The karma explanation is especially offensive because it implies that victims are to blame for their plight. It tends to be used by the privileged to justify their privileged position: those who starve to death are paying for their past lives, etc, so we can eat our gourmet meals with a clean conscience. The Christian explanation of evil, on the other hand, does not offend the victims. However, as an atheist, I agree with you that some people just have more luck in this world than others, that evil has no metaphysical explanation, although it certainly has social ones: anti-earthquake construction measures save lots of lives.

Hi Julian,

Surely you are ignoring the Book of Job, Joseph Butler and indeed the mainstream of real religious thought in yourcritique of Christianity (amongst other religions).

For example, Job’s suffering is not his fault (God reproves his “friends” for saying this) but still he is commended for not cursing the Lord, though God has permitted him to suffer.

As for “taking offence”, at least the Bible is really grappling with these questions. We agree, I hope, that they are genuinely difficult.

Karma is a funny creature, as it allows us to do anything we want essentially. If all events are the result of karmic retribution or reward, then we have little free will in our life, since we are paying (or rewarded) for our past actions. But if this life is lived as a large result of Karmic balancing, then the next life is going to be lived as a result of what then? If its based on the previous life, then we are being punished or rewarded based on actions that we had no control over (it was karma!!).

I’m sure there is a theological explanation, perhaps not all events are karmic… but people often treat it as that.

Additionally I could justify acts that harm other people, by saying that Karma compelled me to punish this person (sort of what Hoddle was saying). If I punch a person, that person derserved it, because of his wrongs in the past life. Bad events are caused by Karmic punishments. Being punched is a bad event. So my punching a person is serving Karma.

Perhaps to fast a first read but do I conclude rightly that there is either purpose, God, or no purpose, angst and acceptance ?

Granted that’s the usual framing and one therefore that’s usually followed, the main discourse of transcendence so to speak. But might we scratch our heads and come up with an alternative? As it stands we are left with, as it’s put, religious mythology, or do it yourself meaning, replete with self identifications, reinventing the self [ who ever invented that one should be shot ] and a displacement of the person into endless trivia or endless causes.

A more plebeian transcendence might be centered in both history and knowledge, the continuity of Man and learning, the enormity of time coupled with appreciation and humility.
Purpose? The purpose is to comprehend, to grasp it all, to understand that whether or not there’s a God there’s an almost timeless greatness beyond the individual but yet one that can be touched and experienced by anyone who cares to make the effort.

Anyway, it works for me.

I don’t really believe in organized religion, I like some of the concepts of religion though (think about the state of our morals without it, though that’s a different subject).

Firstly I think the universe (not just in our social constructs but the whole damn thing) being governed by the morals of our actions is absurd, how do we know that the text of religion is right (as in maybe there is the type of invisible force but maybe without that type of direction). There might be life on other planets with a different feel for morals, do they deserved to be punished because all our/the right religions originated on earth (though if life on other planets has a type of evolution, that might be different, personally I think religion is part of our evolution, it was meant to happen), a human centered universe doesn’t seem right.

I believe that suffering is a human creation, it might just be interpretation; though nature has given us the basics, pain is bad, the urge to procreate is high and etc.- we humans can interpret these in the opposite from nature: some people seek pleasure out of pain and some people don’t want kids but still want sex. In this way the opposite of suffering is of our creation, nature never said buying a car will make you happy (actually I think nature would not condone of that action).

If karma does exist I believe we should start with a clean slate. Evolutionarily and cruelly though, people born with disabilities were somewhat meant to die (sadly). I was thinking of trying to prove that luck was not something linked with a world without karma, though I guess the only way to do that is to say the parents might have done something but sometimes its just bad genes. It can still be a clean slate if suffering is of our own creation, but then that would probably wipe out the possibility of the existence of karma. So…is that a paradox? I guess that means I can’t really be completely right about everything - I guess, if I was right, that it can only be either that suffering is our own creation or there is some form of universal rules for karma from which all life knows (which could be the basic ones - though like I’ve said before that I believe that religion is part of evolution so religion could just be a more complex version of the natural basic sufferings)

Actually I think I went no where with this, sorry if i wasted your time.

John Wu. Think of the state of our morals with religion. Voltaire thought, and can be excused for thinking, that belief in a god is necessary for morality, but surely, in historical perspective, religion doesn’t come out all that well. Voltaire was concerned about the lower classes; something was necessary to keep them in order. I would ask: what’s your excuse? — but that seems a bit forward and unkind.

But then I come upon this, and I wonder. ‘I think religion is part of our evolution, it was meant to happen.’ This is surprising, surely. Meant to happen? What does that mean? That there is a purpose, after all, despite the fact that everything is simply the outcome of mutation, adaptation and selection?

I think the most helpful thing in Julian’s post is this: ‘Traditionally, it is the view that life has no purpose which is seen as the bitter pill to swallow. But, as Glenn Hoddle found out to his cost, squaring the view that there is a point to it after all with the ills of the world turns out to be the most offensive, sourest brew… of all.’ Now, that is an important insight, and one that I have been coming to for some time — I’m a slow learner. I came across an interesting thing in CS Lewis’ “A Grief Observed.” He is trying to work through his grief after his wife’s death. He’s also trying his damndest to work himself back to faith, and here’s where the turn begins. “Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary.” (Harper, 60) He made his choice. It seems to me the wrong one.

The whole secret lies in the words ‘meant to be’. Either it was meant to be, intentional, purposive, or it was not. If there is no meant to be about it, then suffering is indiscriminate and cruel, but not intended or deserved. That’s why poor old Glenn Hoddle was in such a fix. Saying there’s a purpose is to make an ass of yourself. Saying there isn’t one, doesn’t make the suffering go away, but it doesn’t make you feel guilty too. Suffering just happens. It wasn’t ‘meant to be.’

No, John, you haven’t wasted our time. You’ve just made the points stand out with greater clarity.

And then there’s that other puzzle - the identity of indiscernibles. Exemplars: Glenn Hoddle and a short plank.

Karma is just sanskrit for work and the idea of freedom/liberation is to get beyond karma to a state of actionless action. Strategies are detailed in the Bhagavad Gita. The point is that all states whether of pleasure or pain are binding so there is no such thing as ‘good’ karma or ‘bad’ karma. It’s a transcendental doctrine or an attempt to make sense of the variety of mens’ fates. Perhaps foisting a theodicy on it is an example of occidentalism. The natura naturans of Spinoza is the nearest best understanding of it.

Right after the 2004 tsunami there was an amazing article in the NYT about how survivors explained why their children had died, or their neighbors had died, etc…all things that seem so (outwardly) random. People mostly attributed the outcome to things like karma (the parents’ misdeeds, not childrens’), being a Muslim (!), sins against nature, etc. etc. I would have thought you could believe such things only from a great distance (a la Sharon Stone), but apparently it isn’t true. It was sad that these people actually blamed themselves and each other for what had happened. (will add link)

For a detailed explanation of Buddhist karma (as apposed to the Hindu form in the Bhagavad Gita) from a professional western philosophy professor see this video.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-241064336110866717&hl=en

Jean, of course it happens close up and personal. The whole point is to understand why all this is happening. In my experience, the thing that people say when they are sick or in pain is: What did I do to deserve this? So, when things do happen, there’s an answer ready and waiting. That’s why people say, when they’ve just escaped from some disaster: Now, I really do believe in God! The whole point is to explain what, otherwise, would be completely random. It was all meant to be.

That was supposed to read ‘up close and personal’!

This is not seen as a wicked and offensive view to hold.

Oh yes it is! By us horrid “militant” atheists anyway.

Eric, There are many forms of “it was all meant to be” and the one in that article I linked to is an especially sad one. I did something wrong in a past life, so my children died. My neighbor’s a Muslim, so he drowned. That’s straightforward blame the victim stuff, and it strikes me as a sad way to think about things.

Then there’s a more uplifting sort of “it was all meant to be”–suffering is redemptive, it’s all part of God’s plan, something good will come of this. When I hear Christians in the US interviewed after bad things happen to them, that’s what I hear them say. Not that I never hear the other sort of thing (what did I do to deserve this?), but not a lot.

I’m still trying to figure out what the “wicked and offensive view” is….I can’t find it! I want to know what militant atheists think, especially the horrid ones.

Celebrity halfwit talks crap.

In other news: Pope wears funny hat; ursine trio engage in sylvan defecation; world continues turning.

Of course, Jean, that’s one answer. You didn’t deserve anything. Suffering is good for you. This is usually said by someone who is not suffering to someone who is.

The other one, where you say that you believe in a god because you were saved from something that just horribly killed 40 others, has a pretty hard edge to it, though it is not often seen as offensive. I’m not sure why not, beause it is.

What is wicked and offensive is the whole complex of ideas that says that human suffering is due to other powers of which we can know nothing. Basically, it explains it away, makes the person responsible for it, guilty about it, or some other way makes suffering evidence for something else, instead of just letting be what it is.

What I find very hard to understand is why some religious people talk about suffering as redemptive or retributive, and then set out to alleviate it. Now that really doesn’t make sense, though we may be glad that the inconsistency is found fairly liberally represented amongst the religious who think like this. One more contradiction is really not noticeable amongst all the rest.

As for something good coming out of suffering, it sometimes does, not because of a god, but because of the virtues learned by those who suffer or compassion by those who help.

But in any case ‘it was meant to be’ said to or about those who are suffering is always wicked and offensive, I should have thought.

Eric M: “Suffering is good for you. This is usually said by someone who is not suffering to someone who is.”

Evidence please.

Eric M: “What is wicked and offensive is the whole complex of ideas that says that human suffering is due to other powers of which we can know nothing.”

What a ridiculous statement!! How can ignorance of all things be “wicked and offensive”!! And if it is, you must find everyone who ever lived “wicked and offensive”!

All the best

Stephen, perhaps, more correctly, I should have said: ‘This is usually said by someone who is not suffering of someone who is.’ Theologians do it all the time. Read Barth, or Rahner, for instance, where suffering is a suffering unto God, etc.

As to my ‘ridiculous statement’, I think it is wicked and offensive for someone to say to someone who is suffering that this is either God’s chastisement, or way of teaching you patience, or he’s making you an example to others. That comes from the first Anglican Prayer Book of 1549, but theologians also do this kind of thing all the time. I find it offensive, and it is arguably wicked. It has been known to succeed in making people more patient in their sufferings, even bearing them with more courage. That being said, it still seems to me wicked (and it certainly is offensive) for you to explain my sufferings away on the basis of something about which you know (and can know) nothing.

I take it that you meant: ‘How can ignorance, of all things, be wicked…,’ etc. But of course ignorance can be wicked, especially when you might have found out. But to use faith either to ameliorate or to castigate someone who is suffering is to speak of something you simply know nothing about. That strikes me as wicked. It can certainly be offensive, and has been to me on occasion. Perhaps I’m just easily offended.

Very, very long quote (because I’m reading it in a book and so can’t be linked)

In Eggers list of justifications, sort of, for writing *A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,* he says: H)The Aspect Having to Do with (Perhaps) Inherited Fatalism….This part concerns the unshakable feeling one gets, one thinks, after the unthinkable and unexplainable happens – the feeling that, if this person can die, and that person can die, and this can happen and that can happen…well, then what exactly is preventing everything from happening to this person……”he lists some of the possibilities such as fires, AIDS, crashes, random knifings, stray gunfire, aneurysms, spider bites, piranhas, on and on and on. He considers his Catholic and karmic sins, finally sort of concludes that “his number is perennially, eternally up, his draft number is low, his bingo card is hot, he has a bull’s-eye on his chest and target on his back.” Therefore, sort of, reading about it will be fun. “You’ll see,” he promises the reader.

My point is quoting all this? I think the sense of having been chosen for good or evil must be reassuring, the result of reaching for a rock in the vacuum that sufferers may feel. I haven’t been there; I don’t know and can only imagine a sense of isolation that karma perhaps can assuage.

Incidentally, why does this book give me a sense of Gulliver’s Travels? I would guess the author admires Swift.

Stephen cited the biblical Job, a story I have always found deeply unsatisfying for its finale, God merely replying: “Who are you to question Me the Magnificent One?”

As for karma. What’s the point if you have no access to information from your previous lives? It’s absolutely Kafkaesque: you come in guilty as hell with no idea what you’ve done. How is suffering instructive (not to mention corrective) under the circumstances? Unless your’e of a “karmically superior” class with the means to afford “past-life regression” (gad), you’re pretty much stuck. Too bad, too sad for the Indian beggar, I guess.

Any deity who created such a system is indistinguishable from a demon. Any other extra-human purveyor of meaning (just deity in drag, I’m afraid) is evil.

The vanity of anthropomorphism at its most ironic.

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the reply. Barth certainly isn’t one of my favourite theologians, but I wouldn’t disagree with the phrase you draw from him or Rahner. I think it is open to the interpretation that our relation to the world is personal. I think this is true, whether we are suffering or not. It can also be a consolation or a means of coping with suffering.

I guess I was quoting your “ridiculous statement” out of context. I think we might perhaps distinguish suffering of a passing kind, where jest can be appropriate, and enduring affliction.

On your last point, your surmise is correct - I concede my error, as wilful ignorance can be wicked. I can also see offence can be given in the sort of way you suggest, though I imagine this is often not the intention of the would-be consoler, who may just be swimming in deeper water than they know.

But in any case ‘it was meant to be’ said to or about those who are suffering is always wicked and offensive, I should have thought.

Interesting, though, how things seem to change depending on who says it. People who have suffered losses themselves often say “it was meant to be”. In that article about the tsunami, people invoked karma to explain everything, including their own losses. To me this seems the opposite of consoling, but I suspect I don’t “get” it–being strictly a tourist when it comes to Buddhism. I suppose the idea is to think the world on the whole is fair, even though your little piece of it is a disaster.

Is it is the case that more people are confirmed in their disbelief by the argument from evil than are parted from their belief in the existence of God by actual suffering? There are people who are turned to God by suffering and experience conversion. This is well documented. None of the people who suffered in the tsunami as related in Jean’s link to the NYtimes article, appear to have forsaken God as a dead loss in times of trouble though there may be finger pointing at the infidel who took a hit.

Conclusion: Those who do not believe in the first instance are generally confirmed by the abstract consideration of evil but paradoxically some may take up God in the event of the onset of actual suffering. Those who believe may develop an agonistic relationship with God but in general continue to retain their faith because faith makes their suffering intelligible. I’m not persuaded that is always the case, redemptive suffering is in the end a mystery.

There’s a wonderful critique of Job in a hard to find journal, The Human World (November 1973, if you’re interested), by the philosopher Herman Tennessen, entitled “A Masterpiece of Existential Blasphemy.” It’s the last word, I think, on Job, and of course points out, not only that the great theophany at the end is unsatisfying, but that it shows the god of Job to be a being of immense primitivity, a cosmic cave-dweller I think Tennessen calls him.

In response to your very gracious response, Stephen, I would only add that trying to make our relationship to the world personal, except in so far as it involves other persons, is a lost cause. That, as I understand it (following Tennessen) is what the book of Job is all about, about the brutal indiscriminateness of suffering. Trying to make it personal makes it cruel. Hence Sharon Stone and Glenn Hoddle, who come across, for all their wish to personalise suffering, as unthinkingly callous.

Jean, I acknowledge the difference between comforting myself and trying to comfort others. As Michael Reidy says, many people turn to God in times of suffering, rather than lose faith in him/her/it (whatever). However, a lot of people don’t. I’m an example of the latter, and I recall that many Jews who survived the Holocaust lost their faith. (On the other hand, many did not.) The belief that ‘God knows best’ in the midst of suffering is sometimes comforting, if you believe it, but I have never been prepared to say to someone in the throes of suffering, ‘It will all turn out for good. God knows best.’ That has always struck me as cruel.

I recall a priest saying to a mother and father who had just lost a child: ‘God picks the fairest flowers, don’t you know?’ The truth is, of course, in the sense in which that was meant, that God picks them all, but in context it was not a helpful thing to say to the parents, though the parents themselves may well have taken comfort from the thought.

Those who believe may develop an agonistic relationship with God but in general continue to retain their faith because faith makes their suffering intelligible. I’m not persuaded that is always the case, redemptive suffering is in the end a mystery.

Michael, there are too many imponderables in that. An agonistic relationship with God is one, I think, where suffering causes problems for belief. Faith doesn’t make suffering intelligible - that’s where the ‘agon’ comes from. But it does, at the same time, give suffering a quality of depth - hence mystery. But mystery is the unintelligible. ‘Redemptive suffering’ (at least in Christianity) is itself an oxymoron posited on a belief in the impossible (namely, that Jesus suffered, died, was buried, and rose again from the dead). It all makes for pretty theology but bad reason, in my view.

Brian takes up my “Job” suggestion. I think the previous posters are right that the book is very old. It does not mention the Mosaic Law for example, though I forget if this is confirmed by the language.

Hegel admired the Book of Job incidentally, though only on account of the “unruly language”.

As to the point that its vision of a distant God is “unsatisfying”, perhaps this is partly because it has since been supplemented by the vision of a “Suffering God” through Christianity.

Ah, Stephen, now you are swimming in deeper water than you could possibly know. Talking about a suffering god, that is. It’s all very well as a trope, but as a claim about the nature of reality, well….. After all, most religious people are quite prepared to acknowledge that the existence of god himself/herself/itself is beyond understanding. To add suffering to the mix is really anthropomorphising with a vengeance.

As a trope, though, does it deal with Job’s complaint? I don’t think so. The arrogance of the cosmic cave dweller is preferable. At least he’s in charge of something. That’s why karma seems to explain things for some people. It makes suffering part of a greater whole, even if we cannot know it. Someone or some principle is in charge. So my suffering is a part of a wider order. It has meaning. But if the god suffers, well, even as divine condescension, as a sharing-with the sufferer, it takes away the element of control.

Oh, I know, he gets it all back in the resurrection, but it still doesn’t explain the suffering. It tries to comfort the sufferer. That’s why I think redemptive suffering is a piece of fool’s gold. It makes pretty theology, and we can wax lyrical, but, in the end, the suffering is real.

Not only Hegel admired Job, but Victor Hugo, Daniel Webster, Tennyson and many distinguished others. Linguist/pundit, Wm. Safire even wrote an entire book on the book.

One of the bible’s messiest texts, the prosey “book-ends” containing the main poem are a curious (if effective) literary device, though I find the obvious interpolations jarring. An ancient text, there has been some scholarly speculation that Job is a later treatment of an even earlier Sumerian tale.

In the end, Job’s deity is simply a personification of an inscrutable universe where “sh*t happens”. I find no use for such personification taken literally rather than “literarily”. I can be pissed-off with even non-existent “persons” (The Big Bad Wolf, Lord Valdemort, Jehovah) but a cold, unfeeling universe, I can make peace with since it imposes no taboos, silly rituals, or irrational beliefs on me.

“Live or die, but don’t poison everything.” (Saul Bellow, “Herzog”)

Eric,

I do not think my or another person’s suffering is “not real”. I think perhaps we are at odds over the concept of “reality” though.

Are you suggesting that something that is part of a greater whole is thereby “not real”?

I agree I do not “know” the depth of the water. My point is that God knows. I recommend Psalm 22 as a description: to describe it as “waxing lyrical” might again be called ridiculous!

The mind thinking these things over tends to express itself lyrically.

All the best

I guess, Stephen, that I’m suggesting that there is no reason to believe that we are part of a ‘greater whole’, and that suffering is the outer marker of the limits of the real. Saying that God knows doesn’t help. In fact, I’m not sure that the expression ‘God knows’ makes any sense.

The problem with the depth of water analogy is that we have some idea (from sonar and other depth finders) how deep it is. But we don’t even know that we’re dealing with depth at all when we’re talking about … well, exactly, about what?

