Now that you know Elizabeth and me a little better (see “This, really, is all about Elizabeth I“), I can go on to speak about the things that now concern me. I would not be here at all, however, had it not been for Elizabeth, not only because I loved her and she died in extraordinary circumstances, but because she was herself so clear about her disbelief, because she was so determined to take her dying into her own hands, and because she wanted me to speak about our love and about the right to die. Religion simply was not a factor in this, and she was pleased when I told her that I was no longer able to believe, not even in the very attenuated way in which I had managed, up to that time, to speak of my state of mind as one of belief. Expressing my own non-belief meant that she no longer felt the need to have a religious service just to please me, so she set about designing her own service, so that people should know that she had not been a person of faith.
And she encouraged me, when I returned from Switzerland, to join in the campaign for the right to die. It is one way in which the love that we knew can continue in other ways, and perhaps influence other lives.
So, then, to business. I do not purport to understand fully why it is that Christianity has made assisted dying and abortion the points at which it is determined to make its final stand, but I think it has to do with the dynamics of religious belief and its need for control over social order. I also think that if we defeat it in this, it will have much less power and influence than it has now.
Religion’s determination to hold onto the entrances and exits of life has to do, I believe, with something absolutely central to religious belief, which is also the source of the idea of the sanctity of human life. As I have experienced it, religion is deeply concerned with notions of order: cosmic order, social order, and the order and integration of the individual life in relation to others, and especially, as religions teach, in relation to God, the ordering principle – as it is supposed – of the universe.
[An aside: "Theologists" (as she is often titled) like Karen Armstrong tell us that religion is not about belief, but about practice, and she even pretends that the etymology of the Latin word 'credo' (I believe) is relevant to its English equivalent. 'Credo' in Latin is related to the words 'cor' (or heart) and 'donum' (to give as a gift), so that 'credo' would mean to give one's heart to God, to enter into a relationship with God, and so on, as though, when it is used in the Nicene Creed, for example, it does not come with any cognitive strings attached. This is pure subterfuge. No one should think that there is no relational-emotional component in an act of faith, but to suggest that there is no intellectual content is simply false. When the gospel Jesus asks: "Who do men say that I am?" and "Who do you say that I am?", he is clearly inviting a confession of faith in terms of an explicit belief about his relationship to God.]
Returning to the question of levels of order: cosmic order, social order, and the order of the individual in relation to others, the cosmos, and especially in relation to God, the ordering principle of the cosmos. At each of these levels religions like to impress upon believers that the ordering principle that runs through all things is the power to which religion pays its dues in worship and obedience. In some simpler religions this aspect of religious belief and practice is more obvious and more dramatic – as when sacrifices are made to the ruler of the universe in order to guarantee the preservation of that order in the regularity of the seasons and the orderly procession of the sun across the sky. In such religions the raison d’être of these ceremonies was brutally clear, as in the Aztec offering of still beating human hearts to the sun with the apparent purpose of preserving the sun in its wonted diurnal course above a fruitful earth.
In the case of more “sophisticated” religions, especially the monotheistic religions, this concern for cosmic order may appear to be less central, but it is, I think, still their very heart and soul, and religious practice is, to a remarkable degree, devoted to the task of putting the individual and the community into a state of orderliness which is thought to be, in some sense, an expression of cosmic order itself. Christianity has made much of the idea that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and that our life task, as human beings, is more and more to make that image a closer and closer approximation, insofar as our finite natures will allow, to the divine nature. So, however the religions account for the cognitive content of their beliefs, that religions make claims as to what is the case seems to me to be unquestionable. Those who write professionally about religion do their best not to address the cognitive content of faith too directly, since it does not stand up well in comparison with science, as well as other forms of human knowing, such as history, textual study, etc., but that there is cognitive content in religious faith is, I think, beyond question, though addressing this issue would take us far beyond our present focus on the reasons for religion’s persistence in imposing its structure of values on those who do not belong to their own faith communities.
The purpose of pastoral theology in the Christian tradition was to find ways of ordering the individual life, and so the life of the community to which those individuals belonged, so that they should be fully coordinate with the divine purposes for each individual and community, so that their lives should run with the grain of the universe, to use the title of Stanley Hauerwas’s Gifford Lectures. Besides the sanctification of time, as in liturgical seasons and great feasts and fasts, there were also to be strenuous exercises of self-examination and self-mortification, with a consequently increasingly strict control over the disorder of emotion and feeling, which in early Christian thought is taken to be the unruly animal part of human nature which leads us into sin. In the Greek Church this process is called “theosis”, which literally means “divinisation,” for in aligning oneself with the rational structure and order of the universe one is, it is supposed, reflecting the divine nature.
Cosmic order is central to comprehensive types of religious belief systems, which is one reason why it is thought that religion and science must be consistent with each other. In Christianity the story goes roughly like this. The world was created by God who loved it into being, and saw that it was good. That it fell away from that original goodness due to man’s sin, and so into consequent disorder and depravity, is the very source of the religious task. If you read the story of the Flood in Genesis, it is a process of uncreation and increasing chaos and disorder. Redemption is the process by which, with God’s help, we bring creation back to the original perfection of its order, and so, in a sense, as Christians learned to say, we become co-creators with God, so that, in the end, God’s purposes may be fulfilled in us.
