Category Archives: Anglican

The Epistemology of Evil

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Perhaps I should have commented over at Butterflies and Wheels, but the case of “Beatriz” (not her real name) in El Salvador (which means, of all things, The Saviour), where the Supreme Court of that benighted Catholic country has just said “No!” to her appeal for an abortion, seems to me worthy of more thorough examination. One more atrocity in the name of religion. The appropriate response is Ophelia’s: “Bastards. Fiends. Demons.” – though given my penchant for exclamations marks, I’d have said, “Bastards! Fiends! Demons!” So a tip of the hat in Ophelia’s direction.

There may seem very little to add to that succinct expression of anger and outrage, but I’d like to explore Beatriz’s situation in relation to something in the New York Times this morning. If you have a few of your free pages at the NYT left, perhaps you could take a look at it and see what you think. It’s an op-ed by a Stanford University anthropologist (T.H. Luhrmann) who has written a book about the American evangelical relationship with God – which clearly begs a number of questions – who thinks, as she says in her title, that “Belief is the Least Part of Faith.” It’s interesting how people seem to be jumping on the “faith isn’t really believing” bandwagon since Sam Harris opened the first salvo in the god wars, but it has become one of the commonest tropes amongst those who want so badly to say something nice about religion, but want us to understand that they are not so foolish as really to believe in such things. And neither, so the story goes, do the “believers,” who are more interested in – and these things do seem to trip so lightly off the tongue – “how to feel God’s love and how to be more aware of God’s presence.”

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How did Jeffrey Small get it so wrong?

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LATER ADDITION: For a clever, restrained and completely conclusive take-down of Catholic MORAL scare-mongering in action take a look at PZ Myers’ “Strident Catholics Hurt My Head“, where PZ simply takes apart the claim that chaos ensued after the US Supreme Court’s 1972 decision that non-married persons have a right to access to contraception, and how the whole funny farm of Catholic apologetics with respect to the purposes of sex and sexuality is simply — as it was bound to be — a kind of deus ex machina, introduced for no other reason than to preserve the church’s power to control the lives of others, and especially the sex lives of others. Although claiming that chaos ensued, PZ shows, by the numbers, that the result was the opposite of a vividly imagined chaos that never occurred.

This can be shown with respect to Roman Catholic scare-mongering over assisted dying as well. The chaos is not really social chaos; it is the chaos in the minds of Roman Catholics when things are taking place of which they disapprove, and which they believe should not take place because they are contrary to a supposed natural law regarding these things. The basic principle at work here is the location and possession of power. The church wants to retain control, but society functions more humanely when unaccountable wielders of power leave the scene.

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Apparently, Huffington Post and TED have entered into an agreement. Huffington Post will publish essays based on TED talks. As Jerry Coyne points out,

HuffPo + Ted = nonsense

I misunderstood, however, and made this comment:

I understand, from your earlier complaint about Sheldrake, that you think TED is inextricably aligned with woo. But surely it is not altogether fair to TED to make the equation above just on the basis that Small has taken Zimbardo’s TED talk and transformed it into a bit of liberal Christian special pleading. As you point out yourself, Zimbardo’s talk is secular, so in what way does TED contribute to Small’s nonsense?

But, as someone pointed out, there is an agreement between HuffPo and TED, and if that is so, as it apparently is, then, given Jeffrey Small’s religiously “informed” response to Phil Zimbardo’s TED talk, this is undoubtedly an example of Jerry’s equation. There is nothing whatever in Zimbardo’s talk that leads to anything in Jeffrey Small’s spinoff HuffPo piece. That was a decision made by an editor at HuffPo, and this should concern us. No responsible editor should have allowed Small’s article to stand as it was. He should have been required to give a reasonable response to Zimbardo’s talk, and if his religious beliefs did not permit that, then it should have been scotched altogether in favour of posting Zimbardo’s talk without Small’s misleading introduction.