Yes, indeed, look at Psalm 22. Where is God enthroned? On the praises of Israel! Where did you say?! Or what about the trusting ancestors, who were delivered? Of what is Psalm 22 a description? I know that Christians have used it as description of events surrounding the crucifixion, as a kind of prophetic description of what really happened.

But as to the actual content of the psalm. In what way is this helpful to the person who suffers? What about “For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him’? (v 24) In what was is that a description? I think it is waxing lyrical beyond the bounds of the evidence. In fact, the evidence is staring the poor psalmist in the face, and he still persists on enthroning an imaginary deity on his praises.

Regarding reality. You say:

Are you suggesting that something that is part of a greater whole is thereby “not real”?

Of course not. I’m just questioning whether there is a greater whole, including, but not limited to, the natural world, of which we may be a part. The trouble with the lyricism, to which I referred, and which you appear to accept, is that it takes us beyond what we can reasonably be said to know. If we could know this greater whole, then talking about God’s love in situations of tragedy, or about karma, when someone is disadvantaged, would not be offensive, but they are.

In the end, as Brian says:

In the end, Job’s deity is simply a personification of an inscrutable universe where “sh*t happens”.

Exactly, and when you personify this kind of universe you get what Tennessen calls a cosmic cave-dweller. No wonder Sharon Stone and Glenn Hoddle seem so offensive. They seem to have come out of the cave themselves.

Here’s a quote from Dave, on Notes and Comments, at Butterflies and Wheels, on the same topic. It seemed to me worthwhile reproducing here. Apologies to Dave if he would not approve. I quote without comment.

To perceive the perils and potentials of human life at any level above that of brute beasts, and also to acknowledge that there is no justice, no order, no ultimate goal or solace - that if we want such things we must construct them for ourselves and hold them together by our will alone, and constantly fail, because we are just matter and energy, no more perfectible than a rock or a tree - that is the agony, consciously chosen, inescapable, haunting, of anyone who possesses in equal measures wisdom and compassion.

Y’know, Eric, the story of Job is a great story. The story of the suffering god is a great story. The story of the Buddha receiving enlightenment is a great story. Dave’s statement isn’t a great story. I wonder if we philosophers are a bit story-challenged, and therefore really unable to grasp how most people make sense of things.

Well…King Lear is a great story, too. So is the Iliad. So is Oedipus Tyrannus. So is Hamlet

Stories can end in tragedy, with no consolation, and still be great stories.

Also, I think people make sense of things with tools other than stories (with stories and also with other tools, that is). Ecclesiastes isn’t a story. A lot of poetry doesn’t tell a story. The Origin of Species isn’t a story.

In other words I think people also want explanation, and observation, and description, and rumination, and information, and make sense of things using all of those too. Though stories may be the favorite tool.

Well, actually, I think the Iliad and the Greek tragedies did probably give people of the time a sense of how to handle bad events. You should dash out your eyes and hope for immorality–as in people telling stories about you forever. This just doesn’t appeal to people much today.

But sure, not every great story helps people make sense of their lives. But stories seem to be preferred vastly over explanations (a la Dave). I mean, this must be true, because the whole Christian story is so utterly senseless, yet “works” for vast numbers of people. I figure this must be because of the sheer quality of the story. Maybe?

There’s a strange bit in the New Testament somewhere–Paul (?) runs into someone on a road and tells him the gospel. He is converted in about 10 seconds. My reaction is–how on earth? But maybe it’s just the spellbinding power of a good story. Pure speculation.

Thank you Ophelia. Your intervention was helpful. Also, I’m not sure Job is a great story. It doesn’t end in tragedy…., but. The ending is unsatisfactory. So he has a wife, is rich again, and has the same number of children, and his second set of daughters is more beautiful than the first! Is this the way that ordinary people make sense of things?

I guess I’d say I’m a pretty ordinary person. I’m not trying to philosophise myself out of this. But, you know what? I think Dave’s statement is a story, a story that a lot of people could tell, of trying to hold a very human construction together by sheer force of will, and sometimes, as I know, failing, and being left with empty hands.

The advantage of stories, I suppose, is that you can lose yourself in them, and forget the story part. It’s when reality starts to force itself on one’s attention, despite the story - and it has a way of doing this, as I, who lived in a story most of my life can say - we look for something else, what Ophelia calls ‘explanation, and observation, and description, and rumination, and information.’ Once that willing suspension of disbelief is ruptured, the story no longer can contain reality, and we must look elsewhere. And we can see the cracks in the story when people like Sharon Stone say things that belong in a story that not everyone tells, and it sounds stupid.

Hey, I’m a great one for stories, but you can only pretend so long! I’ve come to the end of all the stories that I know, and if I can get there, Jean, I suspect that you can too.

Jean, it was Philip and the Ethiopian, I think. Our paths crossed.

Well of course the guy being converted in about ten seconds could be a story that Paul told! About himself as the great converter.

Stories are very powerful…But I think people also want understanding - and I think maybe intellectuals can underestimate that want, in an effort to compensate for being intellectuals - you know, not wanting to impose our elitist tastes on the masses, kind of thing.

This is not clear to me, Ophelia. You say:
People want to understand more than a story can tell them;
Intellectuals don’t quite realize that people want to understand;
Intellectuals are compensating for being intellectuals;
Intellectuals have elitist tastes;
Intellectuals don’t want to impose their tastes;
On the masses? The people who want to understand? You would withhold valuable insights from the masses from embarrassment about being elitist, that is from being privileged to have those insights, garnered from tastes the masses cannot acquire?
Then what are those masses to do, how become wiser if the intellectuals choose not to share their wisdom?

I don’t quite say, rtk - I qualified most of those claims with ‘I think’ and the like. And I didn’t say people want to understand more than a story can tell them, I said they want understanding also; understanding there is a shorthand for (say) the kind of thing that Dave said and Eric quoted. I was saying that I think people want thinking, even difficult thinking, as well as stories.

And of course I wouldn’t withold valuable insights from the masses; my point was to warn against doing that out of a kind of self-doubting squeamishness that intellectuals are prone to. I’m a passionate believer in intellectuals’ sharing their wisdom, and that’s what I was saying.

This is especially necessary in the US where people are accused of elitism on the most sub-microscopic of provocations.

Sorry for changing the subject a little but to Eric: what I meant by religion as a part of evolution is that religion is a part of our growth as humans (our first interpretation of the universe) not literally evolution; to morality and religion, I meant think of morality if religion never existed. I guess I shouldn’t wait a day before posting again, sorry again. Actually this might be somewhat relevant, if it is, I hope it helps.

As enlightening as stories can be, they can also be retarding, their meanings rendered perversely and purposefully opaque in ways that honest intellectual discourse and argument, by their very nature, resist. For millenia, Job has been used to squelch the kind of intellectual questioning Ophelia insists on with its facile “God’s will” interpretation - certainly a convenient gift to any would-be Judeo-Christian oppressor.

Stories are fine, even fundamental, as long as they remain stories - parabolic, allegorical and/or merely entertaining. But there is significant danger in forgetting that much of what comes down to us as story once passed for science and literal answer to the existential questions of the times in which they originated.

Few fear or would excuse the crimes of Zeus or Jove today, but they do fear and excuse Jehovah based on belief in the biblical stories - a point made time and again by unbelievers and conveniently glossed-over by believers who would find the behaviours of their god reprehensible, even deranged, in any other context.

I suppose that Glen Hoddle is only voicing a common understanding of the doctrine of karma so I was being unfair to him calling him thick. Amongst observent Buddhists and Hindus a similar sort of rationalization is expressed and what is complex and intelligible in the matrix of associated doctrines and theories of identity, causality and liberation becomes a new adjunct to crystals.

Again I have to say that it is obvious that the argument from evil doesn”t affect the mass of religious folk ’cause if it did there wouldn’t be any, ’cause suffering is round the bend if not already here for all of us.

Hi All,

This is all very interesting. It would be interesting to unpack the idea of a “story”, which some seem to take as a roundabout way of saying something that falls short of literal statement of fact. We could try the same with “myth”, “poetry”, “metaphor”, etc.

It is limiting to say that “we philosophers” do not draw on story. The idealist tradition certainly did so. Indeed, it sometimes guardedly took poetry as “higher” than other more mechanical sorts of thinking. Hegel of course then put “absolute knowing” above “art” and “religion”.

But then, Hegel and his follower’s “absolute knowing” was not a model of clarity. Hence the room for Ayer’s attack on Bradley, and so on to the current day.

On another point, a group of us met a friend last night whose husband is having a pretty hard time of it at present. Some of you would have been proud of me: not a word of “false consolation” crossed my lips, we listened and tried to take her mind off things instead.

Obviously not every story is helpful, and people do want ways of understanding besides stories, but they’re powerful. The “philosophy of life” Dave expresses (above) is a set of statements about how things work. It seems sterile next to a memorable story…and I say that despite the fact that I’m in the business of creating such statements, not writing stories. Of course, the story could actually be a true one about a real person. The Lance Armstrong story, for example. Get cancer, win Tour de France 7 times. This is an excellent story. (By the way, he’s an atheist.) Religion seems to invariably involve a strange blurring of story-telling and history. Out of worries about the blurring, maybe we’re too quick to fault the stories.

Sterile? Really?

So do your own such statements seem sterile to you next to a memorable story?

There are several aspects to this issue - let’s tease out some of them.

1) Quality. A good story is more powerful than a bad explanation. But is a bad story more powerful than a good explanation? I would say absolutely not. I’ve read (the beginnings of) lots of pedestrian novels that left me stone cold and bored, and lots of explanations (of various kinds) that exhilarated and inspired me. So maybe the issue is not genre but quality.

2) Content. Maybe Dave’s explanation in particular seems sterile to you, because you disagree with or dislike the content, as opposed to Dave’s explanation seeming sterile to you because it’s an explanation?

3) Apples and oranges. The suffering god story and the Buddha story are longer and more elaborate stories; Dave’s explanation is a comment on a post. This is similar to 1 but not identical. Comments on blogs aren’t usually publication-quality, or meant to be.

So maybe we’re too quick to fault the explanations, as opposed to being too quick to fault the stories.

I’d say just the opposite, Jean. Because of the blurring, we allow a lot of nonsense to get a free ride. And the real trouble with stories that blur over into claims about reality is that, when push comes to shove, it’s the claims that do all the damage, and the story aspect that gets forgotten. That’s been my experience.

Let me expand a little…

I think there’s a certain amount of mythology, or illusion, about the powerfulness of stories. I used to share it myself - so I think I’m familiar with it from the inside. But it’s really only the best stories that are powerful - and dud stories are a dime a million. Most relentless bores are great anecdotalists - great in the sense of enthusiastic - and they will bore you senseless!

And a really good explanation can be incredibly powerful, and exciting. I honestly think it’s a mistake to think stories as such are more powerful than explanations as such. And as it’s a mistake that can encourage people to slight rational thought…it’s a mistake that matters. I think.

To be fair to Dave, he was just posting his ideas rapidly, as most of us do. He was not writing polished prose for publication. Perhaps if Dave were to polish his explanation, it might seem less “sterile”. It’s a bit unfair to compare a rapid post with the classics of world literature, among which I include several religious texts, including books of the Bible.

Of course my own statements seem sterile to me, compared to a memorable story!

I think Dave’s explanation is OK. It’s basically an existentialist account of how to deal with bad things. There are other things you could say that might be more appealing, but I don’t find it particularly unappealing.

It came into this thread as an alternative to religious story telling (or what I’d describe as such) so it seemed fair to comment on the difference between philosophical accounts and stories. An “account” is not evocative or colorful or transporting, and maybe it does take “narrative” to get those properties.

So, nothing against Dave,but I’m skeptical that anything of the sort can fulfill the needs of the vast numbers of people who go in for bible stories, Lance Armstrong stories, etc. I say that without glee.

By the way, I’m not making some general claim like “all stories are better than all explanations.” Arrgh, that would have to be false. I’m just saying that a “philosophy of life” that takes the form of a set of general claims does seem sterile, for lack of characters, narrative, color. Even if it’s a really good philosophy of life, there’s something ungripping about it.

Real world evidence–it’s hard as hell to get philosophy published unless you can package it as a narrative. Very few people want to read claim 1, claim 2, claim 3….they want something to happen. They want people and events, and surprises.

I’ve always thought if I could be sent to prison then I’d be able to write a best seller. Then I could tell the story of how I went to prison and read Aristotle and gained enlightenment …and everybody would love it.

With that thought…gotta run.

Ophelia says (reasonably, it seems to me) “I honestly think it’s a mistake to think stories as such are more powerful than explanations as such.”
With paintings substituting for stories and photography in place of explanation, it’s an argument that took place often very many years ago. It was correct then as it is now. The photograph was accurate in a way the painting was not. Just as the explanation is reliable and the story may not be. But, alas, there’s that other dimension - depth. That’s a whole other story, I mean explanation.

Ah right; I see what you mean.

Still - Ecclesiastes is quite gripping!

But not in the same way as the story of Joseph etc. True.

JK wrote: “I’ve always thought if I could be sent to prison then I’d be able to write a best seller. Then I could tell the story of how I went to prison and read Aristotle and gained enlightenment …and everybody would love it.”

Sorry, it’s been done. Often, beginning perhaps with St.Paul. Thoreau, too. Ghandi? Very many best sellers. I don’t mean to be discouraging, though. You could just visit, like Capote. Or write a song maybe from Folsom prison. King? Now I’m stuck thinking of this. Your fault. Another ten just occurred to me.

Borstal Boy - a classic of the genre.

I think the fact that it’s been done is the point! It’s a hot genre. I’ve wondered why that is myself - there’s something fascinating about stories of confinement, while the experience of it must be deadly dull. I found ‘Carrier’ fascinating to watch, while experiencing it would drive me stark staring mad.

First, in response to Amos (and Jean), I don’t think what Dave wrote was sterile. That’s why I quoted it. I thought it was well thought out and well expressed. I would say almost lyrical, but, hey, maybe I’m just mushy. I thought it really was.

Second, I don’t get this thing about stories and anti-stories. Yes, I told stories most of my life, and tried to use them to find depth, something that would actually make sense of the world. (That’s what most religions do, by the way. They don’t just let the stories tell themselves. They tell you what the stories mean.) And you know what - they never did! The stories kept getting in the way. Go to any church where the Bible is not taken literally, where people try to make sense of things through stories. They interpret the stories to death, and still don’t really get down to where what they think the story is somehow ‘about’ really makes sense.

The advantage of stories, in case you didn’t notice, is that you can read yourself into them if you try. There’s enough give in stories that you can fit it to the shape and size of your own life. Well, sometimes, and then, when you can’t, you gloss over it very quickly, and get on to the parts that give a little. Watch the smarmy preachers on TV. They do it all the time.

I guess I’ve had my fill of stories. Jean may be right, though I don’t think so. I recall the ‘Beyond the Fringe’ sketch of the preacher. ‘Life is like … a can of sardines. We’re all of us looking for the key.’ There is no key. And looking for it is what most religions do with stories. Forget it. Most stories don’t give depth to people’s lives. Most of them are at the shallow end. The deeps are off in the distance, where the stories end.

I don’t want to push the story story too hard…it just struck me when Job was getting juxtaposed to a very sensible “philosophy of life”…hmm, there’s something missing here. There’s a reason we’ve been hearing about Job for 2500 years…and gee, that other story of the “suffering god” is damn good.

It’s obviously a dangerous thing when people take certain stories too seriously. The whole thing about how God gave a certain chunk of land to “the chosen people” is one very dangerous story. Of course, there are lots and lots.

Also, what you say about interpreting to death is very true. This, I’ve learned, is what sermons are all about. You take a pretty good story and then embroider furiously. What’s laid overtop is often pretty unrelated to what’s underneath. (But is that so bad? If the embroidery job is good, then what’s the harm?)

Maybe we are inherently a story-telling species, and stories do a lot to help us make sense of our lives. The religious ones, but also biographies, legends, novels, etc. They all create templates that new events fit into. I have found a few stories influential in my life.

But honestly–if something really awful happened in my life, I haven’t the slightest idea what I’d find useful–stories, no stories, maybe just anti-depressants. I don’t want to be ridiculous about the power of stories.

“But honestly–if something really awful happened in my life, I haven’t the slightest idea what I’d find useful–stories, no stories, maybe just anti-depressants. I don’t want to be ridiculous about the power of stories.”

I seem to recall Amos and another respondent here saying that it was poetry that served and comforted them best after great loss and personal crisis.

This, I’ve learned, is what sermons are all about. You take a pretty good story and then embroider furiously. What’s laid overtop is often pretty unrelated to what’s underneath. (But is that so bad? If the embroidery job is good, then what’s the harm?)

Yes, it is so bad. The point about stories is that, if they’re any good at all, they’re forever. Our interpretations are only momentary events in the story of the story. And the story is what is left, and it’s open to all sorts of interpretations, on and on forever. (Well, perhaps, not quite, the stories of the Olympian gods are not so powerful anymore.) You know, there’s nothing wrong with the story of believing that there is a being that favours you, and promises you a place on the earth. That’s a good story, in many ways. But look at how it can be interpreted!

There’s nothing wrong, in itself, with the story that God would send his own son to suffer for the sake of his people - that’s your good story of the suffering God - but when that people didn’t recognise God’s only son (only in the story, of course) what happened? God chose another people who recognised and accepted the son who came and suffered for the thankless people who rejected him - who were real flesh and blood people, by the way …. and so begins the long, sad story of Christian anti-Semitism. So, is the suffering God story still a good one?

We are storied people. No doubt about that. And we find ourselves in stories, and we identify ourselves with stories, and there’s something wonderful about that. But stories clash, and there’s no way of critiquing stories from inside. That’s why you can talk so readily about the goodness of stories. When you’re captive within the story, it’s the only reality you know, and when that reality sends you out to kill, instead of comfort, your neighbour, then that’s what you will do.

You’re not being ridiculous about the power of stories. They’re very powerful and very dangerous. I’m storied out. I have a deep distrust of stories. Just try a lifetime as a captive to a story, and then see the story as just that, just a story. Only someone who is not captive to stories could think of stories in the way that you do.

For me, interpretations are to stories what manuals are to gadgets. I’m allergic to all of them. Just give me the gadget and I’ll make do just fine. Give me the story. Or the song. Or the painting. Or or or. Let it resonate; that’s all I ask. But when it does! My experience recognizes the song, sings with it, and my little experience becomes enlarged, broadened, deepened, and just maybe better understood. If it doesn’t resonate? You can have all the N.Y.T. reviews, it just falls flat. The three recent big time movies, No Country for Old Men, Sweeney Todd, and There Will Be Blood – plop, fast forward; all the skill of its makers were wasted on me, but I sat riveted to Lars and the Real Girl. Art is personal, unlike information in a plain brown wrapper..

Ophelia: I agree with you about the story of Joseph. Thomas Mann ran with it at great length and with much power. Best part: Seeing Joseph enter the room, looking for all the world like a stud, Potiphar’s wife slices her hand instead of the orange.

“Only someone who is not captive to stories could think of stories in the way that you do.”

Well said. The emancipation from story is a harrowing experience.

Yes, Brian, poetry. Amos referred us to Richard Rorty, as I recall, and his essay before he died, and the comfort that he found in poetry. I found it there too, in Wordsworth’s sonnets, and Philip Larkin, and a few others, even Swinburne’s Garden of Proserpine (which Rorty himself mentions, I think, and which I first came to know through ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’, of all places), though I was never that fond of Swinburne (even though, like Shelley, he sometimes has long, sinuous verses that wrap you round in the most delicious sound) . But not in stories, certainly not in stories that captivate millions. Certainly not in those.

Gosh, Brian, our paths are crossing and recrossing!