All Christian morality is, in this respect, made up of individual and communal acts of restorative justice, as we attempt to align our minds and our hearts, and the whole texture of our lives, with the perfect purposes of God. The whole of St. Augustine’s magnum opus, The City of God, sets out to show in detail how the disorder of the present age is but the necessary preliminary of the coming city of God where God’s purposes will be fully revealed. The important point is the disorder of the present age, set over against the perfection and order of the revealed purposes of God.
I will not dwell overmuch on this theme, but it is important, I think, that we understand why the churches (and religion in general) are so intrusive in society and in the lives of individuals, for each religion is rooted in some idea of cosmic order contrasted with the disorder of the individual and society, and in the supposed need to restore as much as they can of the original goodness of cosmic order as a demonstration of their faithfulness to the purposes of God. Religions cannot let go of their control over society, because the ordering of society is seen by religions as the necessary condition for the expression of individual faithfulness or lack thereof, and whether lives are running, as they must, with the grain of the universe. As Hauerwas himself says:
The great failure of Christians in modernity is our willingness to make peace with the world. [op. cit., 208, fn 4]
For this reason religions cannot respect boundaries. Religions must intrude into the lives of others, with or without invitation.
It is one thing to explain the religions in scientific terms, as Boyer, Atran, Tremlin and others do, but it is quite another thing, I think, to recognise the parameters which the religions set for themselves and others. And it is this “and others” that Atran, in particular, it seems to me, does not seem to understand. Religion may be, as Anderson Thompson points out in his invaluable little book Why We Believe in God(s), the result of a combination of factors having to do with individual psychology, because, for instance, to mention only a couple of factors, we are intuitive theists, or because of the tendency, seen even in childhood, promiscuously to ascribe teleology to the things that we see (that is, to describe them in terms of purpose), and how this plays into our natural deference to authority, and thus to the ease with which we ascribe truth to the minimally counterintuitive stories that we are told, stories that permeate the culture, and become ordering principles in terms of which we understand ourselves and our relations with others. But it is the deep structure of those stories that imposes itself upon religious people’s way of seeing the world as a whole, and makes it difficult for them to describe the world in ways that can acknowledge the independence and the right of others to describe the world differently and to act on that description.
Suicide is a test case, and there is not one great religion (with the exception, perhaps, of Buddhism, which is, in many respects, a humanism) for which suicide is an acceptable or a normatively good act, and there is a simple reason for this. For suicide is seen as a deliberate rejection of, and a refusal to accept, the goodness of creation. It is an individual statement that the world is not, as the religions imagine it to be, a lovingly ordered cosmos tending towards a final good, and thus suicide is exemplary of the disorder which religion sees it as its primary task to resolve.
I believe this is why religious critics of assisted dying continue to claim, despite convincing evidence to the contrary, that the legalisation of assisted dying would immediately result in the in-breaking of chaos into the social world, leading to a breakdown of the moral order in a disordered frenzy of radical individualism.
In Proverbs 14.12, we read that
There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.
This sentiment is at the root, I believe, of the religious prohibition of assisted dying. An example that I often cite is from Cardinal Cahal B. Daly’s little book, Morals, Law and Life, but the same belief underlies every slippery slope argument used by the religious to warn about the dangers of legalised assisted dying. Daly’s argument, significantly, begins, not with assisted dying, but with contraception, thus covering both the entrances and the exits:
The works of the scientific humanists [he writes] are there to prove that man’s attitude to contraception determines whether he will think it wrong or right for a mother to kill her defective child, or for a doctor “gently and humanely to extinguish his patient’s life.” [45]
This is obviously a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, for though humanists may support assisted dying and abortion, it is not because they support contraception. But, for Daly, anything which interferes with what is thought to be the God-ordained order of the human world contains the seeds of chaos which will eventually put everyone at risk. In terms of this type of reasoning, the suffering of individuals is not really significant. If we must sacrifice the dying or suffering individual to pain and existential despair on the altar of our supposed duty towards God, to preserve the established order in which every pregnancy is a gift, and every death a cosmically ordered event, this is a small price to pay to prevent chaos and condemnation.
It is important to note that much religious language speaks either directly or indirectly to the issue of cosmic order. Christians and others speak regularly about God’s will, and about God’s plans and purposes for us. Christianity (as does Islam) speaks of the glory that awaits us, and about the obligation to direct one’s life by the will of God. Christians speak about the two books of God, the book of nature and the book of scripture. This is normative Christian language; even liberal theologians are not immune to it. God’s love expressed in creation is on the one side; our duty in fealty and service on the other. It is inescapable. In any event, the emphasis that is placed on the shaping of society, and the denunciation of individualism and choice, speak for themselves. Of course, real beliefs are often masked by pretending to argue on secular, consequentialist grounds. But in whatever language they use, scarcely a thought is given to the pains and struggles of the dying, or to individuals whose diseases rob them of their individuality, their life projects, their hopes, their sense of dignity, of everything which made them the truly alive persons they had been, until they stare blankly at yet more sufferings, yet more pains and indignities, yet to come. You can see this human blindness in the religions every day, in their inability to accept women as fully human and able to make their own life decisions, in their rejection of gay and lesbian people, in their hopeless attempts to stay the tides of history.
