Category Archives: Buddhism

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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The Ottawa Citizen asks the “Religion Experts” about Assisted Dying and the Sanctity of Life

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Now available in Polish at Racjonalista.

Thanks to Veronica Abbass we have the delight of reading a bunch of tripe from some so-called “religion experts” giving us their take on what the “renewed debate” tells us about the sanctity of life. According to Helga Kuhse, the Australian bioethicist, the Sanctity of Life Principle can be expressed as follows:

It is absolutely prohibited either intentionally to kill a patient or intentionally to let a patient die, and to base decisions relating to the prolongation or shortening of human life on considerations of its quality of kind. [The Sanctity of Life Doctrine in Medicine, 11; italics in original]

Now, the Ottawa Citizen (here) thinks that asking a group of “religion experts” how the debate over assisted dying is affecting our conception of the sanctity of life would be a useful exercise. In general, of course, you might as well just ask the pope, because so-called “religion experts” are not likely to stray very far from the usual religious line that life is sacred. Indeed, while not all of the Ottawa Citizen’s “religion experts” are actually religious experts at all, in general all of them are reluctant to stray away from things they take to be revealed. Almost all of them return a firm non placet so far as assisted dying is concerned. We are not surprised. (It is perhaps worth adding, parenthetically, that the contributors are not really “religion experts” at all, a form of words which suggests expertise in the study of religion. One of the contributors (Kevin Smith) does not seem to have any religious affiliation at all. The rest are supposedly “religious experts”, that is, religious believers whose religious faith gives them moral prejudices of one kind or another based on supposed revelations or authoritative religious texts.)

What is more surprising, perhaps, is that the Ottawa Citizen should end its article with the words of a Roman Catholic priest:

We can do better as a society than killing those who suffer but that requires  that we begin with the awareness that all human life is sacred.

At least I think these words come from the priest contributor. Whether these are the words of the last person on the Citizen panel is not altogether clear, but since the Citizen deemed it appropriate to ask only one apparently nonreligious person to comment, there seems to be an underlying assumption that religious people are in some sense moral experts, whose views not only need to be heard and respected, but are the principal sources of our moral understanding. As such this doubtless expresses the editorial position of the newspaper itself. The Citizen has a long history of printing Margaret Somerville’s obiter dicta on the subject of assisted dying (and other ethical issues, but especially those emphasised by the Roman Catholic Church) from time to time. I assume these views are concordant with its own editorial position on the matters in question. But to suppose, as the Citizen apparently does, that “religion experts” have anything pertinent to say on the matter is simply to accord to religious leaders an expertise that they do not possess. Religions think they have insight into the minds of their gods, but there is no reason to think either that what supposed gods think on moral issues should concern us, or that we should pay any attention to those who think that they know what their gods think. It’s time to rid ourselves of the uncritical respect paid to religions and their leaders.

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Holiness is a Dangerous Illusion

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The stories about child sex abuse in Ireland keep coming in. It’s a bit like water torture, drip, drip, drip, day after day new revelations of abuse, coverups, new ways of excusing the failures of the church, of blaming the victim, society, the relativist culture, the highly sexualised media, the 60s (!), anything at all so that the people who are truly responsible don’t have to examine themselves and their own religious culture, don’t have to try, at least, to discern the part that celibacy (in the case of the Roman Catholic Church), or just the forms of religion itself play in reducing “other people” — in this case kids, but others are reduced in the same way – to objects that can be exploited and used for illicit pleasure, profit or power. There’s another report about to be made public, from County Donegal in Ireland, which is expected to say that the Garda (the police) were complicit in the cover up, and that not only priests, but lay people, participated in using the kids for their own purposes and pleasure.

And, at the heart of all this? Well, take a look at this:

Ordination -- the making of a deacon

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Random Shots in the Dark

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Another wannabe polemicist has decided to take down the “New Atheists”* a peg or two. Today’s issue of The Chronicle Review includes an article entitled “The New Atheists’ Narrow Worldview“, in which a teacher of philosophy Stephen T. Asma — it only needs a ‘th’, and it suggests the kind of intellectual congestion involved in what he has to tell us — suggests that “most friends and even en­e­mies of the new athe­ism have not yet no­ticed the pro­vin­cial­ism of the cur­rent de­bate.”

After casually insulting the so-called Four Horsmen, in which he calls them “soldiers of reason”, and suggests that, “[l]ampooning the anx­i­eties of evan­geli­cals, these best-sell­ing athe­ists are em­brac­ing their “dan­gerous” sta­tus and dar­ing be­liev­ers to match their for­mi­da­ble philo­soph­i­cal acu­men,” he goes on to point out that most of the world’s people are animists, and that the contemporary New Atheism scarcely touches on this type of religion which dominates the developing world, in which people pay their respects to local nature spirits, belief in which, Asma claims, “may be ev­ery bit as em­piri­cal and ra­tional as West­ern science, if we take a clos­er look at life in the de­vel­op­ing world.”

*I’ll leave the quotes off ‘New Atheism’ and its variants, but they should be understood, since it is not really clear what Asma means by speaking of new as opposed to (what must now be assumed to be) old atheists.

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