This is my first blog post at Free Thought Blogs, so I want, from the start, to explain my own reasons for being here, for thinking of myself as a “freethinker” (a term which still does not come easy to me), and for wishing to join a community dedicated to freedom of thought, atheism, and opposition to religious belief. I also want to make the point as clearly as I can, as I start out, how Elizabeth (my wife who died in 2007 in Zurich) is the main inspiration of all that I write, and the patron “saint,” if you like, of this Blog. Without her, I would have been a very different person indeed. I will also remark on some of my present interests and concerns.
At the masthead or banner of my blog choiceindying.com, there from the very beginning in December 2010, has been the tag line, “Arguing for the Right-to-Die and against the Religious Obstruction of that Right.” However, had it not been for Elizabeth, my wife of almost 18 years and best friend for 20, whose picture (sitting on a peak in the Lake District) is in the banner above, and who is now in my Gravatar image as well (precisely because what I am trying to say about her part in this is true), I probably would never have come to the point of disbelief, for not only was she a disbeliever long before I was, it was her struggle to die, when her MS, and the misery and pain and indignities associated with it, became so intolerable, that opened my eyes to the fact that, even for a liberal “believer” of the “Sea of Faith” sort, there were moral issues of great importance that I had simply overlooked by the general institutional support that accompanied my membership in, and action on behalf of, a specific religious institution. This stood out for me in stark relief the moment Elizabeth tried to take her own life, and failed, thus setting her on a course which would eventually take her to Zurich, where Dignitas, the assisted suicide organisation which accepts foreign applicants, helped her, with great kindness and dignity, to die, as she sought to do.
Elizabeth herself, though many years younger than I, was the formative influence in my life, far more important than schooling or religion. A woman of great integrity, energy, intellect and joy, she offered me unconditional love, and provided the basis for the freeing of my mind from the dead weight and trammels of my past. Though I do not believe in destiny, the shape my life took seemed – because I can only think of my life until the point that Elizabeth and I exchanged our love as but a propaedeutic and forerunner to the fullness of life that I would come in time to know with her – almost predestined, as though we were supposed to meet and fulfil each other’s dreams of love and commitment. This was expressed in a poem I wrote after her death, entitled “Easter Rising,” about an unexpected intimate encounter with Elizabeth very early on the first Easter morning after we had (earlier in the year) first exchanged our vows of love (and, truth be told, shortly before I would go out to celebrate another resurrection, in a more formal, liturgical way). The poem ends on this note:
One flame forever,
as in the snow,
deeply blended,
each to each,
we yielded,
as the sun began to climb,
and, as one, arose together,
that first Easter morn,
enfolded in each other,
a new creation,
of each other born.
Religion, from that point, began to play an increasingly secondary role in my life, and though I continued to function as a priest in the Anglican Church for all the years of our marriage — and was, indeed, more actively involved in the institutional life of the church on a diocesan level – it was perhaps inevitable that, with Elizabeth’s death, my active participation in that ministry should come to an end. I soon realised that “faith,” for me, had become not only very tenuous, but, indeed, an impediment to clarity of thought and fulness of life. I remember with great affection, however, the years I spent as a priest, and the people I served and learned to care for and admire during all those years, especially those years of priesthood which I shared with Elizabeth, who taught me (for the first time in my life) what it is to love and to be loved in return. It was when the beliefs of the church began to have an immediate impact on the life of the one I held most dear, that close relationship with the church, and participation in its official ministry became intolerable. It is important to recognise that the church does not truly acknowledge the right of its members to value things differently than these things are valued through the church’s institutional expression; and being an active and supporting member of the church is in fact to uphold and defend those values, even when one most strenuously disagrees.
I am reminded here of something written by Ronald Dworkin (as I believe*, though undersigned by Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and T.M. Scanlon), in the Philosophers Brief, an Amicus Curiae brief to the Supreme Court of the United States in the matter of the State of Washington et al. v. Glucksberg et al. and Vacco et al. v. Quill et al. (argued before the Supreme Court on January 8, 1997), where the six philosophers argue that
[c]ertain decisions are momentous in their impact on the character of a person’s life — decisions about religious faith, political and moral allegiance, marriage, procreation, and death, for example. Such deeply personal decisions pose controversial questions about how and why human life has value. In a free society, individuals must be allowed to make those decisions for themselves, out of their own faith, conscience, and convictions.