I tried, as a priest, to help people see these things, and then, finally, I had to say, Enough! The church is like Dickens’ Circumlocution Office. It talks things to death in weary meetings, trying to find scriptural or theological precedents, and then the process starts all over again at the beginning. I call it the hermeneutical auction. Change sometimes happens, but the conservative interpretation is built in to the process, so it is slow and uncertain. This inability to override centuries of interpretation of a book with unknown origins deeply impacted someone whose life was more important to me than my own, whose radiance, though still bright, was dimmed by sufferings and indignities and disabilities that blighted her young life until, though she never wanted to die, she wished that she were dead before worse should come. But Christians will continue to say how difficult and complex a question it is, and how we need more time to discuss it and come to terms with it. And so Elizabeth was forced, by laws upheld and ratified by the religious who live amongst us, who set up roadblocks at every turning, to take matters into her own hands, and to bring her life to an end before she otherwise would have done, because she did not know how long she had before she would be unable to take away the life that was becoming such a burden.
And if I am angry at religion and at the church in which I spent so much of my life in service – and I am – it is because the churches simply refuse to see the harm done by beliefs for which there is not one shred of evidence. If those ill-founded beliefs were only a comfort to those facing the storms of life, and if, by resorting to them, individuals could find a place of refuge, without doing harm to others, then there is no reason they should not continue without restraint. They might even do some good, as I believe they sometimes do.
But religions are not only a comfort. Religions cnnot respect boundaries. Religions insist on shaping society itself in ways imagined to correspond to an order laid down by God. If individual lives are to run with the grain of the universe, social order must also run with the grain of the universe. Therefore, religions insist on extending their beliefs and practices far beyond the limits of their own members, to society as a whole. From the religious perspective social ordering is part of the project of the ordering of individual lives, and there is simply no basis upon which to ground their claims. They should have no say over the ordering of society, and their irrelevance should be made clear.
I used to believe that there was room for a more liberal interpretation of Christian beliefs, but in the end it seemed that I had managed to support an organisation which cannot help imposing its will on the unwilling. There is no safe place for individualism in religion. In the end it will be spewed out as lacking religious zeal. And no wonder, for the meaning of the Greek word ‘hairesis,’ from which we get our word ‘heresy’, is simply choice or choosing (amongst other things). Heretics are those who choose, but choose differently, as it seems best to them. And whether this is now spoken of as “unbridled individualism,” as Margaret Somerville does, or else as “relativism,” as the pope insists, or simply as “secularism,” the religious point of this language is that religion needs whole societies within which to carry out its task, and cannot easily accept dissent or real doubt.
It is important, therefore, to understand the dynamics of belief, and the part played by doubt in the religious project itself, lest this be used as evidence that, after all, religion is capable of accommodating serious doubts and questions. It can’t. In order to entertain religious belief at all, doubt itself must be seen to be an element within religious faith. It’s not possible to hold religious beliefs without occasionally coming to the point of doubt, and spiritual exercises can in fact accommodate and even naturalise doubt as an element of faith. The Dark Night of the Soul, the Cloud of Unknowing, the so-called “dry spells,” when spiritual consolation is sought without response, the elusiveness of God: all these things are well-known way stations on the spiritual journey, and spiritual directors take them intheir stride. Indeed, they are familiar talking points about prayer and meditation, even demons to be wrestled with in the privacy of one’s own soul.
This is why it is so important to puncture the intellectual confidence of the religions. The effort to shore up the crumbling walls of systematic religious thought, pretending that it stands on equal ground with disciplines that use real evidence to establish their claims, is a good sign that all is not well with the religions. Strong religions could simply ignore science, and some attempt, absurdly, to do so. After all, in the face of conflict with other religions, each religion imagines itself to be sui generis, and, as such, where they are culturally isolated, they are sources of great confidence and power.
This is becoming more difficult due to the progress of science, and the inter-penetration of cultures. So religions need to remind us, by fair means or foul, that they are still confident and powerful. It is not for nothing that the great symbols of faith are those of authoritative and overawing figures or demonstrations of transcendent power, such as the Christos Pantokrator (the All Powerful Christ) which dominates so many Orthodox churches,
for religions are past masters at the art of public representations of power. Great monuments to religious belief, such as churches, cathedrals, mosques, and temples, as well as demonstrations of the power of religions to marshal great masses of people to an ordered purpose: all of these express the awesome power and transcendent authority from which religious beliefs are claimed to come, and are meant to reduce the individual to babbling incoherence. In the Western tradition, massively comprehensive theological systems attempt to perform the same function, but, when measured against the achievements of science, they are incoherent – which is why the relation between religion and science is becoming such a hotly contested issue.
This is one thing, by the way, that impressed both Elizabeth and me on our honeymoon trip to Britain. Our five week journey around Britain was based principally on the great cathedrals and churches that had special architectural or other significance. It was hard not to miss the fact that the sheer mass of some of the churches and cathedrals must have simply overawed those who lived in their shadow, and so have been impressed, not only with the power of the church – which had, in those days, as much or more secular power than the state – but with the awesome power and authority of God over their lives and deaths.
The fact that churches and other religious institutions and persons tend to exhibit themselves in this way, as though they possessed a share of the power of God or the gods themselves, causes severe problems for liberal polities, for religions were, in fact, in their original form, comprehensive cultures, which controlled every aspect of life from birth until death. And just saying that provides a clue as to the reasons for the Roman Catholic and fundamentalist Christian and Muslim emphasis on controlling the entrances and, especially, the exits of life. Religion claims that these prohibitions are rationally justified, but this is just a mask, I believe, to conceal religion’s drive for political and social control.