What’s wrong with Small? He completely misunderstands Zimbardo. Small misses the point altogether. He begins by considering the problem of evil, but Zimbardo’s talk has nothing whatever to do with the problem of evil. Small continues to mislead by talking about evolution in terms of freedom, but Zimbardo is not talking about evolution, though Small wants, for religious reasons, to push things in that direction (after all, freedom is one of the fundamental arguments for defending the goodness of God in the face of evil, and if he can include freedom in evolution, then the argument can be taken all the way back to the formation of life itself!):

Evolution only works because of freedom in the natural world: a freedom of genetic mutation, a freedom of natural selection, and a freedom of randomness. This freedom led to the existence of conscious humans, but by necessity the same freedom also causes cancer, disease, natural catastrophes, and even extinctions. The paradox of existence is that death and destruction bring forth new life. Spring follows winter.

This is just silly. Jeffrey also takes the wrong message from Zimbardo’s talk. He says this:

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo demonstrated in his Stanford Prison Experiment (which he discusses in his fascinating TEDTalk) that the potential for cruel behavior lies within the ordinary person and that the environment in which the person is placed can bring forth this potential.

That is not what Zimbardo said. He said the problem lies with power, which is contextual, not with the individual or with what lies within the individual:

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This is the key, and it’s important to see this, because what Zimbardo calls the heroic response to evil depends upon seeing the contextual features that permits power to be exercised in unaccountable ways. Instead of seeing this Jeffrey wants to do the typical religious thing and place the problem in the individual’s use of freedom.

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Are there any religious experts? “Religion experts” on euthansia

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks again go to Malgorzata.

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The Ottawa Citizen has an advice column which puts questions to so-called “religion experts,” who give answers on crucial issues facing individuals and society. There is a big problem with this, because religion experts are, almost by definition, not religion experts at all. What is there to be expert about? They might be experts in their own religion, but there is no such thing as a religion expert who is qualified to give religion’s answer to any question. A recent column in the Citizen’s “Ask the Religion Experts” column, for 31 January 2012 — thanks to Veronica Abbass for the link – asks the two questions: “Is euthanasia right? Would God want us to suffer?” And then the religion experts weigh in on the side of their favourite god. The nonsense that this makes of the questions should be clear right from the outset. We ask the experts their opinion, and all they can do is refer to the “experts” of their religion. According to Z, this is the way it is; according to Y, the truth is such-and-such, and so on. And, around the edges, a little lie or two will take you over the hump when reason fails.

The first one is perhaps the funniest. It’s by a Bahá’í scholar, Jack McLean. Seeing him described as a scholar reminds me of the day I took my M.Div. degree diploma and cut it to shreds. I no longer consider that to be a degree at all. It qualified me as an Anglican priest, but it no longer seems to me that there was anything to know, except, of course, historically, for the church does have a history (or perhaps I should say the churches have a history, for there is no point, during the whole history of Christianity, where there was an unquestioned unity within Christianity), but it is impossible to be a scholar of religion itself, for religion has no subject matter. The “theo” part of theology (the word ‘theology’ meaning, roughly, the logos of theos, or the reason, knowledge of god) is simply UA (on unauthorised absence), having departed his post, or, rather, never having been there in the first place, for all the confident pretence of religious believers, especially its officer class, to which, largely, the Ottawa Citizen has appealed for enlightenment upon a subject which has no object.

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Definitely the Conclusion of the Liberal Christian Theist Series

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Under my last post in this series (which I thought I had ended!) The Philosophical Primate made this comment:Gorilla

Eric, I am… puzzled. Specifically, by this:

The short answer to the question, of course, is that there is. No one can reasonably deny it. There are liberal Christian theists. There are even liberal Christian atheists, though most of them do not put it quite so bluntly.

What is puzzling is that you spend most of the rest of this post talking about those Christian atheists — for, as you note, that is the only possible honest description of Freeman, Cuppitt, Spong, et al — without ever returning to support the claim that there is a liberal Christian theism. Given your prior posts on this subject, there seems to be an intrinsic problem of inconsistency between being genuinely liberal in one’s theology/theism and maintaining any sort of commitment to the scriptures as God’s Word. Frankly, I took that line of argument to be a quite reasonable basis for denying that there can be genuinely liberal Christian theism, because to be both Christian and theistic must at minimum require treating the Christian holy text *as* holy, with all the illiberal implications thereof — those implications being what makes Spong’s “sins of scripture” sinful in his estimation. Indeed, the only Christian theist you discuss in this post, C.H. Dodd, seems to be striving for theological liberalism but failing, because he cannot escape that traditional view of scriptures as being the authoritative “Word of God.” I fear perhaps that, desiring not to go on too long, you left out something important you’d intended to say.