This is an insight that is vital, not only, of course, for those seeking death, but for those wishing to live their lives in the light of their own convictions about the value, meaning and the purposes of life. Christian churches, as well as other religions believe, without foundation, that not only do they have access to the true meaning and purpose of life, but that they are peculiarly suited to establish norms of moral guidance which alone have the right to be publicly recognised as determining principles for the organisation and direction of whole societies. In the process they have made it all but impossible (depending on the local power of church or mosque and minaret) to receive help to die, divorce, abortion, or even effective contraception. And, as the recent sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church testify, or the widespread terrorist activities carried out on behalf of Islam make very clear, such religious institutions are prepared to resort to their own laws and principles in order to evade the scrutiny of public officials over criminal acts which would, if known, bring their institutions into severe and lasting disrepute, or which do, being known, bring their religious beliefs into justified contempt.
In the light of considerations such as these I have made it my business over the last few years, starting out slowly, by making overly long comments on Ophelia Benson’s Butterflies and Wheels blog, and Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True website, to speak out against the dogmatic affirmations of religious institutions on issues such as assistance in dying, abortion, and other issues of public morality, as well as to take the religions to task for the inadequate grounding of their religious beliefs, let alone their moral convictions, and to ask whether such convictions, based on such exiguous or even nonexistent grounds, are plausible candidates for use as foundational principles for public policy or general principles of justice. As religions increasingly intrude themselves into public life with their prescriptions for the good society, which can be built only, so they suggest, on truths about transcendent and eternal things which they claim to provide, it behoves those of us who have been shriven of such beliefs by thoughtful reflection or distressing experience, to challenge continually the right of religions to represent themselves in public life as disinterested voices seeking only the public good. Religions are private associations of individuals of no more importance to the public good than any other such associations, whether golf and country clubs or service clubs like the Rotary or the Lions, and the presumption of bishops to challenge governments should be seen for what it is: a naked attempt at seizing power that belongs only to the people acting as a whole in quest of justice and equity and the greatest liberty consistent with the greatest well-being of all.
These are, then, for me, foundational principles. However, I do recognise that these values must be achieved by means of an ongoing, vibrant moral and political discourse in which the limits of freedom are constantly explored and probed, and the values that make for a good life are the matter of constant inquiry and dispute. It follows from this, in my view, that attempts to place any particular discipline at the centre of the social conversation should be resisted. Recently, a number of philosophers and others have warned the disbelieving community of the dangers of scientism. I am thinking here, in particular, of Philip Kitcher and Susan Haack, both of whom have warned of this danger. Without intending to question the unequalled achievements of science, they see it as a danger to the social good to confine our inquiries to science alone, or to attempt to characterise as scientific all the various pursuits that people undertake in quest of the truth.
I remember, with considerable distress, the occasion on which it became clear that there was nothing further that scientific medicine could do for my beloved Elizabeth, and how that realisation played havoc with her sense of personal fulfilment. Though she rejected with contempt offers from relatives and friends for other supposed options for “treatment,” including, in a couple of cases, so-called “faith healing,” she also began to recognise the inadequacy of science to deal with the more sombre aspects of life, to be a consoling presence in the midst of existential distress. All she had then — and I trust it was enough — was the love and devotion that we had each for each, but it did indicate that the dimension of community which is compassed by religion and its practices, both liturgical and pastoral, might be seen as the expression of human value, however intermixed with poorly grounded metaphysical beliefs. Elizabeth, who contributed not a little to the life and excitement of the church communities of which we were, as two people deeply in love, an integral part, would understand this, for she appreciated the relationship with the community which sustained both of us, even as, little by little, we were letting go of God.
It is for this reason that I have, over the past few years, at the same time that I have been harshly critical of religious institutions, been supportive of the idea that religion, as a human creation, may still contain much that is enriching. It is hard to think that thousands of years of religious thought and organisation, even if there be no gods or supernatural entities to undergird them, have simply been pointless exercises, closely associated, as they have been, with an attempt to understand something of the depths of what it means to be human and to live life within communities devoted to the human good, however variously described. Much theology deserves the characterisation that Jerry Coyne contemptuously assigns to it as Sophisticated Theology™, but it does not for this reason follow that theologians have not understood much that is of interest and importance about the project of being human.
