Category Archives: Fundamentalism

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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Drip Drip Drip – Fundamentalist Tory MPs in Canada Continue their Backdoor “Pro-Life” Campaign

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Canadians should be very concerned about the continuing intrusion of fundamentalist MPs in life and death issues. Not long ago Mark Warawa (Member for Langley, BC) introduced a motion to “condemn discrimination against females occurring through sex-selective pregnancy termination.” While there is some justification for his concern, the purpose of the motion is to reintroduce control over women’s reproductivity into the law, which was ended in 1988. Warawa wants us to think that he introduced the motion as a support for the rights and dignity of women, portraying his Motion 408 as a move to end violence against women and girls. But this is a smoke screen. If this apparently woman-friendly motion were to be passed, it would open the door to much more control over women’s right to abortion. As I have stated before, it is important to change the attitude of immigrants so that women come to be valued. Primitive ideas of women’s subordinate position should be erased from the ethnic memory of those who have chosen to make a life in Canada, where women’s rights are equal to those of men. In this we are clearly failing, since we refuse to address the issue at the level of individual communities and practices which continue to disadvantage women. But women in general, including immigrant women, cannot be equal if they have no control over reproductive decisions, which means that abortion must not be reintroduced into Canada’s Criminal Code as it had been before 1988 merely on the pretext of dealing with misguided immigrants.

There have been other motions from backbench Tory MPs attempting to limit the abortion rights of Canadians (for example, Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312, for which he was thanked by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada – these guys are not subtle!), and now backbench Tories have added to these intrusions by requesting the RCMP to investigate some abortions as murders! They call them “post abortion killings,” but there is no evidence that there is a conspiracy to kill children who have been born. In fact, according to Statistics Canada, there have been 491 such cases, but a statement from Statistics Canada shows clearly that these are not cases of murder or post abortion killings. According to the account in the Globe and Mail, Statistics Canada made a statement about these cases as follows:

Statistics Canada said the 491 cases that it counted during the 10-year period referred to matters where “the cause of death or stillbirth is an abortion.”

“These are included in national cause-of-death statistics because when the aborted fetus is born alive and subsequently dies, each event must be registered,” the federal agency said in a statement.

Statistics Canada added it also included stillbirths when “the aborted fetus is born dead but meets the provincial requirements [birth weight and/or gestational age].”

Again we are faced with a Tory smoke screen, trying to hide fundamentalist Christian dogma behind something that they think will arouse the concern of Canadians. This continuous drip drip drip of Christian intervention in Canada’s secular law is to be deplored, and it is time for Canadians to let these antediluvian religious hacks know that their attempts to import Christian (and doubtless other religious) prejudices into the law is unwelcome, and contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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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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Big Flop?

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I haven’t given the “Big Think” website another thought since I first encountered it some years ago. It’s a website that, according to an article in the New York Times, was intended to be a kind of intellectual YouTube, and to “do for intellectuals what YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, did for bulldogs on skateboards,” and this morning Jerry has a comment on a post at “Big Think” by an evolutionary psychologist named Satoshi Kanazawa in which he which tears Kanazawa apart limb by limb, indicating how seriously downmarket Big Think seems to have become. I won’t comment on either Jerry’s comment, or Kanazawa’s original post, except to say that for someone to say that he knows for sure that God doesn’t exist (as Kanazawa does), and yet goes on to say that he is not an atheist, is quite simply (without further qualification) to contradict himself. However, I’ll put that aside, because I wasn’t going to write anything at all today until I came upon another of Kanazawa’s posts over at what we must now call, I think, “Big Flop,” if Karazawa is representative of the level of intellectual sophistication to be found there.

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The Right Sort of Alarm

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Karl Giberson has now written two HuffPo articles on the Marco Rubio “controversy” (here and here). In an interview with GQ Rubio (a junior Senator from Florida) was asked about the age of the earth, and instead of giving a straightforward answer to the question, ended up by saying that it was one of life’s great mysteries. Later, he retracted that statement, and suggested that it all depends which community you ask. If you ask scientists, they will tell you that the age of the earth is 4.54 billion years old, but if you ask many creationists, they will say that the earth is somewhere around 10,000 or less years old. The scientific view, he said, must be taught in schools, but parents have the right to teach their children lies. Of course, he didn’t use the word ’lies,’ but that’s what it amounted to, and that is pretty shocking coming from a possible presidential contender next time around.