Liberal religion has been, in the long run, largely a failure, because it could not keep its hands on the levers of political power and cultural invigilation. It allowed itself to be culturally marginalised, and that has been accompanied by a growingly insistent question about the truth of the beliefs that were apparently central to the community’s existence, which simply could not be deferred forever. It is one thing to say, with some of Christianity’s liberal defenders, that the truth, whatever it may turn out to be, is expressed in the form of myth, but it is an entirely different thing to ignore the fact that, without any claim to truth, or way of demonstrating truth, religion itself had to be content to be thought of as a marginal cultural pursuit, which could not keep pace with the changes taking place within the culture itself.
This was brought home to me quite forcefully when I heard Tariq Ramadan say that Christianity had lost control of “its” culture, something that Islam, he said, would never be prepared to do – which is one of the reasons why I think Islam will be a greater problem for the West than many people seem prepared to acknowledge.
The problem of a liberal polity is that it must marginalise and relativise comprehensive world views like religions. In his book Political Liberalism, Rawls asks whether such a polity can be stable. The answer to this question, as Rawls understood, is of course that, so long as great cultural institutions like religions continue to vie for public representation in the law, and in the symbols of sovereignty, it cannot be. Religions, however, know that if they are not successful in being so represented, their influence will wane. That is why it is so important that they be defeated, and placed on notice that the public expression of religious power is no longer acceptable in societies in which the norm for what it means to know is science, and only those disciplines which are consistent with science. This does not mean, I hasten to add, that human knowledge is restricted to the propositions of science – what I am saying at the moment is not scientifically verifiable, for example, but I have tried to give reasons for supposing it true – but it does mean that any discipline claiming to be in possession of knowledge must be consistent with the affirmation of such propositions. Religion is not amongst them.
These are some of the reasons why I oppose religion, because I now see it as having been, all along, something offensive and sometimes malignant, and this is something I was slow to see. It holds us hostage to unsubstantiated claims. And while I cannot regret the years I spent in religion’s service, because so bound up with the love that Elizabeth and I enjoyed and shared, I regret that nothing that I said in all those years would ever have been able to make of religion itself something kinder or more humane, as I wished it to be. This will never happen, and that is why I have set my heart against it, though it played so prominent a role in my life, and set its seal upon the one great love in which it was my privilege to share.
Elizabeth I & II, two very powerful pieces. Thank you.
Perhaps your ideas about the ‘cosmic order’ also explain the increased criticism of ‘militant’ atheists. As long as atheists could be regarded as mere individuals out of step with cosmic order they could be ignored. Once the ‘militant’ atheists start being recognised, and are seen as mobilising a society of like minded individuals, they are ‘attacking’ the cosmic order. Just as Darwin’s dismissal of the Great Chain of Being did.
I’ve noticed that many of the religious believers treat Laws of Nature as ‘real’ rules enforced by a creator, whereas non-believers consider Laws of Nature to be observed regularities in nature. Top down vs bottom up.
It seems as if the global communities (at least in the West) are polarizing into two camps. Those that believe in the ‘cosmic order’ and consider the individual subordinate to the collective, and those that believe that there is no ‘cosmic order’ and that individual concerns trump the collective.
Thank you Eric for sharing Elizabeth’s life with us. I can see parallels to biological evolution in your description of religion and society. If religions could remove individual variation from the population, then no change could take place. The difficulty always has been in how to suppress individual variation given the highly personal components of religious belief. One of the commenters recently discussed his experience in seminary of the process of delimiting god and it really is a feedback process of taking raw belief and molding it into the thing a religion defines belief to be.
I think this must have been a fascinating talk even if it was difficult to get across in the time. Reading this piece, I finally understand the importance of your recent posts about the sanctity of life, in a religious context. The idea about the goal of religions being to work towards cosmic reordering makes a lot of sense to me at first sight, though I will have to give it some more thought. From my vanishing knowledge of Christian art and history, I know one sees these ideas expressed strikingly in Christian art from the Middle Ages. However I would be very interested to know if the Anglican hierarchy explicitly speaks in this way today, to any extent?
Discovered Joys, yes, in particular I noticed what seemed to be real panic about ‘aggressive secularism’ emerging in the speech of religion-friendly public commentators at the beginning of this year (I’m in the UK). It is unfortunate that it’s easy to represent individual-based rights as selfish, and this is the line that such people usually take. But I see no reason why one couldn’t have a society that clearly specified a minimal set of ways in which individual rights had to bow to collective ones, and otherwise allow people to do as they will, an they do no harm. Furthermore, one can make many rational arguments for putting collectives before individuals, albeit undermined empirically by the examples of various communist states – but this is not what these people usually seem to be doing, rather it’s a yearning after a cosmic authority. It’s rather moving, and yet horrifying, because it’s based on an untruth and is deeply vulnerable to abuse by anything that fills the gap where cosmic instructions don’t come. As regards treating the laws of nature as if they were the ‘real’ rules, it almost has aspects of learned helplessness. And yet we gladly override nature’s plan to kill us in infancy, or in healthy adulthood with infections, and nor apparently does this violate the cosmic order. What an odd species we are! (Does anyone know of any groups that argued against the introduction of antibiotics on cosmic order-type grounds? There’s bound to have been someone, somewhere….)