This struck me with particular force when I was reading Jim Holt’s fascinating book Why Does the World Exist? An Existentialist Detective Story (WW Norton, 2012) and came upon the account of his encounter with John Updike, who, despite his interest in science and its awesome achievements, retains a kind of theological insight into the quality of being human, and how closely intertwined this is with what he knows about the scientific origins of life and the universe. At one point in their conversation Updike said
that ruling out natural theology does leave too much of humanity and human experience behind. … to make faith into an abstract scientific proposition is to please no one, least of all the believers. There’s no intellectual exertion in accepting it [viz., faith]. Faith is like being in love. As Barth put it, God is reached by the shortest ladder, not the longest ladder. Barth’s constant point was that it is God’s movement that bridges the distance, not the human effort. [251-252]
My point in quoting this is not to agree or disagree with Karl Barth’s theology, or Updike’s assessment of it. My point is simply that, as a novelist, Updike the novelist is faced with the task of creating believable characters who can be understood “in the round,” as it were. For that purpose, he is saying, science is not enough; it simply does not reach dimensions of being human that are at once real and yet not describable in scientific terms. That, it seems to me, is important evidence that must be taken into account when we are speaking of being human. The poetry of science, as Richard Dawkins has called it, is not enough to account for what Updike might call the poetry of human existence, “the sheer sweetness of being” with which Updike’s novels and stories are, in Jim Holt’s words, suffused. This sweetness is something that I only knew through the love of a wonderful woman, in the light of which alone life seems now, to me, a worthwhile undertaking, however truncated and impoverished by her absence. That is why what I do is all about Elizabeth.
_____________
*That it was largely written by Dworkin is my judgement, at any rate, basing myself purely on stylistic grounds.
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LIke the new digs.
Thank you.
Unless, and until, you decide all of your work will be here, I will continue reading your story (and Elizabeth’s) here and at the current site.
You have given me many ways out of the binds I am in with my siblings.
Thanks for joining! I am looking forward to ideas that could help with the rents and in-laws regarding death and dying.
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I’m glad to see FtB has gained another eloquent writer and thinker. I’m looking forward to reading your posts along with an ever-growing list of blogs that I never think I’ll have time for, but are just so compelling and interesting that I somehow find the time.
Thank you, Eric for an interesting, informative and well-written first post.
For those like me who are unfamiliar with the word “propadeutic” the Free Dictionary defines it as:
I was particularly taken by this comment:
This idea was what started me on the road to atheism. I had some serious misgivings about some church doctrines. When I brought my doubts to the clergy I was told to pray to strengthen my faith. Never was I given logical explanations for the bits of dogma causing me trouble. I was informed that “God has told us this is true!” My comment that God hadn’t told me “this is true” was dismissed as an impertinence. To be a member of the church in good standing meant I had to accept the totality of what certain people had decided God had told them. My argument that God had apparently told a great number of people numerous contradictory things was denounced as heresy: “God only talks to us.” I walked away from that church, then from Christianity, and then from the idea of gods altogether.
I’m unimpressed by Barth’s statement on natural theology. From what I can tell, theology is based on guesses about the state of mind of a fictitious being as interpreted by many people over centuries of time. Should I be impressed by Trapè’s insistence that Augustine of Hippo was misunderstanding Paul’s misogyny? Or should I think all three men were merely expressing their opinions and prejudices?
Hello, Eric. This is just incredibly surreal posting a comment to you at FTB. I’m pinching myself. I just want to wish you all the best in your new home. Your profile photo is so nice. Cheers!
I look forward to reading your posts. I was diagnosed with MS in 1997.
Thank you for such a personal and revealing post. I agree that we should have as much personal choice when it comes to our death as we do for (some) other choices. I look forward to following your blog.
Hi!
It’s 23 C and about 5000% humidity.
I wish I had some of your cool.
Thank you Eric for sharing the story about the loss of Elizabeth. I am sure she will live forever in your thoughts.