Giberson, however, faced with this almost unbelievable expression of ignorance by a leading light of the Grand Old Party, even if it was done for political reasons, suggests that there’s no point in facing this problem head on. That will just make creationists more determined than ever to stick to their guns. After all, he says, they really believe in spiritual warfare between Good (them) and Evil (those who speak the truth). Yes, I know, that’s not the way he puts it, but it’s really the way it sorts itself out. In his first article he ends with the words, “Give Rubio a break.” Then in the second article he raises the spectre of American survival. It seems that Giberson himself is confused and unsure of himself, even though he suggests that he knows the way forward, and it does not lie with people like Coyne, Dawkins, Dennett and Stenger. For what, he asks, do people see when they consult these experts? Passionate anti-religious polemic. And how are the creationists to find a different point of view if people do not write about it?

Even a diligent search [Giberson writes] would turn up but a few books explaining how contemporary scientific ideas can be understood within the framework of traditional Christianity.

In place of the deniers of religion, Giberson offers us Chris Mooney and Michael Ruse instead, for they — well, what do they do? — go easy on religion? play accommodationist games? allow religious ignorance a place to wallow? What do they do that Coyne, Dawkins, Dennett and Stenger don’t? Basically, I think, they pull in their fangs, and pretend that science is no threat at all to the creationists’ worst fears.

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Religious extremism and moderation: Are there really any sophisticated believers?

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Now available in Polish at Racjonalista. Thanks again to Malgorzata.

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I’ve been stymied over the last few days trying to untangle the issue of true belief. For some time now we have been told that the men who hijacked the planes that brought down the Twin Towers in New York, flew into the Pentagon, or were brought down by some courageous passengers in a Pennsylvania field, are not representative of Islam. People who criticise the new atheists are forever accusing them of misrepresenting true Christianity, which is not, we are to suppose, represented by Christian fundamentalists. Indeed, with some justice, but also with a fair degree of self-serving diversion, Christians who do not want to be identified with American fundamentalists have been saying for some time that modern Christian fundamentalism is really, that is, really and truly, a modern version of Christianity dreamt up fairly recently by Christians who took science as their model of what a real religion looks like. And then it is added, of course, that it couldn’t be further from the truth. Real Christianity, we are to understand, unlike fundamentalism, is quite at home in the modern university, and can pull its own weight in academic discussion, as well as at those places where it interfaces with science. Some Christians, like the people at the Faraday Institute in Cambridge — another “institute” funded by the Templeton Foundation — go so far as to suggest that, not only can Christianity be shown to be consistent with scientific discovery, but that hard science, when examined closely, actually supports specifically Christian beliefs.

It’s that last point that I find truly puzzling. Like people who find embryology in the Qu’ran or nuclear war in the Mahabharata, Christian theologians who actually claim support for Christian beliefs in contemporary science just have to be wrong. And, of course, when you actually look at the theological work that they do it becomes abundantly clear that this is not really what they mean. What they mean is that, if we take the theories of science, we can find some plausible “workaround” that allows the Christian to claim that, when all is said and done, at least science does not make Christian belief impossible. Christians can still hold onto their beliefs, like Linus to his blanket, despite the fact that those who are making these claims indulge in so much special pleading, and continue to make such obvious attempts at diverting attention from the most serious conflicts by keeping up a running patter which at least looks like it is taking science into account, that their unease with science is rather brutally plain to everyone but themselves. And when they start talking about myth, and tell us that of course Christians don’t actually believe — in a strong sense of this word — that Christian doctrines like the virgin birth, the resurrection, or the ascension into heaven actually took place in the strict and literal sense of the word (as, we will see in a moment, Rowan Williams does), but are useful organising principles for the religious communities for whom these narratives form the central justifying story for their belonging, their ritual, and their creeds; no one is meant, we are assured, to think that these things happened in quite the simple way that fundamentalists assume that they did.

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What is the biggest obstacle to religious faith?

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Veronica Abbass has very kindly referred me, via her comment at the Canadian Atheist site, to the “religion experts” of the Ottawa Citizen where, this week, they address the question: “What is the greatest obstacle to faith? ” Kevin Flynn, an Anglican priest and director of the Anglican Studies programme at St. Paul University — a Catholic school which, according to its website offers “degrees in Philosophy, Theology, Human Sciences and Canon Law” — in other words, not a university at all — suggests that science itself is not an obstacle to faith; rather, he says,

the greatest obstacle to faith in our culture is the notion — widely held but  little examined — that science has made religious faith absurd and untenable.  This is not science, but “scientism.”