Isabel @ #3
I think the subject of religion vs healthcare is an interesting one. From humanist.org a snippet:
Religions That Have Endangered Children Because of an Official Objection to Medical Care
* Bible Believers’ Fellowship
* Christ Assembly
* Christ Miracle Healing Center
* Christian Science
* Church of God Chapel
* Church of God of the Union Assembly
* Church of the First Born
* End Time Ministries
* Faith Assembly
* Faith Tabernacle
* Followers of Christ
* Holiness Church
* Jehovah’s Witnesses (only objection today is to blood transfusions)
* Jesus through Jon and Judy
* “No Name” fellowship
* Northeast Kingdom Community Church
* The Source
I recall reading that some religious people objected to smallpox vaccination when it was discovered. Some religious people have objected to cervical cancer vaccinations (because it will encourage young girls to have sex), contraception is a no-no to the RC church (but not to all of their members), and at one time pain relief during birth and caesarian sections were denied to women (they had to suffer like (mythical) Eve.
Notice how it is mostly women and children that suffer! Strange that.
Pain relief during birth withheld? Oh….. Struggling for something to say here. As you imply, it’s not ‘just’ the cruelty that is so staggering – there are many many examples of that – but the naked hatred of women.
But do these groups actually say that one oughtn’t to save a life medically because it’s God’s will to take it? I thought they mostly took the line that one shouldn’t need medicine because faith should be enough. Apart from the notorious Jehovah’s Witnesses who have scriptural reasons for rejecting blood transfusions. I shall look it up if I can find the moral fortitude.
Isabel, you said:
Members of the hierarchy do not often speak explicitly on theological matters, unless they are qualified by training to do so, though they may make rulings that may have theological effect. For instance, a Bishop of Nova Scotia once refused permission to use the terms, Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier (or Sustainer) in the context of baptism, in place of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This says something at once about the order of life on earth, as well as in eternity. And, anyway, while there are distinct trends in Anglican theology, there is no Anglican theology as such, and Anglicans are found “all over the map” theologically, from fairly evangelical, fundamentalist, to full-blown catholic, often accepting the pope as an authority on Christian doctrine.
Nevertheless, there are cosmic implications, if you like, of a lot of things said by Anglicans. For instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s intervention on assisted dying, or his recent speech about same sex marriage, carry implications for his understanding of ordered moral relationships, and what is, in fact, naturally the case. Much of the discussion of the acceptability of homosexual relationships has turned on the question of God’s purposes, and whether these are expressed by the “natural” order (in the sense that some men and women seem “naturally” ordered to same sex attraction), or by a moral order which makes a claim on our obedience regardless of our natural inclinations. The outworking of this in relation to assisted dying should be obvious, since here we are dealing with what is often called “natural death,” as opposed to a death which is willed by the person concerned. God is assumed to order our natural lives in such a way as to determine not only the manner but the time of our deaths.
Regarding the artistic expression of this, a good place to look is the way in which hell is artistically represented. Take Hieronymus Bosch for instance, and his wildly chaotic paintings of hell. Or Dante’s descriptions of hell in the Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto XIII, for example, which describes the state of those who die by suicide). The disorder which is depicted is a direct reflection of the refusal to act according to natural law (God’s law).
And. yes, my recent posts on sanctity of life were a spin-off from what I was preparing for the conference. Very perceptive of you to notice.
Isabel writes: “It is unfortunate that it’s easy to represent individual-based rights as selfish, and this is the line that such people usually take.”
This is an extremely common trope, but even a passing familiarity with the logic of rights ought to be enough to dispel it whenever it rears its head. Whenever someone takes that line, here is how you should cut them off. Simply point out that every attribution of a right which belongs to individuals necessarily and simultaneously attributes an obligation on everyone else to act or refrain from acting towards individuals in certain ways specified by the attributed right. In short, universal human rights can equally well be characterized as our universal mutual obligations towards one another. There is nothing radically individualistic or selfish about mutual obligations.