For the record, I’ve never said that poetry or Richard Rorty comforted me at any moment of my life. I’m not sure if anything comforted me, but Bach helps.
So does a bottle of wine. Stories: let’s take Nietzsche who writes both explanatory prose and a long story-poem, Zarathustra. For me, his prose is much more effective. I prefer the Plato of Socratic argument to the Plato of myths. The problem is that most philosophers (sorry) write badly, while great story tellers or poets write well. Aristotle can be as dry as the phone book, and reading analytic philosophy is often like reading instructions for filling out tax forms. When a philosopher writes well, for instance, Plato at times or Nietzsche, his explanations are as powerful as any story ever told.

I’m sorry, Amos, I thought you had referred us to an article by Richard Rorty written shortly before his death. In that, he remembered a few poems, which he found gave him comfort, although he had never written any, and could not write, poetry. He wished that he had spent more time with it. And I thought it was you who had referred us to what was quite a beautiful short essay on the fleetingness of life and the comfort of poetry.

I stand corrected, Amos. It was Paul Hutton (who linked to Rorty) and Eric who mentioned the solace of poetry in a discussion on grief back on March 20th.

Here’s a Sufi story which may be apposite.

Astrology
A Sufi once knew, through prescience, that a city would shortly be attacked by an enemy. He told his neighbour, who realized that he was a veracious but simple man, and who advised him:
“I am sure that you are right, and you should go and tell the monarch. But if you want to be believed, please say that you divined it, not by wisdom, but by astrology. Then he will act, and the town may be saved.”

The Sufi did so and the townspeople were delivered through the correct precautions being taken.

Yes, you’re right Brian, and of course I could have checked it myself. The dangers of memory. Sorry Paul. It was wonderful essay.

Eric MacDonald, on May 30th, 2008 at 11:38 pm Said:
Gosh, Brian, our paths are crossing and recrossing!

Eric: Gosh? gosh?
Write on the blackboard *god damn* 100 times
Do this while sipping a white Lacrima Christi
Then write *Holy shit* 50 times.
Do this while sipping a Bloody Mary
Then write a story about it. No metaphors, puh-leeze. Just say it like it is.

“Only someone who is not captive to stories could think of stories in the way that you do.”

Eric, I’m sure my attitude has something to do with my history and yours has something to do with yours, but your generalization just ain’t true. Take Karen Armstrong, for example. She grew up very much a captive, even living in a very stifling convent. After she lost belief, she came to write about religions (all) with great affection and respect. Her book “The Spiral Staircase” is a wonderful memoir of all this (the memoir being another kind of story I like a lot).

Michael, It’s funny that in your story astrology is supposed to be taken as science, as opposed to wisdom…but apart from that quirk, good story!

I agree, Jean, that Armstrong’s Spiral Staircase is a wonderful account of story captivity. But, reading some of her other books, especially the one on Mohammed, it’s obvious that she’s still captive to stories, cripplingly so. She writes well about stories, but she is notoriously unreliable. Her entering the convent was no mistake. In some ways, she’s still there.

It’s true, my attitude to stories as something to do with my history, as yours do with yours, but that doesn’t make what I say untrue, and I think that Karen Armstrong is a case in point.

rtk. Well, I’m conservative in some ways. However, I have now done my penance. Can I get back into the club now?

I fear you’re not going to accept any examples of “once captive now free” religion appreciators because you’re going to construe appreciation as evidence of continued captivity. As if captivity has to have a permanent negative effect. (Don’t think so!) I’m sticking with Armstrong as a an example. Her books have problems, but I don’t really think they’re due to her once- captivity. She’s determined to foster peace, love, and understanding. That (though honorable) gets in the way of objectivity.

I suppose that consciously or unconsciously, we all construct a narrative about our life or take one ready-made: be it that of a warm family person, a seeker, a rebel against the system, a critical mind who accepts no mystifications, etc. Those stories are both illusions and guide-posts by which we live. Illusions because we never really live out those narratives and guide-posts because they structure our lives to some extent. Now, some stories are more positive than others and some, in pragmatic terms, structure our lives in more functional terms. If my narrative were that of a great seducer of top models, that narrative would be so
distinct from my lived experience that it would lose its value as a structure. Finally, it appears wise to be conscious of one’s narratives, not to be captive of them, in Eric’s terms. As the journalist I.F. Stone says, all governments lie, but the problem is when they believe their own lies. Ditto with narratives.

Armstrong is a dreadfully misleading writer on religion (not scholar, though she is often called a scholar). Jeremy could cite chapter and verse on this, if he weren’t too busy.

Peace love and understanding are good things, but not at any price.

I have a lot of sympathy for her based on her memoir (very worth reading), but I haven’t been able to get through her books. The one I tried started off with stuff about Greek philosophy I knew to be false, so my trust level went way down. I do think she’s awfully determined to portray every religion as gentle and beautiful, and this just does not serve the cause of truth.

Armstrong is still so clearly a captive (not to mention popularizer) of her story, that you simply cannot “stick” with her as your sole example, Jean, if you are determined to refute Eric. And writing:

“I fear you’re not going to accept any examples of ‘once captive now free’ religion appreciators because you’re going to construe appreciation as evidence of continued captivity…”

is perilously - if unintentionally - close to the edge of sophistry.

Objectives of peace, love or home-cooking are simply not sufficient reason to overlook interpretive bias, not even Armstrong’s.

I found the memoir of hers that I read (Through the Narrow Gate I think) fascinating. But yeah, her determination doesn’t serve the truth. I have this example via Jeremy -

She says he exiled one of the Jewish tribes from Medina after he discovered that they were plotting against him - but according to Martin Lings’ Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources this ‘discovery’ came via a revelation from the Angel Gabriel.

Armstrong:

Muhammad tried to reassure Nadir, and made a special treaty with them, but when he discovered that they had been plotting to assassinate him they too were sent into exile…

This is what happened (from the earliest histories – which are dripping with anti-Semitism) -

The Jewish tribe of Nadir had long been confederates of the Bani ‘Amir, and the Prophet decided to ask them to help him pay the blood-wite. So he went to them..and laid the matter before them. They agreed to do what he requested, and invited him to stay until a meal could be prepared…While they were sitting there, in front of one of the fortresses, Gabriel came to the Prophet, unseen by any save him, and told him that the Jews were planning to kill him and that he must return to Medina at once.

My, how convenient. And how odd that Armstrong calls that a ‘discovery.’

That’s great Jean. I’ll stick with Karen Armstrong as a counter-example!

A good example of someone who knows the power of stories, and finally had to step outside them - and keeps trying to capture what is important in stories without telling one - is Don Cupitt. But there’s still something clever that he does with his hands!

However, I won’t push the point much further. The trouble with stories is that there’s always something controlling about them. Cupitt says that our stories tell us who we are (and who we aren’t). Just look at Plato’s myth of the cave, which has had a chequered history in philosophy, and not always a good one. As Popper points out, very elitist (see The Open Society and its Enemies). I like Amos’ take. All narratives lie, so if you narrative something (can I use it as a verb?), be very aware of how others may use it.

Well, Golly (or should I say Hot damn (rtk)?!), when I pressed the ‘Submit Comment’ button I didn’t expect such instant support.

As I recall - this is very dim now - Mohammed had a Jewish tribe (or was it two?) massacred, after making peace with them. I think Tony Blair will find that stories don’t make peace, people do. Stories tend to create limited resources, as Hector Avalos says in his book Fighting Words. We can do better things with words.

Oh yeah, Cupitt is fun to read but he plays fast and loose as an old roller-coaster when it comes to language and ideas. He starts out sensibly enough but often leaves you feeling merely dizzy by the end. His infatuation with Wittgenstein and post-modernism is exasperating in the extreme but nothing to worry about since you won’t come away understanding either any better than you did before you read him.

Brian, Sophistry? Huh? It doesn’t seem to me that Eric has evidence that Karen Armstrong’s religion-friendly attitude is due to her earlier captivity. Based on reading her memoir, I don’t see her that way. Given that he’s ready to explain her attitude that way, it’s fair of me to wonder whether he’s going to construe every case of a “captive, later free” religion appreciator as appreciative only because of earlier captivity. Or in other words, never really free.

If you read the essays in the anthology “Philosophers without Gods” you will learn the life stories of many people who were once religious and then became atheists. Some of them wind up very negative about religion, some very positive. I see the positive ones as evidence against what Eric has said. Will add link to a review I wrote for Free Inquiry, with details about some of these people.

Jean, I promised to leave well enough be. However, others seem intent on keeping this discussion going. It’s an important one, I think. Yes, I’ve read quite a few of Armstong’s books, with one weather eye open for misrepresentation and bias. One book, Battle for God, I simply could not wade through.

You’re right, of course, that some people come away from the religious experience and retain some positive regard for religion, which is hard not to do in a world that is saturated with it. Even Dennett has Christmas carol singing parties, and no doubt feels all warm and fuzzy when he does.

However, I think religion, even amongst those in Philosophers without Gods who retain some favourable feelings towards religion, gets off too easily. Blackburn speaks, in the same volume, about ‘respect creep,’ and I think this is often the response people who reject religious beliefs. How many atheists have come out since Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris and Grayling, rejecting their militancy? Some atheists have added the term fundamentalist. They find it hard simply to dismiss it. After all, billions of people still find it meaningful.

David Owens’ contribution, ‘Disenchantment’, actually concludes that science drains the cosmos of meaning or purpose (165), and concludes that religions give people fixed points of meaning. It seems to me that he understands neither religion nor science, and seriously overrates religion.

Of course, I don’t have any hard evidence that Armstrong is still in the convent at heart, but I’d say, given her interpretive bias, and her way of misrepresenting things that she could have known (and might know and covers up?), she’s still infected with religion. She can’t let it go, and it hasn’t let her go either. I know some of the symptoms. I recognised the woman in the convent. I was less convinced by her story that she had made it out.

There’s some classic evidence for this tendency of giving undeserved respect to non-rational (and even irrational) beliefs, in a recent thing done by Mark Vernon on Comment is Free (Guardian) - here:

Can you prove it

This looks like backsliding to me of a rather egregious sort, the kind of respect creep which gives a free lunch to every charlatan around. I think the point to be made here is that, despite everything, religious stories work whether or not the reality they imply is as the stories say or not, but claims about reality underlie them. This is what does the damage.

Stories can be wonderful, but when they implicitly make claims that cannot be substantiated, and when people frame their lives in accordance with those implicit claims, they’re dangerous. And Karen Armstrong’s voice - what is taken widely but not correctly as a scholarly voice - lending plausibility to such stories, not only does not serve the cause of truth, but actually stokes the fires of hatred. What does she call Mohammed? ‘A prophet for today’? Yeh, right!

“The Spiral Staircase” would make a great book for a discussion group, because it is intriguing what keeps her wanting to go “up the staircase.” She wants very badly to believe…something. But I took that as something about her, not about how thoroughly she’d been brainwashed.

My review of Philosophers without Gods explains my own feeling about these things–why I don’t always want to be joining in with the religion critics. It’s not that I disagree, but that I think there need to be other voices in the chorus. Or instruments in the symphony, to use the metaphor I used there. There are “varieties of unbelief” as I say there, and I do think a certain sort of unbelief-cum-antipathy is getting all the airplay these days.

I like Mark a lot and enjoy his blog (every day) but didn’t agree with that last entry.

“It doesn’t seem to me that Eric has evidence that Karen Armstrong’s religion-friendly attitude is due to her earlier captivity. Based on reading her memoir, I don’t see her that way.”

I do and I also read the book. But neither of us has provided evidence endorsing or refuting Eric’s position by simply voicing an opinion. Do you think Eric would be justified in suggesting your take can be dismissed simply because he fears you will always take the side of Story? The issue of fairness might be better served by question rather than conjecture.

All the airplay? All the airplay? When fans of religion, including the above-mentioned atheist fans of religion, keep publishing the same attack on ‘militant’ ‘fundamentalist’ ‘extreme’ atheists day in and day out?

There is more unapologetic atheism around than there was before Dawks published his book, but that’s a departure, and a recent one; and it has been greeted by an avalanche of reaction; and meanwhile the usual flood of unapologetic theism has not been noticeably reduced. I think the idea that unbelief-cum-antipathy is getting all the airplay is similar to the charge that the standard ‘fundamentalist atheists are going to steal your jobs’ tirade always starts off with: a complaint at the flood of atheist books. All one has to do is visit a bookstore to see what nonsense that is. Shelf after shelf after shelf of religion and ‘inspiration’ and ’spirituality’ and ‘metaphysics’ and of course New Age; and half of one shelf containing atheist books. Yeah that’s an avalanche all right; that’s a monopoly of the airplay all right.

This is getting very complicated. On the face of it, Karen Armstrong is a once-religious non-believer who now has a positive attitude toward religion. If you want to say her positive attitude is owing to earlier brainwashing, that’s got some “a priori” plausibility but I’d only believe it based on some specific evidence about her. I haven’t heard any.

If I had to guess (which of course I don’t) my guess would be that Armstrong’s pro-religion thing is a matter of temperament. That’s based solely on having heard her on various radio chat shows - she’s very hyper, very eager, very impassioned. I have a feeling she’s very impassioned about inter-religious understanding and so on - she’s an enthusiast, as it were, perhaps in the sense that James Mill so disliked. It could be chicken and egg - that this temperament is why she became a nun in the first place and why she is still a friend of religion, rather than the friendship being the product of the nun-hood.

That’s just a guess though.

As a total outsider of all religious questions, the passion that I read on this blog seems rather baffling, quaint really. Although I’ve had a couple friends who were nuns, my model remains Audrey Hepburn. Mention reverend and I hum Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show or Hallelujah a la Jeff Buckley, maybe picture Bing Crosby or even Saul on the road to Damascus, maybe Diary of a Country Priest. It’s all fun and games, the more extreme the more entertaining to me. Yet I read here that there’s argument about the reliability of the texts – hinted at shyly as “stories.” Well, yeah, they’re stories. What’s the big deal? So no one walked on water. I kind of figured.

When there’s no personal threat, no narrow escape, there’s also no need to put away childish things. I wander into the upper tv channels to watch evangelical performances that entertain like the best of rap. Of course they must be kept out of the way of the politicians, soooo like them, but soooo not enjoyable. In combination, they are lethal, really. I know there are potential Inquisitions on both sides of today’s war. I could easily understand a heated argument about that scary combination. But the stories? What next? No one really ate Baby Bear’s porridge? Party poopers!

Ophelia, I agree with you about Karen Armstrong. That’s my impression too, a temperament that first gets expressed in one way, then in another. It’s a kind of passion, maybe doomed to be unfulfilled. She just can’t really bring herself to believe (I suspect) even though she’s drawn to a sort of otherworldliness (and peace and love…etc).

Yes, the atheist symphony is very very small. In a US bookstore you get rows and rows of “Christian Inspiration” books, and (at Borders, but not Barnes and Noble) a little atheism section. Maybe half a shelf. I’m all for the symphony. Good development, needs to exist.

What worries me is the composition of the symphony. I think there are many kinds of atheists with many attitudes. Some have a great antipathy for religion, some don’t. The loudest, most noticeable members have a lot of antipathy. This isn’t good as a matter of PR, but also (to my mind) it means some of the truth gets left out. The truth about religion is much messier and murker, much more gray, than Dawkins et al say.

And that doesn’t mean I don’t like him. I do. Just bought the paperback (after listening to the whole book in audio last summer), enjoyed rereading bits, but did think–he does have a lot of antipathy, and that’s probably why he gets called so many names.

Ophelia stole the march on me. So I’ll just ‘ditto’ what she says about airplay.

However, I was going over a couple of the essays in “Philosophers without Gods”, and some, from a philosophical point of view, anyway, simply alarm me. For instance, James Tappenden’s ‘An Atheist Fundamentalism.’ He begins his section on The Human Importance of Christian Belief with this remark:

There are many reasons that one might want to treat a religious belief with deference, even though one regards it as false. Many of these reasons apply to fundamentalist Christianity as I understand it.

And then he speaks about norms about keeing a hands-off policy towards religion, norms which

represent a deference to religion in general; both as a way to keep peace in society, and as an acknowledgement of the importance of religion in many people’s lives. [my emphasis]

This is bad enough, but then he adds that we show respect because many people are strengthened by faith, and

If religious faith can play such a role in someone’s life, it’s only decent to leave well enough alone.

This is alarming in itself, it seems to me, but when he goes on to talk about hopes for a miracle as a source of emotional support, I begin to lose patience. He adds to this washing oneself of moral stains, the idea of penitence, and learning about the harm that we have done…, and things that are only tangentially religious. He even throws in Kierkegaard to speak of the inner transformation that might constitute a ’special kind of miracle’, ‘a metaphysical change in the moral significance of one’s inner nature,’ though what that’s got to do with fundamentalism, I’m not sure.

Basically, he’s talking about motives to believe, a bit like temperament, perhaps, as Ophelia imagines about Karen Armstrong, or perhaps just James’ will to believe. Tappenden says he hasn’t given an exhaustive account of motives for believing in the divinity of Christ, and I wonder what in hell it’s all about (’hell’ is there for rtk): some people get to make up reality as they go along, others must do with what’s really there? I remember people used to tell me: ‘You mustn’t do anything to upset people’s simple faith.’ Truth is, in my experience, if it’s simple, you can’t upset it, and if it’s got any purchase on reality at all, it can’t wait to be upset.

Why so much passion, rtk? Because religion fucks up a lot of lives, and religions shouldn’t a get out of jail free card when they do it.

Obviously, my formatting is a bit off. Sorry, html is like Arabic to me.

Said Eric (yes, he did):Because religion fucks up a lot of lives Ahhh, yes, we got rid of the gollies and goshes and Heavens to Betsies!

Yes, of course religion does that, too. But there are some good deeds.

Religion as an art form, especially participatory performance art.
Religion as applied philosophy, supplying esoteric answers where there aren’t any solid ones. Especially useful when the world was still flat.
Religion as applied psychology, the minister just an available ear for people who truly have no other listener.
Religion as sex therapy, as in the Torah, the business man must service his wife weekly, the camel driver biannually. Interesting that it’s only the men that must be instructed.
Religion (in my neighborhood) as a really good place to meet potential dates at the Saturday night dance.
Skip all the dietary crap.
Religion as a hot subject for movies.
Skip Paul, have fun with druggy Revelations, I read all the Begats and don’t recommend them, take Song of Solomon absolutely literally, but above all the beauty of making it all in seven days is worth the price of admission.

Once again, these days there is no universal called Religion. The word “religion” is used to apply to associations/organizations/doctrines ranging from
hardline Islamist and Bible belt fundamentalism to
reform Judaism, Quakers, Zen Buddhists, and Unitarian-Universalists. I guess that those of us who note the incredible difference between Al Qaeda and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship get irritated when they are both mentioned as part of a single phenomenon. It’s a bit like lumping together all political organizations from Amnesty International to the KKK.

What Amos said. Yes. Fair enough. I agree.

But what’s a person to do who has great big cosmic questions of the sort philosophers address. You don’t have offices with shingles. Consulting a local philosopher to get answer is not an option. So there’s that variety of good to evil places Amos mentioned.

Eric, Your account of that article is (ahem) very selective.

The main point he’s arguing is that if you’re going to say you’re a believing Christian, you should be saying you believe the “fundamentals” of Christianity, not some thin, liberal, social justice substitute. By that definition, he says, he is not a believing Christian. (And is also, in fact, an atheist.)

Then he makes an argument why Christian belief/disbelief should be focused on “fundamentalist” Christianity (as he calls it, though he admits his terminology is non-standard). The argument is that the fundamentals have a great power to help people get through life. Considering that power, nothing else should be counted as “real Christianity.”

The power has to do with the ideas of afterlife and redemption, which help people with some of the very hard parts of life–loss of loved ones, and guilt.When he talks about respect for Christianity, what he means is seeing that power, that’s all.

