Category Archives: Bible & Sacred Text

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? 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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Is there a liberal Christian theism? I

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It has been suggested that there may be problem at the heart of the new atheist project. If so, then it needs to be addressed. We can put the problem in this way. Now, please note, I do not say that it is a problem, but that it may be one. I want to look more closely at it, in order to say whether, first, it is a problem, and then, second, if it is, whether it has been adequately dealt with. There are a number of atheists who believe that this is a problem, and that those who dismiss it are being superficial and unnecessarily dismissive of religion. While atheism is not just a negative dismissal of theism, it is at least that in part. However, if its status as a rational dismissal of theism is to stand, it must respond to theism’s efforts to present itself as rational and able to take on board the kinds of criticism that are often made of the theistic world-view. Quite aside from the question of the existence of God, which is not going to be settled to anyone’s satisfaction within the lives of anyone living today or tomorrow, there are other questions as to the acceptability of faith, and those who dismiss religious faith must have an answer, in addition to scepticism about the existence of God, why more liberal approaches to religious belief are unacceptable to nonbelievers who persist in opposing even liberal religion, and have shown themselves reluctant to join even with the exponents of liberal religion in attempting to bring about justice and peace in our societies and in the world.

Aside from arguments pertaining to the existence of a god or gods, amongst the strongest arguments against theism are those pertaining to the use of scriptures by most theistic religions, that is, the belief in and use of texts considered to be holy and revelational of the nature and purposes of the god or gods believed in by the religion concerned. This is also the area in which liberal Christianity has made the most effort to be contemporary and open to change, so it is an important test area for the question of whether there is a genuinely liberal Christian theism. We are all familiar with the fairly intemperate putdowns of the idea of sacred writings which are believed to contain (in some form or other) the very words of a god. They have been dismissed off-handedly as bronze-age scribblings, the camp-fire maunderings of Middle Eastern goat-herders, and various other dismissively derogatory things, none of which, even if true, would necessarily show that the works do not contain the words of a god. It is a simple informal fallacy to suggest that the origin of a propositional claim is in itself sufficient to defeat it. In any event, the writings of, say, the Jewish Tanach were probably none of them written by goat-herders (notwithstanding the fact that David is depicted therein as a shepherd of the tribe of Benjamin); and, besides, the most primitive parts of the Tanach were probably written during the transition from the bronze age to the early iron age, the later parts originating entirely in the later iron age and extending into the historical period. So it will really not do, however rhetorically clever it is thought to be, to dismiss the writings as flawed because early, or flawed because originating in a period of rudimentary technology.

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Congratulations, Jerry Coyne!

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This post is now available in Polish translation here. Thanks, as always, to Malgorzata at Racjonalista.

Jerry Coyne has just finished reading through the Bible (the Christian Bible, or at least one version of it — the Ethiopian canon, for example, contains 9 extra books, not included in the Western canon, and the Western canon includes 11 books (depending on how they are counted) not included in most Protestant Bibles), and he has some comments about the experience over at Why Evolution is True. I have done it myself about four times. The last time I tried, some fifteen years ago, I gave up after finishing the Torah, or the five books of Moses, because it became so oppressive and unintelligible, so Jerry deserves our congratulations for persevering to the end, though, to be frank, the only reason for doing something like this is to be able to say that you had actually done it.

It’s a bit like climbing mountains. Edmund Hilary, the first white man to climb Mount Everest (he was accompanied in the feat with his Sherpa guide, Tenzin Norgay), once said that the reason for climbing mountains is “because they’re there,” and the same, I suppose, could be said for reading the Bible, or any other supposedly holy book. Because they’re there. And scaling the mountains of words — or (perhaps a more appropriate image) descending the cliffs into trenches or rift valleys towards the nadir of human thought – is almost as treacherous as climbing real mountains, because anyone who has read through the Bible, and, perhaps, even more so for someone who has scaled the treacherous depths of the Qur’an, with its unremitting hatefulness, is bound to be a poorer person for the effort. If reading changes you, reading these texts can only change you for the worse, for to confront human evil sanctified by centuries of blind adulation is a risky business, to say the least.