You post reminded me of what Astrid Lindgren once wrote:
“Wen die Götter lieben, den lassen sie jung sterben” (~~The beloved of gods die young)
Leave out the gods and you can still be on the same page. Without the gods, there is still love and still death. You live and you pass as you please. That shall be the norm. (I didn’t cite Nietzsche on purpose here)
looking forward to read more from you.
It is great to see you on FtB’s Uncle Eric (I hope if it is OK to affectionately call you that like Prof Coyne does). I came to choiceindying.com from WEIT a couple of years ago, and it is always a splendid read, as well is your comments on WEIT.
Will you be re posting some of your ‘greatest hits’ for this new audience? If so one of my favorites is ‘The Right to Die and the Archbishop of Canterbury’ from march last year.
So, I thought this was a pretty nice post, and obviously there’s a lot of personal sentiment going into it, but I’m a contentious asshole, and therefore have to argue with you about something.
Specifically: “religion, as a human creation, may still contain much that is enriching.”
There are many things that are often wrapped up within “Religion” that have value: Occasionally interesting storytelling in the form of mythology, occasionally enlightening philosophy whenever supernatural reasoning mostly gets left out of the equation, beautiful art made in the name of some god or other. However, all of these, and every other positive quality that can be gleaned from the great refuse-heap that is religious ideology, is made worse, made toxic and poisonous, by its association with religion. The stories are less entertaining when it’s clear that some poor fool believes them. The philosophy, even when it’s good, is used to support supernatural lies. The art is hoarded by criminals in silly hats. Religion made all of these things worse, and all of them could have been done without religion, and continue to be done without religion, every day all over the world. Each piece of religious thought that is worth keeping only because useful after a laborious extrication from the bowels of the beast, and a thorough cleaning to remove all the bile that is supernatural and authoritarian thinking. Even then, each of those ideas would have been better if it had just been formed outside of religious thought in the first place.
Too much of what makes humanity good gets caught up in religion, because too much of humanity is religious. It is, however, the human beings involved who are making the religion good, not the other way around, and who knows to what heights they might have taken their craft without a divine albatross around their necks? Unrestrained by vitriolic dogma and regressive hierarchy, how much beauty might humanity have created? Without maddened ideology with no attachment to reality, how much hatred and death and hideous, vile atrocity might have been avoided?
Religion gives us a little, and then takes a lot. It then pretends that, without it, we have nothing. It is best not to fall into its trap, and instead realize that we can create everything that it purports to give us ourselves.
And… that post got away from me, a little. Oh well, w/e. I don’t really know anything about what you actually believe, so for all I know you agree with me and would just say a lot of this differently, so I apologize if I’m misinterpreting your statement. It’s 4AM here, after all.
Welcome. I wish I’d read your writing before now. I am very alone around here in my advocacy of the right to die. It interests me to hear how others feel on this issue.
Welcome Eric! Excellent prose. Perhaps in the future we could discuss the use of LSD in easing the anxiety of impending death. There’s an informative TEDtalk on the subject. I’ll check back often.
Shplane, Spess Alium. While I agree that religion is often a poison, and can even be a refuse-heap, as you say, this seems to me to be rather over the top:
Religion did not always make all of these things worse, and there is, despite the widespread enmity which religion has deservedly attracted to itself, the fact that religion itself is a human creation, and, as such, can be seen, not only to have blighted people’s lives, but often to have lightened them as well, as well as, in many important instances, to assist in the ardent struggle for justice and right. Examples of this abound in World War II Germany, where the so-called “Confessing Church” (and other committed religious believers) stood boldly against the neo-paganism of Nazism, and paid for their dissent with their lives. A book of their writings, introduced by Trevor Huddleston (second archbishop of the Anglican Province of the Indian Ocean, and a stalwart opponent of apartheid in South Africa), entitled Dying We Live, is full of the testimony of the strengthening effect of religious conviction in the face of tyranny, when others, with less categorical commitments, did much less. So, while I agree with the claim that religion has often led to diminishment, it does not do to overplay one’s hand. Much that has been written by moral and pastoral theologians still has value to “souls” in pain, and the offer of a resolution for the kind of lingering guilt that sometimes can make it seem as though one is trying to swim upstream in moral molasses (or treacle, depending on where you live), is not simply to be dismissed as so much shadow play.