He makes a rather strong argument about why you should be deferential to Christians. He gives the example of going to a funeral for a soldier. Say (to add a detail he doesn’t) that the person died in Iraq. You shouldn’t make an argument that the Iraq war is a fiasco and the guy’s death was a waste. Mean thing to do.

Considering the power of Christian ideas to help people deal with loss and guilt, he argues, you ought to defer to them in the same way you’d defer to the bereaved on the Iraq war. (Of course, if the bereaved want to debate Iraq at the funeral, that’s different, and if Christians want to have debates, that’s different. I think that goes without saying.)

Bottom line–he makes it clear he’s not a Christian (and in fact an atheist) but gives some reasons for respect and deference. I don’t think this precludes having debates about Christianity. It means not bombarding your devout Christian friends with reasons why Christianity is hopeless nonsense. Is this not pretty f’n reasonable? (OK, I’m trying to join in with the expletives…sorry to be so delicate about it.)

Fixed a few things in the last comment….

p.s. rtk, Why all the heat about religion, especially between coreligionists (like a bunch of us here)? Good question. Must give it a think!

Jean, common courtesy tells you not to criticise people’s beliefs at times of crisis when just those beliefs are their fall-back position. Of course, you don’t raise questions about the sustainability of faith positions at times like this.

But Tappenden goes much further than this, and suggests that there are, in general, reasons to defer to religion. In view of religion’s capacity for violence, I suggest, these reasons are not substantial, and those with extreme views get to develope their rather less society friendly views while people skirt around issues with polite deference. There is absolutely no reason why, in ordinary situations, when we are not dealing with situations of personal crisis (unless you think of life as a perpetual crisis), we should not tell religionists, including Christians, Muslims and Jews, that religion is hopeless nonsense, as I think it is. Tappenden’s reasons for not doing this are scarcely compelling.

Although apologetics has a long history in Christianity, if fell into disrepute in the last half century or so, mainly because most practioners of apologetics realised that it was little more than an extended form of special pleading, finding all the tidbits that supported their position and excluding the rest. But apologetics was a response to a widespread tendency, since the 18th century at least, to take well-aimed shots at Christianity, and reasons for believinng in transcendent beings and laws. And now, instead of maintaining the pressure on religions at a time when we know more about the universe than was ever known, and there are fewer and fewer places for a god to hide, you are suggesting that we back off from a form of thinking and feeling and shaping life when what religions have done is to base their believe systems, a la James, on sheer assertion, and their will be believe?!

So, no, I don’t think it’s pretty reasonable at all, especially when religions are on the defensive, have fewer and fewer apologetic moves to make, and are making more and more claims for respect and participation in public decision making. I don’t think that is reasonable at all. In fact, not to be paranoid, it seems to me that religion around the world today, in the Middle East and other Muslim majority countries, in India, with the new emphasis on Hindutva, in the US where Christians are making a credible bid for power (every candidate for the presidency has to make good on his or her religious credentials to be a credible), I think it’s high time that philosophers did their job, and point out in good Socratic fashion, that people are not as wise or knowledgeable as they think they are aboutt unseen realities and powers. Indeed, I’m ready to go all postmodern on you and call religious discourse today clearly and rather dangerously hegemonic.

I notice you speak of co-religionists in your last post. But you, I thought, acknowedged your atheism up front. Is atheism a religion now?

Oh, by the way, you don’t have to join in the more colourful forms off speech in order to participate fully. If the language makes you uncomfortable, I’ll go back to gosh and golly if you like.

“Coreligionists”–I used it with a touch of humor. We do agree 100% about “what’s out there”–no gods, nothing of the sort. We disagree, though, about religion and religious folk.

I don’t think Tappenden is saying all you think he’s saying…the whole point of his article is to explain what “real Christianity” is and undercut people who say they are Christians without believing the central tenets. (And then to say he’s not a Christian…) His point is quite narrow, and when he talks about “respect” and “deference” he means something very specific (as I said before). It’s not at all an attitude like “you might be right.” The point is that he sees the role in people’s lives that is played by the fundamental tenets of Christianity. It’s serious stuff.

Since his goal is to explain why he is NOT a Christian, it would be unfair to suppose he’s offering a general account of how to talk about religion. So getting away from that article….

My view is that we should talk about it in lots of ways. It’s good having Dawkins, Harris, etc., around to stomp on the most ridiculous tenets of faith. It’s good crashing through the hushed reverence and calling a spade a spade. It’s also good recognizing bad stuff that’s done in the name of religion.

But, there is much more to the truth. It’s the Buddhist monks in Myanmar right now who are feeding the people. My #1 hero is a Christian–Paul Farmer, who runs the world health organization Partners in Health. US churches spend lots of time building houses for Habitat for Humanity and working at soup kitchens. I think for most people, religion is a central source of meaning, value, and community in their lives.

I suppose the ultimate reason why I have a preference for deference (er…) is that I think it’s a basic fact of life that we must live together with people we disagree with. If I am too pushy about my understanding of the truth, it’s a sure thing someone with the opposite understanding will be just as pushy.

Hey, I don’t altogether disagree with you Jean, and I would not want to detract from the good that people do. That, of course, is not my meaning, and it is arguable right now that religious people do more of this kind of reaching out to help others in distress than non-religious people do. Hence the monks in Burma (I will not use the name chosen by despots). That’s probably got to do with the religious traditions and communities which are highly organised and able to communicate concerns and have them listened to and responded to very quickly.

However, Tappenden is actually trying to tell people what they may think, and it is also arguable, I think, that it was more liberal forms of Christianity which started the churches in their widespread concern for ameliorating the human condition. I think Tappenden is wrong about ‘fundamentalist Christianity’, even if he means that in a special way. Liberal Christians or Radical Christians, or Christians without belief in God or Jesus’ divinity, are also concerned about justice issues, and they are clearly in the forefront of several movements for social justice, for gay and lesbian people, for instance, for women, and so on. They take the stories seriously as defining a form of life; they simply don’t see the point of continued emphasis on dogma. I know, Blackburn thinks that they thereby subvert their own programme, which depends on the metaphysical superstructure built on the stories, and that they’re living off capital and not making any further religious investments.

I guess my point is that liberal Christianity or radical Christianity are in the process of secularising their story, and if they go far enough, they may actually provide the basis, within a secular understanding of being human, for some of the commitments to justice and help in times of crisis, that will actually extend further and be more humane than much of the help that is now offered through Christians with fundamentalist leanings.

So far as being pushy goes, I think that if we don’t push, religions, which are great at arrogating power to themselves, will continue to make unaccceptable claims not only for respect but for acquiescence from a public that does not share its beliefs. I bid you remember the theocon movement in the US, and the growing force of Islamism, from which many Muslims dare not divorce themselves, no matter how contrary it may be to their own understanding of how to get along in Western (or even Muslim) societies. I believe strongly that is our responsibility to push as hard as we can, and force religions to produce the bona fides on which their claims rest. Failing that, I am afraid, religions are quite prepared to infringe whatever rights they can in order to get the power that their world view demands.

I guess my main point is that I find your approach to religion too soft, and too compromising. Religions are not like that, especially fundamentalist ones, even understood in Tappenden’s way. They know about power, and they think they know truths which qualify them to hold and wield it. I think we need to push the claims of rational discussion as far as it will go here. And if this gets very pushy - and it probably will - that may be one of the prices we pray for freedom.

So, I’m not disputing what you say about religion’s good deeds. But there area lot of bad deeds that religion has been and still is responsible for; and besides this there is the fact that religion is, by its very nature, totalising, and so is hungry for power. I’m not willing to grant it power just on the strength of good deeds. A good, early book of Don Cupitt, is Crisis of Moral Authority, where he grants the points about religion’s good side, but raises some pertinent questions about religion’s continued claim to moral authority. I share that concern.

Eric: You seem to believe that there is an eternal essence to religion, and that essence lies in the most
fundamentalist varieties of religion. I don’t see why a liberal religion, like Reform Judaism, is any less a religion than Orthodox Judaism. In any case, Orthodox Judaism of 2008 is not Orthodox Judaism of 1808 or 1008. You generally emphasize the doctrinal aspect of religion, which slowly changes, but the social aspect of religion, religion as an institution which participates in society, changes as rapidly as society does. Religon may be unaware of how rapidly it changes, as most of us are, but no one is exempt from the influence of social forces.

So much for religious tolerance! I just crossed over to the dark side. I was out for a nice heads up Sunday ride on my skimpy carbon fiber bike when I got blown away by 319 (I counted them!!!!) motorcycles, half with passengers, preceded and followed by cars proclaiming on huge banners *Annual Bikers for Christ Ride.* In spite of a 20-30 mile wind on my right, I could feel their wind on me as I stayed in my 12 inch little lane on a narrow state road. It was gravelly, very unstable for racing wheels and a bike that weighs 15 pounds with all its unobtainium components. I wonder if they at least take up some kind of collection for Burma or China.

Which speaking of, I choose the Catholic Relief Society for giving because they are usually already in the country and entry isn’t a problem although mobility probably is. At least I’m not paying airfare for the helpers. I think they have a good donation/use of money ratio. Of course Oxfam is my choice, too.

The thing about the doctrinal aspect of religion (this has been pointed out before; sorry about repetition) is that it doesn’t go away, so to the extent that it’s dangerous (and much of it decidedly is), the danger doesn’t go away. It would be nice if 1) all religion were liberal religion and 2) liberal religion could be relied on to remain liberal. But neither of those is the case.

How is one supposed to stop disputing doctrinal aspects of religion when they make the lives of so many people, especially women, shit?

Julian, I am a Buddhist and there are many things that I agree with you, but certainly not any of your statements about Buddhist doctrine. Why do you stick to flat, crude stereotypes and make no effort to reach a mature understanding when it comes to religious thought. Why do atheists write almost endlessly about religion and almost seem to progress to cruder and characterizations that depart further away from the thinking of recognised authorities in the area. It is as if atheists are refining their ability to misunderstand religion as it is understood by mature scholars and practitioners.

As a philosopher you wouldn’t tolerate this in any other field of thought, being careful to come to some understanding of the best practitioners so why don’t you so the same with, of all things, religious thought?

Anyone with even the most cursory understanding of Buddhism knows that it is founded on compassionate action. Clearly Sharon Stone is not a world authority on Buddhism so why just barrel on down her line of thinking? It isn’t as if there hasn’t been lots written on this.

Silly speculations about earthquakes aside, the fact that there is a causal relationship between someone’s past actions and the current predicament is no reason at all for not showing compassion. This is a modern assumption based around on our irrational and highly-sentimental ethics–Hume seems to have been one of the great instigators. For a Buddhist who properly sees the causal nature of the whole predicament compassion comes much more easily.

You really can’t hack off a piece of someone else’s philosophy and spin a story based on the misreading of someone as wholly ignorant as Sharon Stone, ignoring the way it fits into the whole. If someone had written a critique of a scientific area in this way people would rightly condemn them for their ignorance. if you are going to criticise a whole field of knowledge, not just some crude and ignorant practitioners, then you really must engage with the thinking of the recognised authorities, unless you just want to set up an echo chamber in which atheists reinforce their articles of faith about how irrational/ignorant/stupid/bad religious people are.

But this seems to be precisely what is happening as far as I can see. The more intelligent and reflective religious people seem to mostly shrug their shoulders in exasperation and leave the atheists to get on with it. I think this lack of meaningful communication is a shame and actually unhealthy.

I have written some articles on this: Why I am not an Atheist (responding to a similar article by Peter Singer at Cif on the problem of evil), Faith and Reason in the Dharma (on faith and reason in Buddhism and the metaphysics and epistemology of spone’s earthquake-karma fiasco) and Earthquake Follies (an expanded explanation of this comment, with a quite detailed reply to the points you make above: mostly concerned with ethics of earthquake-karma).

There’s more God consciousness in this thread than the average ashram.

There appears to be a serious lack of historical awareness in the comments on the unchanging nature of religion’s lust for hegemony. I’m reading Reeve’s book on ‘Mill - Victorian Firebrand’ which is interesting if slackly written. It puts in perspective the daftness of expecting Muslim countries which have no experience of democracy to be on the same footing in relation to free speech, the rights of women etc. as the developed West a mere 200 years ago when Mill was born had none of those rights. This remained the case for much of the 19th.C.

Hey, if you can’t get a life, get Mill’s life.

Chris,

I have encountered this accusation of atheist lack of nuance and understanding from religionists before but find it unconvincing. One could hardly accuse Eric or Jean of a lack of knowledge or understanding, or Eric of unsophisticated first hand experience.

At any rate, you have added nothing to the discussion with your appeal to “recognized authorities”. Recognized by whom? Fellow sectarians? Scholars? It is for you to articulate atheist misunderstanding and where it allegedly goes wrong. Simply saying so doesn’t make it so. More importantly, it is for you to unpack Buddhist teachings of karma for our enlightenment if we misunderstand.

Until then, your response remains an ironic demonstration of the very pomposity and elitist superiority you accuse the atheist of. Even worse, it is without content. So please engage and inform us not by merely referring us to links but by engaging the specifics of our discussion here to date. I’m sure you will find us an eager audience.

Ophelia: There is much variety in how seriously religious people take the doctrines. There are religious fanatics who believe every word of the Bible was dictated by God and there are people who go to church or synagogue because their family does or because there aren’t many other places to get together with others in contemporary society. I’m a loner myself, but not everyone is. For me, a church is a place where people meet. When I’ve tried to talk about religion with people who go to church, I notice that most of them have less idea than I do about the so-called doctrines of their faith, especially the Catholics. Reform Jews also tend to be ignorant about the fine points of Judaism. As to the oppression of women, some religions oppress women, others don’t. My favorite Zen Buddhist website (no, I’m not a Buddhist) features mostly women Zen masters. Reform Judaism has women rabbis. Contemporary secular capitalism has lots of institutions and customs which oppress women as much as religion does or more. I will not list them, as you know them as well or better than I do. Read any of Maureen Dowd’s columns in the NYT editorial page about Hillary Clinton and you’ll see how machismo permeates the thinking of a woman political columnist in the so-called liberal media.

“I guess my main point is that I find your approach to religion too soft, and too compromising.”

Eric, I agree with you about Tappenden’s main point. But as to my being “too soft.” Welllll…. Some religious ideas are appalling, and deserve to be flogged. On the other hand, many are harmless. I don’t want to convert anyone (if their beliefs are harmless)…maybe because I so detest it when someone wants to convert me. I’ve written some things that are pretty forthright about “bad religious ideas”…but here at TP I don’t do that much. I figure I’d just be preaching to the choir.

MIchael–It often occurs to me that the date varies from place to place. In some places it’s about 10,000 bc, and in others about 1800. I think you have a point! (Didn’t Mill have a strange life? I’d like to read that…)

If I may (!) quickly offer a different response to Chris Dornan–I’m going to follow his links. I think he’s quite right to complain that it’s silly to take the word of Sharon Stone on how Buddhists look at anything.

Come now, Jean. This thread has never been about Stone’s outrageously grotesque caricature of the doctrine of karma - Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan or other.

I’m not opposed to anybody reading Chris’s links. I would simply wish him to address the issues raised (and the issues he raised by way of criticism) in the context of this discussion. There has been precious little of karma, much less Buddhism, in this thread, discourse quickly turning to a much more general discussion of religion and faith.

Ophelia, One anecdote about Catholic doctrine. I recall a Catholic psychologist, who always wore a cross, had a picture of Saint Francis on her wall, sent her children to Catholic schools, goes to mass, etc. Talking to her, I discovered that her conception of God was pantheistic. I insisted that she was a pantheist; she insisted that she was a Catholic. Was she in favor of a woman’s right to choose? Yes. How could she square that with what the Pope says? She doesn’t try to: she is a Catholic; she lives in a Catholic culture; she goes to mass because it’s a tradition and because she finds the ceremony moving; she accepts those parts of Catholicism which make sense to her and pays no attention to the other aspects. Very typical of liberal Chilean Catholics. Most religious people are not as logical as you are, Ophelia, or even as I am: they don’t strive for a coherent worldview.

amos, I know all that, but it doesn’t address the danger that I pointed out. I know not all believers are literalists, but some are; in absolute numbers, a great many are; and in any case the doctrine is always there, waiting. So the fact that liberal religion is religion too seems not all that cogent.

A number of things have been said here that may be worthy of a response, but I think simply quoting Ophelia is more to the point (of course, that won’t stop me from adding some comments):

The thing about the doctrinal aspect of religion (this has been pointed out before; sorry about repetition) is that it doesn’t go away, so to the extent that it’s dangerous (and much of it decidedly is), the danger doesn’t go away. It would be nice if 1) all religion were liberal religion and 2) liberal religion could be relied on to remain liberal. But neither of those is the case.

This is the reason I am not nearly so sanguine as Jean. But at the same time, I’m not trying — surprising as it may seem — to convert anyone. I’m trying to make a point. If I’m successful, some will see it; if not, not.

Jean talks about harmless beliefs, from which she would not want to convert anyone. Which ones did you have in mind, Jean? When does something become harmful? When someone acts on it? Or when it is passed on to someone who takes it more seriously and acts on it? Or when it is inculcated into a child who then is captive to it? The simplest beliefs can be apparently harmless, and then, suddenly, with the slightest twist, become harmful.

The main point about religious beliefs is that they are not patient to disproof by evidence, so, though they may change as the culture changes, because they are latent within the sacred texts or sacred tradition, they can be right back like a flash. I’ve seen it happen again and again, like a bloody Jack-in-the-box. Look at Turkey, where religious authorities would simply love to return women to the chador or closet them at home. Little harmless beliefs which seem so innocuous, until someone uses them. It’s not as simple as all that.

In response to Chris. Why the crude stereotypes? Because they’re there. Look at Christianity, rich with them, the most grotesque caricatures imaginable. And yet, who can say that these do not represent Christianity? The pope thinks he can, but where does he get that authority? The same goes for Buddhism. Faithful to which doctrines, defined by whom, and why? That’s precisely the point that I’ve been trying to make. There simply is no evidential basis for making the claims that religions make. “Yon Cassius has a sleek and hungry look. Such men are dangerous.”

Ophelia, you were sending yours while I was writing mine. I can’t seem to keep it short, so you got there first. Sorry to repeat again and again!

Yeah, actually, Chris Dornan - what do you mean by “I am a Buddhist and there are many things that I agree with you, but certainly not any of your statements about Buddhist doctrine. Why do you stick to flat, crude stereotypes and make no effort to reach a mature understanding[?]”

What statements about Buddhist doctrine? Julian didn’t even use the word “Buddhist”.

No problem, Eric! I didn’t mean to get there first - just happened to turn up.

Brian, I have spent three days writing a careful response to this article (the second tow links) explaining precisely where I think this article is going wrong. i suppose I could have tried to cut-and-paste two very substantial blog articles into this comment thread but I don’t think anyone would have thanked me for it. Instead I wrote a pretty fairly comment explaining explaining why I think the whole approach that atheists have been taking to religious philosophy is wrong and backed it up with the links written specifically for the purpose.

Your point about ‘pomposity and elitist superiority’ I can’t make any sense of at all. If anyone advances an argument citing sources that are not recognised as authorities, or claims that a field of knowledge is bunk by refuting arguments that are advanced by someone clearly not recognised within the field concerned they are rightly dismissed or ignored–what can possibly be gained by this? If I can write arguments that a given field of knowledge is invalid by picking anyone at all to represent it then I can set about easily demolishing every idea that has ever been written about, surely.

I am not sure what you mean by ‘elite’ here but surely you will recognise ‘merit’ and that we have to recognise that some people’s writing carries more weight than others in evaluating an entire discipline.

I do agree with you about one thing. Although I was only speaking specifically about Julian’s original article (and I was responding to the content of the article), Jean has entirely vindicated your assessment in her candid and open response.