What an excellent essay, Eric: deeply saddening but very enlightening. Your remarks about ecclesiastical buildings – not to mention mosaics or paintings of Christ Pantocrator (or Michelangelo’s Last Judgement) being expressions of power are absolutely right. Something that has struck me, living as I do in Japan where Buddhism has been so important a force, and having visited Thailand and taken an interest in Buddhist art, is the way that statues of the seated, meditating Sakyamuni emanate power – they are often so made as to give the impression of great and immovable weight, of being impervious (since the Buddha has penetrated to the reality that lies beneath illusion) to all accidents, and of being – so it seems to me – at the centre of the universe. Yet in my experience few people – I include art historians – seem to comment on this (perhaps they have, but I haven’t come across it). The temple near where we live belongs to the Shingon sect (Esoteric Buddhism) and particularly on holidays a magical ritual is performed by the priests which involves energetic drumming and chanting, as well as shooting flames, before a terrifying wooden statue of Fudo-myou-o (which means, roughly, ‘Immovable Wisdom King’). Here’s a brief description of who Fudo is, poached from somewhere on the internet: ‘Acala Vidyârâja’ (another of his names) ‘is one of the Vidyârâjas (Myôôs) class of deities, and a very wrathful deity. He is portrayed holding a sword in his right hand and a coiled rope in his left hand. With this sword of wisdom, Acala cuts through deluded and ignorant minds and with the rope he binds those who are ruled by their violent passions and emotions. He leads them onto the correct path of self control. Acala is also portrayed surrounded by flames, flames which consume the evil and the defilements of this world. He sits on a flat rock which symbolizes the unshakeable peace and bliss which he bestows to the minds and the bodies of his devotees.’ Like the statues, this Buddhist music (I think one can call this chanting and drumming music) creates a sense of extraordinary power, as of course does Tibetan chanting, with its extraordinarily deepened voices, its drums and blaring horns. Which brings me to your remark about Buddhism being a kind of humanism. Certainly, Buddhism as it has in the past been generally presented to the West comes across as a kind of humanism, and certainly many of the Buddha’s teachings, which are often admirable (a great deal more admirable than those of the founder of Christianity), come across as a kind of humanism, and genuinely are ‘humanistic’ (is that a word? – yes, but not a very attractive one); but Buddhism as a religion is rather a different matter. and involves all sorts of magical and ascetic practices and spectacular rituals, as well as a splendid variety of gods. While on the subject of music (I’m going to ramble), Bach wrote a number of marginal remarks regarding music in his Bible, among which is this: ‘NB. In devotional music, God with his grace is always present’ – this was beside Chronicles II, 5: 13-14, where the moment is described when ‘it came even to pass, as the trumpeters and singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord… that then the house was filled with a cloud… for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of God.’ Verdi’s Messa da Requiem (though written by an unbeliever) is also, particularly in the ‘Dies Irae’ sections, an extraordinary expression of power. Beethoven had sought in the ‘Ninth Symphony’ to create a sort of humanistic religious music. I suspect that Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ created such a scandal not only because of its brazen musical novelty but because it took a real and savage punch at the music of Christian tradition. End of the ramblings.
Thanks, Eric,
You raise many ideas that I can affirm, more than I dare list here. One is the role of doubt in every belief system, including Christianity (which you formerly embraced in a liberal version) and atheism (which you presently embrace).
You say, “In order to entertain religious belief at all, doubt itself must be seen to be an element within religious faith. It’s not possible to hold religious beliefs without occasionally coming to the point of doubt, …”
As a Christian I too have wrestled with various doubts over the years and still do from time to time. So do most Christians I know. So did some of Jesus’ disciples after his resurrection (Luke 24:11, 38; John 20:27) and prior to his ascension (Matt. 28:17).
What I find fascinating on websites like this one is the lack of doubt in the very firm belief in the truth of the propositions that no creator of the cosmos exists and that there is no human existence beyond the death of human bodies. IMHO belief in such propositions requires more faith without supporting evidence than I am able to muster.
Sure, atheists can reassure themselves by allusions to multiple religions, imaginations of multiple universes, complaints that those who believe in a creator cannot provide “knock ‘em down” arguments (such as we should expect only in deductive demonstrations), etc. Such objections do not account for the appearance of our cosmos some 13.8 billion years ago (according to current relevant data) with amazing indicators of design (such as SETI enthusiasts seek from ETs), the assumptions of objective moral norms to which social reformers seek to appeal, etc. When such evidences are dismissed as “senile” such complaints hardly suggest rational reflection.
I specially appreciate your brief mention of “sin” too often absent from websites like this. IMHO most atheists fail to understand Christianity for lack of their understanding of sin and its curse on all humanity and nature.
On the issue of control, of course all organizations seek control of various sorts, including all governments. It seems that the primary passion of this website is to urge a change in Canada’s laws that continue to criminalize assisting in achieving someone’s death. Urging such a fundamental change in Canada’s laws strikes me as an attempt to control our culture far beyond what numbers of advocates warrant.
Appeals to individualist autonomy strikes me as more than outweighed by the pressure of obligation that legalized physician-assisted death would put on our elderly, chronically infirm and disabled, let alone on our medical community and those who train professionals in these and related fields. I think the present situation in this regard is for the greater good, in spite of serving as the primary care-giver for a wife who has struggled with non-stop severe pain for more than a decade and a half. I too was once diagnosed as terminal with severe pain for several years. I’m really not impressed with quality of life arguments on this proposed solution. I recognize the limits of medical pain relief.
‘… most atheists fail to understand Christianity for lack of their understanding of sin and its curse on all humanity and nature.’ You know, Al H, I suspect most of the people who comment on this website were brought up as Christians: you need to learn to distinguish between ‘understanding’ and ‘acceptance’ or ‘agreement’, and, conversely, between ‘lack of understanding’ and ‘disagreement’ or ‘unwillingness to countenance the taking of certain myths for truth’. As for the appearance of the universe so many billion years ago, the ‘objections’ on the part of atheists you refer to are not pretending to account for it. ‘IMHO’ – but your opinions are really not very humble at all, and your projection on to atheists of your own arrogant surety is distasteful.
Wow, Al, anything is grist to your mill. You say:
Not “of course all organisations ….” et seq, at all. I’m not an organisation, and those that do exist trying to change the law do so, not for ideological reasons — not because we’re unbelievers, or because we share a Weltanshauung, but for good reasons. And, remember, the laws that exist reflect the religious world view that has been dominant in the West since about the sixth century. And while some of our laws were influenced by Roman law, laws concerning things like euthanasia or assisted dying come right out of the Christian playbook. However, in a pluralist, liberal democracy, laws should not be beholden to specific world views; they should, rather, reflect ranges of reasonable choice, which our laws at present do not. Why should old worn out laws be protected just to please Christians, when the limits of liberty should be determined, not by the religious belief of a few, but by the harm principle? Christians are trying to preserve a part of their legal heritage, which many now feel is intrusive and a limit to the liberty interests of other citizens.