I would recommend that you and others of like mind read the very humane writings of Richard Holloway, a man who no longer considers himself a Christian, though he was an Anglican priest and, as Bishop of Edinburgh, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church (where, by the way, the American Episcopal Church gets its name), and who now writes books of acute sensitivity about the human condition, where he takes the insights of religion seriously as a contribution to human self-understanding. His books Godless Morality, Looking in the Distance, Anger, Sex, Doubt and Death, and Between the Monster and the Saint are full of sensitive and kindly insights into the human condition by someone who, though no longer a believer, is unwilling to discard the one channel into which so much human thought and effort had been focused during the ages of faith.
Hi Eric,
I’ve followed you at your other blog for a while and always appreciate (although don’t always agree with) your thoughtful commentary on religious intrusion into the secular sphere.
While I would not disagree with your claim that theologians can have insight into what it is to be human, it does not necessarily follow that this insight is a result of their chosen profession, and in fact this could be an active impediment to a clearer understanding of the human condition.
I agree that religion, as a human invention, contains much of value. I have only to look to the example of my Grandfather, a Mennonite preacher, and my own parents whose faith inspired in them a profound compassion and kindness and acceptance of others as they are.
I no longer share their faith in God, but that openness and humanity are forever a part of who I am and I cannot deny that they were inherited from a religious point of view.
Andre Comte-Sponville talks about what he calls “fidelity”; that part of our religious heritage which is left after one loses one’s faith. Concepts of love, compassion, forgiveness, humility, altruism all have a place in our religious history. We can certainly have all of that without belief in a deity, but we cannot deny that they are also part of most religious traditions.
I’ve come to think of religion as a kind of art form; an expression of our own humanity. The gods people believe in tend to reflect who the believer is; the angry, judgmental person believes in a vengeful God; a man like my Grandfather believed in something very different.
A Hermit:
While I largely agree with what you say — Don Cupitt, for whom I have a great deal of respect, says that religion now should be accepted as art — one besetting problem remains: most religious people do not regard their religious belonging as an art from, for so regarding it would not only relativise it, it would also open it up to free expression, and so it would lose the power to guide and direct that so many people seek from religion. I know someone who started going to a fundamentalist church, not because he believes, so much (at least that’s what he says), although it is hard to think that he does not, but because the discipline of faith has led to a more disciplined life, and the abandonment of habits and practices that he had found it impossible to relinquish. I doubt very much that religion as art would have enabled him to do this.
Steve, when you say –
– this is undoubtedly true. My point was simply that, since so much of human experience has been understood through the lens of religious faith until fairly recently, it would be a loss to ignore the contribution that theologians had made to our understanding of being human. Take Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, for example. That is, I think, a profound reflection on the nature of being human which it would be unfortunate to discard simply because it is written from a theologian’s perspective. Whether they would have had a clearer perspective without the religious lens is another issue altogether, and scarcely relevant to the point that I wanted to make: that we should not carelessly throw away so much of the human heritage simply because, until the last few hundred years, most of it was seen from a religious point of view. We rightly accuse Christianity, for example, of ransacking and laying waste to the tradition of the Greek Enlightenment. We should not treat the religious tradition with a similar disregard for its accomplishments, whether or not we can share the religious convictions which underlie them.
Well yes, it’s a limited analogy; as you say the difficulty is getting the believers to see it that way…and the more institutionalized the belief the more difficult that becomes.
The comments were not too long!!
Hi Eric, welcome! I want to tell you that I’m stunned by your writing (btw, you still sound like a priest! Or at least you sound like the ones I grew up with). This was an incredibly thought provoking introduction. Thank you for sharing your story, both what you’ve written and what you have yet to write – I’ll be reading.
Beautiful essay Eric.