At least now, though, when the issue of the value of such ancient texts is more frequently raised by critical voices, the danger is much less than it once was, for now it is possible to forget the patina of holiness and read them as the irreducibly human works that they are, with all their blotches and wrinkles. One of the things that should be clear to anyone who has read the Bible or the Qur’an straight through is how uneven these texts are. Perhaps I should qualify that, because the Qur’an is not as uneven as the Christian or the Jewish Bible. There are at least high points of literary achievement in the Bible, and this cannot be said for the Qur’an. I’m told that in Arabic the resonance of the language can reduce a person to tears. It is hard to believe that the thoughts themselves can do so, the Qur’an containing, amongst holy books, the most stultifyingly constipated thought ever to enter the minds of men, and being so unremittingly boring and repetitious that it is hard to stay awake, let alone retain what little intellectual content is to be found in it. How anyone can think the thoughts and call them holy is simply beyond reason and the most fertile imagination.

The Bible, though, has some genuine treasures, amongst them the Song of Songs, a lively erotic work of some subtlety, and the book of Job, perhaps the most unrelentingly searching study of the problem of evil ever written. The book ends, of course, on an entirely false note, as though lives can substitute for lives, or wealth for suffering, but the poetic heart of the book is an ageless and so far unanswered challenge to the justice of any imaginable god. Another text of some value is Ecclesiastes, the author of which was almost certainly not a true believer, who provides as convincing a case for atheism as any of the new atheists. It’s fundamental message is that “shit happens.” The world goes on in its accustomed way without any sign of design or purpose, and so one should live stoically, drifting with the tide of change, accepting the goodness that may come one’s way, and enduring the suffering without complaint.

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And the Real Turkey Is?!

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Christine Odone, whom I once called the most rebarbative journalist published in English newspapers today, has crossed the line in an article that flew under my radar a few days before Christmas, not only expressing her views in her familiar, constipated prose, but this time tipping over into outright abuse. It all stems from an interview given by Richard Dawkins to the Muslim Mehdi Hasan for Al Jazeera. Hasan had an op-ed in the Guardian (as long ago as last July), which makes a nice companion piece to Odone’s childish tantrum regarding some incidental remarks made by Dawkins in that interview. The key issue being discussed seems to be the old chestnut of whether religion does more good than evil in the world. That’s really a roundabout way of getting at the real point at issue; namely, whether religion can be reasonably criticised. For the strange thing is this. Criticism of religion is taken as a blanket denial of any value in religion whatsoever, and defenders of religion are very quick to pick up on anything, any little word or expression which can be taken to be a chink in their opponent’s armour, and by then putting the Schwerpunkt of their argument at that point, they give the impression of having overturned their opponent altogether.

One thing that nonbelievers have to remember is that religious believers have been at this business of apologetic defence of their religious beliefs for much longer than nonbelievers. They have been hardened and inured to criticism, because the religions themselves have been constantly at each other’s throats for millennia. If you listen to the Mehdi Hasan interview straight through, you will notice how unfazed he is by Dawkins’ expression of amazement that Hasan should actually believe that Muhammad rode to heaven on a winged horse. It is in the Qu’ran, so he believes it. He asks Dawkins if he is abusing his children by telling them the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven, and Dawkins says no, of course not. Here is the story, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Muhammad travels on the steed Buraq to “the farthest mosque” where he leads other prophets in prayer. He then ascends to heaven where he speaks to God, who gives Muhammad instructions to take back to the faithful regarding the details of prayer.

I happen to disagree with Dawkins. I think it is abusive to teach such stories to children, if they are led to believe that they are true. It encourages them to believe in fantasy as truth, which must have an effect on how they regard truth itself. Hasan was actually successful in getting Dawkins to give way on this point, clearly because Dawkins did not want to appear insensitive and strident. If Hasan tells these stories to his children as part of the mythology of Islam, then perhaps no harm is done, but if he tells these stories as confirming the immediacy and reliability of Muhammad’s revelation, that is certainly a form of child abuse. Fairy tales are one thing, since children know that fairy tales are not true; but telling children tall tales in contexts that are heavy with religious significance and seriousness is another matter altogether. This kind of story telling is only a very short distance away from the sources of religious violence, and this is a practice that needs to be acknowledged and opposed.