Now, I have gone of record as suggesting that scientism is, in fact, a misunderstanding of the status and scope of science. The belief that all that we know can, in the end, be reduced to the statements of science is, I believe, an imperialist gesture by some scientists who cannot conceive of knowing what is not, at base, scientific. This is very clearly stated by Jerry Coyne in a recent piece about Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos, where, countering Nagel’s claims about reductionism, he says this (he is referring to this review of Nagel’s book, by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg, in The Nation):

Here all three academics (Weisberg is a philosopher; Leiter a professor of law) make a mistake: the view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics, which is materialism, is not identical to an attempt to reduce all sciences to physics.  The former must be true unless you’re religious, while the latter is a tactical problem that will be solved to some degree as we understand more about physics and biology, but is unlikely in our lifetime to give a complete explanation for higher-level phenomena. Remember, though, that “emergent phenomena” must be consistent with the laws of physics, even those laws may not be useful for explaining things like natural selection.

And then, a bit later, he simply denies that there are moral truths, for this would contradict his claim that all that we can know can be reduced to the propositions of science. Now, I haven’t made a study of reductionism, and what it is possible to say regarding the reduction of one science to another, but it strikes me that saying, as Coyne does, that “‘emergent phenomena’ must be consistent with the laws of physics” does not, in fact, contradict the claim, made by Nagel, Weisberg and Leiter, that such reductions are or at least may not be possible. Whether it is or is not possible to carry out successive reductions of science that do in fact account for higher level phenomena, so that science is truly unified, is not something that can be based on the claim, which is obviously correct, that higher level phenomena must be consistent with the laws of physics. The question is — and it has not so far been answered, all attempts at producing a unified science to the contrary — whether the laws of physics can explain higher level phenomena. In other words, doubts about the in principle reduction of all sciences to the laws of physics is not clearly only an option for a religious believer, because there is no inconsistency in the belief that higher level phenomena may be only explicable at that higher level, even though such phenomena are consistent with the laws of physics. That seems to me almost trivially true, although I acknowledge that I have not studied the logical conundrums at the heart of concepts of reduction, emergent phenomena, and so on.

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Why do you have to hunt down everyone unless you’re weak?

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Just a preface by way of explanation. I’m sorry to be so unproductive over the last few days. It is Spring here, and I have my usual spring-time allergies, but this year they are affecting me particularly seriously. When that happens, stringing words together to make a sentence, let alone a post, is a struggle. This post took longer to write than almost any other, not because of its complexity or length, but because of what might be called thought-block. Bear with me. This Spring too will pass.

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Maureen Dowd has an interesting piece in the New York Times for Saturday (19th May 2012). Entitled Here Comes Nobody it is an attack on the Roman Catholic Church’s growing tendency to control its message, and to marginalise those who differ. It also expresses concern over the increasingly popular political idea that public policy should be governed by the religious beliefs of elected officials and members of legislatures, a growing tendency which is going to land us in serious political trouble if we are not careful. The telltale signs are increasing. Muslims, pretending that their religion is not political, are practically everywhere insisting that Islamic principles should govern everything from finances to women’s dress, and a host of things in between, all designed to normalise Islamic oppression in democratic contexts. The Roman Catholic Church is playing exactly the same game, by condemning liberal democratic establishments as radically secular and anti-Catholic, going so far as to tell women religious in the United States where the emphasis of their ministry must lie — not in the direction of social justice, but in an emphasis on the “pro-life” agenda of the Vatican, something that is governed by rigorously orthodox teaching. The sign of weakness lies in the increasingly narrow focus of religious practice. When religions are strong they are diversified, expansive, and encompass societies. When they are weak, they become narrow, intolerant and self-centred; brand loyalty becomes a central concern, and emphasis is placed on things which arouse deep emotions. During the 18th century Enlightenment this was known, in Britain at least, as “enthusiasm,” and was shunned by people who considered themselves intellectually sophisticated, and who had felt the winds of change blowing.