So, is there a liberal Christian theism? I say yes, but then I have to qualify my yes. I was going to write this as a comment in response to our furry philosopher, but it seemed more appropriate to bring it up front and face it a bit more publicly.

Let’s start with Dodd, because I do not think that he fails to be a theological liberal. What I think happens in Dodd’s case is that he takes Christianity as being inherently liberal. The conclusions that he comes to in the course of his book on the authority of the Bible are liberal ones, not liberal so far as the idea of the inspiration and authority of the Bible goes, perhaps, but liberal insofar as the message of the Bible, as he understands it, turns out to lead to a religion with liberal values, broadly speaking. He takes the critical-historical conclusions about the Bible seriously, and then, within the parameters set by the “higher criticism,” endeavours to locate a liberal message of love and toleration, and finds it. You may say, if you like, that he is reading this message into the text, and that is true. But that is true of everyone who reads a text as a sacred text having authority. Christian doctrine cannot be read in the biblical text. It may have seemed natural to the first Christians to think of Jesus as divine, given what is said in the gospels, but at no point in the gospels is there a clear statement that Jesus is the Son of God. In fact, in Mark, Jesus goes to some trouble to stress that he is the Son of Man. So, if you want to take Jesus as the Son of God, or to understand God as Three Persons in One God, you have to do a lot of creative reading. Thus, reading a liberal message in the Bible is not all that hard, if you single out, for particular notice, certain developmental themes that run through the Bible as a whole, but I will let you read Dodd if you want to find out how he does it. Spong does essentially the same thing, though it is hard to think that Spong remains a theist, whilst Dodd certainly was.

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Is there a liberal Christian theism? Conclusion

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Don Cupitt Atheist PriestThe short answer to the question, of course, is that there is. No one can reasonably deny it. There are liberal Christian theists. There are even liberal Christian atheists, though most of them do not put it quite so bluntly. For example, Don Cupitt, and the Sea of Faith movement in England, New Zealand and Australia, speak in terms of a “non-realist” theology. That is, the theological words used by Sea of Faith members are a bit like mathematical symbols. They do not have a referring function; that is, they do not denote anything real. They are words that are used in a traditional cultural narrative which carry along with them historical associations with a time when the words were really thought to refer to actual beings “out there” in reality, but are now seen as cultural symbols used as organising principles of a way of life. And that way of life can be as rich as the old, realist Christianity of the past. The only difference is that the language is no longer taken to be about anything other than the cultural activities in which it is embedded.

This, of course, does not convince everyone, and the position is not widely adopted. For instance, Anthony Freeman, an Anglican priest, and member of the Sea of Faith movement in England, published, in 1993, a book entitled God in Us. He was then a priest in the Diocese of Chichester, was even involved in the training of clergy, and was promptly cashiered by his bishop, Eric Kemp. (There is a BBC account of Freeman’s travails here.) It is worthwhile quoting a few words from Freeman’s book here to give you the flavour of non-realist “theology”:

I return finally to the questions with which we began: ‘Do you believe in God? Are you not an atheist?’ The answer is, ‘Yes, I do believe in God, and one of the things I believe about God is that he does not exist.’ This is not just my being clever. A very important point is being made. Our view of religion as a human creation — let us call it Christian humanism — still stands firmly in the Christian tradition, and sees itself as a legitimate heir to the New Testament. We still find value in the Christian vocabulary, including the word God, and in the Christian stories, especially those of Jesus. A secular humanist, an atheist, has no place for such things. That does not mean that for us it is simply, ‘business as usual’. If we are to take seriously the non-supernatural form of Christianity which I am commending, then the emphasis of religion shifts from heaven to earth, from the next world to this one, and from dogma to spirituality and ethics. But religion still has an important place in human life. [28-29]

This puts the idea of a non-realist Christianity in a nutshell. You may think that it is not very surprising that Freeman’s bishop should have given him his pink slip, but as you think this, you might also wonder what people are going to do with the rich cultural heritage that the religions bequeath to their contemporary followers. Or, perhaps, most important, what are they going to do without it?