—————

Ophelia: Karma as far as I know is a concept that only applies in religions of Indian orgin, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. Sharon Stone’s comments were clearly made in a Buddhist context and Julian said ‘What is surprising is that we do not take offence at religious beliefs more often’. So which religion was Julian talking about? Clearly Julian either meant one specific religion in his critique of karma–in which case it was clearly Buddhism–or he meant all religions that worked with the idea of karma. Either way I am entitled to work within a Buddhist framework in critiquing Julian’s argument. if I can show that his argument doesn’t apply to Buddhism then I have shown that it doesn’t apply to all religions that accept the idea of karma.

I think the lack of precision implicit in your argument is worrying. In what other field would it be acceptable to advance generic arguments where none of the terms are properly tied down? Doesn’t this betray a general lack of seriousness, a contempt even, for the whole field of study that we are to believe is being crushed and dismissed in a short blog article.

Chris Dornan, I didn’t make an argument, I just asked what you meant by telling Julian you didn’t agree with his statements about Buddhist doctrine when he hadn’t used the word ‘Buddhist.’ That’s not an argument, it’s merely pointing out an inaccuracy.

Ophelia: “The doctrine is always there waiting”.
Well, the world is a sliding slope. Any kid who puffs on a joint could end up addicted to heroin, but
most of them don’t. I still insist that it is a pertinent fact that in contemporary western society (I’m not talking about Afghanistan) fewer and fewer people, even those who attend religious services and call themselves believers, take traditional religious doctrines as literal truth. Yes, they could revert to burning witches and heretics, but it doesn’t seem likely. My Catholic friend who believes in a woman’s right to choose and whose idea of God is basically pantheist could join Opus Dei, but it is not probable. Jean could join the U.S. Marines and volunteer for action in Iraq, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
However, as I said, the world is a sliding slope. There aren’t any certainties.

Eric,

Benign ideas: Jesus loves me, God loves me, my dead child is now with God, God wants us to be good, God loves us all equally, all sentient beings have a spirit (atman), the root cause of suffering is desire, our duty is to repair the world.

Bad ideas: Jesus loves me but not my Jewish neighbor, women only get into heaven by marrying men, the Jews are the chosen people, humans and animals are in completely separate categories, people should fulfill the role prescribed by their caste.

I admit–the way I look at religion (without general antipathy) is partly a matter of basic disposition. 95% of humanity is religious, give or take a couple of percents. I can’t bring myself to think 95% of humanity harbors ideas that are seriously villainous. To me this is a very Christian view of the world. It postulates dark and dangerous masses that need to be saved. Only, it’s the atheists who are cast in the role of saviors.

The bad ideas are really bad, and I do feel antipathy for them. That’s enough antipathy for me.

Chris Dornan,

I’ve read your blog pieces but see littleconnection between them and the discussion we’ve been having here save as they apply specifically to Julian’s introduction. However, while you were writing, the discussion progressed rapidly beyond that introduction to the extent that your poast seemed almost without context when it appeared.

At any rate, surely you don’t believe Julian or anybody else here ever regarded Sharon Stone as any kind of “authority”? I don’t recall the issue of authority coming up in any context whatsoever (but it’s been a long thread and I’m tired, so somebody correct me if I’m wrong).

Your blog pieces were sophisticated Buddhist theology of a kind I am familiar with. I’m sure the stuff makes sense to you in its own hermetic way but to me it’s simply a trick of language with little actual content or meaning; the same incoherent god/religion-talk that has been refuted successfully time and again to my satisfaction.

Sorry if you feel insulted by my alleging pomposity and religious elitism, but you introduced the issue of authority when that had not been an issue. You also implicity imputed to atheists a stridency and inability (or refusal) to appreciate the subtle nuances of what the authentically/authoritatively religious are really going on about. Clearly that is not the case either given the rather wide range of religious background, education and experience here.

Of course we recognize there are mature, sincere, and intellectually aspiring religionists; part of this discussion has been about differentiating between types. But the bottom line for most has been that such religionists are a minority, their positions ever at risk of being overridden by the reactionary forces of dogmatism (one of your cited “authorities”, Benedict XVI, emblematic of just such forces). Despite religionist’s good will and honest intellectual striving, most here seem to still find their positions wanting, incoherent, untenable and simply untrue. They can be aesthetically beautiful, of course, but beauty and truth (Keats notwithstanding) are not the same thing.

.

[...] Peter Singer at Cif ), and Faith and Reason in the Dharma and Earthquake Follies responding to an article by Julain Baggini at Talking Philsophy on Sharon Stone’s earthquake-karma comments—is addressing just this problem, the insistence [...]

Julian is very green mentally speaking if the recycling of ancient screeds is anything to go by. His apercu was written 9 years ago and it seems that there has been no advancement of learning in the meantime. In a mutable world such adherence to doctrine is a rare thing and I for one will not gainsay it.

My previous remark about karma was from a Hindu perspective as developed in the Bhagavad Git and Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya, is, I think, accurate and provides a counterpoint to popular accounts. It is this: there is no such thing as good or bad karma, there is just karma. All predicaments must be seen through and may be used even those that are on the face of it unpleasant. It is an unwarranted assumption that the unpleasant is the result of evil doing in a previous life. I think that we all are aware that a little suffering may have the effect of making people more sympathetic to others. Most observant Hindu households take the duty of looking after the unfortunate seriously but of course there are those who say ‘be off with you, let it be for a judgment against you’.

Ah, Jean, I guess I see those simple, ‘harmless’, beliefs in another way. Take ‘Jesus loves me.’

Jesus loves me, this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him belong,
They are weak but he is strong.

Now it’s not so innocent and harmless. It acknwledges the authority of texts, and the great power of someone (not clearly identified) in relation to which/whom the child is weak. The love is conditional, upon the child’s apperception of himself as weak in relation to the strong Jesus and his authoritative text. And implicitly it makes the child a tool of the text,and of those who interpret it.

Who’s going to be able to think his/her way out of this complex of harmless beliefs? It’s recursive after all. It keeps defining itself and its authority in terms of itself. And by means of this you eventually have a willing subject, who may, indeed, go on to live a peaceful, law-abiding and even caring life. But, depending on how the transformations of the original harmless belief, we could end up with something a bit less manageable, even a lot less manageable.

That doesn’t mean that, because people hold these ‘harmless’ beliefs, I hold all religious people to be villains, and probably only a minority will enter that particularly disagreeable minority, but the majority gives impetus to, and underwrites the power of the zealots. The harm lies, not only in the beliefs, but in the context in which they are embedded. I will not show deference to something that can become so harmful, and I do not respect those who have been captivated by dreams. Rather than show deference and respect, it seems to me, those who can see the dangerous potential of religion should be trying to convince people that there are other ways of making sense of their lives and the world that don’t require a mental capitulation to belief systems that have no basis in evidence, and cannot be sustained without the indoctrination of children.

I have had a conversation (by means of letters, believe it or not) with an older woman (91 or 2, I think) who wants to convince me that, at its heart, Christianity, rightly understood, is benign. I have taking the opposing view. I do not think we will convince each other, but it is something I am willing to do, in season and out of season, because I believe, not without evidence, that religion is one of the most dangerous forces convulsing our world at the present time. I suspect that religious apocalyticism, which is the flip side of ‘Jesus loves me’, will take the world to the brink of disaster. If we make it, it will be a close run thing. That is not the world that I would choose for my children or my chidren’s children, or anybody’s children. And that is why I keep insisting that religions are more dangerous than they look. I think they are.

You expanded on “Jesus loves me” while I just meant it “as is.” But in any case….

Rather than show deference and respect, it seems to me, those who can see the dangerous potential of religion should be trying to convince people that there are other ways of making sense of their lives and the world that don’t require a mental capitulation to belief systems that have no basis in evidence, and cannot be sustained without the indoctrination of children.

What would this mean in a real situation? You mention your correspondence. I was talking to someone yesterday who said she’d been a “spiritual seeker” for 40 years and was finally converting to Judaism. She said she feels as if she’s “come home.” Would I want to get in the way of her sense of home (she can’t have that “by blood” like I can)? Would I really want to aim to persuade her out of the conversion? I can’t imagine it. Here’s 40 years of “seeking” getting satisfyingly resolved…I have to think–good for her! If she wants to initiate a religion debate, that’s fun, but I do think I need to be respectful. Don’t I???

I’m not going to tell you what you should do in a particular case. Particular cases have a way of defining their own parameters, and of course you need to be respectful, as I am with my correspondent. I’m not going to be deliberately rude to her, and call her names. But I suppose, if you considered the example you gave, that you might well want to ask her some pointed questions, such as, Why does this feel to you like coming home? Have you considered the foundation of the beliefs you are about to adopt? Can you see that Judaism, though it feels like home to you now, can also be destructive of people’s lives in particular ways? Have you considered whether this is something you are doing as a result of a cultural ‘at-homeness’, or whether your attraction has to do with the beliefs upon which Judaism has been traditionally grounded? And in relation to that, have you asked whether those grounds are sufficient? Is there any other belief system that might provide the same kind of personal resolution for you, at the same time that it doesn’t raise so many questions of reason and evidence? Etc. I could add more questions, but it doesn’t seem to me that raising these questions would be to show disrespect, and might even be helpful.

Eric: There is a time and place for almost everything. If I were to write in this blog that I “had come home” in converting to any given religion, you would be perfectly justified in showing me the negative aspects of said religion. Those are the rules of the game. If a person who defines herself as a “seeker” (that self-designation tells me something about her: that she envisions her life as a search or as a path, a trite metaphor, but it’s her way of making sense of her life) tells that she’s found a home in Judaism, I think that it would be a lack of respect towards her or at least a lack of sense of what the situation calls for to begin to ennumerate the negative aspects of Judaism. Maybe her search will lead her beyond Judaism. Maybe not. Now, if said seeker told me that she had found a home in
a Satanic cult or in Al Qaeda, I would have a different response. I might even have to call the police. If she told me that she had found a home in Scientology, I would probably consider her to be a hopeless case and say nothing. If she told me that she had found a home in the philosophy of Nietzsche, that would be a sign that we could argue or discuss the issue.

Ah well, we have a difference of opinion, and I think the different ways we look at such a conversation make it as vivid as can be. Must get something done around here…and feel guilty for getting in the way of the Karma discussion. There was a moment 50 comments back when we appeared to be in 100% agreement, but it passed. I’m sure it’s more interesting this way.

amos,

I still insist that it is a pertinent fact that in contemporary western society (I’m not talking about Afghanistan) fewer and fewer people, even those who attend religious services and call themselves believers, take traditional religious doctrines as literal truth.

Well I did say that it would be nice if all religion were liberal religion - so I agree with you at least about the pertinence. But I don’t agree about the fact - I don’t think that is a fact; and even if it is a fact of ‘western society’ as a whole, there are large patches of western society where the reverse is true. And I think that too is a pertinent fact.

You expanded on “Jesus loves me” while I just meant it “as is.”

But the thing about that is, such ideas are never reliably ‘as is’ - they’re never stable ‘as is.’ They are sometimes, but they also always expand. The idea has too much baggage not to expand.

With really good people, who are temperamentally good and practiced and disciplined at being good, it expands into further benign ideas. But…such people are in short supply.

Amos, I would like to have a conversation with all the above that you mentioned (a Satanic cult, Al Qaeda, Scientology, Nietzsche). That’s why I’m hanging around this thread. I was hoping to hear from someone who has experienced the *K* word. Agreement I don’t need; I get plenty of that from myself.

rtk: Good luck. Maybe you have the gift of conversing with people with very closed or narrow or limited minds. I lack the patience. Conversing with Al Qaeda can be hazardous for your health as Daniel Pearl discovered.

Ophelia: Surprise. We agree that really good people are in short supply. However, can’t atheism be used or misused by bad people or unthinking people in the same way as “Jesus loves me” can?
For example, what someone calls “lumpen Nietzscheans”: atheists with fascist tendencies, a cult of violence against women, a glorification of egoism . Another example: Ayn Rand and her cult, atheists too.

Re: “Jesus loves me”

There was a book that came out a couple years ago about “Jesus through the ages” that talked about today’s Jesus in America. He is a close friend and personal counselor. He is someone you can have a nice chat with. So there’s expansion, but it varies. Other Jesuses are not innocuous–like the one who counsels leaving your family to prepare for the Kingdom of God. (Nobody talks about him anymore.) Also, the exclusive one who says only believers get to enjoy eternal life.

I don’t think I can really make myself think that every religious idea is so dangerous I’m entitled to confront believers for whom they are “existentially” important (a la Eric’s series of questions). Some are, though, and I have confronted believers about them.

amos, yes, sure. I think of them as Callicles types - who sound very like the Athenians in the Melian dialogue - ‘Come on, Melians, get a clue: we’re stronger than you and so we’re going to do whatever is in our own interest.’

But - at least they don’t have that love of Jesus to give them the Extra Energy.

Well I don’t think I’m entitled to confront religious believers personally in any case - unless they’ve confronted me first. (I don’t always choose to confront them even then, but I do think I’m entitled to.)

Jean you must have shifted your thought in the middle of that last para? From [not] any to some? In other words the last sentence seems to contradict the first, so I think you must not have meant exactly ‘any’…

Good editing! I think I meant “just any”…which means pretty much “every.” Must fix.

:- )

I’m subbing TPM as we speak, I must be in editing mode!

I hope there are some goodies in there (and be kind to my little offering!).

But of course!

I really am puzzled as to the response of Jean and Amos to my suggested questions. I don’t think of them as confrontational at all. Here is a friend or acquaintance who has been searching for 40 years (was it?), and says that she feels that she is coming home in her planned coversion to Judaism. After all those years! I think some questions are in order. Why does this feel so right, after all this searching? Are you sure this is the answer to your questions, the conclusion of your searching? What is it about your decision that feels like coming home? What questions — havng been asking them for so long (after all, this is what searching is all about) — do you think are being answered? What would make you think that this is no longer the answer to your questions?

As to a satanic cult or Al Quaeda. Well, the latter is a terrorist organisation, so, some kind of confrontation would seem to be in order. But satanism? I’m not sure what it is, or whether it is real belief system or not. But if you’re prepared to pose questions about that, why not about belief systems whose foundation is just as shaky, although not so obviously counter-cultural?

I guess I simply don’t understand. If someone were to come to me and say that his searching was over, that he had come home, I’d put the questions. However, I wouldn’t feel myself licensed to do that to someone, say, a neighbour, who had decided to convert, and didn’t share his decision or his feelings about it with me. Why would I confront someone like that? That’s his/her own business. But if it’s put to me? What’s the issue here? And, if it were a friend who was telling me this, and I knew about his searching, I’d want to ask some very pertinent questions. I don’t see the problem?

As for thinking that holding religious beliefs is always dangerous. There’s an important distinction here. Religious ideas have a life of their own. The way some people hold beliefs about Jesus is not necessarily dangerous, but, as you point out, the idea itself can be dangerous. It’s not ‘other Jesuses’ ; the Jesus of faith is like a comic character; it’s always the real Jesus. The same Jesus who is someone’s friend and brother, is the same Jesus who excludes people from fellowship, sends someone to kill a doctor who provides women with abortion, as well as the Jesus who thinks the Jews are Christ-killers. It’s all there in the texts that people read, and the beliefs morph themselves in different ways through different people’s lives. Of course, not every instance of a belief is dangerous, but that doesn’t mean that the belief itself is not.

What’s the goal of all that questioning? Why are the questions “in order”?

Is it to get her to see that she has not found anything? That she does not have a basis for becoming a member of the temple? That her warm sense of belonging is ill-founded? That she’s wrong? That her 40 year search has brought her to nothing after all? If I succeeded in those goals, wouldn’t there be a serious risk of making her worse off?

As to Jesus. My closest Christian friend is an ardent liberal. There is not a chance on earth she’d ever affiliate herself with Christian crazies who kill abortion doctors. She’s in the driver’s seat. “Her” Jesus is not an exclusivist. In fact, he’s not even a Republican. (joke)

If you support Obama for president, you can’t pick the parts you like and reject the parts you don’t like. The parts all come in one package. But with Jesus, you can. There is lots of room for interpretation and creativity (especially is he’s not real!). And no, the bible is not the final word. You can skip things (like Jefferson and Tolstoy did). In fact, everyone skips things, emphasizes others, even people who consider themselves fundamentalists. They don’t admit it, but they do.

Give all that room for “creating your own” there’s nothing that says that one person’s benign religious beliefs run any risk of turning into another person’s malignant religious beliefs. I just don’t see it.

Eric, it has happened to me at least a dozen times that someone has told me they were leaving their church, most recently a Mormon. The position I always take in an effort to be helpful is against their decision. I think of all the advantages of staying with their life long affiliation. It’s their job in our discussion to present arguments that they hope I can’t refute. I think they should be able to do that as well as the positive reasons for their conversion. They know my arguments are friendly, not confrontational.

Amos, some months ago we said goodbye to the same friend whose return we just celebrated with the rabbit. She is Italian, a lapsed Catholic. Also here were several Turks, one sephardic and others Moslem, several born again atheists from England and Scotland, 3 local Mennonites, some I dunno whats, a couple vanilla Protestants and one Mormon. The food was a terrorist dinner, being all mid-eastern. Nobody killed anyone. Except for more baklava.

Eric: Reading my own note, I think maybe I wasn’t clear. I meant I argue in favor of the religion they are leaving, never against what they are joining or nothing if that is the case. My own belief, if you can call it that, is zero, no isms of any kind, not even anti-isms.

Amos, I left out 3 orthodox New Jersey Jews with a Swiss Catholic 4th family member. Who cares what anyone was. We talked about sports a lot.

Chris Dornan, I didn’t make an argument, I just asked what you meant by telling Julian you didn’t agree with his statements about Buddhist doctrine when he hadn’t used the word ‘Buddhist.’ That’s not an argument, it’s merely pointing out an inaccuracy.

This is perfectly surreal and possibly illustrating my point better than any words of mine can. Everyone else here seems to have accepted that without actually saying so Julian’s article must have been talking about Buddhism. To illustrate my point I have deleted the line that I would normally place in the post where I label your quotation, and here I am talking about your comment without explicitly naming. It is as if you were to later claim it was an inaccuracy to say I had ever discussed your post because I had never said so anywhere, yet everyone here understands that context.

All I did was to explain why Julian’s could only have been referring to the Buddhist idea of karma or, stronger than that, about every idea of karma. Either way my above comment is relevant to his piece. There is no inaccuracy.

Fundamentalist types generally have difficulty in appreciating context, insisting that the only truths are those that are stated literally. Can you not see that argument playing out here.

Sorry Eric I missed your response and I am on the road today and without any internet for most of it. You said:

In response to Chris. Why the crude stereotypes? Because they’re there. Look at Christianity, rich with them, the most grotesque caricatures imaginable. And yet, who can say that these do not represent Christianity? The pope thinks he can, but where does he get that authority? The same goes for Buddhism. Faithful to which doctrines, defined by whom, and why? That’s precisely the point that I’ve been trying to make. There simply is no evidential basis for making the claims that religions make. “Yon Cassius has a sleek and hungry look. Such men are dangerous.”

I think there are three reasons for choosing the best rather than the worst as representatives of Christianity. Firstly it is something that is always done in any other field. Nobody would attempt to demonstrate that science was hopelessly incoherent by finding the crudest and least informed commentators. As I have been saying, if I were to base my arguments that science didn’t know whether it was coming or going over climate by referring to the considerable stash of articles on the Uncommon Descent website I would be ignored or laughed at. You are doing just the same. Believe me the folks at Uncommon Descent have a far better grasp of the issues of Climate Science than Julian has of how karma works in Buddhism (on the evidence of the above article). What is to be gained by this? People of no intellect whatsoever with no insights to offer can sit around all day taking other people’s drivel and tearing it to shreds. Yet for some reason highly trained and intelligent people seem to think it is a useful activity to do what anyone can do and is really devoid of intelligent content.