Religions tend to be static, because they depend upon the loyalty of ordinary people whose lives are marked by a fair degree of stasis, and for whom change is threatening. When religions go through a period when they feel themselves at risk, they tend to shorten their defence perimeter, choosing easily identifiable features of their internal landscape to defend. This also has the virtue of making their enemies and opponents more easily identifiable. In Dowd’s essay this tendency is clearly identified.  Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, was invited to give the commencement address at Georgetown University, which, because of her role in the insurance kerfuffle that the USCCB has made such a circus of, made her an easy target. As Dowd says:

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Can there be a religion without the supernatural?

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To begin with, I don’t know the answer to that question, so it is asked earnestly. I know that there is a kind of liberal Christianity — of the Sea of Faith variety — to which I was at one time greatly attracted — which has dispensed, or at least largely dispensed, with the supernatural apparatus which is central to most religions. I also acknowledge that there are some cultural traditions, commonly called religions, which do not, at least in some of their forms, depend upon belief in a god or gods, though supernatural figures are often attached to them in practice, such as Buddhism and Jainism. But my question is a much more exacting one. Can there be a religion, including all the practices normally associated with religions – such as ritualised symbolisms and communities, without superadding the supernatural?

This was a question to which the Anglican theologian Maurice Wiles addressed himself in a fairly well-known popular book, God’s Action in the World (which apparently I no longer possess). One of his concerns in the book was so to describe God’s action in the world that it would be both intellectually — that is, theologically — respectable, and religiously compelling. This is a very difficult balancing act to achieve, as anyone who has tried it over a number of years with a congregation of Christians would testify. I’m sure that many members of the Clergy Project would acknowledge, for, as disbelieving clergy were heading in the direction of unbelief, many of them went through a period of trying to accommodate their religious language with what they were increasingly learning from science, philosophy, biblical studies, and the sheer bewildering variety of positions on any topic you care to mention respecting religious belief.

My own process was gradual, and, towards the end, proceeded at an almost breakneck speed. When I read some of my homilies during this period I wonder that people were content to hear me any longer, since I had moved so far and so fast away from anything that might be considered traditional faith, that, when the time came to say a few words at my wife Elizabeth’s secular memorial service, having in the meantime become an unbeliever, people who expressed concern about members of the congregation hearing something so threatening to belief were answered with: “He hasn’t said anything here that he hasn’t already said in church!” This actually came as quite a shock to me, since, though I had promised from the start of my ministry in that place that I would not tell them anything that I did not myself at the time believe, I did not think that I had travelled quite that far, and that fast.

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Reminding myself why I write about religion

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To anyone stopping by choiceindying.com it must seem as though my principal aim is to argue against, and do whatever damage I can, to the religious project. I have no illusions about the degree of success that I should expect from any such venture. Religions are monolithic, deeply entrenched culturally, and still retain the unquestioning respect of the majority of people in the world. My little contribution is not likely to make very much of a dent in religion’s social standing, and it is doubtful that the pope or other Christian leaders, or the leaders of any other religion, will lose much sleep over the things that I write here day by day.

Nevertheless, the kinds of things one reads about regarding the role that religion plays in the world should convince any reasonable person that the task, though it seems hopeless, is a necessary one. Some of the outrageous laws that are being passed in various states in the United States, about the status of the embryo, or on the teaching of bogus “science” in science classes, or the spectacle of the Catholic Church intruding itself into public space in order to continue its oppression of women — such as the proposed oppression of women in places like Honduras — or the suppression of freedom in every Muslim country in the world, not to mention practically every Muslim community in the free world: these are reminders of how necessary it is that we go on opposing religion in season and out of season, and why we need to ignore or lambaste people like Alister McGrath, who, in a recent Australian Broadcasting Corporation op-ed piece, “The Future is not looking so ‘Bright’ for Atheism” — which has got to be one of the sillier pieces that this silly man has published — took the stillborn project of using the word ‘Bright’ as a positive way of referring to nonbelievers to suggest, falsely, that the growing marginalisation of the term is a sign of the flagging fortunes of atheism. It only needs to be pointed out that McGrath’s book, The Twilight of Atheism, prefigured the most dramatic rise in militant unbelief for over a hundred years, to recognise how out of touch McGrath really is. Despite his credentials, this is a man not worth paying much attention to. To go from teenage rebellious atheism to the writing of a three-volume “scientific” theology — which is about as plausibly scientific as reiki therapy — is an achievement of sorts, but one which, in the end, will fade into the deepening sands of time, unsung, and, I am sure, unmourned.

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