Regarding faith and doubt. The point I was making was simply that faith has “naturalised” doubt, but that it is not real doubt. It is “religious doubt”, which is a part of faith itself. Real doubt is when people give proper attention to other points of view, and correct their own belief on this basis, if correction is shown to be needed. It is not simply an aspect of the justification of beliefs which do not change, but are protected by the veneer of “doubt”, which is only a way of protecting beliefs from real questions, and real doubts. You give me solid reasons for taking a point of view, and I may have to revise my beliefs. If I think of reasons why my beliefs are deficient, then I will have to provide a corrective. However, my first thought, when I do this, will not be my existing beliefs, but the process of discovery. The trouble with religious “doubt” is that it is there as a buffer between faith and real doubt, doubt that is corrosive of belief.
This old chestnut simply doesn’t work:
There is absolutely no evidence that legalised assisted dying would put people under an obligation to die. This is just cooked up by religious opponents, because there is nothing better in their armamentarium. Besides, many of the elderly, chronically infirm and disabled, want the option for assisted death if things become intolerable. They are not children, and are able to make up their own minds. This is an example of the religious mind grasping at straws.
Oh, yes, and just to make it clear, Al. Individualist autonomy (which you seem to write with sneer quotes) as The Philosophical Primate points out on another thread, creates obligations on others. It is not a kind of private world, but is only possible in a society where rights are recognised and respected. The right to die is not an obligation to die, but it does mean that others are not permitted to define my attitude towards death or to limit my access to it.
Al H.
What I find fascinating is that, after devoting much of your comment to criticizing atheists, you make arguments against assisted dying which are entirely secular. Why, then, is atheism or its converse relevant here? If you have knowledge of God’s will on the matter why not share it?
Eric #6, thanks for your very interesting answer. I absolutely agree that there are, as it were, cosmic implications of many things said by Anglicans. I was wondering how conscious it was, at least within the more liberal wings, that I understand to be more concerned with the gentler, more embracing and less tyrannical aspects of Christianity (even if the results can be utterly compassionless). However, thinking about it, I think I’m just being unimaginative in asking the question – I’m conceiving of this hypothetical cosmic order as being something like a galactic police state, such as no decent person should endorse, but I’m sure one could come up with a more benign image! (I’m with Christopher Hitchens on finding something inherently tyrannical and horrifying in the concept of God, but probably only because when I deeply believed in one he was rather unpleasant. Oh, the sense of freedom when I felt safe about saying that aloud…)
Christian art is something I approach with great caution because I find it moving in a troubling way, on the whole – but I make the occasional foray and always get a good deal out of it. A remarkable record of human thought, anyway.
To Tim Harris #10: I appreciate your informing me that most posters on this website come from a Christian background. I would not have guessed that for others besides Eric. Those atheists from a Christian background with whom I have dialogued previously have mostly come from a rather liberal Christian background where they have already been taught to believe that all world religions are equally valid and to dismiss as mythical biblical accounts of miracle including divine confluent authority of Scripture. Some atheists come from a rather liberal version of Islam and other world religions. It seems to be a relatively short step from liberal versions of any religion to atheism, especially if they already held a weak view of sin before embracing atheism.
In such dialogues I try to offer reasons and arguments that I think my dialogue partners should find credible (on common ground where possible — note David Evans #13), rather than trite or silly. If they interpret these reasons and arguments as arrogant, I’m really not sure how to correct that. I certainly do not intend them that way. Typed messages lack the nuance of tone of voice, hence are more vulnerable to readers’ misjudging motives and intentions.
To David Evans #13: If you want a biblical basis for my objection to suicide or physician-assisted suicide, you need look no further than the sixth commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” This seems to be replicated in most world religions and worldviews, though not by atheists and other secularists. I recognize exceptions in “just wars” (which I don’t support) and execution of justice (which I do allow for in principle).
To Eric MacDonald #12: In my view, personal autonomy is not a sufficient warrant to grant such an exception to the sixth commandment. Sure, suicides, murders, etc. happen and no law can prevent them. That does not imply that they should be legalized. The sense of obligation to request a physician-assisted suicide that I mentioned in my #9 post (in cases where physician-assisted suicide has been legalized) is an internal psychological sense of obligation on the part of the elderly, chronically infirm or disabled who wish not to be a burden on others, especially when that option is recommended to them by their care-givers — as I understand has happened repeatedly in the Netherlands. E.g., I don’t want my dear wife to sense that obligation in addition to her severe 24/7 physical pain. I do not regard as in the common good a segment in the training of health-care professionals devoted to most efficient and effective means of killing their patients, if requested to do so by anyone, including the patient. I believe there is merit in the Hyppocratic oath to do no harm. At least in ancient Greece it helped to restore some measure of confidence in health-care professionals.
Does this make sense? I don’t ask if you agree.
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To Al H. #15:
“though not by atheists and other secularists.”
I Googled “atheist commandments” and found several lists. Every one included either a variant of “Don’t kill people” or a variant of “Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.”. The latter is good because it implies a condemnation of murder, while also allowing for assisted dying.