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Is there a liberal Christian theism? II

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I am going to cruise straight on, even though some very good questions (and answers!) were provided in the comment stream of “Is there a liberal Christian theism? I.” I do not want to look closely at those questions and answers here, for in a sense they anticipate and pre-empt many things that I want to say now (as I supposed, when I let the first instalment go without this conclusion, they might).

I want to begin, then, with the oft-quoted passage from Augustine’s commentary on Genesis, part of which I uploaded and linked in my first instalment of this post on liberal Christian theism. The importance of Augustine for my purposes (and for the purposes of those who wish to deny that scripture is to be read literally) is simply that, in his commentary, Augustine suggests that, where the facts are known to be otherwise than they are depicted in scripture, it must be that scripture was intended to be read symbolically or figuratively. Thus, it is suggested, even those who first accepted the authority of the Bible were aware that it does not aim at the truth of science, but at religious or theological truth, and the Bible’s errors of fact are not justly held against the Bible as a source of religious enlightenment and truth.

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Another Anti-Modernist Pope

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The Syllabus of Errors was a catalogue of sayings, gleaned from earlier papal documents, issued on 8th December 1865, in which certain propositions were condemned as heretical. Amongst the propositions condemned were the following:

“The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” (No. 55)

“Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.” (No. 15) and that “It has been wisely decided by law, in some Catholic countries, that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship.” (No. 78)

“The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” (No. 80)

Notice how these condemn precisely those freedoms upon which liberal democracies are founded. In his homily at a mass celebrated on the Epiphany (6th January), three new archbishops were consecrated in St. Peter’s Basilica, and the pope reiterated the last of these errors of modernism, firmly rejecting, in the words of the Reuters report, ”suggestions that the Church should change to suit public opinion.” He told the newly ordained archbishops that courage was needed to stand up to the “intolerant agnosticism.” According to the report the Pope Ratzinger said:

Today’s agnosticism has its own dogmas and is extremely intolerant regarding anything that would question it and the criteria it employs.

He went on to add that

the courage to contradict the prevailing mindset is particularly urgent for a bishop today. He must be courageous.

At the same time the pope denounced attempts “to push religion out of public debate” (which is a close relative of Error Number 55 above).

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This, really, is all about Elizabeth II

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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.

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“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. How is truth in religion determined?

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Well, the votes are now in, and the Church of England General Synod, by only six votes in the house of laity, defeated the motion that would have approved women bishops in the old C of E. But on the issue of what the truth is about women bishops, no one, I’m afraid, is any better informed than they were before. Both sides thought they knew.

Women Bishops Motion Defeated by Church of England General Synod
Even the purple umbrellas with the mitred female symbol didn’t work!
So much for Anglican juju! Perhaps you have to be in Africa!

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In a report this morning (which I should have bookmarked, because I now find that I cannot remember where it was) someone said, a bit contemptuously, referring to the “upcoming” vote in the Church of England General Synod about women bishops, that the truth is not determined by majority vote. Which got me to thinking, of course, because then the question arises how truth is determined in religion. On the specific question of women bishops, for example, or accepting the marriage of gay and lesbian persons, how does the church go about “discovering” the truth?

Of course, we know how truth is ordinarily determined. We search for evidence that a claim is correct. If I say it is raining outside, all you have to do is to look out the window and see. And if I respond, “Well, it’s raining somewhere in the world. Look, here’s a forecast for Matabeleland. It’s probably raining there,” you can justly say that that is not what is normally meant by saying, “It’s raining today.” So, evidence seems to be a clincher. And that goes for all sorts of evidence.