The second reason relates to Jean’s point that the vast majority of people today are religious and this is not going to change any time soon, whatever arguments are made by atheists. Assuming it were even desirable (which I don’t think it is) that atheists could destroy other people’s faith by their arguments, they aren’t actually going to succeed in this and even if they could it would take far too long to achieve the atheist nirvana where all religion has been expunged from the world. Indeed the whole project ought to be reminiscent of some pretty unpleasant episodes in the 20th century. I don’t think it is such a good idea for others to believe they are so right that they can decide for others what is true and what is right for them.

The real reason why it is not a great idea to identify religion with the worst, crudest and least reflective interpretations of religion is that it is acting to propagate fundamentalist religion. If religion is here to stay then intelligent people should be, if anything, working to ensure that the ethical, intelligent and reflective strains of it prevail. By working to undermine and destroy intelligent religion you are merely helping to ensure that the worst, most harmful and corrupted variants prevail.

Thirdly, unless you remain open to the possibility that more intelligent variants of religion exist you will just see all religion as nasty and malignant. I know perfectly well that this isn’t the case because I have had lots of experience of uncorrupted religion that is enormously helpful to people, helping them to make sense of life, and to act ethically and so on. (Note I am not saying religion is necessary for this—just that for some kinds of people it is useful,)

By all means pick up the likes of John Hagee (as Gershom Gorenberg does Divine Press Office: Defense Team Fired) and show why he really makes very little sense. Or Julian could have observed that many people with a poor or weak grasp of karma (often of the new-age type) might think they have enlightened views but they are actually pretty lazy, feeble and odious. While you could do this I think it is more instructive to actually explain how karma works in Buddhism.

Well, just to chime-in with my 2-cents worth, I’m sympathetic with what you’d be trying to do, Eric, but way too cynical to believe that your rationality would trump the irrational or comforting in your friend’s case. People rarely draw their boundaries with a straight line, not even rational people.

You and I share the same abhorrence for the dangers of faith. However, one of my best friends is prioress of a cloistered monastery of Carmelite nuns, another a New Age healer (or biotheologian, as I like to say). Both women came to their decisions by routes that made sense to them even if they are nonsense to me.

I suppose if a friend were about to join the Branch Davidians, I might speak-up. Otherwise I’d remain silent. Most of those I call friends who are religionists have their reservations about their belief systems and certainly know the downsides and criticisms. They are intelligent people. I guess I am not so concerned to fight individuals as I am systems.

My believer friends know I disagree with them. Interestingly, the nun is the one who minds least. As she says - and as every atheist must - “you may be right”. (”Right” as in Humpty Dumpty may actually be put back together again and living an after-life on one of the outer moons of Saturn, Sister Therese.)

I’m no acitivist and don’t give a damn what other people believe. As I’ve probably said here before, as long as religion is not forced on me, legislated, or part of the science curriculum of my child’s science classroom, I’m perfectly okay with people making their own decisions based on their best lights.

Besides, to thoroughly misquote Jesus: The irrational are with you always.

Brian said:

At any rate, surely you don’t believe Julian or anybody else here ever regarded Sharon Stone as any kind of “authority”? I don’t recall the issue of authority coming up in any context whatsoever (but it’s been a long thread and I’m tired, so somebody correct me if I’m wrong).

Of course I didn’t imagine that Julian thought so and everybody understood that. My point was that by taking those comments as representative of Buddhism and basing his refutation of Buddhism on them he was treating Sharon Stone as an authority.

Your blog pieces were sophisticated Buddhist theology of a kind I am familiar with. I’m sure the stuff makes sense to you in its own hermetic way but to me it’s simply a trick of language with little actual content or meaning; the same incoherent god/religion-talk that has been refuted successfully time and again to my satisfaction.

This is pure fundamentalist-speak. Julian’s article had nothing to do with the way karma is understood by people anyone who had made even the most minimum efforts to understand karma in a Buddhist context. I have taken the time to explain it carefully in terms that a non-Buddhist can follow: no trickery but a plain explanation of what Buddhists mean by karma and more importantly how they are expected to view people who are suffering (including ourselves) and how this ties in to Buddhist notion of karma.

To accuse me of elitism who is taking the time to explain to you my understanding of karma while you, holding the position of exclusive rationality and righteousness, dismiss all of religion as the ‘reactionary forces of dogmatism’ when it isn’t indulging in ‘a trick of language with little actual content or meaning’; and I am the elitist?

I have made it clear that I am just asking that those with a proper understanding of the area in question be used to represent the area. Now I appreciate that you can hardly be expected to go round and work out for yourself who makes sense and has a mature understanding of the art. This is a problem that is present in all areas of scholarship, and that is why people get recognised as authorities and their views are considered safely representative of their field. It so happens that there are particularly good scholars in positions heading up the relevant religions. (Whether I agree with Pope Benedict’s conservatism—which I don’t on the whole—is not the point.) So if youy want to say things about Catholicism or Anglicanism or Tibetan Buddhism there is no reason why the writings of these people shouldn’t be used.

The complete lack of any curiosity about what karma is or how it interacts with Buddhist ethics, the lack of any attempts to engage in the philosophical issues at hand, the hackneyed rhetorical attacks just lead me to believe that certain atheists have no interest whatsoever in religious ideas or thought when they engage in these discussion but to just bolster their own prejudices. I hope I am wrong but it appears as if such atheists seem to rely on maintaining this idea of the irrationality of religion in general to justify their own decision to reject religion.

I think this is a great shame. Atheism should be allowed to stand without on its own merits (and like religion it isn’t going anywhere) and best religious practice should be recognised and encouraged. Neither the interest of atheists nor of the religious are served by atheists joining fundamentalists in misunderstanding religious thought (and this article is seriously misunderstanding Buddhist thought).

Well, Chris, I’m hopeful my previous post gives lie to the characterization of atheism you THINK I’m professing. We’re clearly talking at cross-purposes and I simply don’t care about the subtleties of karma any more than I care about the subtleties of transubstantiation or flying prophets.

I again ask who gets to speak for Christians, Buddhists, etc? Even if my intellectual religious friends recommend an authority, it’s really beside the point anyway. First because you can bet it won’t be the ascendant or popular version that so powerfully sways others and can be used to manipulate large populations of them. Second because every faith system I have ever studied winds-up “making it up” once it (rather quickly) reaches the point and problem of falsifiability.

Without condescension, I will say that of all the religious systems I’m aware of, the Buddhist is the least offensive and most psychologically satisfying to me. It would be the one I’d be most attracted to if the above didn’t get in the way.

Oh well. I’m an elitist bastard.

Eric: It may be a cultural thing, but in Chile we don’t tend to confront people’s beliefs, unless it’s in a specific situation where beliefs are supposed to be debated. Arguing with a seeker who had found a home after years of searching would be considered a lack of tact. I’m considered to be an ultra-confrontational person here, one who argues, one who questions when it is not tactful too, but questioning the woman who had found her home seems like a lack of tact even to me. Perhaps things are different in the U.K.. Still, since Judaism seems to me to be harmless, I see no reason to challenge the seeker’s sense of having found her place. Finally, it may be that your years as a minister or your personality make you want to lead others to the truth. I have absolutely no desire to lead others to the truth. I try not to lie to myself. I enjoy discussing ideas with people who I consider to be my intellectual peers, but that my neighbor harbors illusions, say, religious illusions, about life, as long as they are harmless illusions, does not affect me at all.

Well, this was quite an avalanche, and after reading most of it, glossing some rather quickly, I’m not sure I get the point.

I was, for years, in the position of receiving people into the church, people who made a choice to become Christians, or, specifically, Anglicans. I never just accepted the decision. I always asked why. Why now? Why here? What was it that they thought they were answering or achieving by making this choice? A few thought about, stayed awhile, and then left. I thought it was probably better for them.

From my point of view it’s a response of care. If someone is making a life-changing decision, and they’re sharing this with me, then I have a responsibility to them. No, of course, one doesn’t simply go up indiscriminately to individuals and challenge their life-choices (that would lack tact), although, like Dawkins, you can do that kind of thing in a book or article or essay or something aimed the general public, or directly at the statements and decisions of religious leaders.

And I’m not really interested in the question whether the majority of people are religious or are going to stay that way (Chris). I hold religion to be an imminent danger to our safety, and I will oppose it when I can. Sure, lots of people hold religious beliefs in benign ways, but, as I said, religious beliefs may be (and I think they are) dangerous anyway.

Sure, I know lots of liberal friends who hold their religious beliefs very lightly and graciously. But I also know that they, and their more conservative co-religionists, get all upset when people address religious belief in a negative way. This was evident even from the response of atheists and agnostics, let alone Christians, to Dawkins’ contribution to the ongoing conversation about religion. Suddenly, it turned into a one-sided diatribe against atheists and others who had questions about belief. It was an amazing performance. Two or three books raising some serious questions about religious beliefs, and then a slew of books and reviews which raise the spectre of the “owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue fringed lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, Cries out, ‘Where is it?’” It was astonishing, as though the market had been flooded with atheism. Anyone taken a look at the religion shelves at the local bookstore, or in Christian bookstores. And yet what I hear, here on this philosophy blog, is that we should all tread softly where religion is concerned. Tread softly, lest you tread on someone’s dreams. Someone even suggested that atheism was being given all the play. How many books appeared with Dawkins’ name in them? “The Dawkins Delusion,” “Dawkins’ God,” and others. Religious people trying desperately to put the genie back into the bottle.

Sorry, from my point of view this indicates that religious belief is dangerous, and that, even in its milder forms, it is preoccupied with power. As someone who is committed to trying to understand the way the world is, illusions themselves are dangerous, and amos, they affect all of us. I think that the response that I have received over the last day or so is an indication of that, and it concerns me.

Someone even suggested that atheism was being given all the play.

That was me, I think, only I said–

There are “varieties of unbelief” …and I do think a certain sort of unbelief-cum-antipathy is getting all the airplay these days.

The point was about unbelievers, as a group. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, etc…are creating the public’s image of what an atheist is. This is atheism-cum-antipathy. Lots of atheists don’t have that antipathy. It is not that I want Dawkins and co. to shut up. I just have a different voice, myself. Lots of other atheists do too. My sense is that living together in a very diverse world requires mutual respect, so my own voice is often respectful. (Though religious folk might say otherwise if they read through this thread. I’ve said some nasty things about religion.) I don’t think respect can be dispensed with, because we don’t have a world run by an all-knowing Philosopher King or Queen who everyone’s going to bow down to.

Your tough attitude toward entering parishioners is a different thing, and I bet the rabbis have it too with converts. The convert is going to interpret that as a request to take the whole matter very seriously. It’s not for me to be similarly challenging with a friend or acquaintance who hasn’t asked for my advice.

Brian, I am actually not interested in the atheism you are practicing so much as what appears to be the case from the arguments you are advancing (or more to the point, the arguments advanced in the article). Really! The inferences are from the arguments you are presenting and not at all intended to be personal.

I understand that you have no interest in the technicalities of karma, but my point is that before you can make any sensible statements on Buddhism you need to understand what karma means in Buddhism. In short if you don’t take an interest in the technicalities of something then you really shouldn’t advance opinions on the matter. I don’t mean that aggressively as telling you what to do or anything, but without this general principle how is it possible to have meaningful discussions.

I really don’t understand how a group of people can justify churning out an astonishing number of articles showing how rubbish religion is based on the most ill-informed, least-sophisticated, least-subtle thinkers who know diddly-squat about what they are talking about (Sharon Stone and Glenn Hoddle being classic examples).

Your assumptions, so clear in your above comments, is that all religion is worthless, so it doesn’t matter who you chose to represent it–as it is all bunk and nonsense anyway–and you may as well chose the most simplistic and crude thinkers to deconstruct. My problem is that you are assuming what you are setting out to show and your choices ensure that you will simply reinforce your assumptions.

I can’t understand why this is interesting philosophy. I really can’t distinguish this kind of analysis from that carried out by many fundamentalists. I can’t help feeling that no matter how much I unpack this you aren’t going to understand because the assumption that all religion is bunk is such a strong article of faith that nothing I say will make any difference. How else can you defend your assumption that you can choose anyone at all to represent Buddhist thought? Would you say that about any field of thought that you respected or were open to respecting?

Try to look at it from my side. (I know they were sincerely meant, but you really don’t have to praise Buddhism. I am really interested in the arguments at the centre of this discussion, not to defend Buddhism, which requires no defence here.)

Arguments are being advanced about a serious field of knowledge that are (from my POV, remember) astoundingly inconsistent with basic Buddhist teachings. I point this out and you say (pretty much) it is all rubbish. I explain why I don’t think it is and you say I am not interested in your arguments and I can chose who I like (Sharon Stone say) to represent Buddhist thought, as it is all rubbish anyway.

I have been trying to say that, whatever the actual merits of Buddhist philosophy, how could you possibly come to any conclusion other than the one you have assumed to begin with? How does this advance anyone’s understanding of anything? All you are doing is showing what no intelligent person doubts, that the arguments of some intellectual pygmies are not very impressive. I just don’t see the value of any of this, but it isn’t confined to this article or some of the comments, but seems to be present in a whole genre of writing.

Well folks, it is clearly time for me to back off now. Wouldn’t want to be thought confrontational or antipathetic. As Jinks would say (if you’re old enough to remember), or was it Yogi — whatever! — ‘Exit, stage right!’

Wait a sec. Hold on there. Yours is only the 152nd post in this thread. 48 to go to make this memorable. I don’t think it was Yogi. Didn’t he say it ain’t over til the fat lady sings? I don’t know if there is such a person here, but if so, center stage now, take the mike and go for it.

Besides, we have not yet addressed the subject. Not good karma.
Make that 47 to go……

Chris,

I knew you might interpret my somewhat positive comments regarding Buddhism as throwing you a bone. You didn’t let me down.

But let me ask you a few basic questions:

*Aside from cause and effect in the physical sense, do you believe there is some extra or supra-physical application of this principle?

*Doe you believe mind exists apart from the brain?

*What about reincarnation: do individual human beings return in ANY discernible - however subtle - manner?

*What about an afterlife? Disincarnate minds? Souls? Spirits? Spiritual worlds? Are these substantial realities?

If you say no, then you are putting a 21st-century gloss on the most consistent kinds of belief with which religion has presented and succoured adherents for millenia. Take these things from the majority of believers and you are left with a minority of religious intellectuals playing an engrossing language game.

Such a gloss owes more to a broadened knowledge brought about the Enlightenment than any religious “breakthrough”. More often, religion has played the part of putting on the brakes, more interested in maintaining its waning authority and power via a reactionary, God-of-the-gaps retreat which has only served to slow down the inevitable. I won’t even address the issue of arguing from conclusions under the circumstances.

Yes, I am a materialist, but I didn’t become one by conversion, feeling, or a still small voice, but by scientific study and convincement. Until and unless the so-called spiritual can be demonstrated to be anything other than a psychological phenomena, a function of the human brain as it has evolved over millenia, then you simply cannot expect me to take even the most sophisticated exposition on its own merits without some sort of corroborating evidence.

To accuse me of dogmatism or fundamentalism on this point is ridiculous. Neither torturing ancient texts nor putting forth arguments based on “thinking” alone are of interest or use to me. If Aquinas and Anselm couldn’t do it, I doubt you can no matter how many links you provide.

Whether religious thought is conveyed as obvious mythology or couched in the language of philosophy, how am I to distinguish its truth content? Via intution? Personal revelation? Why the Sutras and not the Upanishads? John of the Cross over Ramakrishna? Your untestable authorities over their untestable authorites. They are NOT saying the same thing. The one thing they do have in common, however, is a belief in extra-or supra-material, non-falsifiable phenomena.

I don’t care if you don’t like my insistence on evidence. I’m still insisting. Otherwise you are wasting my time playing with language and I’m done repeating myself.

Here’s your chance to have the last word. Don’t squander it.

Eric, Understandable. I’ll accept your right to be confrontational if you’ll stop calling me “too soft.” Really, it makes me feel confrontational. :-)

Re Buddhism: I can’t take the “metaphysics” seriously, but it makes valuable points about “the art of living.”

Now I too will disappear from this thread.

The phrase, “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings’ was falsely attributed to Yogi Berra, but I was talking about Yogi Bear (of Yosemite). It’s either he or Jinks the cat. Anyway, if right won’t do, how about, ‘Exit, stage left’? And, Jean, I don’t think of myself as confrontational. I’m a gentle, grey-haired, aging guy, who wouldn’t hurt a fly (well, a fly maybe). I’ve been harmed by confrontational, but quite nice men in frocks and pointy hats who talk about love and all the other warm and fuzzy things, so they’re supsect. And I don’t take kindly to that. But if I’m soft and gentle as…, well, what can I say? :-)

Brian, to answer your question, I have yet to come across anything in the Tibetan Buddhist teachings that doesn’t make complete sense and isn’t entirely consistent with the the evidence, with reality as I have experienced it. Broadly speaking the answer to your series of questions is yes.

(BTW, I did say your comment on Buddhism was sincerely meant but was just making it clear that I wasn’t taking any of this personally or trying to defend Buddhism.)

Notice that I have never at any point questioned atheist rationale, except when atheists make statements about other people’s belief systems and their relationship to them.

Look back at your own comments and presumptions. I don’t doubt for a moment the positive side of your atheistic choice and I don’t seek to question it, that religion doesn’t work for you, that it just doesn’t make any sense. That is a fine, rational position. My problem comes with the negative stuff, your assertions about the utility and rationality of religious philosophy for other people. For sure, dismiss it and take no interest in it beyond the most shallow and superficial understanding. That is your choice and life is short. But then I can’t see how you can rationally justify passing opinion on the subject that can be any more than a somewhat ill-informed opinion.

Again, looking at your final comment, it offers a simplistic narrative about the evolution of all religious thought and repeats your assumptions that it is all a pile of nonsense. While of course you are entitled to this opinion, when I step up to the plate and offer a philosophical argument–not couched in any religious terms, not requiring any belief to follow the argument, explaining how the whole is strictly based on evidence and logic–you just dismiss it as a load of religious mumbo jumbo. Remember I have great admiration for science and the scientific method–there is nothing about my philosophy that negates this, except where people step over the line from evidence-based science to dogmatic scientism.

From all of this I conclude that where religious thought is concerned you just don’t seem to be interested in doing any serious philosophy. Until you get beyond your assumptions and engage in proper philosophical argumentation to back up your position I can only assume that this area–the nature and value of religious thought–is for you faith-based and not open to rational discussion. Religious thought is far too big a field to be dismissed so effortlessly with the kind of shallow and ill-informed arguments of this article.

To be fair you have engaged in the discussion in a way that everyone else has declined to do and, for me anyway, it has been productive and useful. Thank you.

Eric, I said that Brian had been the only one to engage and then I saw your reply–it got lost in the avalanche! (I like your writing by the way.)

While you see religious thought as dangerous I see bad religious thought as extremely dangerous, and I view naive atheism as one of the worst kinds of religious thought. It is particularly frightening for me because the people that cleave to it lack self-awareness to a degree that is difficult to find in anywhere else, except in other religious fundamentalists, so convinced are they in the exclusivity of their rationality and righteousness. This kind of thinking played itself out with absolutely tragic consequences in the 20th century, but in this kind of faith-based area evidence counts for little.

I think people should be careful about attacking ‘religion’ as against ‘bad religion’ because religion is a much too large and diverse field to be treated monolithically. You are never going to succeed in destroying it, so by lazily associating bad religion with all religion and then attacking that (not particularly difficult) the fundamentalist’s work is done for them. People aren’t going to give up religion on the basis of these arguments, but the arguments certainly do help to confuse people about what is good and bad religion.

