difficult to speak of with respect. But that is, not to put too fine a point on it, very much the case. I used to think that, as an Anglican, I could largely disregard what other Christians believed, and could, thus, separate myself from beliefs and practices which I then regarded as clearly immoral expressions of intolerance and hatred. But I was naive then, and thought that this was not characteristic of Anglicanism as I had come to know it. It is true that I began that way, holding, in a very conservative way, beliefs and attachment to traditions which effectively excluded from the church all but those who could understand Christianity according to a fairly narrow, Anglo-Catholic interpretation of what constituted true Catholicity and therefore true belonging in the church; but I gradually lost those hard edges, and, while still inveterately Anglican, began to think of Christianity as, at its best, a broad house in which believers and unbelievers, as well as adherents of other religions, could find a place of peace where they could explore their humanity together without prejudice.

When I had come to the end of my active ministry I was not all that far from being an unbeliever myself. I could no longer take seriously the central Christian affirmations of the supernatural birth of Jesus — well, from childhood I had never really accepted that — or his death and resurrection, or his miracles and bodily ascension into heaven (which makes no sense, of course, in terms of scientific cosmology). Nor could I make any sense of the claim that Jesus was both God and man. This became more and more unintelligible to me, especially when, considering the gospel narrative of the life, teachings and acts of Jesus, he came to seem to me not only not in any relevant sense a perfect man, but someone of his time and place whose claim to superior morality came to seem, almost daily, less and less convincing. While he never came to seem to me as morally reprobate as Muhammad, his moral failings are too prominent — especially his teachings regarding a place of eternal punishment, where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies — to accord him even approbation as a good man. What is unique to him — say, his prescription that we should love our enemies — seems untenable, and what is worthy in his moral teaching is almost entirely borrowed from Jewish sources. I make no judgement, and do not intend to, regarding Jesus’ historical existence, for it seems obvious to me that the gospel Jesus is not a figure of history, whatever historical reality may lie behind it. The historical questions seems to me largely uninteresting. If gods do not come to earth as Jesus is said to have done, then the gospel Jesus cannot be an historical figure.

Continue reading →