Science is a methodology, which given adequate experimental controls, can isolate the relationship of one thing with another. When the controls on other variables cannot be achieved, as within any complex system, statistical methods can substitute. Separating the variables and establishing relationships requires data and processing power. The human mind and associated senses is in many respects more powerful and more discriminating that any electronic computer. Is the processing of the brain to convert data into knowledge, science? No, because the judgments it arrives at are influenced by all kinds of mental structures both inherited and learned. But yet the brain is capable of insights far more subtle than any scientific experiment. Especially the brains of those who have informed and disciplined their mental structures with the knowledge and insights of great thinkers. This is humanism. Is it different from science? Not in its basic reliance on empiricism and rationality. But yes, in that it has neither experimental nor statistical controls, except through the filtering mechanism of the individual brain.
I’m probably not going to read any of that, as I simply don’t have the time or, honestly, much interest in doing so. However, just going off of your description: “Testimony” doesn’t mean a whole lot, and calling Nazism “pagan” is laughably ahistoric considering the vast majority of nazis being some flavor of christian. Of course a religious group is going to claim that they could not have done whatever positive deeds they did without their religion. Of course they will claim that no atheists ever did anything good. That’s exactly the point I was making: Religion, which is the belief in and reverence of supernatural entities or forces that supposedly hold sway over nature and/or human lives, took those positive actions that would more rightly be attributed to things like “compassion” and “empathy” and “self-sacrifice”, and said “Yeah, no, that was totally all me. Couldn’t have done it unless they believed in wizards.”
Probably most of those who opposed nazi atrocities were, in fact, religious. It doesn’t seem at all unlikely considering the demographics of the time. That does not mean that religion was necessary to that opposition, even if those doing the opposing would claim that it was. That is simply what religion does. It tacks itself on to everything we do, and then claims that it was essential to the process, no matter how ultimately irrelevant it actually was. Any claim that belief in *Insert mythical being here* resulted in some great and wondrous act should be met with extreme scrutiny, both because there’s no real connection there, and because one of religion’s most powerful means of propagating itself is to claim that it is more important to the human endeavor than it actually is.
Just to make it clear: I am not suggesting that we should abandon every idea that has ever been given a religious veneer. I’m simply suggesting that we should always be sure to recognize that the core of religion, unevidenced belief in supernatural entities, rarely has much of anything to do with all the satellite beliefs and institutions that get lumped in with them. Religion does not cause morality or creativity, it co-opts them to make itself grow. I’m not suggesting that we abandon every good thing that’s been done in the name of religion, I’m suggesting that we stop saying that we’re doing them in the name of religion, and stop believing people when they say that they couldn’t be good without dogma. We are entirely capable of painting ceilings or protecting people from nazis without the help of an imaginary friend telling us to do so.
But, then, maybe you’re right. Maybe without a divine taskmaster cracking the whip behind them, few if any people would have stood against Hitler’s tyranny and hatred. If that is really the case, then I honestly just can’t see how humanity is worth enough to care about in the first place. If most of us can’t oppose frickin’ NAZIS on our own, what the hell’s the point?
Since I don’t think I got it across well in that post: Religion does not always harm those achievements (Unless you’re like me and become offended when seeing great things attributed to fictional beings instead of the people who actually did them), but it often does, and it never improves them. The problem is that one cannot tell which is which at a glance, so one must always remove anything religion claims as a positive piece of itself from the religious framework to see if it remains positive.
I’m disputing very little of what you say here. I am certainly not encouraging that we put a religious veneer on our actions. Nor would I suggest that doing so gives them greater weight, though this would be rhetorically effective with some people, obviously. And, while it is true that many Nazis were Christian — that almost goes without saying — indeed, a large number of SS concentration camp guards were communicating Catholics! — there is, as Dawkins repeats from time to time, a kind of “sub-Wagnerian” paganism about Nazism, which was actively cultivated by leaders like Himmler, so it is not altogether ahistoric to speak of Nazi paganism. When Hitler spoke of making a religion from the operas of Wagner, he certainly had Teutonic paganism in mind, and the Reichsparteitage were pretty obviously intended to be quasi-religious rituals with a pagan flavour.
Well, sometimes I was embarrassed by their length, as you may recall, but it was kind of you then, and kind of you now, to make light of the space I sometimes took up on your blog, which is still the first I turn to in the morning.
Thank you Marie-Therese! Good to hear from you. How are things going with you, now that the Magdalene Laundry issue has been brought front and centre in the public conversation about past wrongs of the church in Ireland?