I think there is something profoundly unhealthy about taking an obsessive interest in an area while refusing to engage seriously in what intelligent, reflective people inside the field have said.

I think atheism is important–like religious thought it is an important strand of modern thought–which is why it should takes a more serious attitude towards religious thought. It can’t bode well for it to remain stuck with a generally shallow and simplistic understanding of the field of thought that it has rejected and is seeking to displace.

Nor do I understand this great grievance about Dawkins being attacked. Many, many people thought it was a dreadful book and they said so–this is no crime. My Buddhist teachers tell me that you shouldn’t attack other people’s belief systems, and there is a tremendous amount of wisdom in this advice.

What you can do is to critique other people’s thought, be it religious thought or any other kind of thought. That means engaging with it and understanding it. From there you can start to explain why you think it might be ill-conceived (see, for example, Gershom Gorenberg’s critique that I linked to above, or indeed my own criticism of the arguments beimng advanced here while respecting [positive] atheist principles).

That way you turn lazy, ill-informed and dangerous thinking into a better understanding and maybe even learn something in the process.

Chris Dornan wrote:

I can’t help feeling that no matter how much I unpack this you aren’t going to understand because the assumption that all religion is bunk is such a strong article of faith that nothing I say will make any difference.

You’re absolutely right about that, probably Brian feels that he has already given too much time to nonsense in either the simple or the complex form. He feels that Religion is just another branch of human activity and should be subject to the same critiques of rationality. He is wrong. Truth in religion is subjective and the doctrines that one holds are just a device for focussing on the ultimately unknowable. No atheist gets this and yet the apophatic tradition is the core of mystical wisdom in all religions. It’s not because they’re stupid or haven’t had it explained carefully enough to them or because they have been listening to Swami Hoddle or Yogini Stone. Bad information doesn’t help of course but part of the scotosis is the inability to say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘maybe everything I know about this is wrong’. They need that radically eviscerating doubt and even then nothing much may happen. That’s where karma comes in.

Well, Chris, I had already exited stage right and then left, and here I am back on stage again! Like a ruddy Jack-in-the-box!

No dispute, people should not be lazy about the belief systems or particular beliefs they reject. That is one fault I find with Dawkins, because he thinks religious thought is primarily about whether a god (or transcendent meaning) exists or not. I think this is an important aspect of religion, and should not be scouted. However, I do understand that it takes more than this to respond to religious believers.

But I’m not lazy that way, as you intimate. I do read the theologians, Tillich, Barth (part of whose Church Dogmatics I am currently reading), Rahner, Kung. I also read radical theologians like Don Cupitt, Lloyd Geering, and even people like Keith Ward and Richard Swinburne. I’ve tried Alvin Plantigna, but find him so out of it that it’s a struggle to read. I have also read, and sought to understand, things like Pascal Boyer’s “Religion Explained”, Guthrie’s “Faces in the Clouds”, Atrans ‘In Gods we Trust,” and so on. In fact, the writing on religion just now is mountainous. A lot of it seems to be an effort to understand a way of life that is disappearing. I know, you’re already on record as saying that people are likely to remain religious for the foreseeable future, but I think what really upset people abut Dawkins’ book (let’s just stick to that, though of course there were others) is that it was stripping the old religious project bare, and left it holding onto the symbolic language of religion without any foundation. That’s why people reacted so angrily.

But so far from getting all the air time, as Jean Kazez suggested, the ‘new’ atheists, as they came to be called, were buried under an avalanche of negative comment, and even that wasn’t able to silence their voices. That says something important, I think.

Buddhism, on the other hand, is both a religion and a philosophy. You can actually divorce Buddhism itself from its more lush flowering in a transcendental direction, and stick to meditative tradtions, which, to the extent that successions of meditators can confirm subjective experiences which result from meditation, can be likened to a scientific tradition, which builds on hypothesis, testing and theory building, and openness to falsification. I say this is possible, though my ability to keep still and meditate is severely limited. But in fact one of the ‘new’ atheists, Sam Harris, does insist on the veracity of some forms of spiritual consciousness. He simply rejects the supernatural colouring that comes along with some descriptions of this.

For years I tried to develop a form of Christianity which did without supernatural reference, and confined itself to community and concern for social justice. And then, in the end, I came up against the sacred text, and realised that there was no way to go around it. It was there as a fixed datum, so that no matter how much one might like to develop and understanding of the religion which marginalised sacred text, the text kept popping back, and the result is that experimental forms of Christian faith are short-lived. It always reverts to type. That is what I take to be the dangerous and destructive part of religion. I met some of this destructiveness in connexion with my own personal life which has given me not only a jaundiced view of the religion itself, but a commitment to do what I can to undermine the effectiveness of religious voices wherever I hear them. I take them to be intrinsically dangerous, and despite religion’s warm fuzzy side, which seems so innocuous and helpful to people in trying to make sense of their lives in a world that is indiscriminately cruel and kind, it always has the capacity to turn round like a scorpion and sting you with its tail. I think that Islam is the most dangerous of all these forces in the world today, but Christianity is becoming so, because of its making common cause with Islam in its effort to regain the power that it lost since the eighteenth century.

Is the form of non-belief that I practice dangerous? It has no intention to impose disbelief by force. It depends upon argument and rhetoric. It doesn’t claim to know everything, or to have any absolute knowledge, and in fact makes criteria of truth a basic premise of belief or non-belief. It insists that the ethic of belief includes giving evidence for the beliefs that we hold about the universe. It takes very seriously books like Job, which question, very deeply, the sources of religious understanding. And it believes that, without rigorous attempts to ground one’s beliefs in intersubjectively verifiable beliefs about the world, the result is bound to be divisive. From this point of view there is little to choose between bad religion and good religion.

Good religion is just religion whose members are good, and so do not take with ultimate seriousness some of the bad parts of their belief systems. Bad religion in the same complex of beliefs where people take seriously the less helpful and more violent aspects of the belief system. People sometimes extol the Sermon on the Mount, in Christianity (though I think it is more questionable, morally, than many people suppose), and contrast it unfavourably with some of Paul’s (and Paul like) misogynistic outpourings. Fair enough, but Paul is still there, and sure as can be, someone will come along and resurrect the old Paul, or the misogynistic Jesus, as Benedict is now doing, and then all bets are off about the goodness or badness of religion.

But, Chris, it’s not because I’m intellectually lazy. I do know quite a bit about religion, having been captive to it for most of my life. And I think it’s because I have seen it up close and personal, and watched the effect of religious ideas on people, and how they behaved towards others, that fills me with concern about our future, now that religion is once again trying to make a comeback. Faith-based anything is nothing to ground a society or an international policy on, and this is happening, and it should give us all cause for concern, it seems to me. As some contemporary atheists have said, the basic premise of the enlightenment was the critique of religion. I simply wonder, as I consider the drift of this thread, whether we want to take it all back. (Sorry to be so long-winded. Just consider all this said sotto voce somewhere out in the wings.)

But so far from getting all the air time, as Jean Kazez suggested, the ‘new’ atheists, as they came to be called, were buried under an avalanche of negative comment

Wow, this is the third time this “airplay” point has been misunderstood in this thread. I’ll correct for a third time and then just give up. The point was that among people expressing the atheist viewpoint today, the more confrontational voices predominate. They don’t just say “no god” but look at religion as a whole negatively. All atheists say “no god” but perceptions of religion vary from atheist to atheist. That’s all. Now I’ll go back into retirement.

Eric MacDonald wrote:

And it believes that, without rigorous attempts to ground one’s beliefs in intersubjectively verifiable beliefs about the world, the result is bound to be divisive. From this point of view there is little to choose between bad religion and good religion.

You have expressed succintly what is transparently wrong with the contemporary atheist project. They are flailing about attempting to land that killer punch on a phantasm of their own devising. Dawkins benefits from the halo effect - if he is smart about evolutionary science he is perhaps smart about religion. His enthusiasm is in the English wild eyed Ranter tradition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranters

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it adds to the tapestry, even if a danger to carpets.

Oh, Jean, you are hard to resist! Especially when you misread the signs of the times. I guess, to be frank, there is a modicum of truth in what you say when you explain that

The point was that among people expressing the atheist viewpoint today, the more confrontational voices predominate.

I hadn’t missed that point. And it’s true that the confrontational atheists were taken more public note of; they got more play on radio and TV interviews, and book reviews than less confrontational atheists. But the reason for this was largely, though not wholly, I grant you, that the response to their position was negative. They did not get to predominate in a positive light (except, I think, when it came to public debate).

But of course the clash of ideologies was irresistable to the mass media. That permitted two things. It allowed conservative Christians a chance to be seen publicly to condemn these infidels. That they came off poorly in public debate is not the fault of Dawkins, Hithens, Harris or Dennett. (How come no one includes Grayling or Michel Onfray in this group?) But the reviews of the confrontationalists by Christians, Jews, atheists and agnostics were largely negative. I’m sure I’ve got them saved somewhere, but I won’t burden you with them now.

So, it’s not that I misunderstood your point, Jean, it’s simply that I think the airplay can be understood in different ways.

The other thing that I think needs saying here is that Daniel Dennett, though he has been grouped with the other three (or five), proposed a research programme to study religions and how they affect us, how religious memes (I do take memes seriously, and I think Dennett is right to keep pushing here) function, why some are so successful, and why many never make it past a few adherents. Dennett’s book has been widely panned as controntational and negative, but I think it was a sincere attempt by a non-believer to ask some pertinent questions about religion and suggest some research strategies. And I don’t understand why this proposal seems to have got lost in the confrontation.

Well, I guess I do understand. As soon as religion is held up for serious, and perhaps (though this is not a sure thing with research proposals) negative, consideration, believers are out in their thousands to rebut what might call their treasured beliefs into question. Well, anyway, perhaps I should leave it at that. It’s really quite hard just to exit and be done with it!

Michael, not a killer punch, just a patient, plodding attempt to get religious people to ante up with some credible reason for believing the things they commend to our belief. So, not really a rant at all.

michael reidy said:

You’re absolutely right about that, probably Brian feels that he has already given too much time to nonsense in either the simple or the complex form. He feels that Religion is just another branch of human activity and should be subject to the same critiques of rationality. He is wrong. Truth in religion is subjective and the doctrines that one holds are just a device for focussing on the ultimately unknowable.

You make some interesting points, especially about the importance of ’subjective truth’ in religious thought. Some religious thought, the more mystical type, is much more poetical, prophetic and less rational. Sometimes it is purely alegorical. All the main religious traditions have these currents running through them. The main thing is that the objective of religious thought is essentially ethical, and that will dictate a different framework from the scientific, focusing on the subjective and ideal rather than the objective and physical.

Many religious folks, like myself (and as it happens the heads of the Catholic and Anglican Churches and the head of Tibetan Buddhism) like their religion rational and philosophical. Within that rational structure they will need to make room for the mystical and the unknown. It is a characteristic of Buddhism that it is founded on a philosophical system and on a ’science of mind’, which is well suited to some people but not others. There really is no better here.

These religious traditions have their own distinctive systems of thinking that are highly discipled, and they must successfully incorporate objective reality. Atheists will find the psychology repulsive, the ethics dubious at best, and the means of integrating reality ridiculous. That is fair enough. But that doesn’t mean that they are simply irrational or that they aren’t highly useful to a fair segment of humanity. It has also been my experience that once you tune into the the way these various systems work, that there is a real wisdom and genius at the centre of them. The more I have encountered the more I have respected.

Now from a philosophical perspective only a minority really appreciate the philosophical aspect. But we should not be surprised at this. It is generally true that only a small minority of a population is really inclined to philosophy. But the genius of these religions is that they have a package that works for the non-philosophically inclined. All the other parts–the poetical, mystical, allegorical and prophetic–can come into play. Not everyone wants to be a philosopher and there are other channels available to them. But the point is that it could never work if there weren’t that foundation of truth on which the whole is built. You can’t just make up some stories to keep people in line. That kind of Kool-Aid may work for a few people for a while but it will never last.

So I think there is a rational core to religion, but it works quite differently from scientific rationale. This makes perfect sense as it is trying to do something quite different.

Eric, I’m a big fan of Dawkins et al, and some of the conversation here is starting to make me want to contribute money to his foundation (if he has one), or maybe go out and buy another 10 copies of his book. I think he’s not just right, but a great writer, and very funny. I also read lots of books about religion, and get a lot out of stuff written in a very different mode–like Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, Richard Friedman, a little Karen Armstrong, etc. etc. I do want to understand religion “from the inside”–the details, what it means to people, etc., and I think respect is ethically important. But we do need to maintain a grip on truth and falsity while “understanding from the inside.” Dawkins is extremely good at that, and I honestly don’t “get” the people who say otherwise.

Jean, Dawkins does have a foundation, and it has charitable tax status in the United States (I believe).

Eric, I did indeed sense that you were well versed in religious thinking thanks to Brian’s warning and some intimations of your own I was careful not to directly accuse you of being ignorant (and thanks for making it clear the depth of interest you do take). In your case it is not a case of being unaware of sophisticated religious thought but 9in my opinion) of over-emphasising crude religious thought. However your depth of knowledge here is just as rare in these atheist discussions as it is among religious people, and this is a great shame. So my argument is that atheists, by focusing on crude religious thought, do neither themselves nor anybody else any favours.

As you will have gathered that while we are alike in many respects we take quite opposing views on some things. I think you are right about the fragility of the religious way of life, but I think the secular, market state is equally in crisis (see for example, Rowan William’s 2002 Dimbleby Lecture). I see both the religious/spiritual and the atheistic/secular visions as going trough a profound crisis. The way froward in my mind is not by one displacing the other but by both of them evolving to meet the challenge and they will both have to learn from each other.

We need intelligent, inclusive and flexible philosophy (whether of the atheistic or religious kind). What I think we certainly don’t need is more dogmatism and intolerance, of whatever variety.

Many religious folks, like myself (and as it happens the heads of the Catholic and Anglican Churches and the head of Tibetan Buddhism) like their religion rational and philosophical.

Ah, you and the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama - cool!

Within that rational structure they will need to make room for the mystical and the unknown…These religious traditions have their own distinctive systems of thinking that are highly discipled, and they must successfully incorporate objective reality…once you tune into the the way these various systems work, that there is a real wisdom and genius at the centre of them.

What does all (or any) of that mean? It looks like just word-salad, to me. It sounds nice, but it doesn’t seem to refer to anything. I can do that too…”I’m rational and philosophical but I make room for the mystical and the unknown; I can do both, no matter how contradictory they are; I can do anything; hooray for me.” How is all that not just self-flattering assertions that are not backed up by anything?

But the genius of these religions is that they have a package that works for the non-philosophically inclined. All the other parts–the poetical, mystical, allegorical and prophetic–can come into play. Not everyone wants to be a philosopher and there are other channels available to them. But the point is that it could never work if there weren’t that foundation of truth on which the whole is built. You can’t just make up some stories to keep people in line. That kind of Kool-Aid may work for a few people for a while but it will never last.
So I think there is a rational core to religion, but it works quite differently from scientific rationale. This makes perfect sense as it is trying to do something quite different.

Same thing. It’s just a bunch of assertions. Why should anyone believe a word of it?

What I think we certainly don’t need is more dogmatism and intolerance, of whatever variety.

That’s interesting, because your comments are full of dogmatism. I think you probably think you’ve made arguments about, for instance, the way religions can combine rationality with mysticism…but you haven’t, you’ve merely made dogmatic claims.

Quite amusing.

Pay attention folks, Religion is not a monolithic force field.
Chris Dornan wrote:

Many religious folks, like myself (and as it happens the heads of the Catholic and Anglican Churches and the head of Tibetan Buddhism) like their religion rational and philosophical. Within that rational structure they will need to make room for the mystical and the unknown. It is a characteristic of Buddhism that it is founded on a philosophical system and on a ’science of mind’, which is well suited to some people but not others. There really is no better here.

Thanks Chris, you’ve made your point for the rationalist tradition within organised religion well. However the springs of religion are something entirely numinous and other and without them there wouldn’t be any religion in the first place. What doctrine does Exodus 13 teach? or the Vedas? These are the grandmother sources of the major religions and to understand the power of religion to profoundly engage humans we need to be more primative than the crisp definitions of later manifestations of the religious impulse would imply.

The theory of truth that applies to religious utterances within a specific tradition is coherence. In other words one speaks sooth by the Vedas or the Dhammapada or the Bible. Those utterances are not true to a reality outside themselves in a congruent or correspondent fashion. This is the explanation for the armies of pandits, fact checkers and the heresy sniffers that religion breeds.

To use those basic tenets as axioms for the creation of an independent philosophical system may well cause some people to lose their faith if it is discovered that the system is unsustainable. For instance I have never read an account of the anatman doctrine which would compel acceptance ((The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships:Neural Buddhists)) Does that mean that I must now regard Buddhism as a vain fiction? No, it is the Noble Eightfold Path which can be proven in myself and not a parcel of propositions.

The worst part is this talk of “subjective truth” that’s been popping up in the last several comments. I mean really…either a deity created the world or didn’t, either I’m going to survive in an afterlife, or I’m not, either Jesus is the son of God or he isn’t, either I have lived previous lives, or I haven’t. It really is just nonsense to think that there’s some sort of subjective truth at stake here, whatever that would mean. These are all claims about the world, to be sorted out by the usual methods we use to sort things out. Now, I grant, some of these otherworldy ideas play a role in people’s lives that I do want to grasp, but the claims themselves ought to be taken at face value and debated in the usual ways. They’re true or not true… there’s really no third option.

Michael, I wrote 6:52 before you wrote 6:50, so in response to you: it’s true that these passages of scripture shouldn’t be reduced to nothing but claims, and thrown in the trash if false. We need to understand what they mean “to the human heart” and appreciate themes and meanings as we would in any other literature. We don’t go through the Iliad thinking “true or false?” and then chuck out the whole thing. But “true or false?” is one good question to ask. I think we’d be pretty much letting our minds go to mush if we didn’t ask it. Do I have previous lives? Thinking it through as reasonably as I can, I arrive at No. Is there still wisdom in the Noble Eightfold Path? Actually, I think there is. The Buddhist idea about desire as the root of suffering is psychologically acute.

The Buddhist idea about desire as the root of suffering is psychologically acute.

Maybe psychologically aSTute instead of aCute?

Umm, my first attempt at blockquote was an acute failure.

Don’t people say “psychologically acute”? I thought they did. Maybe Ophelia will come back and tell us.

We need to understand what they mean “to the human heart” and appreciate themes and meanings as we would in any other literature.

I happen to agree with that, which is why I would not, as Michael does, apply the word ‘truth’ to that meaning, without severe qualification. As Jean has also pointed out, there are pretty serious problems with the idea of ’subjective truth’. I think, in the sense in which Michael uses it, there is a problem with the idea of ‘religious truth’ as well.

The word ‘truth’ immediately makes wider claims. What is true deserves, even demands, our attention. So, when the cardinals in Britain started spouting off about truth in relation to the bill which enabled the creation of hybrid embryos for research purposes, or when people start talking about the end times, or even the noble eightfold path, a bid is being made for our attention which the points being made often do not deserve. The noble eightfold path may show some acute psychological observation of the root of suffering, but is the renunication of desire therefore a desirable thing? Shall we not love because love and suffering are so closely intertwined?

It is true. The fact that we are transient beings means that to love is to give a hostage to fortune. It does not follow, however, that forgoing love and attachment will preserve us from suffering. It may just mean that we live lives of a semi-detached loneliness instead. I have never been convinced by the Buddha’s message. It has always seemed to me that the way of non-attachment is an invitation to pointlessness. Desire may be the root of suffering, but non-attachment is not the cure. Is there one? Should we be looking for it?