I would be interested in any evidence you have that secular societies have higher murder rates than religious ones.
Sorry for the perhaps disrespectful comment, but other readers might parse the title wrongly as well; I thought of Queen Elizabeth II and was surprised to see a link to a post about Queen Elizabeth I.
The story is that the film The Madness of George III was retitled The Madness of King George in the States so that people wouldn’t wonder why they had missed parts I and II.
Thanks for posting this, Eric. This has helped me to understand the motivations and fears of the religious a little better.
One bit where you lost me was the section on doubt, and how it must be made an element within religious faith. How does this work? Surely doubt is part of the process of both rational inquiry and religious belief. A scientist would say that when he has doubts, he needs to gather more evidence. How does a religious person not come to the same conclusion? Why is doubt not a dealbreaker for them? (I should note that while I used to be a believer – a catholic, Al H. might be curious to know – I never found it sensible to believe in something without reason. It must make sense, I thought. This is probably why I eventually became an atheist.)
Tim Harris: What part of Japan do you live in? I went to school at Kansai Gaidai in Hirakata, Osaka-fu. Then I taught English for 2 years in Fukui-ken. I’ve been back in the States for several years now.
Tim, perhaps I didn’t make it as clear as I might have. The point is that doubt is an element of faith. In other words, it’s not the kind of doubt that goes anywhere. Once it starts going somewhere, the believer must begin moving away from faith. The whole point of dealing with doubt in the context of faith is that it can be taken as part of faith itself. It can seem as if believers are actually dealing with issues that prompt doubt. Normally, doubt functions as a method of discovery. What doubt in the religious context does is to satisfy the believer that the obligations of reason have been fulfilled, even when they’re not.
Take, for example, the problem of pain. There is, really, no solution to this problem. It is just as simple as Lucretius put it. But faith must be able to absorb the challenge, so it addresses the problem, and simply addressing the problem is sufficient to satisfy the believer that, while no satisfactory solution is available, the problem has, in a sense, been taken care of. The same for the famous “dry periods” in the spiritual life. The sense of faith can be very tenuous, and at times it becomes a mere routine. But so long as it is understood that routinisation is not, in itself, unfaithfulness, and may pass, one can go on functioning within the believing community as a believer, even when there is no joy in believing, even when it seems like an empty and unrewarding task to be got through. Spiritual directors, in that kind of situation, talk in a knowing way about the spiritual life as a kind of journey — as Bunyan does, for example, with the Slough of Despond — and that is just a feature of spiritual life, that you take in your stride when you come to it. The task then is to persevere in faith, even when faith is dead and unrewarding.
So, while doubt in the midst of faith raises questions, it can be satisfied with less. Just talking about it, for example, is “dealing with it”, and this is already to have, in a sense, defused it, taken away the danger that it poses to faith itself. Doubt in the context of faith is like a shock absorber, or like the outer walls of a defended position. While doubt is entertained, it is never allowed to challenge faith directly. So, when the religious believer tells us that s/he is perfectly aware of the objections or the problems that the nonbeliever raises, the function of doubt is perceived differently in each case. For the believer, doubt is there to challenge and so reinforce belief. For the nonbeliever, doubt raises more questions than belief can withstand.
In this connexion it is perhaps worthwhile pointing out that the real point of no return for me was Darwin’s response to the death of his daughter Annie. As I was facing the same outcome, when Elizabeth was so obviously failing, and failing quickly, it was clear that the quite simple mechanism of evolution was “selecting her out”. She would not pass on her genes to the next generation. And it was the very impersonality of the forces that were brought to bear on her in this way that convinced me that there is no loving purpose behind our lives, or our being here. The love, though very real, and very strong, was ours, very human, after all. I had not read Darwin’s Origin until I was nearly sixty, and then, following that experience, I went on to read a lot more about evolution, as well as about Darwin and his religious beliefs. I had been studying the Holocaust for some years, trying to make sense of belief in God in that context, and putting the two together simply raised too many questions for faith. I was till holding on, but only just. It could not survive the final years, when Elizabeth’s suffering grew so great.
So while doubt as an element of faith functioned for a while, at the end it simply led me away from faith itself. And what finally sealed the deal was the church’s take on assisted dying, the belief that, no matter how great the suffering, the person must die from the disease that is killing her, that, somehow, that may be taken as God’s will. And, from the standpoint of faith, you can see the point. To die by one’s own hand is to die “before one’s time,” a time known to God alone. And so we can say, at the death bed, that while we do not understand the mystery of God’s ways, we believe that his purposes are loving. But when someone dies by their own hand, or at their request, there is no mystery there. We know why the person has died. We cannot say that there is a mystery about the death. Of course, hidden in there is the unspoken thought that, if it be God’s will, we may tarry until Jesus comes again. All kinds of people believe that they will be alive when Jesus returns. The thought is expressed in one of the gospels, when Jesus says to one of the disciples about another that, if that other should tarry until Jesus comes again, what is that to him? This is a mystery, hidden in the heart of God, as it were. That we all will die is not taken as obvious to those who believe that Jesus rose from the dead and will return. (This only occurred to me just now.)
Sorry to be so longwinded about it. I hope this makes some sense.
Tim Martin, I live in Tokyo, and have lived here for almost 40 years. well over half my life!
Yes, Eric, that does help. Thanks for the detailed explanation!