Take the meaning of words, for example. It’s hard to find hard empirical evidence that such-and-such is the meaning of the word ‘X,’ for any X, but looking it up in a dictionary usually gives a pretty good indication of what a word means, though dictionaries are sometimes wrong, especially if they haven’t kept up with common usage. In his book The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell recounts the way many words simply changed their meaning under pressure from their widespread use by the troops at the front. The word ‘lousy’, for instance, as in the expression, “The beach was lousy with tourists,” comes straight from the front lines, when soldiers, who were often ”lousy” with real lice, started using the word to describe other situations, as in “The hill was just lousy with Fritz,” speaking of a hill swarming with German soldiers. Words shift and change their meaning under the pressure of events, and the evidence that a word means something is often only determinable by seeing how it is used by a representative sampling of native speakers of the language.

But religion presents a special difficulty. How do we determine what is the truth in religion? When is it right to say, of someone who claims to be a Christian, that they are not really Christian at all? For example, in today’s Guardian, Theo Hobson questions whether or not Roger Scruton is a Christian. “Is Roger Scruton really a Christian?” he asks in his title, and he concludes that only in some Pickwickian, or, rather, pagan sense can he be called a Christian:

And yet, his approach to Christianity is so far from mine that I am not sure we belong to the same religion at all. The problem is not that he values a particular cultural expression of Christianity (who doesn’t?), but that he values it with idolatrous fervour. By so strongly identifying Christianity with one antiquated expression of it, he wilfully stands against the renewal of Christian culture. This is the grounds for my accusation: a real Christian will have some account of how the tradition can be renewed, rather than pose as the heroic last defender of one beautiful, tragically doomed cultural expression of it. That’s romantic paganism, not Christianity.

That’s a pretty heavy condemnation, but it only amounts to saying that Scruton is not a Christian in the sense in which he, Theo Hobson, is a Christian, or at least, in the sense that Hobson thinks it appropriate to be a Christian.

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Bishops are Nut Cases

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I say that bishops are nut cases with particular reference to Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester, Massachusetts (as well as to another who will be mentioned anon), who attacked “Question 2″ on the Massachusetts ballot, an assisted dying measure which lost by a small margin. I find it hard to see why such matters are a matter of majority rules. This is democracy in the wrong place. If majority rule governs how people will be permitted to die, it could as easily be used to marginalise minority groups — and that, of course, is just what have in the case of those who seek assistance in dying. They are a minority group. But bishops in general tend to be nutty. What is nutty about this particular bishop is not that he is opposed to assisted dying, but that he is opposed for such shallow reasons. It is, of course, not a matter of course that he says that “Catholic health care may never condone or assist in assisted suicide in any way.” Bishops often hide their religious presuppositions when talking about things like assisted dying. This, however, even if not mentioned, can just be taken for granted, and it should simply cancel through as in an equation, so that no one need take any notice of it, and yet he wrote a letter to be read in all the parishes on his diocese, which is, I think, a form of political intrusion that should be forbidden by law to those organisations that, through tax exemptions and other perks, feed from the public trough.

But, what he opposed, he said, was the wording of the bill that was up for decision in the election. And, I agree to some extent. Passing legislation by plebiscite is simply the wrong way to go about things, for public policy needs to be thoroughly vetted before it is placed on the statute books. The nutty thing, however, is simply that he lacks the imagination to see that palliative care is simply not enough. Why can’t people see this? And why can they not see that assisted dying should not be only about people who have terminal illnesses that will cash themselves in within a prescribed period? Compassion and Choices in the US, and Dignity in Dying in the UK are the same in this respect. They seem unable to see that assisted dying needs to be extended to those whose lives have become intolerable to them, whether terminal or not. A terminal prognosis is simply the worst basis upon which to premise assisted dying legislation, for it assumes that terminality in itself is a necessary condition for interminable suffering that only death can end, and it suggests, beyond that, that people who have a terminal prognosis are all eligible candidates for assisted dying, thus satisfying the slippery-slope conditions that so many people say they fear. Of course, saying that all are eligible does not say that all must, but it maps out a class of people whose lives may be seen to be, by definition, intolerable, and that is unsatisfactory. Many people die in peace. Dying is not a terrible experience for everyone, and having a terminal prognosis is not, as I say over and over again, and should not be, a necessary condition for someone to seek to die. Assistance in dying should be possible for people like my Elizabeth, or Tony Nicklinson, or Diane Pretty, Gloria Taylor, or Sue Rodgriguez (they’re all searchable names on the internet). Why is it so hard for people to see this?

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