Don’t people say “psychologically acute”?

JK: Yes, you’re right, I’m wrong. It happens.

Ophelia: yes I did hesitate over bracketing myself with the real intellects–I didn’t mean it that way as I think you knew. I just meant that some people prefer to get things philosophically others don’t. People of an atheist persuasion would do well to remember that before they advocate tearing down all religion–a hopelessly unrealistic aim even if it were desirable.

And the rest of your comment is I am afraid in the same vain–rhetorical bluster. If you want the close argument on why this article is misconceived then follow the links from my first comment and I will be happy to respond to any questions you have on it. The above point was trying to explain to those that were prepared to listen (not engage in juvenile point scoring) why the whole area is extremely complicated. So it was woolly for sure but hardly dogmatic as you claimed. You will note that I wasn’t trying to put atheism down, but convey a sense of how each tradition has its own rational framework. Some ideas need close arguing, while others are better served by a different style–I was responding to a comment by Eric at the time, when we weren’t contesting some logical point but actually mapping out common ground.

Buddhism: the idea that craving or desire leads to suffering is true at times, but at other times one gets what one desires and it’s pleasurable. Maybe frustrated desires lead to suffering, but that could be an argument in favor of striving harder to attain one’s desires. Buddhism is hedonism upside down or inside out, isn’t it? Now the fact that Buddhist meditation produces changes in brain rhythms is interesting, but it doesn’t mean that those changes in brain rhythms are somehow “higher” than normal mental functioning or closer to enlightenment or that there is anything which could be called “enlightenment”. That meditation may lower your blood pressure and help you sleep better doesn’t prove that it is anything more than a useful technique for dealing with stress and tensions. But for Buddhists I imagine that their religion is more than a technique for dealing with stress, and I find the metaphysical claims behind Buddhism, karma, enlightenment, Buddha mind, nothingness, reincarnation, nirvana, to be as unconvincing as those of Islam.

michael reidy: I entirely agree that there is a poetic/allegorical/prophetic/mystical tradition. I would hesitate to call it irrational, as I wouldn’t describe good poetry as irrational (bad poetry, yes :-)). Now I think it is quite possible to approach the Vedas, Exodus 13 through the medium of logic–this is what would happen in a good sermon, but I wouldn’t say it would be at all possible captures them with logic though.

My point was more that there is a philosophical strand to these traditions which I think is quite rational (and Ophelia, that is just my opinion, so please spare the snide remarks). It is this philosophical tradition that I think atheists would do well to focus on (constructively) (and that’s another opinion).

amos, you have it spot on that Buddhists see meditation practice as more than just relaxation. And I think you are in many ways right to bracket Buddhism with Islam. Buddhism has a vastly better press than Islam in the West obviously but I think there is more in common than people imagine (and of course I don’t mean the perversion of Islam pushed by those with violent political agendas). In other respects they are really quite different–in some ways atheists may find Islam more palatable, being a more social and worldly religion; in other ways Buddhism may appeal, especially its philosophical rigour (but these are just my opinions of course).

Jean:
Reality because it encompasses us is greater than we can describe. Different sages and seers of the ancient traditions get a glimpse of it or have a certain realization and from their words and rituals a body of practice builds up. To say of one that it is true and the other is false or that you can’t have reincarnation and an afterlife both is a simplification. ( By the way both Buddhism and Hinduism have a well developed theory of an afterlife as an interim realm with heaven and hell. Cancelling out doesn’t come into it; reality is bigger than the both of us and a hill of beans.

If the Buddha was enlightened does that mean that the Besht wasn’t the keeper of the Holy Name? Too simple. Those figures are like points of pure light that we can focus on not bearers of dogma. Their realization is expressed according to the culture in which they live and that accounts for the apparent differences in their stories as you put it.

Jean said:

The worst part is this talk of “subjective truth” that’s been popping up in the last several comments. I mean really…either a deity created the world or didn’t, either I’m going to survive in an afterlife, or I’m not, either Jesus is the son of God or he isn’t, either I have lived previous lives, or I haven’t. It really is just nonsense to think that there’s some sort of subjective truth at stake here, whatever that would mean. These are all claims about the world, to be sorted out by the usual methods we use to sort things out.

I would never have guessed that you appreciated The God Delusion. Seriously this is really a very basic point, and while you hold to this religion is going to make almost no sense from the inside. I mean you could observe that people seem to get benefits from their religion but I can’t see how you would ever make any sense of how or why it is as it is.

I had promised to write an article Theism for Non-Theists on my blog which was going to touch on this, so this might be an opportunity to take a bite out of it.

By ’subjective truth’ I mean of course a truth that holds across time but is truth for an individual only. All the questions you raised were all posed from the perspective of ‘objective’ truth, the kinds of truths is good for different observers and what we normally mean when we talk about truth.

However, supposing I suffer from severe vertigo, then it is true for me that walking over a high rope bridge is going to be a terrifying experience. It won’t be true for someone that suffers from no vertigo and has been doing it every day of their lives. This is a simple example, but religion is in a sense all about trying to condition people to behave more skilfully, more in their long term interests, to be able to make more sense of the world, etc. All of these are highly relative, being dependent upon what you believe, what your experiences are, what your natural disposition is and so on. Also as you gain more experience with a religious tradition, trying it out in a greater range of circumstances you will start to verify that it helps with ethical objectives (this is my personal experience and tons of other people I have spoken to, but its all anecdotal and I am not trying to make any claims, just convey a concept). This is really verifying the religion in one’s own private laboratory, and they really are truths of a different kind than, say, whether the Earth rotates around the Sun or vice versa.

So the idea of ’subjective truth’ isn’t a mixing up or diluting of the usual idea of truth but referring a really quite complementary idea.

Chris, I really think when people say God created the universe, they are actually talking about the universe–the one out there. They are making a claim about the world. It just can’t be true for you that he did, and false for me. Just not possible.

Dispensing with straightforward issues of truth is a very bad idea. Many religious beliefs have very tangible implications for real life activities. For example, if you believe you’ll be reborn, this really does make a difference to attitudes about this life. For example, if you think you may rise in caste in your next life, you may be more tolerant of your low caste in this life. You will not make the most of this life. You will do less to change the world.

If you think Jesus can save you from sin, and keep you out of the fires of hell, then you might get yourself to believe, or go to church, or do whatever you think is relevant. You might waste time, at the very least.

So it is really very important to ask plain and simple questions. Do I have another life to come? Did God create the world? Can Jesus save me? These question cannot have answers that are different for me than they are for you. That is like saying that a bomb fell on Hiroshima for me, but not for you. It’s just nonsense.

Dawkins’ book is about whether it’s true or not that God exists. This is an excellent question. It is not a question that anyone can really push aside as not “the real question.” I think he does a fine job of addressing it.

But of course, there is much more to the study of religion than asking whether specific claims are true or false. Scripture can be understood as literature, religious practices can be understood anthropologically, it’s reasonable to want to know what it is like to be an orthodox Jew, or an evangelical Christian…or whatever, from the inside.

There’s nothing the least bit contradictory about thinking Dawkins makes excellent argument for atheism, but still wanting to study religion “from the inside.” Many religious studies scholars actually are atheists–such as Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman, and yet have a very deep understanding of the religions they study.

Eric said:

It is true. The fact that we are transient beings means that to love is to give a hostage to fortune. It does not follow, however, that forgoing love and attachment will preserve us from suffering. It may just mean that we live lives of a semi-detached loneliness instead. I have never been convinced by the Buddha’s message. It has always seemed to me that the way of non-attachment is an invitation to pointlessness. Desire may be the root of suffering, but non-attachment is not the cure. Is there one? Should we be looking for it?

You would be quite right to be sceptical of such a philosophy, but it is subtly different from the Buddhist teachings, at least as I have understood them. (This I think will also address Amos’s point.)

Blake’s lines are often quoted here:

He who binds himself to a Joy,
Does the winged life destroy;
He who kisses the Joy as it flies,
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

The point is to live life more joyfully and not to crush the joy. the whole aim of Buddhism is to live life more skilfully so that you get more of the good things. It is all about what is the best way to get those good things. The Dalai Lama is find of saying that if you want to be selfish then don’t be foolishly selfish but wisely selfish. Buddhism agrees with the Socratic idea that people will do the ethically right thing that also always in their best long term interest. Now of course most people here will say that is all fairsy stories, but the logical point is that it is (ironically) preaching an egoistic ethics: do this to maximise your long term happiness.

Now whether minimising attachment really does increase happiness is something for each person to investigate and decide, but if your investigation concludes that attachment brings you happiness then you should certainly increase your attachments.

By the way Buddhism doesn’t say that you should give up any hedonistic pleasures: it just says being attached to them isn’t smart.

Anyhow: there is no dogma here. I am just reporting my understanding of what I have been told. And the whole is predicated on investigating what brings long-term happiness and adopting the things that promote it. Buddhism says that it is the ethical things, the things that promote and protect other people’s happiness that promote your long-term happiness.

Anyway I have just voiced my own opinions because the things I have been hearing are quite different from the things that are being said here. If you are interested please check out someone who really knows what they are talking about. I have done my best to repeat what I have been told but I am really not qualified.

Chris Dornan wrote:

I entirely agree that there is a poetic/allegorical/prophetic/mystical tradition. I would hesitate to call it irrational, as I wouldn’t describe good poetry as irrational (bad poetry, yes :-)). Now I think it is quite possible to approach the Vedas, Exodus 13 through the medium of logic

There had to be a ‘burning bush’ before the theologians got to work on it and in a lot of cases extinguished it. As an antidote to Mill (Victorian Firebrand/Reeves) I picked up ‘The Idea of the Holy’ by Rudolf Otto and read this:
“Both imaginative ‘Myth’, when developed into a system, and intellectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion, are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat as to be finally eliminated altogether.”

Why is Dawkins as helpful to the atheist campaign as Bill Clinton was to Hillary’s?

Jean said:

Dispensing with straightforward issues of truth is a very bad idea. Many religious beliefs have very tangible implications for real life activities. For example, if you believe you’ll be reborn, this really does make a difference to attitudes about this life. For example, if you think you may rise in caste in your next life, you may be more tolerant of your low caste in this life. You will not make the most of this life. You will do less to change the world.

I never said that one should dispense with straightforward issues of truth and went to some pains to make it clear that that wasn’t what I had in mind.

religions certainly do have tangible implications for people’s behaviour. The issue of rebirth as it happens is very much testable, and I am aware of various pools of evidence–some of it highly systematic–that verify it. There is Stephenson’s research plus the Tibetan Buddhist Tulku system; the latter admittedly is only really good for anyone who has spent time around Tibetan Buddhist; people here will naturally be sceptical of both bodies of evidence but I the fact that people reject Stephenson’s evidence I think reflects the powerful grip of materialist metaphysical assumptions. However my point is that it is evidence based.

A much better example would be karma. There is no evidence for karma as I have explained, but there is no evidence against it either. The obvious thing in its favour is that, properly understood (i.e., avoiding the trap outlined in Julian’s article) it encourages ethical behaviour: surely everyone can see the value of a teaching that says that if you inflict suffering on another person it is actually a delayed way of inflicting that harm on yourself.

Anyway, as I have been at some pains to point out, in Buddhism at least (according to my understanding anyway), you are only encouraged to do the things that are in your long-term interest. (I think this is actually also true of all decent religions [and you can take this as a definition of a decent religion if you like]).

Chris, I really think when people say God created the universe, they are actually talking about the universe–the one out there. They are making a claim about the world. It just can’t be true for you that he did, and false for me. Just not possible.

As I said, this becomes highly problematic. First you have to understand what Christians mean by ‘God’. And how can you make any instrumental sense of the creation story: what experiments can you conduct to falsify the claim that God created the world? Of course atheists will say ’see! we told you so’, but this just reflects a positivistic approach to the world which is excellent for making sense of science and investigating physical processes. It just doesn’t work at all for religion. The only way I think to approach such religious doctrine are firstly in psychological terms (does such a view of the world appeal), then ethical terms (will this view help me to make sense of the world and act skilfully), all of which needs to be tested by trying it out.

If the only knowledge that you are prepared to even discuss must be compatible with a materialist ontology (one that is pretty incompatible with quantum mechanics by the way–see Stapp’s The Mindful Universe), then this is all mumbo jumbo and you will never have many coherent conversation with non-atheists.

However for many people do find them extremely useful in their lives, even if positivists won’t find meaningful truth claims. They will experience the religion as truth, but it will be an entirely subjective truth, as in that icecream is delicious. We do this all the time.

And the rest of your comment is I am afraid in the same vain–rhetorical bluster. If you want the close argument on why this article is misconceived then follow the links from my first comment and I will be happy to respond to any questions you have on it. The above point was trying to explain to those that were prepared to listen (not engage in juvenile point scoring) why the whole area is extremely complicated.

Chris Dornan, you should keep a civil tongue in your head. It was not rhetorical bluster; you made a slew of assertions and no effort to offer any argument for them. It’s not rhetorical bluster to point that out, nor is it juvenile point scoring. I’m not going to follow links you made on a different post; this isn’t my life’s work; you can’t excuse an unargued comment by saying you have an argument somewhere else. You’re dogmatic and damn rude besides.

Chris: Ok, let’s assume for the moment that not being attached to things increases happiness. A decent hypothesis. We might even do a psychological experiment on a group of volunteers to see if those who are not attached to X and Y are happier than those who are attached to X and Y.
It’s a bet, isn’t it? I bet that I’m not going to get most of the things that I desire in this world, and so I will be happier if I am not attached to getting those things. It’s like Stoicism. It may be a sensible bet. Now, what does that bet have to do with enlightenment, nirvana, reincarnation, karma, Buddha mind, etc.?

They will experience the religion as truth, but it will be an entirely subjective truth, as in that icecream is delicious.

No. That ‘as in’ is not an ‘as in’. That won’t fly. ‘God created the universe’ can’t be the same kind of ’subjective truth’ as ‘that icecream is delicious’ because the first states an external fact about the external universe while the second states a subjective personal singular reaction to a sense experience. To pretend the two are eqiuivalent is some rhetorical bluster if you like. The universe-related equivalent of that icecream is delicious would be ‘this universe is beautiful,’ not God created the universe.

Okay, here’s another thing.

My point was more that there is a philosophical strand to these traditions which I think is quite rational (and Ophelia, that is just my opinion, so please spare the snide remarks). It is this philosophical tradition that I think atheists would do well to focus on (constructively) (and that’s another opinion).

Spare the snide remarks yourself. You can’t do that - you can’t say it’s just your opinion and then in the next breath tell ‘atheists’ they would do well to focus on it. You’ve been doing that ever since you turned up: making aggressively hostile comments about (your tendentious version of) “atheists” and then saying you’re just riffing on your opinions. It’s one or the other, it’s not both. Either you’re making an argument to challenge all these pesky atheists and positivists, or you’re just musing on your opinions. Pick one and stick to it.

Or don’t. What am I doing - I have work to to.

Lest I spend the rest of my life ensconced in this thread, I’m not going to take up the question of whether karma and rebirth are really “out there” or not, but I’m glad Chris sees that as an important question.

Why is Dawkins as helpful to the atheist campaign as Bill Clinton was to
Hillary’s?

Sniff. Don’t mention Hillary. I’m having a bad night.

At first I did think Dawkins was helpful, as I would say reading him made me more open about being a non-believer (which is not so easy in the bible belt), and a lot of other people too. I’m thankful for that. His irreverence amuses me a lot, but probably isn’t perfect atheist image-making. It’s good that there are actually many unbelievers writing books and articles these days, and they have a wide variety of attitudes, styles, etc.

… to be a Buddhist is to cultivate detachment, a separation from all this, to view the world as less enticing and less permanent, to be detached from its pains as much as its pleasures. This is the fundamental essence of how a Buddhist lives, tasting the pleasures and pains infrequently, cultivating a sort of detachment as if you are holding the world at arms length slightly and looking askance at it. Buddhists can apprehend the general unsatisfactoriness of life. We can see that much work needs to be done on ourselves. The nature of the world cannot be changed, but the nature of ourselves can. That is where the work sits.

I quote that from the following website:

http://www.homeoint.org/morrell/buddhism/nonatt.htm

I don’t know what authority such an interpretation has in Buddhism, but it is a comment on this said by the Dalai Lama at Harvard in 1988.

Non-attachment…views desire as faulty, thereby deliberately restraining desire…

Very much like the stoic ideal of acceptance of the world as it is. We are transient, temporary beings. If a child dies, it is not an evil, and one should accept this without distress or pity. As for Blake, I’m not sure what he means by ‘binding oneself to Joy,’ or ‘kissing Joy as it flies.’ We are transient beings. If we care at all, there will be loss. If there is loss there will be suffering. Is this not part of life? Should we seek to protect ourselves from loss? ‘Better,’ the old saying goes, ‘to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’ No, I think I won’t give Buddhism a very close look.

Ah, Jean, you are mellowing as the thread continues. Is this just a spinoff from your bad night, or is it real, something in there!

The bad night is US election-related, the mellowing is … well, actually, due to some Buddhist wisdom I read. I’m serious! Thich Nhat Hanh makes the wise observation that there’s no point in “interfaith” dialogue unless people really are open to being persuaded by each other. On karma and rebirth, I’m not open…or on the virgin Mary, or the resurrection, or any of these things. I have to be honest and not waste anybody’s time!

Sorry Jean. From my distance, I first preferred Hillary, since Obama seemed packaged and phony to me. After his eloquent speech on race, I switched to Obama. However, once again I began to perceive Obama as too slick and returned to the Hillary fold. As to the issues, I don’t believe either of them. Since U.S. politics appears to boil down to whom you’d prefer to have a beer with, I’d prefer to have a beer, no several beers, with Hillary. She is more capable of authenticity than Obama is; it’s harder for her to fake it, although she tries hard, too hard, to fake it. After 3 or 4 beers, one might glimpse the person behind Hillary. Obama is shrewder than Hillary is, shrewdness probably being an asset as a president.

I find Obama very phony, and I just don’t understand how people respond to him, but I will read one of his books and get myself to be for him…because I’d be insane to vote for McCain. I’m proud that Hillary turned out to be such a tough and persistent candidate. We thought she was great when we saw her at two rallies in Dallas. Uh-oh, my son just decided to go out in the street and scream “Hillary in 2012″ so I better go and intervene!

Jean:
Yes there is a problem with subjective truth but only if it were a stand alone thing. In religion some figure becomes the embodiment of truth or the exemplar of true living or rightousness. That person is then focussed on. As to whether the world had a beginning in time or not and other conundrums the answers given by religion are not scientific hypotheses.

With Hillary one felt that there was a lack of empirical acquaintance with the truth and though Obama is a waffler there was an element of firmness that got him through the Rev. Wright debacle. Now he faces the Bradley effect. My feeling is that Edwards is for the VP slot but what do I know?

Very briefly Eric, on desire. To a Buddhist way of thinking, desire has attachment running through it. I have repeatedly heard teachers say that some attachment/desire can be beneficial, the type that motivates you follow the teachings and so on. However, the endpoint that we are looking for (as I understand it) is a place where things are accomplished effortlessly, without desire or attachment. But people that operate without attachment are lively, vital and great fun to be with. It is just that they aren’t squeezing themselves or others to fixed agendas but dealing skilfully with things as they arise.

My point is just that the Buddhist approach to attachment/desire is much more subtle and interesting than it may appear at first.

[...] atheists should be critiquing in response to the article on karma and Sharon Stone’s comments at Talking Philosophy the subject of attachment and desire came up.  While I have this little series on Buddhism I may [...]

[...] 4, 2008 · No Comments [The discussion thread for Julian Baggini's Karma’s heart of Stone at Talking Philosophy took off and produced an interesting discussion of how atheists should [...]

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