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Slaughter of the Innocents Trope and William Lane Craig

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I have been waiting for someone to make the connexion. All along I have been speaking of the Newtown murders of little children as ”the slaughter of the innocents,” because, coming just before Christmas, it should be almost impossible for a Christian not to notice the parallel between the Newtown massacre and the story of Herod’s killing of the male children of Bethlehem, in his efforts to kill the child Jesus, who, Matthew tells us, so clearly, was born to be king of the Jews. And, finally, someone has made the connexion. But he hasn’t carried it far enough, which shows how shallow people’s appropriation of their own myths really is. Of course, we’ve had the predictable but stupid idea that the murders were God’s judgement on America for turning its back on God, as well as the usual run of the mill stuff about punishment for abortions or entertaining the notion of gay marriage. Leave it to William Lane Craig to make the connexion! Here he is talking about the slaughter of the innocents, and its congruity with the meaning of Christmas.

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Craig’s interpretation of this is so simple-minded, it’s hard to think of the man as a scholar of some repute. I’m not sure I’d go as far as Jerry Coyne, though, in his interpretation of what Craig has to say. Here’s what Jerry says over at Why Evolution is True:

Apparently the recent slaughter is God’s way of reminding us of “what Christmas is for, what it’s all about.” And it’s almost as if Craig thinks that God engineered the murders to that end.

I don’t think that’s Craig’s point. I think Craig is just saying that we should take it as a reminder that we live in a world in which unspeakable evils occur, but there’s no sign that he thinks that God precipitated the murders as a reminder.

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The Pope’s Theocratic Challenge – Time to Revisit Vatican Statehood

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The other day, feeling not so well, I went on a righteous rant against the Roman Catholic Church, the pope, and other idiots who think they have the right to limit women’s freedom to make their own reproductive decisions. It is vital that we see it in this light. Forget the intrinsic or sacred value of the foetus, which, the Roman Catholic Church claims, is equal to that of the “mother’s”. This is the usual religious smokescreen laid down so that we won’t notice what the church is really trying to do. It is trying its damnedest to control people, to make them dance to the Roman Catholic tune, suggesting that only the Roman Catholic Church really knows what is right and good. No one else really knows. That’s the bottom line for the pope and his coterie of conservative bishops, archbishops and cardinals around the world. They’re not prepared to discuss this. Their minds are made up. They know what the truth of morality really is, and the rest of the world should just bend to it and follow their direction. Most of all, women have no choice in the matter. They should just shut up. Women are, really, nothing but walking time bombs of emotional instability, and they should be made to shut up and produce babies. It doesn’t matter how they got pregnant. It doesn’t matter how much psychological trauma they undergo in the process. They may be pregnant by rape or sexual abuse. Pregnancy may lead to death, disability, breakdown, the termination of plans and projects and hope for the future. It simply doesn’t matter, and women should just shut up and bear children. That is their assigned lot in life. It’s simply a matter of natural law.

Zoe Williams has a hard-hitting piece in the Guardian today, where she points out how simply out of touch today the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is on the issue of abortion. It’s time to stop taking these people seriously, she suggests. It’s time simply to reject the mindless repetition of the old certainties. And she says something that really needed to be said:

The tendency with the abortion debate is to consider the anti-choice lobby as more sensitive, more governed by their consciences and anger than the pro-choice lobby. It’s true in some respects – the Roman Catholic church certainly has a tendency toward hysterical overstatement. And yet we pander too much to anti-abortionists, taking whatever scraps of reproductive rights they’ll throw us, stopping the fight as soon as our immediate pragmatic needs have been met.

Yes, and a thousand times yes. It’s the same with the anti-assisted dying movement too. The attempt is always being made to paint their opponents as crass and cruel, as baby-killers, murderers and representatives of a culture of death. How many times have I heard Peter Singer characterised as immoral, because he thinks that easing a defective baby out of life is better than simply allowing it to die of starvation and dehydration? John Lennox said precisely this in his debate with Richard Dawkins, and Dawkins rightly responded by saying that Singer is one of the most morally conscientious persons he knows. Lennox is like the pope. He no longer seems to know what is morally relevant in today’s world, because he lives so much in the past. Christians have to live in the past, almost by definition, because the writings that they consider authoritative were written, some perhaps four, some three, and others around two thousand years ago.

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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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